Rome is the city par excellence, the Urbe, and its citizens say they have seen it all; they tend not to be surprised by anything and are always attentive to signs of every kind, which have a great number of interpreters, some very renowned. The Ides of July, the 15th, are approaching. The “Ides” marked the middle of the month and the day of the full moon; these dates were dedicated to the god Jupiter and were considered days of good omens and good fortune. Today we have the Angelus in the square of Castel Gandolfo at twelve and a little after; the lack of the Pope’s continuous public events is noticeable. The topics do not let up, and we continue with the inevitable comments on what happened in Écône, with the week’s abuse news and a long article on the existence of the devil. Let’s begin…
Lunch with the Pope.
Pope Leo XIV takes part in the gardens of Castel Gandolfo in the “Lunch with the Pope,” with two hundred socially vulnerable people from the Diocese of Rome. Impromptu words at the blessing of the table: “I came with hunger, hunger for justice, hunger for authentic charity, hunger for a Church that knows how to open its doors, welcome and receive everyone.” Among the participants were refugees, single mothers with children, people with disabilities and immigrants involved in training and job-placement programs. “Today we want to build a bridge with all those present and with our society, so that the causes of poverty and injustice that still afflict our world may be eliminated. This is the Church we want to build.”
It is the holiday dedicated to hospitality and fraternity at the Borgo Laudato Si’ in Castel Gandolfo. The day began with Mass, presided over by Cardinal Fabio Baggio, Director General of the Laudato Si’ Center for Advanced Studies, and concelebrated by Monsignor Luis Marín de San Martín, Prefect of the Dicastery for the Service of Charity. The guests took a guided tour of the Laudato Si’ Village. Last August, Pope Leo XIV decided to have lunch with people living in poverty from the Diocese of Albano. From that encounter came the idea of making it a regular event, with the intention of involving a different Italian diocese each year.
Donatella Parisi, communications coordinator of the Laudato Si’ Center for Advanced Formation: “This very special place—closed to the world for four hundred years, then reopened by Pope Francis and now wide open thanks to Pope Leo—welcomes these people who, for us, are our guests of honor.” Cardinal Fabio Baggio: “Borgo Laudato Si’ was created to show that the protection of creation and the care of the human person constitute a single mission.” “After Lampedusa, this day represents a new stage in Pope Leo XIV’s journey toward the social peripheries of our time. At Borgo Laudato Si’, the Holy Father meets people living in vulnerable conditions, reaffirming that the Church is called to be present wherever human dignity requires listening, closeness and hope.” Luis Marín: “The Holy Father’s choice confirms that charity is expressed through closeness, encounter and sharing. When the Church places the most vulnerable at the center, it makes the Gospel visible and bears witness that no one is marginalized in the heart of God.” Cardinal Baldassare Reina: “We wanted the protagonists of this day to be people accompanied daily by the parishes, Caritas and the numerous ecclesial and associative groups of the Diocese of Rome.” “The encounter with the Holy Father restores a central role to those who too often remain on the margins and calls the entire Christian community to the responsibility of welcoming others.”
The Latin rite in Ukraine.
In the 20th century, when, at the end of the Second World War, “Ukraine was subjected to a regime inspired by Soviet ideology.” During that period, “the Catholic Church in that region was the object of a cruel persecution organized and implemented by the civil power, whose aim was its complete extinction among the people.” The Church of Ukraine “rediscovered life and development,” celebrating the thirty-fifth anniversary of the reconstitution of its institutions at the same time as the twenty-fifth anniversary of the apostolic journey of Saint John Paul II.
The abuses in the week’s news.
It is offered to us by Federica Tourn, and the weekly headlines belong to well-known names: the Archbishop of Rabat and the death of the sadly notorious Bishop Roger Vangheluwe. In Spain, a priest drugged his victims before abusing them.
Vangheluwe admitted to having sexually abused one of his minor nephews for thirteen years, beginning in the 1980s, and later another nephew for two years. The bishop avoided criminal charges due to the statute of limitations. His public confession triggered a major scandal over clerical abuse in Belgium, with thousands of testimonies: a wound and a true national drama, as became clear during Pope Francis’s apostolic visit in September 2024.
Cardinal Cristóbal López Romero, Archbishop of Rabat, says he has been “suspended” from his ministry following accusations of inappropriate sexual conduct brought by five women. The Holy See has opened a preliminary investigation to clarify the facts. He denies all the accusations but announced that until the investigation concludes, he will not preside over public celebrations, will not participate in pastoral activities and will refrain from holding any public office.
