The EWTN portal reports on the latest literary offering from “Cardinal” Fernando Filoni, “Grand Master” of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre, a book titled My Days Are in Your Hands: Men and Women in the Footsteps of Jesus. The work purportedly examines the divine-human relationships of biblical figures and “saints” spanning four millennia, culminating in the post-conciliar “canonized” figures of Mother Teresa and Edith Stein. Filoni insists these figures “are not extraordinary” but “became extraordinary” through human cooperation with grace, framing sanctity as a psychological journey of trauma, anxiety, and self-surrender accessible to the modern therapeutic sensibility. This anthropocentric reduction of the sanctitas to a narrative of personal resilience and “courage of God” epitomizes the conciliar church’s abandonment of the supernatural order for a naturalistic, immanentist spirituality.
The Naturalistic Dismantling of the Supernatural Order
The cited article reveals a fundamental inversion of Catholic theology: the ordo gratiae is subordinated to the ordo naturae. Filoni’s assertion that the saints “were normal people, as all the others in the world, as we are normal people” and that “what is important… they were touched by the grace of God, and they answered to this grace” echoes the semi-Pelagian error condemned by the Council of Orange (529) and reiterated by the Council of Trent: Si quis dixerit, hominem sine gratia Dei per libera sua arbitria posse credere, credere, sperare, diligere… anathema sit (If anyone says that man without the grace of God can by his own free will believe, hope, love… let him be anathema). The language of “answering grace” as a human achievement replaces the Thomistic gratia praeveniens and gratia cooperans where Deus operatur in nobis sine nobis ut velimus, et cum nobis cum velimus ut operemur (God works in us without us that we may will, and with us when we will that we may work). The book’s focus on “trauma,” “anxiety,” “addiction,” “abandonment” — the lexicon of modern psychotherapy — displaces the language of peccatum, poenitentia, gratia sanctificans, virtus heroica. This is the hermeneutic of continuity with Modernism condemned by St. Pius X in Lamentabili sane exitu (prop. 58: “Truth changes with man… Christ did not proclaim any specific, all-encompassing doctrine suitable for all times and peoples”) and Pascendi Dominici gregis: the transposition of the supernatural into the psychological, the dogmatic into the existential.
The Litany of Post-Conciliar “Saints”: Canonizations by Usurpers
The article explicitly names Mother Teresa and Edith Stein as “contemporary saints.” From the perspective of integral Catholic faith, these “canonizations” are null and void, performed by manifest heretics who have ipso facto lost the papacy. 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 “canonizations” of John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and the current usurper Leo XIV (Robert Prevost) possess no juridical or infallible authority. Mother Teresa’s “canonization” by the antipope Francis Bergoglio is particularly egregious: her public adherence to religious indifferentism (“I love all religions… if people become better Hindus, better Muslims, better Buddhists by our acts of love, then something else is growing there”), her acceptance of the Novus Ordo Missae, and her collaboration with the Masonic-influenced “Order of the Smile” render her a symbol of the conciliar church’s apostasy, not Catholic sanctity. Edith Stein, while a convert, was “canonized” by the same apostate lineage and is upheld as a patron of the false ecumenism condemned by Pius XI in Mortalium Animos (1928) and Pius IX in the Syllabus (prop. 16, 17, 18). To present these figures as models of Catholic sanctity without qualification is to participate in the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place.
EWTN: The Propaganda Arm of the Conciliar Sect
The source itself — EWTN, the “Eternal Word Television Network” — is a flagship institution of the neo-church. Founded by the “Mother” Angelica (Rita Rizzo), a Poor Clare nun who embraced the Novus Ordo and the post-conciliar hierarchy, EWTN has consistently promoted the “hermeneutic of continuity,” the “new evangelization,” and the legitimacy of the antipopes from John XXIII onward. The interview by Erik Rosales and “Fr.” Mitch Pacwa (a Jesuit of the conciliar obedience) serves not to transmit the faith but to market a product of the conciliar establishment. The article’s closing “newsletter” solicitation (“Daily/Weekly… I agree to receive communications from EWTN”) underscores the commercial, bureaucratic nature of this enterprise: negotiatores templi (merchants of the temple). The “related articles” sidebar — “Cardinal Filoni: Leo XIV’s papal name points to…”, “Cardinal Filoni warns that Christians in the Holy Land…” — reveals the incestuous closed loop of conciliar media, endlessly recycling the pronouncements of usurpers and their “cardinals” to manufacture an illusion of magisterial continuity.
