National Catholic Register portal reports on the testimony of Virginia Pérez de Santana, who recounted how her husband Miguel, diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumor, claimed to have had a direct experience of God in a hospital room — an embrace, a voice, and an overwhelming sense of peace — before dying in March 2026. The article presents this private mystical experience as an edifying confirmation of the faith, complete with daily rosary, anointing of the sick, and a prayer chain of 500 people. What is presented as a beautiful story of Catholic devotion is, upon examination through the lens of integral Catholic theology, a case study in the modernist substitution of subjective religious experience for the objective truths of the Faith, and a dangerous drift toward the very errors the Church has always condemned in the matter of private revelation.
The Primacy of Objective Faith Over Subjective Experience
The entire architecture of the article rests on a single foundation: a private, unverifiable, subjective experience elevated to the status of certainty. Miguel, alone in a hospital room, claims to have felt an embrace, heard words, and received knowledge that “God exists.” His wife then transmits this testimony to the public as though it were a confirmation of the Catholic Faith itself. But the Catholic Church has never taught that the certitude of faith comes from private mystical experiences. Faith is “the evidence of things that appear not” (Hebrews 11:1) — it is an assent of the intellect to divine truth on the authority of God revealing, not a conclusion drawn from interior sensations.
The Council of Trent, in its Decree on Justification (Session VI, Chapter 9), anathematizes those who say that men are justified by faith alone in the sense that “nothing else is required to cooperate in order to obtain the grace of justification.” Faith is necessary, but it is not a feeling. It is not warmth coursing through the body. It is not electricity. It is not an embrace felt in an empty room. The article’s entire emotional appeal is built on precisely the kind of sentimentalism and emotionalism that the Church has always identified as a hallmark of false spirituality.
St. Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa Theologica (II-II, Q. 171-175), treats extensively of private revelations and establishes the principles by which they are to be judged. The first and most fundamental principle is that private revelation does not belong to the deposit of faith. No one is bound to believe it. It does not carry the guarantee of the Church’s infallible Magisterium. The article, however, presents Miguel’s experience as though it were on par with — or even superior to — the truths revealed by God and proposed by the Church’s ordinary and extraordinary Magisterium. Virginia explicitly states that her husband went from “faith” to “certainty” through this experience: “I no longer merely have faith; I am certain that God exists.” This is the language of illuminism, not of Catholic theology.
The Illuminist Heresy and the “Experience of God”
The phrase “I’ve had an experience with God” is not Catholic language. It is the language of Protestant pietism, of charismatic movements, of the illuminism condemned by the Church for centuries. Pope Pius IX, in the Syllabus of Errors (1864), condemned the proposition that “Divine revelation is imperfect, and therefore subject to a continual and indefinite progress, corresponding with the advancement of human reason” (Proposition 5). The entire modernist project — synthesized and condemned by St. Pius X in Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907) and Lamentabili Sane Exitu (1907) — consists precisely in the reduction of religion to subjective religious experience, to the “sense of the divine” within man.
Proposition 20 of Lamentabili condemned the idea that “Revelation was merely man’s self-awareness of his relationship to God.” Proposition 25 condemned the proposition that “Faith, as assent of the mind, is ultimately based on a sum of probabilities.” Miguel’s “experience” is presented as the very thing that moved him from probability to certainty — but this is the certainty of sentiment, not of faith. It is the certainty of the emotions, not of the intellect moved by divine authority. The article does not once question whether this experience could have been a natural phenomenon — the product of a brain tumor affecting perception, of stress-induced neurochemical changes, or of autosuggestion in a moment of extreme fear. The uncritical acceptance of a subjective experience as divine revelation, without any reference to the Church’s criteria for discernment, is itself a modernist error.
