The “Spiritual Exercises” of the Apostasy: Humanistic Sentimentality Masquerading as Catholic Retreat
The cited article from the EWTN News portal (February 24, 2026) reports on the second and third meditations of the Lenten spiritual exercises for the Roman Curia, led by the “bishop” Erik Varden, a functionary of the conciliar sect. The focus was on a sentimentalized presentation of St. Bernard of Clairvaux as “the Idealist” and a novel meditation on “God’s help,” drawing on the figure of Mary Ward. This presentation is a quintessential example of the post-conciliar church’s systematic replacement of Catholic supernatural theology with a naturalistic, humanistic, and subjectivist spirituality. It represents not a development, but a complete rupture with the integral Catholic faith, reducing the Lenten retreat—a time for penance, reparation, and confrontation with sin—to a therapy session for the ego.
A “Companion” for Selfishness: The Corruption of St. Bernard
“Bernard is a good, wise companion for anyone setting out on a Lenten exodus from selfishness and pride, wishing to pursue authenticity with eyes set on the all-illumining love of God.”
This characterization is a profound deformation. The “Lenten exodus” is not from “selfishness and pride” in a vague, psychological sense, but from mortal sin and the state of enmity with God. The goal is not “authenticity” according to a modern, existentialist understanding, but holiness: the restoration of sanctifying grace and the growth in charity, the theological virtue by which we love God above all things for His own sake, and our neighbor as ourselves for the love of God. To frame Lent as a journey toward “authenticity” is to adopt the language of the world, not of the Church. It centers the subject’s self-realization, not God’s glory and the soul’s salvation.
St. Bernard of Clairvaux, a Doctor of the Church, was a monk, a preacher of the Crusades, a fierce defender of the faith against heretics like Peter Abelard, and a profound theologian of the mystical marriage of the soul to Christ. His “love of God” was not a vague “all-illumining” feeling, but the concrete, demanding, and often painful participation in the love of the Crucified. His “humility” was the theological virtue that ordered him totally under God and the legitimate hierarchy of the Church. To call him “the Idealist” is to impose a modern, romantic, and essentially Pelagian framework on a man who preached the absolute necessity of grace and the utter helplessness of human nature without it. The article’s Bernard is a therapeutic buddy for the modern psyche; the real Bernard was a scourge of worldly wisdom and a herald of the absolute transcendence of God. The omission of Bernard’s crusading zeal, his combat against error, and his ascetic rigor is not incidental; it is necessary for the modernist project of creating a harmless, “compassionate” saint palatable to the secular world.
The Blasphemous Trivialization of “God’s Help”
“The notion that God can and will help us in our predicaments is axiomatic to biblical faith… It sets the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob… apart from the Unmoved Mover of philosophy.”
This statement is theologically reckless and borders on blasphemy. It sets up a false dichotomy between the God of the philosophers (a straw man) and the God of the Bible, as if the latter were a divine butler who “helps us in our predicaments.” The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is the same God who demands total sacrifice (Genesis 22), who hardens Pharaoh’s heart (Exodus), and who sends His Son to die on the Cross. “Help” in biblical faith is not primarily about solving our worldly predicaments, but about sanctification—being conformed to Christ, which often involves suffering, abandonment, and the Cross. The article’s God is a cosmic therapist; the God of Catholic theology is the Supreme Legislator and Judge whose primary “help” is the grace to obey His laws and endure His trials for His glory.
The reference to Mary Ward, “Do your best and God will help,” is particularly insidious. Mary Ward (1585-1645) founded the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Loreto Sisters), which has been repeatedly criticized for its lax enclosure, its adaptation to Protestant countries, and its perceived feminist and individualist spirit. Her maxim, while seemingly pious, reflects a semi-Pelagian error, implying that human effort (“do your best”) is the primary condition for divine aid. Catholic theology, defined solemnly at the Council of Orange (529) and reaffirmed by the Council of Trent, teaches that even the beginning of faith is a gratuitous gift of God, not a human achievement that then triggers divine help. To present this as a “biblical conviction” is to import a condemned heresy into the retreat.
The Heresy of Subjective Experience: The Case of Job
“What about times when believers fall and appear abandoned… hearing only the echo of their own voice? Varden pointed to Job as the scriptural figure who embodies this experience, proposing that Job’s book can be read ‘as a symphony in three movements, going from a visceral lament through an exposition of menace to a wholly surprising experience of grace.’”
