EWTN News reports that on April 13, 2026, the individual occupying the Vatican under the name Leo XIV departed for Algeria, initiating a 10-day “apostolic journey” to four African nations — Algeria, Cameroon, Angola, and Equatorial Guinea — marking the third international trip of his usurpation. The article notes that in Algeria, Catholics number “only a few thousand in a country of about 48 million Muslims,” and that the visit is expected to focus “especially on encounter and fraternity.” Leo XIV described himself upon his appearance on the central balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica as “a son of St. Augustine,” making this the first papal visit to the land of St. Augustine. The article further details that Leo XIV sent a telegram to Italian President Sergio Mattarella expressing “the lively desire to meet the brothers and sisters in the faith and the inhabitants of those dear nations.” This so-called journey is not a mission of evangelization but a diplomatic spectacle that perfectly encapsulates the post-conciliar Church’s abandonment of its divine mandate to convert all nations to the Catholic Faith.
The Conversion Mandate Abandoned: “Encounter and Fraternity” Instead of Baptism
The article reveals that in Algeria, a nation of approximately 48 million Muslims, the visit is expected to focus “especially on encounter and fraternity.” This is the language of Vatican II’s Nostra Aetate and its poisonous progeny — a declaration that the Catholic Church no longer seeks the conversion of non-Catholics but rather their comfortable coexistence. The very purpose of the Church’s missionary activity, as defined by Our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, is unequivocal: “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost” (Matt. 28:19). Pope Pius XI, in the encyclical Quas Primas, solemnly declared that “the Church, established by Christ as a perfect society, demands for itself by a right belonging to it, which it cannot renounce, full freedom and independence from secular authority” and that its mission is “to teach, govern, and lead all to eternal happiness, those who belong to the Kingdom of Christ.”
What does “encounter and Fraternity” with 48 million Muslims mean in practice? It means the implicit recognition that Islam is a legitimate path to God — a proposition condemned by the perennial Magisterium. The Syllabus of Errors of Pope Pius IX explicitly condemned the proposition that “man may, in the observance of any religion whatever, find the way of eternal salvation” (Proposition 16) and that “Protestantism is nothing more than another form of the same true Christian religion, in which form it is given to please God equally as in the Catholic Church” (Proposition 18). If Protestantism — which at least retains baptism and a veneer of Christian scripture — is not an equal path to salvation, then how much more so Islam, which denies the Holy Trinity, the Divinity of Christ, and the Redemption through the Cross? The silence of Leo XIV on the necessity of converting these Muslims to the Catholic Faith is not merely an omission; it is a public denial of the Church’s missionary mandate and an implicit preaching of the heresy of religious indifferentism.
“A Son of St. Augustine”: The Perversion of a Doctor of Grace
The article notes with apparent approval that Leo XIV “described himself on May 8, 2025, when he first appeared as pope from the central balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica, as ‘a son of St. Augustine'” and that visiting Algeria — the land of St. Augustine — is therefore “a fitting destination.” This self-identification is rich with irony when one considers what St. Augustine actually taught. St. Augustine of Hippo, the Doctor of Grace, was one of the most implacable enemies of religious indifferentism in the history of the Church. He wrote extensively against the Donatists, the Pelagians, and the Manicheans, insisting on the absolute necessity of the Catholic Church for salvation: “Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus” — outside the Church there is no salvation. He taught that grace is not a cooperative effort between God and man but a sovereign gift, and that the sacraments of the Catholic Church are the ordinary means of salvation.
The St. Augustine of the neo-church is a fabrication — a patron saint of “dialogue” and “encounter” who never existed. The real St. Augustine would have boarded that plane to Algiers not to engage in “fraternity” with those who deny Christ’s divinity, but to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ with the authority of one who knows that the eternal souls of 48 million people hang in the balance. The appropriation of St. Augustine’s name by a man who embodies everything Augustine fought against — religious indifferentism, the denial of the Church’s exclusive salvific role, and the reduction of Christianity to a humanitarian fraternity — is an act of intellectual and spiritual fraud.
The Telegram to Mattarella: Caesar Before God
Before his departure, Leo XIV “sent a telegram to Italian President Sergio Mattarella” in which he wrote: “At the moment when I am preparing to make the apostolic journey to Algeria, Cameroon, Angola, and and Equatorial Guinea, moved by the lively desire to meet the brothers and sisters in the faith and the inhabitants of those dear nations, I am pleased to address to you, Mr. President, the expression of my respectful greeting, which I accompany with fervent prayers for the good and prosperity of the entire Italian people.” This telegram is a masterpiece of post-conciliar subordination of the spiritual to the temporal. The “pope” — or rather, the occupant of the Vatican — addresses the President of Italy with “respectful greeting” and prays for “the good and prosperity of the entire Italian people” in purely naturalistic terms.
Compare this with the teaching of Pius XI in Quas Primas: “Let rulers of states therefore not refuse public veneration and obedience to the reigning Christ, but let them fulfill this duty themselves and with their people, if they wish to maintain their authority inviolate and contribute to the increase of their homeland’s happiness.” The papal duty is not to send respectful greetings to secular rulers but to remind them that their authority derives from God and that they are subject to Christ the King. The telegram to Mattarella reveals a man who sees himself not as the Vicar of Christ commanding nations to submit to the Kingship of Jesus Christ, but as a religious diplomat paying courtesy calls to the servants of secular power. This is the abomination of desolation — the Holy See occupied by a figure who has inverted the proper order of things, placing Caesar above God.