St. John of the Cross, the Doctor of Mystical Theology, in his Ascent of Mount Carmel (Book II, Chapters 19-22), warns with extraordinary precision against precisely this kind of attachment to interior sensations and supposed divine communications. He teaches that the soul must not cling to such experiences, even if they are genuinely from God, because to do so is to make an end of what is merely a means. The true measure of the spiritual life is not consolation but conformity to the will of God through obedience to His commandments and the teachings of His Church. Miguel’s experience, as recounted, produced consolation — but consolation is not sanctity, and peace of soul is not proof of divine favor.
The Omission of the Supernatural Order
What is most striking about the article — and what reveals its fundamentally naturalistic character — is what it omits entirely. There is no mention of the state of Miguel’s soul in the theological sense. Was he in the state of sanctifying grace? Had he recently confessed? Was he receiving the sacraments with proper dispositions, or merely going through the motions of a ritualized “anointing of the sick” administered by a chaplain whose orthodoxy cannot be verified? The article treats the sacraments as though they operate ex opere operato in a mechanical sense, without any reference to the dispositions of the recipient — a position that the Church has always rejected as the error of magic.
The Council of Trent teaches (Session VII, Canon 8) that the sacraments are not merely signs but truly contain and confer grace — but always on the condition of proper disposition. The article’s silence on this point is not accidental. It reflects the post-conciliar mentality that treats the sacraments as social rituals rather than as the supernatural means of salvation instituted by Christ. The chaplain at the Navarra Clinic administered the anointing of the sick — but the article does not tell us whether this was done according to the traditional rite, with the proper matter and form, or according to the revised post-conciliar rite whose validity has been seriously questioned by theologians.
Furthermore, the article makes no mention of the last things — death, judgment, heaven, and hell — except in the most sentimentalized and vague terms. Virginia says she feels “incredibly fortunate to be able to say that my husband is in heaven.” But on what basis does she make this assertion? The Church has always taught that no one can know with certainty, apart from a special revelation, whether a particular soul is in heaven. This is not a matter of feeling or hope; it is a matter of divine judgment. The article’s casual assumption that Miguel is in heaven — based on his “experience,” his peace, his daily rosary — is a form of presumption that the Church has always warned against.
The Rosary as Talisman and the Cult of Sentiment
The article mentions that Miguel and Virginia prayed the rosary daily and that Miguel carried a Schoenstatt Pilgrim Virgin statue to visit other patients. The rosary is presented as a source of comfort and peace — which it can be, when properly prayed with meditation on the mysteries of faith. But the article reduces the rosary to a kind of spiritual talisman, a practice that produces “peace” as though peace were the goal of the spiritual life rather than a possible byproduct of union with God’s will.
St. Louis de Montfort, in his Secret of the Rosary, teaches that the rosary is a meditation on the life, death, and resurrection of Christ — not a technique for achieving emotional tranquility. The article’s treatment of the rosary is consistent with the post-conciliar reduction of Catholic devotional life to subjective emotional experience rather than objective meditation on divine truths. The Schoenstatt movement itself, moreover, has been the subject of serious theological criticism for its emphasis on personal “covenant” experiences and its tendency toward a sentimentalized spirituality that obscures the demands of the Gospel.
The prayer chain of 500 people is presented as evidence of God’s action — “so many good people who, without even knowing us, cared and prayed for us.” But the article does not tell us what these people were praying for. Were they praying for Miguel’s conversion, for the salvation of his soul, for the acceptance of God’s will? Or were they simply praying for a miracle, for his cure, for the preservation of his earthly life? The article’s silence on this point reveals its fundamentally naturalistic orientation: the purpose of prayer, in this narrative, is not the salvation of souls but the alleviation of suffering and the production of emotional peace.
The Theology of the “Blessing” of Suffering
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the article is its treatment of Miguel’s illness as a “blessing.” Miguel himself is quoted as saying: “In time, you will come to see this as a blessing, because thanks to the tumor, God has granted me this experience.” Virginia echoes this: “For Miguel, this has been the greatest gift God could have given him.” This is not Catholic theology. This is the theology of the felix culpa run amok — the idea that evil (in this case, a fatal illness) is actually a good because it produces a desirable spiritual effect.
