EWTN News reports that Ramón Castro Castro, bishop of Cuernavaca and president of the Mexican Bishops’ Conference, used his June 14 homily to compare the Church’s mission to a FIFA World Cup match, declaring “we have Jesus Christ as our captain.” Castro Castro framed the Church’s work in terms of “teamwork,” “discipline,” and “mutual trust,” while lamenting Mexico’s “violence, insecurity, extortion, corruption” and calling for “committed laypeople, generous young people” and “holy families” to address “spiritual hunger.” The prelate emphasized that God “never tires of us” and that Christ “sees people’s hidden pain,” but notably reduced the supernatural mission of the Church to a naturalistic metaphor drawn from global sporting entertainment. This homily exemplifies the conciliar reduction of the Faith to horizontal, worldly categories — a betrayal of the Church’s divine constitution and the Kingship of Christ.
The King of Kings Reduced to a Team Captain
The central metaphor of Ramón Castro Castro’s homily is not merely inane — it is theologically catastrophic. To declare that “we have Jesus Christ as our captain” in the context of a sporting competition is to commit a fundamental category error that reveals the depth of modernist bankruptcy. Christ is not a “captain.” He is not a team leader among equals, not a motivational figurehead rallying players on a field. He is King of kings and Lord of lords (Rev 19:16), to whom “all power in heaven and on earth has been given” (Mt 28:18).
Pius XI, in the encyclical Quas Primas (1925), established the Feast of Christ the King precisely to combat the secular error that Christ has no authority over public life and human societies. The Pontiff taught with crystalline clarity: “His reign 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.” Christ’s kingship is not a metaphor. It is not an analogy drawn from sports, commerce, or democratic governance. It is an ontological and juridical reality flowing from the Hypostatic Union: because the Word assumed human nature, “He possesses dominion over all creatures, not by force but by essence and nature” (St. Cyril of Alexandria, quoted in Quas Primas).
Castro Castro’s “captain” language belongs to the horizontal, naturalistic plane of human organization. It reduces the supernatural mission of the Church — the salvation of souls through the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the sacraments, and the preaching of the Gospel — to a collaborative team effort. This is not Catholic teaching. It is the language of the conciliar sect, which has systematically dismantled the Church’s divine constitution and replaced it with the grammar of secular institutions.
The Omission of the Church’s Divine Constitution
What is absent from this homily is as damning as what is present. Nowhere does Ramón Castro Castro mention the divine constitution of the Church. Nowhere does he affirm that the Church is a perfect society, endowed by her Divine Founder with all necessary means to achieve her supernatural end. Nowhere does he quote the teaching of Pius XI 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 Syllabus of Errors of Pius IX condemned as error 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” (Proposition 19). Yet this is precisely the implicit framework of Castro Castro’s discourse, which treats the Church as a voluntary association of like-minded individuals working together as a “team” — not as the Mystical Body of Christ, the ark of salvation outside which there is no redemption.
The homily’s emphasis on “mutual trust” and “teamwork” further reveals the democratization of the Church that is the hallmark of post-conciliarism. In the true Church, authority descends from Christ through the hierarchy — it does not emerge from the collective consensus of the “team.” Pius IX condemned the error that “the Church teaching should only approve the common opinions of the Church listening” (Lamentabili, prop. 6). The faithful do not “trust one another” as the foundation of the Church’s mission — they trust in Christ, who promised to be with His Church all days, even to the consummation of the world (Mt 28:20), and who guaranteed the infallibility of her Magisterium.
Naturalistic Compassion Without the Supernatural Remedy
Castro Castro’s enumeration of Mexico’s ills — “violence, insecurity, extortion, corruption, mistrust in society, family breakdown, and religious indifference” — is accurate as a description of symptoms. But his diagnosis and prescription are purely naturalistic. Christ “sees people’s hidden pain.” Christ “feels compassion.” God “never tires of us.” All of this is true in itself, but divorced from the supernatural means of grace, it becomes nothing more than sentimental humanitarianism — the very “cult of man” that the pre-conciliar Magisterium consistently condemned.
