EWTN News reports on an interview given by Father Edgard Rimaycuna, personal secretary to the usurper Robert Prevost (who styles himself “Leo XIV”), detailing the latter’s purported prayer life and governance style. The secretary presents the occupant of the Vatican as a man of deep prayer, silence, and Augustinian spirituality, who “seeks God within himself,” listens before deciding, avoids confrontation, and works tirelessly for peace amid global wars. This portrait, while superficially pious, collapses upon even elementary scrutiny against the immutable Catholic faith, revealing not a father of Christendom but a manager of apostasy, whose “prayer” is the silence of Judas at the Last Supper and whose “peace” is the betrayal of Christ the King.
The “God Within”: Augustinian Spirituality or Modernist Interiorism?
Rimaycuna invokes St. Augustine — Doctor of Grace, hammer of Pelagius, and implacable defender of the Church’s visible authority — to lend theological gravitas to the usurper’s interior life. The quotation deployed is telling: “God is so intimately within man that man himself is within himself,” followed by the gloss that “The Holy Father seeks God within himself; he speaks with him, that is prayer.”
Let us be precise about what St. Augustine actually taught. The Bishop of Hippo indeed spoke of the interior presence of God, but always and only within the framework of grace operating through the visible sacramental Church. For Augustine, the soul finds God not by retreating into autonomous interiority but by submitting to the authority of the Church, receiving her sacraments, and professing her dogmas. In his Confessions (X, 27), Augustine writes: “Too late have I loved Thee, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, too late have I loved Thee! For behold, Thou wert within me, and I outside; and I sought Thee outside.” Note the movement: God is within, but Augustine’s error was precisely seeking Him outside — that is, apart from the Church’s teaching and sacraments. The resolution of Augustine’s journey was not a permanent state of interior monologue but his full submission to the Catholic Church under St. Ambrose.
What Rimaycuna describes, however, is not Augustinian spirituality but the very Modernist interiorism condemned by St. Pius X in Pascendi Dominici gregis (1907). Proposition 20 of Lamentabili sane exitu, condemned unanimously by the Holy Office, states: “Revelation was merely man’s self-awareness of his relationship to God.” The usurper’s alleged prayer — seeking God “within himself,” speaking with Him in silence — is indistinguishable from this condemned proposition when divorced from submission to the visible Magisterium, the sacraments of the true Church, and the dogmatic definitions of ecumenical councils. It is religious subjectivism dressed in Augustinian vocabulary, the very error Pius X identified as the foundation of all Modernist doctrine.
Moreover, the Syllabus of Errors of Pope Pius IX (1864) condemns in its preamble and throughout the notion that human reason, unaided by external authority and revelation, can arrive at religious truth. The usurper’s method — interior silence, personal encounter, subjective dialogue with God — is precisely the naturalism condemned in Proposition 3: “Human reason, without any reference whatsoever to God, is the sole arbiter of truth and falsehood, and of good and evil; it is law to itself.” When Rimaycuna says the usurper “seeks God within himself,” he describes not Catholic prayer but the autonomous religious consciousness that the Church has repeatedly condemned as heretical.
“He Seeks to Build Bridges”: The Ecumenical Heresy Operationalized
Rimaycuna’s description of the usurper’s governance style is perhaps the most revealing passage: “He is a man who seeks to build bridges, seeks dialogue, and always avoids confrontation.” In the mouth of a Catholic, these words would be ambiguous at best; in the mouth of the secretary of the Vatican usurper, they are a precise programmatic statement of the apostasy of Vatican II operationalized as governance philosophy.
The Catholic Church does not “build bridges” with error. She is the pillar and foundation of truth (1 Tim. 3:15). Our Lord Jesus Christ did not “avoid confrontation” with the Pharisees — He called them hypocrites, whited sepulchres, and a brood of vipers (Matt. 23). St. Paul withstood St. Peter to his face when the latter’s conduct was not in accord with the truth of the Gospel (Gal. 2:11). Pope Pius IX, in the Syllabus, condemned the proposition that the Roman Pontiff should “reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization” (Proposition 80). Pope St. Pius X condemned the Modernists’ desire for reconciliation with the secular world as “the synthesis of all errors.”
