Pride, the Gateway Vice: How False Prophets Deceive Others

In our last piece, Part Two of our False Prophecy series, we looked at six warning signs the saints have given us for testing whether a prophecy is genuinely from God. If you read them closely, you may have noticed something: they weren’t really six separate problems. They were six faces of the same one.

Nearly nine hundred years ago, St. Hildegard of Bingen, later recognized by the Church as a Doctor of the Church for the depth of her theological teaching, saw this with striking clarity. In her Liber Vitae Meritorum (The Book of the Rewards of Life), she names the root plainly:

“Pride… is the source of all faults and material and mother of all other evils, since pride caused the first angel to be cast out of heaven and drove man from paradise.”  Liber Vitae Meritorum, Part 3, Section 34, Para. 42

Every other vice in her vision grows out of that one root. It’s worth walking through her chain, because it explains something our last piece could only describe from the outside.

The Chain that Pride Builds

This ancient teaching doesn’t leave pride standing alone. It traces exactly how pride moves after it takes hold of a soul, falling to other vices in the chain that grow directly out of the last.

A proud person that refuses to submit to a higher authority soon can’t bear to see anyone else honored above itself. That envy curdles into a hunger for recognition, a need to be seen as great. That hunger, once it’s used to getting admiration, stops tolerating correction from anyone, since it no longer needs anyone’s approval but its own. Refusing correction long enough eventually costs the soul its capacity to trust anyone at all, including God. And a soul that can no longer trust in God will eventually give up hope. That’s the sharpest observation in this whole teaching: once a soul believes it’s already lost, it removes the last restraint on the flesh. That’s how this chain ends in outright moral collapse. The flesh is only the vehicle. The corrupted will is the actual cause.

Read the paragraph above again. Think about what you learned in Part Two. Do you see how neatly the chain of vices line up? The craving for recognition is pride reaching for an audience. Reckless zeal is pride mistaking its own heat for God’s fire. Disobedience is the same refusal to answer to anyone but yourself. These aren’t six unrelated red flags. They’re all symptoms of the same disease, the vice of pride, caught at six different points along its progress.

We don’t have to take this progression from the root vice of pride all the way to disobedience on faith. History has given us a modern real-world case that plays it out in full, start to finish. Let’s take a look at it as a tool to help us discern the prophecy, devotion, or movement you are struggling to discern the fruits of right now.

A Real Example: When Pride Built a False Church

In 1968, several children in a small Spanish village reported seeing an apparition of the Virgin Mary. Soon after, a young office clerk named Clemente Domínguez began claiming his own visions at the same site. What started there didn’t stay small.

Pride showed up first. Domínguez wasn’t content to simply share what he claimed to have seen. He wanted to be a bishop, and when legitimate Church authorities in Spain declined, he found one aging archbishop willing to ordain him anyway, without the Vatican’s permission. Within two years, that ordination grew into something far larger: after the pope died in 1978, Domínguez declared that Christ Himself had crowned him pope in a private vision, no conclave needed. He took the name Gregory XVII.

Vainglory followed close behind. He didn’t just claim the papacy quietly. He appointed his own cardinals, held two full councils of his own invented church, and set himself up with all the trappings of the office he’d never lawfully held.

Reckless zeal escalated it further. In less than two years, Domínguez and his bishops consecrated roughly ninety more bishops of their own, with no authorization from Rome at all. What began as one irregular ordination multiplied into an entire shadow hierarchy, built almost entirely on private visions rather than anything the Church had ever approved.

Disobedience to authority was the clearest sign of all. The local Archbishop of Seville formally condemned the site and forbade any Catholic religious activity there. Domínguez and his followers ignored it. When Rome later declared his own excommunication, he responded by declaring the actual pope in Rome deposed instead.

A lack of real scriptural and doctrinal grounding showed itself in just how far the claims went. Domínguez went on to invalidate the Second Vatican Council entirely and to declare the real, universally recognized pope an antipope, positions with no basis in Scripture or in anything the Church has ever taught, resting on nothing but his own private visions.

Where Real Humility Actually Showed Up

Not everyone caught up in this story responded to correction the same way. The archbishop who performed that first unauthorized ordination, once he was excommunicated for it, did something Domínguez never did. He recanted. He formally withdrew his support for the ordinations, asked the pope for forgiveness, and was received back into full communion.

That’s what real humility under correction looks like: not defending yourself, not declaring your corrector illegitimate, just yielding. But the story doesn’t end neatly there, and that’s worth knowing too. Years later, that same archbishop performed more unauthorized ordinations and was excommunicated a second time. Pride, even after it’s been genuinely humbled once, can return if it isn’t fully uprooted. That’s not a reason for despair. It’s a reason to keep watch over your own heart continually, not just once.

The Fruit Doesn’t Always Show Up Right Away

Domínguez’s pride founded the whole movement. But pride like that doesn’t stay contained to the person who started it. It gets built into the institution itself, and it tends to keep producing the same fruit, generation after generation, long after the original founder is gone.

