National Catholic Register (April 22, 2026) reports that during his apostolic journey to Equatorial Guinea, Leo XIV urged the faithful to “take the destiny of Equatorial Guinea into your own hands,” calling them to “build a future of hope, justice, and peace” through their own choices and shared commitment. The pontiff celebrated Mass at the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Mongomo, praised 170 years of evangelization, and encouraged the baptized to become “apostles of charity and witnesses to a new humanity.” His homily centered on naturalistic appeals to human responsibility, the common good, freedom, and human dignity — while the supernatural order, the Kingship of Christ, the necessity of the true faith for salvation, and the Church’s divine mandate to teach and govern nations were conspicuously absent. This address is not merely incomplete; it is a systematic substitution of the Catholic Gospel with the religion of man glorifying himself, precisely the error condemned by St. Pius X as the synthesis of all heresies: Modernism.
The Eucharist Reduced to Symbolic Human Encounter
Leo XIV opened his homily with a reflection on the Eucharist that, while using orthodox-sounding language, subtly evacuates the sacrificial reality of the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. He declared: “The Eucharist truly contains every spiritual good of the Church: it is Christ, our Passover, who gives himself to us, he is the living Bread that nourishes us… His presence in the Eucharist reveals God’s infinite love for the entire human family and the way he encounters every woman and every man even today.”
The language is carefully constructed to avoid any mention of the Mass as a true propitiatory sacrifice, the unbloody renewal of Calvary offered by the priest in persona Christi for the living and the dead. The Council of Trent anathematized anyone who says that the Mass is “only a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving” or that it “is not propitiatory” (Session XXII, Canon 3). Leo XIV’s formulation — “contains every spiritual good,” “reveals God’s infinite love,” “encounters every woman and every man” — is the language of the post-conciliar Novus Ordo, where the Eucharist is presented as a communal meal of encounter rather than the dread Sacrifice of the Altar. The faithful are not told that the Mass is the application of the merits of Calvary for the remission of sins, both for the living and for the souls in Purgatory. They are not warned that the post-conciliar “reformed” liturgy, with its systematic destruction of the rubrics, its orientation toward the people, and its suppression of prayers expressing the propitiatory nature of the sacrifice, has rendered the “Mass” celebrated in the conciar sect a vehicle of ambiguity at best and sacrilege at worst.
The true teaching is immutable: “The victim is one and the same: the same now offers Himself by the ministry of priests, who then offered Himself on the cross; the manner alone of offering is different” (Council of Trent, Session XXII, Chapter 2). The Mass does not merely “reveal” love — it propitiates the wrath of God against sin. This is the first and most fundamental omission: the silence about the sacrificial character of the Mass is the silence about the Cross itself.
170 Years of Evangelization Without the Preaching of Conversion
The usurper expressed gratitude for “these 170 years of evangelization in Equatorial Guinea,” praising “missionaries, diocesan priests, catechists and lay faithful who have devoted their lives in service to the Gospel.” He said: “Through the example of their lives, they have played their part in bringing about the Kingdom of God, unafraid of suffering for their fidelity to Christ.”
This is a carefully sanitized history. The true missionaries of the Church — those who operated under the authority of the Holy See before the conciliar revolution — preached one message with absolute clarity: Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus — outside the Church there is no salvation (Pope Boniface VIII, Unam Sanctam). They did not merely offer “example” and “witness” — they demanded the conversion of infidels to the Catholic faith, the baptism of children, the abandonment of pagan practices, and the submission of nations to the Kingship of Christ. The missionary encyclicals of the true popes — from Maximum Illud of Benedict XV to Evangelii Praecones of Pius XII — are unequivocal: the purpose of mission is the planting of the Church and the salvation of souls through baptism and incorporation into the Mystical Body of Christ.
What Leo XIV describes as “evangelization” is, in the context of the post-conciliar sect, something entirely different: a dialogue with cultures that leaves intact their errors, a “witness” that no longer demands conversion, a “service to the Gospel” that has abandoned the Gospel’s command: “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost” (Matthew 28:19). The conciliar sect’s missions have become development projects, humanitarian aid, and interreligious dialogue — precisely the “horizontal” reduction of the Church’s mission condemned by Pope Pius XI in Quas Primas: the reign of Christ is spiritual, yes, but it encompasses all of human society, and the Church has the divine mandate to teach, govern, and lead all nations to eternal salvation — not merely to “encounter” them.
“Take Your Destiny Into Your Own Hands” — The Religion of Human Self-Determination
The central line of the homily, and the one that most clearly reveals its modernist character, is this: “Brothers and sisters, there is a need for Christians to take the destiny of Equatorial Guinea into your own hands.”
