EWTN News reports on an encounter in Barcelona’s Raval neighborhood on June 10, 2026, where 6-year-old Renzo, a Peruvian migrant child living in poverty, asked Leo XIV: “Why do bad things happen to some people? And not to others? Whose fault is it? Why are there so many people living on the street? No one sees them, no one helps them.” The so-called pontiff responded with vague reassurances about God’s love, Jesus’ companionship, and eternal joy, while emphasizing social charity, forgiveness, and the loneliness of the elderly. The event was staged at a soup kitchen run by the Missionaries of Charity and the Mano Amiga Foundation, with the entire spectacle serving as a photo opportunity for the conciliar sect’s narrative of “touching human suffering” while remaining utterly silent on the supernatural causes of evil, the necessity of the Church’s true social teaching, and the apostasy that has rendered the post-conciliar institution incapable of answering even a child’s most fundamental theological question.
The Unanswered Question: Silence on Sin, Supernatural Faith, and the True Social Reign of Christ
The most damning aspect of this entire encounter is not what Leo XIV said, but what he refused to say. A child asks the most profound question in human experience — “Why do bad things happen?” — and the occupant of the Vatican offered a response devoid of any mention of sin, the Fall of man, the necessity of sanctifying grace, the reality of Hell, or the redemptive value of suffering united to the Cross of Christ. This is not merely an oversight; it is the systematic emptiness of Modernism, which has excised the supernatural from its pastoral vocabulary and replaced the salvific mission of the Church with a naturalistic program of social assistance indistinguishable from secular humanitarianism.
The Catholic answer to Renzo’s question was well known for nearly two millennia: per peccatum mors intravit in orbem huum (through sin death entered the world — Romans 5:12). The Catechism of the Council of Trent teaches that suffering, poverty, and death are consequences of Original Sin and personal sin, and that the remedy is not soup kitchens alone but the sacraments, prayer, penance, and the grace merited by Our Lord Jesus Christ on Calvary. St. Augustine, in De Civitate Dei, explains that all the evils of this life flow from the disorder introduced by the Fall, and that true justice and peace are only possible when individuals and societies submit to the reign of Christ the King. Pius XI, in Quas Primas, explicitly states: “When God and Jesus Christ — as we lamented — were removed from laws and states and when authority was derived not from God but but from men, the foundations of that authority were destroyed.”
Yet Leo XIV said nothing of the sort. Instead, he offered: “Through the life of Jesus Christ, God shows us that, even amid suffering, he never abandons any of his children, for he has prepared eternal joy for us — a place where there will be no more sorrow or pain.” This is the language of universalism — the implicit suggestion that all are saved, that God’s love is unconditional in the sense that it requires no conversion, no sacramental life, no submission to the Church. It is the heresy condemned by the Council of Trent (Session VI, Canon 16): “If anyone says that it is always given to the one who has been justified to repent of any sin, if he asks for it, let him be anathema.” The true teaching is that God’s love demands a response of faith, obedience, and perseverance in grace, and that those who die outside the state of grace face eternal damnation.
The Reduction of the Church’s Mission to Social Work
The entire staging of this event — at a soup kitchen, surrounded by the poor, with Leo XIV praising charitable organizations — reveals the conciliar sect’s fundamental ecclesiology: the Church exists to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, not to save souls. This is the “Church of the Poor” theology that emerged from the Second Vatican Council’s Gaudium et Spes, a document that redefined the Church’s mission in terms of temporal progress and human development rather than the supernatural end of eternal salvation.
Pius XI, in Quas Primas, teaches with unmistakable clarity: “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 Church’s mission is to subject all men and all nations to the kingship of Christ, which means preaching the Gospel, administering the sacraments, and forming consciences in the moral law — not distributing food packages while remaining silent on the doctrinal and moral causes of poverty and injustice.
The article notes that Leo XIV told the gathered organizations: “Each diocesan ecclesial community… is called to reach out, according to its own means and capabilities, and with discretion, sensitivity, and perseverance, to the wounds and needs of the least and most vulnerable, in order to alleviate their suffering and remedy their poverty.” This is the language of liberationism without the Cross — a purely horizontal conception of charity that ignores the supernatural order entirely. The true Church has always taught that the greatest act of charity is to lead a soul to God, for the loss of a single soul is a greater tragedy than the suffering of all the poor in the world combined. As St. Thomas Aquinas teaches, bonum gratiae unius maius est quam bonum naturae totius universi (the grace of one soul is greater than the natural good of the entire universe).
Forgiveness Without Justice: The Modernist Distortion of Mercy
Leo XIV’s extended discourse on forgiveness is equally revealing of the conciliar sect’s moral bankruptcy. He stated: “Forgiving does not mean saying that what was wrong was actually right, nor does it mean letting someone continue to cause harm. It does not mean forcing oneself to forget, as if nothing had happened… Forgiving means not letting hatred take over our hearts.”
While this may sound superficially reasonable, it is a radical distortion of the Catholic doctrine on forgiveness. The Church teaches that forgiveness is an act of virtue that presupposes repentance on the part of the offender. Our Lord said: “If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him” (Luke 17:3). The Council of Trent (Session XIV, Chapter 3) teaches that contrition — sorrow for sin with a purpose of amendment — is necessary for the remission of sins in the sacrament of Penance. Leo XIV’s formulation, by contrast, reduces forgiveness to an interior disposition devoid of any objective moral framework — forgiveness without repentance, mercy without justice, love without truth.
