VaticanNews portal reports on a message sent on behalf of the usurper Leo XIV by “Cardinal” Pietro Parolin to the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, on the occasion of its 102nd annual day. The message encourages the institution to be “an interpreter of the Gospel in the educational and cultural sphere, in constant dialogue with the Church’s Magisterium,” and centers on the theme “The Experience of Knowledge,” quoting 1 Corinthians 13:2. The address reduces Catholic education to a humanistic project of “love,” “encounter,” and “common good,” while remaining entirely silent on the supernatural mission of the Church, the necessity of sanctifying grace, and the absolute primacy of divine truth over all human constructs. This message is not a Catholic vision of education but a manifesto of the conciliar revolution’s naturalistic humanism, dressed in the language of Scripture to sanctify apostasy.
The Emptiest Quote in Scripture: 1 Corinthians 13:2 as a Weapon Against Truth
The centerpiece of Leo XIV’s message is the citation of Saint Paul: “If I understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so as to move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing (1 Cor 13:2).” The message claims these words “invite us to reflect more deeply” on the relationship between knowledge and love. But what does the message actually do with this verse? It instrumentalizes it. It uses the Apostle’s words not to illuminate the supernatural order but to subordinate knowledge—and by extension, truth—to a vague, sentimental concept of “love” that is never defined in Catholic terms.
Saint Paul, writing under divine inspiration, is speaking of caritas—the theological virtue of charity, which is the love of God above all things and the love of neighbor for the sake of God. Charity without truth is not charity; it is sentimentality. Charity without the Faith is not charity; it is naturalism. The Apostle himself, in the very same epistle, spends chapters 12 and 14 meticulously regulating the use of charisms within the unity of the Faith, and in chapter 13 he places charity as the indispensable form of all virtues—not as a substitute for doctrine. As Saint Augustine teaches, “Charitas non quaerit quae sua sunt”—charity does not seek its own, but it most certainly seeks God’s truth and demands its proclamation.
The message, however, never once defines love in supernatural terms. It speaks of “love for learning,” “love for what is studied,” and “love for those with whom one relates.” This is not the caritas of Saint Paul. This is the love of the world condemned by Saint John: “Love not the world, nor the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the charity of the Father is not in him” (1 John 2:15). The systematic extraction of supernatural content from Scripture is the hallmark of Modernism, condemned by Saint Pius X in Lamentabili sane exitu (proposition 20): “Revelation was merely man’s self-awareness of his relationship to God.” When Leo XIV quotes Saint Paul but strips the quote of its supernatural meaning, he is doing precisely what the Holy Office condemned in 1907: treating divine revelation as a springboard for humanistic reflection rather than as the immutable Word of God demanding obedience.
“Knowledge Born from Love”: The Psychologizing of Truth
The message states: “Knowledge is born from a love for learning, because the act of knowing is the fruit of a desire and a specific movement of the human soul even before it is an application of the intellect.” This sentence is a masterpiece of modernist ambiguity. In Catholic theology, knowledge is born from the intellect’s conformity to reality, illuminated by divine truth. The intellect is the formal principle of knowledge; the will, moved by love, is the motive that directs the intellect toward its proper object. But the message inverts this order, making knowledge a “fruit of desire” and a “movement of the human soul” before it is an act of the intellect. This is not Thomistic epistemology; it is the immanentist subjectivism that Saint Pius X identified as the very essence of Modernism in Pascendi Dominici gregis: “The foundation of religious philosophy, [the Modernists] say, is to be found in vital immanence. Hence, they say, religion, whether taken as a whole or in its parts, must be immanent in the life of the soul.”
By grounding knowledge in subjective “desire” and “movement of the soul,” the message opens the door to the complete relativization of truth. If knowledge is born from my desire, then what I “know” is a function of what I love—and if my love is disordered, my knowledge will be disordered. The Catholic position is the exact opposite: truth is objective, immutable, and prior to the soul’s movement toward it. As Pope Pius IX declared in the Syllabus of Errors (proposition 3): “Human reason, without any reference whatsoever to God, is the sole arbiter of truth and falsehood, and of good and evil; it is law to itself.” This is precisely the error the message promotes, albeit in softer language: the human soul, not the divine intellect, becomes the measure of knowledge.
The “Common Good” Without Christ the King
The message warns that “knowledge that is not oriented toward encounter and justice lies at the root of many evils,” and praises knowledge that “can contribute to the common good.” The “common good” is a concept with a precise meaning in Catholic social teaching: it is the sum total of social conditions that allow individuals and groups to achieve their perfection in Christ. It presupposes the recognition of God’s sovereignty, the authority of the Church, and the primacy of the supernatural end of man. Pope Leo XIII, in Immortale Dei, defined the common good of civil society as inseparable from the recognition of the true religion: “The Almighty, therefore, has given the charge of the human race to two powers, the ecclesiastical and the civil, the one being set over divine, and the other over human, each the highest in its own kind, and each fixed within certain limits, defined by its own nature and special object.”
