Catholic Watch

When Pope Leo XIV last week completed his seven-day trip to Spain by visiting the Canary Islands, where thousands of migrants have died attempting to reach Europe, one would expect the usual boilerplate language typical of the Catholic hierarchy of late. This would include that Western nations need to treat immigrants with respect and dignity (hint: unreservedly welcoming them in and putting them on the fast track to citizenship) and that immigrants have the right to leave their nations of origin. There was certainly some of that, similar to his predecessor, Francis.

But what was surprisingly welcome was that the pope tempered that language with exhortations and warnings to those same migrants, a message that has been often frustratingly absent from the Catholic Church’s public commentary regarding one of the greatest crises facing the West. It’s language that many of the Catholic faithful — and the broader world that, to various degrees, still looks to the papacy as a moral compass — desperately yearned to hear, especially given that Catholic teaching is actually quite nuanced and moderate on the topic of immigration and borders. One hopes the rest of the Catholic hierarchy were paying attention.

Two Catholic priests who were wrongfully convicted and executed by the communist regime in former Czechoslovakia have been beatified.

On June 6, Fathers Jan Bula (1920-1952) and Vaclav Drbola (1912-1951) were beatified in Brno, Czech Republic, by Cardinal Michael Czerny. According to media reports, 13,000 people attended the ceremony.

Pope Leo XIV had previously recognized the diocesan priests Bula and Drbola as martyrs in October, stating that they had been sentenced to death out of “hatred for the faith.”

Based on fabricated charges, the communist government of Czechoslovakia had accused the priests of involvement in the assassination of communist officials; however, neither of them had anything to do with the attack. In the 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Czech judicial system exonerated the priests. They are the first victims of the communist regime to be beatified in the country.

Pope Leo XIV has named Maria Montserrat “Montse” Alvarado, who currently serves as the President and Chief Operating Officer (COO) of EWTN News, as the next Prefect of the Dicastery for Communication.

In its June 2 daily bulletin, the Vatican announced that Alvarado’s appointment will take effect on November 1. The president of the conservative Catholic media outlet will notably be the first laywoman to lead a Roman curia office and will continue the trajectory of Pope Leo and his predecessor, Pope Francis, of naming women and laypeople to key positions in the Vatican.

Just over a year ago, Pope Leo XIV’s first meeting with Maria Montserrat Alvarado, his newly appointed Prefect of the Dicastery for Communication. pic.twitter.com/2Aqo9fL4bh

— Catholic Sat (@CatholicSat) June 2, 2026

“While this appointment was unexpected, I receive it with a sincere desire to serve the Holy Father as he begins his pontificate,” Alvarado said in a statement after the appointment.

As a successor of the apostles, I have a solemn duty not only to preach the Gospel, but also to help the faithful discern the spirits of the age in the light of the unchanging truth entrusted to the Church by Our Lord Jesus Christ.

St. Paul exhorted Timothy to “preach the word: be instant in season, out of season: reprove, entreat, rebuke in all patience and doctrine” (2 Tim. 4:2). That duty belongs to every bishop charged with guarding the deposit of faith.

Therefore, I feel it is important to address concerns regarding the recently released encyclical letter, Magnifica Humanitas, of the Holy Father Leo XIV. Some have found parts of it insightful and compelling. Others have experienced a deep uneasiness while reading it – a concern that, beneath many true statements, the document reflects a broader theological shift that risks placing man at the center in a way that obscures the primacy of God.

The Vatican has issued a new directive discouraging investment in mining, framed as a matter of environmental responsibility. But the Faith and Reason panel sees something else: a Church that blessed Pachamama idols in 2019, whose current Pope knelt to Pachamama in 1995, now imposing an anti-human ecology that prioritizes the earth over the people who live on it.

The hosts defend their reporting on the newly surfaced photographs of Pope Leo XIV participating in a Pachamama ritual, not to scandalize, but to demand clarity. If cardinals condemned Pachamama as “demonic” and “apostasy” under Francis, what do they say now that the man in the photo sits on the Throne of Peter? The silence, they argue, is gaslighting: pretending the obvious is not happening.

German former bishop Reinaldo Nann has come to the defense of Pope Leo XIV in light of his participation in a 1995 Pachamama-related ceremony, arguing his presence was only an “interreligious” cultural gesture to honor the “soul of the Earth.”

On March 22, Spanish language news outlet Religión Digital published a defense of Pope Leo XIV by Nann defending Leo XIV against accusations that he participated in an act of idolatry during a 1995 ecological and theological congress in Brazil, where then-missionary Father Robert Prevost was photographed kneeling in the context of a ceremony associated with Pachamama, a pagan goddess linked to Andean religious traditions.

The end times are not announced by earthquakes or wars alone. The greatest sign, Fr. James Altman warns, is the apostasy unfolding inside the Church itself.

Joining John-Henry Westen, Fr. Altman draws on the warnings of Our Lady’s apparitions, Quito, La Salette, Garabandal, and the testimony of exorcists like Fr. Gabriel Amorth, who witnessed Padre Pio’s anguish over the loss of faith spreading through the Church’s own leadership. The crisis is not external. It is internal. And it has now reached the papacy.

The SSPX has announced it will proceed with episcopal consecrations on July 1, defying Vatican objections and declaring the Church in a state of emergency. Cardinal Robert Sarah and Cardinal Walter Brandmüller have issued public rebukes, demanding obedience to Pope Leo. Bishop Athanasius Schneider has offered support. The battle lines are drawn, not over rebellion, but over whether the crisis within the Church justifies extraordinary measures to preserve the priesthood and the faith.

Pope Leo’s recent episcopal appointments have placed men supportive of same-sex blessings into positions of authority, elevated figures entangled in Freemasonry controversies, and advanced leaders shaped by Germany’s Synodal Way. The pattern is not accidental. It is a deliberate reshaping of the hierarchy in Rome’s own image.