The National Catholic Register portal reports that Disney Channel actor David Henrie and his wife Maria, a former Miss Delaware, have authored a children’s picture book titled Is God Bigger Than a Dragon? published by Ascension Press. The book, inspired by their son’s bedtime questions, aims to merge “story time” and “Bible time” through rhyming answers to imaginary fears, endorsed by Jonathan Roumie of the modernist series The Chosen. This venture epitomizes the conciliar church’s reduction of the supernatural Faith to a therapeutic, emotionally managed storytelling exercise devoid of the Cross, sin, judgment, and the Social Reign of Christ the King.
The Cult of Celebrity Supplants the Authority of the Magisterium
The article centers not on the Depositum Fidei but on the celebrity status of a Disney alumnus and a beauty pageant winner. The Register highlights Henrie’s “breakout role as Justin Russo on Disney Channel’s Wizards of Waverly Place” and Maria’s title “former Miss Delaware” as credentials for catechesis. This is the cult of personality elevated above the Magisterium. As Pius XI teaches in Quas Primas, “the Church, established by Christ as a perfect society, demands for itself by a right belonging to it… full freedom and independence from secular authority.” Here, the secular celebrity culture is baptized and presented as a vehicle for divine truth. The endorsement by Jonathan Roumie, star of The Chosen—a series that rewrites Scripture with humanistic sentimentality—further seals the modernist imprimatur. The “faith” on offer is not the Fides Catholica but a product branded by entertainers.
Ascension Press: A Propaganda Arm of the Neo-Church
The publisher, Ascension Press, is a flagship of the post-conciliar commercial apostolate. It produces materials that consistently dilute dogma, promote the “theology of the body” novelties, and accommodate the spirit of the world. The book’s description—”a fun colorful tool for bedtime read-alouds and catechetical conversations”—reveals the pragmatic, utilitarian mindset condemned by St. Pius X in Lamentabili Sane Exitu: “The dogmas of faith should be understood according to their practical function, i.e., as binding in action, rather than as principles of belief” (condemned prop. 26). The Faith is reduced to a “tool” for managing childhood anxiety, not the Veritas Revelata demanding assent of intellect and will.
Sentimentalism and the Erasure of the Supernatural Order
The book’s premise—answering a child’s fear of dragons, dinosaurs, and roller coasters with rhyming assurances that “God is bigger”—is a classic modernist substitution of religious feeling for divine faith. The article states the book “bridges two parts of a child’s bedtime routine… story time and then there’s Bible time.” This dichotomy itself is telling: Scripture is treated as a storybook genre, not the inspired Word of God (Dei Verbum). The “rhyming, Bible-grounded answer” replaces the Catechism with nursery verse. There is no mention of Original Sin, the necessity of Baptism for salvation, the reality of hell, the obligation of the Most Holy Sacrifice, or the Kingship of Christ over all nations. As Pius XI declared: “When God and Jesus Christ… were removed from laws and states… the foundations of that authority were destroyed.” This book removes Christ the King from the nursery, leaving only a cosmic comfort blanket.
The Disney Connection: Worldliness Baptized
Henrie’s formation in the Disney machine—a corporation historically hostile to Christian morality and a purveyor of occult fantasy (wizards, sorcery in Wizards of Waverly Place)—is presented without critique. The article treats his Disney past as a neutral biographical fact, not a spiritual hazard. St. Paul warns: “Be not conformed to this world” (Rom 12:2). The conciliar church’s “dialogue with the world” has become a capitulation to its idols. A “Catholic” actor formed by a pagan entertainment conglomerate now produces “Catholic” content for the same market. This is not evangelization; it is religious syncretism, the “abomination of desolation” in the holy place.
Omission as Heresy: The Silence on the Cross and Judgment
The gravest accusation is what the article and the book omit. There is no Cross, no Blood, no Redemption, no Final Judgment, no Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus. The “God” presented is a benign, giant teddy bear, not the Deus Fortis, Deus Zabaoth of the Psalms. The Syllabus of Pius IX condemns the proposition: “The civil government… has a right to an indirect negative power over religious affairs” (Error 41); here, the “civil government” of the nursery—parental sentiment and childish imagination—dictates the theology. The book caters to the child’s fears rather than forming the child’s soul in timor Domini, the beginning of wisdom (Ps 110:10). This is the “false striving for novelty” condemned by St. Pius X: “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.”
Conclusion: A Symptom of the Great Apostasy
This children’s book is a microcosm of the conciliar catastrophe: celebrity-driven, sentimentally therapeutic, doctrinally vacuous, commercially packaged, and utterly silent on the Social Reign of Christ the King. It prepares children not for the Church Militant but for a comfortable, counterfeit spirituality that cannot withstand the gates of hell. True Catholic parents reject this pabulum. They teach their children the Catechism of the Council of Trent, the lives of the true Saints (canonized before 1958), the reality of sin and hell, the necessity of the Traditional Latin Mass, and the duty to fight for the Regnum Christi in every sphere. “He who is not with Me is against Me” (Mt 12:30). This book, and the structure that produces it, is against Him.
Source:
Catholic Actor David Henrie Slays Bedtime Fears in New Faith-Filled Picture Book (ncregister.com)
Date: 17.08.2026