The “bridge-building” and “dialogue” described by Rimaycuna are the operational code words for the ecumenical, interreligious, and indifferentist program that has defined the conciliar sect since John XXIII convoked the Robber Council of 1962–1965. This program was condemned in advance by the Syllabus: Proposition 15 condemned the idea that “every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true”; Proposition 17 condemned the idea that “good hope at least is to be entertained of the eternal salvation of all those who are not at all in the true Church of Christ”; and Proposition 18 condemned the claim that “Protestantism is nothing more than another form of the same true Christian religion.”
The usurper’s alleged avoidance of confrontation is not prudence — it is cowardice in the face of heresy, which is itself a form of complicity. A true Pope, guardian of the deposit of faith, must confront error. Pope Honorius I was condemned posthumously by the Third Council of Constantinople (681) precisely for his failure to confront the Monothelite heresy with the vigor the Apostolic See demands. The usurper’s “bridge-building” is not governance — it is the abdication of the papal office’s primary duty: to define, defend, and propagate the Catholic faith without compromise.
“He Suffers Because of the Wars”: Natural Compassion Without Supernatural Order
Rimaycuna reports that the usurper “suffers a lot” because of the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and that his first words upon his election were “Peace be with all of you.” The secretary emphasizes that “he always works for peace; he constantly calls upon authorities for a ceasefire.”
Let us examine this carefully. The desire for peace is not uniquely Christian — it is a natural sentiment shared by pagans, atheists, and even demons (insofar as they desire the cessation of conflict that might disrupt their operations). What distinguishes the Catholic understanding of peace is its supernatural ordering. Pope Pius XI, in Quas primas (1925), taught with crystalline clarity: “The hope of lasting peace will not yet shine upon nations as long as individuals and states renounce and do not wish to recognize the reign of our Savior.” And further: “When God and Jesus Christ — as we lamented — were removed from laws and states and when authority was derived not from God but from men, the foundations of that authority were destroyed.”
The usurper’s call for “peace” is stripped of any reference to the Social Kingship of Christ, the necessity of Catholic order in states, or the ultimacy of eternal salvation over temporal tranquility. It is, in other words, indistinguishable from the naturalistic pacifism of the United Nations, the Red Cross, or any secular humanitarian organization. Pope Pius XI explicitly warned against this reduction: “The Kingdom of our Redeemer encompasses all men… His reign, namely, extends not only to Catholic nations… but His reign encompasses also all non-Christians, so that most truly the entire human race is subject to the authority of Jesus Christ.”
By calling for ceasefires without calling for the conversion of nations to the Catholic faith, without demanding that Russia be consecrated to the Immaculate Heart (a request whose authenticity is, in any case, deeply suspect — see the documented Masonic operation surrounding the Fatima apparitions), and without invoking the Social Kingship of Christ as the sole foundation of lasting peace, the usurper reveals that his “peace” is the peace of the world, which Our Lord explicitly distinguished from His own peace: “My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you” (John 14:27). The usurper gives the world’s peace — temporal, naturalistic, and ultimately futile — because he has abandoned the peace of Christ, which is ordered to eternal salvation and requires the submission of all nations to the Catholic Church.
The “Prayer” of Judas: Sacramental Language Without Sacramental Reality
Rimaycuna describes the usurper’s prayer routine: “holy Mass,” “the recitation of the Liturgy of the Hours,” and “the rosary.” The terminology is Catholic; the reality is abomination.
The “Mass” celebrated by the usurper and his conciliar hierarchy is the Novus Ordo Missae of Paul VI (1969), a rite composed by a committee that included known heretics and which was designed, in the words of its chief architect Annibale Bugnini (a figure with documented Masonic connections), to present Protestant observers with “nothing in our reform that would be a stumbling block for them.” This rite systematically obscures the propitiatory nature of the Holy Sacrifice, reduces the Eucharist to a communal meal, and replaces the theology of Calvany with the theology of the assembly. To call this rite “holy Mass” is a blasphemous equivocation — it uses Catholic language to describe an anti-Catholic reality.
