The EWTN News portal reports on November 5, 2026, the publication of a book titled Growing in Humility: 7 Steps with Cardinal Merry del Val by Father Álvaro Serrano Bayán, published by Editorial Monte Carmelo. The article, authored by Victoria Cardiel, presents the work as a spiritual masterclass derived from the Secretary of State of St. Pius X, framing his life as a template for contemporary “humility.” Crucially, the piece legitimizes the current usurper on the Chair of Peter, “Pope” Leo XIV (Robert Prevost), noting his recent audience with a “Merry del Val study group,” and highlights a prologue by “Cardinal” Pietro Parolin, the Secretary of State of the conciliar sect. This article constitutes a brazen act of theological identity theft: it weaponizes the very architect of the Church’s defense against Modernism to adorn the neo-church which embodies that condemned synthesis of all heresies.
The Theft of a Saintly Legacy for the Service of Apostasy
The cited article relates that Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val, “at just 38 years of age,” assumed the Secretariat of State under St. Pius X, describing him as a “brilliant diplomat” whose “discreet loyalty and profound interior life” earned the Pope’s trust. It recounts his role in the 1903 conclave and his encouragement of the newly elected Giuseppe Sarto. Superficially, these are historical facts. However, the subtext is a calculated operation of legitimation. By presenting Merry del Val—a prelate who, as Secretary of the Holy Office, was the principal executor of Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907) and the author of the Oath Against Modernism (1910)—as a spiritual guru for the subjects of “Pope” Leo XIV, EWTN performs a sleight of hand. It implies a continuity of spirit between the hammer of Modernism and the very structure that has institutionalized Modernism as its official theology since the Robber Council (Vatican II).
The article notes that the book features a prologue by “Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the current secretary of state of the Holy See.” This is the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place (Matt. 24:15). Parolin is a chief architect of the Accord with the Chinese Communist Party, the synodal revolution, and the relativization of doctrine via Amoris Laetitia and Fiducia Supplicans. To place his name alongside Merry del Val is not merely anachronistic; it is sacrilegious. It fulfills the prophecy of St. Pius X in Pascendi: “The Modernist… makes it his business to… gradually transform the Church… until nothing remains but a vague and meaningless religious sentiment” (Denz. 2079). The “humility” sold here is precisely that vague sentiment, stripped of the odium haeresium that defined Merry del Val’s actual ministry.
Redefining Humility: From Theological Virtue to Psychological Self-Help
The linguistic level of the article reveals the Protestantization and psychologization of virtue characteristic of the conciliar sect. Father Serrano Bayán is quoted: “Humility is walking in the truth, being good, telling it like it is without making ourselves out to be more or less than who we really are,” attributing this to St. Teresa of Jesus. While the Carmelite Doctor indeed defines humility as truth (veritas), the article immediately distorts it: “Humility doesn’t mean saying ‘I’m worthless’; rather, humility is valuing ourselves a great deal. God created us, everything comes from God, and we don’t need constant recognition from others to know who we are.”
This is not Catholic humility; it is the self-esteem gospel of the neo-church. True Catholic humility, as taught by St. Bernard and St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theol. II-II, q. 161), is a virtue that “consists in keeping oneself within one’s own bounds” and, primarily, in submitting one’s mind and will to God (submissio Dei). It involves a profound recognition of one’s nothingness and sinfulness before the Divine Majesty (nihil sum, nihil possum, nihil valeo). The article’s version—”valuing ourselves a great deal”—is the cult of man condemned by Pius XI in Quas Primas: “When God and Jesus Christ… were removed from laws and states… the foundations of that authority were destroyed… because the main reason why some have the right to command and others have the duty to obey was removed” (Quas Primas). By removing the timor Domini (fear of the Lord) and the sense of sin, the conciliar “humility” becomes a tool for autonomous self-actualization, the very superbia (pride) masquerading as virtue.
The book’s structure—”7 Steps,” “380 spiritual counsels,” “a go-to book to use when adoring the Blessed Sacrament”—reveals a Pelagian methodology. It treats sanctity as a technique, a self-help program accessible to the “contemporary reader,” divorced from the gratia sanans and gratia elevans mediated by the true Sacraments and the true Hierarchy. This is the naturalism condemned in the Syllabus of Errors (Prop. 3, 58): “Human reason, without any reference whatsoever to God, is the sole arbiter of truth and falsehood… the gratification of pleasure” (here, spiritual consolation) “ought to be placed in the accumulation and increase of riches by every possible means.”
The Silence on the Oath Against Modernism: A Deliberate Omission
The symptomatic level is most damning in what the article omits. There is not a single mention of the Oath Against Modernism (Sacrorum Antistitum, 1910), which Merry del Val drafted and which St. Pius X imposed on all clergy. That Oath binds the swearer to “firmly embrace and retain the doctrine of the faith… and never to teach anything contrary to it” and condemns the error that “dogmas… are not immutable, but are subject to evolution”. The conciliar sect, whose “Pope” Leo XIV is praised in the article for receiving the study group, has officially abandoned this Oath (effectively suppressed in 1967 by “Paul VI”).
