Leo XIV Denies Another Miracle, Says Christ Invited the Deaf-Mute to Choose to Speak Again!

Prevost ‘catechizing’ his flock…

Leo XIV Denies Another Miracle, Says Christ Invited the Deaf-Mute to Choose to Speak Again!

‘Pope’ Prevost on May 12, 2025 (image: Shutterstock/ErreRoberto)

Exactly one month has passed since Robert Francis Prevost — stage name: ‘Pope Leo XIV’ — denied Christ’s Miracle of the Multiplication of the Loaves. He did so by reinterpreting it in typical Modernist fashion as a ‘miracle’ of sharing: “…the real miracle performed by Christ was to show that the key to overcoming hunger lies in sharing rather than in greedily hoarding”, the false pope declared in a message to the FAO Conference in Rome on June 30, 2025. Our full analysis and refutation can be found here.

Today, July 30, Leo resumed the General Audiences he had suspended for the summer break, and his ‘catechesis’ centered one last time on the public life of Christ, specifically on Our Blessed Lord’s healing of the deaf-mute.

Before we look at Leo’s words, let’s first consider the applicable passage in St. Mark’s Gospel:

And again going out of the coasts of Tyre, [Jesus] came by Sidon to the sea of Galilee, through the midst of the coasts of Decapolis. And they bring to him one deaf and dumb; and they besought him that he would lay his hand upon him. And taking him from the multitude apart, he put his fingers into his ears, and spitting, he touched his tongue: And looking up to heaven, he groaned, and said to him: Ephpheta, which is, Be thou opened. And immediately his ears were opened, and the string of his tongue was loosed, and he spoke right. And he charged them that they should tell no man. But the more he charged them, so much the more a great deal did they publish it. And so much the more did they wonder, saying: He hath done all things well; he hath made both the deaf to hear, and the dumb to speak.

(Mark 7:31-37)

The divinely-inspired record of this beautiful miracle wrought by Christ is not terribly difficult to understand, although we should point out that the word “dumb” is archaic for “mute”, and that traditional Scripture commentaries (for example, Lapide, Haydock, Orchard) say that based on the Greek word used in the original text, we are not to understand a man who was entirely unable to speak but one who spoke only with difficulty or with an impediment. Nevertheless, the point is clear: Christ miraculously healed the man from his deafness and his inability to speak properly, so much so that the people marveled and spread the word about it.

This harmonizes beautifully with other passages in the Gospels and fulfills what had been prophesied of the Messiah in the Old Testament:

Say to the fainthearted: Take courage, and fear not: behold your God will bring the revenge of recompense: God himself will come and will save you. Then shall the eyes of the blind be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. Then shall the lame man leap as a hart, and the tongue of the dumb shall be free: for waters are broken out in the desert, and streams in the wilderness.

(Isaias 35:4-6)

Art thou he that art to come, or look we for another? And Jesus making answer said to them: Go and relate to John what you have heard and seen. The blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead rise again, the poor have the gospel preached to them.

(Matthew 11:3-5)

And when Jesus had passed away from thence, he came nigh the sea of Galilee. And going up into a mountain, he sat there. And there came to him great multitudes, having with them the dumb, the blind, the lame, the maimed, and many others: and they cast them down at his feet, and he healed them: So that the multitudes marvelled seeing the dumb speak, the lame walk, and the blind see: and they glorified the God of Israel.

(Matthew 15:29-31)

We can easily see how inspiring this Gospel truth is: The Messiah has come, He makes all things well, He cures the deaf, the mute, the blind, the lame. Yet He does so, chiefly, not for the sake of improving natural life, which must necessarily end in death, but to introduce sinful men to spiritual things and supernatural truths, showing them the path to Eternal Life:

…when Christ opened the ears and unloosed the tongue of the body, He opened also the ears and tongue of the soul, that they might listen to His inspiration, and believe that He was the Messiah, and that they might ask and obtain of Him pardon of their sins.

(Fr. Cornelius a Lapide, The Great Commentary, vol. 3, 5th ed., [Edinburgh: John Grant, 1908], p. 409)

These beautiful and truly edifying truths Leo XIV could have preached about in his catechesis this morning, but he chose not to.

