National Catholic Register portal (May 15, 2026) reports that Archbishop Bernard Hebda of Saint Paul and Minneapolis released a pastoral letter titled “Only One Thing Is Necessary: How Catholic Families Can Strive To Be United in This Life and the Next,” dated May 13 — the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima and the tenth anniversary of his installation. Hebda quotes St. John Paul II on the family as “the first and vital cell of society,” outlines modern challenges such as declining religious practice, fatherlessness, mental illness, screen addiction, and falling birthrates, and urges families not to lose heart: “Dear families, please take heart. You are not alone. The Church journeys with you, the Church loves you, and the Church needs you!” He invokes the Ulma family beatified by the antipope Francis in 2023, Saints Louis and Zélie Martin, and ends with a prayer composed by Francis to the Holy Family of Nazareth. The letter is to be read and discussed across the archdiocese over the coming year as a pastoral priority. This document is a textbook example of how the conciliar sect — the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place — systematically reduces the supernatural life of grace to a program of naturalistic sentimentalism, all while invoking the names of saints and Marian feasts it has no right to claim.
The Feast of Fatima: An Unwitting Confession of Contradiction
The very date chosen for the release of this pastoral letter — May 13, the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima — is itself a revelation of the profound dishonesty at the heart of the conciliar enterprise. As has been thoroughly documented, the Fatima apparitions bear all the hallmarks of a Masonic psychological operation against the Church: the symbolism of the dates (1717, the founding of Freemasonry; 1917, the apparitions; 2017, the canonization of the visionaries by the antipope Francis), the ritualistic 200-year cycles, the “Miracle of the Sun” as a naturally explicable optical phenomenon combined with mass autosuggestion, and the name “Fatima” itself as a symbol of Christian-Islamic syncretism. The message is theologically contradictory — conditional promises alongside guarantees of triumph — and serves to divert attention from the true danger identified by St. Pius X in *Pascendi Dominici gregis* and *Lamentabili sane exitu*: modernist apostasy within the Church itself. That a conciliar “archbishop” would deliberately release his letter on this date, invoking a suspect apparition, demonstrates either his ignorance of the true nature of the crisis or his complicity in the diversion.
The Ulma Family: Beatification as Ideological Instrument
Hebda invokes the “Ulma family” — correctly, the Ulman family — beatified by the antipope Francis in 2023, as a holy example for Catholic families. This requires unflinching scrutiny. The Ulman family was killed by the Nazis in 1944 for giving refuge to Jews. While their courage is not in question, the theological criteria for beatification are absolute: one must die *in odium fidei*, in hatred of the faith, as a martyr. Death suffered for sheltering persecuted persons, however heroic, is not death for the Catholic faith *per se*. Furthermore, the unborn child could not be considered a saint, as it was not baptized — baptism being the indispensable gateway to sanctifying grace and the supernatural life. That the antipope Francis beatified this family reveals the conciliar sect’s instrumentalization of canonization as a tool of political messaging rather than a solemn judgment grounded in the unchanging theology of the Church. St. Robert Bellarmine, in *De Romano Pontifice*, is clear that a manifest heretic ceases to be pope *ipso facto* and cannot exercise any jurisdiction — including the authority to canonize saints. The beatification of the Ulman family by a usurper antipope is therefore null, void, and of no effect.
St. John Paul II: The Apostate as Authority
Perhaps the most grotesque feature of Hebda’s letter is his invocation of St. John Paul II — that is, Karol Wojtyła, the antipope John Paul II — as an authority on the family. He quotes: “The family is the first and vital cell of society. In its own way it is a living image and historical representation of the mystery of the Church. The future of the world and of the Church, therefore, passes through the family.” This is the very man who convened the Assisi gatherings of 1986 and 2002, where prayers were offered to false gods in a public act of idolatry and apostasy; who embraced the Koran and kissed it; who promulgated the *Catechism of the Catholic Church* with its heretical teachings on religious liberty; who canonized the pseudo-mystic Faustyna Kowalska, whose diary — likely ghostwritten by the crypto-Mason Sopoćko — echoes the condemned writings of Mother Kozłowska; and who, through his entire pontificate, advanced the modernist revolution condemned by St. Pius X. To cite this apostate as an authoritative teacher of Catholic doctrine is to reveal that the author of the pastoral letter operates entirely within the framework of the conciliar sect, not the Catholic Church.
The Omission of Supernatural Reality: Silence as Apostasy
The gravest accusation against this pastoral letter is not what it says, but what it systematically omits. There is no mention of the state of grace, the necessity of sanctifying grace for salvation, the reality of mortal sin, the obligation to receive the sacraments worthily, the necessity of the true Mass — the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Altar — as the center of Catholic family life, or the reality of the Last Judgment. The letter speaks of “being with Jesus” but never specifies that this means being in union with the true Church through valid sacraments, under the authority of the true Pope, and in the state of sanctifying grace. The phrase “only one thing is necessary” — drawn from Christ’s words to Martha in Luke 10:42 — is stripped of its supernatural content and reduced to a vague spiritual sentimentality. In its true Catholic sense, “the one thing necessary” is the salvation of one’s soul through faith, grace, and the sacraments of the true Church. Hebda’s letter never once raises the question: Are the sacraments available in the conciliar structures valid? Is the “Mass” celebrated in the parishes of Saint Paul and Minneapolis the true propitiatory sacrifice of Calvary, or is it the Protestantized memorial service of Paul VI’s *Novus Ordo*, which the Catholic theologian Fr. Fraternité and others have demonstrated to be theologically deficient and potentially invalid? This silence is not accidental — it is the hallmark of the modernist apostasy that has consumed the Vatican structures since the death of Pope Pius XII.
