EWTN News portal reports on José Ignacio Celis, a Mexican immigrant in Houston caring for his wife Claudia, diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s at age 44. The article frames their thirty-year marriage as a testament to human perseverance, centering on the refrain “Love is a decision. Love is not a feeling” — a voluntarist maxim that reduces the theological virtue of charity to an act of natural will. Celis left his financial career to provide full-time care, invoking St. Joseph as a psychological model rather than a patron of grace, and explicitly denies that God sends suffering: “God does not send suffering. Suffering happens because that is simply how life is… God weeps with you.” The piece concludes with a solicitation for financial donations. This report exemplifies the conciliar sect’s substitution of caritas with humanitarian sentiment, evacuating the Cross of its redemptive efficacy and the Sacraments of their necessity.
The Naturalist Anthropology of the “Decision” to Love
The article’s central thesis — “Love is a decision… you have to decide to love every day” — is a Pelagian corruption of Catholic doctrine. Caritas is not a product of human resolution but a gratuitous infusion of the Holy Ghost (Rom 5:5: “caritas Dei diffusa est in cordibus nostris per Spiritum Sanctum qui datus est nobis”). The Council of Trent anathematizes anyone who asserts that man can, by his own natural powers, fulfill the divine law or merit eternal life without grace (Sess. VI, Can. 2). Celis’s formulation makes the marital vow a feat of autonomous willpower, indistinguishable from secular “commitment.” The Catechism of the Council of Trent teaches that matrimonial grace perfects natural love, orders it to supernatural ends, and strengthens the spouses to bear each other’s burdens in Christo. The article’s silence on sanctifying grace, the Sacrament of Matrimony as a channel of that grace, and the necessity of the state of grace for meritorious action exposes a functional naturalism: God is a companion in suffering, not the Author of the supernatural order.
Blasphemous Denial of Divine Providence in Suffering
The declaration “God does not send suffering… Quite the opposite: God is with you in your suffering; he doesn’t like to see you suffer, he weeps with you” is a formal repudiation of the dogma of Divine Providence and the theology of the Cross. The Holy Ghost teaches: “Whom the Lord loveth, he chastiseth; and he scourgeth every son whom he receiveth” (Heb 12:6). The Council of Trent (Sess. XIV, Ch. 8) affirms that God “visits” the elect with tribulations “that they may be conformed to the image of His Son.” Pope Pius XI, in Quas Primas, declares that Christ’s Kingdom demands that the faithful “deny themselves and carry their cross” — not as a meaningless accident of biology, but as a participation in the Redemption. To claim God “weeps” impotently beside suffering is to deny His potestas ordinata and to fashion an idol of sentimentalism. This is the kenosis of the conciliar religion: a deity stripped of sovereignty, reduced to a therapeutic presence.
St. Joseph Reduced to a Psychological Coping Mechanism
Celis reports praying: “St. Joseph, help me care for Claudia. How would you care for the Virgin if she had Alzheimer’s? [I want to do it] just like that, exactly the same way.” This instrumentalizes the Patron of the Universal Church as a role-model for caregiving technique, ignoring his primary role as Custos Redemptoris, terror of demons, and intercessor for the grace of a holy death. The true Catholic invokes St. Joseph for the gratia finalis perseverantiae, for the salvation of souls, for the protection of the Church from her enemies. The article’s St. Joseph is a domestic life-coach for the “domestic church” of the neo-church — a construct of Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium (n. 11) that obscures the hierarchical, sacramental reality of the Church. No mention is made of Extreme Unction, the Church’s sacrament for the dying, or of praying for Claudia’s soul’s purification. The supernatural finality is entirely absent.
The “Domestic Church” as Substitute for the Mystical Body
The priest at their 1999 wedding in the Archdiocese of Monterrey (a post-conciliar structure) told them: “You entered as single individuals; you will leave forever united as one.” This vague unity is the conciliar “communion of persons” divorced from the sacramentum tantum and res et sacramentum of Matrimony — the indissoluble bond signifying Christ’s union with the Church (Eph 5:32). The article speaks of “heaven” as a shared destination but never mentions the visio beatifica, the necessity of dying in sanctifying grace, the particular judgment, or the reality of Hell. The children’s distress is framed psychologically: one daughter “feels the pain of losing the chance to have her mother present,” the son “wonders if his mother will be able to attend important milestones.” Not a word of offering these sufferings for the conversion of sinners, for the Poor Souls, or for the restoration of the Church. This is the horizontalism condemned by Pius XII in Humani Generis: the reduction of Christianity to human solidarity.
EWTN: The Propaganda Arm of the Conciliar Sect
The source, EWTN News (ACI Prensa), is the media apparatus of the “Church of the New Advent,” founded by the Franciscan “Mother” Angelica under the aegis of the usurper “bishops” of the post-conciliar hierarchy. Its consistent editorial line promotes the “hermeneutic of continuity,” the “new evangelization,” and the cult of the “pope” — currently the antipope Leo XIV (Robert Prevost). This article serves the sect’s pastoral strategy: presenting a human interest story that validates the Novus Ordo marriage rite (defective in form and intention since 1969), the “daily Mass” of the Novus Ordo Missae (a Protestantized memorial meal), and a spirituality devoid of asceticism, mortification, and the timor Domini. The final plea for “prayer and financial assistance” reveals the mercantile dimension: the neo-church sustains its “laity” through crowdfunding, not through the Church’s patrimony or the alms of the faithful administered by true pastors.
Symptomatic Diagnosis: The Gospel of Self-Actualization
Celis’s closing words — “Pain has taught me to try hard to be happy… I know that God weeps with me… what a joy it is to do so with God by your side” — encapsulate the anti-Gospel of the conciliar revolution. The imitatio Christi is replaced by self-actualization through suffering. The Via Crucis becomes a therapeutic journey where “joy” is the metric of success. The true Catholic, formed by the immutable Magisterium (Trent, Vatican I, Pius X’s Lamentabili Sane Exitu, Pius XI’s Quas Primas, Pius XII’s Mystici Corporis), knows that “through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God” (Acts 14:22) and that the summum bonum is not marital companionship nor emotional resilience but the glorificatio Dei in the visio essentiae. This article is a masterpiece of deception: it uses Catholic vocabulary (Mass, St. Joseph, heaven, vow) to propagate a religion of man, by man, for man — the very definition of the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place (Mt 24:15). Qui habet aures audiendi, audiat.
Source:
‘Love is a decision’: Husband loves his wife even more after early-onset Alzheimer’s (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 14.09.2026