EWTN News portal reports that on June 8, 2026, the usurper Robert Prevost, styling himself “Pope Leo XIV,” became the first antipope in history to address Spain’s Congress of Deputies, delivering what the conciliar sect presents as a “forceful appeal” for human dignity, life protection, migrants, families, peace, and religious freedom. The address, lasting nearly seven minutes of standing ovations and shouts of “Long live the pope!”, was delivered before 700 guests amid tight security in Madrid’s Palacio de las Cortes. The speech touched upon abortion, migration, artificial intelligence in warfare, political polarization, and religious freedom, including a defense of the sacramental seal of confession. Only two left-wing parties, Podemos and BNG, with six lawmakers out of over 600, chose not to attend. The event was framed as a historic moment of Catholic engagement with political authority, yet beneath its polished rhetoric lies the same modernist rot that has consumed the conciliar sect since 1958.
The Illusion of Catholic Authority in a Vacant See
The very premise of this event is built upon a foundational lie: that Robert Prevost occupies the Chair of St. Peter. From the perspective of integral Catholic faith, the See of Rome has been vacant since the death of Pope Pius XII in 1958, or at the latest since the death of the last validly elected pontiff. The men who have since claimed the title of “pope” — beginning with the manifest heretic Angelo Roncalli (John XXIII) — are, as St. Robert Bellarmine teaches in De Romano Pontifice, automatically deprived of all jurisdiction the moment they fell into manifest heresy: “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.” This is not a disciplinary penalty requiring declaration; it is an ontological reality. As Bellarmine further clarifies, manifest heretics “are already outside the Church before excommunication and deprived of all jurisdiction. They have indeed been condemned by their own judgment, as the Apostle teaches (Titus 3:10-11).”
Canon 188.4 of the 1917 Code of Canon Law confirms this principle: every ecclesiastical office becomes vacant “by the mere fact and without any declaration by reason of tacit resignation” when a cleric “publicly defects from the Catholic faith.” The post-conciliar occupants of the Vatican have done precisely this, embracing and propagating errors condemned by the perennial Magisterum — from the Syllabus of Errors of Pius IX to Lamentabili sane exitu of St. Pius X. Their “teaching” carries no more authority than that of any other manifest heretic. When Leo XIV addresses Spain’s parliament, he does so not as the Vicar of Christ but as the spokesman of a paramasonic structure that has systematically dismantled Catholic doctrine for nearly seven decades.
“Human Dignity” Without God: The Modernist Substitution
The central theme of Leo XIV’s address is “human dignity” — a phrase repeated with the frequency of a mantra, yet stripped of its Catholic theological foundation. He warns against subordinating this dignity to “shifting social consensus or the whims of the majority,” and asks: “Can a community that casts into the shadows the unborn child, the elderly, the sick, those who suffer in silence, or those who depend entirely on the care of others be called fully just?”
The language sounds Catholic. It is not. The Catholic understanding of human dignity is rooted in the supernatural order: man is created in the image and likeness of God (imago Dei), redeemed by the Precious Blood of Christ, and called to eternal beatitude. Human dignity, properly understood, flows from man’s relationship to his Creator and his destiny in the supernatural order. As Pope Leo XIII taught in Immortale Dei, the state exists for the common good ordered toward eternal happiness, and all authority derives from God. Pius XI, in Quas Primas, explicitly grounded Christ’s kingship in the hypostatic union: “He possesses, in a word, dominion over all creatures, not by force but by essence and nature,” and therefore “angels and men are to be obedient and subject to His dominion as Man.”
What Leo XIV offers instead is the language of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — dignity as an autonomous, self-referencing category, detached from divine law, supernatural grace, and the obligation of nations to profess the Catholic Faith as the sole true religion. This is precisely the error condemned by Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors, Proposition 15: “Every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true,” and Proposition 77: “In the present day it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the State, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship.”
When Leo XIV speaks of “human dignity” without once mentioning the obligation of the state to recognize Christ the King, to submit to the Church’s authority, or to legislate in accordance with divine law, he is not teaching Catholic doctrine. He is baptizing the errors of Vatican II’s Dignitatis Humanae — the declaration on religious freedom that Pius IX explicitly condemned as heretical. The omission is not accidental; it is the very essence of modernism. As St. Pius X warned in Pascendi Dominici Gregis, the modernists “proceed to act as if it were possible for a Christian to accept and adapt the substance of Catholic doctrine to modern philosophy, while rejecting its traditional formulation.” The substance Leo XIV offers is naturalistic humanism dressed in Catholic vestments.