This statement, taken at face value, is a direct contradiction of the most fundamental principles of Catholic theology. Non nobis, Domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriam — “Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to Thy name give glory” (Psalm 113:9). The entire economy of salvation is built upon the principle that man cannot save himself, that grace is necessary, that without Christ we can do nothing (John 15:5), and that it is God who works in us both to will and to do (Philippians 2:13). The Church has always taught that nations, like individuals, are subject to Divine Providence and that their destiny is in God’s hands, not man’s.
Pope Pius XI, in Quas Primas, established the Feast of Christ the King precisely to combat the modern error that human societies can and should organize themselves independently of God’s law and the Church’s authority. He wrote: “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.” And further: “The state is happy not by one means, and man by another; for the state is nothing else than a harmonious association of men.”
Leo XIV’s exhortation to “take your destiny into your own hands” is the language of the French Revolution, of liberalism, of the Declaration of the Rights of Man — all of which were condemned by Pope Pius VI in Auctorem Fidei and by Pope Gregory XVI in Mirari Vos. It is the language of the Syllabus of Errors (1864), which condemned the proposition that “the Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization” (Proposition 80). It is, in short, the language of the religion of man who makes himself God — the very religion that the true Church has always identified as the religion of the Antichrist.
The Common Good Without Christ the King
The homily is saturated with references to “the common good,” “justice,” “peace,” “fraternity,” “freedom,” and “the dignity of the human person.” Leo XIV said: “The future of Equatorial Guinea depends upon your choices; it is entrusted to your sense of responsibility and to your shared commitment to safeguarding the life and dignity of every person.” And: “May there be greater room for freedom, and may the dignity of the human person always be safeguarded.”
These phrases are the stock-in-trade of the post-conciliar sect, drawn directly from Gaudium et Spes and the social teaching of the conciliar “popes.” They are the language of the “Church of the New Advent,” which has replaced the supernatural order with a naturalistic humanism that treats the problems of the world as primarily material and social rather than spiritual and moral. The true social teaching of the Church, as articulated by Leo XIII in Immortale Dei and by Pius XI in Quas Primas and Quadragesimo Anno, is unambiguous: the common good is only possible when society is ordered according to God’s law, when the Church exercises her divinely appointed authority over nations, and when Christ is publicly acknowledged as King.
Pope Pius XI stated: “If rulers and legitimate superiors will have the conviction that they exercise authority not so much by their own right as by the command and in the place of the Divine King, everyone will notice how religiously and wisely they will use their authority.” And: “The state must leave the same freedom to the members of Orders and Congregations, both male and female, who are indeed the most valiant helpers of the Pastors of the Church and contribute most to the expansion and establishment of Christ’s Kingdom.”
Leo XIV says nothing about Christ the King. He says nothing about the obligation of the state to recognize the Catholic Church as the one true Church. He says nothing about the necessity of confessional states, of laws conforming to the natural law as interpreted by the Church, of the suppression of public blasphemy and immorality. Instead, he offers the bland, humanitarian platitudes of the United Nations — “freedom,” “dignity,” “the common good” — stripped of all supernatural content. This is not Catholic social teaching; it is the social teaching of the world, which the Church was founded to combat.
“Apostles of Charity” Without the Faith
Leo XIV called the baptized to become “apostles of charity and witnesses to a new humanity.” This phrase — “a new humanity” — is revealing. The Church does not preach a “new humanity” achieved through human effort and social organization. She preaches the regeneration of humanity through the grace of Baptism, the merits of Christ’s Passion, and the sacramental life of the Church. The “new man” of Scripture is the man regenerated in Christ (Ephesians 4:24, Colossians 3:10) — not the product of social development or political reform.
The call to be “apostles of charity” without the corresponding call to profess the true faith, to convert infidels, to defend the Church against her enemies, and to work for the social reign of Christ the King, is a call to naturalistic philanthropy — the very “charity” that the world practices and that the true Church has always distinguished from supernatural charity, which is a theological virtue infused by God and ordered toward the Beatific Vision. Pope Leo XIII, in Immortale Dei, taught that the Church’s charity is inseparable from her mission of truth: the Church cannot separate justice from faith, nor can she reduce her mission to the alleviation of temporal suffering while ignoring the eternal destiny of souls.
The Omission of the Supernatural Order
Perhaps the most damning aspect of this homily is what it does not say. There is no mention of:
– The necessity of the Catholic faith for salvation — the dogma Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus, defined by the Fourth Lateran Council, the Council of Florence, and Pope Boniface VIII.
