Vatican News portal (11 August 2026) reports on a Dutch psychiatrist, Christel Grimbergen, who walked 2,800 kilometres from Maastricht to Rome in three months and three weeks, presenting this physical endurance test as a Catholic pilgrimage. The article details her route, logistical hardships, weather dangers, and encounters with helpful strangers, culminating in her arrival at the Vatican Grottoes accompanied by a conciliar “canon,” Eric van Teijlingen. Grimbergen describes her motivation as a desire for “silence, solitude,” to “read God’s signs,” and to “experience trust in Him,” concluding that the journey’s supreme fruit was gaining “faith in humanity.” This report exposes the conciliar sect’s complete substitution of the supernatural order with naturalistic humanism, masquerading mere pedestrianism as sanctity.
The Naturalistic Inversion of Pilgrimage
The cited article relates that Grimbergen undertook this trek partly in memory of a deceased friend and partly for “religious reasons,” yet the content reveals a purely immanentist spirituality. She sought “silence, solitude, and have plenty of space to stay in contact with God, to read God’s signs and to experience trust in Him.” This language — “reading signs,” “experiencing trust” — is the vocabulary of Modernist immanence condemned by St. Pius X in Lamentabili sane exitu (prop. 20, 25), where the error is condemned that “Revelation was merely man’s self-awareness of his relationship to God” and “Faith, as assent of the mind, is ultimately based on a sum of probabilities.” True Catholic pilgrimage is not a subjective quest for religious experience but an objective act of penitentia and oratio, directed toward the gaining of indulgences, the intercession of saints, and the salvation of the soul — none of which are mentioned.
The article’s climax is Grimbergen’s declaration: “I think that is the most beautiful thing about a pilgrimage: you gain faith in humanity.” This is the summa heresis of the conciliar religion: the displacement of fides divina by fides humana. Pius XI, in Quas Primas, teaches that “the Kingdom of Christ encompasses all men… most truly the entire human race is subject to the authority of Jesus Christ” and that “peace will flourish… when all willingly accept the reign of Christ and obey Him.” The article presents the exact inversion: peace and trust arise from mutual human aid, not from submission to Christ the King. This is the “secularism of our times, so-called laicism” which Quas Primas condemns as the plague “which began with the denial of Christ the Lord’s reign over all nations.”
The Invalid “Clergy” and Simulated Sacraments
Grimbergen was accompanied for the final kilometre by Eric van Teijlingen, described as a “Dutch priest… a canon of St. Peter’s Basilica.” In the conciliar sect, the new rite of ordination (1968) and the new rite of episcopal consecration (1968) are dubia de facto at best, and widely held by sound theologians to be invalid due to defect of form and intention. A “canon” of the Vatican Basilica in the post-conciliar structure holds an office in a paramasonic structure occupying the Vatican, not in the Catholic Church. The fresco he showed her — St. Peter handing keys to St. Servatius — is housed in a basilica that has become, in the words of the Syllabus of Errors (prop. 55), a place where “The Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church,” realized in the Lateran Pacts and the subsequent secularization of the Holy See’s temporal sovereignty.
Grimbergen “received the Sacrament of Confirmation” eight years ago. In the conciliar rite, the matter (chrism consecrated by a doubtfully valid “bishop”) and form (“Receive the seal of the Gift of the Holy Spirit” vs. the traditional “I sign thee with the sign of the cross…”) are altered, casting grave doubt on the validity of the sacrament. As the Defense of Sedevacantism file demonstrates, a manifest heretic cannot confer valid sacraments of the living (Confirmation, Orders) because he lacks jurisdiction and membership in the Church: “A non-Christian in no way can be Pope… a manifest heretic is not a Christian… therefore, a manifest heretic cannot be Pope” (Bellarmine, De Romano Pontifice 2:30). The same principle applies to “bishops” and “priests” of the conciliar sect who adhere to the heresies of Vatican II.