A court in Málaga has sentenced a Spanish priest, known as “Father Fran,” to 52 years and six months in prison. He was found guilty of sexually abusing four women after drugging them. According to the sentence, the acts occurred between 2020 and 2021, and the priest recorded the abuses.
The sad attack by German “Catholic?” theologians on Maria Goretti.
The German theologians Philippa Haase, Judith König and Ute Leimgruber ask, regarding Saint Maria Goretti, to reconsider the concept of “martyr of purity” and “martyr of virginity.” Maria Goretti would be sending the wrong message: that a rape victim must resist until death to defend the inviolability of her body, and that if she does not, she is wrong, committing a sin, and then must feel guilty for not having resisted. And what is even more serious is the fact that Maria Goretti forgave her rapist, Alessandro Serenelli, who, upon being rejected, murdered her. She even forgave him, almost as if to justify his macho instinct and communicate to today’s women that they must understand and forgive men, who ultimately respond to a sexual instinct that is often difficult to control or repress.
It is not the first time an attempt has been made to question the sanctity of Maria Goretti. Giordano Bruno Guerri already tried many years ago, explaining that the story of the attempted rape by Serenelli and the murder of the young woman was the product of the poverty in which the families of the protagonists lived. He also explained that Maria Goretti had no trace of sanctity, but simply the ignorance of a young woman raised in the religious fears of the time and in a conception of sin typical of rural communities, where illiteracy and superstition based on fear of the devil and hell were widespread.
The Church’s reaction at the time was severe, completely discrediting Guerri’s version. Today the attack comes from three respectable, and well-paid, theologians, moreover German, and no response is expected; as long as there is no adherence, we consider ourselves satisfied. For these paid illuminati all martyrs would be negative examples when they invite us to dedicate our lives to the service of the Gospel and to die to bear witness and defend our faith.
The act of forgiving is precisely the highest degree of sanctity, and it is natural that this should seem absurd according to current thinking: forgiveness understood as a feeling opposed to revenge, but which cannot and must not exempt the guilty from justice, as shown by the case of Serenelli, who ended up in prison, was convicted of murder and served his sentence for the crime he committed. Upon leaving prison, he was a transformed man, and thanks to Maria Goretti’s forgiveness, he ended his life as a Christian. All of this is extraordinarily Christian, but politically incorrect, in a world where today sanctity is as far removed from contemporary thought as possible.
Once again these positions have their epicenter in Germany, where the highest levels of the hierarchy participate in the Lutheranization of Catholicism, through a synodal process that increasingly resembles a Trojan horse built to demolish the Church from within and reinterpret the Gospel in a modernist and Protestant key.16”
Grünwidl responsible for the Orthodox in Austria.
Why is the Priestly Society of Saint Pius X so criticized?
Many questions surround the earthquake caused by the consecrations of Écône, which we believe goes far beyond a local schism and affects many Catholics throughout the world. Why does this stance provoke so many criticisms?
An article today presents three attitudes toward the crisis. The crisis shaking the Church has been evident for several decades: a decline in religious practice, a decrease in vocations, a loss of the sense of the sacred and of sin, and doctrinal and liturgical confusion. Some good news does not compensate for the disaster we have witnessed for more than half a century.
Analyses differ as to the causes of this crisis and the solutions that must be adopted. Official ecclesiastical authorities, despite their divergences and some differences, usually respond to the crisis with structural reforms, but remain united in their commitment to implement the guidelines of the Second Vatican Council: conservatives slow the process, progressives accelerate it. The difference does not lie in the direction, but in the speed.
Then there are the traditional communities ex-Ecclesia Dei, canonically recognized, which maintain the traditional liturgy, although they enjoy a certain tolerance within the official legal structures. Their apostolate depends largely on the always revocable benevolence of ecclesiastical authorities toward them.
Finally, there is the Priestly Society of Saint Pius X, which, believing that the errors spread after the Council and the liturgical reform are the root of the current crisis and must be publicly denounced, provides itself with its own means and decides to take a radical path without fearing separation.
The essential difference between the former Ecclesia Dei groups and the SSPX does not lie in their attachment to the traditional Mass, but in their assessment of the causes of the crisis. The canonically recognized traditionalist communities continue to accept institutionally, by virtue of their statutes, the Second Vatican Council and its liturgical reforms. They may criticize certain excesses or interpretations, but they do not question the principles or the legitimacy of the reforms. The Priestly Society of Saint Pius X believes that several conciliar teachings, particularly on religious freedom, ecumenism and collegiality, as well as the liturgical reform itself, constitute deep causes of the crisis and must therefore be subjected to doctrinal criticism.