Where in this homily is the call to repentance? Where is the preaching of the necessity of the sacraments — confession, the Holy Eucharist, the sacramental life — for the remission of sins and the sanctification of souls? Where is the affirmation that “there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12)? Where is the recognition that Mexico’s crisis is fundamentally a spiritual crisis — a consequence of sin, apostasy, and the abandonment of the social Kingship of Christ?
Pius XI identified the root cause of society’s ills with surgical precision: “this kind of outpouring of evil has afflicted the whole world because very many have removed Jesus Christ and His most holy law from their customs, from private, family, and public life” (Quas Primas). The remedy is not “teamwork” and “committed laypeople” — it is the restoration of Christ’s reign over society, the return of individuals and states to obedience to God’s commandments, and the recognition that “the state is nothing else than a harmonious association of men” subject to the authority of Christ.
Castro Castro’s lament about “spiritual hunger” and the need for “more workers in the vineyard” is a parody of our Lord’s words. When Christ said “the harvest indeed is plentiful, but the laborers are few” (Mt 9:37), He was speaking of apostles sent with divine authority to preach, baptize, and teach — not of “committed laypeople” and “generous young people” organized into a team. The conciliar sect has systematically laicized the Church’s mission, replacing the ordained priesthood with lay “ministers,” replacing the apostolic preaching with dialogue, and replacing the salvation of souls with social activism. Castro Castro’s homily is a perfect specimen of this apostasy.
The World Idol and the Abomination of Desolation
The choice of the FIFA World Cup as the backdrop for this homily is not incidental — it is symbolic of the conciliar Church’s capitulation to the world. The FIFA World Cup is one of the great secular liturgies of globalized modernity, a spectacle of idolatry that commands the devotion of billions, generates obscene sums of money, and serves as a vehicle for the homogenization of cultures under the banner of commercial entertainment. That a “bishop” of the conciliar sect should use this spectacle as the framework for his preaching reveals the depth to which the post-conciliar hierarchy has sunk.
The true Church has always understood that the friendship of the world is enmity with God (Jas 4:4). St. Pius X, in Pascendi Dominici Gregis, identified the Modernist as one who “subordinates the supernatural to the natural, and faith to science” — precisely what Castro Castro does by subordinating the supernatural mission of the Church to a naturalistic sporting metaphor. The conciliar “bishops” no longer preach the Gospel to the world — they preach the world to the Church, baptizing its idols and calling the result “relevance.”
The Mexican Crisis Demands the Remedy of Christ the King
Mexico is indeed a nation ravaged by violence, corruption, and despair. The blood of the Cristero martyrs — who died precisely because they refused to submit to the godless Mexican state’s persecution of the Church — cries out from the ground. The true remedy for Mexico’s suffering is not “teamwork” under a “captain” — it is the public and social recognition of the Kingship of Jesus Christ, the return of the state to the principles of Catholic doctrine, and the restoration of the Church’s freedom to exercise her divine mission without interference from secular authority.
Pius XI taught: “Christ possesses the so-called executive power, for all must obey His commands, and this under the threat of announced punishments, which the obstinate cannot escape” (Quas Primas). Castro Castro’s homily contains not a single word about the obligation of the state to obey Christ, not a single word about the duty of rulers to recognize the Church’s authority, not a single word about the final judgment in which Christ “will very severely avenge these insults, because His royal dignity demands that all relations in the state be ordered on the basis of God’s commandments and Christian principles.”
Instead, we are offered a “bishop” who compares the Church to a soccer team and Christ to a captain. This is not the faith of the martyrs. This is not the faith of the Fathers. This is not the faith of the Magisterium. This is the faith of the conciliar abomination — a counterfeit religion that retains the vocabulary of Catholicism while hollowing out its supernatural content and replacing it with the spirit of the world.
The faithful who desire the salvation of Mexico — and of all nations — must reject this modernist counterfeit and return to the immutable teaching of the true Church: Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat — Christ conquers, Christ reigns, Christ commands.
Source:
Mexican bishop amid World Cup playoffs: ‘We have Jesus Christ as our captain’ (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 17.06.2026