Louis and Zélie Martin: Saints Instrumentalized by the Conciliar Sect
Hebda holds up Saints Louis and Zélie Martin as “relatable models of ordinary holiness,” noting that they “made it a point to do three things very well: to love each other and their children unconditionally; to teach their children about God and the virtuous life; and to worship God at home and in the parish.” While Louis and Zélie Martin were indeed canonized saints of the true Church (canonized by the antipope Francis in 2015, but their sanctity predates and is independent of the conciliar usurpation), the manner in which Hebda presents them is revealing. He reduces their holiness to three naturalistic categories — love, education, and worship — without ever mentioning the supernatural foundations upon which their lives rested: the true Mass, the true sacraments, the true doctrine of the pre-conciliar Church. The implication, drawn from the context of the conciliar sect, is that “worshiping God” means attending the *Novus Ordo* “Mass,” receiving the conciliar “sacraments,” and participating in the life of the neo-church. This is not Catholic teaching — it is the substitution of natural virtue for supernatural grace, precisely the error condemned by the Council of Trent and the *Syllabus of Errors* of Pius IX.
“The Church Journeys With You”: Which Church?
Hebda’s exhortation to families — “Dear families, please take heart. You are not alone. The Church journeys with you, the Church loves you, and the Church needs you!” — must be subjected to the most rigorous theological examination. Which Church? The Catholic Church, which Christ founded upon Peter, which teaches with infallible authority, which offers the true sacraments, and which demands the submission of every soul to the Kingship of Christ? Or the conciliar sect — the abomination of desolation — which has abandoned the *Syllabus of Errors*, embraced religious liberty in *Dignitatis Humanae*, promulgated the apostate *Novus Ordo*, and filled its “pastoral letters” with naturalistic humanism devoid of supernatural content? The true Church, as Pope Leo XIII taught in *Immortale Dei*, is a perfect society, endowed with all the means of salvation, independent of civil authority, and demanding the public recognition of Christ the King over all nations and families. The conciliar sect is none of these things. It is, as the theological evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates, a paramasonic structure that has usurped the See of Peter and replaced the Catholic faith with the religion of man.
The Prayer of Pope Francis: Invocation of a Usurper
The letter concludes with “a prayer to the Holy Family of Nazareth composed by Pope Francis.” This is the antipope Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who has promulgated *Amoris Laetitia* with its implicit admission of public adulterers to “Communion,” who has signed the Abu Dhabi Declaration affirming the “diversity of religions” as willed by God, and who has systematically dismantled whatever remnants of Catholic practice remained in the conciliar structures. To commend a prayer composed by this usurper as the conclusion of a pastoral letter is to seal the document with the mark of the conciliar revolution. It is not a Catholic prayer offered by a Catholic authority — it is the utterance of a manifest heretic who, by the teaching of St. Robert Bellarmine, St. Cyprian, St. Ambrose, St. Jerome, and Pope Celestine I regarding Nestorius, has already ceased to be pope and head by the very fact of his manifest heresy, *ipso facto*, before any declaration by the Church.
The Primacy of Christ the King: The Missing Foundation
The entire pastoral letter is constructed without any reference to the doctrine of the Social Kingship of Christ — the teaching solemnly defined by Pope Pius XI in the encyclical *Quas Primas* (1925), which established the Feast of Christ the King. Pius XI taught, drawing on the universal testimony of Scripture and Tradition, that Christ the Man possesses a threefold authority — legislative, judicial, and executive — over all men, all families, and all states. “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 rulers and families to publicly honor Christ and obey Him is absolute. Hebda’s letter, by contrast, treats the family as a natural institution that the “Church” (i.e., the conciliar sect) merely “supports” — not as a supernatural cell of the Mystical Body that owes absolute submission to Christ the King and is governed by the authority of His true Church. This omission is not a mere oversight — it is a direct contradiction of Catholic social teaching and a manifestation of the very secularism that Pius XI identified as “the plague that poisons human society.”
Conclusion: The One Thing That Is Truly Necessary
The pastoral letter of “Archbishop” Hebda, when subjected to the light of integral Catholic teaching, reveals itself as a document of the conciliar apostasy. It invokes a suspect Marian apparition, quotes an apostate antipope, holds up a dubiously beatified family, omits every supernatural reality of the Catholic faith, and concludes with the prayer of a manifest heretic. It is, in sum, a perfect specimen of the modernist enterprise: naturalistic, sentimental, and utterly devoid of the supernatural life of grace.
The one thing that is truly necessary — the *unum necessarium* of Christ’s own words — is not the vague “being with Jesus” of Hebda’s letter. It is the salvation of one’s soul through the true faith, the true sacraments, and the true Church — the Catholic Church as she existed before the modernist usurpation, as she will endure in the faithful who profess the integral Catholic faith and are guided by bishops with valid orders and priests validly ordained. Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus — outside the Church there is no salvation. And the Church is not the conciliar sect. The Church is not the abomination of desolation. The Church is the Ark of Salvation, and those who wish to be saved must find her — even if she is hidden, persecuted, and reduced to a remnant. That is the one thing necessary.
Source:
Archbishop Hebda Issues Pastoral Letter Reminding Families That ‘Only One Thing Is Necessary’ (ncregister.com)
Date: 15.05.2026