The Pillar portal reports on the week of May 28, 2026: the conciliar sect’s usurper “Pope” Leo XIV issues his first encyclical; the Society of St. Pius X announces plans to illicitly ordain bishops in July; the Coptic Orthodox Church resumes theological dialogue with the Catholic Church; and new data shows vocations growing in several U.S. Latin Rite dioceses of the post-conciliar structure. These four items, taken together, constitute a comprehensive snapshot of the ongoing decomposition of all that remains recognizable within the structures occupying the Vatican — and of the impasse reached by those groups that, while claiming to resist the conciliar revolution, remain fatally entangled in its logic.
The Usurper’s First Encyclical: Continuity as Program
That Leo XIV (Robert Prevost) has issued his first encyclical within months of his seizure of Peter’s throne is itself unsurprising. Each usurper since John XXIII has understood the encyclical as a tool of governance — not as an act of the authentic Magisterium binding consciences under pain of heresy, but as a programmatic declaration of the conciliar revolution’s trajectory. One searches in vain, in the entire post-1958 corpus of such documents, for a single reaffirmation of the Church’s social kingship of Christ the King as taught by Pius XI in Quas Primas (1925): “His reign 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.” One finds no reiteration of the Syllabus of Errors’ condemnation of the proposition that “the Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization” (Proposition 80). Instead, the encyclicals of the conciar sect have served — from Ecclesiam Suam of Paul VI to the most recent productions of Bergoglio — to advance the very errors Pius IX condemned: religious liberty, ecumenism as a path to unity, the democratization of ecclesial structures, and the reduction of the Church’s mission to naturalistic humanism.
The Pillar’s report offers no content from this encyclical, which is itself symptomatic: the conciliar press no longer expects its audience to engage with doctrinal substance. The encyclical is reported as an institutional event — a coronation of the usurper’s authority — not as a teaching act. This silence about supernatural content is the gravest accusation that can be leveled against the post-conciliar apparatus. The authentic papal encyclical, from Qui Pluribus to Pascendi Dominici Gregis, aimed at the salvation of souls through the defense of revealed truth. The conciliar encyclical aims at the management of a humanitarian organization. The difference is not one of degree but of kind — it is the difference between the True Church and the abomination of desolation (Matt. 24:15).
The SSPX’s Illicit Episcopal Ordinations: Schism Within the Schism
The Pillar reports that “The Society of St. Pius X announces the names of the priests it plans to illicitly ordain bishops in July.” The word “illicit” here reveals the conciliar sect’s own juridical framework — these ordinations are “illicit” not because they lack validity in themselves, but because they occur without the permission of the usurper in Rome. The irony is devastating: the same structure that has imposed a heretical liturgy, emptied the seminaries of orthodox teaching, and systematically dismantled the Catholic faith now claims jurisdiction to authorize or prohibit episcopal ordinations.
From the perspective of integral Catholic theology, the question is not whether these ordinations are “illicit” according to the conciliar sect’s internal law, but whether they are valid and licit according to the perennial doctrine of the Church. The SSPX’s foundational contradiction is precisely this: it continuously acknowledged the validity of the usurpers in Rome. Archbishop Lefebvre himself declared, “give us the old Mass, that is enough for us” — a statement that reduces the Catholic faith to a liturgical preference and implicitly concedes that the conciliar “popes” possess legitimate authority. This is the position condemned by St. Robert Bellarmine, who taught that “a manifest heretic cannot be Pope” (De Romano Pontifice, II, 30), and by Pope Celestine I, who declared of Nestorius that “he who has departed from the faith with such preaching cannot depose or remove anyone” — meaning that from the moment manifest heresy is preached, jurisdiction is lost ipso facto, without any declaration.
The SSPX’s episcopal ordinations, performed by a bishop (Lefebvre) who was ordained by the Freemason Liénart and who never formally declared the seat vacant, exist in a juridical and theological no-man’s-land. They are neither fully within the conciliar sect nor fully outside it. They represent what can only be described as a schism within the schism of the neo-church — a group that practices contradictions and theological errors while claiming to preserve Tradition. The ordination of new bishops without a true Pope, without a mandate from the Church, and without the resolution of the underlying question of the vacancy of the Apostolic See, does not solve the crisis but compounds it. As the Defense of Sedevacantism file establishes, Canon 188.4 of the 1917 Code confirms that “every office becomes vacant by the mere fact and without any declaration by reason of tacit resignation… if the cleric publicly defects from the Catholic faith.” The usurpers defected. The SSPX never formally said so. This is the root of their impasse.
