The Pillar portal reports on what it calls a “definitive ranking” of the “lamest sports jerseys” received by the current occupant of the Vatican, Leo XIV (Robert Prevost), since his installation as antipope. The article, authored by Michelle La Rosa and published June 17, 2026, catalogs with gleeful irreverence the various sports memorabilia gifted to the American-born usurper — from a Chicago Cubs jersey (a provocation against his supposed White Sox loyalty) to a French national basketball jersey (“insulting,” in the author’s estimation), a pink Giro d’Italia cycling jersey (“not in the pope’s color wheel”), a Philadelphia Flyers hockey jersey, a Tennessee Volunteers college football jersey, and a comically miniature crystal football from the U.S. State Department. The piece is written in a tone of lighthearted mockery, treating the Roman Pontificate as little more than a celebrity fan club and the papal apartment as a cluttered sports memorabilia closet. What the article reveals, beneath its veneer of harmless humor, is the complete collapse of any understanding of the sacred dignity of the papal office — a collapse so total that even Catholic media now treats the Vicar of Christ as a figure of entertainment rather than veneration.
The Papal Office Reduced to a Spectator Sport
The very premise of this article — ranking the “worst” jerseys given to the man occupying the Vatican — presupposes something that no Catholic before 1958 would have entertained for a moment: that the Roman Pontiff is a figure whose personal taste in sports gifts is a matter of public amusement and editorial commentary. The author writes with breezy casualness: “Jerseys can be good gifts. For example, Leo received a Chicago White Sox jersey – his favorite hometown team – with his papal name on it. That’s a very cool gift.” The phrase “papal name” is deployed here not with any sense of its theological weight — the name taken upon assuming the Chair of Peter, signifying a new spiritual fatherhood over the universal Church — but as a branding exercise, no different from a player’s name stitched across the back of a uniform.
This is not merely irreverence. It is the logical terminus of the conciliar revolution’s democratization of the Church. When Pius XI proclaimed the Feast of Christ the King in Quas Primas (1925), he did so precisely to combat the “secularism of our times, so-called laicism, its errors and wicked endeavors” — a plague that began with “the denial of Christ the Lord’s reign over all nations” and the removal of Jesus Christ “from laws and states.” The secularization of the papal office — its transformation from a sacred institution into a personality cult centered on the personal preferences, hobbies, and sports allegiances of whoever happens to occupy the Vatican — is not an accident. It is the intended fruit of the post-conciliar project to make the Church “relevant” to the modern world by stripping it of everything supernatural, hierarchical, and sacred.
The Language of Apostasy: Tone as Theological Symptom
The linguistic register of this article is itself a diagnostic tool. Consider the following passage: “And since he’s a boomer American priest, he’s probably obligated to insist jokingly to everyone within earshot that it’s ‘rose, not pink.'” The phrase “boomer American priest” is deliberately reductive. It strips the subject of any ecclesiastical dignity and reduces him to a demographic caricature — a nostalgic, out-of-touch elderly American. The word “obligated” is used sarcastically, implying that the man’s supposed insistence on the word “rose” is a tedious personal quirk rather than, in a proper Catholic understanding, an expression of the papal prerogative to define and declare.
The author continues: “This is a great jersey…if you like losing teams.” The entire article operates within the framework of secular sports culture — winning and losing, rivalries, mascots, fan loyalty — and applies it without remainder to the papal office. There is not a single sentence that acknowledges, even in passing, that the Roman Pontiff is the Successor of Peter, the visible head of the Mystical Body of Christ, the teacher of all Christians, the judge of the living and the dead. The silence is total. And as the instructions remind us: silence about supernatural matters is the gravest accusation.
The article’s treatment of the French basketball jersey is particularly revealing: “Who knew France had a basketball team? Do the French people know? Do the French players know?” This is not merely a joke about French basketball. It is a microcosm of the post-conciliar Church’s relationship with the nations: the papal office, which once commanded kings and emperors, which defined the boundaries of Christendom, which launched crusades and canonized saints and condemned heresies, is now a platform for exchanging sports memorabilia with heads of state. The French president Emmanuel Macron — a man whose political record includes the promotion of abortion, the erosion of Catholic education, and the advancement of secularist ideology — is presented as a gift-giver to the pope, and the gift itself is treated as the most newsworthy element of the encounter.
The Cult of Personality and the Destruction of Sacred Hierarchy
Pius IX, in the Syllabus of Errors (1864), condemned as error number 19 the proposition that “The Church is not a true and perfect society, entirely free — nor is she endowed with proper and perpetual rights of her own, conferred upon her by her Divine Founder; but it appertains to the civil power to define what are the rights of the Church, and the limits within which she may exercise those rights.” Error number 24 declared: “The Church has not the power of using force, nor has she any temporal power, direct or indirect.” And error number 80 — perhaps the most prophetic of all — condemned the proposition that “The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization.”
