The article from EWTN News reports that the antipope Robert Prevost (“Pope Leo XIV”) began Lenten spiritual exercises on February 22, 2026, led by Cistercian Bishop Erik Varden of Trondheim, Norway. Varden, described as having a journey “from atheism to the Christian faith” and a “well-known public profile as a writer on spirituality,” will give 11 meditations titled “Illuminated by a Hidden Glory,” reflecting on St. Bernard of Clairvaux with an “idealistic dimension and a realistic view of the Christian experience.” The retreat, held in the Pauline Chapel, aims to foster “an atmosphere of silence, discernment, and inner renewal” among Curia officials, accompanied by Eucharistic adoration and the Liturgy of the Hours. The piece notes the antipope’s predecessor, “Pope Francis,” typically chose private retreats and died in 2025. Varden’s appointment is highlighted as creating interest due to his style “characterized by dialogue with contemporary humanity.”
This report, emanating from a recognized organ of the conciliar sect, presents the activities of the apostate hierarchy as normative Catholic practice. Its underlying assumption is the legitimacy of the post-Conciliar “papacy” and its appointed bishops, a premise that must be categorically rejected. The focus on a bishop with a personal narrative of atheism and a spirituality centered on “dialogue with contemporary humanity” and “inner renewal” exemplifies the Modernist infection condemned by St. Pius X. The entire framework ignores the non-negotiable, exterior, and juridical demands of Christ’s reign over individuals and societies, as defined by the pre-1958 Magisterium. The retreat’s themes, while using traditional language (“St. Bernard,” “Eucharistic adoration”), are emptied of their traditional, penitential, and dogmatic content, repackaged into a palatable, humanistic experience for the managers of a globalized apostate structure.
The Humanistic Substitution of the Lenten Spirituality
1. Factual Deconstruction: A Usurper and a Suspicious Prelate
The article presents “Pope Leo XIV” and “Bishop Erik Varden” as legitimate Catholic authorities. From the perspective of integral Catholic faith, this is a fundamental falsehood. The line of antipopes began with Angelo Roncalli (“John XXIII”) in 1958, who promulgated the heretical Vatican II council. As demonstrated in the file on the Defense of Sedevacantism, a manifest heretic loses the papacy *ipso facto* (Canon 188.4, 1917 Code; Bellarmine, *De Romano Pontifice*). The current occupant of the Vatican, Robert Prevost, is a heretic and apostate, thus a usurper. His “Lenten spiritual exercises” are illicit gatherings of schismatics.
Furthermore, Bishop Erik Varden’s biography is a red flag. His stated journey “from atheism to the Christian faith” and his prominence as a writer on “spirituality” in the post-Conciliar world align with the Modernist profile of personal religious experience supplanting objective, received doctrine. St. Pius X’s encyclical *Pascendi Dominici gregis* (1907), summarized in *Lamentabili sane exitu*, condemned the idea that religious truth is subjectively “evolved” within the individual (Propositions 20, 25, 58). Varden’s appointment by an antipope to lead the Curia’s retreat is a clear sign of the “Church of the New Advent’s” preference for clerics whose formation is rooted in the ambiguous, experience-based religion of Modernism, not in the immutable dogmas of the pre-Conciliar Church.
2. Linguistic and Rhetorical Analysis: The Language of Naturalistic Mysticism
The article’s language is carefully neutral, reporting events as if they belong to a normal, healthy ecclesial body. Key phrases reveal the underlying naturalistic and immanentist mentality:
* “**inner renewal**”: This focuses on subjective, psychological states, detached from the traditional Lenten call to exterior penance, mortification, and the amendment of life through the Sacrament of Penance. It echoes the Modernist error condemned by Pius X: “Faith, as assent of the mind, is ultimately based on a sum of probabilities” (Proposition 25), reducing religion to a personal, evolving sentiment.
