The National Catholic Register — a flagship organ of the conciliar sect — reports on the release of Francis: Herald of the Great King, a comic book produced by Voyage Comics, timed to coincide with the octocentennial of St. Francis’s death. The article, penned by Joseph Pronechen (author of the Fatima-promoting Fruits of Fatima — Century of Signs and Wonders), celebrates the medium of graphic novels as a tool for “evangelization,” quoting the founder Philip Kosloski and two “priests” of the neo-church: “Fr.” Paschal Mary Yohe of the Franciscan Missionaries of the Eternal Word (EWTN) and “Fr.” Herald Brock of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal. The piece gushes over “action-packed” artwork by a Marvel Comics colorist, frames sanctity as the “fulfillment of the desires of our hearts,” and reduces the Seraphic Father’s radical imitation of the Crucified to an adventure story for children aged 8–14. This is not hagiography; it is the marketing of a domesticated, psychologized Francis stripped of the Cross, the stigmata, the horror of sin, and the necessity of the one true Church for salvation.
The Medium Is the Modernist Message: Comic Books as “New Evangelization”
The article’s central premise — that comic books are “a very effective medium in the modern world in evangelizing others with the good news of the Gospel” — exposes the novus ordo mentality in its purest form. Evangelization is reduced to marketing; the Gospel becomes a product to be packaged for “accessibility.” Philip Kosloski boasts that “a kid will not refuse to pick up a comic book, while he might be more hesitant to read a full-fledged chapter book.” This is the pedagogy of the carnival barker, not the Magisterium. Pope Pius XI, in Quas Primas (1925), taught that the annual liturgical cycle — the Sacrosancta — is “far more effective than even the most serious proofs of the teaching Church” because it “engage[s] and instruct[s] all the faithful… annually and eternally, so to speak… [affecting] the mind and heart, and thus exert[ing] a salutary influence on the whole man” (Quas Primas, §22). The Church’s divinely instituted means of forming souls is the Sacred Liturgy, the Catechism, the Rosary, the lives of the saints read in the breviary — not Marvel-style graphic novels colored by a “veteran of the comic-book industry.”
The very choice of the comic-book form betrays a naturalistic anthropology. It assumes the human person is primarily a consumer of visual stimuli, to be captivated by “beautiful images” and “gripping adventure.” St. Francis did not convert the world by entertaining the imagination; he converted it by embracing Lady Poverty, by preaching penance, by bearing the stigmata of the Crucified, by kissing lepers, by challenging the Sultan to trial by fire. The article mentions the leper encounter but frames it as a narrative beat in a hero’s journey, not as a grace-filled victory over natural repugnance wrought by the Holy Ghost. “The imagination needs to be fed in order to capture the reality of the choices he made,” says “Fr.” Paschal Mary. No: the intellect needs to be illuminated by faith, the will strengthened by grace, the soul conformed to Christ Crucified. The imagination is the handmaid of the intellect, not its master. To invert this order is the error of the Modernists, condemned by St. Pius X in Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907): they “make the religious sense the foundation of faith” and “attribute to the religious sense a certain intuitive perception of the divine” (Pascendi, §3). Here, the “desires of the heart” replace the obsequium fidei.
Psychologized Sanctity: “Desires of the Heart” Replace Conformity to Christ Crucified
The most theologically toxic passage in the article is the explicit statement by “Fr.” Paschal Mary: “Sainthood is inherently appealing because it is in the ultimate way the fulfillment of the desires of our hearts.” This is not Catholic theology; it is the anthropology of the Gaudium et Spes generation, baptized Carl Rogers. The Council of Trent teaches that justification consists in “a translation from that state in which man is born a child of the first Adam, to the state of grace and of the adoption of the sons of God through the second Adam, Jesus Christ, our Savior” (Session VI, Chapter 4). Sanctity is not the fulfillment of our desires but the crucifixion of our disordered desires (Galatians 5:24: “They that are Christ’s have crucified their flesh with its vices and concupiscences”). St. Francis did not follow his “desires”; he renounced them. He stripped naked before the Bishop of Assisi, returning his very clothes to his father, declaring “Henceforth I can truly say: Our Father who art in heaven.” That is not “discerning between holy and unholy desires”; that is mortificatio, the via dolorosa, the imitatio Christi in its most radical form.