This interpretation is a masterpiece of modernist exegesis, reducing sacred Scripture to a psychological drama. The Book of Job is not about a “surprising experience of grace” in the sense of a warm, subjective feeling. Its climax is the theophany (Job 38-41), where God appears not to comfort Job, but to remind him of his creaturely nothingness and God’s inscrutable wisdom and power. Job’s response is one of abasing repentance (“I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be hindered… therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes” – Job 42:2-6). There is no “surprising grace” in the sense of a resolution to Job’s problems; his material losses are restored only after his humbling submission. The article’s reading, which focuses on Job’s “visceral lament” and a vague “experience of grace,” completely omits the central, terrifying, and humbling encounter with the living God. It turns a lesson on God’s absolute sovereignty and man’s humility into a story about God eventually making us feel better after we have our emotional outpouring. This is the heresy of religious subjectivism, condemned by St. Pius X in Pascendi Dominici gregis and Lamentabili sane exitu (e.g., Prop. 25: “Faith, as assent of the mind, is ultimately based on a sum of probabilities”; Prop. 26: “The dogmas of faith should be understood according to their practical function, i.e., as binding in action, rather than as principles of belief”).
The Omission of the Supernatural: The Gravest Sin
The entire article is a study in the systematic omission of the supernatural order. There is not a single mention of:
* Sanctifying grace, the depositum fidei, or the sacramental system as the ordinary means of salvation.
* The sacrifice of the Mass as the true and perfect reparation for sin, the central act of Catholic worship.
* The state of mortal sin and its eternal consequences (hell).
* The authority of the Church to teach, govern, and sanctify, derived from Christ.
* The social reign of Christ the King over individuals, families, and states, so clearly defined by Pius XI in Quas Primas.
* The final judgment and the four last things (death, judgment, heaven, hell).
This silence is not neutral; it is dogmatically negative. It teaches, by omission, that the Catholic religion is a moral and emotional philosophy, not a supernatural revelation with concrete obligations, hierarchical authority, and eternal consequences. This is the very essence of the Modernist heresy, which Pius X defined as the attempt to “reform” the Church by bringing her into harmony with “modern civilization,” i.e., by naturalizing and subjectivizing the supernatural. The Syllabus of Errors (1864) condemns this directly:
* Error #3: “Human reason, without any reference whatsoever to God, is the sole arbiter of truth and falsehood, and of good and evil.”
* Error #58: “All the rectitude and excellence of morality ought to be placed in the accumulation and increase of riches… and the gratification of pleasure.”
* Error #59: “Right consists in the material fact. All human duties are an empty word.”
The spirituality promoted here reduces “God’s help” to the gratification of pleasure and the accumulation of a subjective sense of “authenticity.”
Symptomatic of the Conciliar Apostasy: The “Bishop” and the “Pope”
The entire scenario is predicated on a fundamental lie: the legitimacy of the “Pope Leo XIV” and the “bishop” Erik Varden. From the unchanging perspective of Catholic doctrine, a manifest heretic cannot be a member of the Church, let alone its head or a bishop (Bellarmine, De Romano Pontifice; Canon 188.4, 1917 Code). The post-conciliar “papacy” and “episcopacy,” which have consistently promoted, protected, and enacted the errors condemned by Pius IX, Pius X, and the Syllabus, are by definition void. The “spiritual exercises” led by a man who is, at best, a schismatic and likely a heretic, for a “pope” who is an apostate, are a sacrilegious mockery. They are the spiritual exercises of the “abomination of desolation” (Matthew 24:15), a pseudo-church offering a pseudo-spirituality to lead souls away from the true sacrifice and true grace found only in the immemorial Catholic Church, which continues in those who hold the integrum fidei depositum (the entire deposit of faith) and are shepherded by valid bishops in communion with the See of Peter as it existed before the apostasy of the 20th century.
Conclusion: The Spirit of the World in Cassock and Stole
The article reveals a “spirituality” that is:
1. Naturalistic: Concerned with psychological states (“authenticity,” “help in predicaments”) rather than supernatural grace and glory.
2. Subjectivist: Centered on the individual’s experience and feelings (“visceral lament,” “experience of grace”) rather than objective truth and divine law.
3. Devoid of the Cross: No mention of penance, mortification, reparation, or the necessity of suffering united to Christ.
4. Silent on Judgment: No warning of hell, no call to conversion from mortal sin, no emphasis on the absolute necessity of the Church for salvation.
5. Pelagian/Semi-Pelagian: The implicit message is that we “do our best” (Mary Ward) and God will help us feel better, denying the absolute primacy of grace and the total depravity of fallen nature.
This is not a Catholic retreat. It is a secular self-help seminar conducted in a chapel, using the names of saints and biblical figures as props for a new, man-centered religion. It is the logical fruit of the conciliar revolution, which, as St. Pius X warned in Pascendi, seeks to “renew” the Church by making her “acceptable to the world.” The “God” of this retreat is not the King of kings whose rights over nations and souls Pius XI demanded be recognized in Quas Primas. It is the “Unmoved Mover” of philosophy in the most banal sense: a distant, impersonal force that occasionally provides a comforting feeling. The true “exodus” needed is not from “selfishness” in a vague sense, but from this apostate conciliar sect and its deadly, soul-destroying novelties, back to the one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church, where Lent is a time of fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12), of mortification, and of making satisfaction for sin, all for the glory of God and the salvation of souls.
Source:
Vatican spiritual exercises: St. Bernard ‘the Idealist’ (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 24.02.2026