EWTN News portal reports that hundreds of Catholics participated in a Eucharistic procession through Williamsburg, Virginia, on June 5, 2026, as part of the so-called “National Eucharistic Pilgrimage” — a multi-state event organized by the conciliar structures occupying the Vatican. The event, themed “One Nation Under God” in conjunction with the 250th anniversary of the United States, featured the carrying of the Blessed Sacrament through historic sites, including the College of William & Mary’s Wren Building. Yet beneath the veneer of public piety lies a profound silence: there is no mention of Christ’s social kingship, no condemnation of secularism, and no call for the submission of nations — including the United States — to the divine law of Our Lord Jesus Christ. This omission alone reveals the spiritual bankruptcy of the post-conciliar “Church.”
The Eucharistic Procession as Substitute for the Social Reign of Christ
The article describes a spectacle: young Catholics carrying amplifiers projecting hymns, families walking together, priests hearing confessions at the back of the line, and Bishop Barry Knestout celebrating Mass at St. Bede Catholic Church. Father Eric Ayers, a former Baptist, remarked that “The Eucharist has always been a source of strength and unity in times of challenge and transition,” and that a Eucharistic pilgrimage “reminds that God is first in our life and in our nation and must be the lens through which we see everything else.”
These words sound pious. They are, however, theologically vacuous. What does it mean for God to be “first in our nation” if that nation’s laws permit abortion, sodomy, usury, and the systematic exclusion of Christ from public life? Pius XI, in Quas Primas (1925), was unequivocal: “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 encyclical further states that “the state is happy not by one means, and man by another; for the state is nothing else than a harmonious association of men” — meaning that the state itself, not merely individuals, owes obedience to Christ the King.
The Williamsburg procession, like the entire National Eucharistic Pilgrimage, reduces the faith to a private devotional exercise — a “lens” through which to “see everything else” — while leaving the structures of a Christless republic entirely intact. This is not Catholicism. It is the religion of the conciliar sect, which has abandoned the Church’s divine mandate to teach, govern, and lead all nations to eternal happiness.
The Silence on Secularism and Laicism
Pius XI identified the root plague of modern times as “the secularism of our times, so-called laicism, its errors and wicked endeavors.” He described its progression: first, the denial of Christ’s reign over all nations; second, the equation of Christianity with false religions; third, the subordination of religion to secular power; and finally, the attempt to replace divine religion with natural religion and “inner impulse.” The Syllabus of Errors of Pius IX (1864) condemned the proposition that “In the present day it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the State, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship” (Proposition 77), and that “The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization” (Proposition 80).
The EWTN article is entirely silent on these condemnations. There is no mention that the United States — a nation founded on Enlightenment principles of religious indifferentism and the “wall of separation” between Church and State — stands condemned by the perennial Magisterium. There is no call for the conversion of the American republic to the Social Kingship of Christ. Instead, the event’s theme, “One Nation Under God,” is a bland civil-religious slogan that could be endorsed by any Protestant sect or even by Freemasonry itself. It is a slogan emptied of all Catholic content.
The “National Eucharistic Congress” as Conciliar Branding
The article notes that the pilgrimage was “Spearheaded by the National Eucharistic Congress” and that it is “the third major Eucharistic procession to take place in the U.S. in recent years.” This is significant. The National Eucharistic Congress is a project of the post-conciliar American “bishops” — men who, by their public adherence to the heretical teachings of the Second Vatican Council (religious liberty, ecumenism, collegiality), have rendered themselves suspect of manifest heresy. As St. Robert Bellarmine teaches in De Romano Pontifice, “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 same principle applies to bishops who publicly profess heresy: they lose jurisdiction ipso facto and cannot legitimately govern the faithful or organize acts of public worship.
The “bishops” who organize these processions — including Bishop Barry Knestout of Richmond — are men who operate within a paramasonic structure that has systematically dismantled the Catholic faith. Their “Masses” are celebrated according to the Pauline Rite of 1969, a rite that, as the Ottaviani Intervention demonstrated, represents a “striking departure from the Catholic theology of the Mass as it was formulated in Session XXII of the Council of Trent.” Their “Eucharistic congresses” are not acts of Catholic worship but exercises in conciliar branding — designed to give the appearance of vitality to a dying institution.
