The EWTN News portal (July 19, 2026) reports on the “Sicar” retreat movement, founded by one Mother María Elena Martínez under the aegis of her “Mary, Mother of Love” private association (erected 2015), which claims to be transforming thousands of young people across Latin America through an experience centered on the Samaritan woman at the well. The article, a translated adaptation from ACI Prensa, details the founder’s spiritual itinerary—from Missionaries of Charity to cloistered life to founding her own community—and the movement’s expansion through Mexico, Guatemala, Argentina, Paraguay, and Peru. Testimonials emphasize “encounter,” “mercy,” “community,” and a “living Jesus,” wholly devoid of doctrinal content, sacramental theology, or the social Kingship of Christ. This report exposes not a revival of the faith, but the quintessential conciliar “new movement”: a Pelagian, immanentist, emotionally manipulative enterprise that substitutes the opus Dei for the opus hominis, confirming the total bankruptcy of the “new evangelization.”
The Anatomy of a Conciliar ‘New Movement’: Private Association, Public Apostasy
The very juridical form of this enterprise betrays its anti-Catholic nature. The article identifies “Mary, Mother of Love” as a “private association of the faithful” founded in 2015. This category exists solely in the 1983 Code of the pseudo-council, a legislative text promulgated by the antipope John Paul II (Wojtyła) which codifies the ecclesiology of Lumen Gentium—the very document that replaces the Societas Perfecta of the true Church with the “People of God” heresy. A “private association” in this counterfeit legal order has no mission from Christ, no canonical standing in the true Church (which alone possesses the potestas iurisdictionis), and serves only to legitimize lay-led initiatives that bypass the hierarchy—even the false hierarchy of the conciliar sect.
The foundress, styled “Mother” María Elena Martínez, admits her path wandered through the Missionaries of Charity (the order of the “saint” Teresa of Calcutta, a darling of the neo-church’s humanitarian religion) and a cloistered monastery before settling on her own foundation. This spiritual tourism—curiositas masquerading as discernment—is the hallmark of the modern religious vocation: not a call to sequela Christi under obedience and the vows of religion ratified by legitimate authority, but a search for “something more interior, deeper” (her words) defined entirely by subjective sentiment. She operates without mandate from a valid Ordinary—for none exist in the territories she occupies—making her movement a societas facticia, a human construct devoid of divine institution.
Linguistic Engineering: The Vocabulary of Immanentist Modernism
The rhetoric of the article is a textbook of Modernist immanentism condemned by St. Pius X in Lamentabili Sane Exitu and Pascendi Dominici Gregis. Consider the lexicon: “spiritual journey,” “process of discernment,” “search for God,” “encounter,” “experience,” “living Jesus,” “mercy knows no bounds.” Absent entirely are the terms of the Catholic religion: gratia sanctificans, peccatum mortale, poenitentia, sacrificium, regnum Christi, iudicium.
The movement takes its name and method from the Samaritan woman (Jn 4), but twists the narrative into a paradigm of “young people for young people“—the democratization of the apostolate, the sensus fidelium weaponized against the sensus fidei. The foundress states: “The passage about the Samaritan woman was so rich, so rich, that I could draw so much from it.” This is the Protestant principle of private judgment applied to Scripture: the text becomes a wax nose for the founder’s “charism,” not the immutable deposit of faith guarded by the Magisterium. The “decisive step” came not from episcopal mandate but from a retreat in 2016 organized by alumni of another neo-movement, “Emmaus.” This is chaos, not missio.
Theological Vacuity: Christ the King Dethroned by ‘Living Jesus’ Sentimentalism
The most damning omission is the total absence of the Social Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Pius XI, in Quas Primas (1925), teaches with unshakeable authority: “Peace is only possible in the kingdom of Christ” (Pax Christi in regno Christi). He condemns the “plague that poisons human society” which is “the secularism of our times, so-called laicism,” stating that “the Church… demands for itself… full freedom and independence from secular authority” and that “rulers and legitimate superiors… exercise authority not so much by their own right as by the command and in the place of the Divine King.”
