The National Catholic Register portal (August 26, 2026) publishes a commentary by the conciliar presbyter Raymond J. de Souza juxtaposing Christopher Nolan’s cinematic adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey with the address of the usurper “Pope” Leo XIV (Robert Prevost) at the Rimini “Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples,” organized by the modernist movement Communion and Liberation. De Souza presents the antipope’s citation of Dante’s Paradiso — “L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle” — as a superior, Christian answer to the capricious violence of the Homeric gods. The article concludes that the “realism of mercy” proclaimed by Leo XIV, which declares “there can be no enemies,” constitutes the definitive divine reality. This exercise in literary criticism serves as a smokescreen for the total repudiation of the Social Kingship of Christ and the enthronement of a sentimental humanitarianism that is the precise theological signature of the Antichrist.
The Usurpation of Peter’s Chair and the Void of Authority
De Souza refers to Robert Prevost as “Pope Leo XIV,” “the Holy Father,” and “the Holy Father” without qualification. From the perspective of integral Catholic theology, this is the primary heresy undergirding the entire piece. As St. Robert Bellarmine teaches in De Romano Pontifice, “a Pope who is 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” (Defense of Sedevacantism, citing Bellarmine). The line of usurpers beginning with John XXIII has consistently propagated the errors of Modernism condemned by St. Pius X in Lamentabili Sane Exitu and Pascendi Dominici Gregis. Leo XIV, by embracing the conciliar magisterium — religious liberty, false ecumenism, collegiality, the new mass — is a manifest heretic. Consequently, ipso facto, he has lost all jurisdiction. As Pope Paul IV defined in Cum ex Apostolatus Officio, the promotion of a heretic to the papacy is “null, void, and of no effect” (Defense of Sedevacantism). De Souza’s refusal to acknowledge this canonical reality renders his commentary an act of fidelity to a paramasonic structure occupying the Vatican, not to the Catholic Church.
“Communion and Liberation”: A Modernist Laboratory for the New Religion
The venue of the address — the Rimini Meeting of Communion and Liberation (CL) — is not a peripheral detail but the epicenter of the conciliar revolution. CL, founded by the modernist Don Luigi Giussani, epitomizes the hermeneutic of experience condemned implicitly by the Syllabus of Errors (Prop. 3, 4, 5: reason as sole arbiter, revelation as progress). It replaces the objective deposit of faith with a subjective “encounter,” the very category Leo XIV deploys: “everyone, even those who oppose us, is a brother or sister to be looked in the eye and encountered in truth.” This is the democratization of the Church condemned by Pius XI in Quas Primas, where the regnum Christi is reduced to a fellowship of “searchers.” The “Friendship Among Peoples” theme is the practical application of the condemned proposition: “The Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church” (Syllabus, Prop. 55), for it builds a “civilization of love” prescinding from the social reign of Christ the King.
Dante Hijacked: From Divine Comedy to Humanitarian Platitude
De Souza weaponizes Dante Alighieri, stripping the Divina Commedia of its doctrinal anatomy — Hell, Purgatory, the Hierarchy of the Church Militant and Triumphant — to leave only a vague “Love that moves the sun.” Dante’s Love is the Unmoved Mover of Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics, the Trinitarian God who damns the unrepentant to eternal fire (Inferno III: “Per me si va ne la città dolente… Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate”). Leo XIV’s “Love” is a neutered deity who “willingly remains silent” before evil, refusing the potestas iudicandi (judicial power) which Pius XI affirms belongs to Christ the King: “Concerning the judicial authority, which Jesus received from the Father, He Himself says… ‘the Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son'” (Quas Primas, citing John 5:22). To cite the last line of Paradiso while silencing the Inferno is the quintessential modernist tactic: retaining the vocabulary of tradition while evacuating its dogmatic content (cf. Lamentabili Sane Exitu, Prop. 22, 59: dogmas as evolving interpretations, truth changing with man).
The “God of Love” vs. The King of Kings: Quas Primas Contra Mundum
The central contrast De Souza draws — Homer’s “loud gods” of power vs. Leo’s “silent God” of mercy — is a false dichotomy designed to overthrow the Kingship of Christ. Pius XI, in Quas Primas, teaches that Christ’s Kingdom is spiritual but universal and legislative: “Christ Jesus is given to men as Redeemer… but at the same time He is the Lawgiver, to whom men owe obedience”. He possesses a threefold authority — legislative, judicial, executive (Quas Primas). The antipope’s “Love” possesses none of these. It issues no laws (“sin exists, of course, but stronger still is the redeeming love of Christ” — antinomianism), executes no judgment (“there can be no enemies” — pacifism), and legislates no truth (“encountered in truth” — relativism).
Pius XI explicitly identifies the plague poisoning society as laicism (secularism): “It began with the denial of Christ the Lord’s reign over all nations; the Church’s authority to teach men, to issue laws, to govern nations… was denied” (Quas Primas). Leo XIV’s Rimini address is the capitulation to this plague. By proclaiming a “realism of mercy” that “counter[s] the false realism that rearms minds, words and nations,” the usurper surrenders the jus gladii (right of the sword) and the potestas docendi (teaching power) to the secular order, begging only for a place at the table of dialogue. This is the negation of Quas Primas: “Let rulers of states therefore not refuse public veneration and obedience to the reigning Christ… if they wish to maintain their authority inviolate”.
