The National Catholic Reporter portal, via its EarthBeat section and OSV News, reports on the response of the conciliar sect’s humanitarian apparatus—Catholic Relief Services (CRS) and Caritas Internationalis—to the catastrophic earthquakes that struck Venezuela on June 24, 2026. The article details the deployment of “emergency food kits,” “hygiene kits,” tarpaulins, and medical supplies, boasting of “working extremely closely” with the U.S. State Department, which has committed over $300 million in funding, $200 million of which flows to “faith-based groups” including CRS. “Bishop” A. Elias Zaidan, chairman of the USCCB’s Committee on International Justice and Peace, urges “the international community to mobilize” and calls the faithful to pray to “Our Lady of Coromoto.” The political context notes the capture of Nicolás Maduro by U.S. forces and the ascent of Delcy Rodríguez. This report lays bare the total substitution of the Church’s divine mission for the salvation of souls with a naturalistic, state-subsidized philanthropy that serves the geopolitical interests of the temporal power.
The Substitution of Supernatural Charity with Naturalistic Philanthropy
The article presents a spectacle of purely material humanitarianism masquerading as Catholic action. Nowhere in the reported statements of CRS spokesperson Brittany Wichtendahl or “Bishop” Zaidan is there a whisper of the spiritual works of mercy—converting the sinner, instructing the ignorant, praying for the living and the dead. The “aid” consists exclusively of “food kits,” “hygiene kits,” “tarpaulins,” “liters of safe water,” and “medical supplies.” This is the corpus without the anima. Pope Pius XI, in Quas Primas, teaches that the Kingdom of Christ “is primarily spiritual and relates mainly to spiritual matters” and that “men who wish to belong to it prepare themselves through repentance, but cannot enter except through faith and baptism.” The conciliar sect’s operatives, by contrast, operate as a branch of the secular welfare state, distributing temporal goods while the souls of the Venezuelan people—overwhelmingly baptized yet abandoned to the errors of socialism, syncretism, and practical atheism—perish without the sacraments, without the Mass, without the preaching of the Gospel in its integrity. This is not caritas (charity), which is theological and ordered to eternal life; it is philanthropia, a naturalistic humanism condemned by the Syllabus of Pius IX (Error 58: “No other forces are to be recognized except those which reside in matter…”). The “neo-church” has become what St. Pius X condemned in Lamentabili (Prop. 65): a “dogmaless Christianity, that is, a broad and liberal Protestantism” reduced to social service.
Servile Collaboration with the Secular Power
The article explicitly highlights the subservience of the conciliar hierarchy to the U.S. government. “Bishop” Zaidan “thanked the U.S. government for its ‘partnership in responding to this natural disaster.'” CRS, the “official overseas humanitarian and development agency” of the USCCB, receives $200 million in State Department funding. This is the exsequatur and appellatio ab abusu condemned in the Syllabus (Error 41): the civil government exercising “indirect negative power over religious affairs.” The “Church” here is not a perfect society (Societas perfecta) with “full freedom and independence from secular authority” (Quas Primas), but a contractor for the American empire. The capture of Maduro by U.S. forces in January 2026 and the installation of Delcy Rodríguez are geopolitical maneuvers; the conciliar sect’s “humanitarian network” functions as a soft-power appendage, legitimizing the new regime and stabilizing the population for the new order. Pius XI warned: “When God and Jesus Christ… were removed from laws and states and when authority was derived not from God but from men, the foundations of that authority were destroyed.” The conciliar sect, by deriving its operational capacity and legitimacy from the State, participates in this destruction. It renders unto Caesar not only what is Caesar’s, but what belongs to God: the care of souls, which it has abandoned for the logistics of survival.
The Silence on Sin, Judgment, and the Kingship of Christ
The most damning aspect of the report is its total silence on the supernatural order. Two earthquakes of 7.2 and 7.5 magnitude, killing thousands in seconds, are treated solely as a “natural disaster” requiring “rescue and recovery efforts.” There is no mention of divine chastisement, no call to penance, no proclamation of the Kingship of Christ over the nations. Quas Primas declares: “The state must leave the same freedom to the members of Orders and Congregations… The annual celebration of this solemnity will also remind states that not only private individuals, but also rulers and governments have the duty to publicly honor Christ and obey Him: for it will remind them of the final judgment, in which Christ… will very severely avenge these insults.” The “Bishop” Zaidan, instead of warning Venezuela and the world that “the wages of sin is death” (Rom 6:23) and that nations which “renounce and do not wish to recognize the reign of our Savior” (Quas Primas) invite catastrophe, functions as a coordinator for logistics. The call to pray to “Our Lady of Coromoto” is stripped of its doctrinal content—Ad Iesum per Mariam—and reduced to a spiritual placebo for “comfort and protect her children,” devoid of the demand for conversion to the one true Faith. This is the hermeneutic of discontinuity with the perennial Magisterium: the lex orandi of the neo-church (humanitarian action + vague Marian sentiment) reflects a lex credendi of practical atheism.
