The EWTN News portal reports that the usurper Robert Prevost, styling himself “Pope” Leo XIV, visited the Catholic Institute of Paris on September 26, 2026, to address a “Provincial Ecclesial Assembly” of the conciliar sect in France. The occasion was a celebrated statistical surge in adult and adolescent baptisms—over 20,000 in 2026, a 20% increase over the previous record year—hailed by the antipope and his collaborator, the “Archbishop” Laurent Ulrich, as “God’s surprising work” and the movement of the “Holy Spirit.” The assembly’s theme, “Catechumens and Neophytes: New Perspectives for the Life of Our Church in Our Dioceses,” and the testimonies of converts like Loïs Barbichon and Jaoide—who approached the faith via subjective “inner impulse” and comparative reading of the Quran and New Testament—epitomize the naturalistic, subjectivist, and ecumenical rot of the post-conciliar counter-church. This spectacle is not the flourishing of the Church, but the metastasizing of the abomination of desolation in the very heart of the eldest daughter of the Church.
The Usurper’s Theater: A False Shepherd Validating a False Flock
The very premise of the event is a criminal usurpation of divine authority. Robert Prevost is not the Vicar of Christ; he is the latest in the line of antipopes beginning with Angelo Roncalli (John XXIII), each a manifest heretic who, by the very fact of their public defection from the Catholic Faith, ipso facto severed themselves from the Mystical Body and lost all jurisdiction. As St. Robert Bellarmine teaches, “a manifest heretic… by that very fact ceases to be Pope and head, just as he ceases to be a Christian and member of the body of the Church” (De Romano Pontifice). The 1917 Code of Canon Law (Canon 188.4) confirms that an office becomes vacant ex ipso facto by “public defection from the Catholic faith.” Pope Paul IV’s Bull Cum ex Apostolatus Officio declares the elevation of a heretic “null, void, and of no effect.” Therefore, every word spoken by Prevost in Paris carries zero Petrine authority; it is the noise of an intruder in the Master’s vineyard.
The “Archbishop” Laurent Ulrich is a functionary of this paramasonic structure, validly ordained perhaps (if before 1968), but exercising a jurisdiction he does not possess, leading a “diocese” that is a juridical fiction within the neo-church. His amazement at the “renewed request for the sacraments” reveals the blindness of those who have substituted the sensus fidei for sociological metrics.
Linguistic Engineering: The Vocabulary of Apostasy
The rhetoric deployed in Paris is a masterclass in Modernist newspeak, designed to evacuate Catholic terminology of its dogmatic content.
- “Synodal Assembly” / “Synodal Discussion”: This is the hermeneutic of rupture institutionalized. The Church is a monarchy, not a democracy. “The Church is not a parliament; she is a kingdom” (Pius XI, Quas Primas). The “consultation phase” involving 45,000 people replaces the Magisterium with the vox populi, realizing the condemned proposition of the Syllabus: “The Church is not a true and perfect society… but it appertains to the civil power to define what are the rights of the Church” (Error 19), adapted here to the “power of the baptized.”
- “Welcoming,” “Accompanying,” “Missionary Disciples”: These are the buzzwords of the Church of the New Advent, replacing conversion, catechesis, penance, and sanctifying grace. The antipope’s call to “strike a wise balance between welcoming new members as they are and educating them in the tenets of the faith” places the subjective state of the convert above the objective truth of the Faith. It is the personalism of Karol Wojtyla (John Paul II) weaponized against the extra ecclesiam nulla salus.
- “Search for Meaning,” “Inner Impulse,” “Questioning”: The testimonies of Barbichon (“inner impulse”) and Jaoide (reading Quran and NT) reveal a naturalistic religiosity, not the supernatural virtue of Faith. “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Heb 11:1), not a psychological crutch during a pandemic or a comparative literature exercise. The Lamentabili Sane Exitu (1907) condemned the Modernist error that “Faith, as assent of the mind, is ultimately based on a sum of probabilities” (Prop. 25) and that “The dogmas of faith should be understood according to their practical function… rather than as principles of belief” (Prop. 26). This is precisely the “faith” on display in Paris.
