The EWTN News portal, through its Arabic-language propaganda arm ACI MENA, reports on the sixth annual Baghdeda Youth Festival held September 12, 2026, in Qaraqosh, Iraq, where nearly 700 young people participated in processions, conferences, and simulated liturgical acts led by the conciliar sect’s Syriac Catholic hierarchy. The event, themed “In the Footsteps of St. Francis,” epitomizes the conciliar revolution’s replacement of the supernatural mission of the Church with naturalistic humanitarianism and false ecumenism.
Invalid Clergy Simulate Sacred Rites in Schismatic Structure
The article centers on the activities of “Bishop Benedictus Younan Hanno” and his fellow “bishops” Yohanna Boutros Moshe and Georges al-Qass Moussa, along with assorted “priests” and “religious”. Per the unchanging discipline of the Church, the New Ordinal of Paul VI (1968) is invalid *ex defectu formae et intentionis*; consequently, no man ordained or consecrated therein possesses the character of Orders or the power of jurisdiction. These men are laymen masquerading as sacred ministers. Their leadership of processions, delivery of “spiritual conferences,” and presiding over “Eucharistic adoration” constitute not merely illicit acts but idolatry and sacrilege, simulating the worship due to God alone while lacking the *sacerdotium* to confect the Eucharist. As Pope Pius XII taught in *Mediator Dei*: “The priest acts in the person of Christ… offering the sacrifice in the name of the Church.” A layman cannot offer what he does not possess.
Reduction of St. Francis to Naturalistic Moral Exemplar
The festival’s theme, “In the Footsteps of St. Francis”, and the conference “St. Francis: A Living Model for Our Young People in Living Hope” reveal the Modernist hermeneutic: the Seraphic Father is stripped of his stigmatic conformity to the Crucified, his militant defense of Holy Poverty against the world, and his burning zeal for the conversion of infidels, and is refashioned into a vague icon of “hope,” “freedom,” and “forgiveness” divorced from the *regnum Christi*. The “bishop” Hanno’s talk, “Leave Everything That Makes You Lose Yourself,” redefines Christian freedom as “a free response of obedience to God rather than as freedom without accountability” — a psychologized, immanentist distortion. True Christian liberty is *libertas filiorum Dei* (Rom 8:21), liberation from sin through the grace of the Sacraments, not a self-actualization project. St. Francis kissed the leper because he saw Christ in him; the conciliar sect embraces the world because it has lost Christ.
Idolatrous “Eucharistic Adoration” and Simulated Sacraments
The article notes the young people “participated in Eucharistic adoration at Our Lady of the Annunciation Church.” Since the “Mass” celebrated by these invalid ministers is a nullity — the Novus Ordo Missae itself being a Protestantized fabrication that omits the propitiatory nature of the Sacrifice, the Real Presence, and the priesthood — there is no Blessed Sacrament to adore. What they adore is bread. This is idolatry pure and simple, a violation of the First Commandment. The Council of Trent anathematizes those who deny the True Presence; the conciliar sect, by its invalid rites, *effectively* denies it. The “Service of the Cross — Teshmeshta” and the “lighting of the festival torch” are liturgical bricolage, *novitates* condemned by St. Pius X in *Lamentabili sane exitu* (prop. 53): “The organic structure of the Church is subject to change… Dogmas, sacraments, and hierarchy… are merely modes of explanation and stages in the evolution of Christian consciousness.”
Erasure of Christ’s Social Kingship and True Mission
Nowhere in the report is there mention of the Social Kingship of Christ over nations, the duty of the State to profess the Catholic Faith, the necessity of baptism for salvation (*extra ecclesiam nulla salus*), or the conversion of Muslims to the one true Church. The procession with olive branches “as a symbol of peace” and the visit to Mosul “welcomed what organizers described as ‘the renewed Christian presence in the community’s historic homeland'” reduce the Church to an ethnic/cultural preservation society. Pope Pius XI in *Quas Primas* thundered: “When God and Jesus Christ were removed from laws and states… the foundations of that authority were destroyed… the entire human society had to be shaken.” The Syllabus of Pius IX condemns the error that “The Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church” (prop. 55). This festival celebrates a Church that has abdicated its divine mandate to teach, govern, and sanctify *all* men, content with a ghetto existence under Islamic rule.
False Ecumenism and the Uniates’ Complicity
The Syriac “Catholic” Church is a Uniate body that, since Vatican II, has fully embraced the false ecumenism of *Unitatis Redintegratio*, treating schismatic Orthodoxy and Islam as “partners” rather than souls to be converted. The presence of “Chorbishop Emmanuel Kallo” preaching “Forgive So That You May Be Free” in the context of ISIS persecution exemplifies the conciliar sect’s pacifist, therapeutic gospel: forgiveness detached from justice, from the rights of Christ the King, from the duty to resist evil *in foro externo*. St. Augustine teaches: “Peace is the tranquility of order” (*tranquillitas ordinis*). There is no order where Christ is not King. The “restored churches” in Mosul are monuments to a false peace, not to the triumph of the Cross.
EWTN: Propaganda Arm of the Abomination of Desolation
The source, EWTN News, founded by the Modernist “Mother Angelica,” has long served as the media mouthpiece of the conciliar sect, legitimizing its false hierarchy, invalid sacraments, and revolutionary theology. The journalist, Georgena Habbaba, described as “former Arabic-language supervisor at St. Peter Seminary for the Chaldean Patriarchate in Erbil,” is a functionary of this paramasonic structure. The article’s tone — upbeat, human-interest, devoid of any supernatural vocabulary (grace, sin, hell, judgment, martyrdom, the Mass as Sacrifice) — is the hallmark of the Church of the New Advent: a religious NGO managing decline while simulating vitality.
Conclusion: A Festival of the Anti-Church
The Baghdeda Youth Festival is not a sign of life but a danse macabre around the corpse of the Faith in that region. Seven hundred youths are confirmed in a false religion, taught that Christianity is a cultural heritage, a therapy of forgiveness, a procession of olive branches — everything except the Via Crucis that leads to the Resurrection. “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you” (Jn 6:54). They are fed stones for bread. Kyrie eleison.
Source:
Nearly 700 young Christians gather in Iraq for Baghdeda Youth Festival (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 14.09.2026