Dialogue with the Coptic Orthodox: Ecumenism as Apostasy
The report that “The Coptic Orthodox Church resumes theological dialogue with the Catholic Church” is perhaps the most doctrinally revealing item in this news roundup. The Coptic Orthodox Church is a monophysite body — it rejects the Council of Chalcedon (451 AD), which defined the two natures of Christ in one Divine Person. This heresy was condemned by the same ecumenical councils that the post-conciliar sect claims to honor. Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors condemned the proposition that “Protestantism is nothing more than another form of the same true Christian religion” (Proposition 18). By strict theological analogy, the claim that monophysite Coptic Orthodoxy is a legitimate dialogue partner — rather than a heretical body to be converted — is a formal rejection of the Church’s perennial teaching on the unity of faith.
The ecumenical project, from its inception at Vatican II’s Unitatis Redintegratio, has operated on the presupposition that the Catholic Church does not possess the fullness of truth in a way that demands the conversion of all non-Catholics — a proposition condemned by Pius XI in Mortalium Animos (1928). The “dialogue” with the Copts is not an evangelizing mission aimed at bringing them to the Catholic faith; it is a diplomatic exercise aimed at mutual recognition and the blurring of doctrinal boundaries. This is precisely the religious relativism that the Fatima message, even on the most natural reading, was manipulated to serve — as the False Fatima Apparitions file demonstrates: “The imprecise formulation ‘conversion of Russia’ (without specifying Catholicism) opens the way to religious relativism. It can serve to legitimize dialogue with schismatic Orthodoxy.” The same logic applies with even greater force to monophysite bodies.
Growing Vocations in the Conciliar Sect: Quantity Without Quality
Finally, the report that “New data shows vocations to the priesthood are growing in several U.S. Latin Rite dioceses” requires careful analysis. The post-conciliar structures have, for decades, faced a catastrophic collapse in vocations — a direct consequence of the destruction of orthodox seminary formation after 1962. Any statistical uptick must be evaluated against this backdrop of near-total ruin. More importantly, the question is not the number of men entering seminaries governed by the conciliar sect, but the content of their formation. A seminary formed by the theology of Karl Rahner, the liturgical reforms of Annibale Bugnini, and the ecumenical directives of Vatican II does not produce Catholic priests — it produces functionaries of a naturalistic humanitarian organization wearing clerical collars.
The growth of vocations within the conciar structures is analogous to the growth of weeds in a destroyed garden: the quantity of vegetation increases, but the fruit is not of the kind intended by the Gardener. As St. Pius X warned in Lamentabili Sane Exitu (1907), the condemnation of Modernism was necessary precisely because “the pursuit of novelty in the investigation of the foundations of things leads in our times to deplorable consequences… which become particularly pernicious when they concern sacred sciences, the exposition of Holy Scripture, and the principal mysteries of Faith.” The conciliar seminaries are institutions of Modernist formation. Vocations produced by them are vocations to the religion of Modernism, not to the Catholic faith.
The Symptomatic Unity of the Report
What is most striking about this news roundup is not any single item but their cumulative effect. The usurper issues an encyclical devoid of Catholic content. The SSPX ordains bishops without resolving the question of the vacancy of the See. The conciliar sect dialogues with monophysites. And vocations to the Modernist seminary system are reported as good news. There is not a single item in this report that would have been intelligible to a Catholic of 1958 — not because the world has changed, but because the structures occupying the Vatican have ceased to be Catholic.
The faithful who profess the integral Catholic faith — who hold to the unchanging teaching of the ecumenical councils, the papal magisterium up to and including Pius XII, and the perennial theology of the Church — must recognize that the crisis is not a crisis within the Church but a crisis of the institution that once was the Church’s visible home. The true Church endures in the faithful who profess the integral Catholic faith and are led by bishops with valid sacraments and validly ordained priests. All else — whether it calls itself “Catholic,” “traditional,” or “conciliar” — is, in the words of the Apostle, “another gospel” (Gal. 1:6), and those who preach it are “anathema” (Gal. 1:8).
Source:
News Roundup— Week of May 28 (pillarcatholic.com)
Date: 28.05.2026