The Pillar Catholic portal reports that the U.S. bishops’ conference (USCCB) voted on June 10, 2026, to advance two beatification causes at the local level: Msgr. Joseph Buh, a 19th-century Slovenian missionary in Minnesota, and John Rick Miller, a 21st-century New York businessman whose evangelization was centered on the false apparitions of Medjugorje and the promotion of consecrations to the Sacred and Immaculate Hearts. The article presents both figures with uncritical hagiographic reverence, omitting any doctrinal scrutiny and thereby revealing the conciar sect’s institutional machinery for manufacturing “saints” that serve its modernist, sentimentalist, and ecumenical agenda rather than the glory of the true Church of Christ.
The USCCB: A Bureaucratic Apparatus of the Conciliar Revolution
The very body advancing these causes — the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops — is itself a product of the post-conciliar restructuring that replaced the hierarchical governance of the true Church with a collegial, democratic, and bureaucratic apparatus. As Pope Pius IX declared in the Syllabus of Errors (1864), Proposition 23: “Roman pontiffs and ecumenical councils have wandered outside the limits of their powers, have usurped the rights of princes, and have even erred in defining matters of faith and morals.” The USCCB, as it exists today, operates under the conciliar constitution Christus Dominus, which restructured the episcopate into national conferences subordinate to the antipapal curia — a structure unknown to Catholic ecclesiology and condemned by the immutable Magisterium.
The article notes that the bishops “voted” to advance these causes, employing the language of parliamentary democracy rather than the language of hierarchical authority. This is no accident. The conciliar sect has systematically replaced the Catholic understanding of the episcopate — bishops as successors of the Apostles governing their flocks with ordinary jurisdiction — with a managerial model in which “causes” are processed through committees, votes, and institutional procedures. The beatification of saints, which belongs to the supreme and infallible judgment of the true Roman Pontiff acting in his universal magisterial capacity, has been reduced to a bureaucratic pipeline managed by conference staff.
John Rick Miller: A Disciple of the Medjugorje Deception
Of the two candidates, John Rick Miller presents the most immediate and grave doctrinal problems. The article openly states that Miller’s entire spiritual life and missionary work were founded upon a “profound spiritual experience at Medjugorje” — the notorious and unapproved apparitions in Bosnia-Herzegovina that the Church has never recognized as supernatural in origin.
The Medjugorje phenomenon bears all the hallmarks of a modernist and potentially Masonic operation against the Church, precisely analogous to the Fatima deception analyzed in the provided dossier. The messages of Medjugorje promote a vague, sentimental piety devoid of doctrinal precision, emphasize “peace” without requiring conversion to the Catholic Faith, and encourage an ecumenical and interreligious spirit that dissolves the exclusive claims of the Church. The seers have been ambiguous at best regarding the authority of the conciliar structures, and the entire phenomenon has served to draw millions of the faithful into a false spirituality centered on private revelation rather than on the sacraments, the Holy Mass, and the immutable deposit of faith.
Miller’s conviction, as quoted in the article, that “the answer to the world’s ills lay in consecration to God” through acts of personal consecration to the Hearts of Jesus and Mary is theologically imprecise and dangerously incomplete. The article quotes him: “When we consecrate ourselves to God, a pact is established between the Father and His child. It is an act that will never be broken by God, but one that is our responsibility to uphold. It is a bond of love and protection.” This language, while sounding pious, reduces the supernatural life of grace to a sentimental covenant and omits entirely the necessity of baptism, the state of sanctifying grace, membership in the true Church, reception of the sacraments, and the avoidance of mortal sin. It is the language of naturalistic piety, not Catholic theology.
The Consecration Campaign: Bypassing the Church’s Authority
Miller’s most prominent achievement, as described in the article, was convincing heads of state — notably Colombian President Álvaro Uribe — to consecrate their nations to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary. The article states: “Miller convinced Uribe that the solution to Colombia’s woes was consecration to God. According to a website dedicated to Miller, Uribe personally consecrated himself, followed by members of his family, government officials, military, and police.”
