EWTN News portal reports that on May 23, 2026, the usurper Robert Prevost, styling himself “Pope Leo XIV,” visited the so-called “Terra dei Fuochi” (Land of Fires) near Naples, Italy — a region devastated by decades of illegal toxic waste dumping orchestrated by organized crime. The visit, the portal notes, marked the 11th anniversary of the late antipope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’. Prevost declared that “the cry of creation and of the poor among you has been felt most dramatically due to a deadly concentration of shadowy interests and indifference toward the common good — forces that have poisoned both the natural and social environments,” adding: “It is a cry that calls for conversion!” He further stated: “We suffer because of the devastation that has compromised a marvelous ecosystem — places, histories, and memories,” and urged the faithful to respond with “a united community, in faith and in commitment.” The visit was the first by any claimant to the papacy to this afflicted region. What Prevost and the conciliar apparatus conspicuously failed to articulate — and what alone constitutes the true remedy — is that the root of all social and environmental devastation is the rejection of the Social Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ by individuals, families, and states.
The Framework of Apostasy: Laudato Si’ as Doctrinal Weapon
The most immediately striking element of this entire spectacle is the explicit invocation of Laudato Si’ as the doctrinal framework for the visit. Prevost declared: “Today we wish to fulfill Pope Francis’ desire, recognizing the great gift that the encyclical Laudato Si’ has represented for the Church’s mission in this land.” This single sentence reveals the entire architecture of the conciliar sect’s worldview: the social and spiritual mission of the Church is no longer defined by the immutable Magisterium, the Fathers of the Church, or the great encyclicals of the true Popes, but by a document issued by Jorge Mario Bergoglio — a man whose entire pontificate constituted a sustained assault on Catholic doctrine.
Laudato Si’ is not a Catholic encyclical in any meaningful sense. It is a compendium of naturalistic environmentalism, dressed in the borrowed language of St. Francis of Assisi, and animated by the spirit of the United Nations’ Agenda 2030. Its treatment of creation is fundamentally Pelagian: it places man, not God, at the center of the cosmos, and reduces the Church’s mission to that of a humanitarian NGO advocating for “planet earth.” The true Catholic position on creation is expressed with crystalline clarity by Pope Pius XI in Quas Primas: Christ the King reigns over all creation, and “His reign, namely, extends not only to Catholic nations or to those who, by receiving baptism according to law, belong to the Church, even though their erroneous opinions have led them astray or discord has separated them from love, but His reign encompasses also all non-Christians, so that most truly the entire human race is subject to the authority of Jesus Christ.” There is no “cry of creation” that is not, at its root, the cry of souls separated from their Creator and Redeemer. To speak of environmental devastation without speaking of sin, of the loss of faith, of the rejection of God’s law, and of the duty of nations to publicly confess Christ the King — is to diagnose a fever while ignoring the disease.
The Theological Vacuum: “Conversion” Without Supernatural Content
When Prevost exclaims “It is a cry that calls for conversion!” one must ask: conversion to what? In the mouth of the conciliar sect, “conversion” has been emptied of all supernatural content. It no longer means the turning of the soul from sin to grace, from the world to God, from the servitude of Satan to the liberty of the children of God through baptism and the sacramental life of the true Church. It means, at best, a vague humanitarian “responsibility” toward the environment and “the poor” — categories deliberately left undefined in Catholic terms.
The authentic Catholic understanding of conversion is expressed by the Council of Trent, which teaches that justification is “not only a remission of sins but also the sanctification and renewal of the inner man through the voluntary reception of the grace and gifts whereby an unrighteous man becomes righteous” (Session VI, Chapter VII). Conversion requires faith — not the “faith” of the conciarist sect, which is a naturalistic impulse toward “dialogue” and “encounter” — but fides formata caritate, faith formed by charity, which is itself a supernatural gift of God, received and nourished through the sacraments of the true Church. There is no mention of baptism, of confession, of the Most Holy Eucharist, of prayer, of penance, of the invocation of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the saints. The “conversion” of which Prevost speaks is a conversion to the world, not a conversion from it.
The Omission of Sin and the Social Kingship of Christ
The most damning silence in Prevost’s discourse — and in the entire coverage of this event — concerns the root cause of the “Land of Fires” catastrophe. Bishop Antonio Di Donna recounted that the environmental tragedy began in the 1980s when industrialists in northern Italy needed to dispose of toxic waste, and hundreds of thousands of tons were dumped in the region by organized crime. The result was the collapse of the agricultural industry and a public health crisis with elevated cancer rates.
Now, from the perspective of integral Catholic doctrine, what is the cause of such organized, systematic evil? It is not merely “shadowy interests” or “indifference toward the common good,” as Prevost vapidly characterizes it. It is the mortal sin of greed — avaritia — operating within a society that has progressively abandoned the moral law of God. It is the fruit of a civilization that has expelled Christ the King from its laws, its institutions, and its public life. Pope Pius XI, in Quas Primas, identified the root of all social calamity with prophetic precision: “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, because the main reason why some have the right to command and others have the duty to obey was removed.”
