The EWTN News portal published on April 15, 2026 an article recounting the testimony of Virginia Pérez de Santana regarding the death of her husband Miguel from brain cancer. The narrative follows a predictable pattern increasingly common in post-conciliar Catholic media: a terminally ill man has a subjective “experience with God” in a hospital room, feels warmth and an embrace, and subsequently radiates peace. His wife then universalizes this private experience as proof of God’s existence and encourages others to “lean on the testimonies of others” because “he is real.” The article, presented as edifying content, is in fact a textbook example of the modernist substitution of personal religious experience for the objective truths of the Catholic faith, the elevation of sentiment over doctrine, and the reduction of supernatural religion to psychological comfort.
The Primacy of Subjective Experience Over Objective Revelation
The central axis of the entire article is not the deposit of faith, not the teaching of the Church, not the sacraments as the divinely instituted means of grace, but rather a private, subjective, unverifiable experience undergone by a layman in a hospital room. Miguel’s encounter is presented as the foundation of certainty: “I no longer merely have faith; I am certain that God exists.” This statement, far from being a model of Catholic piety, is a direct echo of the modernist error condemned by Pope St. Pius X in Lamentabili sane exitu (1907), which rejected the proposition that “revelation was merely man’s self-awareness of his relationship to God” (proposition 20), and that “the dogmas which the Church proposes as revealed are not truths of divine origin but are a certain interpretation of religious facts, which the human mind has worked out with great effort” (proposition 22).
The Catholic faith is not built on private experiences, feelings, or interior sensations. It is built on the objective revelation of God, transmitted through Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture, and infallibly interpreted by the Magisterium of the Church. As the Vatican Council of 1870 defined, faith is “a supernatural virtue by which, inspired and assisted by the grace of God, we believe that the things which He has revealed are true, not because of the intrinsic truth of the things, viewed by the natural light of reason, but because of the authority of God Himself who reveals them, who can neither be mistaken nor deceive” (Dei Filius, Chapter 3). Miguel’s claim to have moved beyond faith to certainty based on a feeling is not Catholic theology — it is the very essence of the modernist error, the confusion of religious experience with the act of faith itself.
The Omission of Doctrine: What the Article Never Says
A careful reading of the article reveals a staggering silence on every doctrinal matter that would be central to a genuinely Catholic account of suffering and death. There is no mention of the state of grace, no discussion of whether Miguel was in mortal or venial sin, no reference to the necessity of confession, no explanation of the theology of suffering as propitiatory sacrifice united to the Cross of Christ. The sacrament of the anointing of the sick is mentioned only in passing — “the chaplain at the Navarra Clinic administered the anointing of the sick” — with no explanation of its purpose, its effects, or its necessity. It is reduced to a ritual footnote in a story about feelings.
This silence is not accidental. It is the hallmark of the post-conciliar neo-church, which has systematically emptied Catholic practice of its supernatural content and replaced it with a naturalistic, therapeutic spirituality. The Council of Trent taught that the sacrament of extreme unction “confers grace, remits sins, and comforts the sick” (Session 14, Chapter 1), and that it is a sacrament instituted by Christ Himself, not merely a pious custom. The article’s treatment of this sacrament as a background detail, while foregrounding Miguel’s subjective warmth and embrace, reveals a theology in which human experience has supplanted divine institution.
Furthermore, Virginia’s statement — “I feel incredibly fortunate to be able to say that my husband is in heaven — because I know it; because he had immense faith, he had such deep love for God, and he demonstrated it in so many ways, such as by praying the rosary every day” — is theologically reckless. No mortal man can know with certainty the eternal fate of another soul. The Church has never taught that daily rosary prayer or subjective feelings of love for God guarantee salvation. This is the error of presumption, condemned by the Council of Trent (Session 6, Chapter 13). The article presents this presumption not as a danger but as a consolation, further evidence of the doctrinal bankruptcy of its sources.
The Language of Sentimentalism as a Symptom of Theological Decay
The vocabulary of the article is drawn almost entirely from the register of emotional experience rather than theological precision. Miguel felt “a warmth,” “a kind of electricity, of love, love, love,” “a love so pure, a love so profound, that he said it was not of this world.” He was “in love with God” and felt “just like a typical teenager waiting outside school for his girlfriend to come out.” Virginia describes the peace she experienced as “no ordinary peace” because “we were enveloped by God.”
