The EWTN News portal reports on the second annual “Catholic Faith Investor Summit” held at the New York Athletic Club on September 16–17, 2026, where over one hundred financial professionals and clergy from various false religions gathered to discuss aligning investment portfolios with a caricature of Catholic social teaching. The summit, organized by Wall Street veteran Roger Aguinaldo — a former member of the USCCB’s National Advisory Council — centered on Mensuram Bonam, a 2022 document of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, and cited the latest encyclical of antipope Leo XIV (Robert Prevost), Magnifica Humanitas. Speakers included “fr.” Séamus Finn, a drafter of Mensuram Bonam, and Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility. The event promoted a three-part process of “exclusion, engagement, and impact,” the launch of a “Catholic USD” stablecoin, and the baptism of artificial intelligence and blockchain as tools for the “empowerment of the poor.” This gathering is not a manifestation of the Church’s social doctrine but a sordid capitulation to global finance, cloaked in the language of the neo-church, which serves Mammon while mouthing the name of Christ.
The Neo-Church’s Capitulation to Global Finance
The very venue — the New York Athletic Club, a citadel of the moneyed elite — and the roster of speakers reveal the true nature of this enterprise. Roger Aguinaldo, a “Wall Street veteran,” admits that “most Catholic institutions inherited their investment processes from the broader market,” yet his solution is not to flee the world’s financial system but to “align institutional dollars with the Catholic faith and create real social impact” within that very system. This is the quintessential modernist error: the belief that the Kingdom of God can be built by the instruments of the Kingdom of Satan. As Pius XI teaches 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… the entire human society had to be shaken, because it lacked a stable and strong foundation.” The summit’s premise — that one can serve God and Mammon by tweaking portfolio allocation — is a direct contradiction of Our Lord’s words: “No man can serve two masters… You cannot serve God and mammon” (Matt. 6:24).
The language of the summit is entirely bureaucratic and naturalistic: “fiduciary responsibility,” “benchmark,” “model portfolio,” “returns,” “scale,” “capitalism.” Carolyn LaRocco’s admission — “we love capitalism; we want to make a lot of money” — lays bare the idol worshipped here. The “faith” invoked is not the supernatural virtue infused at baptism but a vague “values-based” sentimentality. Pierre LeCocq of UNIAPAC (the International Christian Union of Business Executives, a modernist NGO) tells attendees: “You’re not here to check a box … you’re here to love.” This sentimental reduction of charity to “impact investing” eviscerates the theological virtue of charity, which has God as its object and the salvation of souls as its end. The Syllabus of Pius IX condemns the proposition that “The civil government… has a right to an indirect negative power over religious affairs” (Error 41) and that “The Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church” (Error 55). This summit operationalizes that separation: the “faith” is a private hobby brought to the public square only to sanitize the pursuit of profit.
‘Mensuram Bonam’: A Modernist Manifesto, Not Catholic Doctrine
The document Mensuram Bonam (“A Good Measure”) is explicitly described as “not a binding magisterial text” but a product of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences — a conciliar body founded by Paul VI in 1967, staffed by economists and sociologists, many of whom are not even Catholic. Its “faith-based guidelines” are drawn from a “Catholic social teaching” that has been corrupted by the personalist, evolutionist, and naturalist errors of the Second Vatican Council and its aftermath. The document’s very title echoes the Pharisaic mentality: measuring out “good measures” of worldly justice while neglecting “judgment and the love of God” (Luke 11:42).