The “Land of Fires” is not an anomaly; it is the logical consequence of a society that has embraced the errors condemned by Pope Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors: the separation of Church and State (error 55), the denial of the Church’s right to exercise authority in temporal matters (error 24), and the reduction of religion to the private sphere. When the State derives its authority not from God but from men — as Pius IX condemned in error 39: “The State, as being the origin and source of all rights, is endowed with a certain right not circumscribed by any limits” — then the result is precisely the lawlessness, corruption, and exploitation on display in the Terra dei Fuochi. Organized crime does not flourish in a vacuum; it flourishes where the law of God is publicly repudiated and the law of man is corrupt.
The Cult of “The Poor” Without the Supernatural Order
Prevost’s lament for “the cry of creation and the poor” places him squarely within the tradition of liberation theology and the conciarist cult of “the poor” that has infected the post-conciliar sect since the 1960s. This is not the Catholic preferential option for the poor — which is always ordered toward the salvation of souls and the supernatural end of man — but a naturalistic, materialistic concern that reduces human dignity to economic and environmental categories.
The true Catholic position is that the poor are to be assisted propter Deum, for the sake of God, and that the greatest poverty is not material destitution but the state of mortal sin, which deprives the soul of sanctifying grace and renders it an enemy of God. Pope Leo XIII, in Rerum Novarum, taught that the remedy for social injustice is not the redistribution of wealth or environmental activism, but the restoration of Christian morals, the recognition of the rights of God, and the just ordering of society according to the principles of natural and divine law. The conciarist invocation of “the poor” without reference to these principles is not charity but ideology — the ideology of the Modernists, whom St. Pius X condemned in Pascendi Dominici Gregis as those who “place the foundation of religious philosophy in that doctrine which is commonly called Agnosticism” and who reduce religion to a merely human phenomenon.
The Linguistic Symptom: Bureaucratic Humanitarianism as Theological Language
A careful analysis of Prevost’s vocabulary reveals the extent to which the conciarist sect has abandoned the language of Catholic theology in favor of the bureaucratic idiom of international humanitarian organizations. He speaks of “shadowy interests,” “the common good,” “responsibility,” “commitment,” “the pursuit of justice,” and “a united community, in faith and in commitment.” This is the language of the United Nations, of the European Union, of the World Economic Forum — not of the Catholic Church.
The true Popes spoke a different language. Pius IX spoke of the “errors having reference to modern liberalism” and condemned the proposition that “the Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization” (error 80). St. Pius X spoke of the “synthesis of all errors” that is Modernism, and of the duty of the Magisterium to “condemn and reject” the propositions of the Modernists. Pius XI spoke of the “secularism of our times, so-called laicism, its errors and wicked endeavors” and of the duty of states to “publicly honor Christ and obey Him.” Prevost speaks none of this. His language is the language of the world, and it reveals the spirit that animates him.
The Symptomatic Level: A Visit That Confirms the Apostasy
This visit to the Land of Fires is not an isolated event; it is a symptom of the systemic apostasy of the conciarist sect. Every element of the spectacle confirms the analysis: the invocation of Laudato Si’ as doctrinal framework; the absence of any mention of sin, of the sacraments, of the Social Kingship of Christ, of the duty of the State to publicly confess the Catholic faith; the reduction of the Church’s mission to environmental and humanitarian activism; the adoption of the language of international organizations; the cult of “the poor” and “creation” divorced from supernatural theology.
The true Church — the Church of all ages, the Church that endures in the faithful who profess the integral Catholic faith — has the answer to the devastation of the Land of Fires, and to every other social and environmental catastrophe: the restoration of the Social Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ over individuals, families, and nations. As Pius XI taught: “If men were ever to recognize Christ’s royal authority over themselves, both privately and publicly, then unheard-of blessings would flow upon the whole society, such as due freedom, order, and tranquility, and concord and peace.” Until that recognition is effected — until the nations return to obedience to the law of God as taught by the true Church — there will be more Lands of Fires, more toxic waste, more cancer, more despair. And the conciarist sect, with its naturalistic humanitarianism and its empty invocations of “conversion” and “responsibility,” will continue to offer palliatives while the disease progresses unto death.
The faithful must reject this counterfeit mercy. The cry of the poor and of creation is indeed heard — but it is heard by the true Church, which alone possesses the remedy: the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the sacraments, the preaching of the Gospel, and the recognition of Christ the King. Everything else is the work of the “abomination of desolation standing in the holy place” (Matt. 24:15).
Source:
In Italy’s ‘Land of Fires,’ Pope Leo XIV laments ‘the cry of creation and the poor’ (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 23.05.2026