This language, while emotionally evocative, is theologically vacuous. It could be adopted without modification by a Protestant charismatic, a New Age practitioner, or a follower of any religion that privileges interior experience over doctrinal content. The article makes no effort to anchor these experiences in the categories of Catholic theology — sanctifying grace, the theological virtues, the gifts of the Holy Ghost, the communion of saints. The result is a generic theistic sentimentalism dressed in Catholic vocabulary but devoid of Catholic substance.
Pope Pius XI, in Quas Primas (1925), warned against precisely this kind of reduction: the kingdom of Christ “is opposed only to the kingdom of Satan and the powers of darkness — and requires its followers not only to renounce earthly riches and possessions, to be distinguished by modesty of conduct, and to hunger and thirst for justice, but also to deny themselves and carry their cross.” The cross, in this article, is not the instrument of propitiatory sacrifice but a vehicle for emotional experience. Miguel’s suffering is presented not as something to be offered in reparation for sin, united to the sacrifice of Calvary, but as the occasion for a warm embrace and a feeling of love.
The Universalization of Private Experience as Pastoral Method
Perhaps the most dangerous element of the article is Virginia’s explicit exhortation to others: “Even if they haven’t felt it within their own bodies, let them lean on the testimonies of others, because he is real; because it is true that God exists, that he rose again, that he is with us.” This statement inverts the proper order of Catholic evangelization. The Church does not ask the faithful to “lean on testimonies” — she proclaims the Gospel, administers the sacraments, and teaches the faith with authority. The testimony of a layman’s private experience is not a foundation for the faith of others; it is, at best, a confirmation of what the Church has already revealed, and at worst, a source of illusion.
St. Thomas Aquinas distinguished carefully between the certitude of faith and the certitude of experience, noting that faith deals with things not seen (Summa Theologiae, II-II, Q. 4, A. 8). The article’s method — encouraging the faithful to base their certainty on the reported experiences of others — is a direct path to the kind of religious subjectivism that the Church has always condemned. It is, in practice, indistinguishable from the Protestant doctrine of the “inner witness of the Spirit,” stripped even of its biblical framework.
The Post-Conciliar Context: Why This Article Exists
This article did not appear in a vacuum. It was published by EWTN News, an organization that, whatever its claims to orthodoxy, operates within and in recognition of the post-conciliar conciliar sect. The article’s theological emptiness, its elevation of private experience, its silence on doctrine, and its sentimental tone are not aberrations — they are the inevitable fruits of the modernist revolution that has consumed the structures occupying the Vatican since the death of Pope Pius XII.
The “Spirit of the Council,” as manifested in the documents of Vatican II and in the subsequent magisterium of the antipopes from John XXIII through Leo XIV, has consistently privileged experience, dialogue, and pastoral sensitivity over doctrinal precision, the theology of the cross, and the supernatural mission of the Church. Articles like this one are the pastoral fruit of that revolution: they reassure, they comfort, they inspire — and they teach nothing. They leave the reader with warm feelings and no knowledge, with emotional consolation and no understanding of the faith for which martyrs died.
The true Church, the Church of all ages, does not need the testimonies of hospitalized laymen to prove that God exists. She has the authority of Christ, the teaching of the Apostles, the blood of the martyrs, and the infallible Magisterium. What the faithful need is not more stories about warm embraces in hospital rooms but sound doctrine — the doctrine of the Council of Trent, the encyclicals of the pre-conciliar popes, the catechism of St. Robert Bellarmine. They need priests who preach sin, hell, heaven, and the necessity of sanctifying grace. They need the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, not the memorial meal of the conciliar sect. They need the sacraments as Christ instituted them, not as the modernists have reformed them.
This article, for all its good intentions, provides none of these things. It provides only what the post-conciliar neo-church always provides: a Jesus of sentiment, a God of comfort, and a faith without content.
Source:
‘I’ve had an experience with God,’ husband tells wife before fatal diagnosis (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 15.04.2026