EWTN News reports that during his final Mass in Africa, held at Malabo Stadium in Equatorial Guinea on April 23, 2026, Leo XIV urged local Catholics to “carry on the mission of Jesus’ first disciples with joy,” proclaim the Gospel “with passion,” and bear witness through lives shaped by “faith, service, and solidarity.” The homily centered on the encounter between the deacon Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8), which Leo interpreted as a model for evangelization—emphasizing openness, inclusion, and personal transformation. He invoked Pope Francis’ *Evangelii Gaudium*, warning against “spiritual self-absorption,” and stressed that Christian faith “does not erase suffering but illuminates it with hope.” The tone was pastoral, emotive, and devoid of doctrinal specificity—typical of the post-conciliar antipapal theater. This performance, while cloaked in biblical imagery, reveals the theological bankruptcy of the conciliar sect: a mission reduced to humanitarian sentiment, stripped of supernatural truth, and silent on the necessity of conversion to the one true Church for salvation.
The Gospel According to the Conciliar Sect: From Supernatural Mission to Naturalistic Humanism
Leo XIV’s homily exemplifies the systematic inversion of Catholic evangelization into a program of horizontal, worldly activism. The Ethiopian eunuch—a figure whom the Church Fathers traditionally read as a symbol of the Gentile world receiving divine revelation through the ministry of the apostles—is recast as an emblem of “the oppressed, the marginalized, and the least among us.” This is not exegesis; it is ideology masquerading as theology. The salvific encounter between Philip and the eunuch, which culminates in baptism and the remission of sins (Acts 8:36–38), is flattened into a narrative of social inclusion and personal empowerment. Where is the call to repentance? Where is the dogmatic assertion that “there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12)?
St. Pius X, in *Lamentabili sane exitu* (1907), condemned the modernist error that “revelation was merely man’s self-awareness of his relationship to God” (proposition 20) and that “dogmas… are a certain interpretation of religious facts, which the human mind has worked out with great effort” (proposition 22). Leo’s homily embodies these condemned propositions. The “Gospel” he proclaims is not the deposit of faith once delivered to the saints (Jude 1:3), but a subjective, evolving “good news” tailored to contemporary sensibilities. The mission of the Church is no longer to “teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost” (Matt. 28:19), but to “bear witness through lives shaped by faith, service, and solidarity”—a phrase indistinguishable from the ethos of secular NGOs.
Silence on the Necessity of the Catholic Church for Salvation
The most damning omission in Leo’s address is his refusal to proclaim the dogma *extra Ecclesiam nulla salus* (“outside the Church there is no salvation”). This infallible teaching, defined by the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), the Council of Florence (1442), and reaffirmed by numerous popes—including Boniface VIII in *Unam Sanctam* (1302)—is conspicuously absent. Instead, Leo speaks of “salvation history” as something that “embraces every man and woman,” without specifying that this embrace occurs only through incorporation into the Mystical Body of Christ, the Roman Catholic Church.
This is not mere oversight; it is doctrinal sabotage. By universalizing salvation without reference to the Church, Leo implicitly endorses the very indifferentism condemned by Pius IX in the *Syllabus of Errors*: “Good hope at least is to be entertained of the eternal salvation of all those who are not at all in the true Church of Christ” (proposition 17). The conciliar sect has long since abandoned the missionary imperative to convert souls to Catholicism, replacing it with a vague “dialogue” that treats all religions as equally valid paths to God. Leo’s homily is but another iteration of this apostasy.
The Eucharist Reduced to Symbolic Assembly
Leo’s exhortation to “celebrate the Eucharist together” rings hollow when one considers the state of the “liturgy” in the conciliar structures. The Novus Ordo Missae, promulgated by the apostate Paul VI in 1969, is not the Most Holy Sacrifice of Calvary re-presented in an unbloody manner, but a Protestantized memorial meal centered on the community rather than on God. The traditional Mass—the *lex orandi* of the Roman Rite for nearly two millennia—has been suppressed, marginalized, and replaced by a rite that even admitted Protestants like Martin Luther would recognize as congenial to their errors.
