The National Catholic Register portal (July 20, 2026) publishes a laudatory review by Santiago Schnell of the Spanish film Sundays (Los Domingos), directed by the atheist Alauda Ruiz de Azúa. The article celebrates the film’s Goya Awards sweep and its supposed “balance” in portraying a teenage girl’s discernment of cloistered religious life, praising its refusal to be either “pious” or “anti-clerical.” Schnell, a mathematician and provost at Dartmouth writing on the “Catholic intellectual tradition,” hails the film’s “openness to the possibility of grace” and its climactic use of the “Prayer of Abandonment” by the pseudo-saint Charles de Foucauld, canonized by the antipope Francis. The review concludes that the film’s success signals a secular audience “no longer satisfied with a culture that explains faith only as a result of trauma.” This review exemplifies the neo-church’s insidious strategy of sanitizing the supernatural into a psychologized humanism, exalting a false saint of the counter-church, and presenting a neutered, naturalistic “vocation” stripped of the Social Kingship of Christ and the necessity of the one true Church for salvation (extra Ecclesiam nulla salus).
The Aesthetic of Indifferentism: Neutrality as the Highest Virtue
The linguistic architecture of the review reveals the modernist rot at the core of the conciliar sect’s cultural apparatus. Schnell praises the film precisely because it “refuses to lean towards one extreme or the other,” calling this “balance” an “achievement.” This language — “neither pious nor anti-clerical,” “neither lecture nor evangelize” — is the rhetorical signature of indifferentism, condemned by Pope Pius IX in the Syllabus Errorum (Error 16: “Man may, in the observance of any religion whatever, find the way of eternal salvation”). The film’s director, an avowed atheist, is held up as a credential: “As the director herself has said, her goal was neither to lecture nor to evangelize, but to present the phenomenon of religious vocation on its own terms.” This is the hermeneutic of discontinuity in cinematic form: the supernatural is reduced to a “phenomenon,” a psychological datum to be observed with “neutrality,” the supreme virtue of the secular liberal order condemned by Pope Pius IX (Syllabus, Error 79: “It is false that the civil liberty of every form of worship… conduce more easily to corrupt the morals and minds of the people”). The review’s tone — measured, academic, “provost-like” — masks a radical theological bankruptcy: the reduction of the Divine Call to a human interest story.
The Psychologization of Vocation: Grace Reduced to Trauma Management
On the factual and theological level, the article admits the film “does not show us enough of Ainara’s sacramental history — one of the film’s limitations.” This admission is damning. In the theology of the Council of Trent (Sess. VI, Decree on Justification) and the immutable doctrine of the Church, a vocation is a gratuitous gratia gratis data rooted in the state of sanctifying grace, nurtured by the Sacraments, and ordered to the gloria Dei and the salvation of souls within the Corpus Mysticum Christi. The film, by the reviewer’s own admission, substitutes psychologism for theology: “Ainara is wounded. She is young. She longs to be loved. She is not a plaster saint.” The aunt Maite’s suspicion — that the vocation is “the product of manipulation, immaturity, grief or escape” — is presented as the “perspective of many viewers,” and the film “gives us all these elements, and none should be dismissed.” This is the hermeneutic of suspicion (Freud, Marx, Nietzsche) baptized by the neo-church. It reduces the vocatio Dei to a complexio psychologica. The review admits the film “declines to say whether Ainara’s call… is the result of grace or woundedness.” This agnosticism regarding grace is the hallmark of Modernism, condemned by St. Pius X in Pascendi Dominici Gregis: the divorce of the visible fact from the divine reality. A true vocation is not a “possibility” to be “taken seriously” by an atheist director; it is a certitudo grounded in the motives of credibility and the interior motion of the Holy Ghost, discerned by a validly ordained priest of the true Church, not a “spiritual director” in a conciliar school.
The False Saint of the Counter-Church: Charles de Foucauld
The theological bankruptcy reaches its apex in the climactic scene praised by Schnell: Ainara praying the “Prayer of Abandonment” by St. Charles de Foucauld. The review notes she repeats “because you are my Father” until she breaks into a “cry of pain: ‘Please, say something. I can’t go on.'” This is not Catholic mysticism; it is quietist sentimentalism bordering on blasphemy, demanding a sensible consolation from God as a condition of surrender. But the graver error is the protagonist: Charles de Foucauld. Canonized by the antipope Francis (May 15, 2022), this “saint” of the neo-church is a product of the abomination of desolation sitting in the Vatican. His spirituality of “universal brotherhood” and “presence” among Muslims without explicit evangelization is the blueprint for the ecumenism and interreligious dialogue condemned by Pope Pius XI in Mortalium Animos (1928) and by the Syllabus (Error 18: “Protestantism is nothing more than another form of the same true Christian religion”). The film’s use of this prayer, canonized by the review as “a line fit for any catechism” (“Faith is a gift, either received or not”), strips the donum fidei of its objectum: the Deus revelatus in the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. It presents a generic “Father” compatible with the “God of the Muslims” praised in the Abu Dhabi declaration — the idol of the neo-church.
