EWTN News portal reports that on April 9, 2026, the usurper Robert Prevost, styling himself “Pope Leo XIV,” addressed athletes of the Milan-Cortina 2026 Olympic and Paralympic Games in the Clementine Hall of the Vatican, declaring that sport “can and must truly become a space for encounter” in a world torn by “polarization, rivalry, and conflicts that escalate into devastating wars.” The event, framed as a spiritual audience, revealed once more how the conciliar sect has replaced the supernatural mission of the Catholic Church with a naturalistic humanism dressed in evangelical vocabulary, reducing the salvation of souls to the promotion of interpersonal harmony through athletic competition.
The Reduction of Christian Witness to Athletic Moralizing
The address begins with what appears to be a harmless commendation of athletic virtue, yet beneath its polished rhetoric lies a systematic evacuation of Catholic substance. Prevost tells the athletes: “Truly, sport, when lived authentically, is not merely a performance: It is a form of language, a narrative made up of gestures, of effort, of anticipation, of falls, and of new beginnings.” This is not Catholic theology; it is the language of secular humanism, the same anthropocentric philosophy condemned by Pope Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors, which rejected the notion that “all the rectitude and excellence of morality ought to be placed in the accumulation and increase of riches by every possible means, and the gratification of pleasure” (n. 58). Here, the “gratification of pleasure” is simply sublimated into the thrill of competition and the emotional satisfaction of personal achievement.
When the usurper speaks of “stories of sacrifice, of discipline, of tenacity,” he deliberately detaches these virtues from their supernatural end. In authentic Catholic teaching, sacrifice is ordered toward the propitiatory sacrifice of Calvary, discipline is the mortification of the flesh for the sake of eternal life, and tenacity is the perseverance of the saints in the state of grace. But in Prevost’s discourse, these virtues are self-referential: they exist for the sake of the athlete’s personal growth and the inspiration of others. There is no mention of the necessity of sanctifying grace, no reference to the sacraments, no warning about the danger of mortal sin, no call to conversion to the Catholic Faith as the sole means of salvation. The entire address is a sermon without a cross.
The Paralympic Heresy: Limitation as “Revelation”
Perhaps the most theologically offensive passage in the address is Prevost’s treatment of the Paralympic athletes: “In particular, in Paralympic competitions we have seen how a limitation can become a source of revelation: not something that holds a person back but something that can be transformed, even transfigured into newfound qualities.” The word “transfigured” is not accidental — it is a deliberate appropriation of sacred language to sanctify a secular event. Our Lord Jesus Christ was transfigured on Mount Tabor before His apostles, revealing His divine glory. To apply this term to the overcoming of physical disability in athletic competition is not merely imprecise; it is blasphemous equivocation, a hallmark of the modernist method condemned by Saint Pius X in Pascendi Dominici Gregis, which exposed how modernists “pervert the eternal concept of sanctity” and reduce supernatural realities to natural phenomena.
From the perspective of integral Catholic faith, physical suffering and limitation are consequences of original sin, permitted by Divine Providence for the sanctification of the soul. They are not “sources of revelation” in themselves but occasions for the exercise of virtue — patience, humility, resignation to the Divine Will — always within the context of the Church’s sacramental life. To speak of disability as something “transfigured into newfound qualities” without reference to the redemptive suffering of Christ, without mention of the Cross as the instrument of our salvation, is to preach a gospel without grace. It is the cult of man, the “anthropocentric direction” of religion that Saint Pius X identified as the very essence of Modernism: “The whole person of the modernist is thus seen to be made up of affirmation and negation. He is a compound of believer and non-believer” (Pascendi, §12).
“No One Wins Alone”: The Communitarian Heresy
Prevost’s assertion that “no one wins alone” and that “behind every victory there are many people involved — from family to teams” is presented as a profound truth, but it is in fact a banal truism elevated to the status of spiritual insight. The authentic Catholic understanding of human achievement is that every good gift comes from God (James 1:17), that without Christ we can do nothing (John 15:5), and that the ultimate victory — eternal salvation — is won solely through the merits of Jesus Christ, applied to the soul through the sacraments of His Church. By reducing the theology of achievement to a celebration of teamwork and family support, Prevost implicitly denies the absolute dependence of man on God, a dependence affirmed by the Council of Trent and every Pope before the conciliar revolution.
The quotation of Psalm 18 — “Thou didst give a wide place for my steps under me, and my feet did not slip” — is wrenched from its context and applied to athletic training. In its original sense, the psalm speaks of God’s deliverance from death and the enemies of the soul. To apply it to the stability of an athlete’s footing is to trivialize Sacred Scripture, treating it as a source of motivational slogans rather than as the inspired Word of God revealing the mysteries of faith and morals. This is precisely the error condemned in Lamentabili sane exitu (n. 12): “An exegete who wishes to fruitfully engage in biblical studies should especially reject any preconceived opinion about the supernatural origin of Holy Scripture, which he should interpret just like other purely human documents.”
The Gospel of “Abundant Life” Without the Gospel
Prevost refers to his own apostolic letter “Life in Abundance,” written for the occasion of the Olympics and Paralympics, claiming that “the Gospel’s vision of abundant life points to harmony between the physical and interior dimensions of the person.” This is a grotesque distortion of Our Lord’s words in John 10:10: “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” The “abundant life” of the Gospel is the life of sanctifying grace, received in Baptism and nourished by the Holy Eucharist, culminating in the beatific vision of Heaven. It has nothing to do with the “harmony between the physical and interior dimensions” — a phrase that could have been lifted from any secular self-help manual or New Age seminar.
