EWTN News reports that on June 10, 2026, the usurper Robert Prevost — styling himself “Pope Leo XIV” — traveled to the Abbey of Montserrat near Barcelona, Spain, where he venerated a 12th-century wooden statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary known as “La Moreneta,” entrusted his claimed pontificate to her intercession, and reflected on mercy, reconciliation, and the avoidance of “hidden violence.” The visit followed a stop at Brians 1 Penitentiary Center, where he told inmates that “the mistakes of a person’s life do not determine who they are” and that “God loves you just as you are.” At Montserrat, he prayed the rosary, invoked St. Ignatius of Loyola’s conversion there, and asked Mary to “guide us to Jesus.” While superficially resembling Catholic piety, the entire performance is a masterclass in the conciliar sect’s characteristic replacement of the supernatural order — the salvation of souls, the propitiatory sacrifice of the Mass, the reality of sin and hell — with a horizontal, naturalistic program of social comfort, psychological reassurance, and sentimental humanitarianism, all wrapped in the aesthetic trappings of a Catholicity long since emptied of its doctrinal substance.
The Prison Visit: Mercy Without the Cross
The detour to Brians 1 Penitentiary Center before ascending Montserrat was not incidental — it was programmatic. The encounter was staged to project an image of a “pastoral” figure embracing the suffering, hearing testimony from inmates Montserrat and Josefina, and offering words of comfort. Josefina’s testimony — “Here in prison I am not alone — Jesus gives me strength, he gives me life” — was met with Prevost’s reflection: “The mistakes of a person’s life do not determine who they are.”
On its surface, this sounds benign. But examined against the immutable teaching of the Church, it is a devastating omission dressed as compassion. The Catholic faith teaches that sin determines precisely who a person is before God — that the state of mortal sin is the worst of all evils, worse than any physical suffering, and that without repentance, confession, and absolution, the soul is in danger of eternal damnation. St. Augustine, whom Prevost invoked, taught exactly this: “God does not command impossibilities; but by commanding, He admonishes thee to do what thou canst, and to pray for what thou canst not, and aids thee that thou mayst be able” (*De Natura et Gratia*, 43:50). The Bishop of Hippo was relentless on the gravity of sin and the necessity of sacramental confession. To invoke Augustine while omitting the necessity of confession, contrition, and satisfaction is to weaponize a Doctor of the Gospel against his own teaching.
Prevost’s formulation — “God loves you just as you are, but he dreams of you being even better” — is the language of therapeutic self-help, not Catholic theology. God does not “dream” of our improvement; He commands our conversion under pain of eternal loss. “Unless you do penance, you shall all likewise perish” (Luke 13:3). The Church before 1958 taught that the sinner must not be comforted in his sin but called to the sacrament of penance, where the priest acts *in persona Christi* to absolve or retain sins. There is no mention of the sacraments in Prevost’s prison address — no exhortation to confession, no mention of the state of grace, no warning about hell. The “mercy” proclaimed is a mercy without the Cross, without the Precious Blood, without the sacramental order that Christ Himself instituted. It is the mercy of natural religion, of indifferentism — precisely the error condemned by Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors, Proposition 17: “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.”
The Veneration of “La Moreneta”: Idolatry in the Guise of Piety
The ascent to Montserrat and the veneration of the 12th-century statue of the Blessed Virgin follows the well-established pattern of the conciliar sect’s manipulation of Marian devotion. The image — a Romanesque wooden sculpture with a dark complexion, popularly called “La Moreneta” (“the little dark one”) — has been the object of local Catalan devotion for centuries. Prevost venerated it, prayed before it, and entrusted his claimed pontificate to its intercession.
The tradition surrounding the statue’s discovery — children seeing a light on the mountain, the bishop finding the image too heavy to move — bears the hallmarks of the kind of private revelation that the Church has always treated with extreme caution. The Church distinguishes sharply between public revelation, which closed with the death of the last Apostle, and private revelations, which carry no guarantee of infallibility and demand rigorous scrutiny. The Syllabus of Errors already condemned the rationalist proposition that “the prophecies and miracles set forth and recorded in the Sacred Scriptures are the fiction of poets” (Proposition 7), and Lamentabili sane exitu of St. Pius X condemned the modernist claim that “revelation was merely man’s self-awareness of his relationship to God” (Proposition 20). The conciliar sect’s embrace of sentimental attachment to images and shrines — while simultaneously undermining the doctrinal content of the faith they supposedly represent — is not Catholic piety but its counterfeit.
