The EWTN News portal reports the launch of a new travel series titled The Road Less Traveled, hosted by Dave Stotts of the Protestant Trinity Broadcasting Network, which will tour Turkish sites associated with early Christianity — Antioch, Cappadocia, Ephesus, the Seven Churches of Revelation, Nicaea, and Constantinople — presenting them as an “adventurous learning experience” to “inspire viewers” through “fast-paced” storytelling. This production epitomizes the conciliar sect’s reduction of the Catholic faith to religious tourism and Protestant-style entertainment, utterly silent on the Islamic extinction of Christianity in Asia Minor and the Social Kingship of Christ the King over nations.
The Conciliar Sect’s Entertainment Complex: EWTN and TBN Collaboration
The very genesis of this series exposes the ecumenical rot at the heart of the conciliar sect. EWTN, the media flagship of the post-conciliar establishment founded by Mother Angelica, partners with Dave Stotts, a veteran of Drive Thru History on the Protestant Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) — a network steeped in Protestant evangelicalism, prosperity gospel, and Zionist eschatology. Stotts himself describes his background: “I experienced firsthand the impact that Christian history can have” during his time on TBN. This collaboration is not an accident but the logical fruit of Unitatis Redintegratio and the ecumenical delirium of the Second Vatican Council, which the Syllabus of Errors condemned in advance: “Protestantism is nothing more than another form of the same true Christian religion” (Error 18, condemned by Pius IX in Noscitis, Dec. 8, 1849).
The series is marketed as “free on EWTN+ and on EWTN.com” — a streaming platform of the conciliar sect — emphasizing accessibility and entertainment value over doctrinal formation. Stotts promises “a fast-paced, adventurous learning experience” to “ignite our own faith in powerful ways today.” This language reveals the Protestantized, subjectivist, emotionalist conception of faith that has replaced the fides quae creditur — the objective deposit of faith entrusted to the Church (Dei Filius, DS 3011). Faith is not “ignited” by travelogues but infused by God at Baptism and nourished by the Most Holy Sacrifice and the sacraments (ex opere operato). As Pius XI teaches in Quas Primas: “Christ reigns in the minds of men… because He Himself is Truth, and men must draw truth from Him and accept it obediently.” Not through “fast-paced, adventurous learning experiences” curated by a TBN host.
Religious Tourism as Substitute for Supernatural Faith
The entire premise reduces the Catholic religion to a travel itinerary. Stotts explains: “We go even further — down forgotten roads and off the beaten path — to come face-to-face with the lives of saints, martyrs, and heroes of the Catholic past.” This is peregrinatio religiosa stripped of its supernatural finality: pilgrimage as tourism, martyrdom as spectacle. The Catholic pilgrim visits holy places to venerate relics, gain indulgences, implore the intercession of saints, and deepen the life of grace through the sacraments — above all the Most Holy Sacrifice. The conciliar tourist visits to “see the world-shaping impact of the early Christians” and “pattern our own lives after their courageous witness.” This is Pelagian moralism: man saving himself by imitating heroes, not the gratia sanans et elevans that conforms him to Christ the King.
Pius XI in Quas Primas condemns precisely this naturalistic reduction: “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 series presents Christianity as a historical phenomenon that “helped shape history itself” — past tense, museum piece — not as the living Regnum Christi that “extends not only to Catholic nations… but His reign encompasses also all non-Christians, so that most truly the entire human race is subject to the authority of Jesus Christ” (Quas Primas, citing Leo XIII, Annum Sacrum). Turkey, a Muslim nation that conquered Byzantine Christendom, is presented as a backdrop for a travel show, not as a nation subject to Christ the King that must be converted and submit to His lex regia.
The Turkish Itinerary: Pilgrimage to Extinct Churches in Muslim Lands
The itinerary reads like a tour of Christianity’s graveyard in Asia Minor: Antioch (where believers were first called Christians), the underground cities of Cappadocia, Ephesus, the Seven Churches of Revelation, Nicaea, Constantinople. Stotts describes Antioch as “where the Gospel first spread — Syrian Antioch, where believers were first called ‘Christians’ and where the Cave Church of St. Peter still stands.” He omits that Antioch fell to Islam in 637, that the Cave Church is a museum in a Muslim country where the Christian population was exterminated or expelled, and that the Social Kingship of Christ demands the reconquest of these lands for the Faith, not their visitation as heritage sites.
