The National Catholic Register article by Andrea Gagliarducci (June 18, 2026) presents an enthusiastic analysis of Leo XIV’s recent six-day visit to Spain, framing it as a strategic shift from the itineraries of his predecessor. The article celebrates the trip as a journey to the “peripheries of faith” – nations with ancient Christian roots experiencing a secularization – and highlights massive turnouts for Corpus Christi in Madrid and emotional responses in Barcelona. Gagliarducci praises the antipope’s speech to the Spanish parliament (Cortes) for addressing populism, nationalism, and abortion, and for invoking the School of Salamanca and Spanish saints like John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila. The piece concludes that Leo XIV’s presence serves to “reawaken dormant faith,” “confirm people in the faith,” and “restore Christ to the center,” portraying the visit as a resounding success for the “New Evangelization.” Beneath this veneer of triumphalism lies a calculated exploitation of Catholic memory to advance the very Modernist revolution that has emptied these nations of their faith.
The “Peripheries” Deception: Masking the Abandonment of the Faithful
Gagliarducci frames Leo XIV’s choice of Spain, Monaco, San Marino, and upcoming France as a deliberate turn towards nations with “solid Catholic history” and “ancient Catholicism,” contrasting it with Francis’s alleged avoidance of such centers. This narrative is profoundly misleading. The true “peripheries” requiring urgent pastoral care are not the historically Catholic nations of Europe, but the countless souls trapped within the conciliar sect itself, starved of true sacraments, sound doctrine, and the uncompromising call to conversion. The antipopes’ travels are not missions of salvation but global propaganda tours for the neo-church, designed to project an illusion of relevance and unity while systematically dismantling the remnants of Catholic truth and discipline. As Pope Pius IX lamented in the Syllabus of Errors (1864), the enemies of the Church operate through “frauds and machinations,” coming forth from hiding to “triumph as a powerful master” (Conclusion, Syllabus). Leo XIV’s Iberian spectacle is precisely such a machination, using the aesthetic trappings of Catholicism – processions, blessings of monuments, parliamentary addresses – to distract from the spiritual desolation wrought by Vatican II and its aftermath.
The Eucharistic Facade: Idolatry Masquerading as Devotion
The article highlights the “1.2 million people gathered to celebrate Corpus Christi in Madrid’s Plaza de Cibeles” as evidence of Spain’s “profound Catholicism.” This is a grotesque misrepresentation. The “Eucharist” venerated in these post-conciliar celebrations is not the true Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, but likely an invalid, sacrilegious parody consecrated by apostate “priests” using the Protestant-influenced 1969 Pauline Rite. To participate in such a “celebration” is not an act of profound Catholicism, but potentially an act of idolatry, adoring a false god of the conciliar sect’s own making. Pope St. Pius X, in Lamentabili Sane Exitu (1907), condemned the Modernist proposition that the sacraments “merely serve to remind man of the presence of the ever-benevolent Creator” (Proposition 41), stripping them of their true sacrificial and sanctifying power. The massive turnout reflects not a revival of true faith, but the success of the neo-church in maintaining a veneer of religiosity while hollowing out its substance. The true “periphery” is the faithful Catholic deprived of the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, forced into the spiritual desert by the very structures Leo XIV represents.
Invoking Saints, Betraying Their Legacy: The School of Salamanca Perverted
Gagliarducci praises Leo XIV for reminding Spain of its “cultural legacy,” specifically the School of Salamanca, which he claims laid the foundations for “human rights.” This is a deliberate distortion serving the conciliar agenda of religious liberty and human dignity divorced from submission to Christ the King. The true School of Salamanca, rooted in the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas and the papal magisterium (e.g., Quas Primas), affirmed the inherent dignity of the human person precisely because man is created in God’s image and redeemed by Christ, and therefore subject to God’s law and the Church’s authority. Their defense of indigenous peoples was grounded in their status as rational souls capable of receiving the Gospel and their right to hear it, not in a secular notion of autonomous “human rights” detached from divine revelation. Pope Pius XI, in Quas Primas (1925), unequivocally stated that Christ’s reign “encompasses also all non-Christians, so that most truly the entire human race is subject to the authority of Jesus Christ” (§28), and that rulers must “fulfill this duty themselves and with their people, if they wish to maintain their authority inviolate” (§29). Leo XIV’s invocation of Salamanca to promote a “healthy secularism” that merely avoids “excluding religion from public life” is a direct betrayal of this teaching, echoing the condemned error that “the Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church” (Proposition 55, Syllabus). He uses the saints’ names to legitimize the very religious indifferentism they fought against.
Parliamentary Theater: The Antichrist’s Kingdom Endorsed
The article describes Leo XIV’s speech to the Spanish Cortes as “monumental,” noting applause even from the anticlerical Podemos party, and claims it served to “remind people of their Christianity.” This scene epitomizes the conciliar sect’s capitulation to the world. The true mission of the Papacy is not to seek approval from parliaments representing every shade of error, but to proclaim the absolute Kingship of Christ over all nations and to condemn error fearlessly. Pope Pius IX declared that the Church possesses “proper and perpetual rights of her own, conferred upon her by her Divine Founder,” and that it is not for the civil power to define these rights (Proposition 19, Syllabus). Furthermore, the Church has the “power of defining dogmatically that the religion of the Catholic Church is the only true religion” (Proposition 21, Syllabus). Leo XIV’s address, seeking common ground with socialists and populists while offering only vague affirmations of “human life” without explicitly condemning abortion as a mortal sin demanding excommunication, is not a reminder of Christianity, but a surrender to the spirit of the age. It embodies the condemned proposition that “The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization” (Proposition 80, Syllabus). The eight minutes of applause are not for Christ the King, but for the successful integration of the neo-church into the liberal democratic order – the very order built on the ruins of Christendom.
“Confirming in the Faith” or Completing the Apostasy?
Gagliarducci concludes that Leo XIV’s purpose is to “confirm people in the faith” and “restore Christ to the center,” calling this a “simple truth” and the “primary purpose of the Petrine office.” This is the ultimate blasphemy. The true Petrine office, as defined by Our Lord Himself (Mt 16:18) and exercised by the pre-conciliar popes, exists to guard the deposit of faith immutably, to condemn error, to sanctify the faithful through true sacraments, and to demand the submission of all souls and nations to the Social Reign of Christ the King. Leo XIV, as a manifest heretic and antipope occupying the Vatican, possesses no such authority. His “confirmation” is not in the Catholic faith, but in the Modernist apostasy. His “restoration of Christ” is not to the center of society as its rightful King, but to a position of tolerated influence within a secular framework that denies His divine authority. As the theological analysis in False Fatima Apparitions argues, the conciliar project diverts attention from the true enemy – modernist apostasy within the Church – and promotes a false ecumenism and religious relativism. Leo XIV’s Iberian tour, with its focus on emotional spectacle, political correctness, and the veneration of a false eucharist, is not a remedy for secularism, but its final triumph within the structures that once housed the true Church. The “before-and-after” Gagliarducci anticipates is not a revival, but the consolidation of the abomination of desolation in the holy place (Mt 24:15).
Source:
Leo XIV: On the Peripheries of Faith (ncregister.com)
Date: 18.06.2026