The VaticanNews portal reports that the Lenten Spiritual Exercises for the head of the conciliar sect, “Pope” Leo XIV, began on February 22, 2026, in the Pauline Chapel, preached by Trappist Bishop Erik Varden on the theme “Illuminated by a Hidden Glory.” The exercises, attended by cardinals and dicastery heads, will run until February 27. In his opening meditation, Varden emphasized Lent as a stripping away of superfluities, a call to “abstinence of the senses,” and a pursuit of peace through battling vices, citing St. Bernard of Clairvaux as a model of “loving and clear-headed discipleship.” This ritual, presented as spiritual nourishment, is in fact a profound manifestation of the theological and spiritual bankruptcy of the post-conciliar apostasy, reducing the sacred season of Lent to a vague, naturalistic self-improvement program utterly devoid of supernatural necessity.
The Desacralization of Lent: From Penance to Pelagian Self-Cultivation
The very theme chosen for the retreat, “Illuminated by a Hidden Glory,” reeks of the gnostic and immanentist tendencies condemned by St. Pius X in *Pascendi Dominici gregis*. It replaces the clear, objective, and supernatural goal of Lent—satisfying divine justice, making reparation for sin, and preparing for the Passion and Resurrection of Christ—with an ambiguous, subjective “glory” that is “hidden.” This is not the *gloria* of God revealed in Christ, but a nebulous inner light, a pure sentiment. The true Lenten call, as taught by the Church for centuries, is not to find a “hidden glory” within ourselves but to *mortify* the flesh, *deny* ourselves, and *take up our cross* (Matt. 16:24). The liturgical color of purple, the suppression of the *Gloria* and *Alleluia*, the increased fasting and abstinence—all these are external, tangible signs of an internal reality: sorrow for sin and dependence on God’s grace. Varden’s focus on “abstinence of the senses” is stripped of its ascetical and purgative purpose. In integral Catholic theology, abstinence is not an end in itself but a weapon against concupiscence, a means to subordinate the lower appetites to reason and reason to God. Here, it is framed as merely removing “things apt to distract us, even things wholesome in themselves,” reducing the spiritual combat to a matter of focus and efficiency, a kind of monastic productivity.
The Omission of the Non-Negotiable: Sin, Judgment, and the Sacramental Life
The most damning critique of this entire exercise is not what it says, but what it *silently omits*. The entire framework of Lent is built upon the pillars of **sin, divine judgment, and the necessity of sacramental grace**. The article contains not a single mention of:
* **Actual sin** and its gravity as an offense against God.
* The **Four Last Things**: Death, Judgment, Hell, and Heaven.
* The **necessity of sacramental confession** for the remission of mortal sins.
* The **Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist** and the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass as the central act of Catholic worship.
* The **obligation to repair for sin** through works of mercy, prayer, and fasting.
* The **primacy of God’s law** over all human desires and “peace.”
This silence is not accidental; it is constitutive of the modernist “hermeneutic of discontinuity.” It reflects the naturalistic religion of the conciliar sect, where the struggle is against “vices and harmful passions” for the sake of personal or social “peace,” not against mortal sin which offends God and merits eternal damnation. Pope Pius XI, in *Quas Primas*, established the feast of Christ the King precisely to combat the secularism that “denied Christ the Lord’s reign over all nations” and removed “God and Jesus Christ… from laws and states.” The modernists have internalized this secularism; their Lent is a private, psychological retreat within a world that has already apostatized. They practice a “peace” that is merely the absence of conflict, not the *pax Christi* which is the “tranquility of order” (St. Augustine) founded on submission to the divine will and the law of the Gospel.
St. Bernard: From Monastic rigor to Modernist “Clarity”
The preacher’s invocation of St. Bernard of Clairvaux is particularly odious. Varden proposes a dichotomy: “Saint Bernard, the Idealist” and “Saint Bernard, the Realist.” This is a classic modernist tactic: to historicize and relativize a saint, separating his “ideal” aspirations from his “realist” context, thereby emptying his teaching of its immutable, dogmatic force. The real St. Bernard was a **monastic firebrand**, a champion of the *via negativa*, who wrote fiercely against the worldliness and rationalism of his day. His “idealism” was a total, burning love for God; his “realism” was the harsh, uncompromising path of asceticism, monastic discipline, and contempt for the world. He taught that the first step to knowledge of God was *self-knowledge* through profound humility and the purgative way—a path of suffering and mortification. To present him as an advocate for “clear-headed discipleship” in a vague sense is to gut his doctrine. St. Bernard would have recognized the “peace” being peddled here as the false peace of the world, the peace of the Pharisee who neglects the weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and *fear of the Lord* (Isa. 11:2-3). His famous phrase, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” would be a perfect indictment of a Lenten retreat that replaces the objective means of salvation (sacraments, penance, obedience) with subjective intentions and “grace” as a vague sentiment.