Cappadocia’s “underground churches… carved entirely out of volcanic rock” are presented as “inspiring… the lengths, and depths, that persecuted Christians were willing to go to practice their faith.” Stotts says: “I came away challenged to live my own faith with that same kind of courage today.” This is sentimental moralism. The Catholics of Cappadocia did not hide in caves for “inspiration” but to celebrate the Most Holy Sacrifice in catacombs, risking martyrdom for the Missae Sacrificium — the very Mass the conciliar sect has replaced with the Novus Ordo table service. The underground churches were not “cross-shaped” tourist attractions but places where the Unbloody Sacrifice of Calvary was offered in secret. To visit them with a Protestant TV host and film a “fast-paced, adventurous learning experience” is sacrilegious trivialization.
Hagia Sophia: Mosque Visited as Tourist Attraction
The series culminates in “ancient Constantinople — present-day Istanbul — where we stand in the breathtaking Hagia Sophia and discover how the Christian faith helped shape history itself.” Hagia Sophia, the great cathedral of Christendom, converted to a mosque in 1453, secularized as a museum in 1935, and reconverted to a mosque in 2020 under Erdoğan, is presented as a “breathtaking” backdrop for a travel show. The mosaics of Christ Pantocrator, the Theotokos, the emperors prostrate before the King of Kings — covered by Islamic calligraphy or obscured — are filmed as aesthetic objects. No mention of the abomination of desolation (Matt. 24:15) standing in the holy place. No call for its reconsecration. No denunciation of the Turkish state’s usurpation. Pius XI teaches: “Let rulers of states therefore not refuse public veneration and obedience to the reigning Christ… if they wish to maintain their authority inviolate and contribute to the increase of their homeland’s happiness” (Quas Primas). The Turkish state, a Muslim power occupying the See of Constantinople, is treated as a benign host for a TV crew.
St. Nicholas Reduced to Santa Claus
In Myra, “the show uncovers the story of St. Nicholas, the fourth-century bishop whose legacy lives on today as Santa Claus.” This reduction of the Wonderworker of Myra, the defender of Nicaea against Arianism, the patron of sailors and children, to the secular icon of commercial Christmas — Santa Claus — is a deliberate trivialization. The conciliar sect delights in this domestication of sanctity. St. Nicholas struck Arius at Nicaea for blaspheming the homoousios; the conciliar sect makes him a jolly gift-giver for a travel show hosted by a Protestant. The Syllabus condemns: “The best theory of civil society requires that popular schools… should be freed from all ecclesiastical authority… and should be fully subjected to the civil and political power” (Error 47). Here, the saint is freed from his episcopal authority and subjected to the commercial power of the Santa Claus myth.
The Seven Churches of Revelation: Silence on Islamic Extinction
Stotts explains: “Next, we travel to the seven churches of Revelation and explore each of the letters St. John wrote to them in the Book of Revelation.” These seven churches — Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, Laodicea — were extinguished by the Islamic conquest of Asia Minor. The Apocalypse promises the angelus ecclesiae of each: “I will remove thy candlestick out of his place, except thou do penance” (Apoc. 2:5). The candlesticks were removed. Christianity was erased from these lands by the sword of Islam. The series explores the “letters” as historical curiosities, not as living warnings to the conciliar sect which has abandoned the primum principium of the faith. The silence on Islam is deafening — but deliberate. The conciliar sect’s Nostra Aetate and the Abu Dhabi declaration demand “dialogue” with Islam, not its conversion. To mention the Islamic extinction of the Seven Churches would contradict the false ecumenism that is the neo-church’s founding myth.
