The Vatican News portal — the official propaganda organ of the conciliar sect occupying the Vatican — publishes a commentary by Andrea Monda, editor-in-chief of L’Osservatore Romano, on Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey. The article, dated 7 August 2026, presents the cinematic reimagining of Homer’s epic not as entertainment, but as a theological manifesto for the modern age. Monda extols Nolan’s transformation of the King of Ithaca into a “secular,” “almost atheist” Enlightenment ruler who discovers “faith” not in divine revelation but in psychological surrender to “the tides,” equating “Zeus’ Law” with the Gospel Golden Rule and framing the pagan nostos (homecoming) as a prefiguration of the Crucifixion worthy of Dante and Borges. This exercise in literary criticism masquerades as spiritual insight while systematically evacuating the supernatural order, replacing gratia with psychology, veritas with narrative, and Christus Rex with the autonomous, suffering self. It is the catechism of the neo-church: a religion of man, by man, for man, where the Cross is reduced to a literary motif and the Church to an NGO for “hospitality.”
The Organ of the Usurpation: Vatican News as Propagandist for the Neo-Church
One cannot analyze the content without identifying the source. Vatican News is the mouthpiece of the usurping hierarchy beginning with the false pope John XXIII, continuing through the antipope Leo XIV (Robert Prevost). Its “editor-in-chief,” Andrea Monda, holds his position by the grace of the paramasonic structure that has eclipsed the true Church. When this portal speaks, it speaks not for Ecclesia Catholica but for the Church of the New Advent, the abomination of desolation foretold by Our Lord (Matt. 24:15). The very act of a “Vatican” news agency reviewing a Hollywood blockbuster as a theological event signals the total collapse of the munus docendi. The true Church, columna et firmamentum veritatis (1 Tim. 3:15), feeds the faithful with the Bread of Angels — dogma, morality, liturgy, the lives of the Saints. The counterfeit church feeds its dupes with celluloid mythology, baptizing pagan heroes as prototypes of the “modern conscience.” This article is not a review; it is an act of magisterial usurpation, imposing a false spirituality on a clergy and laity already deprived of the true Mass and true doctrine.
Naturalism Masquerading as Theology: The Reduction of the Divine to the Human
The central theological crime of Monda’s text is radical naturalism. He writes: “Odysseus comes across as a ‘secular’ leader, almost an ‘atheist’… grounded as it is in fear, ignorance, and sacrifice. He resembles an Enlightenment ruler ahead of his time, ready to mock the superstitions of his subjects.” Here the conciliar sect reveals its true god: Autonomous Reason. The “faith” Nolan’s Odysseus discovers is explicitly not supernatural. Monda admits: “It is the search for something truer, something more deeply human… At first, he seeks it by believing only in himself, relying on his own strength and celebrating the weight of his own free will. Gradually, however, he is forced to reconsider… surrendering control and allowing himself to be carried by the tides.”
This is Pelagianism dressed in existentialist garb. “Surrendering to the tides” is not fides (faith), which is “substantia sperandarum, argumentum non apparentium” (Heb. 11:1), an assent of the intellect to Divine Truth moved by the will under grace. It is stoic resignation, a psychological coping mechanism. The Council of Trent anathematizes those who say that justifying faith is nothing else than confidence in divine mercy (Sess. VI, Can. 12). Monda’s “faith” has no object — no Trinity, no Incarnation, no Redemption, no Church, no Sacraments. It is faith in faith, the quintessence of Modernism condemned by St. Pius X in Pascendi Dominici Gregis: “The Modernist… does not deny that there is a God… but he so explains the divine personality that it is reduced to a mere symbol of the religious sentiment.” The “tides” are the new Providence; the “monsters within” are the new original sin; the “journey” is the new salvation history. Deus ex machina has been replaced by homo ex psychologia.