“No Enemies”: The Heresy of Indifferentism Condemned by Pius IX
The most scandalous utterance reported by De Souza is the antipope’s declaration: “there can be no enemies, and that everyone, even those who oppose us, is a brother or sister to be looked in the eye and encountered in truth.” This is the formal heresy of Indifferentism and Latitudinarianism, explicitly anathematized in the Syllabus of Errors:
- Prop. 15: “Every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true.”
- Prop. 16: “Man may, in the observance of any religion whatever, find the way of eternal salvation.”
- Prop. 17: “Good hope at least is to be entertained of the eternal salvation of all those who are not at all in the true Church of Christ.”
- Prop. 18: “Protestantism is nothing more than another form of the same true Christian religion…”
If “there are no enemies,” then the Church Militant is a fiction. If the Muslim, the Jew, the Protestant, the Atheist, the Mason are merely “brothers to be encountered,” then Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus is denied. The “Love that moves the stars” becomes a universalist solvent dissolving the necessitas medii (necessity of the means) — the Church, the Sacraments, the Faith. St. Augustine, cited by Pius XI (Quas Primas, n. 30), defines the State as a “harmonious association of men” ordered to the bonum commune under God’s law. A “brotherhood” without the confessio fidei is the Masonic fraternité, the very “synagogue of Satan” denounced by Pius IX in the Syllabus introduction: “It is from them that the synagogue of Satan… takes its strength.”
Mercy Without Justice: The Modernist Denial of the Cross
De Souza writes: “God is not loud. Indeed, Jesus struggles even to speak… love is the law of life and the means of redemption — the way of the crucified Messiah.” This is the theology of the “theology of the cross” divorced from the theology of glory — a Lutheranized, modernist caricature. The Cross is not merely a symbol of “sacrificial love”; it is the propitiatory Sacrifice satisfying divine Justice. Quas Primas reminds us: “Christ as Redeemer acquired the Church with His Blood, and as Priest offered Himself as a sacrifice for our sins and eternally offers it”. The “realism of mercy” that ignores Justice is idolatry. It creates a god who forgives without repentance, who saves without conversion, who reigns without ruling. This is the “dogmaless Christianity” (Prop. 65, Lamentabili) — a “broad and liberal Protestantism” where the Crucifixus is replaced by a vague “Emmanuel” found in “creation” (De Souza’s phrase), accessible to all religions.
The reference to Nolan’s Odyssey — “The power of the sacrifice is in the cost of the person making it” — is twisted to prefigure the Sacrifice of the Mass as mere human self-gift. But the Mass is the Unbloody Sacrifice of Calvary, opus Dei, not opus hominis. The conciliar “table of assembly” simulates this sacrifice while denying its propitiatory nature (Council of Trent, Sess. XXII, Can. 1-3). De Souza’s “narrator” becomes a false prophet for the neo-church’s anthropocentric liturgy.
Nolan’s Odyssey as Straw Man: Distracting from the Conciliar Apostasy
The entire comparison with Homer/Nolan is a diversionary tactic. By contrasting the Christian God with pagan caricatures (Poseidon, capricious Zeus), De Souza and Leo XIV avoid the real alternative: the Catholic God of the Council of Trent, the Syllabus, and Quas Primas — the God who commands, judges, and damns. The “ancient gods” are a safe straw man; the living Tradition of the Church is the threat the conciliar sect must neutralize. The article’s silence on the Mass, the Sacraments, the Papacy, the Episcopate, the Four Last Things, the Social Reign of Christ the King — the very pillars of the integral faith — is the loudest condemnation. As Pius XI warned: “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” (Quas Primas, citing Ubi Arcano). The shaking we see is the fruit of the “mercy” preached at Rimini.
Conclusion: The Abomination of Desolation Speaking “Peace, Peace”
The commentary in the National Catholic Register is not a defense of the Faith; it is the hagiography of the Antichrist’s vicar. It takes the sublime poetry of Dante — which presupposes the entire Catholic cosmology of sin, grace, hierarchy, and authority — and presses it into the service of a humanitarian NGO headed by a manifest heretic who has automatically severed himself from the Church (Canon 188.4, 1917 Code; Bellarmine; Paul IV). The “Love that moves the sun and stars” is Deus Caritas Est (1 John 4:8), but this God is also a consuming fire (Heb 12:29). To preach the former while denying the latter is the mark of the False Prophet (Apoc 13:11). True Catholics, adhering to the Sedes Vacans reality, recognize in Leo XIV’s Rimini address not the voice of the Good Shepherd, but the whisper of the hireling who flees when the wolf comes, leaving the sheep to be scattered — a scattering engineered by the very “mercy” that refuses to call the wolf an enemy.
Source:
Beyond ‘The Odyssey’: The Love That Moves the Sun and Stars (ncregister.com)
Date: 26.08.2026