VaticanNews portal reports (May 11, 2026) that the usurper Robert Prevost, styling himself “Pope Leo XIV,” met with the Board of the Vatican Observatory Foundation and delivered an address in which he praised the pursuit of science as a means to “find God in Creation,” lamented man-made light pollution, and framed the hunger to understand the universe as “a reflection of that restless longing for God.” The article presents this as evidence of the Catholic Church’s supposed embrace of science. In reality, this address is yet another manifestation of the conciliar sect’s systematic reduction of the Faith to naturalistic pantheism, its idolatry of human reason, and its deliberate silence on the only matters that truly concern the salvation of souls.
The Ghost of Leo XIII Weaponized Against the Faith
The address begins with a calculated invocation of Pope Leo XIII, who re-founded the Vatican Observatory in 1891. The article quotes the 19th-century Pope as saying the institution was re-founded so that “everyone might see clearly that the Church and her Pastors are not opposed to true and solid science, whether human or divine, but that they embrace it, encourage it, and promote it with the fullest possible devotion.”
This selective quotation is a masterclass in modernist deception. Leo XIII, in his encyclical Immortale Dei (1885), taught with crystalline clarity that the Church’s authority extends to the whole of human life and that civil society must recognize the sovereignty of Christ the King. In Arcanum Divinae Sapientiae (1880), he condemned the reduction of marriage to a mere civil contract. In Libertas Praestantissimum (1888), he condemned the liberal notion that every man is free to profess whatever religion he chooses. The Leo XIII of these encyclicals — the true Leo XIII — understood that science must be subordinate to revealed truth, not placed alongside it as a parallel path to God.
What does the conciliar sect do with this legacy? It strips Leo XIII of his supernatural mission and recasts him as a proto-modernist, a champion of “science and faith dialogue” — precisely the kind of indifferentism that Pius IX condemned in the Syllabus of Errors (1864), Proposition 15: “Every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true.” The usurper’s invocation of Leo XIII is not a continuation of his teaching but a mutilation of it, designed to lend papal authority to the very errors Leo XIII spent his pontificate combating.
The Denial of Objective Truth — By Those Who Deny It Most
The article states that “both faith and science face a more insidious threat from those who deny the very existence of objective truth,” according to the usurper. This is a breathtaking inversion of reality. It is the conciliar sect itself that has systematically denied objective truth for over six decades.
Consider the fruits of the post-conciliar revolution. The Declaration on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis Humanae (1965), proclaimed that every person has a right to religious liberty — a proposition directly condemned by Pope Gregory XVI in Mirari Vos (1832) and by Pius IX in the Syllabus, Proposition 77: “In the present day it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the State, to exclusion of all other forms of worship.” The conciliar sect’s entire ecumenical enterprise — its prayer meetings with pagans, its veneration of the “earth” at Assisi, its signing of the Abu Dhabi Declaration on Human Fraternity — is built on the denial that the Catholic Church possesses the fullness of objective truth.
St. Pius X, in Lamentabili Sane Exitu (1907), condemned the modernist proposition that “truth changes with man, because it develops with him, in him, and through him” (Proposition 58). Yet this is precisely the operating principle of the conciliar sect, which has “developed” its doctrine on religious freedom, the liturgy, the nature of the Church, and the relationship between faith and reason in ways that are irreconcilable with every preceding Pope. The usurper’s lament about the denial of objective truth is not a defense of Catholic doctrine — it is a projection of the conciliar sect’s own guilt onto its critics.
Stewardship of the Planet: The New Gospel of the Neo-Church
The usurper’s address pivots quickly from astronomy to environmentalism: “we bear a solemn responsibility for the stewardship of our planet and for the welfare of those who dwell upon it, especially the most vulnerable, whose lives are imperilled by the reckless exploitation of both people and the natural world.”
