The Pillar, a portal dedicated to covering news from the structures occupying the Vatican, published on May 1, 2026, a paid-subscription podcast episode titled “The Friday Pillar Post,” authored by Ed Condon. The content, accessible only to paying subscribers, purported to offer “Vatican watch” news — that is, coverage of the activities, statements, and governance of the conciliar sect headquartered in Rome. The very existence and business model of such a publication — monetizing news about an institution that has, since 1962, systematically dismantled the Catholic faith — reveals a profound spiritual disorder. Rather than sounding the alarm about the abomination of desolation that has occupied the Chair of Peter, The Pillar treats the usurpers, their bureaucracies, and their novelties as legitimate objects of journalistic interest, thereby normalizing the greatest crisis in the history of the Church.
The Normalization of Usurpation Through Journalism
The Pillar’s entire editorial premise rests upon a foundational lie: that the structures currently operating out of the Vatican constitute the Catholic Church. Ed Condon, as the author and publisher of this May 1, 2026, episode, operates within a framework that takes for granted the legitimacy of the post-conciliar apparatus — from the antipope (currently Robert Prevost, who styles himself “Leo XIV”) down through the network of “bishops,” “cardinals,” and “priests” who have, by their public adherence to the heretical documents of the Second Vatican Council and their implementation of its revolutionary reforms, separated themselves from the true Church of Christ. The Code of Canon Law of 1917, Canon 188.4, is unambiguous: “Every office becomes vacant by the mere fact and without any declaration by reason of tacit resignation, recognized by the law itself, if the cleric: … 4. Publicly defects from the Catholic faith.” St. Robert Bellarmine, whose authority The Pillar would do well to consult, taught that “a Pope who is a manifest heretic, by that very fact ceases to be Pope and head, just as he ceases to be a Christian and member of the body of the Church” (De Romano Pontifice, II.30). The men who have occupied the Vatican since John XXIII convened the robber council have preached, taught, and legislated heresy — from the doctrine of religious liberty (Dignitatis Humanae) to the ecumenism that places idolatry on the same plane as the true faith (Unitatis Redintegratio). That a Catholic journalist treats their pronouncements as news worthy of paid subscription is itself a symptom of the disease.
What The Pillar Silences: The True State of the Church
The gravest accusation against any journalistic enterprise is not what it reports, but what it omits. In this regard, The Pillar is culpable of a silence that is nothing less than a crime against the souls of the faithful. Nowhere in its coverage — as evidenced by the very structure of this podcast episode and its accompanying show notes — is there any acknowledgment that the Catholic Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, cannot be identified with the modernist, paramasonic structure that has occupied Rome since the early 1960s. There is no warning that receiving “Communion” in post-conciliar structures, where the Mass has been reduced to a table of assembly and the rubrics violate the theology of the propitiatory sacrifice, constitutes sacrilege. There is no mention that the Novus Ordo Missae, the rite by which the vast majority of the conciliar sect worships, was designed — as its principal architect, Annibale Bugnini, a suspected Freemason, freely admitted — to be virtually indistinguishable from a Protestant service. There is no acknowledgment that the “saints” canonized by the antipopes, such as John Paul II (an open heretic and apostate) or John Henry Newman (a propagator of the evolution of dogma), have no authority whatsoever, since an antipope cannot canonize.
Pope Pius XI, in his encyclical Quas Primas of December 11, 1925, taught with the full weight of his Apostolic authority that “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.” He further declared that “when God and Jesus Christ — as we lamented — were removed from laws and states and when authority was derived not from God but from men, the foundations of that authority were destroyed.” The Pillar, by treating the conciliar usurpers as the legitimate governors of Christ’s Kingdom on earth, implicitly denies the universal Kingship of Christ and substitutes for it a naturalistic, sociological understanding of the Church as merely one institution among many in the global media landscape.
The Business of Normalizing Apostasy
It is particularly revealing that The Pillar operates on a paid subscription model — “The full episode is only available to pay subscribers,” the text announces. This is not merely a commercial detail; it is a spiritual indicator. The men who have seized the Vatican have transformed the Church of Christ into a brand, a media enterprise, a non-governmental organization with a communications strategy. That Catholic journalists have followed suit — creating paywalled content about the doings of antipopes and modernist “bishops” — demonstrates the extent to which the conciliar revolution has succeeded in reducing the supernatural reality of the Church to the level of a consumer product. The faithful are invited to pay for information about an institution that is actively working to destroy their faith. This is not Catholic journalism; it is the commercialization of apostasy.
Pope Pius IX, in his Syllabus of Errors of 1864, 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). The Pillar, by treating the conciliar sect as a legitimate subject of journalistic coverage, implicitly endorses precisely this reconciliation. Its very existence is predicated on the assumption that the structures occupying the Vatican are the Church, that their “popes” are popes, that their “teaching” is teaching, and that their governance is governance. This is the hermeneutics of continuity elevated to a business model.
The Duty of the Faithful: Rejection, Not Subscription
The faithful Catholic — the one who holds fast to the integral faith of all time, who adores Christ the King in the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass as offered according to the unchanging Roman Rite, who recognizes that the See of Peter is vacant and that the men who occupy it are usurpers — has no business subscribing to The Pillar or any similar enterprise. The duty of the faithful in this time of unprecedented crisis is not to keep informed about the doings of the conciliar sect but to preserve and profess the faith, to seek out valid sacraments from priests who have not defected from the Catholic faith, and to pray for the restoration of the true Church. As St. Pius X warned in Lamentabili Sane Exitu (1907), the pursuit of novelty “leads in our times to deplorable consequences, abandoning all restraint. It causes the heritage of humanity to be rejected, and often leads to the most grievous errors, which become particularly pernicious when they concern sacred sciences.” The Pillar is a fruit of that pursuit of novelty — a journalistic enterprise that takes the novelties of the conciliar revolution as its starting point and builds a business upon them.
The Catholic who wishes to remain Catholic must reject not only the theological errors of the post-conciliar period but also the entire ecosystem of normalization that surrounds it — the podcasts, the paywalls, the “Vatican watches,” the “Catholic news” portals that treat the abomination of desolation as though it were the Kingdom of Christ. The Pillar is not the answer; it is part of the problem. And those who pay to listen to it are not staying informed — they are subsidizing their own deception.
Source:
The Friday Pillar Post – May 1, 2026 (pillarcatholic.com)
Date: 01.05.2026