Vatican News portal reports on a telegram sent by the usurper Leo XIV (Robert Prevost) on the 50th anniversary of the 1976 Friuli earthquake, in which he expressed “spiritual closeness” to the affected, praised international solidarity, and hoped the tragedy would inspire “a renewed commitment to the values of fraternity and charity.” The message, signed by Cardinal Pietro Parolin, commended the “exemplary reconstruction” as a “model of civic rebirth” and entrusted the population of Friuli to the Virgin Mary and the patron saints Hermagoras and Fortunatus. This telegram, while outwardly pious in its invocations, is a textbook example of the conciliar sect’s systematic reduction of every human event to naturalistic humanitarianism, stripping catastrophe of its supernatural meaning and replacing the call to repentance with the bland celebration of “fraternity” — a word that, in the post-conciliar lexicon, has become a synonym for the denial of the Kingship of Christ over nations and souls.
The Erasure of Supernatural Judgment: Catastrophe Without Sin, Suffering Without Redemption
The first and most glaring omission in this telegram is any mention of the supernatural dimension of natural disasters. Catholic teaching, immutable and consistent, holds that earthquakes, floods, famines, and pestilences are, at their deepest theological level, consequences of sin — both original and personal — and instruments of divine Providence calling men to repentance. The Council of Trent teaches unequivocally that the just sufferings of this life are remedial and purifying, while the Church’s liturgy for times of calamity has always included prayers of propitiation, fasting, and public penance. Pope St. Gregory the Great organized solemn litanies during the plague of Rome precisely because he understood that natural disasters are divine admonitions. The Roman Ritual itself contains prayers “in time of earthquake” (*tempore terrae motus*) that implore God’s mercy and beg Him to avert His just wrath.
What does Leo XIV offer instead? He expresses “spiritual closeness” — a phrase so vacuous it could be uttered by any secular humanitarian organization — and hopes the memory of the tragedy will inspire “a renewed commitment to the values of fraternity and charity.” Not a single word about repentance. Not a single word about sin. Not a single word about the necessity of conversion to avoid eternal catastrophe, which infinitely surpasses any temporal earthquake. The telegram treats the Friuli earthquake as though it were a morally neutral event, a mere occasion for human solidarity, stripped entirely of its theological significance as a potential chastisement of God. This is not Catholic teaching; it is the naturalism condemned by Pope St. Pius X in *Pascendi Dominici gregis*, where he identified the modernist error of “separating the natural from the supernatural” as one of the fundamental pillars of the synthesis of all heresies.
“Fraternity” and “Charity”: The Conciliar Substitution of Naturalistic Humanism for Supernatural Virtue
The Pope’s invocation of “fraternity and charity” as the values to be drawn from the earthquake deserves careful scrutiny. In authentic Catholic theology, *caritas* (charity) is the greatest of the theological virtues, defined by St. Thomas Aquinas as the friendship of man with God, ordering all other loves toward their supernatural end. True charity is inseparable from the virtue of religion, from the worship of the true God, and from the recognition that man’s ultimate end is the Beatific Vision. Charity without faith is not charity at all; it is mere humanitarian sentimentality, which the Church has always distinguished sharply from supernatural virtue.
The word “fraternity” (*fraternitas*), however, carries an even more sinister resonance in the post-conciliar context. It is one of the three words of the Masonic triad — *Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité* — and its adoption as a supreme value by the conciliar sect is not accidental. Vatican II’s *Nostra Aetate* and subsequent documents elevated “fraternity” to a quasi-dogmatic status, using it to justify dialogue with false religions, the denial of the Church’s exclusive claim to be the ark of salvation, and the relativization of Catholic truth. When Leo XIV speaks of “fraternity” as a value to be drawn from a natural disaster, he is not speaking the language of the Gospel — which commands “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Mt 4:17) — but the language of the United Nations and the Masonic lodges. The authentic Catholic response to catastrophe is not “fraternity” but penance; not “solidarity” but the call to the sacraments, to confession, to the restoration of Christ’s law in private and public life.
Pius XI, in *Quas Primas*, taught that “the peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ” is the only true foundation for social order, and that the removal of Christ and His law from public life is the cause of all the world’s calamities. The Friuli earthquake, like every natural disaster, is a reminder that “unless you repent, you will all likewise perish” (Lk 13:3). To reduce its lesson to “fraternity and charity” is to commit the very error Pius XI condemned: the secularization of public life and the banishment of Christ the King from the governance of nations.
