National Catholic Register portal reports that the canonization cause for Sister Blandina Segale, the so-called “Fastest Nun in the West,” has cleared the theological review at the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, with Vatican theologians unanimously voting to advance her cause. Archbishop John Wester of Santa Fe called it a “very historical moment,” while petitioner Allen Sanchez claimed the theologians’ deliberation was not a debate but a “celebration.” The article presents Segale as a model of faith, courage, and charity, highlighting her work in schools, orphanages, and hospitals in the American Southwest, her intervention against lynch mobs, and her notorious friendship with the murderer William Bonney, known as “Billy the Kid.” If the antipope Leo XIV approves, she will be declared “Venerable,” requiring one more miracle for beatification — though Sanchez claims to have “58 of them.” This entire spectacle is yet another manifestation of the conciliar sect’s systematic manufacture of false saints to legitimize its apostate regime, substituting naturalistic humanitarianism for the supernatural virtue of sanctity and reducing the Church’s canonization process to a bureaucratic rubber stamp for its progressive agenda.
The Canonization Factory: How the Conciliar Sect Manufactures Saints
The advance of Sister Blandina Segale’s cause through the theological review of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints is not a sign of the Church’s vitality but of its utter spiritual bankruptcy. The conciliar sect, having emptied the Catholic faith of its supernatural content, has replaced the rigorous discernment of true sanctity with a bureaucratic process designed to produce “saints” who embody the very errors condemned by the pre-conciliar Magisterium. That the theologians’ deliberation was described as a “celebration” rather than a debate reveals the predetermined nature of the entire process. Where is the solemn obligation to protect the faithful from false models of holiness? Where is the vigilance of the Church that once scrutinized causes with the severity demanded by the gravity of declaring someone worthy of universal veneration? The answer is that these “theologians” are not guardians of the faith but functionaries of the neo-church, tasked with producing figures who will serve the conciliar revolution’s narrative of social activism, interreligious harmony, and naturalistic charity divorced from the explicit proclamation of Catholic truth.
The 1917 Code of Canon Law, in Canons 1999–2030, established extraordinarily rigorous procedures for canonization causes, reflecting the Church’s understanding that declaring someone a saint is an exercise of infallible judgment demanding the utmost caution. The post-conciliar reforms of Paul VI in 1969 — himself a manifest heretic and therefore incapable of binding the Church — gutted these procedures, replacing the “Devil’s Advocate” (Promotor Fidei) with a “Promoter of the Faith” whose role was transformed from adversarial critic to cooperative participant. The result is precisely what we witness today: a canonization factory that produces “saints” at an unprecedented rate, each one carefully selected to advance the conciliar agenda. John Paul II, the apostate who “canonized” more individuals than all his predecessors combined, set the precedent. Benedict XVI and Francis continued the practice. Now Leo XIV is being presented with yet another candidate whose life, as described in the article, exemplifies everything the pre-conciliar Church warned against.
The “Heroic Virtue” of Naturalistic Humanitarianism
Allen Sanchez stated that the theologians confirmed Segale “used the gifts of the Holy Spirit and fulfilled the corporal works of mercy.” This language, while superficially Catholic, is emptied of its true meaning when examined in light of unchanging doctrine. The Catechism of the Council of Trent teaches that the gifts of the Holy Spirit — wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord — are bestowed upon the soul in sanctifying grace and orient it toward supernatural ends: the contemplation of divine things, the avoidance of sin, and the attainment of eternal salvation. The corporal works of mercy — feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, sheltering the homeless, visiting the sick, visiting the imprisoned, and burying the dead — are meritorious only when performed in a state of grace and for the love of God, not for the love of man alone.
What does the article actually tell us about Segale’s spiritual life? Archbishop Wester stated that she “saw the world through the eyes of God” and had “the wisdom of the Scriptures, the wisdom of the Church, the wisdom of faith.” These are pious platitudes devoid of content. Where in the article is any mention of Segale’s interior life of prayer, her devotion to the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, her fidelity to the Church’s teaching on the necessity of the Catholic faith for salvation, her zeal for the conversion of souls to the one true Church? Instead, we are told that she “conceived that we needed hospitals and schools and cemeteries and orphanages” and that “God wants us all to live together in peace.” This is not the language of Catholic sanctity; it is the language of naturalistic humanitarianism, the very error condemned by Pope Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors (1864), which anathematized the proposition that “the Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church” (Proposition 55) and that “the Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization” (Proposition 80).
St. Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa Theologiae (II-II, Q. 23, A. 7), teaches that the virtue of charity is ordered first and foremost toward God, and only secondarily toward our neighbor for the sake of God. To perform works of mercy without this supernatural ordering is to reduce Christianity to mere philanthropy — precisely the error of the Modernists, whom St. Pius X condemned in Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907) for reducing the Church’s mission to “merely humanitarian and social ends” (§39). The article’s description of Segale’s work — building schools, hospitals, and trade schools, raising money for “numerous efforts” — could describe any secular social worker of the Progressive Era. What distinguishes her as a Catholic candidate for sainthood? The article provides no answer, because the conciliar sect has no answer. It has replaced supernatural sanctity with naturalistic activism.
The Scandal of “Billy the Kid” and the Relativization of Evil
Perhaps the most revealing element of the article is its treatment of Segale’s relationship with William Bonney, known as “Billy the Kid” — a man described in the article itself as “an American criminal linked to numerous murders in the late 19th century.” The article recounts, with evident admiration, how Segale nursed one of Bonney’s wounded gang members back to health, how she convinced Bonney to abandon his plan to scalp four doctors in revenge, and how they subsequently became friends. It notes that she “visited him in jail” and that he called off a stagecoach robbery upon discovering she was a passenger.
Let us be clear about what this means. A woman being presented for canonization by the Catholic Church formed a friendship with a multiple murderer, visited him in jail, and received favors from him — and this is presented not as a scandal but as evidence of her sanctity. The article frames this as an example of her “compassionate heart” and her ability to “see the good in people.” But the Catholic Church has always taught that friendship with manifest sinners, particularly those who persist in mortal sin without repentance, is itself sinful. St. Paul commands: “I wrote unto you in an epistle not to keep company with fornicators: not altogether with the fornicators of this world, or with the covetous, or extortioners, or with idolaters; for then you must needs go out of the world. But now I have written unto you not to keep company, if any man that is named a brother be a fornicator, or covetous, or an idolater, or a railer, or a drunkard, or an extortioner; with such a one not to eat” (1 Cor. 5:9–11).
The article makes no mention of Segale calling Bonney to repentance, urging him to confess his sins, or exhorting him to save his immortal soul. Instead, the relationship is presented as a model of “seeing the good in people” and “living together in peace” — the very language of the false ecumenism and religious indifferentism condemned by Pope Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors (Proposition 15: “Every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true”) and by Pope Gregory XVI in Mirari Vos (1832), which condemned the “absurd and erroneous proposition” that “liberty of conscience” is the right of every man. Archbishop Wester’s exhortation that “all of us in New Mexico, Catholic and non-Catholic alive, to follow Blandina’s example… to live in harmony with people, to see the good in people, to be able to affirm one another and build each other up, and to be able to live together in peace” is a direct echo of the conciliar declaration Nostra Aetate and the Assisi gatherings, where the post-conciliar authorities gathered representatives of false religions to pray for peace — an act of apostasy condemned by every pope before John XXIII.
The Church has always taught that peace is only possible in the kingdom of Christ (Pius XI, encyclical Quas Primas, 1925). Pius XI declared: “The Kingdom of our Redeemer encompasses all men… 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.” The “peace” that Archbishop Wester promotes — a peace between Catholics and non-Catholics, between the Church and the world, between good and evil — is not the peace of Christ but the peace of the Antichrist, who seeks to reconcile all things in opposition to God.
The Omission of the Supernatural: Silence as Apostasy
The most damning aspect of the article is not what it says but what it omits. There is no mention of Segale’s devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, no mention of her fidelity to the Traditional Latin Mass, no mention of her adherence to the Church’s teaching on the necessity of baptism for salvation, no mention of her opposition to the errors of Modernism that were already spreading during her lifetime (she died in 1941, the same year as Pius XI and just before the death of the last validly elected pope, Pius XII, in 1958). There is no mention of her position on the social reign of Christ the King, no mention of her understanding of the Church as the one true means of salvation, no mention of her interior life of prayer and mortification.