The “Sicar” retreat knows nothing of this. It proposes a “living Jesus” who “continues to perform miracles every day” to heal wounds and give “steady flames” of faith, but a Jesus who makes no claim on the civil order, the laws of nations, the education of youth, or the public profession of the faith. It is the “Christ without a Crown” of liberal Catholicism. The article notes the retreat reaches young people in “parishes and correctional facilities”—yet there is no mention of converting the prison system to Catholic principles, no denunciation of the Masonic states hosting these retreats, no call for the Reconquista of Latin America for the Kingship of Christ. It is a retreat from the world, not a conquest of the world for Christ. As Pius XI warned: “When God and Jesus Christ… were removed from laws and states… the foundations of that authority were destroyed.” Sicar builds on sand, offering a privatized, therapeutic Jesus who demands nothing of the res publica.
Sacramental Silence: The Hallmark of False Evangelization
Read the article closely. Search for the words: Mass, Confession, Eucharist, Holy Orders, Priesthood, Baptism, Confirmation, Extreme Unction. They are **nowhere to be found**. The “fruits” listed are: “shift in how one views others,” “eyes of mercy,” “no longer judge,” “love experienced in community,” “persevere in faith,” “encounter with God that changed everything.”
This is the religion of the Sentiment, the Gefühlsreligion condemned by the Syllabus of Pius IX (Error 16: “Man may, in the observance of any religion whatever, find the way of eternal salvation“) and by the Council of Trent (Sess. VII, Can. 1: “If anyone shall say that the sacraments… are not necessary for salvation… let him be anathema“). True evangelization is the administration of the Sacraments of the New Law—instituted by Christ, entrusted to the valid priesthood, channels of ex opere operato grace. A “retreat” that produces “transformation” without the Blood of Calvary made present on the altar, without the absolution of the tribunal of penance, without the doctrinal formation of the Catechism of Trent, is a psychodrama, not a mission. It offers the “opium of the people“—emotional consolation—in place of the Cross.
The testimonial of Ottmar Ricalde is revealing: “My life was always focused on pleasing others, but when I met God and realized how much he loves me, I began wanting to please him.” This is pure Pelagianism: the initiative of the human will (“I began wanting”) responding to a vague “love,” untethered from gratia praeveniens, the sacramentum baptismatis, or the mandatum of the Decalogue. It is the “auto-redemption” of the Modernist, condemned in Lamentabili (Prop. 38: “The teaching on the death of Christ for the redemption of men is not an evangelical teaching, but only Pauline“—here inverted: redemption is reduced to a felt experience of being loved).
Symptomatic Diagnosis: The Rot of the ‘New Pentecost’
“Sicar” is not an anomaly; it is the logical fruit of the conciliar revolution. It mirrors the Focolare, Communion and Liberation, the Neocatechumenal Way, and the Charismatic Renewal: lay-led, experience-driven, doctrinally amorphous, ecumenically inclined (the article notes expansion into “Paraguay,” “Argentina,” “Peru” without mention of converting schismatics or Protestants), and perfectly adapted to the “synodal” church of the antipope Leo XIV (Prevost).
The Syllabus condemns the error that “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). The conciliar sect, having surrendered to the civil power (religious liberty, Dignitatis Humanae), can only produce “private associations” that function as NGOs of spiritual wellness. Mother María Elena’s “private association” is a sui generis NGO, registered under the laws of Masonic states, offering a product (“retreat”) to a demographic (“young adults 24-25”) identified by a market analysis (“they no longer had a place”).
St. Pius X diagnosed this spirit in Pascendi: “They aim at such a development of dogmas as appears to be their corruption… the pursuit of novelty… leads to deplorable consequences, abandoning all restraint.” The “Sicar” movement is novelty incarnate: a new “charism,” a new “methodology,” a new “community,” all without reference to the Traditio, the Magisterium, or the Sacramentum.
The article concludes with the words of the Samaritan woman: “Whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst.” But the water offered by Sicar is not the aqua viva of the Sacraments and the true Doctrine, but the stagnant water of the cistern of Modernism—cisternae dissipatae, quae non possunt aquas continere (Jer 2:13). It leaves the young people of Latin America thirsting still for the King who alone can satisfy, the Rex Regum whom the conciliar sect has dethroned and whom these “retreats” ignore entirely.
There is no “new evangelization,” only the eternal Evangelization: Docete omnes gentes… baptizantes eos… docentes eos observare omnia quaecumque mandavi vobis (Mt 28:19-20). Sicar teaches nothing, baptizes no one, observes nothing. It is a counterfeit coin minted in the forge of the abomination of desolation.
Source:
Sicar: The Retreat Transforming the Lives of Young People in Latin America (ncregister.com)
Date: 19.07.2026