This language is not Catholic. It is the language of the United Nations, of globalist NGOs, of the World Economic Forum. The Church’s mission, as defined by Christ Himself, is not the “stewardship of the planet” but the salvation of souls: “Going therefore, teach ye all nations; baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost” (Matthew 28:19). The Church has always taught that the natural world is God’s creation and that man has a duty to use it responsibly — but this duty is ordered toward the ultimate end of eternal salvation, not toward the temporal goal of “sustainability.”
Pius XI, in Quas Primas (1925), established the Feast of Christ the King precisely to combat the secularism that removes God from public life. He wrote that “the Kingdom of our Redeemer encompasses all men” and that “rulers of states… 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.” The usurper’s address contains not a single mention of Christ the King, not a single mention of the obligation of rulers to submit to divine law, not a single mention of the supernatural end of human existence. Instead, we are offered the banal platitudes of global environmentalism — a substitution of the Gospel with the agenda of the Antichrist.
This is the pattern of the conciliar sect: every address, every encyclical, every audience is an opportunity to advance the program of the New World Order under the guise of Catholic social teaching. The “reckless exploitation” language echoes the rhetoric of climate alarmism, which serves to concentrate power in the hands of global elites while distracting the faithful from the true sources of human misery: sin, apostasy, and the loss of the true Faith.
The Heavens Declare the Glory of God — But Not to the Neo-Church
The usurper speaks of “contemplating the heavens” as an invitation “to see our fears and failings in the light of God’s immensity.” He speaks of the night sky as “one of the last truly universal sources of joy in our divided world.” He laments that “man-made light has blinded us to the lights God has placed in the heavens.”
These are beautiful sentiments — in the abstract. But they are deployed here in the service of a system that has blinded the faithful to the light of Christ far more effectively than any light pollution ever could. The conciar sect has destroyed the traditional liturgy, the supreme vehicle through which the faithful encounter the transcendent God. It has replaced the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass with a Protestantized memorial meal. It has filled its seminaries with modernists, its parishes with heretics, and its altars with sacrilege. And now the usurper laments that man cannot see the stars?
The Psalmist declares: “The heavens shew forth the glory of God, and the firmament declareth the work of his hands” (Psalm 18:2). But the Church has always taught that the natural knowledge of God available through creation is insufficient for salvation. As the Council of Vatican I taught in Dei Filius, divine revelation is necessary because “God, from the beginning of creation, manifested Himself to our first parents” but also because “the natural light of reason is insufficient to know with certainty, in a way free from all error, the truths necessary for salvation.” The usurper’s address reduces the relationship between faith and science to a vague naturalism in which gazing at the stars becomes a substitute for the supernatural life of grace.
The Incarnation as Afterthought: A Revealing Omission
The article notes that “in conclusion, Pope Leo XIV urged the faithful to never lose sight that the Christian religion is based on the Incarnation, since God made Himself known through His Creation and sent His only Son to redeem it.”
The Incarnation is mentioned only in the conclusion — as an afterthought, a theological footnote appended to an address that is fundamentally about science, environmentalism, and the “universal joy” of stargazing. This is not accidental. The conciar sect’s entire program is built on the marginalization of the supernatural. When the Incarnation is mentioned, it is stripped of its dogmatic content — the hypostatic union, the redemptive sacrifice, the necessity of the Church as the sole ark of salvation — and reduced to a vague affirmation that “God made Himself known through His Creation.”
This is the heresy of semi-rationalism condemned by Pius IX in the Syllabus, Proposition 2: “All action of God upon man and the world is to be denied,” and Proposition 11: “The Church not only ought never to pass judgment on philosophy, but ought to tolerate the errors of philosophy, leaving it to correct itself.” The usurper’s address does not judge science by the standard of divine revelation; it places them on the same plane, as complementary paths to the same vague “God” — a God who is not the God of Catholic dogma but the god of liberal Protestantism, the god of the United Nations, the god of the New World Order.