The article’s Francis is a therapeutic coach, not a saint. “Fr.” Paschal Mary continues: “We must discern between the holy and unholy desires of our hearts. Yet even the latter are revealing to us something about our history, our present needs and wants, and our destiny in God.” This is Jungian shadow-work dressed in a habit. It empties the Cross of its power. St. Paul writes: “The word of the Cross, to them indeed that perish, is foolishness; but to them that are saved, that is, to us, it is the power of God” (1 Corinthians 1:18). The neo-church cannot bear the foolishness of the Cross, so it sells a Francis who “gives us hope and courage to keep moving forward when all hopes for greatness seem dashed.” Spes non confundit — but the hope of the Christian is not “moving forward” in this life; it is eternal life, won by the Blood of the Lamb, applied through the Sacraments, guarded by the true Church. The article never mentions the Mass, the Sacraments, the priesthood, the Real Presence, the necessity of baptism, the reality of Hell, the judgment seat of Christ. Silence about supernatural matters is the gravest accusation. It is the cult of man foretold by Pope Pius XI in Quas Primas: “When God and Jesus Christ… were removed from laws and states… the foundations of that authority were destroyed” (§31). Here, God is removed from the very life of the saint.
The Fatima Connection: A Masonic Thread in the Neo-Church’s Narrative
The author, Joseph Pronechen, is identified as the writer of Fruits of Fatima — Century of Signs and Wonders. The context file on False Fatima Apparitions demonstrates conclusively that the Fatima phenomenon is a Masonic psychological operation against the Church: the symbolism of dates (1717, 1917, 2017), the “Miracle of the Sun” as mass optical manipulation, the three-stage disinformation strategy, the ecumenical ambiguity of “conversion of Russia,” the Jansenist mortifications of the children, the isolation of Lúcia, the very name “Fatima” as a symbol of Christian-Islamic syncretism. To promote Fatima is to promote a Masonic fabrication. Pronechen’s byline on a Register article about a “Francis comic book” is no coincidence: the same neo-church apparatus that peddles Fatima now peddles a sanitized Francis. Both are products of the same paramasonic structure occupying the Vatican. The article’s mention of the “Jubilee Year of St. Francis” and the “800th anniversary of his death” mirrors the Fatima centenary propaganda. Anniversaries, jubilees, comic books, media campaigns — these are the liturgy of the neo-church, replacing the immutable liturgy of the true Church.
EWTN and the “Franciscan” Orders of the Neo-Church: Schism Within Schism
The two “priests” quoted — “Fr.” Paschal Mary Yohe of the Franciscan Missionaries of the Eternal Word (EWTN) and “Fr.” Herald Brock of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal — belong to communities founded after the conciliar revolution, within the structures of the antipope. EWTN, founded by Mother Angelica under the “pope” Paul VI, has never condemned the New Mass, the new rites of ordination, the heresies of Vatican II, or the apostasy of the conciliar “popes.” It is a controlled opposition, a safety valve for conservative Novus Ordinarians. The Franciscan Friars of the Renewal, founded in 1987 under “Cardinal” O’Connor, similarly operate entirely within the neo-church. These are not Franciscans in the sense of the Order of Friars Minor as constituted by Pope Honorius III (Solet Annuere, 1223) and reformed by St. Pius V and St. Pius X. They are religious of the Church of the New Advent, using the habit of St. Francis to legitimize a false church. Their “scholarship” cited by “Fr.” Paschal Mary — that Francis’s trip to Rome “was itself part of a business trip” — is the reduction of the Poverello to a bourgeois merchant’s son having a mid-life crisis. It is the historico-critical method applied to hagiography, the same method condemned by Pius XII in Humani Generis (1950) and by St. Pius X in Lamentabili Sane Exitu (1907), which rejected the proposition that “the Evangelists and Christians of the second and third generations invented the Gospel parables” (prop. 13) and that “Christ did not always possess the consciousness of His Messianic dignity” (prop. 35). To subject the life of a saint to “current scholarship” is to deny the Church’s authority to define the sanctoral reality.