This is the same logic that has led the conciliar sect to refuse to condemn heresy, to maintain communion with manifest heretics, and to treat the gravest sins against God and neighbor as matters of “pastoral sensitivity” rather than objective moral evil. It is the lex orandi of an institution that has lost the capacity to distinguish between good and evil.
The Loneliness of the Elderly: A Symptom of the Collapse of Catholic Family Life
Leo XIV’s remarks on the loneliness of the elderly — “Let us not allow loneliness and abandonment to become the norm in the lives of older adults. That is a very sad thing” — are a textbook example of the conciar sect’s tendency to lament the symptoms of civilizational collapse while remaining utterly silent on their causes. The abandonment of the elderly is a direct consequence of the destruction of the Catholic family, which in turn is the fruit of contraception, divorce, abortion, secularism, and the conciar sect’s own silence on these mortal sins.
Pius XI, in Casti Connubii (1930), taught that the family is the fundamental cell of society and that its dissolution leads to the ruin of nations. The elderly are abandoned precisely because the family has been redefined as a contract of convenience rather than a sacramental bond ordered toward the procreation and education of children in the faith. The conciliar sect, far from defending the indissolubility of marriage and the sanctity of family life, has facilitated the very dissolution it now pretends to lament through its Amoris Laetitia and its general pastoral approach of “accompaniment” that refuses to exclude anyone from the sacraments regardless of their state of life.
The Soccer Question: The Cult of the Personality and the Trivialization of the Papacy
The article’s closing note — that Renzo asked Leo XIV if he liked soccer, and the latter responded that he played soccer as a young man and that “a little sport is good for everyone” — is a perfect encapsulation of the trivialization of the papal office under the conciliar regime. The successor of St. Peter, the Vicar of Christ, the Supreme Pastor of the universal Church, is presented not as a figure of awe and reverence but as a jovial, approachable “man of the people” who plays tennis and follows local soccer teams.
This is the cult of man condemned by St. Pius X in Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907): “The Modernist apologist borrows from the text of the Church’s teaching only what suits his purpose, and then proceeds to treat the rest as a mere human construction.” The conciliar sect has systematically demolished the sacred character of the papacy, replacing the majestas Petri (the majesty of Peter) with a personality cult centered on the individual occupant’s hobbies, travel preferences, and “relatability.” The true Pope — were one to exist — would be a figure of doctrinal authority, moral severity, and supernatural grandeur, not a celebrity who jokes about soccer with children.
The Migrant Question: Silence on the Causes of Poverty and the Duty of Catholic Nations
The article notes that Renzo and his family “arrived in Spain some time ago fleeing extreme poverty in Peru.” The conciliar sect’s response to this reality is to operate soup kitchens and praise charitable organizations. The Catholic response, by contrast, would address the root causes of poverty in Latin America: the legacy of Freemasonic colonialism, the exploitation of Catholic nations by international usury, the destruction of indigenous cultures, and — most critically — the failure of the conciar sect itself to evangelize and catechize the peoples of South America.
Pius IX, in the Syllabus of Errors (1864), condemned the proposition that “the Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization” (Proposition 80). The poverty of Peru and the mass migration of its people to Europe are the fruits of the liberal, Masonic economic order that the conciar sect has embraced rather than condemned. The true Church would call for the social reign of Christ the King over Peru, the establishment of Catholic economic structures based on the guild system and the principles of Rerum Novarum, and the conversion of the nation to the Catholic faith — not the exportation of its impoverished population to the increasingly secularized nations of Europe.
Conclusion: The Abomination of Desolation Speaks, and a Child Deserves Better
The encounter between Renzo and Leo XIV is a microcosm of everything that is wrong with the conciliar sect. A child asks the most important question a human being can ask, and he receives an answer that is theologically vacuous, supernaturally empty, and pastorally bankrupt. There is no mention of sin, no call to conversion, no reference to the sacraments, no teaching on the redemptive value of suffering, no proclamation of the kingship of Christ over individuals and nations. Instead, there are vague platitudes about God’s love, social charity, forgiveness without repentance, and soccer.
This is the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place (Matthew 24:15) — an institution that occupies the Vatican, wears the vestments of Peter, and speaks with the voice of a child’s question on its lips, yet has nothing of the Catholic faith to offer. Renzo deserves better. Every child deserves better. The true Church — the Church of all ages, the Church that teaches, governs, and sanctifies with the authority of Christ — would have answered Renzo with the fullness of Catholic truth: that suffering is the consequence of sin, that God permits evil for the greater good of those who love Him, that Jesus Christ is the only way to eternal salvation, and that the Church, through her sacraments and her teaching, is the ark of salvation in a world drowning in misery of its own making.
But that Church does not speak from the Vatican today. It speaks from the catacombs, from the hidden chapels, from the faithful remnant who preserve the integral Catholic faith against the tide of Modernism. And it is to that Church — not to the conciar sect — that Renzo’s question must ultimately be directed.
Source:
Peruvian boy whose family struggles to make ends meet asks pope why bad things happen (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 10.06.2026