The Preacher and the Usurping Hierarchy: Wolves in Monastic Clothing
Bishop Erik Varden is a bishop of the conciliar sect. His episcopal consecration, regardless of its technical validity, is null and void in the eyes of God because it was received in communion with and for the service of the apostate hierarchy that has overthrown the Catholic Faith. He preaches in the Pauline Chapel, a desecrated space where the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is profaned daily. His presence there, and the participation of the cardinals and dicastery heads, is a public act of schism and apostasy. The entire event is a theatrical performance within the “paramasonic structure” occupying the Vatican. The Syllabus of Errors of Pius IX, in its section “Errors Concerning the Church and Her Rights,” condemns the very premise of this gathering: the idea that the ecclesiastical power can operate independently of the true faith or that the Church can be a “perfect society” while her leaders propagate error. Proposition 19 states: “The Church is not a true and perfect society, entirely free… but it appertains to the civil power to define what are the rights of the Church…” The conciliar sect has inverted this: it claims the rights of the Church while denying its doctrine. This Lenten retreat is a symptom of that inversion—a “spiritual” event devoid of the Holy Ghost, because the Holy Ghost does not guide a sect that has embraced Modernism, which St. Pius X called the “synthesis of all heresies.”
A Lent Without God: The Naturalistic Religion of the Neo-Church
The language throughout the article is impeccably naturalistic. “Entering Lent” is about entering “a space stripped of superfluities.” The goal is to “be people of peace.” The struggle is against “vices and harmful passions.” There is no mention of **offending God**, no invocation of **divine justice**, no appeal to the **sacramental system** as the only means of grace. This is the religion of man, not of God. It is the religion of the “abomination of desolation” standing in the holy place (Matt. 24:15). The true Lent, as taught by the Council of Trent and the Roman Catechism, is a time of **satisfaction**, of making amends to the outraged majesty of God. It is a journey with Christ into the desert to be tempted, and with Him to the garden of Gethsemane to sweat blood in agony. It is a participation in the penitential life of the Church Militant, suffused with the hope of heaven but grounded in the stark reality of sin and the absolute necessity of God’s grace. The conciliar sect’s Lent is a self-help seminar in a gilded cage. It offers the “peace” of the world, which Christ came not to bring, but to divide (Matt. 10:34). The peace of Christ is the peace of a soul reconciled to God through the blood of the covenant in the sacrament of penance; it is the peace of a conscience clear through obedience to the Commandments; it is the peace of the Church, which is “the kingdom of Christ on earth,” as Pius XI taught, and which requires the public and social reign of Christ the King.
Conclusion: A Call to Abandon the Abomination
This Lenten retreat in the Vatican is not a Catholic event. It is a liturgical and spiritual act of the “neo-church,” a sect that has exchanged the sublime, bloody, and sacrificial religion of Catholicism for a bland, psychological, and humanistic substitute. The faithful are not being led to Calvary; they are being led into a meditation room. The call is not to repentance and faith, but to “clarity” and “discipleship” defined by the modernists themselves. The true Catholic, who holds the faith integral and immutable as taught before the death of Pope Pius XII in 1958, must have absolutely no part in this. He must flee the conciliar structures as one would flee a plague. His Lent must be spent in the true Church, wherever she endures—in chapels where the traditional Mass is offered by validly ordained priests in communion with the bishops who have not defected. There, and only there, will he find the “hidden glory” that the world cannot give: the glory of the Cross, the glory of the Resurrection, and the glory of being a member of the one, holy, Catholic, and *Apostolic* Church, which the conciliar sect has shamelessly abandoned.
Source:
Lenten Retreat Preacher opens Spiritual Exercises in the Vatican (vaticannews.va)
Date: 22.02.2026