César Sánchez, a 35-year-old former seminarian, carefully studies the encyclicals and exhortations of Pope Francis. He then contrasts them with Catholic doctrine and reveals the contradictions. He admits that the work is “exhausting,” but he perseveres because the purpose is lofty: to proclaim that a fraud sits in Peter’s chair. No, something worse: a mortal enemy of the Church. It is, he says, “as if we had Joan Gaspart”, former president of Barça, as president of Real Madrid. This “ordinary Catholic” opened his YouTube channel in 2018 Caesar for Jesus Christ, which has more than 97,000 subscribers. He worked as a teacher, he says, but God asked him to dedicate himself “only to this.” And “this” is defending a rigorous vision of faith and in particular attacking Francis, whose teaching is “contradictory” to the Catholic essence, Sánchez maintains. Because?
One reason – the former seminarian begins – is the Pope’s permissiveness with adultery in his 2016 exhortation. Amoris Laeitia, which led four cardinals to publicly raise their doubts. “Two of them died shortly after, suddenly,” he says. Do you suspect murder? “It’s hard to know.” Another aberration, in Sánchez’s eyes, was allowing in 2019 a “worship” of the Andean goddess Pachamama, an event that links with the appearance “40 days later, like the 40 days that Jesus Christ was in the desert,” of the first case of covid. 19. The list does not end there. Francisco, he adds, is a Mason, he has a “pact with the Chinese Communist Party,” he supports the 2030 Agenda. And the most serious thing: he is not even pope. According to Sánchez, he is an “antipope” who usurped the throne after a “coup d’état.”
Luis Santamaría, researcher at the Ibero-American Network for the Study of Sects, has identified more than 40 groups that call themselves Catholics with activity in Spain and that are separated from the line of the Church, to which are added a wide myriad of channels. digital. Around twenty of them, he maintains, deny the legitimacy of the Pope. Their other three common features, points out the author of Just outside the cross. The sects of Christian origin in Spain, They are “religious traditionalism,” “political ultraconservatism,” and a penchant for “conspiracy theories” about the Church or the world. Some speakers of these positions are secular, others declare themselves clerics despite lacking official recognition. Santamaría explains that this phenomenon, with historical roots, grew after the election of Francis in 2013. His representatives, he adds, have “raised the tone” following the death on December 31, 2022 of Benedict XVI, who was seen by many as a kind of last firewall to prevent the arrival of the “antichrist.”
One of the anti-Francis groups, that unlike Caesar for Jesus Christ It is not a digital channel but an entire organization, it is now under the spotlight. It is the Pious Union Sancti Pauli Apostoli, led by the excommunicated bishop Pablo de Rojas, under whose tutelage a group of nuns has been placed in a case that seems designed to engage audiences. The Pious Union, which maintains that Francis is a “simple layman,” is not alone. There are more self-proclaimed churches and orders in similar positions. The Seat of Wisdom, for example, awaits a “legitimately elected pope” to approve its statutes. The Mercedarian Church declares itself “successor” of the Roman Church. And the Palmarian Church, based in Palmar de Troya (Seville), has its own pope, the Swiss Markus Josef Odermatt, enthroned as Peter III.
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A false pope for a “new world order”
Although Tridentine echoes and Francoist nostalgia have stood out in Pablo de Rojas’s descriptions of the Pious Union, another current runs through his activity: conspiracism. In their letters, this group accuses the Government of “enslaving” Spain to “foreign powers” to establish the “New World Order.” Is the same order what César Sánchez fears, of Caesar for Jesus Christ, who on his channel raises suspicions that the snow that fell in Madrid in 2021 was just that, snow: “I don’t want to say that it has plastic, I don’t want to say that it is a climate weapon, but I don’t want to rule it out either,” he says in a video. Although aware that his opinions can be labeled as “conspiracy,” Sánchez rejects that label. Also the fanatic. “A fanatic is he who does not use reason,” he defends.
The narration of Caesar for Jesus Christ It could be summarized like this: the world is witnessing “the end of the battle between good and evil,” which has an advantage because at the head of the Church there is a “Luciferian Freemason.” “The situation is so serious,” he says, “that only the return of Christ can fix it.” In his opinion, the election of another pope would not be enough, since Francis’ papacy is “flawed from origin”, all according to a theory widely spread in these circles according to which either Benedict XVI’s resignation was invalid or Well, Francisco’s election did not have it. Or one thing and the other.