The article in The Pillar is a living illustration of error number 80. The entire conciliar project — from John XXIII’s “opening to the world” through the present spectacle of jersey-collecting in the Apostolic Palace — has been precisely this: the reconciliation of the Roman Pontiff with modern civilization, achieved by the systematic abandonment of every claim to supernatural authority, sacred dignity, and hierarchical supremacy. When the pope becomes a sports fan, a recipient of gag gifts, a figure whose “color wheel” is a matter of editorial commentary, then the Petrine office has been effectively neutralized as a force for the conversion of nations and reduced to a ceremonial role in the global entertainment industry.
The article’s bonus mention of the “world’s tiniest crystal football” — a gift from the U.S. State Department — is perhaps the most symbolically potent image in the entire piece: “A crystal football could be a cool gift for the first American pope – a nod to a uniquely American sport is a great reminder of his roots in the US of A.” The phrase “first American pope” is telling. It is not “first American antipope” or “first American usurper.” The author, like virtually all Catholic media operating within the conciliar framework, accepts without question the legitimacy of the post-1958 occupants of the Vatican. The gift from the State Department — a secular government — is treated as a charming diplomatic gesture rather than what it truly is: a symbol of the subordination of the papal office to the interests of a nation-state. The United States, a country founded on Protestant and Enlightenment principles, whose constitutional order is built on the radical separation of Church and State, is here treated as the papal homeland, and the pope’s “American roots” are celebrated as a point of pride rather than a source of deep concern for the integrity of the Faith.
The Hermeneutic of Continuity as Cover for Apostasy
The Pillar portal positions itself as a serious Catholic news outlet. It is not a satirical publication. It is not a secular sports blog. It is a Catholic media organization that has chosen, as its editorial content, a ranking of the “lamest” jerseys received by the man it recognizes as the Vicar of Christ. This is not an oversight. It is not a lapse in judgment. It is the natural and inevitable consequence of the hermeneutic of continuity — the conciliar strategy of maintaining the external forms of Catholicism while hollowing out their content.
The article does not attack the Faith directly. It does not deny any dogma. It does not promote heresy in explicit terms. It does something far more insidious: it creates a cultural environment in which the papal office is understood entirely in naturalistic, secular, entertainment-driven terms. The reader who consumes this content is not led to deny the divinity of Christ or the Real Presence. He is led to forget that these things have any relevance to the papal office. He is led to see the pope as a celebrity, a personality, a figure of fun — and not as the representative of the King whose kingdom, as Pius XI declared, “encompasses all men” and 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 Absence of the Supernatural: A Diagnostic Criterion
St. Pius X, in Lamentabili sane exitu (1907), condemned as error number 20 the proposition that “Revelation was merely man’s self-awareness of his relationship to God,” and as error number 58 that “Truth changes with man, because it develops with him, in him, and through him.” The entire post-conciliar project is built on these condemned propositions. The papal office, understood in its full Catholic sense, is a supernatural institution: the pope is the Vicar of Christ, appointed by divine Providence to teach, govern, and sanctify the faithful. His authority comes not from his personal qualities, his nationality, his sports preferences, or his diplomatic relationships, but from the promise of Christ: “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matt. 16:18).
The article in The Pillar contains not a single reference to any of this. There is no mention of the pope’s role as teacher of faith and morals. There is no mention of the Magisterium. There is no mention of the sacraments, the Mass, the salvation of souls, the final judgment, or any other supernatural reality. The papal office is presented as a purely natural phenomenon — a combination of celebrity, diplomacy, and sports fandom. This is not merely a failure of journalism. It is a theological statement: the implicit assertion that the supernatural dimension of the papal office is irrelevant, or nonexistent, or at least not worth mentioning in a Catholic news article.
Conclusion: The Abomination of Desolation in the Holy Place
The spectacle of the papal apartment filled with sports jerseys — pink cycling jerseys, losing hockey jerseys, rival baseball jerseys, college football jerseys, French basketball jerseys, and crystal footballs the size of eggs — is not merely absurd. It is a symbol of the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place (Matt. 24:15). The conciliar sect, having emptied the Catholic Church of her supernatural content, having replaced the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass with a Protestantized memorial meal, having substituted the social gospel for the preaching of repentance and conversion, having embraced religious liberty, false ecumenism, and the cult of man, has now reached the point where the papal office itself is treated as a platform for sports entertainment.
The faithful who still profess the integral Catholic faith — who believe in the unchanging doctrines of the Church, in the necessity of the social reign of Christ the King, in the reality of sin and grace and the final judgment — must recognize this spectacle for what it is: not a harmless bit of fun, but a symptom of the most profound apostasy in the history of the Church. The remedy is not to laugh along, not to rank the jerseys, not to debate whether the Cubs or the White Sox is the better gift. The remedy is to reject the entire conciliar edifice, to return to the immutable Tradition of the Church, and to pray for the restoration of the true papal office — an office that belongs not to collectors of sports memorabilia, but to the successors of the Prince of the Apostles, who were commissioned by Christ Himself to feed His lambs and His sheep (John 21:15-17).
Source:
Pope Leo’s lamest jerseys – A definitive ranking (pillarcatholic.com)
Date: 17.06.2026