Moreover, the nickname “La Moreneta” — with its reference to dark or Moorish complexion — opens the door to the kind of Christian-Islamic syncretism that has been a recurring feature of the post-conciliar landscape. The False Fatima Apparitions document notes that the name “Fatima” itself is a symbol of Christian-Islamic syncretism. While Montserrat is not Fatima, the pattern is the same: the conciliar structures exploit local devotions with ambiguous origins and syncretic undertones to promote a religiosity that is horizontal, sentimental, and emptied of doctrinal precision — a religiosity perfectly suited to the ecumenical and interreligious agenda of the neo-church.
The Omission of the Supernatural Order
The most damning feature of the entire Montserrat visit is what is absent. In Prevost’s address, there is:
- No mention of the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass — the propitiatory sacrifice of Calvary re-presented on every altar of the true Church, the center of all Catholic life and the sole means by which the fruits of the Redemption are applied to souls.
- No mention of the sacraments — no exhortation to confession, no mention of the Eucharist as the true Body and Blood of Christ, no reference to baptism as necessary for salvation.
- No mention of sin as an offense against God — only “mistakes” that “do not determine who you are,” a formulation that strips sin of its theological gravity.
- No mention of hell, judgment, or eternal salvation — the four last things, which were the constant preoccupation of every true pope and bishop, are entirely absent.
- No mention of the Social Kingship of Christ — Pius XI’s encyclical Quas Primas established that Christ the King reigns over all nations, that rulers have a duty to publicly honor Him, and 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” (quoting St. Augustine). Prevost’s visit to a prison and a shrine produces no such teaching — only vague invocations of “justice and peace.”
- No condemnation of error — no denunciation of secularism, laicism, religious indifferentism, or the apostasy that has consumed the structures occupying the Vatican.
This silence is not accidental. It is the defining characteristic of the conciliar revolution. As the False Fatima Apparitions document observes, the Fatima message was manipulated to divert attention from modernist apostasy within the Church — the very apostasy that St. Pius X identified as “the synthesis of all heresies” in Pascendi Dominici gregis (1907). The Montserrat visit follows the same pattern: aesthetic Catholicity without doctrinal content, sentimental devotion without supernatural faith, “mercy” without the Cross.
The Invocation of St. Ignatius: A Weaponized Conversion
Prevost recalled that “St. Ignatius of Loyola” spent a night in prayer before the Virgin at Montserrat, after which “he laid aside his knightly arms — a moment that marked the beginning of a new life in the service of Jesus Christ.” This is historically accurate in its broad outline — St. Ignatius did undergo a profound conversion and spent time at Montserrat. But the invocation of this great saint by a figure who occupies the Vatican as a usurper and who promotes the very errors St. Ignatius spent his life combating is a grotesque irony.
St. Ignatius founded the Society of Jesus precisely to defend the Church against heresy, to uphold the authority of the Roman Pontiff, and to combat the Protestant Reformation. His Spiritual Exercises are a rigorous program of meditation on sin, judgment, hell, and the life of Christ — the exact opposite of Prevost’s therapeutic, sin-minimizing, hell-silent “pastoral” approach. The Jesuits before the Council were the pope’s shock troops against error; the Jesuits after 1968 have been among the primary agents of the conciliar revolution. To invoke St. Ignatius while dismantling everything he stood for is not devotion — it is desecration.
“Do Whatever He Tells You”: Words Stripped of Their Meaning
Prevost cited Our Lady’s words at the Wedding at Cana: “Do whatever he tells you” (John 2:5), calling them “a true guide for Christian living, because Mary leads us to Christ and teaches us to listen to his voice, obey his word, and allow him to transform us.” But what is Christ’s word as proclaimed by this figure? It is a word without the commandments, without the sacraments, without the threat of judgment, without the promise of eternal life conditional on faith and obedience. It is a “word” that has been filtered through the hermeneutics of Vatican II — the very hermeneutics that St. Pius X condemned as the corruption of dogma through the “development” of doctrine according to the “advancement of human reason” (Syllabus, Proposition 5).
The Christ to whom Mary leads is the Christ of the Gospels — who said “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me” (John 14:6), who instituted the sacraments as necessary means of grace, who warned “wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it” (Matthew 7:13). The “Christ” of the conciliar sect is a Christ of universal salvation, of dialogue with error, of mercy without justice — a Christ who is not the Christ of Catholic doctrine but an idol of modernist manufacture.
The Social Kingship of Christ: The Great Absence
Pius XI’s Quas Primas (1925) — issued exactly a century before the conciliar revolution reached its full flowering — is the definitive papal statement on the Social Kingship of Christ. In it, Pius XI taught with unmistakable clarity:
- Christ the King reigns over all men, whether Catholic or not: “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.”
- Rulers have a duty to publicly recognize Christ’s kingship: “Let rulers of states therefore not refuse public veneration and obedience to the reigning Christ, but let them fulfill this duty themselves and with their people, if they wish to maintain their authority inviolate and contribute to the increase of their homeland’s happiness.”
