EWTN News Staff reports on the activities of Leo XIV during his visit to Equatorial Guinea on April 21, 2026, the final stop of a broader African tour that included Algeria, Cameroon, and Angola. The “pope” met with President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, civil leaders, the diplomatic corps, cultural figures, and visited a psychiatric hospital in Malabo. He also prayed at St. Elizabeth Cathedral and spoke at the León XIV Campus of the National University. The article presents these activities as routine pastoral diplomacy, devoid of any substantive doctrinal content, evangelistic urgency, or prophetic confrontation with error. This is precisely the problem: the conciliar sect reduces the Church’s mission to humanitarian tourism and interfaith-style dialogue, while the salvation of souls and the public reign of Christ the King are entirely absent.
The Silence of the “Shepherd”: No Gospel, No Doctrine, No Truth
The most striking feature of this article—and of the entire African tour it describes—is what is not said. There is no mention of preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the nations. There is no call to conversion to the Catholic Faith. There is no condemnation of heresy, schism, or paganism. There is no insistence on the necessity of baptism, the sacraments, or the true Church for salvation. In short, there is nothing distinctively Catholic in any of the reported activities.
Leo XIV met with civil leaders. He visited a psychiatric hospital. He spoke to “cultural stewards.” He waved to crowds. He viewed a plaque beneath a statue in his own honor. These are the activities of a UN diplomat or a secular humanitarian figure—not of the Vicar of Christ, who is bound by divine commission to docere, regere, sanctificare (teach, govern, sanctify).
Pius XI, in Quas Primas (1925), declared with apostolic authority: “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 duty of the Sovereign Pontiff is not to exchange diplomatic pleasantries with the powerful, but to assert the royal dignity of Christ over all nations and to demand that rulers and peoples submit to His kingship. Leo XIV’s meeting with the dictator Obiang—a man whose regime has been widely condemned for human rights abuses—is reported without a single word of moral admonition, let alone a demand for justice rooted in Catholic social teaching. This is not diplomacy; it is moral abdication.
The Cult of Personality: A Statue in His Own Honor
Perhaps the most grotesque detail in the entire article is the photograph caption describing Leo XIV “view[ing] a plaque underneath a statue in his honor” at the León XIV Campus of the National University in Malabo. A statue. In his own honor. While he is still alive.
This is not Catholic practice. This is the behavior of a secular head of state, a dictator, or a cult leader. The Church has always reserved public veneration for the saints—those who have died in the odor of sanctity and been formally canonized through the Church’s infallible process. For a living “pope” to permit, let alone participate in, the unveiling of his own statue is an act of supreme vanity and a manifestation of the cult of man that the conciliar revolution has elevated to a systemic principle.
Pius IX, in the Syllabus of Errors (1864), condemned the proposition that “the Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization” (Proposition 80). Leo XIV’s entire pontificate is the living embodiment of this condemned proposition. He does not confront modern civilization; he embraces it, celebrates it, and allows himself to be honored by it.
The “World of Culture”: Dialogue as Substitute for Evangelization
The article reports that Leo XIV met with the “World of Culture” at a university campus named after himself. This language—”World of Culture”—is pure conciliar Newspeak, drawn directly from the spirit of Gaudium et Spes and the post-conciliar obsession with “dialogue” with the modern world.
The Church’s mission is not to dialogue with “culture” as such. The Church’s mission is to evangelize—to proclaim the truth of Jesus Christ to all nations, to convert souls, to baptize, and to teach all things whatsoever He has commanded (Mt. 28:19-20). The very concept of “dialogue with culture” presupposes that human culture has something to teach the Church, that the Church must “learn” from the world, and that truth is arrived at through mutual exchange rather than through the authoritative proclamation of divine revelation.
This is the heresy of indifferentism, condemned by Pius IX in the Syllabus: “Every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true” (Proposition 15), and “Man may, in the observance of any religion whatever, find the way of eternal salvation” (Proposition 16). The conciliar sect has replaced the missionary mandate with interreligious dialogue, and the result is that entire continents—including Africa—remain steeped in paganism, animism, and heresy while the “pope” exchanges pleasantries with cultural elites.
The Psychiatric Hospital Visit: Naturalistic Charity Without Supernatural Purpose
The visit to the Jean Pierre Olie Psychiatric Hospital is presented as an act of mercy. And indeed, mercy is a virtue. But Catholic mercy is never merely naturalistic. The Church’s care for the sick has always been inseparable from the supernatural ends of the faith: the administration of the sacraments, the prayers of the Church, the offering of the Holy Sacrifice for the suffering, and the hope of eternal life.