But the message makes no mention of God, no mention of the Church’s authority, no mention of the supernatural order. The “common good” it invokes is the common good of liberal humanism—a worldly, horizontal, naturalistic concept that Pius XI explicitly condemned in Quas Primas: “The Kingdom of our Redeemer encompasses all men… He is indeed the source of salvation for individuals and for the whole… The state is happy not by one means, and man by another; for the state is nothing else than a harmonious association of men.” Pius XI insisted that the state’s happiness depends on its recognition of Christ’s royal authority. The message’s “common good” is the common good of the secular republic, stripped of Christ, stripped of grace, stripped of the Church—and therefore not a common good at all but a common ruin.
“Encounter and Justice”: The Conciliar Mantra
The phrase “knowledge that is not oriented toward encounter and justice” is not Catholic language. It is the language of the conciliar sect, forged at Vatican II and refined by the antipopes who followed. “Encounter” is the Bergoglian buzzword for the replacement of conversion with dialogue, of preaching with listening, of the missionary mandate with interreligious chumminess. “Justice” in this context means social justice in the secular sense—the redistribution of material goods, the promotion of “human rights,” the advancement of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals—not the supernatural virtue of justice that renders to God what is God’s and to neighbor what is his due under the moral law.
Saint Pius X, in Lamentabili (proposition 58), condemned the proposition 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.” The message does not go this far explicitly, but its silence on the supernatural virtues—faith, hope, charity, prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance—and its exclusive focus on horizontal, worldly outcomes (“encounter,” “justice,” “common good”) reveals the same naturalistic anthropology. The Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, under the guidance of such messages, is not forming Catholics; it is forming useful citizens of the New World Order.
Artificial Intelligence and the Abdication of Moral Responsibility
The message addresses artificial intelligence with breathtaking superficiality: “Processes of learning cannot be reduced to the production of ever more powerful algorithms. On the contrary, they require an adequate level of human responsibility and ethical discernment.” This is a platitude, not a moral teaching. Where is the condemnation of the grave sins facilitated by AI—the spread of pornography, the manipulation of elections, the destruction of privacy, the automation of killing? Where is the reminder that every technological development must be evaluated in light of the natural law and the Ten Commandments? Where is the warning that AI, like all human creations, is subject to the effects of original sin and can become an instrument of unprecedented evil?
Pope Pius XI, in Quas Primas, warned that “when God and Jesus Christ were removed from laws and states and when authority was derived not from God but from men, the foundations of that authority were destroyed.” The message’s treatment of AI is a perfect illustration of this warning: it speaks of “human responsibility” and “ethical discernment” without any reference to God, without any reference to the moral law, without any reference to the Church’s teaching authority. It is ethics without God—which is to say, it is not ethics at all but pragmatism.
“In Christ-Wisdom”: The Syncretistic Formula
The message quotes the university founders as recognizing that “in Christ-Wisdom there is, at the same time, what is most proper to our faith and what is most universal in human intelligence.” This formula is deeply suspect. In Catholic theology, Christ is not “Christ-Wisdom” in the sense of a principle that reconciles faith and human intelligence on equal terms. Christ is God, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Faith is not one pole of a dialectic with “human intelligence”; faith is the supernatural virtue by which we believe God on His authority, and it is superior to all human intelligence, not its partner in dialogue.
The formula “Christ-Wisdom” echoes the modernist tendency to reduce Christ to a principle of religious experience rather than the objective, historical, divine Person who founded the Church and entrusted her with the deposit of faith. Saint Pius X condemned this in Pascendi: “The Modernists… place the foundation of religious philosophy in vital immanence… Hence, they say, religion, whether taken as a whole or in its part, must be immanent in the life of the soul.” The “Christ-Wisdom” formula is immanentism dressed in Christological language—a way of saying that Christ is important not because He is God but because He represents the highest achievement of “human intelligence.” This is the evolution of dogmas condemned by the Syllabus of Errors (proposition 5): “Divine revelation is imperfect, and therefore subject to a continual and indefinite progress, corresponding with the advancement of human reason.”
