EWTN News reports that EWTN Spain has expanded its programming to 24/7 broadcasting on digital terrestrial television, a move announced on April 20, 2026, explicitly timed to precede the visit of the usurper antipope Leo XIV to Spain in June 2026. EWTN Spain president José Carlos González-Hurtado stated that the expansion allows the network to “walk with people throughout their day, offering a constant point of encounter with Christ,” while EWTN CEO Michael Warsaw framed the initiative as building on the legacy of Mother Angelica and serving the “Church in Spain” during a time of “profound questions surrounding the dignity of life.” This announcement reveals the deep entanglement of Catholic media apparatus with the conciliar sect’s antipapal structure, using the language of evangelization to legitimize and promote the authority of a manifest heretic occupying the Vatican.
The Illusion of “Encounter with Christ” Without the True Church
The statement by González-Hurtado — “If faith is truly part of our lives, it cannot be confined to a single moment — it must be present in all of them” — sounds superficially pious, but it conceals a fundamental theological error. Faith, in Catholic doctrine, is not a diffuse, ambient cultural presence; it is fides quae creditur (the faith which is believed) and fides qua creditur (the faith by which it is believed), rooted in the authoritative teaching of the true Church, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, and the sacraments validly administered. Pius XI, in Quas Primas (1925), established the Feast of Christ the King precisely to combat the secularist error that Christ’s reign could be relegated to private devotion or cultural ornamentation. He declared: “His reign, namely, extends not only to Catholic nations or to those who, by receiving baptism according to law, belong to the Church, even though their erroneous opinions have led them astray or discord has separated them from love, but His reign encompasses also all non-Christians, so that most truly the entire human race is subject to the authority of Jesus Christ.”
The EWTN announcement says nothing — absolutely nothing — about the necessity of the true Faith, the true sacraments, or the true Church for salvation. It reduces “encounter with Christ” to passive television consumption, a substitute for the supernatural life of grace. This is the religion of naturalism condemned by Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors (1864), Proposition 1: “There exists no Supreme, all-wise, all-provident Divine Being, distinct from the universe, and God is identical with the nature of things.” When Christ is reduced to a media “encounter,” He ceases to be the Divine King demanding the submission of every intellect and will, and becomes instead a therapeutic presence for the spiritually comfortable.
The Antipapal Visit: A Journey Without Authority
The article explicitly links the EWTN expansion to the upcoming visit of Leo XIV to Spain, described as “the first papal visit to the country since Pope Benedict XVI visited in 2011.” The use of the word “papal” here is not merely imprecise — it is a lie by omission. From the perspective of integral Catholic faith, Leo XIV (Robert Prevost) is not a pope. He is a usurper, a manifest heretic who has never held legitimate authority over the Church.
As St. Robert Bellarmine teaches in De Romano Pontifice (Book II, Chapter 30): “A Pope who is a manifest heretic, by that very fact ceases to be Pope and head, just as he ceases to be a Christian and member of the body of the Church.” Wernz and Vidal confirm that such a one is deprived ipso facto of jurisdiction even before any declaratory sentence. The 1917 Code of Canon Law, Canon 188.4, states that every office becomes vacant “by the mere fact and without any declaration” if the cleric “publicly defects from the Catholic faith.” And Pope Paul IV’s Bull Cum ex Apostolatus Officio (1559) declares null and void any promotion of one who has “defected from the Catholic Faith or fallen into some heresy.”
Leo XIV, like his predecessors from John XXIII onward, has publicly embraced the heresies of the conciliar revolution: religious liberty (Dignitatis Humanae), ecumenism, the novel doctrine of collegiality, and the destruction of the Holy Sacrifice through the Novus Ordo Missae. His visit to Spain is not a “papal visit” — it is the travels of a heretical impostor, and EWTN’s enthusiastic coverage constitutes material cooperation in the propagation of a false authority.