Instead, he set the Gospel passage of the healing of the deaf-mute into the context of a crisis of communications he says the world is experiencing. Leo suggests that the deaf-mute had simply chosen not to speak or hear anymore, and Christ’s miracle consisted in getting him to decide to speak properly and to listen again:

…today I would like to reflect on a passage from the Gospel of Mark that presents us with a man who cannot speak or hear (cf. Mk 7:31–37). Just as it can sometimes happen to us, perhaps this man chose not to speak anymore because he did not feel understood; he chose to shut off every voice because he had been disappointed and wounded by what he had heard. In fact, it is not he who goes to Jesus to be healed, but others bring him. One may think that the people who take him to the Master are concerned about his isolation. The Christian community, however, has also seen in these people an image of the Church, which accompanies each person to Jesus so that they may listen to His word. The episode takes place in pagan territory, so we are in a context where other voices tend to drown out God’s voice.

Jesus’ behavior may initially seem strange, because He takes this person aside (v. 33a). In this way, He seems to emphasize his isolation, but on closer look, it helps us to understand what lies behind the silence and closure of this man, as if Jesus had perceived his need for intimacy and closeness.

Before anything else, Jesus offers him silent closeness, through gestures that speak of a profound encounter: He touches this man’s ears and tongue (cf. v. 33b). Jesus does not use many words; He says only what is necessary in that moment: “Be opened!” (v. 34). Mark uses the word in Aramaic—Eph’phatha—as though to let us hear, almost “in person” its sound and breath. This simple and beautiful word contains the invitation that Jesus addresses to this man who had stopped listening and speaking. It is as if Jesus were saying to him: “Be opened to this world that frightens you! Be opened to the relationships that have disappointed you! Be opened to the life you have given up facing!”. Closing in on oneself, in fact, is never a solution.

After the encounter with Jesus, that person not only begins to speak again, but he does so “plainly” (v. 35). This adverb, inserted by the Evangelist, seems to suggest something deeper about the reasons for his silence. Perhaps this man had stopped speaking because he felt he was saying things the wrong way, perhaps he felt inadequate. All of us experience what it means to be misunderstood, to feel that we are not truly heard. All of us need to ask the Lord to heal our way of communicating, not only so that we may be more effective, but also so that we may avoid wounding others with our words.

(Antipope Leo XIV, General Audience Catechesis, Vatican.va, July 30, 2025; underlining added.)

This is a classic case of reading ideological talking points into the sacred text. ‘Pope’ Francis did this for years with his insufferable daily homilies at the Casa Santa Marta.

Notice that Leo XIV does not use the sources of revelation and the Church’s teaching to shed light on the passage in question; rather, he approaches it with his peculiar talking points in mind and “interprets” the text according to them.

There is not the hint of an indication in the text that somehow the man in need of a cure had chosen not to speak anymore, yet Prevost assumes it to be so for his entire ‘catechesis’. The ‘isolation’ he mentions also seems contrived. It cannot be ruled out that the poor man was isolated, of course, but the text merely says that people brought him to Christ. The reason for that could simply be that he hadn’t heard of Christ or wasn’t aware that Christ was present in his location. (He was, after all, deaf.)

Furthermore, it is obvious that with his use of the expression eph’phatha — “be thou opened” — Christ commanded the man’s ears to open up and his tongue to be loosed — it had nothing to do with an “invitation” to listen and speak again, as if Our Lord had ‘nudged’ the deaf-mute into deciding to use his faculties of hearing and speaking rightly once more. Dr. Jordan B. Peterson might have accomplished as much.

According to Leo, the deaf-mute man had simply chosen to stop speaking and hearing…

If we read the entire catechesis, we can see that Leo hit on a number of the popular ideological buzzwords: encounter, relationship, experience, invitation, human dignity, closeness, and journey. His ‘explanation’ of Christ’s miraculous cure of the deaf-mute remains entirely horizontal, concerned only with the natural life of this world; and the word “miracle” is entirely absent. Although at the very end of his speech he does make fleeting mention of Christ’s Passion, His Cross, and salvation, these appear as more of an afterthought and certainly do not constitute Prevost’s chief concern.

What Leo has uttered in this travesty of a Catholic catechetical presentation is nothing but Bergoglian drivel. His mentor, ‘Pope’ Francis (Jorge Bergoglio), could not have said it better himself — he who was on an infernal mission to naturalize the supernatural, to neutralize the Gospel by depriving it of its supernatural character.

It may not look like it on the outside, but in substance Leo XIV is really Francis II; and no traditional vestment, exquisite chant, or beautiful Latin is going to change that.

Image sources: Shutterstock (ErreRoberto; cropped) / Nirupam Brahma (cropped)
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