* “**dialogue with contemporary humanity**”: This is the hallmark of the post-Conciliar “new evangelization,” which seeks to empty the faith of its supernatural, exclusive, and dogmatic character to make it palatable to the secular world. It directly contradicts the Syllabus of Errors, which condemned the notion that “the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the State” (Error 77) and the idea that “civil liberty of every form of worship… conduce more easily to corrupt the morals and minds of the people” (Error 79). The Syllabus affirmed the duty of the State to publicly honor Christ the King. “Dialogue” implies equality and compromise with error, a concept utterly foreign to the pre-1958 Church, which taught that error has no rights (*Error has no rights*).
* “**Illuminated by a Hidden Glory**” and “**Communicating Hope**”: These titles are vague, poetic, and devoid of concrete, supernatural content. They lack any reference to the Passion of Christ, the necessity of contrition, the horror of mortal sin, the reality of Hell, or the absolute sovereignty of God’s law. This is the language of religious sentimentality, not of Catholic dogma. Pius XI in *Quas Primas* defined Christ’s kingdom as requiring obedience to His laws and the subordination of all human affairs to divine authority. A Lenten retreat that omits this is a counterfeit.
* The description of the retreat’s setting (“Pauline Chapel,” “Vatican”) and practices (“Eucharistic adoration,” “Liturgy of the Hours”) uses traditional trappings to provide a veneer of legitimacy for a fundamentally altered spiritual content. This is the “hermeneutics of continuity” in action: using old forms to smuggle in new, heterodox content. The Modernists, as Pius X noted, “under the guise of more serious criticism… aim at such a development of dogmas as appears to be their corruption” (*Lamentabili*, Intro).
3. Theological Confrontation: Omission of the Social Kingship of Christ
The article is silent on the core Catholic doctrine of the Social Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ, a doctrine solemnly proclaimed by Pius XI in *Quas Primas* (1925), which the article itself references in its file on Fatima but ignores here. The encyclical states unequivocally: “His reign… extends not only to Catholic nations… but His reign encompasses also all non-Christians, so that most truly the entire human race is subject to the authority of Jesus Christ.” It commands rulers to publicly honor Christ and obey Him, warning that “Christ, whom not only was cast out of the state, but also forgotten and ignored through contempt, will very severely avenge these insults.”
The retreat’s focus on “inner renewal” and “discernment” for Curia officials is a radical omission and, in fact, a denial of this doctrine. It reduces the Church’s mission to the internal, private sphere of individual conscience, precisely the error condemned by the Syllabus (Error 44: “The civil authority may interfere in matters relating to religion…”). The true Catholic state, as taught by Leo XIII in *Immortale Dei* and Pius XI in *Quas Primas*, must recognize Christ as King and order its laws accordingly. The conciliar “Church,” however, has embraced the errors of religious liberty and the separation of Church and State (cf. Dignitatis Humanae, Vatican II), making any authentic teaching on Christ’s Social Kingship impossible. The retreat thus serves to inculcate a purely privatized, pietistic faith, perfectly suited to the apostate, secularized world order.
4. Symptomatic Analysis: The Conciliar Sect’s “Spirituality” of Apostasy
This event is a perfect symptom of the systemic apostasy of the post-Conciliar structure:
* **Leadership by a Former Atheist:** The choice of a bishop whose personal story includes atheism signals a “Church” that values worldly narratives and psychological journeys over doctrinal purity and heroic virtue. In the true Church, bishops are to be “men of sound doctrine” (Titus 1:9), not former atheists whose conversion narratives may be suspect or whose theology is inevitably colored by a lack of early, integral formation.
* **Focus on “Experience” over Doctrine:** The emphasis on Varden’s “dialogue with contemporary humanity” and his books combining “theological reflection with personal experience” is pure Modernism. Pius X condemned the proposition that “the dogmas which the Church proposes as revealed are not truths of divine origin but are a certain interpretation of religious facts, which the human mind has worked out with great effort” (Proposition 22). The “experience” of the individual becomes the criterion, not the objective, extrinsic deposit of faith.
