EWTN News portal reports that on April 21, 2026, the usurper Robert Prevost, styling himself “Pope Leo XIV,” inaugurated the “Leo XIV Campus” of the National University of Equatorial Guinea in Basupú, delivering an address in which he praised education as “an act of trust in human beings,” urged the formation of youth in “truth, responsibility, and service to the common good,” and employed biblical imagery—the tree of knowledge and the cross—to argue that faith and reason are harmonious, that Christ is not “a religious escape” from intellectual effort, and that knowledge must be “welcomed, sought with humility, and served with responsibility.” He further stated that the university should be judged not by size but by the “quality of the people it forms for society,” and that Christian tradition offers “essential guidance” for the use of science and technology. The event was attended by the “archbishop” of Malabo, the rector of the university, students, and faculty, all of whom echoed the language of “integral formation,” “innovation,” and “service to the common good.” Not once in this entire discourse was the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ invoked as the sole Redeemer, nor was there any mention of the necessity of the Catholic faith for salvation, the authority of the true Church over education, the reality of original sin, the necessity of grace, or the eternal destiny of the human soul. This is not merely an omission—it is the programmatic silence of Modernism, the very heresy condemned in excruciating detail by St. Pius X, and it reveals that the conciliar sect’s conception of “truth” is a naturalistic, humanistic abstraction stripped of all supernatural content.
The Usurper’s “Truth”: A Word Evacuated of Catholic Content
The central word in Prevost’s address is “truth”—repeated, lauded, and yet never once defined in Catholic terms. He speaks of “seeking the truth,” “rooted in truth,” “formed by truth,” and “transforming existence into a gift for others.” But what is this “truth”? Is it the Truth Who said “Ego sum via, veritas, et vita” (John 14:6)? Is it the deposit of faith guarded by the infallible Magisterium? Is it the dogmatic teaching of the Church that “there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12)? Not a single syllable. The word “truth” in the mouth of this usurper is a hollow vessel, filled with whatever content the spirit of the age pours into it: personal sincerity, scientific progress, social responsibility, “service to the common good.” This is precisely the Modernist conception of truth condemned by St. Pius X in Lamentabili sane exitu (1907), where proposition 62 was condemned: “The principal articles of the Apostles’ Creed did not have the same meaning for the first Christians as they do for contemporary Christians,” and proposition 58: “Truth changes with man, because it develops with him, in him, and through him.” Prevost does not say truth changes—he simply never defines it, which is worse, because it leaves the door open for every error while maintaining the appearance of orthodoxy.
Pius XI, in Quas Primas (1925), taught with perfect clarity: “Christ reigns in the minds of men, not so much because He possesses a profound intellect and vast knowledge, but rather because He Himself is Truth, and men must draw truth from Him and accept it obediently.” The “truth” of Leo XIV is not Christ—it is an autonomous human endeavor, a “search,” a “task,” a “noble effort” that man undertakes and to which Christ is merely “harmonious.” This is the very inversion condemned by Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors (1864), proposition 3: “Human reason, without any reference whatsoever to God, is the sole arbiter of truth and falsehood, and of good and evil; it is law to itself, and suffices, by its natural force, to secure the welfare of men and of nations.” The usurper’s discourse is a textbook application of this condemned proposition.
“An Act of Trust in Human Beings”: The Cult of Man
Prevost declares that the inauguration of the campus is “an act of trust in human beings.” Let the reader pause and consider this phrase. The Catholic Church, before the conciliar revolution, taught that man is a fallen creature, wounded by original sin, incapable of salvation without supernatural grace, and that “the imagination and thought of man’s heart are prone to evil from his youth” (Gen. 8:21). The Church placed her trust not in human beings but in God, in the merits of Christ, in the sacraments, in the intercession of the Blessed Virgin and the saints. Pius IX condemned in the Syllabus 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.” While Prevost does not go so far as to deny God outright, his “trust in human beings” is the practical fruit of the same naturalism—man is sufficient, man is capable, man is worthy of trust. This is the cult of man condemned by every pope before John XXIII, and it is the animating spirit of the entire conciliar enterprise.
The archbishop of Malabo, the rector, the students, the faculty—all speak the same language: “discipline, respect, responsibility, commitment to the common good,” “academic excellence, innovation, integral formation.” These are the slogans of secular humanism baptized with a thin veneer of Christian terminology. Where is the language of sanctifying grace? Where is the call to holiness? Where is the warning about mortal sin? Where is the invitation to receive the sacraments, to confess, to commune, to live in the state of grace? Silence about supernatural matters is the gravest accusation. It reveals that the conciliar sect has replaced the supernatural order with a naturalistic program of self-improvement and social engineering.