- The rejection of Christ’s kingship is the cause of all modern evils: “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.”
Prevost’s visit to Montserrat — and indeed his entire claimed pontificate — is conducted in absolute silence on this teaching. There is no call for Spain, for Catalonia, for any nation to publicly recognize the Social Kingship of Christ. There is no condemnation of the secularism and laicism that Pius XI identified as “the plague that poisons human society.” There is no reminder that “the Church, established by Christ as a perfect society, demands for itself by a right belonging to it, which it cannot renounce, full freedom and independence from secular authority.” The “justice and peace” for which Prevost asks are not the justice and peace of Christ the King — they are the justice and peace of the United Nations, of naturalistic humanism, of the very secularism that the true popes condemned as apostasy.
The “Golden Rose” and the Aesthetics of Apostasy
The article notes that “in 2023, Pope Francis offered a Golden Rose to this venerated image.” The Golden Rose is an ancient papal tradition symbolizing the fragrance of Christ’s virtues. That it was bestowed by Jorge Mario Bergoglio — the antipope who canonized John Henry Newman, who promulgated Amoris Laetitia, who signed the Abu Dhabi Declaration on Human Fraternity — upon a statue at a Benedictine abbey is entirely consistent with the conciliar sect’s modus operandi: the preservation of Catholic aesthetics as a shell emptied of Catholic doctrine. The Golden Rose is real; the faith it once symbolized is absent. This is the abomination of desolation — the holy place occupied by that which profanes it.
The Testimony of the Faithful: Co-opted Devotion
The article quotes Sister Ángeles Piqué: “Catalonia without La Moreneta would be nothing,” and Sister Doraliza: “We need the pope to bring us Christ’s message: unity, fraternity, and to come to the Virgin as our point of reference.” These are the words of simple faithful who retain a genuine attachment to Catholic forms — but whose devotion has been co-opted by structures that no longer teach the fullness of the faith. The “unity” and “fraternity” invoked are not the unity of the one true Church and the fraternity of the baptized in the state of grace — they are the false unity of ecumenism and the false fraternity of the Abu Dhabi Declaration, which placed the Catholic religion on the same level as all other religions.
The 9-year-old boy Miguel, who asked Prevost to bless Ukraine and who keeps the Bible on his nightstand, represents the tragedy of the conciliar era: genuine faith in the young, exploited by structures that will not teach them the fullness of Catholic truth. The Bible on the nightstand — a Protestant habit encouraged by the conciliar sect’s de-emphasis of the sacraments and the Magisterium in favor of private reading — is a symptom of the very error that the true Church has always warned against. “The interpretation of Holy Scripture given by the Church, while not to be scorned, is nevertheless subject to more exact judgments and corrections by exegetes” — this proposition was condemned by St. Pius X in Lamentabili (Proposition 2). The conciliar sect has made this condemned proposition its operating principle.
Conclusion: The Abomination in the Sanctuary
The Montserrat visit of June 10, 2026, is a perfect microcosm of the conciliar apostasy. It has all the external forms of Catholic piety — the veneration of Our Lady, the prayer of the rosary, the invocation of saints, the visit to a place of historical Catholic significance — and none of the substance. It proclaims mercy without the sacraments, love without truth, peace without Christ the King, devotion without doctrine. It is the faith of the Syllabus of Errors brought to life — the faith of indifferentism, of naturalism, of the equation of the Catholic religion with all other forms of worship.
The true Church endures — in the faithful who profess the integral Catholic faith, who attend the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass as offered by validly ordained priests in communion with the true Church, who believe without hesitation that outside the Catholic Church there is no salvation, that Christ the King reigns over all nations, that the sacraments are necessary for salvation, and that the conciliar structures occupying the Vatican are not the Church of Christ but the abomination of desolation foretold by Our Lord: “When therefore you shall see the abomination of desolation, which was spoken of by Daniel the prophet, standing in the holy place…” (Matthew 24:15).
Mary, Mother of the Church — the true Mary, not the sentimental figure manipulated by the neo-church — does indeed lead us to Jesus. But she leads us to the Jesus of the Gospels, of the Cross, of the Eucharist, of the Last Judgment. She leads us to the Jesus who said “I am the door. If anyone enters through Me, he shall be saved” (John 10:9) — not the Jesus of universal salvation, of interreligious dialogue, of mercy without repentance. The faithful who truly love Our Lady will reject the counterfeit offered by the conciliar sect and cling to the immutable Tradition of the Church — the Tradition that Prevost and his predecessors have spent seven decades dismantling.
Source:
Pope Leo entrusts his pontificate to Our Lady of Montserrat: May she ‘guide us to Jesus’ (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 10.06.2026