The EWTN News portal reports that the Vatican Observatory has named an asteroid “Gioacchinopecci” after the individual who occupied the Chair of Peter under the name Leo XIII, alongside asteroids named for other figures tied to the institution’s history. The article presents this as a celebration of the “Church’s” supposed harmony with science, quoting the 1891 motu proprio *Ut Mysticam* to suggest that the “Church” has always embraced “true and solid science.” The piece further notes that Leo XIII is the third “pope” to receive such an honor, following Gregory XIII and Benedict XVI, and that the observatory’s telescopes were relocated from Rome to Castel Gandolfo and eventually to Arizona due to light pollution. What the article conceals beneath its veneer of pious scientific celebration is the profound theological rot of a conciliar sect that dares to invoke the name of a true pontiff while systematically dismantling everything he defended.
The Appropriation of a Legitimate Pontiff by Apostates
The article speaks of “Pope Leo XIII” without the slightest qualification, as though the institution currently occupying the Vatican — the same institution that produced the apostate “Leo XIV” (Robert Prevost) — has any legitimate claim to continuity with the pontificate of Gioacchino Pecci. This is a deliberate act of historical theft. Leo XIII was a true Successor of Peter, author of the magnificent encyclical *Rerum Novarum* and the *Syllabus of Errors* condemnations, a pontiff who understood the social reign of Christ the King and the irreconcilable hostility between the Church and the world. That his name and legacy are now brandished by the very conciliar sect that has betrayed every principle he stood for is not merely ironic — it is blasphemous. The neo-church invokes Leo XIII’s *Ut Mysticam* to justify its existence as a scientific institution, while simultaneously promoting the very rationalism and naturalism that Leo XIII and his predecessors condemned without equivocation.
Pius IX, in the Syllabus of Errors (1864), condemned the proposition that “the method and principles by which the old scholastic doctors cultivated theology are no longer suitable to the demands of our times and to the progress of the sciences” (Proposition 13), and further that “philosophy is to be treated without taking any account of supernatural revelation” (Proposition 14). The conciliar sect has done precisely this — subordinating theology to the spirit of the age, treating divine revelation as an obstacle to “progress,” and embracing the very rationalism the true Magisterium anathematized. To invoke Leo XIII in defense of this trajectory is to spit upon his grave.
The Cult of Science as Substitute for the Supernatural
The article quotes Leo XIII’s *Ut Mysticam* stating that astronomy is “a most noble science that, more than any other human discipline, raises the spirit of mortals to the contemplation of heavenly events.” This is a selective and self-serving quotation. Leo XIII, like all true pontiffs, understood that the natural order points to the supernatural — that the contemplation of creation leads to the knowledge and worship of the Creator. The conciliar sect has inverted this order: science is no longer a handmaid of theology but a replacement for it. The Vatican Observatory, far from leading souls to the contemplation of God, serves as a public relations instrument designed to demonstrate the neo-church’s “relevance” to the modern world — the very world that St. John warns is “seated in the wicked one” (1 John 5:19).
The relocation of the observatory’s telescopes — from Rome to Castel Gandolfo to Mount Graham, Arizona — is itself a parable. The light pollution that drove the instruments away from Rome is not merely physical; it is the spiritual darkness that has enveloped the Vatican since the conciliar revolution. The true light — the light of Catholic doctrine, the light of the Most Holy Sacrifice, the light of the social reign of Christ the King — has been extinguished in the very heart of Christendom. That the observatory now operates from a mountain in Arizona, far from the tombs of the Apostles, is a fitting symbol of an institution that has fled from the supernatural mission entrusted to it by Christ.
The Naming of Asteroids: A Ritual of Vanity
The article describes in tedious detail the process by which asteroids receive permanent names — provisional designations, orbital calculations, approval by the Working Group for Small Body Nomenclature of the International Astronomical Union. This bureaucratic minutiae serves a single purpose: to lend an air of scientific respectability and institutional permanence to what is, in essence, an act of vanity. The conciliar sect names celestial bodies after its own figures — “popes,” cardinals, Jesuit astronomers — as though the cosmos itself must bear witness to its legitimacy. This is the behavior of a sect desperate for validation, seeking in the stars the recognition it can no longer command among the faithful.