The Vatican Observatory: A Monument to Conciliar Apostasy
The Vatican Observatory itself, under the direction of the conciar sect, has become a symbol of the neo-church’s capitulation to the spirit of the age. Its telescopes are described as “places where the glory of God’s Creation is encountered with reverence, depth, and joy” — but this “reverence” is not the reverence of the Catholic liturgy, which offers to God a sacrifice of infinite value. It is the reverence of natural religion, of pantheism, of the heresy condemned by St. Pius X in Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907), where he described the modernist error of reducing religion to “a certain sentiment born of the heart” rather than to the objective truths of divine revelation.
The “summer schools and workshops” mentioned in the article are not schools of Catholic theology. They are schools of secular astronomy, dressed up in Catholic language to give the appearance of continuity with the Church’s tradition. But the tradition of the Church is not the tradition of Galileo — it is the tradition of the Council of Trent, of the First Vatican Council, of the Syllabus of Errors, of Quas Primas. It is the tradition that teaches that “the Church is not a true and perfect society, entirely free — nor is she endowed with proper and perpetual rights of her own, conferred upon her by her Divine Founder” is a condemned error (Syllabus, Proposition 19), and that “the Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization” is likewise condemned (Syllabus, Proposition 80).
The Restless Longing for God — Redirected From the Sacraments to the Stars
The usurper’s final flourish — “The hunger to understand Creation more fully is nothing less than a reflection of that restless longing for God, which lies at the heart of every human soul” — is perhaps the most revealing statement in the entire address. St. Augustine wrote: “Thou hast made us for Thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee” (Confessiones, I.1). But for St. Augustine, this rest is found in the sacramental life of the Church, in the grace of the Holy Spirit, in the Eucharist, in the forgiveness of sins through the sacrament of penance.
For the usurper, this “restless longing” is redirected toward the study of creation — toward science, toward astronomy, toward the natural world. This is not Catholic theology. It is the theology of the Enlightenment, of Rousseau, of the liberal Protestants who reduced Christianity to a system of natural morality. It is the theology that Pius IX condemned in the Syllabus, Proposition 58: “No other forces are to be recognized except those which reside in matter, and 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 conciliar sect has spent six decades redirecting the faithful’s longing for God away from the sacraments and toward the world — toward social justice, toward environmentalism, toward interfaith dialogue, toward science. The usurper’s address is simply the latest iteration of this program: a systematic effort to replace the supernatural with the natural, the divine with the human, the eternal with the temporal.
Conclusion: The Abomination of Desolation Speaks From the Holy Place
The address delivered by the usurper Robert Prevost to the Vatican Observatory Foundation is not a Catholic document. It is a document of the conciliar sect — a sect that has occupied the Vatican since 1958 and has used its structures to advance a program of apostasy, indifferentism, and naturalism. The address contains no mention of the Most Holy Trinity, no mention of the necessity of baptism, no mention of the reality of sin and the need for repentance, no mention of the Last Things — death, judgment, heaven, and hell. It contains no mention of the Church’s infallible teaching on the relationship between faith and reason, no mention of the errors condemned by the Syllabus, no mention of the social reign of Christ the King.
Instead, it offers us the idolatry of science, the gospel of environmentalism, and the naturalistic pantheism of the New World Order. It is, in every meaningful sense, an address that could have been delivered by any liberal Protestant minister or United Nations official — dressed up in the trappings of the papacy to give it an authority it does not possess.
The true Church — the Church of all ages, the Church that endures in the faithful who profess the integral Catholic faith — does not need telescopes to find God. She has the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the sacraments, the infallible Magisterium, and the promise of Christ: “I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world” (Matthew 28:20). The usurper’s address is not a sign of the Church’s vitality. It is a sign of the depth of the apostasy that has consumed the structures occupying the Vatican — and a call to all faithful Catholics to reject the conciar sect and return to the immutable Tradition of the Church.
Source:
Pope to Vatican Observatory: Church embraces science to find God in Creation (vaticannews.va)
Date: 11.05.2026