Isaac García, 39, who broadcasts from Valencia on his channel, moves in these theses. Maccabeus, with more than 20,000 subscribers. The election of Francisco, he maintains, was due to the fact that a cabal of progressive clerics, the “St. Gallen Mafia”, managed to pervert the 2013 conclave. For García, Francisco is “an antichrist” in “manifest heresy” who acts with the “own hatred” of those who “do not have faith”, as proven by their ideas about blessing homosexual couples.
Similar narrative schemes are found in Worship and Liberation, an “apostolate” with more than 150,000 subscribers on YouTube that complements its offer with a website and spaces on social networks. “A conclave must be called to provide the Catholic Church with a true pope,” he maintains. Worship and Liberation. The messages delve into conspiracy, giving rise to the omnipresent theory about a globalist plan for a “New World Order” and which maintains that there is a powerful lobby gay in the Church, the “lavender mafia”. Anti-vaccine messages also have space.
A frequently cited source in this hornet’s nest is the web Like an almond tree, where along with authors who reject that Francis is pope there is one who doubts that he would even be ordained deacon. An editorial calls on Catholics to demand an “end to its support for the diabolical agenda of the UN” and several texts warn of a “homosexualist” drift in the Church. The journey through groups and channels continues. The “heresies” of the “pseudopope” and the “continuation of Nazism” with the 2030 Agenda are the subject of attention of Remnant Armywhose almost 25,000 subscribers on Telegram receive messages against vaccines and against the censorship suffered by the xenophobic theory of the great replacement (according to which the white and Christian population is being systematically replaced around the world by the advance of immigration).
The impact on the faithful
Luis Santamaría warns of the impact of this entire set of messages between conspiracy, apocalyptic fanaticism and ultra-conservatism. “When the Poor Clares [de Belorado] They say that the Pope is a heretic, they repeat distortions that come out of this misinformative environment,” says the researcher. The journalist Vicens Lozano, with more than 35 years of experience in the Holy See, also shows his concern, pointing out how the rise of conspiracy linked to extreme right ideas, a global trend that goes beyond the religious, has in the Church “an expression especially significant.” Author of Vaticangate, An investigation into an “utra plot” against the Pope, Lozano believes that there are Catholic hierarchs whose discourse fuels this phenomenon. He cites German Cardinal Gerhard Müller, whom Lozano places as “enemy number one” of Francis and who also declares war against the “diabolical new world order,” which earns him sympathy in conspiracy circles.
The case of QAnon, an amalgam of theories that implicates an entire supposed progressive elite in a pedophile plot, has already shown how the spread of this type of thinking can hurt religious confessions. A 2020 article from the MIT Technology Review, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explains that QAnon took advantage of the pandemic to attract followers among the evangelical bases. Juantxo Domínguez, president of the Sectarian Prevention and Abuse of Weakness Network, does not see this permeability between the spaces of religion and conspiracy as coincidental. “Religious fanaticism is a favorable terrain for these theories, which also use typical schemes of religious narration,” he adds, in reference to the fight between good and evil or the early arrival of a savior or a cataclysm.
Carolina Galais, a researcher on social movements at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and a student in this field, affirms that it is logical that in crises – the case of the pandemic – conspiracy theories emerge, because “they help people process complex events” “vulnerable.” But she warns of insufficient grounds for attributing greater exposure to risk to believers. Of course, she cites a study carried out in Poland and published in 2021 that concludes that religious fanaticism—not religiosity per se— makes it easier to embrace these beliefs.
The tension caused by the expansion of the virulent ideology anti-Francis has already forced the Spanish hierarchy to act. The bishop of Orihuela-Alicante, José Ignacio Munilla, removed a priest from his duties in February for calling the pontiff a “heretic.” “An isolated case is not a symptom of a generalized problem,” the Spanish Episcopal Conference (CEE) responds in writing to EL PAÍS, which does admit that “the climate of polarization” in society also “unfortunately” affects the Church.
The EEC places emphasis on expressing its rejection of the “reactionary movement” known as “sedevacantism”, which denies the legitimacy of the popes after the pontificate of Pius XII (1939-1958), since it creates “spiritualist ghettos” without “connection with the reality”. Although the episcopal response does not cite this group or any other, among the sedevacantists is the Pía Unión Sancti Pauli Apostoli, which provides cover for the rebellious Poor Clare nuns. “It is important to be attentive to the emergence of these groups due to the spiritual damage and confusion they can cause in many of the faithful,” says the Spanish Episcopal Conference.
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