EWTN News portal reports on the upcoming visit of the antipope Leo XIV to Spain, drawing a comparison between the religious landscape of Benedict XVI’s World Youth Day in 2011 and the increasingly secularized Spain of 2026. Two experts — sociologist Rafael Ruiz Andrés and Bishop Emeritus César Augusto Franco Martínez — analyze the state of the “Catholic faith” among Spanish youth, noting that while Spain is increasingly secularized, the conciliar sect claims that “faith is growing among young people.” The article presents statistics showing a rise in self-identified Catholics among Spanish youth from 31.6% in 2020 to 45% in 2025, and frames the upcoming visit as a “message of hope” and a “compass for Catholicism in Spain.” What this article conceals beneath its veneer of hopeful commentary is nothing but the systematic dismantling of Catholic faith by the very structures occupying the Vatican, whose architects now dare to speak of “hope” while presiding over the spiritual ruin of an entire nation.
The Statistical Smokescreen: Counting Souls Without Saving Them
The article proudly cites statistics — the “Pluralism and Coexistence Foundation’s 2025 Barometer” and the “Young Spaniards 2026” report by the SM Foundation — to manufacture the illusion of a Catholic resurgence. We are told that 45% of young Spaniards now identify as Catholic, up from 31.6% in 2020, and that 38.4% consider religion “quite or very important” in their lives. These numbers are presented as evidence that “Catholicism once again interests and challenges them.”
But what does it mean to “identify as Catholic” in a country where the conciliar sect has systematically emptied the Faith of its supernatural content? St. Pius X, in Pascendi Dominici gregis (1907), warned precisely against this kind of naturalistic reduction: the Modernists “are of the opinion that the sacraments were instituted for the purpose of fostering faith” and that “the whole of the doctrine of the faith must be brought into harmony with the modern sciences” (Lamentabili, propositions 41, 64). The “Catholicism” measured by these sociological barometers is not the Catholic Faith — the unchanging deposit of divine revelation entrusted to the Church — but a cultural sentiment, a vague religiosity indistinguishable from the naturalism condemned by Pope Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors (1864), which rejected the proposition that “human reason, without any reference whatsoever to God, is the sole arbiter of truth and falsehood” (proposition 3).
The Bishop Emeritus César Augusto Franco Martínez himself inadvertently exposes the hollowness of these statistics when he admits: “We also live in a multicultural and multireligious society … many say they believe in God, yet they also believe in reincarnation and in other trends coming from Asia.” This is not Catholic faith. This is the very indifferentism anathematized by Pope Pius IX: “Man may, in the observance of any religion whatever, find the way of eternal salvation” (proposition 16, Syllabus of Errors). That a “bishop” can acknowledge syncretism — the blending of belief in God with reincarnation — without so much as a whisper of condemnation reveals the depth of the apostasy. The Faith is not a “fleeting sentiment,” as he correctly notes, but he offers no remedy, no call to conversion, no insistence on the necessity of the one true Church. Instead, he reduces the solution to “personal engagement” and “prayer” — as if the conciliar structures themselves were not the primary obstacle to genuine Catholic life.
“Post-Secular Dialogue”: The Language of Surrender
Rafael Ruiz Andrés describes the upcoming visit of Leo XIV as “post-secular in nature,” characterizing it as that of “a religious leader belonging to a denomination of immense significance in our country, yet one who speaks to a diverse, pluralistic society and who offers a vital message capable of being heard by audiences wider than the Church itself.”
Let the full weight of this statement be understood. The Catholic Church — the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church founded by Our Lord Jesus Christ, outside of which there is no salvation — is reduced to “a denomination.” The successor of St. Prince of the Apostles is demoted to “a religious leader” among many. The mission of the Church — to teach all nations, to baptize all peoples, to proclaim the kingship of Christ over every soul, family, and state — is replaced by the project of “offering a vital message capable of being heard by audiences wider than the Church itself.”
This is not Catholic ecclesiology. This is the ecumenism condemned in the Syllabus of Errors: “Protestantism is nothing more than another form of the same true Christian religion, in which form it is given to please God equally as in the Catholic Church” (proposition 18). It is the religious liberty condemned by Pope Gregory XVI in Mirari Vos (1832): “the liberty of conscience and of worship is the right of every man.” And it is the false dialogue with the world condemned by St. Pius X, who warned that the Modernist “possessed of a false philosophy and false ideas concerning the Church’s authority” would seek to “reconcile” the Church with the spirit of the age rather than condemning it.
Pius XI, in Quas Primas (1925), established the Feast of Christ the King precisely to combat the secularism that this article treats as an accepted reality to be “dialogued” with. He wrote: “The Kingdom of our Redeemer encompasses all men… His reign, namely, extends not only to Catholic nations or to those who, by receiving baptism according to law, belong to the Church… 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 Church is not to offer a “vital message” to pluralistic audiences but to demand the submission of all nations to the kingship of Christ — “to God is given what is God’s, and because of God to Caesar what is Caesar’s, who is great because he is smaller than heaven” (Pius IX, Syllabus of Errors, concluding allocution).