This reinterpretation of the Gospel through the lens of naturalistic psychology is the very essence of the modernist heresy. As Saint Pius X taught, the modernist “distinguishes between the science of God and the faith” so that “faith holds one thing and science another” (Pascendi, §6). Prevost’s “abundant life” is a science of human fulfillment stripped of supernatural content, offered to athletes as a substitute for the true Gospel. It is, in the language of the Syllabus of Errors, the reduction of Christianity to “a certain dogmaless Christianity, that is, into a broad and liberal Protestantism” (n. 65, Lamentabili).
Sport as “Prophecy of Peace”: The Olympic Truce as Counter-Liturgy
The usurper’s invocation of the Olympic truce — “breaking the logic of violence to promote that of encounter” — reveals the deeper agenda at work. The conciliar sect has long sought to replace the Church’s supernatural mission of conversion with a naturalistic project of “peace” and “encounter” among all peoples and religions. This is the same spirit that animated the 2019 Abu Dhabi declaration of Bergoglio, which proclaimed that “God wills the pluralism of religions,” a statement condemned by every Pope who taught the dogma extra ecclesiam nulla salus.
Pius XI, in Quas Primas, established the Feast of Christ the King precisely to combat the secularism that removes Christ from public life and replaces His reign with human institutions. The Olympic truce, in Prevost’s presentation, becomes a counter-liturgy: a ritual of peace that requires no conversion, no repentance, no submission to the Kingship of Christ. It is “prophecy” without truth, “peace” without the Prince of Peace. As Pius XI warned: “When God and Jesus Christ — as we lamented — were removed from laws and states and when authority was derived not from God but from men, the foundations of that authority were destroyed” (Ubi Arcano). The Olympic truce, celebrated in the Vatican itself, is the liturgical expression of this removal.
The Silence That Condemns: What Was Not Said
The most damning aspect of this address is not what was said, but what was omitted. In an audience with hundreds of athletes from around the world, many of whom may never have heard the true Gospel, the usurper said nothing about:
- The necessity of Baptism for salvation
- The obligation to profess the Catholic Faith as the only true religion
- The reality of sin and the need for the Sacrament of Penance
- The propitiatory sacrifice of the Holy Mass as the center of Christian life
- The existence of Hell and the danger of eternal damnation
- The social Kingship of Christ over all nations, including the Olympic movement
- The obligation of states to conform their laws to the law of God
This silence is not accidental; it is systematic. It reflects the conciliar sect’s deliberate abandonment of the Church’s missionary mandate in favor of a universal “dialogue” that presupposes the equality of all religions and the sufficiency of natural virtue. It is the silence of apostasy, the silence of those who, as Saint Paul warned, “have made shipwreck concerning the faith” (1 Tim. 1:19).
The Athletes as Instruments of the Neo-Church
The testimonies of the athletes following the audience confirm their role as unwitting instruments of the conciliar sect’s propaganda. Francesca Lollobrigida, the speed skater, spoke of combining “being a mother and a top athlete” as her goal, presenting this as a form of witness. Nikko Landeros, the ice hockey player, described his Catholic background in the vaguest terms: “I still pray every day, and I’m thankful to be here. You know, if it weren’t for God, I wouldn’t be alive.” Neither athlete spoke of the necessity of the Catholic Church for salvation, of the importance of the sacraments, of the reality of sin and grace. Their Catholicism is a cultural sentiment, a vague theism compatible with any religion or none — precisely the “indifferentism” condemned by Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors (nn. 15-18).
This is the fruit of the conciliar revolution: a “Catholicism” that is indistinguishable from secular humanism, a “faith” that requires nothing supernatural, a “Church” that exists to validate the achievements of the world rather than to call the world to repentance. The athletes are not being evangelized; they are being used — presented as models of human virtue to lend credibility to a sect that has abandoned the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Conclusion: The Abomination of Desolation in the Temple of Sport
The audience of April 9, 2026, is not an isolated event but a symptom of the systemic apostasy of the conciliar sect. By welcoming Olympic athletes into the Vatican and addressing them in the language of secular humanism, the usurper Robert Prevost has transformed the See of Saint Peter into a platform for the religion of man. The “space for encounter” he promotes is not the encounter of the soul with God through the sacraments of the Catholic Church, but the encounter of human beings with one another in the pursuit of natural virtue — a virtue that, without grace, is incapable of meriting eternal life.
The true Church, which endures in the faithful who profess the integral Catholic faith and are led by bishops with valid sacraments, has no part in this spectacle. Her mission is not to celebrate the achievements of athletes but to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ, to administer the sacraments, and to lead souls to eternal salvation. As Pius XI declared in Quas Primas: “His reign, namely, extends not only to Catholic nations or to those who, by receiving baptism according to law, belong to the Church, even though their erroneous opinions have led them astray or discord has separated them from love, but His reign encompasses also all non-Christians, so that most truly the entire human race is subject to the authority of Jesus Christ.” The Olympic Games, like every human activity, are subject to the Kingship of Christ — not as a “space for encounter” but as a field of apostolate, a mission territory, a place where the Gospel must be preached and souls must be won for the true Faith.
Until the structures occupying the Vatican return to this mission — which, given the depth of the apostasy, is humanly impossible — their addresses to athletes, like all their pronouncements, will remain what they are: the words of men without authority, speaking a gospel without grace, in a temple that has become, in the words of Our Lord, “a den of thieves” (Matt. 21:13).
Source:
Pope Leo XIV: Sport must be a ‘space for encounter’ (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 09.04.2026