The Abortion Question: Moral Outrage Without Supernatural Foundation
Leo XIV’s most pointed remarks concern abortion, delivered at a moment when Spain’s socialist-led government seeks to enshrine constitutional protections for the practice. He declares: “Every human life must be recognized and safeguarded from conception to its natural end, in every circumstance of its existence,” and warns that “when this certainty is obscured, the most vulnerable are the first victims, and the law loses its deepest meaning.”
One might ask: where is the mention of original sin? Where is the teaching on baptism of desire and the necessity of the sacraments for salvation? Where is the warning that procured abortion is not merely an injustice against “human dignity” but a mortal sin that incurs automatic excommunication (Canon 2350 of the 1917 Code)? Where is the reminder that the unborn child, if it dies without baptism, is deprived of the beatific vision — the very purpose for which Christ died on the Cross? Where is the call for Spain to repent of its legislative apostasy, to abolish the abortion laws that constitute formal cooperation with evil, and to recognize that no parliamentary consensus can legitimize what God condemns?
The silence is deafening. Leo XIV speaks of “fragile lives” and “the moral greatness of a nation” in terms that any secular humanist could endorse. He frames the defense of life as “a goal of civilization” rather than as a binding obligation under divine law. This is the language of the conciliar sect’s “consistent ethic of life” — a rhetorical strategy designed to sound Catholic while avoiding the supernatural claims that would alienate the liberal establishment. It is the same strategy employed by Karol Wojtyła (John Paul II) in Evangelium Vitae, where the gravity of abortion is acknowledged but the Church’s authority to compel Catholic states to criminalize it is quietly abandoned.
Pius XI, in Casti Connubii (1930), was unequivocal: “The penalties established by the Church for the more grievous sins against the sixth commandment include, for those who procure abortion, excommunication incurred ipso facto and reserved to the Ordinary.” He further declared that “any use whatsoever of matrimony exercised in such a way that the act is deliberately frustrated in its natural power to generate life is an offense against the law of God and of nature, and those who indulge in such are branded with the guilt of a grave sin.” The contrast with Leo XIV’s bland appeals to “civilization” and “fragile lives” could not be starker.
The Family: Naturalized and Stripped of Its Sacramental Reality
Leo XIV describes the family as “the primary human reality and the natural foundation of the community” and “the first school of humanity, where one learns, before anywhere else, the basic grammar of living together: welcoming life, caring for others, forgiving, serving and belonging.”
Again, the language is carefully calibrated to avoid any specifically Catholic content. Where is the teaching that marriage is a sacrament — not merely a “natural foundation” — instituted by Christ to signify the union of Christ and the Church (Ephesians 5:32)? Where is the reminder that the family exists for the procreation and education of children for the Church and for heaven, not merely for “living together”? Where is the condemnation of divorce, contraception, and civil unions — all of which Spain has legalized with the tacit acceptance of the conciliar sect?
Pius XI, in Casti Connubii, taught that “the family is more sacred than the State and that men are begotten not for the earth and for time, but for Heaven and eternity.” The family is not merely a “school of humanity” but a domestic church, ordered toward the salvation of souls. Leo XIV’s naturalistic description reduces the family to a sociological unit — precisely the error condemned by the perennial Magisterium.
Selective Citation of Spain’s Catholic Heritage
Leo XIV invokes Cervantes, St. Teresa of Ávila, Miguel de Unamuno, and the School of Salamanca, particularly Francisco de Vitoria, claiming that this tradition shaped “a legal and moral consciousness capable of remembering that authority always entails responsibility and that every human being must be recognized as a subject of rights and duties.”
This is a masterful exercise in selective memory. The School of Salamanca — particularly Vitoria, Soto, and Suárez — operated within a framework of Catholic natural law that presupposed the truth of the Faith and the authority of the Church. Their teachings on the rights of indigenous peoples, for example, were grounded in the conviction that these peoples were capable of receiving the Faith and that their conversion was the duty of Catholic sovereigns. They did not teach a generic “human rights” doctrine detached from the supernatural order.