The “Bishop” Zaidan and the Usurper Hierarchy
The article identifies A. Elias Zaidan as “shepherd of the St. Louis-based Maronite Eparchy of Our Lady of Lebanon of Los Angeles” and “chairman of the USCCB’s Committee on International Justice and Peace.” In the eyes of the integral Faith, he is a pseudo-bishop, a functionary of the secta conciliaris. The line of usurpers on the Chair of Peter begins with John XXIII; every “bishop” in communion with the antipope Leo XIV (Robert Prevost) participates in the schisma and haeresis of the conciliar revolution. Canon 188.4 of the 1917 Code, cited in the defense of sedevacantism, states that an office becomes vacant “by the mere fact and without any declaration… if the cleric: 4. Publicly defects from the Catholic faith.” The public adhesion of the Maronite hierarchy to the post-conciliar errors—religious liberty, false ecumenism, the new Mass, collegiality—constitutes such a defection. Zaidan’s “statement” is not the voice of a successor of the Apostles teaching ex cathedra for the salvation of souls, but the press release of an NGO executive managing a disaster relief budget. He has no jurisdiction, no mission, no authority from Christ. As St. Robert Bellarmine teaches: “A non-Christian in no way can be Pope… a manifest heretic cannot be Pope.” The same principle applies to the episcopate: a manifest heretic cannot be a bishop. The “Maronite Eparchy” in communion with the Vatican II sect is a simulacrum of the Church.
Caritas Internationalis: Engine of the Neo-Church’s False Humanism
The article notes that both CRS and Caritas Venezuela “are part of Caritas Internationalis, the universal Catholic Church’s global humanitarian network.” This claim is a lie. Caritas Internationalis is the operational arm of the conciliar sect’s anthropocentric religion. It embodies the heresy of action condemned by St. Pius X in Pascendi: the reduction of Christianity to a “religious movement” (Lamentabili, Prop. 59) aimed at temporal betterment. Its “global humanitarian network” is a paramaçonnic structure paralleling the UN/NGO complex, funded by governments (USAID, EU, etc.) and thus bound by their anti-Catholic conditionalities (promotion of “reproductive health,” “gender ideology,” religious indifferentism). The Syllabus condemns the idea that “the Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church” (Error 55); Caritas Internationalis realizes the inverse error: the fusion of the Church’s temporal patrimony with the State’s agenda, rendering the Church a department of the secular order. The distribution of “73,000 medical supplies” and “120,000 liters of safe water” by Caritas Venezuela is not the Church acting as Mater et Magistra; it is the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place, distributing bread that perishes while withholding the Bread of Life.
Our Lady of Coromoto: Marian Devotion Divorced from Catholic Truth
“Bishop” Zaidan’s invocation—”Let us all join in prayer that Our Lady of Coromoto, patroness of Venezuela, will comfort and protect her children”—exposes the Mariolatry of the neo-church. True Marian devotion is Christocentric and ecclesiological: “To Jesus through Mary,” leading to the una, sancta, catholica et apostolica Ecclesia. In the conciliar sect, Marian titles become cultural totems for a “people of God” defined by baptismal statistics, not unity of Faith. Our Lady of Coromoto, patroness of a nation ravaged by socialism and now by earthquakes, is invoked not for the conversion of Venezuela to the integral Faith, nor for the Social Kingship of Christ over its laws, but for “compassionate international assistance.” This is the syncretism condemned by Pius XI: “the Christian religion began to be equated with other false religions and shamelessly placed in the same category.” The “prayer” requested is a naturalistic petition for temporal relief, indistinguishable from the plea of a secular humanist. It ignores the Fatima paradigm (itself a Masonic operation, as documented) which the neo-church exploits, substituting the Consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart (a pseudo-mystical political act) for the Consecration of the Human Race to the Sacred Heart commanded by Leo XIII and renewed by Pius XI in Quas Primas (“on the same day each year the consecration to the Heart of Jesus be renewed”). The neo-church’s Marianism is a diversion from apostasy, focusing on external “miracles” and “patronesses” while the modernist apostasy within consumes the vineyard.
Conclusion: The Abomination of Desolation in Action
The Venezuela earthquake response, as reported by the National Catholic Reporter, is a perfect icon of the conciliar sect: a well-funded, state-partnered, media-savvy humanitarian machine that has lost the Faith. It possesses the logistics of charity without the theology of charity; the structure of the Church without the jurisdiction of the Church; the name of Catholic without the substance of Catholic. Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus. The thousands of Venezuelans buried in the rubble needed not only “tarpaulins” and “hygiene kits,” but the Sacraments, the Mass of All Time, the absolution of a valid priest, the preaching of the Cross. The conciliar sect gave them the former and denied them the latter. This is the mysterium iniquitatis operating “in the holy place” (Mt 24:15). Quas Primas promised: “If rulers and legitimate superiors will have the conviction that they exercise authority not so much by their own right as by the command and in the place of the Divine King, everyone will notice how religiously and wisely they will use their authority.” The “rulers” of the neo-church exercise authority in the place of the State Department, the UN, and the Masonic lodges. Their “wisdom” is the wisdom of this world, which is “foolishness with God” (1 Cor 3:19). The faithful remnant must reject this counterfeit charity, cleave to the Tradition of the Fathers, the Mass of Trent, and the Social Kingship of Christ, knowing that non praevalebunt—the gates of hell shall not prevail against the true Church, which subsists in those who keep the depositum fidei entire and inviolate.
Source:
Catholic leaders, aid workers respond to Venezuela earthquakes (ncronline.org)
Date: 09.07.2026