The summit speakers treat Mensuram Bonam as a new rule of faith for finance. Aguinaldo declares: “Your consultant’s model portfolio doesn’t know what Mensuram Bonam is. Your benchmark doesn’t scream for human dignity.” This is the language of the novatores condemned by St. Pius X in Lamentabili Sane Exitu and Pascendi Dominici Gregis. Proposition 58 of Lamentabili condemns the error that “Truth changes with man, because it develops with him, in him, and through him.” Proposition 59: “Christ did not proclaim any specific, all-encompassing doctrine suitable for all times and peoples, but rather initiated a certain religious movement, applied or applicable to different times and places.” Mensuram Bonam is precisely such a “movement” — a pragmatic adaptation of the Faith to the zeitgeist of global finance, ESG, and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
The three-part process — “exclusion, engagement, impact” — is lifted directly from the playbook of secular “responsible investing.” “Exclusion” means negative screening (abortion, pornography, gambling); “engagement” means shareholder activism (filing SEC proposals); “impact” means selling the stock if engagement fails. This is not Catholic moral theology but Protestant-inflected corporate governance. Catholic morality judges acts by their object, intention, and circumstances in light of the eternal law and the natural law, not by “proxy voting” and “shareholder resolutions.” The idea that one can “engage” with a company producing abortifacients to “bring practices into line with Catholic principles” while remaining a shareholder is formal cooperation in evil. As the Syllabus condemns: “Moral laws do not stand in need of the divine sanction, and it is not at all necessary that human laws should be made conformable to the laws of nature and receive their power of binding from God” (Error 56). The summit inverts this: divine sanction is replaced by SEC rules.
The Antipope’s ‘Encyclical’: Magnifica Humanitas and the Cult of Man
The article notes that Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster and her interfaith group “welcomed Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, which focuses on human dignity as economies are reshaped by rapidly advancing technologies like artificial intelligence.” This single sentence condemns the entire enterprise. First, Robert Prevost (“Leo XIV”) is a manifest heretic and usurper of the See of Peter. As St. Robert Bellarmine teaches (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.” Canon 188.4 of the 1917 Code declares that an office becomes vacant ipso facto by “public defection from the Catholic faith.” The line of usurpers beginning with John XXIII has publicly defected by promoting religious liberty, false ecumenism, and the new mass. Any document issued by Prevost has zero authority; it is the private writing of a layman.
Second, the title Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”) reveals the anthropocentric heart of the conciliar religion. This is the cult of man condemned by Pius XI in Quas Primas: “The state is happy not by one means, and man by another; for the state is nothing else than a harmonious association of men… Let rulers of states therefore not refuse public veneration and obedience to the reigning Christ.” The antipope’s encyclical, praised by a Rabbi, focuses on “human dignity” abstracted from the Kingship of Christ. This is the laicism Pius XI identifies as the plague of the age: “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. And then, slowly, the Christian religion began to be equated with other false religions and shamelessly placed in the same category.” The presence of a Rabbi at a “Catholic” summit, celebrating an antipope’s encyclical, is the realization of the Syllabus’s condemned proposition: “Protestantism is nothing more than another form of the same true Christian religion, in which form it is given to please God equally as in the Catholic Church” (Error 18), extended now to Judaism and all religions.
False Ecumenism: Rabbis and ‘Interfaith’ Capitalism
The participation of Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster, executive vice president of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR), is not an accident but the logical fruit of the conciliar sect’s false ecumenism. The ICCR is a coalition of “faith-based” investors (Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, secular) that uses shareholder activism to advance a leftist political agenda: climate change, LGBT “rights,” “racial justice,” etc. The summit’s embrace of this group demonstrates that the “Catholic” identity of the event is purely marketing. The “faith” in “Catholic Faith Investor Summit” is the fides humana of the modernists — a vague religious sentiment common to all religions — not the fides catholica which is “one Lord, one faith, one baptism” (Eph. 4:5).
Pius IX in the Syllabus condemns: “Every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true” (Error 15) and “Man may, in the observance of any religion whatever, find the way of eternal salvation” (Error 16). The summit operationalizes these errors. The “unified mission” praised by James Good — “a remarkably diverse group of financial professionals converge with a unified mission” — is the unity of the Tower of Babel, not the unity of the Church. The true Church knows no collaboration with false religions in the temporal order that compromises the Social Kingship of Christ. As Leo XIII taught in Immortale Dei (cited in Quas Primas), “His reign encompasses also all non-Christians, so that most truly the entire human race is subject to the authority of Jesus Christ.” The summit inverts this: Christ is subjected to the “interfaith” consensus of the financial markets.