Moreover, Leo XIV’s invocation of Miguel de Unamuno — a philosopher whose Catholic credentials were, to say the least, questionable — is revealing. Unamuno was a modernist in all but name, tormented by doubt and unable to accept the Church’s authority with the simplicity of faith. To cite him alongside St. Teresa of Ávila, the great Doctor of the Church and reformer of Carmel, is an act of intellectual dishonesty that reveals the conciliar sect’s preference for ambiguity over clarity.
The authentic Catholic legacy of Spain — the Spain of the Reconquista, of the Council of Trent, of the Spanish Inquisition (which, whatever its excesses, defended the Faith against heresy and apostasy), of the missionary enterprise that brought the Gospel to the Americas — is precisely what the conciliar sect has spent decades dismantling. Leo XIV’s sanitized version of Spanish Catholic heritage is a tool of modernist appropriation, not a genuine recovery of tradition.
Migration: Compassion Without Doctrine
Leo XIV devotes significant attention to migrants and refugees, calling for “safe and legal pathways, a respectful welcome and real opportunities for integration,” while also promoting “the right to remain in one’s own land.” He warns against traffickers and smugglers and declares that “no nation can face a challenge of this magnitude on its own.”
The Catholic Church has always taught the duty of charity toward the stranger. But Catholic social teaching also insists that the common good of the political community — including the preservation of its cultural and religious identity — is a legitimate concern of the state. Pius XII, in his 1946 address to the College of Cardinals, acknowledged the right of nations to regulate immigration in accordance with the common good. The idea that migration should be managed primarily through “safe and legal pathways” and “integration” — without any mention of the duty to evangelize migrants, to require their conformity to the laws of the Church, or to prioritize the spiritual welfare of the native Catholic population — is a purely naturalistic framework.
Furthermore, Leo XIV’s call for “the right to remain in one’s own land” implicitly endorses the United Nations’ framework of international development and climate policy — the same framework that promotes population control, abortion, and gender ideology under the guise of “sustainable development.” The conciliar sect’s alignment with UN migration compacts and global governance structures is well documented. Leo XIV’s remarks are not a departure from this alignment but a continuation of it.
War and Artificial Intelligence: Moralizing Without Authority
Leo XIV warns against rearmament and the use of artificial intelligence in warfare, declaring that “weapons may impose a temporary silence; but they can never build a genuine and lasting peace,” and that “decisions regarding life and death are never [to be] left to automated systems nor removed from the moral responsibility of the human person.”
These are platitudes that any secular ethicist could endorse. Where is the teaching on the conditions for a just war, as articulated by St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas? Where is the reminder that peace is not an end in itself but is ordered toward the tranquility of order — the peace of Christ, which can only exist in the Kingdom of Christ? Pius XI, in Quas Primas, taught that “the hope of lasting peace will not yet shine upon nations as long as individuals and states renounce and do not wish to recognize the reign of our Savior.” Peace is only possible in the kingdom of Christ — not through diplomatic negotiations, arms control treaties, or ethical oversight of AI.
Leo XIV’s warnings about AI in warfare are particularly ironic coming from a representative of the conciliar sect, which has systematically automated the destruction of Catholic worship through the Novus Ordo Missae — a liturgical “reform” designed by committees and implemented through bureaucratic fiat, with no regard for the organic development of sacred tradition. The conciliar sect has no moral authority to speak on the ethics of automated decision-making when it has itself automated the desacralization of the Most Holy Sacrifice.
Political Polarization: The False Nobility of Dialogue
Addressing Spain’s polarized political climate, Leo XIV urges lawmakers to resist contempt for opponents: “Political pluralism should not degenerate into the constant disparagement of one’s adversary. In a mature society, even conflict can become a path to peace, when differences are softened by listening.”
This is the language of the post-conciliar “dialogue” — a concept that, in Catholic teaching, has a very specific and limited meaning. The Church engages in dialogue with non-Catholics for the purpose of bringing them to the Faith, not for the purpose of finding common ground on moral principles. As Pius XI taught in Mortalium Animos (1928), “the union of Christians can only be promoted by promoting the return to the one true Church of Christ of those who are separated from it.” Dialogue that presupposes the equality of religious opinions, or that treats moral truths as negotiable, is not Catholic dialogue — it is indifferentism, condemned by the Syllabus of Errors (Proposition 15) and by every pope up to Pius XII.