The “Enlightenment” Odysseus: A Projection of the Modernist Cleric
Monda’s description of Odysseus as an “Enlightenment ruler ahead of his time” who “mocks the superstitions of his subjects” is a transparent auto-portrait of the conciliar “clergy.” These men — invalidly ordained in the new rite of Paul VI, devoid of sacramental character and jurisdiction — have indeed “moved beyond the religiosity of their contemporaries.” They have discarded the lex orandi (the Traditional Mass), the lex credendi (the dogmas of Trent and Vatican I), and the lex vivendi (Catholic morality). Like Nolan’s Odysseus, they are “secular leaders” managing a humanistic NGO. They mock the “superstitions” of extra Ecclesiam nulla salus, the Social Kingship of Christ, the necessity of baptism, the reality of Hell, the immutability of doctrine. They rely on their “own strength” — media strategies, synodal processes, diplomatic accords with secular powers — celebrating the “weight of their own free will” in defiance of Non est volentis, neque currentis, sed miserentis Dei (Rom. 9:16). The “Trojan Horse” deception Monda attributes to Odysseus — “devised the terrible deception… shattered trust, committed sacrilege, destroyed the rules governing relations among people” — is the perfect metaphor for the Second Vatican Council: a horse dragged within the walls of the City of God, filled with the soldiers of Modernism, destroying the pietas and hospitium of Tradition.
“Zeus’ Law” and the Golden Rule: Natural Law Divorced from its Legislator
The article’s most insidious error is the equation: “The law he tramples underfoot is repeatedly referred to in the film as ‘Zeus’ Law’, the principle that governs civilized coexistence, the same golden rule echoed later in the Gospel: ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’.” This is the heresy of Naturalism condemned by Pope Pius IX in the Syllabus Errorum (Prop. 3, 56, 57) and by Leo XIII in Libertas Praestantissimum. The Golden Rule is not “Zeus’ Law.” It is the Law of Christ, the Lex Christi, which binds because it proceeds from the Eternal Legislator, the Logos Incarnate. To attribute it to “Zeus” — a demon (Ps. 95:5: “Omnes dii gentium daemonia”) — is to divorce the moral order from its Divine Author. This is the precise program of the Masonic “City of Man”: a universal ethics without the True God, a “fraternity” without paternity, a “solidarity” without supernatural charity. Monda writes that this law is founded on “respect, loyalty, pietas, and hospitality.” But pietas toward whom? Toward Zeus? Toward the “tides”? Sine Deo, nihil est bonum. Without the True God, “hospitality” becomes the suicide of nations (the migrant invasion), “loyalty” becomes obedience to the New World Order, and “respect” becomes tolerance of evil. Pius XI in Quas Primas (cited in CONTEXT) teaches: “When God and Jesus Christ… were removed from laws and states… the foundations of that authority were destroyed.” Monda’s “Zeus’ Law” is the antichristian foundation of the neo-church’s social doctrine.
Syncretism of the Abyss: Equating the Nostos with the Cross
The climax of the article is the citation of Jorge Luis Borges: “Throughout history, humankind has told two stories: the story of a lost ship sailing the Mediterranean seas in quest of a beloved isle, and the story of a god who allows himself to be crucified on Golgotha.” Monda concludes: “In Nolan’s Odyssey, the first story is retold in the light of the hope to which the second points.” This is the synthesis of all heresies: Religious Relativism. The nostos of Odysseus — a pagan warrior’s return to his palace, achieved through cunning, slaughter, and the aid of a goddess (Athena/Minerva) — is not a “prefiguration” of the Cross. It is a type of the worldly man seeking his own glory. The Cross is not a “story” among others; it is the unique, historical, supernatural Event by which “Deus… reconciliavit sibi per ipsum omnia… pacificans per sanguinem crucis eius” (Col. 1:20). To place Homer and the Evangelists on the same plane as “storytellers” is to deny the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture (condemned in Lamentabili Sane Exitu, Props. 9-19) and the unicity of Christ the Savior (Acts 4:12: “Nec est in alio quisquam salus”). This is the “ecumenism of the return” inverted: not the return of dissidents to the Church, but the return of the Church to the world, to myth, to the kosmos. The “hope to which the second points” is not the hope of the Resurrection, but the vague, immanent “hope” of a “straight path which breaks the pagan cycle” — a Gnostic escape from matter, not a Catholic redemption of it.