When Leo speaks of the Eucharist as “good leaven for all,” he reveals his adherence to the modernist error condemned by St. Pius X: that “the sacraments merely serve to remind man of the presence of the ever-benevolent Creator” (*Lamentabili*, proposition 41). The Eucharist is not a symbol; it is the true Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, offered in propitiatory sacrifice for the living and the dead. To speak of it as “leaven” is to reduce it to a metaphor for social cohesion—a far cry from the dogma defined at the Council of Trent: “If any one saith that in the Mass a true and real sacrifice is not offered to God… let him be anathema” (Session 22, canon 1).
“Joy” Without Doctrine: The Emotionalism of the Neo-Church
The repeated emphasis on “joy” and “passion” in Leo’s homily is characteristic of the conciar sect’s substitution of emotional experience for doctrinal truth. True joy in the Catholic sense is a supernatural fruit of the Holy Ghost, proper to those who live in the state of grace and adhere firmly to the teachings of the Church. It is not the effervescent sentimentality of a stadium rally.
Pius XI, in *Quas Primas* (1925), warned against reducing the reign of Christ the King to a private, interior sentiment: “His kingdom is primarily spiritual and relates mainly to spiritual matters… [but] it encompasses all men… so that most truly the entire human race is subject to the authority of Jesus Christ.” Leo’s “joy” is privatized, individualized, and disconnected from the public, social Kingship of Christ. There is no mention of the duty of rulers and states to recognize Christ’s authority, no call for the conversion of nations, no reference to the social reign of the Sacred Heart. Instead, we are offered a therapeutic spirituality that soothes consciences without demanding repentance.
The Legacy of *Evangelii Gaudium*: A Manifesto of Modernism
Leo’s explicit quotation of *Evangelii Gaudium*—the apostolic exhortation of the apostate Jorge Bergoglio—is not incidental; it is programmatic. That document, widely regarded as a cornerstone of the conciliar revolution, promotes a “Church permanently in mission,” but one whose mission is defined not by the proclamation of dogma, but by “accompaniment,” “discernment,” and “mercy” detached from truth. It is the antithesis of the missionary spirit of the pre-conciliar Church, which sought to convert souls to the Catholic faith, not to “walk with them” in their errors.
By invoking this text, Leo aligns himself with the very current of Modernism that St. Pius X called “the synthesis of all heresies” (*Pascendi Dominici gregis*, 1907). The mission of the Church is not to “keep making room for the poor” in some abstract, humanitarian sense, but to preach Christ crucified, to administer the sacraments, and to lead souls to eternal salvation through the one true Church. Anything less is betrayal.
Conclusion: A Mission Without Christ the King
What Leo XIV presented in Malabo was not the mission of Christ’s Church, but the agenda of the conciliar sect: a mission devoid of dogma, silent on the necessity of the Catholic faith for salvation, and saturated with the naturalistic humanism condemned by every pope from Pius IX to Pius XII. The “joy” he proclaims is not the joy of the saints who suffered martyrdom for the faith, but the shallow euphoria of a world that refuses to repent.
Until the structures occupying the Vatican repudiate the errors of Vatican II, restore the traditional Mass, reaffirm the dogma *extra Ecclesiam nulla salus*, and proclaim the social Kingship of Christ the King over all nations, their “missions” will remain what they are today: elaborate performances of apostasy, cloaked in the language of Scripture but emptied of its substance. The faithful who cling to Tradition must reject this counterfeit evangelization and hold fast to the immutable deposit of faith, for “the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine… and they will turn away their ears from the truth” (2 Tim. 4:3–4).
Source:
Pope to Equatorial Guinea: ‘Carry on the mission of Jesus’ first disciples with joy’ (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 23.04.2026