Leo XIV’s call for “the nobility of dialogue” is a call for Catholics to abandon the prophetic witness of the Faith in exchange for social respectability. It is the same strategy that has led the conciliar sect to silence its own faithful on issues like abortion, homosexuality, and religious liberty, in order to maintain its seat at the table of global governance.
Religious Freedom: The Heresy of Dignitatis Humanae Reasserted
Perhaps the most revealing portion of Leo XIV’s address is his defense of religious freedom: “The freedom upon which the contemporary state is built, if it is authentic, recognizes the religious dimension of the human person, respects it and protects it legally.” He further declares that “faith does not seek to impose itself through privileges or coercion; yet neither can it be silenced as if it were irrelevant to public life.”
This is the heresy of Dignitatis Humanae — the Vatican II declaration that proclaimed the right of every person to religious freedom, defined as immunity from coercion in religious matters. This document was explicitly condemned by the perennial Magisterium. Pius IX, in the Syllabus of Errors, condemned the proposition that “every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true” (Proposition 15). He further condemned the idea that “in the present day it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the State, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship” (Proposition 77).
Leo XIV’s defense of the sacramental seal of confession, while superficially Catholic, is framed within this same heretical paradigm. He presents the seal as part of “the broader sphere of religious freedom” — a fundamental right that protects “the most intimate sphere of the person.” But the seal of confession is not a “right” granted by the state or derived from “human dignity.” It is a divine law, instituted by Christ Himself, that binds the confessor under pain of mortal sin and eternal damnation. To frame it as a matter of “religious freedom” is to subject divine law to the categories of liberal constitutionalism — precisely the inversion that the conciliar sect has effected since Vatican II.
The Standing Ovation: A Sign of the Times
The nearly seven-minute standing ovation, with shouts of “Long live the pope!”, is not a sign of Catholic vitality. It is a sign of the profound spiritual blindness that has overtaken the Catholic world since the conciliar revolution. The same crowds that applaud Leo XIV’s generic appeals to “human dignity” and “peace” would recoil in horror if he were to teach, with the clarity of Pius IX, that the Catholic Church is the only true religion and that the state is bound to profess it; or, with the force of St. Pius X, that modernism is the synthesis of all heresies and that those who embrace it are outside the Church.
The standing ovation is the applause of a world that wants the appearance of Catholicism without its substance — the aesthetic of tradition without the obligation of faith. It is the same world that fills cathedrals for concerts but empties them for the Most Holy Sacrifice. It is the world that the conciliar sect was created to serve.
Conclusion: The Abomination of Desolation Speaks in the Temple
Leo XIV’s address to Spain’s parliament is not a Catholic teaching. It is a modernist homily — a carefully crafted speech designed to project the image of Catholic authority while advancing the agenda of the conciliar revolution. Every theme — human dignity without God, the family without sacramental grace, migration without evangelization, peace without Christ the King, religious freedom as a human right — is drawn from the playbook of Vatican II and its aftermath.
The true Church — the Church of the Apostles, of the Fathers, of the Councils, of the great popes from Peter to Pius XII — endures in the faithful who profess the integral Catholic faith and are led by bishops with valid sacraments and validly ordained priests. This Church does not address parliaments to beg for “human rights.” It teaches, governs, and sanctifies with the authority of Christ, demanding that nations submit to the kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ and that all men embrace the one true Faith for the salvation of their souls.
As Pius XI declared in Quas Primas: “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.”
Until that teaching is restored — until the abomination of desolation is cast out from the holy place — addresses like Leo XIV’s will continue to be delivered, standing ovations will continue to resound, and the faithful will continue to be led astray by men who wear the garments of shepherds but are, in truth, wolves in sheep’s clothing. Videant consules ne quid res publica detrimenti capiat — let the consuls see to it that the republic suffer no harm. But the true Republic — the City of God — suffers immeasurably every time a usurper speaks in the name of Christ without possessing His authority.
Source:
Pope Leo XIV tells Spain’s parliament every human life must be protected (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 08.06.2026