Filoni: A “Cardinal” of the Paramasonic Structure
Fernando Filoni, as “Grand Master of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre,” holds an office within the paramasonic structure occupying the Vatican. His career — Nuncio to Iraq, Prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples under Benedict XVI and Francis — places him at the center of the post-conciliar revolution. The Order of the Holy Sepulchre itself, restructured by Pius XII and Paul VI, has become a vehicle for dialogue with schismatics and Muslims, a “bridge-building” exercise that betrays the social reign of Christ the King proclaimed by Pius XI in Quas Primas: “His reign encompasses not only Catholic nations… but also all non-Christians… Let rulers of states therefore not refuse public veneration and obedience to the reigning Christ.” Filoni’s book, by presenting the Old Testament figures (Abraham, Moses, Ezekiel) and New Testament figures (John the Baptist, Peter, Paul) alongside post-conciliar “saints” on a flat, egalitarian plane of “human struggle and divine encounter,” implicitly denies the discontinuity of the New Covenant and the unique mediation of the Catholic Church (extra Ecclesiam nulla salus). It is the theologia perennis of the Modernists: all religions are paths to the same divine “touch.”
The Silence of the Cross: Omission as Accusation
What the article — and by extension the book — omits is damning. There is no mention of:
- The Sacrifice of the Mass as the source and summit of sanctity;
- The Sacraments (Baptism, Confirmation, Penance, Extreme Unction) as instrumental causes of grace;
- The Mediatorship of the Blessed Virgin Mary (true, not the Fatima fabrication);
- The Four Last Things (Death, Judgment, Heaven, Hell);
- The Social Kingship of Christ over nations and laws (Quas Primas);
- The necessity of the visible, hierarchical Church for salvation;
- The anathemas of Trent and Vatican I against heretics and Modernists.
This silence is the argumentum e silentio par excellence: a spirituality stripped of the Crux, the Altare, the Sacerdos, the Ecclesia. It is the “broad and liberal Protestantism” (Lamentabili, prop. 65) into which Modernism transforms Catholicism. The “courage of God” Filoni speaks of is not the fortitudo of the martyrs who non acceptaverunt redemptionem (Heb 11:35) but a vague, therapeutic resilience suitable for the “spiritual but not religious” demographic.
The Symptomatic Diagnosis: Conciliarism as Systemic Apostasy
This book launch is not an isolated error but a symptom of the conciliar church’s essence. The Second Vatican Council’s Gaudium et Spes (n. 22) — “Christ… fully reveals man to himself” — inaugurated this anthropological turn. Filoni’s work is the ripe fruit of that poisoned tree: a “theological anthropology” that replaces theocentrism with anthropocentrism, gratuitous grace with human potentiality, the Church Militant with a “community of seekers.” The Syllabus of Pius IX condemns the root errors: “Human reason, without any reference whatsoever to God, is the sole arbiter of truth and falsehood” (prop. 3); “The Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church” (prop. 55); “The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization” (prop. 80). Filoni’s book, promoted by EWTN, is a manifesto of this reconciliation with the world. It offers a “sanctity” that costs nothing, demands no conversio morum, no odium sui, no carrying of the Cross after Christ (Mt 16:24) — only “trust,” “surrender,” and “courage.”
Conclusion: Return to the Immutable Tradition
The faithful Catholic, adhering to the quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus of St. Vincent of Lérins, must reject this literature as venenum in melle (poison in honey). True hagiography — the Acta Sanctorum of the Bollandists, the Legenda Aurea of Jacobus de Voragine, the writings of St. Alphonsus Liguori, Dom Guéranger’s Liturgical Year — presents the saints as athletae Christi who certaverunt usque ad sanguinem (Heb 12:4), whose lives manifest the heroic virtue that flows from gratia sanctificans and the Gifts of the Holy Ghost, not from psychological coping mechanisms. The “Cardinal” Filoni, the EWTN platform, and the antipopes they serve are lupi rapaces in vestibus ovium (Mt 7:15). Non est aliud nomen sub caelo datum hominibus, in quo oporteat nos salvari (Acts 4:12) — neither Filoni, nor EWTN, nor the “Order of the Holy Sepulchre,” nor the “saints” of the conciliar calendar, but only Jesus Christ, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, reigning in His One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, which subsists in the remnant that keeps the Faith entire, the Mass of Trent, and the rejection of all Modernist novelty. Viva Cristo Rey!
Source:
Cardinal Filoni delves into God’s relationships with biblical figures, saints in new book (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 22.10.2026