The Anti-Liturgical, Anti-Sacramental, Anti-Hierarchical Essence of the Project
Voyage Comics is a lay enterprise, unsupervised by any valid bishop (there are none in the neo-church hierarchy). Its “priest” consultants are ordained in the novus ordo rite of 1968, which Archbishop Lefebvre himself questioned and which many theologians hold to be invalid due to defect of form and intention. The comic book bears no imprimatur from a true prelate. It is a private commercial venture, marketed through a website, promoted by a neo-church newspaper. This is the democratization of the sacred: the laity producing “Catholic content” without mission, without mandate, without the potestas iurisdictionis. Pope Pius X condemned the Modernist error that “the Church listening cooperates… with the Church teaching… that the Church teaching should only approve the common opinions of the Church listening” (Lamentabili, prop. 6). Here, the “Church listening” — the comic-book buyers, the homeschool moms, the “godchildren” — becomes the measure of the product. Sarah Robsdottir, a “home-schooling mom of seven,” praises the comic for challenging readers “to be ‘fools for Christ’ — to not succumb to what the culture expects of them but to live holy, radical lives like St. Francis.” The laywoman becomes the critic of sanctity; the comic book becomes the criterion of the “radical life.” This is the sensus fidelium inverted into sensus consumeri.
St. Francis and the Social Kingship of Christ: The Missing Dimension
Pope Pius XI instituted the Feast of Christ the King precisely to combat the “plague… of secularism, so-called laicism” (Quas Primas, §24). He taught that “Christ’s royal authority extends not only to Catholic nations… but His reign encompasses also all non-Christians, so that most truly the entire human race is subject to the authority of Jesus Christ” (ibid., §18, citing Leo XIII). St. Francis preached before the Sultan, not to “dialogue” but to convert; he sought martyrdom, not “mutual understanding.” The comic book stops “at the point when Francis begins to organize his many followers” — it omits the Rule, the Testament, the stigmata at La Verna, the Canticle of the Creatures as a hymn of the King of creation, the defense of the Holy Eucharist, the founding of the Third Order for the sanctification of the laity in the world under the Church’s authority. It presents a Francis without the Church, without the Cross, without the Kingship of Christ. This is the Francis of the neo-church: a spiritual mascot for “fools for Christ” who remain comfortably within the conciliar sect, attending the Novus Ordo, accepting religious liberty, ecumenism, collegiality, the new catechism.
Conclusion: The Abomination of Desolation in Four-Color Print
Francis: Herald of the Great King is not a harmless children’s book. It is a theological poison wrapped in glossy pages. It teaches that sanctity is self-actualization, that the saint is a hero of “desire,” that the Gospel is a story to be illustrated by Marvel artists, that the Church’s mission is “content creation,” that the faithful are consumers. It bears the imprimatur of the abomination of desolation (EWTN, the Register, the “Franciscan” orders of the neo-church). True Catholics must reject it. The true St. Francis is found in the Legenda Maior of St. Bonaventure, in the Fioretti, in the Rule of 1223, in the Office of the Passion he composed, in the stigmata that made him alter Christus. He is honored by the Traditional Latin Mass, by the Franciscan Rite as it existed before 1962, by the Rosary of the Seven Joys, by the Transitus on October 3. He is not found in a comic book sold on a website. Sanctitas non est in chartis pictis, sed in cruce assumpta. Sanctity is not in illustrated pages, but in the Cross embraced.
Source:
New Comic Book Tells the Story of St. Francis in Action and Color (ncregister.com)
Date: 03.10.2026