The Church teaches that suffering is a consequence of original sin and that God can draw good from evil — but this does not make the evil itself a blessing. St. Paul writes: “We know that to them that love God, all things work together unto good” (Romans 8:28) — but this is a statement about God’s providence, not a claim that every instance of suffering is a “gift” or a “blessing.” The article’s uncritical embrace of this theology of suffering-as-gift is consistent with the post-conciliar tendency to romanticize suffering and death rather than presenting them in the light of the Cross as consequences of sin that must be borne with faith and hope, not celebrated as spiritual opportunities.
Pius XI, in Quas Primas (1925), teaches that Christ’s kingdom is “opposed only to the kingdom of Satan and the powers of darkness” and that its followers must “deny themselves and carry their cross.” The cross is not a gift to be celebrated; it is a burden to be borne. The article’s treatment of Miguel’s illness as a blessing that brought him closer to God is a subtle but real distortion of the Catholic theology of the Cross — a distortion that serves the modernist agenda of making religion palatable, comfortable, and emotionally satisfying rather than demanding, sacrificial, and supernatural.
The Absence of the Church’s Authority
Throughout the entire article, there is no reference to the Church’s authority in matters of faith and morals. There is no reference to the Magisterium, to the teaching of the popes, to the canons of the councils, to the witness of the saints. The entire narrative is constructed on the basis of personal experience, personal testimony, and personal interpretation. This is the essence of the Protestant heresy of private judgment, dressed in Catholic clothing.
The article does not once ask whether Miguel’s experience conforms to the Church’s teaching on private revelation. It does not once reference the norms established by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (in its pre-conciliar form) for the discernment of such phenomena. It does not once consider the possibility that the experience could have been a deception — whether natural or diabolical. The article simply presents the experience as self-authenticating, as though the sincerity of the subject were sufficient guarantee of its divine origin.
This is precisely the error condemned by St. Pius X in Pascendi, where he describes the modernist as one who “places the origin of religion in the religious sense, which is nothing other than a certain instinct or feeling”. The article’s entire narrative is built on this foundation: Miguel felt something, therefore it was God. The Church has always taught that feelings are not a reliable guide to truth, and that the discernment of spirits requires the application of objective criteria by competent authority — not the uncritical acceptance of subjective testimony.
Conclusion: The Substitution of Experience for Faith
The article from National Catholic Register is not a story of Catholic heroism. It is a case study in the modernist dissolution of the Catholic Faith into subjective religious experience. Every element of the narrative — the private “experience of God,” the elevation of sentiment over doctrine, the reduction of the sacraments to ritual comfort, the romanticization of suffering, the absence of the Church’s authority, the presumption of salvation — points to a spirituality that is fundamentally naturalistic, fundamentally Protestant, and fundamentally opposed to the integral Catholic Faith.
The true Catholic response to suffering is not to seek experiences but to unite oneself to the will of God through faith, hope, and charity, using the means of salvation instituted by Christ in His Church. The true Catholic response to death is not to presume heaven but to commend the soul to God’s mercy through prayer and the sacraments, trusting in His justice and His love. The true Catholic response to doubt is not to seek private revelations but to submit one’s intellect to the truths proposed by the infallible Magisterium of the Church.
Miguel’s story, as presented, may be sincere. It may even be moving. But sincerity is not truth, and emotion is not faith. The Church has always taught that the supernatural life is built on the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity — not on experiences, not on feelings, not on the subjective certainty of private revelation. The article’s failure to make this distinction is not merely an oversight; it is a symptom of the very disease that has ravaged the post-conciliar Church: the substitution of the subjective for the objective, the emotional for the doctrinal, and the human for the divine.
Source:
‘I’ve Had an Experience With God,’ Husband Tells Wife Before Fatal Diagnosis (ncregister.com)
Date: 15.04.2026