The “Magisterium” With Which One Is to Be “in Constant Dialogue”
The message calls the university to be “in constant dialogue with the Church’s Magisterium.” Which Magisterium? The Magisterium of Pope Pius IX, who condemned the proposition that “the Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization” (Syllabus, proposition 80)? Or the Magisterium of John XXIII, who convoked the revolution? Or the Magisterium of Paul VI, who imposed the Protestantized Novus Ordo Missae? Or the Magisterium of Bergoglio, who signed the Abu Dhabi Declaration proclaiming that God wills the diversity of religions?
The “Magisterium” with which the conciliar sect demands “constant dialogue” is not the authentic Magisterium of the Catholic Church. It is the ever-shifting, self-contradictory, modernist pseudo-magisterium of the post-1958 antipopes—a “magisterium” that has condemned nothing, defined nothing, and instead has “dialogued” itself into complete doctrinal dissolution. To be “in constant dialogue” with this pseudo-magisterium is to be in constant rebellion against the true Magisterium, which speaks with one voice across the centuries and demands obedience, not dialogue.
The Founders: Gemelli and Barelli in the Conciliar Pantheon
The message praises “Father Agostino Gemelli and Blessed Armida Barelli” as sources of inspiration. Agostino Gemelli was a central figure in the Catholic modernist movement in Italy, deeply influenced by the very currents that Saint Pius X fought. His vision of a Catholic university was one that would engage with modern culture on modern culture’s terms—precisely the “opening to the world” that Vatican II would later canonize. Armida Barelli, beatified by the conciliar sect, is a figure whose cause was advanced by the same structures that have systematically dismantled Catholic education, Catholic liturgy, and Catholic identity.
The invocation of these figures is not accidental. It is a signal that the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore is not a Catholic university in the pre-conciliar sense—that is, an institution dedicated to the formation of souls in the integral Faith under the authority of the Church. It is a concilar institution that uses the name “Catholic” as a brand while promoting the naturalistic, modernist, and syncretistic agenda of the post-1958 revolution.
The Apostolic Blessing: Sacramental Simulation
The message concludes with Leo XIV imparting his “Apostolic Blessing.” This is a simulation of a sacramental act by a man who, if the arguments of sedevacantism are correct, has no authority to impart it. According to the teaching of Saint Robert Bellarmine, a manifest heretic “by that very fact ceases to be Pope and head, just as he ceases to be a Christian and member of the body of the Church” (De Romano Pontifice, II, 30). If the occupant of the Vatican is a manifest heretic—and the public record of heresy, apostasy, and blasphemy by the post-1958 antipopes is overwhelming—then he has no jurisdiction, no authority, and no power to bless. His “Apostolic Blessing” is an empty gesture, a ritual performed by a man who has no apostolic authority, invoking a grace he has no power to confer.
Even setting aside the sedevacantist argument, the “Apistolic Blessing” of the conciliar antipopes is suspect. Pope Paul IV, in Cum ex Apostolatus Officio, declared that if any Roman Pontiff has defected from the Catholic Faith, “his promotion or elevation… shall be null, void, and of no effect.” The post-1958 antipopes have promoted and imposed doctrines condemned by the Syllabus of Errors, Lamentabili, and Pascendi—including religious liberty, ecumenism, and the collegiality that undermines papal primacy. Their blessings are not Catholic blessings; they are the blessings of the abomination of desolation sitting in the temple of God (2 Thess. 2:4).
Conclusion: A University Without a Soul
The message of Leo XIV to the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore is a document of the Antichurch. It quotes Scripture but empties it of supernatural content. It speaks of “love” but means sentimentality. It speaks of “knowledge” but means pragmatism. It speaks of “the common good” but means the secular agenda. It speaks of “dialogue with the Magisterium” but means submission to the ever-changing dictates of modernist revolution. It speaks of “Christ-Wisdom” but means the reduction of the God-Man to a principle of human intelligence.
The Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, under such guidance, is not a Catholic university. It is a conciliar institution that uses the name of the Sacred Heart—the same Heart to which Pius XI consecrated the entire human race in 1925—as a marketing tool while promoting the very errors that the Sacred Heart came to combat. The “experience of knowledge” it offers is not the experience of divine truth but the experience of the world, the flesh, and the devil, sanctified by the language of Scripture and the imprimatur of the Antichurch.
The true Catholic university—the one that formed Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Robert Bellarmine, and Saint Pius X—no longer exists in the structures of the conciliar sect. It exists only in the hearts of the faithful who cling to the integral Faith, who reject the revolution, and who await the restoration of all things in Christ the King. “The gates of hell shall not prevail” (Matt. 16:18)—but the gates of hell have prevailed in the Vatican, and the message of Leo XIV is proof.
Source:
Pope encourages Italy’s Catholic University to foster knowledge and faith (vaticannews.va)
Date: 19.04.2026