The EWTN portal reports that the usurper Robert Prevost, styling himself “Pope Leo XIV,” addressed participants of a “Holiness in History” conference organized by the “Dicastery for the Causes of Saints” on October 21, 2026, his first appearance since surgery. He declared that history without saints is “less human,” invoked Pius XI’s 1930 establishment of a historical section, demanded “rigor” for “recent causes,” and asserted that the “profile of saints may undergo development” to interpret the Gospel for “today’s challenges.” This address manifests the Modernist corruption of the very concept of sanctity, reducing the supernatural and immutable crown of glory to a malleable sociological construct subject to historical-critical evolution.
The Usurpation of Papal Authority and the Nullity of the “Dicastery”
The article presents the figure of Robert Prevost (“Leo XIV”) exercising the munus docendi and munus regendi as if he possessed legitimate jurisdiction. From the perspective of integral Catholic theology, this is a fundamental impossibility. 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.” The line of claimants to the Holy See since John XXIII has publicly professed the heresies of the Second Vatican Council—religious liberty, ecumenism, collegiality, and the new ecclesiology—constituting manifest, public defection from the Catholic Faith. By Canon 188 §4 of the 1917 Code, which binds by divine and natural law, “Every office becomes vacant by the mere fact and without any declaration… if the cleric publicly defects from the Catholic faith.” Pope Paul IV’s Bull Cum ex Apostolatus Officio confirms that the promotion of a heretic “shall be null, void, and of no effect,” requiring no declaratory sentence.
Consequently, the “Dicastery for the Causes of Saints” is a bureaucratic organ of the conciliar sect, devoid of canonical mission and judicial power. It cannot bind the faithful, nor can it authenticate sanctity. Its “historical section,” established by Pius XI in 1930—a true Pope exercising true authority—has been subverted into a tool for the fabrication of “saints” who serve the narrative of the neo-church. The reference to Pius XI by the antipope is a classic Modernist tactic: abusus non tollit usum (abuse does not remove use), weaponizing a legitimate past act to legitimize a current nullity.
The Modernist “Historical-Critical” Method Applied to Holiness: Evolution of Dogma
The most theologically lethal statement in the address is the explicit admission of doctrinal evolution regarding the saints:
“As the ages pass, even the profile of saints may undergo development: not to follow the stereotypes of the moment, but to interpret a particular experience through the categories of the Gospel lived out.”
This is a textbook application of the Modernist heresy condemned by St. Pius X in Lamentabili Sane Exitu (1907) and Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907). Proposition 58 of Lamentabili condemns the error: “Truth changes with man, because it develops with him, in him, and through him.” Proposition 54 condemns: “Dogmas, sacraments, and hierarchy… are merely modes of explanation and stages in the evolution of Christian consciousness.” The antipope applies this evolutionary principle to the sanctoral cycle itself. The “profile of a saint”—which is the manifestation of heroic virtue and conformity to Christ, immutable once the Church has infallibly declared it—is here subjected to “development” and “reinterpretation” through the “categories of the Gospel lived out” today. This severs the saint from the depositum fidei and makes him a wax nose for the “signs of the times.”
The demand for “rigorous examination of all the material collected” for “recent causes” using “tools proper to the study of history” reveals the naturalistic reduction of the supernatural. The Church’s judgment on sanctity is not a historical investigation but a judicium ecclesiasticum rooted in the charism of infallibility (charisma veritatis certum) protecting the definition of a saint’s heroic virtue and miracles. To subject “causes” to the flux of modern historiography—itself often infected by rationalism (Syllabus, Props. 3, 4, 13)—is to deny that the Church teaches by divine authority, not human scholarship. As Pius XI taught in Quas Primas, the Church’s liturgy and calendar are the lex orandi, lex credendi (the law of prayer is the law of belief); to make the calendar subject to historical revisionism is to make the Faith subject to it.
The Anthropocentric Perversion: “People of God” vs. The Reign of Christ the King
The antipope states:
“The people of God seek models for living in the present, intercessors who help members of the Church face today’s challenges and recognize their opportunities.”
Here the cult of man replaces the cult of God. The purpose of canonization is not to provide “models for living in the present” or “intercessors for today’s challenges” in a horizontal, sociological sense. The end of the saints’ veneration is the glory of the Most Holy Trinity (ad majorem Dei gloriam) and the confirmation of the dogmatic truth that grace produces heroic virtue. Pius XI, in Quas Primas, explicitly condemns the spirit of the age which “began with the denial of Christ the Lord’s reign over all nations… the Church’s authority to teach men… was denied… the Christian religion began to be equated with other false religions.” The antipope’s language—”face today’s challenges,” “recognize opportunities”—is the language of secular humanism and laicism, the very “plague” Pius XI identified. It reduces the Communio Sanctorum to a self-help group for the “People of God” (a conciliar ecclesiological category replacing the Corpus Christi), stripping the saints of their role as witnesses to the Social Reign of Christ the King over individuals, families, and states.
The Illegitimacy of “Recent Causes”: Canonizations without Authority
The phrase “recent causes” is a coded reference to the assembly-line “canonizations” of the conciliar era—John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul II, and others—men who publicly taught heresy and implemented the destruction of the liturgy and discipline. The “Dicastery” seeks to legitimize these “causes” through a veneer of “historical rigor.” But ex nulo, nullum fit effectum (from nothing, nothing comes). A “canonization” performed by a manifest heretic who has lost the papacy ipso facto (Bellarmine, Wernz & Vidal, Billot) possesses zero dogmatic value. It binds no one. It is an act of the paramasonic structure occupying the Vatican, intended to canonize the architects of the apostasy itself. The “reputation for holiness” (fama sanctitatis) required by true canon law cannot exist for those who publicly rupture the unity of the Faith. As the Syllabus of Errors (Prop. 23) condemns: “Roman pontiffs and ecumenical councils have wandered outside the limits of their powers… and have even erred in defining matters of faith and morals.” The current claimants do precisely this, and their “canonizations” are the supreme act of that error.
Symptomatic Conclusion: The Abomination of Desolation in the Vatican
This audience is a symptom of the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place (Matt. 24:15). The usurper mimics the external forms of the papacy—audiences, references to predecessors, bureaucratic dicasteries—while emptying them of supernatural substance. The “Holiness in History” conference is a parody of the Church’s hagiographical tradition, replacing the immutable light of the City of God with the flickering candle of modern historiography. The faithful must recognize that no “saint” created by this structure commands veneration, and no “pope” speaking from this throne commands obedience. The true Church, reduced to a remnant (reliquiae), preserves the unchanging calendar of the saints canonized by true Popes before 1958, awaiting the restoration of the Social Reign of Christ the King which alone can heal the “immeasurably poorer” world—a poverty caused not by a lack of “models,” but by the dethronement of Christ the King by the very men now pretending to canonize His friends.
Source:
Pope Leo XIV: The world is poorer without saints (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 21.10.2026