The EWTN News portal (September 1, 2026) publishes an obituary by Daniel Payne commemorating Wendell Berry, a Baptist-born agrarian essayist who styled himself a “forest Christian” and explicitly rejected organized religion, yet is extolled as a “national American sage” and a beacon for “Catholics” by the conciliar sect’s media apparatus. The article highlights Berry’s partnership with the now-defunct “St. Catharine College,” his reception of the National Humanities Medal from Barack Obama, and his vague proclamation that the world is “redeemed only by love” — a sentimentalized distortion of John 3:16 severed from the Mystery of the Cross, the necessity of the Church, and the Social Kingship of Christ the King. This panegyric exposes the conciliar sect’s definitive apostasy: the substitution of the supernatural order of grace for a naturalistic, Pelagian humanitarianism that finds “redemption” in soil stewardship and neighborliness rather than in the Precious Blood of the Lamb.
The “Forest Christian”: A Gnostic Flight from the Visible Church
The article admits Berry remained “distant from organized religion,” preferring the self-fashioned label “forest Christian.” This terminology is not poetic; it is heretical. It signifies a Gnostic rejection of the Una, Sancta, Catholica et Apostolica Ecclesia — the sole Ark of Salvation — in favor of a private, immanentist spirituality rooted in the created order rather than the Creator. As Pope Pius IX infallibly condemned in the Syllabus of Errors (Error 16): “Man may, in the observance of any religion whatever, find the way of eternal salvation, and arrive at eternal salvation.” Berry’s “forest Christianity” is the practical application of this condemned indifferentism: a religion of the woods, where the “neighborliness” of men replaces the Caritas infused by the Holy Ghost through the Sacraments.
The conciliar sect’s writer, Anna Keating, writing in the modernist rag America Magazine, is cited approvingly claiming Berry’s philosophy serves as an “antidote to the many ills of our time.” This is the voice of the ecclesia novae adventus: it looks to an unbaptized agrarian for the remedy of the world’s ills, ignoring the only remedy — the restoration of all things in Christ (Instaurare omnia in Christo). The article notes Berry “took literally the statement in the Gospel of John that God loves the world,” yet strips that love of its soteriological content: the Incarnation, the Passion, the Resurrection, and the founding of the hierarchical Church. As St. Pius X condemned in Lamentabili Sane Exitu (Prop. 22): “The dogmas which the Church proposes as revealed are not truths of divine origin but are a certain interpretation of religious facts, which the human mind has worked out with great effort.” Berry’s “love” is precisely this: a human construct, a “religious fact” divorced from divine Revelation.
Pelagian Agrarianism: “Redeemed Only by Love” Without the Cross
Berry’s central dictum — “the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love” — is a masterpiece of Pelagian deception. It echoes the Modernist error condemned by St. Pius X: “Faith, as assent of the mind, is ultimately based on a sum of probabilities” (Lamentabili, Prop. 25) and “The dogmas of faith should be understood according to their practical function, i.e., as binding in action, rather than as principles of belief” (Prop. 26). For Berry, “love” is a generic humanitarian sentiment, a force immanent in the cosmos, requiring no Mediator, no Sacrifice, no Baptism, no Eucharist.
This is the heresy of immanentism. The world is not “redeemed by love” in the abstract; it is redeemed by the Sanguis Christi, applied through the Sacrosanctum Mysterium of the Altar. Pope Pius XI, in Quas Primas, teaches with unshakeable authority: “Christ not only is to be adored as God by angels and men, but that angels and men are to be obedient and subject to His dominion as Man… His kingdom encompasses all men… not only to Catholic nations… but His reign encompasses also all non-Christians.” Berry’s “localism” and “community mutual help” are a direct rebellion against the Social Kingship of Christ. He proposes a “renewal of rural communities” accomplished “from the inside by the ancient rule of neighborliness,” explicitly rejecting outside instruction — a rejection of the Magisterium and the Missio of the Church. This is the civitas terrena built on viribus naturalibus alone, the City of Man masquerading as the Kingdom of God.
The Conciliar Sect’s “Canonization” of the Secular
The EWTN obituary functions as a de facto canonization rite for the conciliar sect. It notes Berry’s “National Humanities Medal” from the aggressively pro-abortion Barack Obama as a mark of honor. It celebrates his lawsuit against the University of Kentucky to preserve a “racially offensive mural” — a defense of historical memory utterly detached from the Salus Animarum. It praises his opposition to coal companies and the death penalty, framing these as the sum of Christian virtue. This is the social gospel of the novus ordo: a Christianity reduced to environmental stewardship, anti-corporate activism, and vague pacifism.
The “Berry Farming Program” at “St. Catharine College” (a conciliar institution closed in 2016, a sign of God’s judgment on its sterility) symbolizes the total inversion of Catholic education. Instead of forming priests and saints for the Unbloody Sacrifice of Calvary, the conciliar structure offered a curriculum in agrarianism. As Pius XI warned in Quas Primas: “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.” Berry’s philosophy is the philosophia perennis of the Masonic “City of Man”: Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité translated into compost and community gardens.
Symptomatic Level: The Fruit of the Conciliar Revolution
This article is not an anomaly; it is the modus operandi of the structures occupying the Vatican since 1958. The Second Vatican Council’s Gaudium et Spes inaugurated the “dialogue with the world” which is, in reality, the capitulation to the world. By praising a man who explicitly rejects the visibilitas Ecclesiae, the Sacraments, and the Regnum Christi, EWTN — the propaganda arm of the antipope Leo XIV (Robert Prevost) — confirms that the conciliar sect has no supernatural mission left. It has become an NGO for “integral ecology” and “human flourishing” defined in purely naturalistic terms.
The silence of the obituary is its loudest condemnation. There is no mention of sin, grace, the Mass, the Papacy, the Last Judgment, Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory. There is only the “human economy,” “precious things,” and the “wish to be at home.” This is the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place: the worship of the creature rather than the Creator (Rom 1:25). The “Catholics” attracted to Berry (per Keating) are those formed by the novus ordo — deprived of the Traditio, the Lex Orandi, and the Lex Credendi — who mistake natural virtue for supernatural sanctity.
Conclusion: Return to the King, Not the Soil
Wendell Berry’s death marks the passing of a talented writer who, like the Rich Young Man, went away sorrowful because he would not sell all and follow Christ in His Church. The EWTN obituary is a testament to the spiritual bankruptcy of the conciliar sect: it mourns a man who built a “kingdom” of dirt and sentiment, while the true Regnum Christi — “a kingdom of truth and life, a kingdom of holiness and grace, a kingdom of justice, love and peace” (Preface of Christ the King) — is denied, obscured, and attacked by the very structures claiming to represent it.
True Catholics, adhering to the Sedes Vacans reality and the immutable Tradition, reject this naturalistic idolatry. We know, with Pope Pius XI, that “there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12; Quas Primas). The world is not redeemed by “neighborliness” or “love of precious things.” It is redeemed by the Precious Blood offered on the Altar by valid priests in communion with the true Successor of Peter, awaiting the Parousia of the Rex Regum. Non est in alio aliquo salus.
Source:
Wendell Berry, agrarian writer who envisioned a world ‘redeemed only by love,’ dies at 92 (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 01.09.2026