EWTN News portal reports on the June 9, 2026, flight of the usurper Robert Prevost — who occupies Peter’s throne under the name “Leo XIV” — from Madrid to Barcelona, during which the antipope was invited into the cockpit of an Iberia aircraft and engaged in banter about Real Madrid football with the pilots. Co-pilot Ángeles Hernández described herself as being “on cloud nine,” attributing the encounter to “God’s ways” and a nun’s assurance that it was “the Lord’s way of telling me he loved me.” The article, dripping with sentimental euphoria, presents this trivial episode as though it were a spiritual event of the highest order. Beneath its saccharine surface lies a textbook case of the conciliar religion’s reduction of the sacred to the sentimental, the supernatural to the anecdotal, and the papal office to a celebrity meet-and-greet.
The Religion of “Cloud Nine”: Sentimentality in Place of Sanctity
The co-pilot Hernández declared: “I think I’m still beside myself … I’m still on cloud nine. I’ve hardly had time to stop and pray, and I believe this is something you process through prayer because otherwise it doesn’t sink in the same way.” This confession is itself a devastating indictment. A woman who has just been in the physical proximity of the occupant of the Vatican admits she has “hardly had time to stop and pray” about it — and yet she has had ample time to give interviews, pose for photographs, and narrate the episode to the press. The event is processed not through prayer but through media. The language of “cloud nine” — a secular idiom for euphoric self-gratification — is telling. Where a Catholic of the integral faith would speak of grace, of humility before divine providence, of the fear of God (timor Domini), this woman speaks the language of emotional consumerism. She feels “blessed” — a word emptied of all theological content and reduced to a synonym for “lucky” or “privileged.”
The exchange she recounts with a nun of the Eucharistic Sisters of Nazareth is equally revealing: “I told her I didn’t know if I deserved something like this, and she replied that it was the Lord’s way of telling me he loved me.” This is not Catholic theology; it is the language of self-help spirituality, of the prosperity gospel, of a deity whose primary function is to affirm the individual’s sense of personal worth. The nun’s response — that God arranged a cockpit encounter as a way of telling a pilot He loves her — is a grotesque parody of divine providence. It reduces the Almighty Author of salvation history to a celestial valet arranging VIP experiences for His favorites. Where is the doctrine of grace as an unmerited gift? Where is the teaching of the saints that God’s love is manifested above all in the Cross, in suffering, in the sacraments, and in the faithful observance of His commandments? The entire exchange breathes the spirit of the conciliar cult of man — the very spirit condemned by St. Pius X in Pascendi Dominici gregis as the essence of Modernism: “the religion of man seeking God” rather than the religion of God revealing Himself to man.
The Antipope as Celebrity: The Destruction of Papal Dignity
The article describes how the antipope “clearly enjoyed the experience,” asked “technical questions” about engine temperature, and engaged in football banter with the pilots: “The pope jokingly replied that he’s also a ‘White’ (referring to the nickname for Real Madrid fans) and added that one has to ‘be careful’ in Barcelona, given the traditional rivalry between the Real team and Barça.” Let the gravity of this sink in. The man who claims to be the Vicar of Christ, the successor of Peter, the supreme teacher of the universal Church, is presented to the world joking about football rivalries with airline pilots. This is not a matter of personality or temperament; it is a matter of the systematic destruction of the papal office’s sacred character.
Pius XI, in Quas Primas (1925), taught with the full weight of his magisterial authority that Christ the King reigns over all nations, and that the Church’s mission is to lead souls to eternal salvation — not to provide photo opportunities and cockpit entertainment. The same Pius XI, in his encyclical Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, lamented that “the cause of the evils which We deplore in the modern world is the denial of the kingship of Christ” and that “when Jesus Christ is excluded from the government of nations, from the education of youth, from the administration of justice, the necessary consequence is that the very foundations of human society are shaken.” What, then, are we to say of a claimant to the papacy whose public persona is built on football jokes, viral videos, and the language of celebrity culture?
The escort of two Spanish Air Force F-18 fighter jets further underscores the point. The article presents this military display as though it were a mark of honor befitting the Vicar of Christ. But the true Vicar of Christ — the Roman Pontiff of the integral Church — derives his authority not from state power, military escorts, or media spectacle, but from Christ’s promise: “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church” (Matt. 16:18). The display of temporal power surrounding this antipope is not a sign of the Church’s strength but of her captivity — captivity to the world, to the flesh, and to the devil. As the Syllabus of Errors of Pius IX condemned in Proposition 24: “The Church has not the power of using force, nor has she any temporal power, direct or indirect.” The fighter jets, the state visit, the media circus — all of this is the apparatus of a political figure, not a successor of the fisherman of Galilee.