The article notes that “Leo XIII is the third pope to have an asteroid named after him,” alongside Gregory XIII and Benedict XVI. Gregory XIII, the reformer of the calendar, was a true pontiff. Benedict XVI — the abdicating antipope whose resignation created the very vacancy now filled by the heretical Leo XIV — is a usurper whose pontificate was marked by the continued erosion of Catholic doctrine. To place these three names in the same category, as though the conciliar succession possesses the same authority as the true papacy, is itself a modernist act — the hermeneutic of continuity applied to the heavens themselves.
The Silence That Condemns
What the article does not say is far more damning than what it does. There is no mention of the true purpose of the Church: the salvation of souls through the preaching of the Gospel, the administration of the sacraments, and the extension of the social reign of Christ the King. There is no mention of the crisis of faith, the destruction of the liturgy, the promulgation of heresies at Vatican II, or the apostasy of the conciliar hierarchy. There is no mention that the same institution naming asteroids after “popes” has, under those very “popes,” condemned the faith of Catholics, suppressed the Traditional Latin Mass, and embraced the principles of religious liberty, ecumenism, and the cult of man that the true Magisterium had explicitly condemned.
Pius XI, in Quas Primas (1925), declared that “the plague that poisons human society” is “the secularism of our times, so-called laicism, its errors and wicked endeavors,” and that the remedy is the public recognition of Christ’s kingship over all nations and all aspects of human life. The Vatican Observatory’s asteroid-naming ceremony is the antithesis of this program. It is an act of accommodation with the world, a genuflection before the altar of secular science, a declaration that the neo-church’s mission is not to convert the world but to impress it.
The Observatory as Symbol of Conciliar Apostasy
The Vatican Observatory, refounded by Leo XIII in 1891, was originally intended to demonstrate that the Church is not the enemy of true science — a legitimate and noble purpose. But under the conciliar sect, it has become something else entirely: a symbol of the neo-church’s obsession with worldly respectability at the expense of its supernatural mission. The same institution that operates telescopes in Arizona has, in its “theological” departments, dismantled the very faith that gives meaning to the cosmos those telescopes observe. It studies the stars while losing its soul.
The article’s closing note — that asteroids have also been named for “four religious sisters” and “Jesuits” — reveals the true character of the conciliar sect: it is an institution that honors its own, that celebrates its own achievements, that seeks its own glory. This is not the Church of Christ, which glories only in the Cross (Galatians 6:14). This is the synagogue of Satan, which gathers its troops against the true Church and decorates itself with the trappings of legitimacy it does not possess.
The faithful who profess the integral Catholic faith — the faith of the unchanging Magisterium, the faith of the Council of Trent, the faith of the great pontiffs from Peter to Pius XII — must see through this charade. The naming of an asteroid after Leo XIII by the conciliar sect is not an honor to that great pontiff; it is a desecration of his memory. The true legacy of Leo XIII is not a rock orbiting the sun; it is the immortal doctrine he defended, the heresies he condemned, and the social kingship of Christ the King that he proclaimed. That legacy belongs not to the neo-church of the Antichrist, but to the true Church of Jesus Christ, which endures in the faithful who refuse to bow before the idols of modernism.
“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.” — Leo XIII, Annum Sanctum (1899), quoted in Pius XI, Quas Primas
The conciliar sect pays lip service to Leo XIII while trampling upon this very teaching. It is not the Church. It is the abomination of desolation standing in a holy place (Matthew 24:15). And no number of asteroids named after its usurpers will change that reality.
Source:
Pope Leo XIII’s legacy reaches space with asteroid named in his honor (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 29.04.2026