The Praise of “Civic Rebirth” and “Exemplary Reconstruction”: Naturalism Triumphant
Perhaps the most revealing passage in the telegram is the praise of the “exemplary reconstruction” as a “model of civic rebirth.” This language is entirely immanent, entirely horizontal, entirely devoid of any reference to the supernatural order. The “civic rebirth” commended is a purely natural phenomenon — the rebuilding of houses, roads, and infrastructure — and the “solidarity” praised is the natural virtue of mutual aid among men, which even pagans possess. Nowhere does the telegram suggest that the true “rebirth” needed is spiritual: the conversion of souls, the return to the sacraments, the restoration of Catholic social order in accordance with the teachings of Leo XIII’s *Immortale Dei* and Pius XI’s *Quas Primas*.
This is the conciliar sect’s characteristic inversion of the order of priorities. The true Church, when confronted with catastrophe, would first call the faithful to Mass, to confession, to reparation, and to the public acknowledgment of God’s sovereignty over creation. The conciliar sect, by contrast, celebrates the natural response to disaster — human solidarity, civic cooperation, international aid — as though these were the highest goods, and as though the supernatural order were either irrelevant or merely decorative. The telegram’s silence about the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass as the supreme act of propitiation and thanksgiving is deafening. The Pope “joins spiritually in the Eucharistic celebration” — but the post-conciliar “Eucharistic celebration” is itself a contested and likely invalid rite, having been fabricated by the Masonic architect Annibale Bugnini and promulgated by the apostate Paul VI. To “join spiritually” in such a rite is not to offer the true Sacrifice but to participate in a simulacrum that may be, at best, an empty ceremony and, at worst, an act of idolatry.
The Invocation of the Virgin Mary and the Patron Saints: Pious Formulae Without Doctrinal Content
The telegram concludes by entrusting “the entire population of Friuli to the maternal protection of the Virgin Mary” and to the patron saints Hermagoras and Fortunatus. On the surface, this appears to be a conventionally Catholic gesture. But in the context of the conciliar sect, such invocations have been emptied of their doctrinal content and reduced to ceremonial formulae. The Virgin Mary invoked by the post-conciliar church is not the Mary of *Ineffabilis Deus* and *Munificentissimus Deus* — the Immaculate Conception, the Mother of God, the Mediatrix of all graces but a vague, ecumenical figure, compatible with the “Marian devotion” of Protestants and even Muslims. The patron saints are invoked not as intercessors before the throne of the Most High, before whom every knee must bow, but as cultural symbols of regional identity.
The invocation of Mary and the saints in a document that contains no call to repentance, no acknowledgment of sin, no recognition of divine chastisement, and no summons to the sacraments is not Catholic piety — it is superstition. It is the outward form of religion divorced from its inner substance, precisely the kind of “exteriorism” that the prophets of the Old Testament and the saints of the New Testament relentlessly condemned. “This people honors Me with their lips, but their heart is far from Me” (Mt 15:8).
The Telegram as a Document of the Conciliar Apostasy
Viewed in its totality, this telegram is not a Catholic document. It is a humanitarian communiqué issued by the head of a naturalistic organization that occupies the Vatican and uses the external trappings of Catholicism to lend spiritual prestige to a message that is, in its substance, indistinguishable from that of the Red Cross or the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Every element of authentic Catholic teaching on natural disasters — divine Providence, the reality of sin, the necessity of repentance, the propitiatory power of the Most Holy Sacrifice, the intercession of the saints ordered toward eternal salvation — is either absent or present only as a decorative shell emptied of meaning.
The true Pope — the one who would occupy the Chair of Peter if the apostasy had not emptied it — would have used the occasion of the Friuli earthquake’s anniversary to call the faithful to repentance, to the sacraments, to the restoration of Christ’s social Kingship, and to the recognition that temporal calamities are but shadows of the eternal punishment that awaits the unrepentant. He would have reminded the people of Friuli, and of all Italy, that “unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain” (Ps 127:1), and that no amount of “civic rebirth” or “exemplary reconstruction” can substitute for the rebirth of souls in the grace of God.
Instead, we have this: a telegram that celebrates natural virtue, ignores supernatural truth, and reduces the greatest catastrophe in human history — the apostasy of the conciliar sect itself — to a footnote in a story about earthquake reconstruction. The true earthquake is not the one that shook Friuli in 1976; it is the one that shook the Church at Vatican II, and whose aftershocks continue to destroy the faith of millions. Until the faithful recognize this, and return to the immutable Tradition of the Church — to the true Mass, the true sacraments, the true doctrine of the social Kingship of Christ — they will continue to be buried not under the rubble of earthquakes, but under the far more devastating rubble of conciliar apostasy.
Source:
50 years on, Pope remembers victims of deadly Italian earthquake (vaticannews.va)
Date: 03.05.2026