The Omission of the Third Secret and the Consecration of Russia
The article makes no mention of the Fatima apparitions, and rightly so — for the so-called “apparitions” of Fatima are, as documented in the file False Fatima Apparitions, a likely Masonic psychological operation against the Church. The “message of Fatima” with its imprecise call for the “conversion of Russia” (without specifying Catholicism) opens the door to religious relativism and ecumenism. The “miracle of the sun” is explicable as a natural optical phenomenon combined with mass autosuggestion. The entire Fatima narrative has been weaponized by the conciliar sect to promote a false ecumenism and to divert attention from the true enemy: modernist apostasy within the Church itself, as warned by St. Pius X in Pascendi Dominici Gregis and Lamentabili Sane Exitu.
The Sacraments in the Conciliar Sect: Valid but Illicit, or Entirely Null?
Father Michael Herlihey, OFM Cap, is quoted as saying he hears confessions during the processions: “Every procession, I just go to the back of the line and hear confessions.” The theological question that the article dares not ask is: are these confessions valid? The 1962 rites, if performed with valid matter, form, and intention, may produce valid sacraments. But the post-conciliar “priests” who operate within the structures of the neo-church do so without legitimate jurisdiction. As Cardinal Billot summarized regarding Nestorius: “if he who is not in the Church cannot have power in the Church, and a hidden heretic can have it, and indeed sometimes does have it, it clearly follows that a hidden heretic is not yet cut off from the body of the Church.” But these men are not hidden heretics — they are open, manifest, and obstinate. They profess the errors of Vatican II publicly and without repentance. The faithful who approach them for confession do so at their own spiritual peril.
The “One Nation Under God” Theme: Civil Religion, Not Catholicism
The article notes that the 2026 procession has taken the theme “One Nation Under God,” described as “a nod to the 75th anniversary of that having been officially added to the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance.” This is perhaps the most revealing detail in the entire report. The phrase “under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, at the height of the Cold War, as a civil-religious gesture against “godless communism.” It was never a Catholic act. It was a Masonic-Enlightenment gesture designed to create a vague, non-denominational “civil religion” that could unite Protestants, Catholics, and Jews under a generic theism — precisely the kind of religious indifferentism condemned by 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”).
The conciliar “Church” has embraced this civil religion wholeheartedly. Instead of calling for the United States to recognize the Catholic Church as the one true Church — as demanded by the perennial Magisterium — these “bishops” are content to march through colonial Williamsburg under a slogan that Eisenhower and the U.S. Congress approved. This is not the faith of the martyrs. This is the faith of accommodation, of surrender, of the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place (Matt. 24:15).
The Pilgrimage’s Endpoint: Philadelphia on the Fourth of July
The article concludes by noting that “The pilgrimage will finish in Philadelphia during the Fourth of July weekend.” Philadelphia — the City of Brotherly Love, the birthplace of the Declaration of Independence, the city where the Constitutional Convention produced a document that enshrined religious indifferentism and the denial of Christ’s social kingship. To end a “Eucharistic pilgrimage” in Philadelphia on the Fourth of July is to make a theological statement, whether intentional or not: that the Catholic faith and the American experiment are compatible, that the “Eucharist” blesses the republic, that the Most Holy Sacrifice of Calvary is a ornament to the Enlightenment project.
This is the very error that Pius XI condemned: “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 United States was founded on the principle that authority derives from “We the People” — not from God. It is a Masonic republic, and no amount of Eucharistic processions through its historic cities will change that.
Conclusion: The True Remedy
The faithful who walked in Williamsburg on June 5, 2026, may have acted with sincere devotion. But sincerity is not enough. As St. Pius X warned in Lamentabili, the errors of Modernism — the synthesis of all heresies — have penetrated even the most seemingly orthodox acts of piety. The true remedy is not more processions, more pilgrimages, more “Eucharistic congresses” organized by heretical “bishops.” The true remedy is the return to the integral Catholic faith: the recognition of Christ the King over all nations, the rejection of religious liberty and ecumenism as condemned by the Magisterium, the repudiation of the conciliar sect, and the restoration of the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass according to the unchanging Roman Rite.
Until that happens, these processions will remain what they are: spectacles of a counterfeit Catholicism, organized by a counterfeit hierarchy, in service of a counterfeit Church — the Church of the New Advent, the paramasonic structure, the abomination of desolation.
Source:
Hundreds of Catholics turn out for Eucharistic procession in historic Williamsburg, Virginia (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 05.06.2026