Blockchain and ‘Catholic USD’: The Neo-Church’s Digital Idol
Perhaps the most grotesque manifestation of the summit’s apostasy is the presentation by Eddie Cullen of a “digital assets firm that has issued a stablecoin called Catholic USD.” Cullen declares: “AI automation of finance ‘is coming like a freight train’ and Catholic financial professionals should be prepared… The question… was not whether the rails get built but who writes the rules.” This is the language of the Antichrist’s forerunner: the total digitization and control of economic life. The Apocalypse warns: “And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the character, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name” (Apoc. 13:17). A “Catholic USD” stablecoin — a digital token pegged to the US dollar, issued on a blockchain — is not a tool for “empowering the poor” but a participation in the construction of the beast’s financial infrastructure.
The claim that blockchain “will empower the poor who have been shut out of ordinary banking” is the same lie told by every financial innovation that has further enslaved the poor in debt and surveillance. The Church’s true doctrine on money, from the condemnation of usury (V Council of Lateran, De Usuris) to the social encyclicals of Leo XIII (Rerum Novarum) and Pius XI (Quadragesimo Anno), teaches that money must serve the common good under the moral law, not become a tool of speculation and control. The summit’s enthusiasm for “new financial infrastructure,” “digital assets,” and “AI automation” is the enthusiasm of the world for its own destruction. St. Pius X in Pascendi warns that modernists “aim at such a development of dogmas as appears to be their corruption.” Here, the “development” is the corruption of the Church’s social doctrine into a fintech startup pitch.
The Silence on Christ the King: Quas Primas Betrayed
The most damning indictment of the summit is what it omits entirely. There is no mention of the Feast of Christ the King, instituted by Pius XI in Quas Primas (1925) precisely as a remedy for the “secularism of our times, so-called laicism.” There is no mention of the Social Kingship of Christ — that “all power in heaven and on earth has been given to Him” (Matt. 28:18), that “His reign extends not only to Catholic nations… but His reign encompasses also all non-Christians”, that “rulers of states… have the duty to publicly honor Christ and obey Him.” There is no mention of the condemnation of usury, the just wage, the right to private property subordinated to the universal destination of goods, the duty of the State to protect the Church, the indissolubility of marriage, the sanctity of life from conception, the rights of the family over the market.
Instead, the summit offers “ESG screens Wall Street pushed on us… virtue signaling” replaced by “2,000 years of Church teaching to guide us” — a teaching that is never actually cited beyond the vacuous Mensuram Bonam. The “2,000 years” are reduced to a brand. The “Lordship of Christ” (mentioned in a related article title) is invoked only to baptize the profit motive. This is the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place: the things of God — His doctrine, His Kingship, His Sacrifice — used to legitimize the things of Caesar, and of Mammon.
No Serving Two Masters: The Sedevacantist Imperative
From the perspective of integral Catholic faith — the faith of the Fathers, the Councils, the pre-1958 Magisterium — this summit is a symptom of the great apostasy foretold by St. Paul (2 Thess. 2:3). The structures occupying the Vatican (the “conciliar sect,” the “Church of the New Advent,” the “paramasonic structure”) have not the Faith, and therefore have not the Church. Their “priests” (like “fr.” Finn), their “bishops,” their “cardinals” (like “cardinal” Turkson), their “popes” (like “Leo XIV”) have ipso facto lost their offices by manifest heresy (Bellarmine, De Romano Pontifice; Canon 188.4; Cum ex Apostolatus Officio). The true Church endures in the remnant of bishops and priests who preserve the Traditional Latin Mass, the unchanging doctrine, and the rejection of all conciliar errors.
The faithful Catholic cannot “align investments” with the neo-church’s documents. He must reject the conciliar sect entirely, including its financial advice. He must invest — if he invests at all — in accordance with the natural law and the pre-conciliar Magisterium: avoiding usury, avoiding cooperation with evil (abortion, contraception, pornography, war profiteering), supporting Catholic families and communities, and above all seeking first the Kingdom of God and His justice (Matt. 6:33). The “Catholic Faith Investor Summit” is a trap for souls, a synagogue of Satan (Apoc. 2:9) where the language of the Faith is prostituted to the service of the world. “Be not conformed to this world, but be reformed in the newness of your mind, that you may prove what is the good, and the acceptable, and the perfect will of God” (Rom. 12:2). The only “good measure” (mensuram bonam) is the fullness of Catholic Truth, uncompromised, unadulterated, and unsubmissive to the princes of this world.
Source:
Financial professionals focus on aligning investment with Catholic social teaching at summit (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 25.09.2026