The “Awakening” That Leaves the Abomination of Desolation Untouched
The article speaks of a “Catholic awakening” among Spanish youth, pointing to youth apostolates such as Hakuna and Effetá and their “extensive impact on social media” as evidence of “increased visibility.” But visibility of what? Of the Catholic Faith? Or of the conciar sect’s program of reducing Christianity to a feel-good, socially engaged, emotionally stimulating movement devoid of doctrinal content?
The Bishop Emeritus warns against a “tsunami” culture in which young people “seek to live somewhat through their senses, through whatever impacts them immediately, enjoying the present day.” He is not wrong in his diagnosis. But the cause of this spiritual shallowness is not secularization from without — it is the apostasy from within. St. Pius X identified the root cause over a century ago: “The partisans of error are to be sought not only among the Church’s open enemies; they lie hid, and … are the more mischievous and less guarded against” (Pascendi Dominici gregis). The conciliar revolution — the destruction of the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the replacement of Catholic doctrine with the “evolution of dogmas,” the substitution of the supernatural life with social activism — has produced exactly the “tsunami” culture the bishop laments. And yet he offers no call to return to Tradition, no condemnation of the conciliar novelties, no insistence on the necessity of the true Mass, the true sacraments, and the true doctrine.
The “increase in adult baptisms” that the bishop mentions “must be examined closely, without allowing oneself to be carried away by facile slogans.” Indeed it must. But the examination must ask: Are these baptisms performed with the proper matter, form, and intention? Are they accompanied by genuine catechesis in the unchanging Catholic Faith — including the necessity of belonging to the true Church for salvation, the reality of hell, the obligation to keep God’s commandments? Or are they merely the statistical fruits of a “rite of Christian initiation” stripped of its supernatural content and administered within structures that have abandoned the Faith?
The Canary Islands: Solidarity Without the Supernatural
The article notes that Leo XIV’s trip to the Canary Islands will serve as “a gesture of solidarity with the migration situation in the country,” and that “the social dimension is one of the challenges facing certain sectors of the Church.” This is the conciliar sect’s characteristic inversion of priorities: the supernatural mission of the Church — the salvation of souls — is subordinated to the temporal mission of “solidarity” with migrants.
The Church has always taught the duty of charity toward the stranger. But the Church has also always taught that the primary end of her existence is the glory of God and the salvation of souls, not the management of migration flows. When Leo XIV visits the Canary Islands to express “solidarity” with migrants, he will be performing the role of a humanitarian NGO leader, not the Vicar of Christ. The true Vicar of Christ would remind migrants — and the nations receiving them — that they have an obligation to seek the truth, to enter the one true Church, and to submit to the kingship of Christ. He would remind Spain that its Catholic identity is not a cultural artifact to be celebrated but a divine mandate to be fulfilled — that “the state is happy not by one means, and man by another; for the state is nothing else than a harmonious association of men” (St. Augustine, quoted by Pius XI in Quas Primas).
The “Compass” That Points Away from Christ the King
The article concludes with the hope that Leo XIV’s visit will “encourage young people and everyone to follow Christ with fidelity and to love the Church without prejudice, despite the failings that we Christians may have.” But which “Church” is to be loved? The Church that Christ founded — hierarchical, infallible, unchanging, demanding? Or the conciliar sect that has betrayed every article of the Creed?
The “failings that we Christians may have” is the language of moral equivalence — as if the apostasy of the conciliar structures were on the same level as the personal sins of individual Catholics. There is no mention in this article of the true cause of Spain’s spiritual ruin: the abandonment of the Catholic Faith by the men who occupied the Vatican beginning in 1958. There is no mention of the destruction of the Mass, the corruption of the sacraments, the teaching of false ecumenism, the embrace of religious liberty, the denial of the Church’s right to exercise temporal authority. There is no mention of the duty of Catholic Spain to publicly recognize the kingship of Christ — a duty that Pius XI declared binding on all states: “Rulers of states therefore not refuse public veneration and obedience to the reigning Christ, but let them fulfill this duty themselves and with their people, if they wish to maintain their authority inviolate and contribute to the increase of their homeland’s happiness” (Quas Primas).
The “compass” that Leo XIV offers is not pointing toward Christ the King. It is pointing toward the “post-secular” utopia of a world in which the Catholic Church is merely one voice among many, in which “denomination” is the operative category, and in which the only sin is the failure to be “inclusive.” This is not hope. This is the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place (Matthew 24:15), and the only faithful response is not dialogue but resistance — the resistance of those who hold fast to the Faith “once delivered to the saints” (Jude 1:3), who refuse to bow before the idols of modernism, and who await the day when Christ the King will vindicate His rights over Spain and over all nations.
Source:
Pope Leo to visit a much more secularized Spain since Pope Benedict’s World Youth Day in 2011 (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 04.05.2026