EWTN News portal reports that on June 8, 2026, the usurper Robert Prevost, known as “Pope” Leo XIV, bestowed a Golden Rose upon the statue of Our Lady of Almudena in Madrid, delivering a homily centered on the collapse of walls and the “Christian roots” of Spain. The article, framed as a celebration of Marian devotion and Spain’s Catholic heritage, presents the event as a moment of spiritual renewal and historical continuity. Yet beneath the veneer of pious rhetoric lies a profound emptiness: the complete absence of any mention of the Social Reign of Christ the King, the necessity of Spain’s explicit return to the Catholic Faith as the sole path to true peace, and the total silence regarding the apostasy that has consumed the conciliar sect. This ceremony, far from being a genuine act of Catholic worship, is a masterclass in modernist ambiguity, reducing the Blessed Virgin to a symbol of vague “hope” and “communion” while ignoring the supernatural realities of sin, grace, and the obligation of all nations to submit to the Divine King.
The Golden Rose: A Papal Tradition Stripped of Its Catholic Meaning
The article notes that the Golden Rose is “one of the oldest papal traditions,” dating to 1096, and describes it as “one of the highest distinctions a pope can bestow upon a Marian image or shrine.” This much is historically accurate. However, the critical question — who bestows this rose, and in what capacity — is entirely evaded. The man who performed this ceremony is not the Roman Pontiff. He is Robert Prevost, an antipope who occupies the Vatican as part of the conciliar sect that has, since 1958, systematically dismantled the Catholic Church from within. The Golden Rose, in the hands of a manifest heretic and usurper, is not a sign of papal authority but a prop in a theatrical production designed to lend legitimacy to an institution that has forfeited any claim to represent the Mystical Body of Christ.
As St. Robert Bellarmine teaches in De Romano Pontifice, 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.” The 1917 Code of Canon Law, Canon 188.4, confirms that every office becomes vacant “by the mere fact and without any declaration” if the cleric “publicly defects from the Catholic faith.” Leo XIV, who has embraced and promoted the errors of Vatican II — religious liberty, ecumenism, the democratization of the Church — is a manifest heretic. His acts, including the bestowal of the Golden Rose, carry no authority and no grace. They are the gestures of a stage actor playing the role of pope, not the Vicar of Christ acting in persona Christi.
The Legend of Almudena: A Story of Catholic Triumph Reduced to Sentimentality
The article recounts the tradition of Our Lady of Almudena: how the statue was hidden in the city walls during the Muslim conquest of 712, and how, after King Alfonso VI recaptured Madrid in 1083, the wall collapsed, revealing the image intact. This is a story of divine providence, of the protection of the Blessed Virgin over her faithful during a time of persecution, and of the triumph of the Catholic Faith over Islam during the Reconquista. It is, in its essence, a story about the supernatural order — about the reality of miracles, the power of prayer, and the fidelity of God to those who remain faithful to Him.
Yet Leo XIV’s treatment of this story is a study in modernist reductionism. He says: “It was thanks to a collapsed wall that the Mother was reunited with her people. This event is providential, because it points to the path that Jesus, through his most holy mother, invites us to follow.” He then immediately pivts to the language of secular humanitarianism: “There are still many walls that do not protect but rather divide, separate, and isolate.” The wall of the citadel — a real, historical wall behind which Catholics hid an image of the Blessed Virgin from the forces of Islam — is transformed into a metaphor for every form of human division: political, social, economic. The specific, supernatural, Catholic content of the story is drained away and replaced with a universalist, naturalistic message that could be uttered at any United Nations assembly.
This is the modernist method in its purest form: take a Catholic truth, strip it of its supernatural and dogmatic content, and refashion it into a message of human fraternity. Pius XI, in Quas Primas, warned precisely against this tendency: “The Kingdom of our Redeemer encompasses all men… His reign 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.” The walls that matter are not the walls of political division but the walls of error, heresy, and apostasy that separate souls from the true Church. And the collapse that is needed is not the collapse of national borders but the collapse of the abomination of desolation that has taken root in the Vatican itself.
Spain’s “Christian Heritage”: A Phrase Empty of Catholic Content
The article repeatedly invokes Spain’s “Christian heritage” and “Christian roots.” Leo himself is quoted as calling the devotion “a sign of the Christian roots that characterize you and give you life.” But what does “Christian heritage” mean in the mouth of a modernist antipope? It does not mean the Catholic Faith as defined by the Council of Trent, the Syllabus of Errors, and the social encyclicals of the pre-conciliar popes. It does not mean the Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella, of the Inquisition, of the missionary conquests that brought the Gospel to the New World under the explicit mandate of the Roman Pontiff. It does not mean the Spain that Pius XI envisioned when he wrote that rulers must “fulfill this duty themselves and with their people, if they wish to maintain their authority inviolate and contribute to the increase of their homeland’s happiness.”
No. In the lexicon of the conciliar sect, “Christian heritage” means a cultural artifact, a historical memory, a source of sentimental identity — stripped of all dogmatic content, all supernatural obligation, all demand for the submission of the state and society to the laws of Christ the King. It is the language of a man who wants to honor Spain’s past without condemning its present apostasy. It is the language of a man who speaks of “roots” while ignoring that the tree has been cut down and replaced with a plastic imitation.