This is a grave distortion of Catholic teaching on consecration and the social reign of Christ the King. Pope Pius XI, in the encyclical Quas Primas (1925), established the Feast of Christ the King precisely to remind the world that Christ’s reign extends over all nations, all rulers, and all aspects of public life — not merely over individuals in their private devotion. Pius XI declared: “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 consecrations promoted by Miller, however, were performed by secular political leaders acting on the private counsel of a lay businessman inspired by unapproved apparitions — not by the true Church acting through her legitimate hierarchy with doctrinal precision and supernatural authority. This is a privatized, sentimental parody of the act of consecration that Leo XIII performed for the entire human race to the Sacred Heart in 1899 — an act performed by a true Pope with full Apostolic authority. Miller’s campaign, by contrast, substitutes the authority of private revelation and personal initiative for the authority of the Church, precisely the error condemned by the Council of Trent and by every Pope who has addressed the relationship between public authority and the Church’s mission.
The Mission for the Love of God: A Para-Church Organization
The article describes Miller’s founding of the “Mission for the Love of God Worldwide,” which by 2013 claimed to have inspired the consecration of “18 cities and states, 16 archdioceses and dioceses, 16 military and police forces, 140 companies, and 72 schools and universities.” This proliferation of consecrations, while numerically impressive, raises serious questions about their theological content and ecclesial legitimacy.
The Catholic Church teaches that consecration is not a magical formula but a solemn act of worship that presupposes the true faith, the authority of the Church, and the intention of acknowledging Christ’s sovereign kingship over all creation. When performed by lay organizations operating outside the direct authority of the hierarchy — or, worse, by the conciliar structures that have systematically undermined the social reign of Christ the King through their embrace of religious liberty, ecumenism, and the separation of Church and State — such consecrations risk being empty gestures or, worse, acts of naturalistic religion that substitute human effort for divine grace.
Pope Pius IX, in Quas Primas and throughout his pontificate, insisted that the separation of Church and State is a pernicious error and that civil authority has the duty to publicly recognize and obey Christ the King. The conciliar sect, by contrast, has embraced the very liberalism and indifferentism that Pius IX condemned in Propositions 77-80 of the Syllabus of Errors. Miller’s consecrations, promoted within and endorsed by these conciliar structures, cannot be separated from this context of systemic apostasy.
Msgr. Joseph Buh: A More Complex Case, But Still Filtered Through Conciliar Lenses
The case of Msgr. Joseph Buh is less immediately problematic from a doctrinal standpoint, as the article describes a 19th-century missionary priest who worked among the Ojibwe people and Slovenian immigrants in Minnesota, founded more than 50 parishes, and was recognized for his personal holiness by his contemporaries. Bishop John McNicholas described him at his funeral as a “saintly priest” for whom “no journey on foot, no distance by horseback was too long or too trying provided a soul was to be helped at the journey’s end.”
However, the article’s treatment of Buh is filtered entirely through the lens of the conciliar sect’s institutional processes. The cause was “explored in earnest” only in 2023, and his remains were moved to the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Rosary in 2024 — actions carried out under the authority of the current conciliar structures in Duluth. Bishop Daniel Felton’s statement in a booklet dedicated to Buh — “Be it the will of God, this holy missionary priest living in his missionary time will become the missionary saint interceding for us in our own missionary time” — employs the language of the conciliar “hermeneutic of continuity,” suggesting that Buh’s missionary work in the 19th century is somehow analogous to the conciar sect’s modernist understanding of “mission” as dialogue, inculturation, and social justice rather than the conversion of souls to the Catholic Faith and the establishment of the Church’s sacramental life.
The article also notes that Buh “helped to create a miners’ union with another Slovenian priest” — a detail that, in the context of the conciliar sect’s post-Vatican II embrace of social activism and labor organizing, may be intended to present Buh as a precursor to the conciliar “preferential option for the poor” and the Church’s supposed mission of transforming social structures. This is a distortion of the true missionary spirit, which seeks first and foremost the salvation of souls through the preaching of the Gospel, the administration of the sacraments, and the establishment of the Church — not the advancement of temporal welfare through union organizing.