The Psychologization of Sin: Conscience without God, Redemption without Grace
Monda speaks of Odysseus’s “burden of conscience — perhaps even what Hegel would call an ‘unhappy consciousness’” and compares him to Oppenheimer. Sin is reduced to psychological trauma; guilt to moral injury; redemption to “atonement and healing” achieved through a final voyage “toward the place where the sun disappears — not alone, but together with Penelope.” This is salvation by self-actualization. The true Catholic doctrine, defined at Trent (Sess. VI), teaches that justification is translation from that state in which man is born a child of the first Adam, to the state of grace and adoption of the sons of God through the second Adam, Jesus Christ. It requires gratia praeveniens, fides, poenitentia, the Sacramentum Baptismi or Paenitentiae. Nolan’s Odysseus finds “solace and redemption only in transcendence, passing into a realm that can exist only through love” — but a love devoid of the Love that is God (1 John 4:8). The “exile… justified by the logic of purifying sacrifice” is a pagan purification, not the Purgatorium of the Church. The comparison to Frodo (a figure from a sub-created mythology by a Catholic author, Tolkien, who explicitly rejected allegory) is abused to suggest that myth replaces mystery. The “straight path” (via recta) is not a cinematic sailing into the sunset; it is the Via Crucis, the narrow way of the Commandments, the Cross, the Church, the Mass. “Ego sum via, et veritas, et vita” (John 14:6). There is no other.
Dante, Borges, and Frodo: Literary Idolatry in Service of the One-World Religion
The invocation of Dante is particularly perverse. Monda quotes Inferno XXVI: “Consider ye the seed from which ye sprang; / Ye were not made to live like unto brutes, / But for pursuit of virtue and of knowledge.” He rips this from its context. Dante places Odysseus (Ulysses) in Hell (Eighth Bolgia), punished for fraud and for the mad flight (folle volo) beyond the pillars of Hercules, a figure of curiositas and pride — the very sins of Modernism. Dante’s Odysseus is a damned soul, not a model of “faith.” Monda inverts the Divina Commedia to make the sinner the saint. This is the hermeneutic of rupture applied to literature: the text means whatever the modernist needs it to mean. The reference to Borges — a gnostic, esoteric writer — as a theological authority seals the apostasy. The conciliar sect has no Fathers, no Doctors, no Saints post-1958 (its “saints” are fabrications: Kolbe, Ulma, Newman, Faustina, Wojtyla — all canonized by antipopes, invalid). It must raid the pagan past and the literary present to construct a ersatz magisterium. “Mutavit gloriam incorruptibilis Dei in similitudinem imaginis corruptibilis hominis” (Rom. 1:23).
Symptomatic Conclusion: The “Signs of the Times” as Surrender to the World
Monda explicitly links the film to “today’s world, scarred by a fragmented global war and by walls raised against migrants, a world in which hospitality is rejected, international law ignored.” This is the political theology of the neo-church: the Gospel reduced to open borders and global governance. The “monsters” are not the demons who possess souls in mortal sin, nor the heretics who destroy the Faith, nor the antipopes who sit in the seat of Peter. The “monsters” are national sovereignty, border security, and the remnants of Christendom. The “Zeus’ Law” is the lex humana of the United Nations, the WHO, the WEF. The “hospitality” is the suicide of the West. The “conscience” is the woke conscience. Nolan’s film, as interpreted by the Vatican News, is a liturgy of the new religion: the Missa pro mundi celebrated on the altar of the silver screen, with the “priest” Monda consecrating the bread of mythology into the body of the “universal brotherhood.”
The true Church, the Ecclesia militans persevering in the catacombs of Tradition, under valid bishops and priests retaining the Sacramentum Ordinis and the Missale Romanum of St. Pius V, recognizes this for what it is: the smoke of Satan entering the Temple (Paul VI, 1972 — a rare accidental truth from a usurper). Non praevalebunt (Matt. 16:18). The gates of Hell — whether they be Masonic lodges, Modernist universities, or Hollywood studios — shall not prevail against the Rock of Peter, which is not the man in the white cassock in Santa Marta, but the infallible Faith he was elected to guard. Monda’s article is a confession of bankruptcy: the conciliar sect has nothing left to offer the world but Nolan’s Odysseus — a man “surrounded by monsters,” rowing toward a sunset that is not the Dies Domini, but the dies irae.
Source:
Odysseus: The man and his monsters in a world in decline (vaticannews.va)
Date: 07.08.2026