The EWTN portal (January 3, 2026) recounts the work of the Kevin Bell Repatriation Trust (KBRT), founded by Colin and Eithne Bell after their son’s 2013 death in New York. This organization repatriates Irish citizens who die abroad, handling logistical and financial burdens for grieving families. While ostensibly framed as a “work of mercy,” the article exemplifies the conciliar sect’s destruction of Catholic eschatology through naturalized piety.
Corporal Works Stripped of Supernal Finality
The article reduces burying the dead—a corporale opus misericordiae (corporal work of mercy)—to mere humanitarian logistics. Colin Bell describes repatriation as giving families “a way to see their loved one,” framing closure in purely psychological terms: “a sense of peace that came with knowing that he was home.” Nowhere does the text mention suffrages for the dead, the necessity of sacramental rites, or the soul’s judgment before God—omissions revealing the neo-church’s abandonment of novissimi (last things).
Pius XI’s encyclical Quas Primas condemns such naturalism: “When God and Jesus Christ are removed from laws and states… the entire human society had to be shaken, because it lacked a stable and strong foundation.” The KBRT’s exclusive focus on physical repatriation tacitly endorses the modernist heresy that death terminates man’s cosmic significance—a betrayal of the Church’s teaching that “it is a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead, that they may be loosed from sins” (2 Maccabees 12:46).
Sacramental Absence as Dogmatic Rebellion
Nowhere does EWTN’s coverage question whether repatriated bodies receive Traditional Catholic burial rites or whether souls received extrema unctio (last rites) before death. This silence perpetuates Vatican II’s sacrilegious indifference to the ex opere operato efficacy of sacraments. The 1917 Code of Canon Law mandated that priests ensure proper sacramental preparation for the dying (Canon 468), yet KBRT operates as if sacraments were optional accessories rather than the sine qua non of salvation.
The article’s sole reference to faith—”one of the corporal works of mercy is to bury the dead”—distorts Catholic doctrine by severing bodily care from spiritual necessities. St. Augustine’s De cura pro mortuis gerenda clarifies: “The care bestowed upon the burial of the body… is not a help to salvation, but a duty of humanity.” By ignoring this distinction, KBRT reduces the Church’s sacramental economy to a necromantic sentimentalism where physical proximity to corpses supplants concern for immortal souls.
Symptomatic of Conciliar Apostasy
EWTN’s uncritical praise for KBRT exposes its complicity in the neo-church’s anthropocentric revolution. The article celebrates how Irish embassies collaborate with KBRT—a violation of Syllabus Errorum Proposition 55, which condemned the idea that “the Church ought to be separated from the State.” Furthermore, describing repatriation as “therapeutic” for the Bells echoes the modernist heresy that religion exists to satisfy emotional needs rather than glorify God.
Pius IX’s Quanta Cura anathematized those who claim “the best condition of civil society demands that human society be conducted without any reference to religion.” KBRT’s omission of Catholic burial requirements—such as consecrated ground, prayers for the dead, and exclusion of public sinners—enables secular authorities to dictate funeral practices, reducing the Church to a travel agency for cadavers.
The miracle-less bird logo compounds this apostasy, replacing the crux mihi certa salus (cross my certain salvation) with naturalistic symbols. As the 1907 decree Lamentabili condemned the proposition that “faith ultimately rests on probabilities” (Proposition 25), so KBRT’s feel-good narrative substitutes theological certainty with emotional pragmatism.
“Kevin was a big character who loved life and always said that he would be famous. So in a way his name is out there and it’s well known throughout the world. I’m sure he’d be very pleased with that fact.”
This eulogizing of the deceased as self-actualized celebrities—rather than sinners needing prayers—epitomizes the conciliar cult of man. Traditional Catholicism demands de mortuis nil nisi orate (about the dead, say nothing but pray), not secular canonizations via charitable branding.
Source:
A homecoming of mercy: The charity that returns Ireland’s dead (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 03.01.2026