Vatican News portal reports on a novena and exhibit at the National Shrine of Our Lady of Champion in Wisconsin, orchestrated by the conciliar sect to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Masonic United States republic. The rector, Fr. Anthony Stephens of the post-conciliar “Priests of Mercy,” invites Catholics to pray for “unity, holiness, and renewal” of a nation founded on Enlightenment rebellion against the Social Kingship of Christ, while venerating a false apparition approved only by the usurping hierarchy and displaying relics of “saints” canonized by antipopes. This spectacle manifests the total substitution of the supernatural mission of the Church for naturalistic patriotism and false ecumenism.
The False Apparition of Champion: A Post-Conciliar Fabrication
The article boasts that the National Shrine of Our Lady of Champion is “the site of the first and only approved Marian apparition site in the U.S.” This approval came in 2010 from Bp. David Ricken of Green Bay, a subject of the antipope Benedict XVI. No true bishop of the Catholic Church, holding the integral Faith, has ever approved this apparition. The visionary, Adele Brise, allegedly received a mandate to “gather the children in this wild country and teach them what they should know for salvation” in 1859. Yet the Church, in her authentic Magisterium, teaches that private revelations—even those not condemned—add nothing to the deposit of Faith and demand no assent of divine faith. The post-conciliar sect’s rush to approve novel apparitions (Fatima, La Salette, Champion, Medjugorje) serves a Masonic strategy of psychological operations against the Church, diverting the faithful from the immutable Tradition and the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass toward sentimental piety and “hyper-acts” of worship, as exposed in the theological analysis of the Fatima operation. The “Miracle of the Sun” at Fatima was a natural optical phenomenon exploited for mass suggestion; Champion lacks even a miraculous sign, resting solely on the authority of a usurper bishop. To build a national novena on this foundation is to build on sand.
Novena for a Masonic Republic: Idolatry of the State
The nine-day novena (July 1–9) seeks “Mary’s intercession for unity, holiness, and renewal throughout the country.” This language reveals a naturalistic conception of the Church’s mission. Pope Pius XI, in Quas Primas (1925), teaches authoritatively: “When God and Jesus Christ… were removed from laws and states and when authority was derived not from God but from men, the foundations of that authority were destroyed… the entire human society had to be shaken, because it lacked a stable and strong foundation.” The United States was founded in 1776 on the Masonic principles of religious liberty, separation of Church and State, and popular sovereignty—errors explicitly condemned in the Syllabus of Errors of Pius IX (props. 55, 77, 78, 79). To pray for the “unity” and “renewal” of a regime constituted in rebellion against Christ the King is to pray for the consolidation of the Civitas Diaboli. The true duty of Catholics is not to beseech heaven for the prosperity of the Masonic state, but to work for the Restauratio Christi in Regnum—the restoration of all things in Christ—by demanding the public recognition of His Kingship over legislation, education, and public morals. The novena’s silence on the Social Kingship of Christ, the necessity of baptism for salvation (Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus), and the conversion of the nation to the one true Faith exposes its Modernist, humanitarian core.
A Pantheon of False Saints: The Fruits of Antipapal “Canonizations”
The exhibit showcases 76 “holy men and women,” including St. John Henry Newman, St. Kateri Tekakwitha, Bl. Stanley Rother, Bl. Michael McGivney, and St. Frances Xavier Cabrini. With the exception of Cabrini (canonized 1946 by Pius XII, whose pontificate marks the beginning of the great apostasy), every name listed is a product of the conciliar sect’s fabrication of sanctity. John Henry Newman, canonized by the antipope Francis in 2019, was the architect of the “development of doctrine” heresy, the bridge between Anglicanism and Modernism, buried by his own request in the same grave as his “friend” Fr. Ambrose St. John—a scandal crying to heaven. Kateri Tekakwitha and the North American Martyrs were canonized by Pius XI and Pius XII, yet their cult is now instrumentalized by the neo-church to promote inculturation and false ecumenism with pagan native spiritualities. Stanley Rother and Michael McGivney, beatified by Francis, are held up as models of “social justice” and “fraternity”—Masonic virtues substituting for the theological virtues. The display of their relics in a shrine built on a false apparition, under the authority of a false bishop, constitutes a simulation of the communion of saints—idolatry masquerading as piety. As the Syllabus condemns: “The Church has not the power of defining dogmatically that the religion of the Catholic Church is the only true religion” (prop. 21)—a proposition the conciliar sect lives out by equating its manufactured saints with the true heroes of Christendom.
Indifferentism and the “Revival” of Empty Pews
Fr. Stephens boasts of a “revival of a renewed interest in Catholicism, converts to the faith,” attracting “Catholics, non-Catholics, and non-Christians—people who aren’t even baptized.” This is the ecumenism of the return condemned by Pius XI in Mortalium Animos (1928) and by Pius IX in the Syllabus (prop. 16: “Man may, in the observance of any religion whatever, find the way of eternal salvation”). The attraction of the unbaptized to a shrine devoid of the True Mass, the true priesthood, and the integral Faith is not a work of grace but a delusion of the devil. The “culture of life” rhetoric invoked by Stephens is the slogan of the conciliar sect’s political wing, stripped of the supernatural ends of marriage, the gravity of mortal sin, and the necessity of the Sacraments. Lamentabili Sane Exitu (1907) condemned the Modernist error that “Faith, as assent of the mind, is ultimately based on a sum of probabilities” (prop. 25) and that “The dogmas of faith should be understood according to their practical function, i.e., as binding in action, rather than as principles of belief” (prop. 26). The exhibit reduces the Faith to a cultural heritage, a “Catholic thread” in American history, rather than the unum necessarium—the sole ark of salvation.
The Priesthood of the New Order: Simulated Authority
Fr. Anthony Stephens is identified as “CPM”—a member of the Congregation of the Priests of Mercy, a post-conciliar institute erected within the neo-church. His orders derive from the invalid Pontificale Romanum of Paul VI (1968), which stripped the sacramental form of the essential signification of the priesthood (offering the Propitiatory Sacrifice). He is not a priest of the Catholic Church but a functionary of the paramasonic structure occupying the Vatican. His “novena” has no canonical standing; his blessing is empty; his preaching is the voice of a stranger whom the sheep must flee (John 10:5). The faithful who participate in this novena, venerating false relics at a false shrine under a false priest, commit objective idolatry and supernatural adultery, abandoning the true Spouse of Christ for the harlot of the Apocalypse.
Conclusion: The Abomination of Desolation in Wisconsin
This event encapsulates the entire conciliar revolution: a false apparition approved by a false bishop, staffed by a false priest, promoting a novena for a Masonic state, exhibiting relics of false saints, all reported by the propaganda organ of the antipope Leo XIV (Robert Prevost). It is a masterpiece of the “ecumenism project” denounced by theologians of Tradition: the imprecise formulation of “American sanctity” opens the way to religious relativism, legitimizing the Masonic founding myths of the Republic. True Catholics, adhering to the immutable Faith of the Fathers and the valid Sacraments preserved by true bishops and priests outside the conciliar structures, must reject this spectacle entirely. “You were bought with a price; do not become slaves of men” (1 Cor 7:23). The only novena pleasing to God is the imploring of the Holy Ghost for the restoration of the Holy Sacrifice, the conversion of the usurpers, and the triumph of the Immaculate Heart—not as a vague promise at a false shrine, but through the Consecratio Russiae by a true Pope in union with the true bishops of the world, as Heaven truly requested, not as the Masonic caricature of Fatima presents it.
Source:
The U.S. turns 250: Celebrate with the saints and a nationwide novena (vaticannews.va)
Date: 02.07.2026