The EWTN News portal (ACI Prensa) reports that a Novus Ordo presbyter, Fr. Valentín Aparicio, vice-rector of the major seminary of the conciliar archdiocese of Toledo, dispensed advice on reading the Bible via a podcast titled “Rebels Wanted.” He recommends beginning with the Gospel of Luke followed by Acts, arguing that the “cultural gap” of the Bronze and Iron Ages makes the text impenetrable without modern “tools” like his YouTube channel. He reduces the unity of Scripture to a literary “narrative thread” akin to a movie plot, centered on the Hebrew concept *berit* (covenant) as a generic “love story.” This exposition manifests the complete bankruptcy of the post-conciliar approach to Divine Revelation: it substitutes the *sensus Catholicus* and the authority of the Living Magisterium with a naturalistic, historical-critical method condemned by St. Pius X, treating the Word of God as a human artifact requiring secular navigation rather than supernatural faith.
Naturalistic Reduction of Divine Revelation to Human Literature
The cited article reveals the quintessential modernist error: the treatment of Sacred Scripture as a mere historical document subject to the same criteria of criticism as profane literature. The “priest” Aparicio explicitly frames the difficulty of reading the Bible as a “cultural gap” dating back to the “transition between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age,” describing the distance as “so immense and so wild.” This language betrays a purely naturalistic anthropology. It denies the *claritas Scripturae* (clarity of Scripture) regarding things necessary for salvation, taught by the Council of Trent (Sess. IV, *Decretum de Canonicis Scripturis*) and the Vatican Council I (*Dei Filius*, Ch. 2). By asserting that one cannot navigate the text without a modern guide (“if someone doesn’t take me by the hand, I don’t know how to navigate it”), he implicitly denies the sufficiency of Scripture *in se* and the interior testimony of the Holy Ghost (*testimonium Spiritus Sancti internum*) which the Church has always taught accompanies the reading of the inspired text for the faithful soul.
The Cinematic Trivialization of the Economy of Salvation
The comparison of the Bible to a collection of “film frames” requiring a “plot, a narrative, a common thread” is a blasphemous trivialization of the *oeconomia salutis*. The Bible is not a human narrative constructed *a posteriori* to give coherence to disparate frames; it is the *Verbum Dei*, breathed by the Holy Ghost (*theopneustos* — 2 Tim 3:16), whose unity is not literary but *theological* and *mystical*, rooted in the Person of the Incarnate Word. The “priest” locates this unity in the Hebrew *berit* (covenant), presenting it as “God’s desire to establish a covenant of love with every human being.” This is a reductive, horizontalized reading. The Covenant is not a generic “love story” but a sacred bond ratified in blood — first typically in the Old Testament, really and substantially in the New by the *Sanguis Christi* on the Cross. To speak of “reclaiming lost paradise” from Genesis to Apocalypse without the centrality of the *Sacrificium Crucis* and the *Missae Sacrificium* is to preach a Gospel without the Cross, a religion of humanitarian progress rather than supernatural redemption.
Usurpation of the Magisterium by the Modernist “Expert”
The most grievous aspect is the displacement of the Church’s Teaching Authority by the “biblical expert” and his digital tools. Aparicio directs the faithful to his YouTube channel for lessons on Genesis, positioning himself as the indispensable interpreter. This is the *analogia fidei* inverted: the private judgment of a modernist exegete replaces the *Consensus Patrum* and the definitions of the Magisterium. St. Pius X, in *Pascendi Dominici Gregis* (1907), condemned precisely this: the Modernist exegete who “interprets [Scripture] just like other purely human documents” (Lamentabili, Prop. 12) and who claims the Church’s interpretation is “subject to more exact judgments and corrections by exegetes” (Lamentabili, Prop. 2). The “priest” says reading is not “stringing words together” but discovering “what God wants to tell you *there*” — a subjectivist hermeneutic (*lectio divina* divorced from *regula fidei*) that opens the door to *Gnosticism* and private revelation, the very essence of Protestantism condemned by the Council of Trent (Sess. IV: “No one… interpreting the Sacred Scripture… contrary to the sense which Holy Mother Church… has held and holds… shall be allowed to do so”).
Invalid Ministry and the Poisoned Wells of Formation
The source of this corruption is the very structure from which Aparicio operates. As vice-rector of the major seminary of the conciliar “archdiocese of Toledo,” he forms candidates for a priesthood that, since the promulgation of the *Novus Ordo Missae* (1969) and the new sacramental rites (1968), lacks the certainty of valid Orders (*sacramenta per se operantia* require the intention of doing what the Church does; the new rites express a Protestantized theology of the priesthood). *Episcopus* Liénart, the ordainer of Abp. Lefebvre (himself a crypto-Mason), typifies the dubious lineage of the post-conciliar hierarchy. Aparicio’s thousands of followers on social media (“Un cura de Toledo”) are not sheep fed by the Good Shepherd, but souls led to slaughter by a hireling (*mercenarius* — Jn 10:12) whose “biblical archaeology” serves only to excavate the faith from the foundations. The podcast host, “Fr.” Ignacio Amorós, calls the Bible a “bestseller” — a commercial category — further evidencing the mercantile, worldly spirit of the *secta conciliaris*.
Symptomatic Diagnosis: The Fruit of Divino Afflante Spiritu Perverted
This article is the ripe fruit of the hermeneutic of rupture initiated by Pius XII’s *Divino Afflante Spiritu* (1943), which opened the door to the historical-critical method, and flung wide by the Second Vatican Council’s *Dei Verbum* (1965), which ambiguously spoke of the “human authors” using their “powers and abilities” (DV 11), allowing Modernists to sever the *auctor primarius* (God) from the *auctor instrumentalis* (man). The result is the “priest” Aparicio: a man who speaks of the “Bronze Age” and “Iron Age” with the vocabulary of a secular anthropologist, who sees “cultural gaps” where the Fathers saw *typologia* and *allegoria*, and who offers YouTube videos instead of the *Catechismus Romanus*. The silence on the *Sacraments*, the *Sacrifice of the Mass*, the *Real Presence*, the *Four Last Things*, and the *necessity of the Catholic Church for salvation* (*extra Ecclesiam nulla salus*) is the loudest condemnation. This is not Catholic biblical formation; it is a Gnostic initiation into the “mysteries” of the neo-church, where the “rebel” is the one who submits to the world’s wisdom.
Conclusion: Return to the Vulgata and the Living Magisterium
The faithful Catholic, adhering to the immutable Tradition prior to 1958, rejects this entire framework. He reads the *Vulgata Clementina* — declared authentic by the Council of Trent (Sess. IV) — under the guidance of the *Catena Aurea* of St. Thomas Aquinas, the commentaries of St. John Chrysostom, St. Augustine, and Cornelius a Lapide, and the sure norm of the *Catechism of the Council of Trent*. He does not need a “priest” from Toledo to hold his hand across a “wild” cultural gap, for the *Paracletus* (Jn 14:26) leads the Church into all truth. The “Bible” of the conciliar sect is a Protestantized, critical edition (Stuttgartensia/Nestle-Aland), stripped of the *Comma Johanneum* (1 Jn 5:7), the *Pericope Adulterae* (Jn 7:53-8:11), and the certainty of the Canon. The advice to “start with Luke” is the blind leading the blind into the ditch of Modernism (Mt 15:14). Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus (what has been believed always, everywhere, by all — St. Vincent of Lérins, *Commonitorium*, 2): this alone is the rule of faith, not the YouTube channel of a Novus Ordo functionary.
Source:
Priest explains how to read the Bible without getting lost in the process (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 03.07.2026