The Omission of Doctrinal Criteria: What Makes a Saint?
The most striking feature of the article — and of the entire conciliar process for advancing beatification causes — is the complete absence of doctrinal criteria for evaluating sanctity. The article presents both candidates in purely naturalistic terms: Buh as a hardworking immigrant priest who founded parishes and helped miners, Miller as a successful businessman turned evangelizer who inspired millions to pray and consecrate themselves. There is no mention of miracles, no discussion of heroic virtue in the theological sense, no examination of whether these individuals professed the fullness of the Catholic Faith, avoided heresy, and lived in the state of sanctifying grace.
The Catholic Church has always taught that sanctity consists not in natural zeal, organizational success, or even extraordinary spiritual experiences, but in the heroic practice of the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity, together with the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance, all lived in the state of sanctifying grace and in communion with the true Church. The conciliar sect, by contrast, has reduced sanctity to a kind of institutional brand management — selecting “saints” who embody the values of the post-conciliar revolution: social activism, ecumenical outreach, lay empowerment, and sentimental devotion.
This is precisely the error condemned by St. Pius X in Lamentabili Sane Exitu (1907), where he rejected the modernist proposition that “the Church is an enemy of the progress of natural and theological sciences” (Proposition 57) and that “truth changes with man, because it develops with him, in him, and through him” (Proposition 58). The conciliar sect’s approach to beatification reflects the modernist conviction that sanctity must be “relevant” to each age — that the saints of the past must be reinterpreted through the lens of the present, rather than serving as timeless models of the unchanging Catholic Faith.
The Deeper Problem: Beatification as an Act of the Antipapal Authority
Ultimately, the advancement of these beatification causes must be understood in the context of the sedevacantist analysis provided in the dossier. If the occupants of the See of Peter since John XXIII are not true Popes but usurpers who have forfeited their office through manifest heresy, then their beatification decrees — and those of the bishops and structures that operate under their authority — have no binding force in the Church of Christ.
As St. Robert Bellarmine taught 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 conciliar structures, having embraced the heresies of Modernism condemned by St. Pius X — including religious liberty, ecumenism, the evolution of dogma, and the democratization of the Church — have placed themselves outside the communion of the true Church. Their beatification of “saints” is therefore not an act of the Catholic Church but an act of the conciliar sect — a counterfeit church that mimics the forms of Catholicism while emptying them of their supernatural content.
The faithful who desire true sanctity must look not to the manufactured “saints” of the conciliar revolution but to the canonized saints of the true Church — St. Pius X, St. Robert Bellarmine, St. Francis de Sales, St. John Vianney, and all those who professed the fullness of the Catholic Faith, fought against heresy and error, and gave their lives in witness to the unchanging Truth of Jesus Christ the King.
Conclusion: The Conciliar Sect’s Factory of False Sanctity
The advancement of Msgr. Joseph Buh and John Rick Miller as beatification candidates is not a sign of the Church’s vitality but of the conciar sect’s desperation to manufacture legitimacy through the cult of personality. Buh, whatever his personal virtues, is being co-opted as a patron of the conciar sect’s social-activist model of mission. Miller, a man whose entire spiritual life was built on the sand of Medjugorje, is being promoted as a model of lay evangelization — a “saint” for the age of the “new evangelization,” in which the Church’s mission is reduced to inspiring sentimental consecrations and prayer groups rather than converting the world to the Catholic Faith and establishing the social reign of Christ the King.
The true Church endures — not in the bureaucratic structures of the USCCB, not in the para-church organizations inspired by false apparitions, not in the manufactured “saints” of the conciliar revolution, but in the faithful who profess the integral Catholic Faith, receive the sacraments from validly ordained priests, and await the restoration of the true Papacy and the triumph of the Immaculate Heart — not through the sentimental consecrations of a lay businessman, but through the return of Christ’s kingship over all nations, as Pope Pius XI proclaimed: “The peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ.”
Source:
Meet the U.S.'s 2 new almost-saints (pillarcatholic.com)
Date: 10.06.2026