Mother Angelica’s Legacy: Co-opted by the Conciliar Sect
Michael Warsaw’s remark that the expansion launches “on what would have been Mother Angelica’s 103rd birthday” and represents “her enduring legacy and vision to proclaim the Gospel without compromise” is a particularly cynical appropriation. Mother Angelica, whatever her personal piety, founded and operated EWTN within the framework of the conciar sect, consistently recognizing the authority of the antipopes and never publicly denouncing the heresies of Vatican II. Her “proclamation of the Gospel” was conducted under the jurisdiction and approval of manifest heretics — from John Paul II, whom she supported, to Benedict XVI, whom she recognized, to Francis and now Leo XIV.
This is not the Gospel “without compromise.” This is the Gospel compromised — filtered through the lens of ecumenism, religious liberty, and the democratized “Spirit of Vatican II.” The true Gospel, as St. Pius X warned in Lamentabili Sane Exitu (1907), is not subject to “continual and indefinite progress, corresponding with the advancement of human reason” (Proposition 5 of the Syllabus). It is immutable. And it cannot be proclaimed authentically by those who submit to authorities who have publicly repudiated it.
The Silence About What Matters: Heresy, Schism, and the State of the Church
The article’s most damning feature is not what it says, but what it omits. There is no mention — not a single word — of the following realities:
- That the structures occupying the Vatican are led by a line of manifest heretics who lost their authority ipso facto upon their public defection from the Catholic faith.
- That the “Church in Spain” referenced by Warsaw is the conciliar sect in Spain, which has imposed the Novus Ordo, embraced religious liberty, and collaborated in the destruction of Catholic education, as condemned by Pius IX in Qui Pluribus (1846) and the Syllabus, Propositions 45–48.
- That the “profound questions surrounding the dignity of life” mentioned by Warsaw are themselves the fruit of the conciliar sect’s failure to proclaim the social reign of Christ the King, as demanded by Pius XI in Quas Primas: “When God and Jesus Christ — as we lamented — were removed from laws and states and when authority was derived not from God but from men, the foundations of that authority were destroyed.”
- That EWTN’s 24/7 programming, by recognizing and promoting the authority of Leo IV, actively impedes the faithful from recognizing the vacancy of the Apostolic See and returning to the true Church.
The article operates entirely within the hermeneutic of continuity — the modernist lie that the conciar sect is the Catholic Church, that its antipopes are popes, that its sacraments are certain, and that its “mission” is the mission of Christ. This is the very error condemned by St. Pius X in Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907), where he exposed the Modernist method of reconciling faith with the destruction of dogma through the concept of “evolution” — “Truth changes with man, because it develops with him, in him, and through him” (Lamentabili, Proposition 58).
EWTN: A Tool of the Abomination of Desolation
Let there be no ambiguity. EWTN, for all its superficial Catholic aesthetic, functions as a propaganda arm of the conciar sect. Its 24/7 expansion in Spain, timed to amplify the spectacle of an antipope’s visit, is not evangelization. It is the reinforcement of a counterfeit Church — the “abomination of desolation standing in the holy place” (Matthew 24:15). The faithful are not called to tune in; they are called to resist.
As Pius IX warned in the Syllabus, Proposition 80: “The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization” — this proposition is condemned. And yet this is precisely the program of EWTN and the entire conciar apparatus: reconciliation with the world, dressed in the language of faith. The faithful must reject this counterfeit, hold fast to the immutable Tradition, and recognize that extra Ecclesiam nulla salus — outside the true Church, there is no salvation. And the true Church is not the conciar sect.
The expansion of EWTN Spain to 24/7 programming is not a victory for the Faith. It is a deepening of the occupation. The faithful must not be deceived by the sweet language of “encounter with Christ” when that encounter is mediated by a network that bows before a heretical usurper and promotes the very system that has emptied the churches, destroyed the priesthood, and led countless souls to perdition.
Source:
EWTN Spain expands to 24/7 programming, setting stage for papal visit (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 20.04.2026