The Pillar portal (July 17, 2026) promotes a “bonus” podcast episode featuring its editors JD Flynn and Ed Condon discussing “camping and cowboys” behind a paywall, exemplifying the conciliar sect’s obsession with trivial naturalism while the Church lies in ruins. This content reveals the complete vacuity of the neo-church’s intellectual and spiritual leadership: while souls perish for lack of the true Mass and doctrine, the architects of the “Great Catholic Conversation” trade in campfire anecdotes.
The Factual Void: A Pastoral Vacuum Filled with Worldly Noise
The cited article advertises a “paid subscriber” bonus episode titled “Hills and dales” wherein the two principal figures of The Pillar — JD Flynn and Ed Condon — engage in dialogue about “camping and cowboys.” There is not a single reference to the Missale Romanum, the Summa Theologiae, the Catechism of the Council of Trent, the social reign of Christ the King, or the existential crisis of the papacy. The “Great Catholic Conversation,” as the portal brands itself, is reduced to a fireside chat suitable for a secular scouting troop. This is not an incidental deviation; it is the essence of the conciliar project: the substitution of the supernatural with the natural, of grace with sentiment, of the Cross with the campfire.
The Linguistic Betrayal: Bureaucratic Jargon Masking Apostasy
The rhetoric employed — “Great Catholic Conversation,” “paid subscribers,” “Substack account,” “producer Kate,” “RSS Feed” — is the language of the marketplace, not the Ecclesia Militans. The term “Bonus” commodifies spiritual discourse, reducing the pearl of great price (Matt. 13:46) to a premium content tier. The hosts are identified by first names (“JD and Ed”), fostering a false familiarity that obliterates the hierarchical distance proper to teachers of the faith. This casual, “buddy” tone is the linguistic signature of the nouvelle theologie and the democratized, protestantized “Church of the New Advent.” It echoes the condemnation of Lamentabili Sane Exitu (1907) against those who “under the guise of more serious criticism and in the name of historical method, they aim at such a development of dogmas as appears to be their corruption” — here, the corruption is not merely intellectual but existential: the replacement of the Depositum Fidei with lifestyle content.
The Theological Abyss: Silence on the Kingship of Christ is Rejection of His Rights
Pius XI, in Quas Primas (1925), thundered: “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 entire human society had to be shaken, because it lacked a stable and strong foundation.” The Pillar’s offering is a microcosm of this removal. By devoting premium airtime to “camping and cowboys,” Flynn and Condon implicitly declare that the Social Reign of Christ the King has no purchase on their time, their platform, or their subscribers’ money. They act as practical atheists (atheoi praktikoi), functioning as if the Incarnation, the Redemption, and the Final Judgment are irrelevant to the “hills and dales” of daily life.
The Syllabus of Errors (1864) condemns the proposition: “The civil government… has a right to an indirect negative power over religious affairs” (Error 41) and “The Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church” (Error 55). The conciliar sect, of which The Pillar is a loyal organ, has internalized this separation not only politically but culturally. Their “Catholic Conversation” is deliberately quarantined from the public square, from the kingship of Christ, reduced to a private hobby — camping — accessible only to paying customers. This is laicism in its purest form: the confinement of religion to the sacristy (or the podcast app), the “denial of Christ the Lord’s reign over all nations” which Pius XI identified as the “plague… so-called laicism.”
The Symptomatic Rot: The Conciliar Sect’s Opium for the Laity
This episode is a symptom of the systemic apostasy diagnosed by St. Pius X in Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907): Modernism’s “synthesis of all errors” produces a religion of immanence, where religious experience is reduced to psychological feeling and natural camaraderie. The “cowboys” and “camping” motif evokes a rugged, Americanist naturalism — the religion of the “frontier,” of self-reliance, of the natural man — diametrically opposed to the supernatural man formed by the Sacraments and the Traditional Latin Mass.
Furthermore, the “paid subscriber” model exposes the simoniacal nature of the conciliar apostolate. The true Church freely dispenses the treasures of grace (gratis accepistis, gratis date, Matt. 10:8). The Pillar gates its “conversation” behind a paywall, making spiritual nourishment a commodity. This is the logic of the “Church of the New Advent”: a paramasonic structure where access to “Catholic” content is contingent on financial transaction, mirroring the secular subscription economy.
The Sedevacantist Imperative: No Legitimacy, No Voice
Flynn and Condon operate within the jurisdiction of the usurper “Pope” Leo XIV (Robert Prevost), the latest in the line of antipopes beginning with John XXIII. As the Defense of Sedevacantism file demonstrates, citing St. Robert Bellarmine: “A manifest heretic cannot be Pope… a non-Christian in no way can be Pope… he cannot be the head of something of which he is not a member.” The “cardinals,” “bishops,” and “priests” of the conciliar sect — including the media apparatus that supports them — possess no canonical mission (Canon 188.4, 1917 Code: publice defectit a fide catholica). Their “conversations,” whether on theology or camping, are vox strangeris, the voice of strangers (John 10:5) which the sheep must flee.
The “Pillar Podcast” is not a Catholic organ; it is a propaganda outlet for the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place (Matt. 24:15). Its trivial content is not a harmless diversion but a deliberate distraction from the vacant See, the invalid Novus Ordo Missae, the sacraments of the new rite (doubtful at best, null at worst), and the universal apostasy foretold in 2 Thess. 2:3. Every minute spent listening to “camping and cowboys” is a minute stolen from the Rosary, the Office of the Dead for the dying Church, the study of St. Thomas Aquinas, and the fight for the Social Kingship of Christ.
Conclusion: The Campfire of the Damned
The “hills and dales” of the conciliar wilderness offer no pasture for the flock. The Pillar’s bonus episode is a monument to the kenosis of the neo-church: emptied of dogma, emptied of sacrifice, emptied of the Cross, filled only with the smoke of a dying fire. “He who is not with Me is against Me; and he who does not gather with Me scatters” (Matt. 12:30). Flynn and Condon scatter. They gather subscribers, not souls. They build a subscriber base, not the City of God. Let the faithful reject this chaff, ut palea separatur a grano (Matt. 3:12), and cleave to the Tradition that alone preserves the Faith once delivered to the saints (Jude 1:3).
Source:
Bonus: Hills and dales (pillarcatholic.com)
Date: 17.07.2026