Many priests, in growing numbers among the younger ones, religious and even bishops privately acknowledge, to a greater or lesser extent, some of the serious difficulties caused by the conciliar reforms, but few dare to say so publicly, for fear of reprisals and sanctions or to avoid compromising their own apostolate. The Fraternity believes that it would be a crime to remain silent when the faith is at stake and continues to denounce what it considers the causes of the crisis, even at the cost of severe sanctions. True charity does not consist in avoiding conflict, but in defending the truth, whatever the consequences.
The Priestly Society of Saint Pius X fully recognizes the jurisdictional authority of the Pope and of the bishops legitimately appointed by him. Daily, during Holy Mass, it prays for the Supreme Pontiff and the bishop of the diocese: “For your holy Catholic Church: deign to pacify it, preserve it, unify it and govern it throughout the world, in union with your servant Pope Leo XIV, with the bishop of the diocese…, as well as with all the faithful and all who profess the Catholic and apostolic faith.” The same occurs during the blessing of the Most Blessed Sacrament and in private prayers. The priests and the faithful also pray for the intentions of the Supreme Pontiff, as prescribed by the Church for the granting of indulgences. The SSPX continues to believe that the best service it can render to the Church, to the Pope and to the bishops consists precisely in continuing its work, with total fidelity to the Catholic faith of all times.
Valli publishes on his Blog the experience of a faithful regular of the Institutes of Ecclesia Dei: the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter, the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest and the Institute of the Good Shepherd. They are distinguished from the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X in communion with the See of Peter (sacramental communion, doctrinal communion and hierarchical communion); they have great pastoral fecundity and carry out a peculiar internal resistance. These Institutes “remind the world that the Church is not an idea, but a people of souls that does not live in the future […]. In the face of adversity, these priests have assumed and continue to assume, here and now, the supreme objective of the salvation of souls, with pragmatism, great pastoral charity and a perseverance worthy of praise .” They “bear witness that service to the Church is carried out with patience, perseverance and humble obedience, without interruptions. […] It is this silent fidelity, more than opposition, that leaves an indelible mark on the life of the Church .”
The Institutes of Ecclesia Dei have chosen to live Tradition not as a conflictual alternative to ecclesial communion, but as its integrated expression, although this has entailed, from the beginning of their institution, a difficult task within the ecclesiological framework subsequent to the Second Vatican Council. From this full communion derives the full canonical licitness of their ministry, which offers the faithful the serenity of receiving the Sacraments in the Church, without having to resort to uncertain and “borderline” solutions, but within a fully recognized structure.
Theirs is a demanding and complicated choice; the priests of these institutes must compromise with a predominantly modernist hierarchy. Their realism has led them to prefer patience to protest, construction to opposition, daily fidelity to proclamations. A heroic submission, an attitude that does not arise from fear, but from the cardinal virtue of prudence, which guides judgment and action according to the real possibilities of good in the concrete circumstances of life.
Another characteristic of these Institutes is their remarkable pastoral fecundity. The experience of these Institutes demonstrates great vitality: the increase in vocations, the number of seminarians, families and young people involved, as well as the vitality of the apostolate and sacramental life. The faithful guided by the priests of these Institutes focus on their own path to sanctification, rather than on theological disputes; they live apart from the perpetually bellicose and polemical tones with Rome. In the face of this storm, these priests have assumed and continue to assume, here and now, the supreme objective of the salvation of souls, with pragmatism, great pastoral charity and a perseverance worthy of praise.
The third characteristic that distinguishes their stance is an attitude of internal resistance, aware that theological fashions pass, pontificates change, ecclesial times succeed one another, but Tradition endures. Remaining within the Church ensures that when the hierarchy rediscovers the richness of its past, it will find faithful children ready to restore this vital essence.
The devil exists: “a living and spiritual being, perverted and perverter”
The Church’s Magisterium on this point is surprisingly sober. The Catechism of the Catholic Church addresses this topic in numbers 391-395, within its analysis of original sin. The doctrine affirms that behind the disobedience of our first parents “there is a seductive voice, opposed to God” (CCC 391). The Church teaches that the devil and other demons were created by God as good by nature, but became evil by themselves, through a free and irrevocable choice. This is the definition of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), which the Catechism takes up literally: evil has no substance of its own; there is no evil principle coeternal with God. Manichaean dualism is radically excluded.
Satan’s power “is not infinite” (CCC 395). He is a creature, powerful as a pure spirit, but a creature nonetheless: he cannot prevent the building of the Kingdom of God. In no. 2851, commenting on the last petition of the Our Father, the evil from which liberation is sought is not an abstraction, but refers to a person, Satan, the angel who opposes God. Those who dismiss Catholic demonology as a medieval relic must bear in mind that it is written, in black and white, in the catechism promulgated by Saint John Paul II in 1992. The Catechism addresses exorcism in no. 1673, carefully distinguishing between major exorcism—reserved for a priest authorized by the bishop—and cases of mental illness, whose treatment “belongs to medical science.” Before performing an exorcism, the Church teaches, it is necessary to verify whether the devil is really present and it is not a pathology.