Reduction of the Saints to Historical Mascots
St. Servatius (4th century) is invoked merely as a historical precedent: “Even though he was no longer young, he walked to Rome three times. I thought: if he managed it, maybe I can too.” This is not the Catholic cultus sanctorum — the veneration of saints as intercessors and models of heroic virtue — but a Protestantized, naturalistic “role model” approach. The article mentions the fresco of St. Peter giving keys to St. Servatius “in recognition of his defense against Arianism.” Arianism denied the divinity of Christ; the conciliar sect, by its doctrine of religious liberty (Dignitatis Humanae), ecumenism (Unitatis Redintegratio), and collegiality (Lumen Gentium), has instantiated a new Arianism: the practical denial of Christ’s social kingship and the divine constitution of the Church. St. Servatius, a true saint, is thus pressed into service as a mascot for a pilgrimage that embodies the very errors he fought.
The Linguistic Mask of Subjectivism
The article’s rhetoric is saturated with subjectivist language: “I wanted to experience…”, “I thought…”, “I felt…”, “For me, it was very important to understand how they lived their faith.” This is the “false striving for novelty” condemned in Lamentabili sane exitu (Section I): “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.” The word “pilgrimage” is stripped of its theological content — peregrinatio ad loca sancta propter pietatem et remissionem peccatorum — and reduced to a therapeutic walking tour. The “prayer intentions” collected from strangers are treated as social currency (“send them photographs or postcards”), not as spiritual obligations binding before God.
Systemic Apostasy: The Conciliar Sect’s Anthropocentric Gospel
This report is not an aberration but the modus operandi of Vatican News, the propaganda organ of the abomination of desolation (Matt. 24:15) occupying the Vatican. The newsletter prompt at the article’s end — “support us in bringing the Pope’s words into every home” — refers to the antipope Leo XIV (Robert Prevost), the latest usurper in the line beginning with John XXIII. The article’s categories — “pilgrimage Netherlands Italy Rome catholic church saints and blessed” — are taxonomic tags for a simulated Catholicism.
The Syllabus of Errors (prop. 77-80) condemns the errors that “In the present day it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the State” and “The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization.” This article is a pastoral application of those condemned errors: a “Catholic” pilgrimage that makes no claim on the public order, demands no conversion of nations, seeks no social reign of Christ, and finds its highest value in “faith in humanity.”
The Theological Vacuum: No Mass, No Grace, No Eschaton
Nowhere does the article mention the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the Blessed Sacrament, Confession, the Last Things (Death, Judgment, Heaven, Hell), or the Blessed Virgin Mary. The “side chapels” of St. Peter’s are tourist waypoints. The “Vatican Grottoes” are a destination, not a place of prayer for the dead. The pilgrimage begins at a basilica (St. Servatius) and ends at a basilica (St. Peter’s), but the Unbloody Sacrifice of Calvary is entirely absent. This is the “dogmaless Christianity” condemned in Lamentabili sane exitu (prop. 65): “Contemporary Catholicism cannot be reconciled with true knowledge without transforming it into a certain dogmaless Christianity, that is, into a broad and liberal Protestantism.”
Grimbergen’s desire to walk to Jerusalem next — “if my parents stay healthy and my employer grants me leave” — reveals the bourgeois, conditional nature of this pseudo-piety. The true pilgrim, like the Crusaders or the medieval peregrini, sets out sub conditione of God’s will alone, not employer’s leave. The article concludes with a subscription pitch, sealing the commercial, naturalistic character of the enterprise.
This is not a pilgrimage; it is a secular hike blessed by the conciliar sect’s “clergy” and broadcast by its media to anesthetize the faithful into believing that natural virtue and human solidarity are the Gospel. Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus — and the conciliar sect is not the Church.
Source:
A Dutch woman's solo pilgrimage on foot from Maastricht to Rome (vaticannews.va)
Date: 11.08.2026