The EWTN News portal reports that the conciliar parish of Our Lady of Grace in Minnesota has commissioned a fresco by artist Mark Balma to memorialize the victims of the 2025 shooting at Annunciation Catholic School, incorporating blue and green ribbons—secular symbols of community solidarity—into the depiction of the Annunciation. The director of liturgy, Rámond Mitchell, explicitly frames the artwork as a vessel for “memory,” “accompaniment,” and “healing,” while the artist reimagines the Blessed Virgin as a mere 14-year-old girl performing domestic chores, stripping the mystery of its dogmatic and regal character. This enterprise manifests the total substitution of the Church’s supernatural mission—missa pro defunctis, suffrage for souls, the Kingship of Christ, and the reality of Purgatory—with a naturalistic, therapeutic anthropocentrism that reduces sacred art to community therapy.
Theological Bankruptcy: The Erasure of the Supernatural Order
The cited article breathes not a word of the Communio Sanctorum, the necessity of suffragia for the faithful departed, the horror of sin, or the justice of God. Instead, Rámond Mitchell, the conciliar “director of liturgy,” declares that sacred art “carries the prayers, memories, and stories of the communities who create and encounter them.” This is pure Modernist immanence condemned by St. Pius X in Lamentabili Sane Exitu (prop. 22, 58, 59): the reduction of dogma and worship to religious sentiment and evolving human consciousness. The “ribbons” tied to a water jug—explicitly identified as a secular “visible sign of solidarity and remembrance”—are elevated to the status of liturgical symbol, displacing the signum crucis, the holy water of Baptism, and the Blood of the Lamb. As Pius XI teaches in Quas Primas, “Peace is only possible in the Kingdom of Christ”; there is no peace in “community solidarity” abstracted from the Social Reign of Christ the King. The fresco is not a sacramentale ordered to grace, but an idol of the “cult of man” erected in a building that has lost the Sacrificium Propitiatorium.
Iconographic Revolution: The Demythologization of the Theotokos
Mark Balma boasts that his “concept for the Annunciation fresco is different than most historical depictions,” rejecting the Tradition of the Fathers and the iconographic canons for a novel exegesis: “I found no reference to her being in a room.” He imposes a rationalist, historical-critical hermeneutic on the Mystery, imagining the Virgin not as the Regina Angelorum full of grace, but as a peasant child fetching water—”not that much older than the children of Annunciation School.” This is the hermeneutic of rupture applied to sacred art: the dogmatic reality of the Incarnation is dissolved into a sociological snapshot. The water jug becomes the locus for the ribbons, and “water is healing” replaces the Fons Vitae who is Christ. St. Cyril of Alexandria, cited in Quas Primas, defines Christ’s dominion as rooted in the hypostatic union (“by essence and nature”), not in human sentiment. Balma’s “fresh way to transform words into images” is the archetype of the Modernist artist who substitutes private inspiration for the sensus Ecclesiae, condemned by Pius XII in Mediator Dei (par. 187-188) regarding the arrogance of private judgment in liturgical matters.
Liturgical Perversion: Therapy Replaces Propitiation
The article describes the conciliar parish campus as a place “where members of the Annunciation community could simply be together when so much of their world had been disrupted.” The principal of the attacked school witnesses the painting of the ribbons—a liturgical act transformed into performance art. The “director of liturgy” speaks of “accompaniment,” the buzzword of the Bergoglian antipapacy, replacing the cura animarum which demands the unceasing offering of the Unbloody Sacrifice of Calvary for the repose of souls. The Syllabus of Pius IX condemns the error that “The teaching of the Catholic Church is hostile to the well-being and interests of society” (Prop. 40); the conciliar sect inverts this, making temporal “well-being” and psychological “healing” the supreme law, silencing the Dies Irae and the reality of Particular Judgment. Where are the Gregorian Masses? Where is the Office of the Dead? They have been abolished by the Novus Ordo revolution, replaced by this “memorial” fresco—a monument to the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place.
The Masonic Signature: Secular Symbols in the Sanctuary
The blue and green ribbons are explicitly identified as the symbol adopted by the “surrounding community”—the civil society, the state, the naturalist order. Their insertion into the sanctuary, tied to a vase in a depiction of the Annunciation, signifies the subversio ordinis: the subordination of the Supernatural to the Natural, of the Church to the World. Pius IX in the Syllabus condemns the proposition that “The Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church” (Prop. 55); here, the State’s ribbon enters the Church’s art, blessed by the conciliar “liturgy director.” The “Miracle of the Sun” at Fatima was exposed in the provided context as “mass optical manipulation… mass panic and autosuggestion”; similarly, this fresco operates as a psychological operation—consoling the natural man while the supernatural Faith is demolished. The artist’s “prayer for guidance” to “unlock a vision” mimics the Masonic “light” of human reason supplanting the Lumen Fidei.
Symptomatic Diagnosis: The Conciliar Sect’s Anthropocentric Religion
This event is not an anomaly; it is the modus operandi of the “Church of the New Advent.” Since the false “pope” John XXIII, the conciliar hierarchy has systematically stripped the liturgy of its propitiatory character (cf. Defense of Sedevacantism: the automatic loss of office for manifest heresy invalidates the claimants to the See of Peter from 1958 onward). The “parish” of Our Lady of Grace is a conciliar structure, its “clergy” invalidly ordained in the new rite (post-1968), its “Mass” a Protestantized assembly. Therefore, its “sacred art” is not sacred—it is religious decoration for a false religion. The EWTN News portal, a flagship of the neo-conservative wing of the conciliar sect, promotes this naturalism as “Catholic,” deceiving the faithful who remain trapped in the structures occupying the Vatican. The true Church, the Ecclesia Militans persevering in the integral Faith and valid Sacraments under true bishops (Episcopi validi), mourns the dead with the Requiem Aeternam, not with ribbons on a water jug. Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus—and outside the True Mass, there is no true sacred art, only the “cult of man” prophesied by the Syllabus and Pascendi.
Source:
Parish pays tribute to Annunciation shooting victims through sacred fresco (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 27.08.2026