The VaticanNews portal — the official propaganda organ of the conciliar sect occupying the Vatican — reports that the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops, through its executive director Michael B. Sheedy, has petitioned Governor Ron DeSantis to stay the executions of two convicted murderers, James Duckett and Dominick Occhicone Jr., scheduled for July 28. The letter, dripping with the saccharine humanitarianism characteristic of the post-conciliar apostasy, argues that “it is possible both to uphold justice and to exercise mercy,” citing the encyclical Evangelium Vitae of the antipope John Paul II and the scriptural passage Ezekiel 18:23. This intervention is not an act of Catholic piety but a manifest rebellion against the ordo iustitiae established by God, a capitulation to the modernist heresy that equates mercy with the abolition of just punishment, and a public testimony that the conciliar sect has wholly abandoned the Social Reign of Christ the King.
The Conciliar Sect’s Mouthpiece Speaks: A Structure of Apostasy
The source alone condemns the content. VaticanNews is the voice of the ecclesia novae adventus, the counterfeit church erected upon the ruins of the Second Vatican Council. Its “bishops” are not successors of the Apostles in the Catholic sense but functionaries of a paramasonic structure, ordained in the invalid Novus Ordo rite of Paul VI, devoid of the character indelebilis of the true priesthood and the jurisdiction necessary for the pastoral office. When Michael B. Sheedy signs as “Executive Director of the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops,” he speaks not for the Ecclesia Catholica but for a bureaucratic apparatus of the abominatio desolationis. The very title “Conference of Catholic Bishops” is a conciliar novelty — collegialitas run mad — unknown to the ius divinum constitution of the Church, where bishops govern their dioceses under the Roman Pontiff, not in democratic syndicates.
Invocation of the Antipope and His Heretical Encyclical
The letter leans heavily on Evangelium Vitae (1995), the encyclical of Karol Wojtyła — “Pope Saint John Paul II” in the sect’s hagiography, but in reality a manifest heretic who lost the papacy ipso facto by his public profession of religious liberty (Dignitatis Humanae), false ecumenism, and the assassination of the Church’s missionary mandate. As St. Robert Bellarmine teaches in De Romano Pontifice: “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.” Wojtyła’s “canonization” by Bergoglio is a nullity, a ritual of the neo-church confirming its own apostasy. To cite Evangelium Vitae as authoritative is to cite a document of the synthesis haeresium — Modernism — which St. Pius X condemned in Pascendi Dominici Gregis as the “synthesis of all heresies.”
The article quotes Sheedy reflecting on the “darkness and depravity to which human beings can sink” — a phrase from the antipope’s encyclical — while ignoring that the true darkness is the eclipse of the lux veritatis in the conciliar sect itself. The reference to Wojtyła’s experience under “Nazi and Soviet regimes” is a sentimental appeal to experience over doctrine, typical of the modernist method condemned by St. Pius X in Lamentabili Sane Exitu (proposition 58: “Truth changes with man, because it develops with him, in him, and through him”).
Perversion of the Cain and Abel Narrative: Mercy Without Justice
The letter’s exegetical sleight of hand on Genesis 4 is diabolical in its subtlety. Sheedy notes that God “did not let Cain off the hook” but “gave him a severe punishment” without demanding his death, concluding: “Not even a murderer loses his personal dignity.” This is a half-truth weaponized to destroy the whole truth. The Catechism of the Council of Trent (the Catechismus Romanus), the sure norm of pre-conciliar doctrine, teaches explicitly on the Fifth Commandment:
Another kind of lawful slaying belongs to the civil authorities, to whom is entrusted power of life and death, by the legal and judicious exercise of which they punish the guilty and protect the innocent. The just use of this power, far from involving the crime of murder, is an act of paramount obedience to this Commandment which prohibits murder.
St. Thomas Aquinas, the Doctor Communis, in Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 64, a. 2, states: “If a man be dangerous and infectious to the community, on account of some sin, it is praiseworthy and advantageous that he be killed in order to safeguard the common good.” The Cain narrative does not abolish the death penalty; it reveals God’s misericordia particularis toward a singular penitent in the infancy of revelation, before the Lex Mosaica (Gen 9:6: “Whosoever shall shed man’s blood, his blood shall be shed: for man was made to the image of God”) and the Lex Christi which perfects rather than abolishes the moral law. The conciliar sect’s “hermeneutic of discontinuity” severs the Old Testament from the New, the ius naturale from the ius divinum, to fashion a gospel of humanitarianism.
The Abolition of the Death Penalty: A Dogmatic Error
The Florida bishops’ petition is not a pastoral plea but a doctrinal declaration: the death penalty is in se illegitimate. This contradicts the unanimous teaching of the Fathers, the Doctors, the Popes, and the Magisterium ordinarium et universale. Pope Pius XII, in his Address to the First International Congress of Histopathology of the Nervous System (Sept. 14, 1952), affirmed: “Even in the case of the death penalty the State does not dispose of the individual’s right to life. Rather public authority limits itself to depriving the offender of the good of life in expiation for his guilt, after he, through his crime, deprived himself of his own right to life.”
The Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992), the sect’s doctrinal compendium, already began the corruption (n. 2267), but it was Bergoglio who in 2018 declared the death penalty “inadmissible” — a formal heresy against the Depositum Fidei. The Florida bishops are merely implementing the antipope’s revolution. By demanding “life in prison without parole” as the sole just punishment, they elevate the dignitas hominis (understood naturalistically) above the iustitia Dei, making the criminal’s temporal life an absolute good superior to the bonum commune and the ordo iustitiae. This is anthropocentrism masquerading as Christianity — the very error of Gaudium et Spes condemned by Archbishop Lefebvre (however compromised his position) as the “cult of man.”
Ezekiel 18:23 Wrested to Destruction
The letter concludes with Ezekiel 18:23: “Do I find pleasure in the death of the wicked… Do I not rejoice when they turn from their evil way and live?” This is the classic modernist tactic: isolating a verse on God’s voluntas signi (will of sign) to negate His voluntas beneplaciti (will of good pleasure) expressed in the lex talionis and the potestas gladii (Rom 13:4: “For he is God’s minister to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, fear: for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is God’s minister, an avenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil”). St. Augustine in De Civitate Dei (I, 21) refutes this pacifist perversion: “The same divine law which forbids the killing of a human being allows certain exceptions… The agent of authority is but a sword in the hand of him who uses it, and is not himself responsible for the death he deals.”
The conciliar bishops pray for the “repose of the souls” of the victims and “consolation of their families” — a pious veneer. But true charity for the victims demands justice: iustitia est constans et perpetua voluntas ius suum cuique tribuendi (Ulpian, Digesta I.1.10). True charity for the criminals demands that they face the temporal penalty due to their crimes, that they may, in the fear of death, turn to God — the very purpose of the poena medicinalis. By shielding them from the scaffold, the bishops deprive them of the gratia finalis that often accompanies the confrontation with mortality. This is not mercy; it is crudelitas sub specie misericordiae.
The “Callousness” of Double Execution: Sentimentalism Over Principle
Sheedy calls it “especially callous” to execute two men on the same day. This reveals the phronema of the neo-church: governance by sentiment, not by prudentia and iustitia. The scheduling of executions is a matter of prudential administration of the civil power, not a theological category. The bishops’ interference in the temporal potestas — demanding the governor commute sentences — violates the duo sunt of Gelasius I (Epistula ad Anastasium): “Two there are, august Emperor, by which this world is chiefly ruled: the sacred authority of priests and the royal power.” The conciliar sect, having surrendered the potestas spiritualis to the world (religious liberty, secularism), now presumes to dictate to the potestas temporalis the exercise of the ius gladii — a usurpation condemned by Pius IX in the Syllabus Errorum (prop. 39: “The State… is endowed with a certain right not circumscribed by any limits” — condemned, but the reverse error, that the Church dictates civil penal policy, is equally condemned in prop. 20, 42, 44).
Symptomatic Level: The Fruit of the Conciliar Revolution
This petition is not an isolated anomaly; it is the necessary fruit of the conciliar tree. Dignitatis Humanae proclaimed the “right to religious freedom” — i.e., the right to error. Gaudium et Spes enthroned “man” as the center of history. Nostra Aetate relativized the extra Ecclesiam nulla salus. The logical terminus is the abolition of the death penalty, for if man has an absolute right to his false religion, he has an absolute right to his life, regardless of his crimes. The Social Reign of Christ the King, proclaimed by Pius XI in Quas Primas (1925) — “Peace is only possible in the kingdom of Christ” — has been replaced by the regnum hominis, where the state becomes a therapeutic agency and the “bishop” a social worker.
Pius XI warned: “When God and Jesus Christ… were removed from laws and states and when authority was derived not from God but from men, the foundations of that authority were destroyed.” The Florida bishops, by petitioning a Catholic governor to violate his duty under Romans 13, are agents of this destruction. They do not speak in persona Christi; they speak in the person of the Antichristus who sits in the temple of God (2 Thess 2:4), masquerading as the Vicar of Christ.
Conclusion: No Communion with the Architects of Apostasy
Faithful Catholics — those who adhere to the Traditio integra, the Mass of all ages, the doctrine of Trent and the Syllabus, the Social Kingship of Christ — must reject this letter and the sect that produced it. The true bishops of the Church, were they to exist in Florida (and they do not, the sees being vacant or occupied by intruders), would admonish the governor to execute justice, to wield the sword as minister Dei, and to commend the souls of the condemned to God through the sacraments — not to beg for their temporal survival. The conciliar “bishops” have chosen Barabbas over Christ, the vita temporalis over the vita aeterna, the civitas terrena over the Civitas Dei. Non est hic Christus, neque ibi.
Source:
Florida bishops petition governor to stay two executions set for same day (vaticannews.va)
Date: 24.07.2026