This silence is not accidental. It is systematic and deliberate. The conciliar sect selects candidates for “canonization” precisely because their lives can be presented in terms acceptable to the modern world — terms of social justice, humanitarianism, interreligious dialogue, and natural virtue — while their specifically Catholic convictions, if they held any, are suppressed or reinterpreted. The result is a gallery of “saints” who are indistinguishable from the heroes of secular liberalism, figures who would be equally at home in a United Nations humanitarian campaign or a Protestant social gospel movement.
St. Pius X, in Lamentabili Sane Exitu (1907), condemned the Modernist proposition that “the progress of sciences requires a reform of the concept of Christian doctrine concerning God, creation, Revelation, the Person of the Incarnate Word, and Redemption” (Proposition 64) and that “contemporary Catholicism cannot be reconciled with true knowledge without transforming it into a certain dogmaless Christianity, that is, into a broad and liberal Protestantism” (Proposition 65). The advance of Sister Blandina’s cause is a living illustration of these very errors. The conciliar sect has transformed Catholicism into precisely the “broad and liberal Protestantism” that St. Pius X foresaw and condemned, and its “canonization” process is the institutional mechanism by which this transformation is made visible and normative.
The Invalidity of Conciliar “Canonizations”
From the perspective of integral Catholic faith, the entire process described in the article is null and void. The antipope Leo XIV, like his predecessors from John XXIII onward, lacks legitimate authority over the Church. As St. Robert Bellarmine teaches in De Romano Pontifice (II, 30): “A Pope who is a manifest heretic, by that very fact ceases to be Pope and head, just as he ceases to be a Christian and member of the body of the Church.” The post-conciliar occupants of the Vatican have professed heresy — religious liberty (Dignitatis Humanae), false ecumenism (Unitatis Redintegratio), the evolution of dogma (implicit in Nostra Aetate and the entire conciliar corpus) — and have therefore ipso facto lost all jurisdiction. Their “canonizations” carry no more weight than the decrees of any other group of men. They cannot bind the faithful, they cannot declare with infallible authority that anyone is in heaven, and they cannot impose universal veneration.
Moreover, the 1917 Code of Canon Law, Canon 188.4, states that “every office becomes vacant by the mere fact and without any declaration by reason of tacit resignation, recognized by the law itself, if the cleric… publicly defects from the Catholic faith.” The post-conciliar authorities have publicly defected from the Catholic faith by professing the heresies of Vatican II. They are therefore incapable of exercising any ecclesiastical office, including the office of judging causes of canonization. Their proceedings are coram non judice — before a judge who has no jurisdiction — and are therefore void.
The true Church endures — in the faithful who profess the integral Catholic faith, in the bishops with valid sacraments who have not succumbed to the conciliar apostasy, and in the priests who offer the true Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass according to the immemorial Roman Rite. It is this Church alone that possesses the authority to canonize saints, and it will exercise that authority when the present crisis is resolved — not through the bureaucratic machinery of the conciliar sect, but through the restoration of the social reign of Christ the King over all nations, as demanded by Pius XI in Quas Primas.
Conclusion: A Call to Reject the Conciliar Counterfeit
The advance of Sister Blandina Segale’s canonization cause is not a cause for celebration but for mourning and resistance. It is yet another manifestation of the conciliar sect’s systematic destruction of the Catholic faith, replacing supernatural sanctity with naturalistic humanitarianism, replacing the rigorous discernment of true holiness with bureaucratic rubber-stamping, and replacing the social reign of Christ the King with the false peace of interreligious dialogue and secular liberalism.
The faithful are called to reject this counterfeit, to hold fast to the unchanging Catholic faith, and to pray for the restoration of the true Church — the Church of all ages, the Church that has never and can never reconcile herself with “progress, liberalism and modern civilization” (Proposition 80, Syllabus of Errors), the Church that knows no peace except the peace of Christ, and the Church whose saints are not social workers but heroic witnesses to the supernatural truth that there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved (Acts 4:12).
Source:
Sister Blandina’s Canonization Cause Clears Theological Review (ncregister.com)
Date: 04.06.2026