– The Kingship of Christ over nations — the teaching of Quas Primas, which obliges all states to publicly recognize Christ’s authority.
– The reality of sin and the necessity of repentance — the first word of Our Lord’s public ministry was “Repent” (Matthew 4:17).
– The existence of Hell and the eternal consequences of dying in the state of mortal sin — a truth that the concilar sect has effectively silenced from its preaching.
– The necessity of the sacraments for salvation — particularly Baptism and Penance.
– The obligation of Catholic rulers to suppress public heresy and immorality — the teaching of Pope Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors and of Pope Leo XIII in Immortale Dei.
– The reality of the crisis in the Church — the apostasy of the conciliar hierarchy, the destruction of the liturgy, the spread of heresy from the highest levels of the “Vatican” apparatus.
– The duty of Catholics to resist the conciliar revolution — to hold fast to the traditional faith, the traditional Mass, and the traditional sacraments, even at the cost of persecution.
This silence is not accidental. It is the silence of a system that has abandoned the supernatural order in favor of a purely naturalistic, humanitarian, and horizontal vision of the Church’s mission. It is the silence of the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place (Matthew 24:15) — the usurper hierarchy occupying the structures of the Church while emptying them of their divine content.
The “New Humanity” of the Conciliar Sect
The entire homily of Leo XIV is a perfect specimen of the theology of the post-conciliar sect — the theology that St. Pius X identified as “the synthesis of all heresies” because it does not deny any single dogma outright but evacuates all of them of their supernatural content, replacing them with a purely naturalistic, immanentist, and humanistic framework. The “new humanity” that Leo XIV envisions is not the humanity regenerated by the grace of Christ; it is the humanity of the United Nations, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, of the World Economic Forum — a humanity that organizes itself without reference to God, that seeks “justice” and “peace” without the Cross, and that builds its “future of hope” on the shifting sand of human autonomy rather than on the Rock of Peter.
Pope Pius X, in Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907), described the modernist method with prophetic precision: “The philosopher must lay aside his preconceived opinions about the supernatural origin of Holy Scripture, which he should interpret just like other purely human documents” (Lamentabili, Proposition 12). The modernist does not deny revelation — he reinterprets it as “man’s self-awareness of his relationship to God” (Proposition 20). He does not deny the Church — he redefines it as a “community subject to continuous evolution” (Proposition 53). He does not deny Christ — he reduces Him to a historical figure considerably lower than the Christ of faith (Proposition 29).
Leo XIV’s homily follows this method exactly. He does not deny the Eucharist — he redefines it as an “encounter.” He does not deny evangelization — he redefines it as “witness” and “service.” He does not deny the Church’s mission — he redefines it as the promotion of “human dignity” and “the common good.” He does not deny the future — he redefines it as something man builds with his own hands. Every element of the Catholic faith is present in word but absent in substance. This is the genius of Modernism: it preserves the vocabulary of Catholicism while emptying it of its meaning, thereby deceiving the faithful into believing that nothing has changed while everything has been destroyed.
Conclusion: The Anti-Gospel of Human Self-Salvation
The homily of Leo XIV in Equatorial Guinea is not a Catholic homily. It is a humanitarian speech dressed in ecclesiastical language. It substitutes the supernatural order with the natural order, the Kingship of Christ with the autonomy of man, the necessity of conversion with the promotion of “human dignity,” and the propitiatory sacrifice of the Mass with a symbolic “encounter.” It is the anti-gospel of human self-salvation — the gospel of the serpent: “You will be as God” (Genesis 3:5).
The true Church teaches that the destiny of nations is in God’s hands, not man’s. It teaches that there is no justice, no peace, no true freedom, and no authentic human dignity outside the Kingship of Christ. It teaches that the Church’s mission is not to help men build a better world on their own terms, but to bring them to eternal salvation through faith, the sacraments, and obedience to the divine law. It teaches that the Mass is the propitiatory sacrifice of Calvary, not a communal meal of encounter. And it teaches that the future of every nation depends not on human choices and “shared commitments” but on whether that nation submits to the social reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
Until the structures occupying the Vatican are liberated from the modernist usurpers, and until a true Pope restores the integral Catholic faith, the traditional Mass, and the social Kingship of Christ, the faithful must resist the conciliar revolution with every means at their disposal — holding fast to the faith of all time, the Mass of all time, and the sacraments validly administered by priests ordained before the conciliar corruption. State et non movetur — the Rock stands and is not moved.
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Source:
Pope Leo XIV to Equatorial Guinea: Take Your Destiny Into Your Hands (ncregister.com)
Date: 22.04.2026