The “Cloister” of the Neo-Church: Simulacrum of Religious Life
The review describes the nuns as “serene and sincere” and the prioress, Mother Isabel, as putting things “in a line fit for any catechism.” Here lies the most diabolical deception. The film portrays a cloistered convent in post-conciliar Spain. In the conciliar sect, “religious life” has been devastated by the “renewal” of Perfectae Caritatis and the novus ordo “profession” rites. The nuns depicted are almost certainly members of an institute under the jurisdiction of the antipope, bound by the new Code of Canon Law (1983), which subverts the very nature of religious profession by subjecting it to episcopal “governance” rather than the votum solemne of the 1917 Code (Canon 573 vs Canon 487). The “priest,” Father Txema, who “listens patiently and never manipulates,” is a presbyter of the Novus Ordo, ordained in the invalid rite of Paul VI (1968), lacking the character sacerdotalis and the power to confect the Sacrificium Propitiatorium. To present these functionaries of the secta conciliaris as icons of the Church is to present the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place (Matt. 24:15). The film’s “enclosure” is a stage set; the true clausura binds the soul to Christ the King in the Missale Romanum of St. Pius V, not the “table of assembly” of the Novus Ordo.
Freedom vs. License: The Liberal Error Enshrined
The review frames the conflict as “two accounts of freedom”: Ainara’s “receptive freedom” vs. Maite’s “possessive freedom.” This is a classic liberal dialectic. Pope Pius IX condemned the proposition: “The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization” (Syllabus, Error 80). The film’s resolution — Ainara’s “Yes” sealed in the enclosure — is presented as a triumph of “autonomy” and “self-determination” (“What looks like obedience may be the beginning of freedom”). This is the heresy of autonomy condemned by the First Vatican Council (Dei Filius, Can. 3: “If anyone says that man can be freed from the obligation of obeying God… let him be anathema”). True Christian freedom is libertas filiorum Dei (Rom 8:21), which consists in obedientia fidei to the Regnum Christi. As Pope Pius XI teaches in Quas Primas: “If rulers of states… wish to preserve their authority… let them not refuse public veneration and obedience to the reigning Christ.” The film privatizes the Kingship of Christ, confining it to the “ecclesial Sunday” of the cloister, while conceding the “family Sunday” to the secular order. This is the laicism condemned in Quas Primas: “The State must leave the same freedom to the members of Orders… but… the annual celebration… will remind states that not only private individuals, but also rulers and governments have the duty to publicly honor Christ and obey Him.” The film’s “happy ending” is a capitulation to the separation of Church and State, a “cloistered” faith that leaves the world to Caesar.
Sedevacantist Critique: The Invalidity of the Conciliar “Vocation”
From the perspective of the integral Catholic faith — the sede vacante reality since the death of Pope Pius XII (1958) — this film and its celebration by the National Catholic Register (a propaganda organ of the USCCB, the episcopal conference of the conciliar sect) represent a sophisticated psychological operation. The “vocation” portrayed is a vocation to the counter-church. As St. Robert Bellarmine teaches (De Romano Pontifice, II, 30), “a manifest heretic… ceases to be Pope and head… by that very fact.” The line of antipopes from John XXIII to Leo XIV (Prevost) has publicly professed the heresies of Vatican II (religious liberty, ecumenism, collegiality), thereby losing the papacy ipso facto (Paul IV, Cum ex Apostolatus Officio: “promotion… shall be null, void, and of no effect”). The “nuns” and “priest” in the film are functionaries of this usurped jurisdiction. They possess no canonical mission (missio canonica), no valid sacraments (Novus Ordo ordinations/consecrations are doubtful at best, invalid at worst due to defect of form and intention), and no jurisdiction. Ainara’s “entrance into the enclosure” is, in reality, an entrance into a sect, a synagoga satanae (Apoc. 2:9) masquerading as the Bride of Christ. The film does not “take religious vocation mainstream”; it mainstreams apostasy wrapped in aesthetic beauty.
The Symptomatic Level: Cultural Seduction as Substitute for Conversion
The success of Sundays in “largely secularized Spain” (650,000 viewers) is not a sign of the “return to obedience” hoped for by Pius XI in Quas Primas, but a symptom of the great apostasy (2 Thess. 2:3). The world loves its own (John 15:19). An atheist director making a “balanced” film about a “vocation” that demands no conversion from the world, no rejection of the novus ordo, no profession of the Credo of Trent, no submission to the Syllabus, is the perfect product of the Church of the New Advent. It offers the consolatio carnalis of “spirituality” without the crux of extra Ecclesiam nulla salus. The review’s final paragraph — “What looks like renunciation may be love… the scandal of Ainara’s vocation is not that it has no explanation. It is that her reasons have been formed in a grammar many modern adults no longer speak” — is a masterpiece of Modernist equivocation. The “grammar” missing is not “vocation” but the Catholic Faith entire: Credo in unam, sanctam, catholicam et apostolicam Ecclesiam. The film and its apologists in the conciliar press invite the audience to “listen” to a siren song that leads not to the Portus Salutis, but to the abyssus of the one-world religion.
Let the faithful flee this celluloid poison. Quas Primas commands: “Let rulers of states therefore not refuse public veneration and obedience to the reigning Christ.” This film offers a Christ without a Crown, a Church without a Pope, a Sacrifice without a Victim, a Vocation without the Faith. It is a ludibrium diaboli dressed in Goya gold. Viva Cristo Rey!
Source:
Spain’s Hit Film ‘Sundays’ Takes Religious Vocation Mainstream (ncregister.com)
Date: 20.07.2026