The African Tour as Spectacle: The Longest Trip, the Shortest Faith
The article highlights that this is “the longest trip of his pontificate so far” and that it includes stops in four nations “with distinct histories, cultures, and pastoral realities.” The emphasis on the length and breadth of the journey reveals the fundamentally worldly nature of these “apostolic” voyages. The true apostles traveled not to accumulate frequent flyer miles or to be photographed with foreign dignitaries, but to plant the Cross of Christ in pagan lands, often at the cost of their own blood. St. Paul’s missionary journeys were measured not in days but in churches founded, souls converted, and martyrs made.
What will Leo XIV accomplish in 10 days across four nations? He will deliver speeches about “fraternity,” “encounter,” and perhaps “integral ecology” — the stock phrases of the post-conciliar lexicon. He will meet with Muslim imams and Orthodox “bishops,” implicitly recognizing their religions as legitimate. He will celebrate the Novus Ordo Missae — that Protestantized rite that diminishes the propitiatory sacrifice of the Mass — before crowds who will leave no closer to the true Faith than before. He will not preach the necessity of baptism. He will not denounce the errors of Islam or the schism of Orthodoxy. He will not remind civil rulers of their duty to submit to Christ the King. In short, he will accomplish nothing of supernatural value, because the post-conciliar Church has nothing of supernatural value to offer.
The Heresy of the “Anglophone Conflict” and Political Opposition
The article notes that in Cameroon, Leo XIV will visit Bamenda, “which lies at the heart of the so-called Anglophone conflict,” and that Douala and Bamenda are “also considered strongholds of political opposition to the government of President Paul Biya, who has been in power since 1982.” The use of the phrase “so-called Anglophone conflict” reveals the editorial bias of the source — a reluctance to name the persecution of English-speaking Cameroonians by the French-speaking government. But more importantly, the article’s framing of the visit in terms of political conflict and opposition reveals the post-conciliar Church’s obsession with temporal affairs.
The Church’s mission is not to mediate between political factions or to lend legitimacy to opposition movements. The Church’s mission is to preach the Gospel, administer the sacraments, and form souls for eternal life. When the post-conciliar “popes” involve themselves in political conflicts, they do so not as Vicars of Christ but as agents of the United Nations agenda, promoting “peace” and “dialogue” without reference to the supernatural order. The true Church, as Pius XI taught in Quas Primas, reminds states that “not only private individuals, but also rulers and governments have the duty to publicly honor Christ and obey Him” and that “Christ, whom not only was cast out of the state, but was also forgotten and ignored through contempt, will very severely avenge these insults, because His royal dignity demands that all relations in the state be ordered on the basis of God’s commandments and Christian principles.”
The 170th Anniversary of Evangelization: What Was Evangelized?
The article notes that in Equatorial Guinea, Leo XIV will be present “to mark the 170th anniversary of the country’s evangelization.” This is a particularly bitter irony. If the country was evangelized 170 years ago, what has become of that evangelization? The post-conciliar Church’s answer is that evangelization is an ongoing process that never reaches completion — a convenient excuse for the failure of the neo-church to maintain the Faith it claims to have planted. The Catholic understanding of evangelization is that it involves the full proclamation of the Gospel, the administration of the sacraments, and the establishment of the Church as the sole means of salvation. When a nation has been truly evangelized, it produces saints, martyrs, and a flourishing Catholic culture — not a situation where the “pope” must return every few decades to celebrate “encounter and fraternity” with the unconverted.
The 170th anniversary of Equatorial Guinea’s evangelization should be an occasion for examining why, after nearly two centuries of Catholic presence, the nation remains in such a state that a “papal” visit focused on “fraternity” is considered appropriate. The answer is that the evangelization was either incomplete or has been systematically undone by the post-conciliar revolution, which has replaced the preaching of the Gospel with interfaith dialogue, the sacraments with humanitarian aid, and the call to conversion with the embrace of religious pluralism.
Conclusion: The Abomination of Desolation Continues
Leo XIV’s African journey is a microcosm of everything that is wrong with the post-conciliar Church. It substitutes “encounter” for evangelization, “fraternity” for the call to conversion, diplomatic courtesy for the proclamation of Christ the King, and worldly spectacle for supernatural mission. The article from EWTN News, while ostensibly reporting facts, implicitly celebrates this apostasy by presenting the journey as a legitimate and praiseworthy exercise of the papal office.
The truth is that the papal office, as instituted by Our Lord Jesus Christ, is not a platform for interfaith dialogue or political mediation. It is the supreme authority on earth for the salvation of souls, exercised through the preaching of the Gospel, the administration of the sacraments, and the governance of the Church. The occupant of the Vatican who calls himself Leo XIV exercises none of these functions in their fullness. He is, in the words of the sedevacantist position supported by the theology of St. Robert Bellarmine, not a valid pope at all, because a manifest heretic — and the post-conciliar leadership has repeatedly manifested heresy through its promotion of religious liberty, ecumenism, and the denial of the Church’s exclusive salvific role — ceases to be pope by that very fact, ipso facto, before any declaration by the Church.
The faithful who desire the true Mass, the true sacraments, and the true doctrine must look not to the occupant of the Vatican but to the unchanging Tradition of the Catholic Church, which endures in those communities that have preserved the Faith handed down from the Apostles. The African nations visited by Leo XIV do not need more “encounter and fraternity.” They need veram fidem — the true Faith — preached with the authority of the Vicar of Christ, not the diplomatic platitudes of a usurper.
Source:
Pope Leo XIV departs for Algeria, beginning third apostolic journey (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 13.04.2026