* **The Privatization of Lent:** Lent in the pre-Conciliar Church was a public, penitential season focused on the Passion of Christ, with obligatory fast and abstinence, intensified devotion to the Stations of the Cross, and the communal practice of the Stations of the Cross. It was a time of public reparation for sin and a stark reminder of the Judgment to come. The retreat’s language of “inner renewal” and “discernment” for a small clerical elite in the Vatican completely severs Lent from its public, penitential, and eschatological character. This mirrors the general post-Conciliar dissipation of liturgical and spiritual rigor.
* **Legitimization of the Usurper:** The very act of the antipope participating in and promoting this retreat is a primary act of his ministry. It reinforces the illusion of a legitimate “papacy” and a legitimate “episcopacy.” For Catholics faithful to Tradition, participation in or recognition of these rites is a grave scandal and a formal cooperation with the abomination of desolation (Matthew 24:15). The retreat is a ritual of cohesion for the conciliar sect’s administrative elite, designed to make them more efficient servants of the globalist, naturalistic agenda.
5. The Grave Omission: Silence on the State of Grace and the Final End
The most damning critique is what the article and the retreat it describes completely omit: the supernatural framework of the Lenten season. There is **no mention** of:
* The **state of grace** versus the state of mortal sin.
* The **necessity of the Sacrament of Penance** for the remission of sins committed after Baptism.
* The **reality of Hell** and the eternal punishment due to unrepented mortal sin.
* The **Four Last Things**: Death, Judgment, Heaven, Hell.
* The **propitiatory nature of the Lenten fast and mortification** as a means of making satisfaction for sin and co-redemption with Christ.
* The **absolute primacy of the worship of God** over all human activities, as demanded by the First Commandment.
This silence is not accidental; it is constitutive of the Modernist, naturalistic religion. As the Syllabus of Errors condemned (Error 56): “Moral laws do not stand in need of the divine sanction…” The conciliar “spirituality” operates on this very principle: it offers psychological “renewal” and “hope” without the foundation of divine law, the terror of Judgment, and the absolute necessity of sanctifying grace. It is a religion for the “spiritual but not religious,” a therapeutic moralism utterly alien to the Catholic faith, which begins with the fear of God and ends with the love of God, mediated through the Sacraments and the hierarchical priesthood.
Conclusion: The Counterfeit Lent of the Apostate Hierarchy
The Lenten spiritual exercises described are a meticulously crafted fraud. They use the language, the setting, and some of the practices of traditional Catholicism to advance the Modernist, naturalistic, and immanentist “spirituality” of the conciliar sect. The preacher, a former atheist turned bishop, embodies the synthesis of all errors: the replacement of objective, received doctrine with subjective religious experience. The themes ignore the Social Kingship of Christ, the necessity of penance, and the terrifying realities of sin and Hell. The participants—the cardinals and prefects of the Roman Curia—are the architects of the post-Conciliar apostasy, and their “renewal” is a renewal in the spirit of the world, not in the spirit of Christ.
True Lenten spirituality, as taught by the pre-1958 Magisterium and the saints, is a stark, bloody, and supernatural journey with Christ to Calvary. It demands the mortification of the senses, the rigorous examination of conscience, the frequent use of the Sacrament of Penance, and the meditation on the Passion, all oriented towards the amendment of life and the ultimate goal of Heaven. It is inseparable from the public confession of Christ’s Kingship over all human institutions. The retreat described is its diametrical opposite: a comfortable, introspective, and doctrinally vacuous exercise in clerical self-congratulation, designed to make the managers of the apostate “Church” feel good about their role in the ongoing destruction of the Faith. Catholics must have absolutely nothing to do with it. They must flee the conciliar sect and its false sacraments and false spirituality, and adhere solely to the unchanging Faith of the pre-1958 Roman Catholic Church, which alone possesses the means of sanctification and salvation.
Source:
Pope Leo XIV begins Lenten spiritual exercises led by Bishop Erik Varden (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 22.02.2026