The Omission of the Supernatural: A Cockpit Without God
Read the article carefully and ask: where is God? Not the sentimental “God’s ways” of the pilot, not the “Lord’s way of telling me he loved me” of the nun — but the true God, the God of Catholic doctrine, the God Who is ipsum esse subsistens, Who has revealed Himself through His Church, Who offers salvation through the sacraments, Who will judge the living and the dead? He is entirely absent.
There is no mention of the antipope celebrating Holy Mass — the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Altar, the unbloody renewal of Calvary, the center of all Catholic life. There is no mention of the Blessed Sacrament, of confession, of the preaching of the Gospel, of the call to repentance, of the four last things. The “Holy Father” — to use the title this article bestows without irony on a manifest heretic and usurper — asks about engine temperature. He jokes about football. He gives blessings as though they were autographs: “The pope told me to let them know they have his blessing and that he is praying for them. I’ll never forget those words — they are truly a gift.”
This is the religion of the conciar sect in its purest form: a religion without sacrifice, without doctrine, without the Cross — a religion of feelings, of experiences, of encounters. It is the religion condemned by the Holy Office under St. Pius X in Lamentabili Sane Exitu, which rejected the proposition that “dogmas of faith should be understood according to their practical function, i.e., as binding in action, rather than as principles of belief” (Proposition 26). The cockpit encounter is not a dogmatic event; it is a “practical” one — an experience to be felt, photographed, and shared. It is Modernism incarnate: faith reduced to religious experience, the papacy reduced to a public relations office, the Church reduced to a platform for human affirmation.
The Heresy of the “Church of Man”
The entire article is structured around the pilot’s feelings: her childhood dream, her sense of being “blessed,” her emotional processing of the event, her gratitude for the blessing. The antipope is not the subject of the story; he is a prop in the pilot’s personal narrative of self-fulfillment. This is precisely the inversion that St. Pius X identified as the defining characteristic of Modernism: “the Church listening cooperates in such a way with the Church teaching in defining truths of faith, that the Church teaching should only approve the common opinions of the Church listening” — condemned in Proposition 6 of Lamentabili. The “people” — their feelings, their experiences, their opinions — have replaced the Magisterium. The antipope does not teach; he affirms. He does not govern; he entertains. He does not sanctify; he poses.
The article’s closing lines are perhaps the most revealing: “She said faith is an immense gift she received from her parents and grandparents, who were the ones responsible for sowing that initial seed.” Faith as a family heirloom, a cultural inheritance, a “seed” watered by personal relationships — this is not the Catholic faith, which is “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1), a supernatural virtue infused by God through baptism, nourished by the sacraments, and preserved by the teaching authority of the true Church. It is, rather, the Modernist conception of faith as a natural development of religious sentiment — condemned by the same St. Pius X in Pascendi as “the faith which proceeds from the heart” rather than from the intellect assenting to divine truth.
Conclusion: The Abomination in the Cockpit
This article, trivial in its subject matter, is profound in its implications. It reveals, with the clarity of a clinical specimen, the spiritual state of the conciliar sect: a structure that has abandoned the supernatural, replaced doctrine with sentiment, substituted the Most Holy Sacrifice with photo opportunities, and transformed the Vicar of Christ into a smiling celebrity dispensing blessings like a talk-show host distributing compliments. The pilot’s “cloud nine” is the conciliar religion’s replacement for heaven — a purely emotional, entirely worldly, and wholly satanic counterfeit of the peace that surpasses all understanding (Pax Christi).
The true Church — the Church of all ages, the Church of the martyrs and the doctors, the Church that endures in the faithful who profess the integral Catholic faith — has no cockpit encounters, no viral videos, no fighter jet escorts. She has the Mass of all time, the sacraments of salvation, the unchanging deposit of faith, and the promise of her Divine Founder: “The gates of hell shall not prevail against her” (Matt. 16:18). Let the conciar sect have its “cloud nine.” The faithful have something infinitely greater: the Cross of Christ, and the certainty that in the end, it is not the spirit of the world that triumphs, but the Lamb who was slain (Rev. 5:12).
Source:
‘I’m still on cloud nine,’ says pilot who shared cockpit with Pope Leo XIV (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 10.06.2026