To write a book on Merry del Val’s “humility” while ignoring his defining act—the defense of immutable truth against the evolution of dogma—is intellectual fraud. It is the hermeneutic of rupture disguised as continuity. The article mentions the “cause for the canonization of Servant of God Rafael Merry del Val continues to proceed.” In the true Church, a cause proceeds sub auspiciis of a valid Pope. In the conciliar sect, “canonizations” (John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul II, John Henry Newman, Maximilian Kolbe, the Ulman family) are null and void acts of a usurping authority, often celebrating figures who embody the very Modernism Merry del Val anathematized. As the Defense of Sedevacantism file demonstrates, citing Bellarmine and Cum ex Apostolatus Officio: “A Pope who is a manifest heretic, by that very fact ceases to be Pope and head… his promotion or elevation… shall be null, void, and of no effect.” Therefore, any “canonization” by Leo XIV or his predecessors in the line of the Great Apostasy is a simulacrum, a theatrical prop for the abomination of desolation.
Legitimizing the Usurper: “Pope” Leo XIV and the Parolin Prologue
The article explicitly states: “Last October, at the Vatican, Pope Leo XIV received members of the Merry del Val study group… a meeting that took place in the context of the 160th anniversary of his birth.” This single sentence is the raison d’être of the EWTN piece. It functions as credentialing for the antipope Robert Prevost. By showing the “Pope” honoring the memory of St. Pius X’s Cardinal, the neo-church signals: “We are the true heirs; Tradition lives here.” This is the Stage 3 of the Masonic operation described in the False Fatima Apparitions file: “Takeover of the narrative by modernists, concealment of the Third Secret, ecumenical reinterpretation.” Here, the “secret” concealed is the Sede Vacante; the “reinterpretation” is the co-option of the Anti-Modernist Saint.
The prologue by “Cardinal” Parolin seals the fraud. Parolin represents the ostpolitik that betrays the Kingship of Christ. Pius XI in Quas Primas declared: “The state must leave the same freedom to the members of Orders… The annual celebration of this solemnity will also remind states that not only private individuals, but also rulers and governments have the duty to publicly honor Christ and obey Him.” The conciliar sect, via Parolin and Leo XIV, does the opposite: it negotiates with atheist regimes (China, Vietnam), promotes religious liberty (condemned by Pius IX, Syllabus Prop. 77, 78, 79), and enforces synodality—the democratization of the Church condemned by Pius X in Lamentabili Sane Exitu (Prop. 53, 54, 55) and Pius VI in Auctorem Fidei.
The Conciliar “Canonization” Factory: Manufacturing Saints for the New Religion
The article notes the author is an “aerospace engineer who also holds degrees in history and communications,” a seminarian turned priest of the conciliar structure. This biographical detail underscores the laicization of the priesthood post-1968. The “7 years researching” in archives of the neo-church yields a product tailored for the consumerist spirituality of the Novus Ordo.
The False Fatima file correctly identifies the strategy: “Disinformation strategy… Stage 3 (1958-2000): Takeover of the narrative by modernists… ecumenical reinterpretation.” Merry del Val, who slept on a straw mattress and wrote the Litany of Humility (“Deliver me, O Lord, from the desire to be loved, esteemed, or preferred”), would have recognized in the conciliar sect the mysterium iniquitatis he fought. His Litany is a cry against vainglory; the conciliar church is an edifice built on human esteem, media approval, and dialogue with the world.
The article concludes with a plug for EWTN newsletters. This commercial aspect reveals the mercantile nature of the neo-church: “The purpose of the book… is to share a spiritual treasure that transformed his own life: ‘Something that has helped me so much, something that I have enjoyed so much…'” This is religious subjectivism (Modernist Prop. 25, 26 in Lamentabili: “Faith… is ultimately based on a sum of probabilities… dogmas… as binding in action, rather than as principles of belief”).
Conclusio: The EWTN article is not a pious tribute; it is a theological counterfeit. It steals the livery of the Church Militant (St. Pius X, Merry del Val) to clothe the Church of the New Advent—the synagogue of Satan (Pius IX, Syllabus context) occupying the Vatican. True humility today demands rejection of the usurpers, adherence to the Oath Against Modernism, and recognition that “the Chair of Peter is vacant” (Sedes vacans) until God provides a true Pope who will “confirm his brethren” (Luke 22:32) in the integral Faith, not in the “humility” of self-esteem. “Non praevalebunt” (Matt. 16:18)—but they will deceive many until the end.
Source:
Lessons on humility from 20th-century Vatican secretary of state who slept on a straw mattress (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 05.11.2026