Pius IX, in the Syllabus of Errors, condemned the proposition 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). He condemned the idea that “the Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church” (Proposition 55). Spain, by its current constitution and laws, is a secular state that guarantees religious freedom and separates Church from state — precisely the errors condemned by Pius IX. Yet Leo XIV stands in Madrid and speaks of “Christian roots” without a single word of condemnation for the apostasy of the Spanish state. This is not Catholic teaching. This is complicity with the enemies of Christ.
The Silence That Condemns: What Leo XIV Did Not Say
The most damning aspect of this ceremony is not what was said but what was not said. In a homily delivered in Madrid — a city that was once the capital of one of the greatest Catholic empires in history — Leo XIV did not once mention:
Christ the King. The Social Reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ over Spain, over all nations, over every aspect of public and private life — the very doctrine that Pius XI enshrined in Quas Primas as the remedy for the evils of modernity — was entirely absent. The Golden Rose was placed at the feet of Our Lady, but no mention was made of her Divine Son’s royal authority over Spain and the world.
The necessity of conversion. Leo spoke of “hope” and “communion” but never called Spain — or anyone — to conversion to the Catholic Faith as the only means of salvation. He did not echo the words of Our Lord: “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). He did not echo the dogmatic teaching of the Church: Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus — outside the Church there is no salvation.
The reality of sin and the need for repentance. The homily was a message of encouragement and hope, but it contained no call to repentance, no acknowledgment of sin, no warning of judgment. It was, in the language of St. Pius X, a sermon fit for the modernist who “aims at such a development of dogmas as appears to be their corruption” (Lamentabili sane exitu, Introduction).
The apostasy of the conciliar sect. Not a single word was directed against the modernist revolution that has devastated the Church since 1958. Not a single word condemned the errors of Vatican II, the new “Mass,” the false ecumenism, the religious liberty that Pius IX condemned as madness. The ceremony was presented as a moment of continuity with the Catholic past, when in reality it was a celebration of the very system that has destroyed that past.
The enemies of the Church. Pius IX, in the Syllabus, warned repeatedly against the “sects” — the Masonic and revolutionary forces that seek the destruction of the Church. He wrote: “It is from them that the synagogue of Satan, which gathers its troops against the Church of Christ, takes its strength.” Leo XIV, standing in a cathedral in Spain — a country that suffered a brutal Masonic revolution in the 1930s — said nothing. The walls he spoke of collapsing were metaphorical walls of division, not the real walls of error and apostasy that the enemies of Christ have erected within the Church itself.
“Form Bonds and Restore the Universal Language of Communion”: The Ecumenical Heresy in Full Display
Perhaps the most revealing line in Leo’s homily is his exhortation to “form bonds and restore the universal language of communion, fraternal love, and harmony.” This is not Catholic language. This is the language of Nostra Aetate, of Assisi, of the Abu Dhabi declaration — the language of the false ecumenism that treats all religions as paths to God and all men as brothers regardless of their faith or lack thereof.
The Catholic Church has always taught that true communion and true fraternal love are possible only within the unity of the Catholic Faith. As Pius XI wrote in Mortalium Animos: “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.” The “universal language of communion” that Leo speaks of is not the language of the Catholic Church — it is the language of the United Nations, of the World Council of Churches, of the Masonic ideal of universal brotherhood without Christ.
This is the language of a man who has replaced the supernatural charity of Christ with the naturalistic humanitarianism of the Enlightenment. It is the language of a man who, standing before an image of the Blessed Virgin Mary holding her Divine Son, chooses to speak not of the Incarnation, not of the Redemption, not of the necessity of baptism and the Catholic Faith, but of “bonds” and “harmony” — words that mean everything and nothing, that offend no one and convert no one.
The Ceremony as a Symptom: The Paramasonic Structure at Work
This ceremony in Madrid is not an isolated event. It is a symptom of the systemic apostasy that defines the conciliar sect. Every element — the invocation of “Christian heritage” without Catholic content, the reduction of Marian devotion to a symbol of vague hope, the silence on Christ the King and the necessity of conversion, the ecumenical language of “communion” and “harmony” — points to an institution that has abandoned its divine mission and replaced it with a program of naturalistic humanism dressed in Catholic vestments.
The Golden Rose, placed at the feet of Our Lady of Almudena by the hands of a manifest heretic, is not a sign of Catholic vitality. It is a funeral wreath placed on the grave of the Spain that once was — the Spain of the Reconquista, of the Inquisition, of the missionary kings, of the Spain that Pius XI called to recognize the reign of Christ the King. It is a sign that the conciar sect continues its work of destruction, not by openly attacking the Faith, but by emptying it of its content and replacing it with a hollow shell of sentimentality and humanitarianism.
The faithful who seek the true Church — the Church of all ages, the Church that teaches, governs, and sanctifies in the name of Christ the King — must recognize this ceremony for what it is: not a moment of grace, but a moment of deception. The walls that need to collapse are not the walls between nations or peoples. They are the walls of the conciliar sect — the walls behind which the enemies of Christ hide their apostasy behind the mask of Catholic tradition. Until those walls fall, until the true Church is restored to her rightful authority, ceremonies like this one in Madrid will continue to be performed — not to honor the Blessed Virgin, but to use her image in the service of the Antichrist’s program of universal apostasy.
Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus. Outside the Church, there is no salvation. And the conciliar sect, with its golden roses and its empty homilies, is not the Church.
Source:
Pope Leo XIV honors Our Lady of Almudena with Golden Rose, reflects on Spain’s Christian heritage (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 10.06.2026