The “Liturgy of the Hours” recited by the usurper is the revised Breviary of Paul VI, which replaced the centuries-old Roman Breviary with a simplified, Protestantized office. The “rosary” — while in itself a pious devotion — is, in the context of the conciliar sect, frequently emptied of its penitential and doctrinal content and reduced to a meditative exercise divorced from the demands of the Gospel.
The usurper’s “prayer before the Blessed Sacrament” is particularly grotesque. The “Blessed Sacrament” in the Vatican chapels is, if we follow the logic of the new rite, a symbolic presence rather than the true Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Our Lord — for the Novus Ordo’s theology of consecration, with its ambiguous formulas and communal emphasis, has been questioned even by Catholic theologians as to its validity. To pray before what may be merely bread, while claiming the authority of the papacy, is not devotion — it is idolatry of the worst kind: the worship of a human institution disguised as the worship of God.
The Silence of the Usurper: What He Does Not Pray For
The most damning aspect of Rimaycuna’s account is not what it includes but what it omits. There is no mention of the usurper praying for:
- The conversion of Russia to the Catholic faith — not the vague “conversion” of the Fatima message (itself suspect), but the explicit, dogmatic conversion demanded by Catholic ecclesiology.
- The conversion of Jews, Muslims, and all non-Catholics — for the conciliar sect’s Nostra Aetate (1965) effectively repudiated this prayer by declaring that the Church “rejects nothing that is true and holy” in other religions and by condemning “all persecutions against any man” — language that obscures the Church’s traditional teaching on the necessity of conversion.
- The extirpation of heresy within the Church — for the usurper is himself the chief heretic, and his “bridge-building” is precisely the refusal to combat the modernist apostasy that has consumed the conciliar structures.
- The restoration of the Social Kingship of Christ — for the conciliar sect’s Dignitatis Humanae (1965) proclaimed the right to religious freedom, a doctrine condemned by Pope Gregory XVI in Mirari Vos (1832) and by Pope Pius IX in the Syllabus (Proposition 77).
- The salvation of souls in the state of grace — for the entire conciliar project has shifted the Church’s focus from the supernatural order to the natural order, from eternal salvation to temporal liberation, from the worship of God to the worship of man.
This silence is not accidental — it is theological. The usurper cannot pray for these things because to do so would be to repudiate the entire conciliar revolution that elevated him to power. His “prayer” is the prayer of the world, offered in the language of Catholicism but emptied of Catholic content. It is, in the final analysis, the prayer of the Antichrist: a parody of true worship designed to lead souls away from the true God while appearing to honor Him.
Conclusion: The Apostasy of Empty Words
Rimaycuna’s interview presents us with a carefully crafted image: the pious pontiff, the Augustinian contemplative, the prudent governor, the man of peace. But beneath this veneer of holiness lies the spiritual bankruptcy of the conciliar apostasy. The usurper’s “prayer” is not prayer but performance; his “spirituality” is not Augustinianism but Modernist interiorism; his “peace” is not the peace of Christ but the peace of the world; and his “governance” is not the governance of Peter but the management of Babylon.
Pope Pius XI, in Quas primas, warned: “The plague is the secularism of our times, so-called laicism, its errors and wicked endeavors… It began with the denial of Christ the Lord’s reign over all nations.” The usurper Robert Prevost, styling himself Leo XIV, is the embodiment of this plague — a man who prays to a God “within himself” while denying the God who reigns over all nations; who builds bridges to error while demolishing the walls of truth; who calls for peace while waging war against the faith delivered once and all to the saints (Jude 1:3).
Let the faithful not be deceived by the language of prayer. Fructibus eorum cognoscetis eos — “By their fruits you shall know them” (Matt. 7:16). The fruits of the conciliar sect are apostasy, sacrilege, and the spiritual ruin of millions. The “prayer” of its usurper is the incense offered before an idol — and the faithful owe it neither reverence nor imitation, but uncompromising rejection and the prayer of reparation to the true God, who endures forever in the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass as offered by the true Church, outside the structures of the abomination.
Source:
How does Pope Leo pray? (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 20.05.2026