The most cited—and most misunderstood—modern magisterial document remains Saint Paul VI’s general audience of November 15, 1972. On June 29, 1972, he had pronounced the famous phrase about the “smoke of Satan” entering the temple of God; he devoted an entire catechesis to defense against the devil. Evil, he stated, is not merely a deficiency, but an efficiency: “a living and spiritual being, perverted and perverter.” A terrifying, mysterious and frightful reality. And he added that whoever refuses to recognize his existence, or turns him into a principle in himself, or explains him as a pseudo-conceptual reality of our misfortunes, stands outside the framework of biblical and ecclesial teaching.
It was a direct response to the theological climate of the time. In 1969, the exegete Herbert Haag had published Abschied vom Teufel (“Farewell to the Devil”), arguing that Satan was merely a symbol of sin. The Magisterium’s response also came through doctrinal means: in 1975, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith published the study “Christian Faith and Demonology,” which reaffirmed the personal existence of the devil as a constant fact of ecclesial consciousness, rooted in Scripture—from the temptations of Jesus in the desert to the evangelical exorcisms—and in liturgical practice, beginning with the baptismal renunciations. A technical document, rarely cited, but which remains the doctrinal point of reference on the matter.
Saint John Paul II took up the theme in his catechesis on the angels in August 1986, devoting two audiences to the fall of the rebellious angels: Satan’s sin consists in the rejection of the truth about God, condensed in the “non serviam.” And in May 1987, on a pilgrimage to the shrine of San Michele in Gargano, he recalled that the struggle against the devil remains as relevant today as it was at the beginning, because the devil still lives and acts in the world. It was during his pontificate, in 1999, that the new rite of exorcisms was promulgated, De exorcismis et supplicationibus quibusdam. This updated the Roman Ritual of 1614, strengthening the criteria for discerning between demonic phenomena and mental disorders.
Already in the 1970s, as a professor, Ratzinger intervened in the debate initiated by Haag with biting passages, later included in Dogma and Preaching: to dismiss the devil means to dismiss a part of the Gospel, because the figure of the tempter is not Semitic cultural dross from which faith can free itself without losing itself. For Ratzinger, the devil is not a “person” in the full sense of the word for man, but rather the disintegration, the dissolution of the human being, yet a real power, not a symbol.
As Pope, he took up the theme in the first volume of Jesus of Nazareth (2007), both in the chapter on the temptations in the desert and in the commentary on the Our Father. Benedict XVI points out that the expression “deliver us from evil” in the final petition can be interpreted in a neuter or masculine form—evil or the Evil One—and that tradition has correctly interpreted this expression as a personal reference: Jesus’ temptations reveal an adversary who does not propose evil in a crude way, but disguised as good, even using apparently biblical arguments. This is Ratzinger’s interpretation of the theme: the devil as an intelligent lie, not as folklore.
The last “ordinary” catechesis of his pontificate—the general audience of February 13, 2013, Ash Wednesday, two days after the announcement of his resignation—is devoted precisely to the temptations of Jesus in the desert: the essence of every temptation, he explained, is to turn away from God, to exploit him for one’s own benefit, to give the ego the place that belongs to him. Benedict XVI bade farewell to the faithful by speaking of the tempter.
In the short time of Leo XIV’s pontificate, in September 2025, addressing the exorcists gathered in Sacrofano, he defined the ministry of the exorcist as delicate but extremely necessary, to be lived “as a ministry of liberation and consolation,” accompanying with prayer the faithful truly possessed by the Evil One, so that, through the sacrament of exorcism, the Lord may grant them victory over Satan. The Angelus of the first Sunday of Lent, February 22, 2026, commented on the Gospel of Jesus tempted by the devil in the desert: Christ, by resisting the devil, shows how to overcome his deceptions and traps.
The devil exists; he is a spiritual creature fallen by free will; his power is real but limited, and his defeat was sealed in the Pasch of Christ. The Church has never centered its preaching on the devil—the center is Christ, “who appeared to destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8)—but neither has it accepted the idea of eliminating him from the deposit of faith to please the spirit of the age. This is the temptation of some “theologians.” The Christian life is a battle, but a battle already won. It is as erroneous to preach an omnipotent devil as to declare him dead.
“Blessed are your eyes because they see and your ears because they hear.”
Happy reading.