There is no mention in the article of Leo XIV administering any sacrament, offering Mass, praying the prayers of the Church for the patients, or invoking the intercession of the saints. The visit is presented as a purely humanitarian gesture—a photo opportunity indistinguishable from what any secular leader might do. This is the naturalization of charity, the reduction of Christian mercy to secular humanism, which is one of the defining characteristics of the conciliar apostasy.
St. Pius X, in Lamentabili Sane Exitu (1907), condemned the modernist proposition that “the dogmas of faith should be understood according to their practical function, i.e., as binding in action, rather than as principles of belief” (Proposition 26). The conciliar sect has taken this condemned proposition and made it the operating principle of its entire “pastoral” activity. Everything is “practical,” everything is “action,” and nothing is doctrine.
The Absence of the Most Holy Sacrifice
Perhaps the most damning omission in the entire article is the absence of any mention of the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass as the central act of the “pope’s” visit. He is reported to have “prayed at St. Elizabeth Cathedral”—but what does this mean in the context of the conciliar sect? Does it mean he offered the Traditional Roman Mass, the unchanging liturgy of the Church? Or does it mean he participated in the Novus Ordo Missae, the fabricated rite of Paul VI that is at best theologically ambiguous and at worst a Protestantized assembly that obscures the propitiatory nature of the Sacrifice?
Given that Leo XIV is a product of the conciliar sect and has never been known to offer the Traditional Mass, the safe assumption is that any “Mass” celebrated during this African tour was the conciliar rite—a rite that the Church has never formally condemned only because no true pope has yet judged it, but which is objectively suspect of heresy and objectively harmful to the faith of the faithful.
The Holy Mass is the center of Catholic life. It is the re-presentation of the Sacrifice of Calvary, the source and summit of the Church’s worship, the means by which grace is poured out upon the world. For a papal visit to an entire continent to pass without the Mass being mentioned even once is a scandal of unprecedented proportions. It reveals that the conciliar sect does not believe in the Mass as the Church has always understood it. It has replaced the Sacrifice with “dialogue,” the altar with the conference table, and the Real Presence with humanitarian sentiment.
The Recognition of a Usurper by Catholic Media
The article, published by EWTN News Staff and sourced from the National Catholic Register, refers to Leo XIV as “Pope” without qualification, without irony, without any indication that he is a usurper who occupies the See of Peter without legitimate authority. This is the fundamental problem with all conciar media: they treat the apostasy as normal, the usurpation as legitimate, and the destruction of the Church as “pastoral renewal.”
The faithful are reminded that, according to the principles laid out by St. Robert Bellarmine in De Romano Pontifice, 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.” The conciar “popes” from John XXIII onward have repeatedly manifested heresy, promoted apostasy, and undermined the faith. They are not popes. They are antipopes, and to recognize them as legitimate is to participate in the destruction of the Church.
Conclusion: The Abomination of Desolation in the Holy Place
Leo XIV’s African tour is a microcosm of everything wrong with the conciar sect. It is a tour of diplomacy without doctrine, of charity without the sacraments, of dialogue without truth, of humanitarianism without the Gospel. It is the Church of the New Advent in its purest form: a naturalistic, humanistic, relativistic organization that uses the name and vestments of Catholicism to advance the agenda of the modern world.
The true Church—the Church of all ages, the Church of the martyrs and the Fathers, the Church that built Christendom and civilized the nations—endures. It endures in the faithful who profess the integral Catholic faith, who reject the conciliar apostasy, and who refuse to recognize the usurpers in the Vatican. It endures in the Traditional Mass, in the true sacraments, in the unchanging doctrine of the Church. It endures, and it will triumph, because “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Mt. 16:18).
Let the faithful reject the spectacle of Leo XIV’s African tour for what it is: a parade of apostasy dressed in Catholic vestments. Let them pray for the restoration of the true papacy, the true Mass, and the true faith. And let them never forget that the Church does not need “dialogue” with the modern world—the modern world needs conversion to Jesus Christ.
Source:
PHOTOS: Pope Leo XIV Visits Equatorial Guinea as Africa Visit Draws to a Close (ncregister.com)
Date: 21.04.2026