Nicaea: The Creed vs. Modernist Apostasy
The visit to “ancient Nicaea, where the Church formulated Christianity’s most foundational creed” is the supreme irony. The Council of Nicaea (325) defined the homoousios — the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father — against Arianism. Pius XI in Quas Primas cites this: “this Council decreed and presented to the faithful to believe as a truth of the Catholic faith that the Only-Begotten Son of God is consubstantial with the Father, and at the same time, by placing in the creed… the words: ‘whose kingdom shall have no end,’ confirmed the royal dignity of Christ the Lord.” The conciliar sect, which has embraced the hermeneutic of rupture and the evolution of dogma condemned by Pius X in Pascendi and Pius IX in the Syllabus (Error 5: “Divine revelation is imperfect, and therefore subject to a continual and indefinite progress”), visits Nicaea as a museum piece. The “foundational creed” is the very standard by which the post-conciliar “popes” from John XXIII to Leo XIV stand condemned as heretics for denying the Social Kingship of Christ, religious liberty, and the necessity of the Catholic Church for salvation.
Absence of the Social Kingship of Christ
Nowhere in the article, the interview, or the series premise is there a whisper of the Social Kingship of Christ — the very feast Pius XI instituted in Quas Primas (1925) to combat “the secularism of our times, so-called laicism, its errors and wicked endeavors.” The series is the embodiment of that secularism: religion as entertainment, history as tourism, faith as “inspiration.” Pius XI warns: “When God and Jesus Christ… were removed from laws and states… the foundations of that authority were destroyed… the entire human society had to be shaken, because it lacked a stable and strong foundation.” Turkey, a secularized Islamic republic, is not called to recognize Christ the King; it is a filming location. The Hagia Sophia, once the throne of the Byzantine Caesar crowned by the Patriarch, now a mosque, is not a scandal crying to heaven for reparation; it is “breathtaking.”
The Syllabus condemns the error: “The Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church” (Error 55). The conciliar sect lives this error. EWTN produces a travel show for a Muslim country without demanding the public profession of the Catholic faith by the state, the restoration of Hagia Sophia as a cathedral, the conversion of the Turkish people. The series is laicism in action: religion privatized, domesticated, televised.
EWTN: Propaganda Arm of the Conciliar Sect
EWTN (Eternal Word Television Network) is not a Catholic apostolate but the media arm of the conciliar sect. Its founder, Mother Angelica, operated entirely within the post-conciliar structures, accepted the Novus Ordo, the new Code of Canon Law, the false ecumenism, and the “canonizations” of John Paul II and John XXIII. The network promotes the “popes” of the neo-church, the “saints” of the neo-church (Kolbe, Faustina, Newman, the Ulmas), and the false apparitions of Fatima. Its collaboration with a TBN host for a Turkish travelogue is the logical endpoint of fifty years of compromise: Protestantized content, Catholic branding, zero supernatural density.
Stotts’ background on Drive Thru History (TBN) is telling. TBN represents the worst of American Protestantism: health-and-wealth gospel, dispensationalist Zionism, anti-Catholicism masked as “Judeo-Christian values.” EWTN’s embrace of him signals that the conciliar sect prefers Protestant entertainment to Catholic truth. As Pius IX condemned in the Syllabus: “The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization” (Error 80). EWTN has reconciled itself with Protestant television production values, secular travel formats, and the modernist mentality that faith is a “journey” to be filmed.
Religious Tourism as Opium for the Conciliar Faithful
The Road Less Traveled is spiritual opium for the faithful of the conciliar sect. It offers the consolatio of beautiful images, the thrill of “forgotten roads,” the comfort of “inspiration” — all without the crux, without the Missae Sacrificium, without the Regnum Christi, without the demand for the conversion of nations. It is the perfect product for a church that has abandoned the Social Kingship of Christ for a seat at the table of the United Nations, the true faith for dialogue, the Mass for the “Eucharistic celebration,” the priesthood for “presidency,” and the salvation of souls for “integral human development.”
Pius XI’s words in Quas Primas stand as an unanswered indictment: “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 Turkey exercise authority in the name of Allah; the rulers of the conciliar sect exercise authority in the name of “dialogue”; the producers of EWTN exercise their media power in the name of ratings. None acknowledge Christ the King. The travel show is not a road less traveled; it is the broad way that leads to destruction (Matt. 7:13), paved with good intentions, beautiful cinematography, and the silence of the truth.
Source:
New EWTN travel series takes viewers to the birthplace of Christianity (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 12.07.2026