The Ceiba and the Cross: Symbolism Without Substance
The usurper employs the ceiba tree as “a parable of that which a university is called to be”—rooted, patient, fruitful. He then refers to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, insisting that Genesis is “not a condemnation of knowledge as such, as if faith was afraid of intelligence.” He says Christian tradition contemplates “another tree, that of the cross, not as a denial of human intelligence but as a sign of its redemption.” He concludes: “From a Christian perspective, Christ does not appear as a religious escape in the face of intellectual endeavors, as if faith began where reason ended. On the contrary, in him the profound harmony between truth, reason, and freedom are manifested.”
This language is deliberately crafted to sound Catholic while evacuating Catholic content. The true teaching of the Church is that the tree of knowledge represents the proud autonomy of man who refuses to submit to God’s law—that the fall was precisely the result of seeking knowledge apart from obedience to God. St. Robert Bellarmine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and the entire patristic tradition teach that the knowledge gained through the fall was not neutral “intelligence” but disordered concupiscence. The cross is not a “sign of the redemption of human intelligence” in the sense of validating autonomous human reason—it is the instrument by which the God-Man atoned for the sin of Adam, by which the wounds of ignorance and malice are healed through grace, through faith, through the submission of the intellect to revealed truth. Pius IX condemned in the Syllabus proposition 6: “The faith of Christ is in opposition to human reason and divine revelation not only is not useful, but is even hurtful to the perfection of man.” Prevost inverts this: he presents faith and reason as “harmonious,” as if there were no conflict, no fall, no need for the submission of the intellect to the obedience of faith (obsequium fidei, Rom. 1:5). This is the Modernist proposition 9 of Lamentabili: “All the dogmas of the Christian religion are indiscriminately the object of natural science or philosophy, and human reason, enlightened solely in an historical way, is able, by its own natural strength and principles, to attain to the true science of even the most abstruse dogmas.”
“Integral Formation” Without the Integral Faith
The students and faculty speak of “integral formation”—a phrase that sounds Catholic but in the mouth of the conciliar sect means nothing more than the development of the whole person in natural terms: intellectual, social, professional, ethical. The Catholic understanding of “integral formation” is formation in the integral Catholic faith—the faith once delivered to the saints (Jude 1:3), the faith that includes the necessity of baptism, the reality of hell, the obligation to keep the commandments, the necessity of prayer and mortification, the vocation to sanctity, the final judgment, the eternal reward of heaven or the eternal punishment of hell. None of this is present. The “integral formation” of Leo XIV is the formation of productive citizens for Equatorial Guinea—men and women who will “transform their own existence into a gift for others” and “enrich the entire human family.” This is pure humanitarianism, the religion of man who worships himself, condemned by Pius XI in Quas Primas: “This plague is the secularism of our times, so-called laicism, its errors and wicked endeavors… It began with the denial of Christ the Lord’s reign over all nations.”
The university, in Catholic teaching, must be subject to the Church, must teach in conformity with Catholic doctrine, must form youth in the fear of God and the love of virtue. Leo XIII, in Immortale Dei (1885), taught: “The Almighty, therefore, has given the charge of the human race to two powers, the ecclesiastical and the civil, the one being set over divine, and the other over human, each the highest in its kind, and each fixed within certain limits, defined by its own nature and special object.” The usurper’s university is not subject to the true Church—it is a secular institution with a bust of the “pope” and a thin drizzle of Christian sentimentality. This is the abomination of desolation speaking in the temple of learning.
The Silence About the One Thing Necessary
What is entirely absent from this discourse? The necessity of the Catholic faith for salvation. The reality of original sin. The necessity of baptism. The existence of hell. The obligation to worship God. The primacy of the spiritual over the temporal. The social reign of Christ the King. The authority of the Church over education. The duty of the state to profess the Catholic religion. The condemnation of religious indifferentism. The danger of losing one’s soul. The need for confession, communion, prayer, penance, mortification. The intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The communion of saints. The last things: death, judgment, heaven, hell.
In place of all this: “trust in human beings,” “service to the common good,” “innovation,” “excellence,” “wisdom,” “uprightness,” “competence.” This is not Christianity. This is not even a watered-down Christianity. This is the naturalism condemned by Pius IX, the Modernism condemned by St. Pius X, the laicism condemned by Pius XI, the religious indifferentism condemned by every pope from Clement VI to Pius XII. It is the religion of the conciliar sect—the religion of man who has abolished God from public life while retaining His name as a decorative flourish.
The ceiba of Equatorial Guinea, in the usurper’s imagery, is called to bear “fruits of progress rooted in solidarity and of knowledge that ennobles and develops the human being in an integral way.” But the true tree—the Cross—bears the fruit of eternal life, and it demands not “trust in human beings” but trust in God, not “service to the common good” but the service of God, not “seeking truth” as an autonomous human project but receiving Truth Himself in humility and obedience. Until the conciliar sect returns to this teaching—which it never will, because it is the seat of the Antichrist—its universities, its “formation,” its “truth,” and its “service” will remain what they are: instruments of apostasy disguised as charity.
Source:
Pope Leo XIV: Universities must seek truth and form the whole person (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 21.04.2026