Theological Bankruptcy: Baptism Without the Church, Grace Without Truth
The central claim—that 20,000+ baptisms constitute a work of the Holy Spirit—is a diabolical inversion. The Sacrament of Baptism, to be valid, requires matter, form, and intention of doing what the Church does. In the conciliar sect, the “Church” intended is the post-conciliar counterfeit; the form often uses the invalid vernacular novelties; the ministers are often “priests” ordained in the invalid 1968 Rite of Ordination or by “bishops” consecrated in the invalid 1968 Rite of Episcopal Consecration. Even if materially valid, these baptisms initiate the recipient into a schismatic sect, not the Catholic Church. They receive the character but remain outside the unity of the Mystical Body, deprived of the sacramental economy of the true Church.
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, because it lacked a stable and strong foundation.” The “secularized France” described in the article—where 50% claim no religion and only 8% attend “Church” regularly—is the direct fruit of the laicism condemned by the Syllabus (Error 55: “The Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church”) and the religious liberty heresy of Dignitatis Humanae. The conciliar sect’s “growth” in this wasteland is not a victory of grace but a symptom of the great apostasy (2 Thess 2:3): people joining a humanist NGO that mimics Catholic externals while denying the Social Kingship of Christ.
The testimony of Jaoide—struck by Jesus’ “determination to show us the example through his life”—reduces the God-Man to a moral exemplar, the Jesus of the Modernists condemned by St. Pius X in Pascendi: “The teaching about Christ transmitted by Paul, John, and by the Councils… is a teaching about Jesus formulated by Christian consciousness” (Lamentabili, Prop. 31). There is no mention of the Divinity of Christ, the Holy Trinity, the Sacrifice of the Cross, the Real Presence, the necessity of the Catholic Church for salvation, or the Last Things. Silence on these dogmas is the loudest profession of heresy.
The Symptomatic Level: The “Springtime” of the Antichurch
This event is the perfect icon of the Church of the New Advent:
- Ecumenism in Action: Jaoide’s path via the Quran is the fruit of Nostra Aetate and the Assisi abominations. The “conversion” is not from error to Truth, but from one religious option to another within the supermarket of “spirituality.”
- Subjectivism as Criterion: “I felt kind of an inner impulse.” The sensus fidelium has been replaced by the sentiment of the individual. The “catechumenate” becomes a therapy group, not a catechesis in the Catechism of the Council of Trent.
- Activism over Holiness: Sister Kohler’s “missionary impulse” and Barbichon’s “finding a mission” reflect the activist heresy condemned by Pius XI: the Kingdom of Christ is reduced to social work. “The Kingdom of our Redeemer encompasses all men… primarily spiritual and relates mainly to spiritual matters” (Quas Primas). The neo-church has inverted the order: the temporal swallows the eternal.
- Statistical Idolatry: Numbers replace sanctity. 20,000 baptisms in a counterfeit rite, administered by ministers of a schismatic sect, to converts ignorant of dogma, is not the “work of the Holy Spirit” but the work of the father of lies building a potemkin village of piety.
The Only Remedy: The Social Kingship of Christ and the True Church
France does not need a “synodal assembly” to manage its “neophytes.” France needs the Reconquête for Christ the King. Pius XI instituted the Feast of Christ the King precisely as a “special remedy against the plague that poisons human society… the secularism of our times, so-called laicism” (Quas Primas). He taught that “the state must leave the same freedom to the members of Orders… who are indeed the most valiant helpers of the Pastors of the Church and contribute most to the expansion and establishment of Christ’s Kingdom.” The “Little Sisters of the Gospel” in Saint-Denis, baptizing 20 adults in a “vulnerable neighborhood,” are not expanding Christ’s Kingdom; they are expanding the conciliar sect’s membership rolls in a suburb lost to Islamization—a demographic reality the antipope dare not name.
The true Catholic response to this article is not hope but horror. “The faith teaches us and human reason demonstrates that a double order of things exists… to God is given what is God’s, and because of God to Caesar what is Caesar’s” (Syllabus, Conclusion). The structures occupying the Vatican give to Caesar what is God’s (souls, worship, doctrine) and to God only the lip-service of a “synodal” bureaucracy.
Let the faithful cling to the Tradition of the Fathers, the Mass of All Time, the bishops and priests who maintain valid orders and jurisdiction by rejecting the conciliar errors, and the certainty that “the gates of hell shall not prevail” (Mt 16:18) against the true Church, however small her visible remnant may appear. The “growth” in Paris is the swelling of the Whore of Babylon’s cup; the true Church endures in the catacombs of fidelity, awaiting the Parousia of her King.
Source:
Pope addresses ‘surprising’ Catholic growth in secular France (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 26.09.2026