Watch what happened to the numbers as that fruit ripened. Of the 192 men this movement consecrated as bishops over its first three decades, well over half eventually left or were expelled. By the time of the founder’s death in 2005, only a small fraction remained. And the sharpest collapse of all came under one particular successor, a man who forced families to sign documents agreeing in advance to evict their own children if they ever left, and who drove out young members in droves during his brief reign. A movement that started with grand claims of restoring the true Church was, by then, shedding its own people faster than it could replace them.

That same successor was also found guilty of assault and robbery. He also abdicated the papacy specifically to marry, walking away from the very vow of celibacy his own movement claimed made him a legitimate spiritual authority the moment it became inconvenient to keep. Two very different failures, worth naming separately and honestly. But taken together, they tell you what was really running the institution underneath its grand claims.

The unrestrained self-indulgence this ancient teaching describes as the final stage of unchecked pride didn’t show up in the founder himself. It surfaced two generations later, in a successor who inherited the same uncorrected root.

We Judge by the Fruit

This is exactly why Jesus told us to judge by fruit and not by first impressions: “by their fruits you will know them” (Matthew 7:16). Fruit doesn’t always ripen on the timeline we’d like it to. Sometimes it doesn’t fully show itself until a founder is gone and someone else is left holding what he built. But it always comes, eventually, to anyone patient enough to keep watching, and the numbers tell their own story even when the leadership won’t.

Church history gives us other sober examples of this same test working, patiently, over time. The Bayside apparitions in New York, centered on a woman named Veronica Lueken who claimed decades of messages from Our Lady, were formally condemned by the Bishop of Brooklyn in 1986. Subsequent bishops reaffirmed that judgment, and Rome itself confirmed the condemnation as recently as 2011, decades after the claims first began. Neither Bayside nor the movement above collapsed overnight. Both took years of patient Church scrutiny before the fruit was fully visible and the judgment was made final. That patience is not the Church being slow to protect her people. It’s the Church actually applying the same test Christ gave us, refusing to rush a verdict that time alone can fully confirm.

Real Fire and Counterfeit Fire

Here’s something worth understanding simply, since it applies to every one of these stories: not everything that feels intense and urgent is actually from God.

Think about it this way. A real fire purifies you and helps you see more clearly. A wildfire also burns bright, but it destroys everything in its path and leaves nothing behind. Both are fire. Only one of them is good for you.

Remember Moses and the burning bush. The bush was on fire, but it never burned up (Exodus 3:2). That’s what God’s fire actually looks like. It burns, it’s real, it’s powerful, but it purifies rather than destroys what it touches. It refines without reducing it to ashes.

Scripture describes God this way elsewhere too. The prophet Malachi compares Him to a refiner’s fire, the kind that burns away impurity from silver and gold until only the pure metal remains (Malachi 3:2-3). That’s what God’s fire is for. Not to destroy what it touches, but to burn away what doesn’t belong so what’s real and lasting can shine through.

That’s exactly what to watch for in a message or a seer who makes you feel intensely urgent, afraid, or desperate for answers. That intensity might feel like it’s from God. But intensity alone doesn’t tell you anything. What matters is what it leaves behind. Does it leave you more peaceful, more trusting, more at rest in God’s care, purified like gold through fire? Or does it leave you burned out, more afraid, more anxious, always waiting for the next warning, the next date, the next thing you have to do to stay safe?

Preternatural Phenomena Are Not the Same Thing as a Miracle

A miracle of God has a specific shape. It involves a real, documented condition, a diagnosis, a named patient, physicians willing to examine both the before and the after, and a result medicine cannot explain by any natural means. Padre Pio’s case with young Gemma Di Giorgi is a clear example. She was born with underdeveloped eyes and no pupils, a condition doctors examined and confirmed left her clinically blind from birth. After Padre Pio prayed over her, she could see, and ophthalmologists documented the change on both sides. That is what a genuine miracle looks like when it’s put under scrutiny: a specific, verifiable claim that survives medical examination rather than shrinking from it.

Unusual lights on a photograph, strange marks on film, an eerie coincidence, none of that is the same category of evidence, and it never has been. These are what the Church calls preternatural phenomena, meaning simply that they fall outside the ordinary course of nature. But “outside the ordinary course of nature” does not automatically mean “from God.” Exorcists have documented poltergeist activity, unexplained lights, and other strange occurrences for centuries, and the Church has never treated these as proof of anything holy on their own. A demon can produce a phenomenon just as easily as it can whisper a lie, because deceiving people has never required the same power that heals a body.

That’s precisely why phenomena like Bayside’s photographed “miracle” images prove nothing by themselves, no matter how strange or inexplicable they appear. There was no named patient. No documented prior diagnosis. No physician confirming a real condition had been reversed. Just images, open to whatever interpretation the movement wanted to give them. Compare that to Padre Pio’s case, where the claim was specific enough, and public enough, to be tested and to hold up under real medical examination.

This is why discernment can never stop at “something unexplainable happened here.” Scripture already warned us this exact confusion would come: “Satan disguises himself as an angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14). The appearance of the supernatural, however striking, was never the test. What it produces, and whether it can survive real scrutiny, always was.

Where This Leaves Us

None of this requires you to be a theologian or a canon lawyer. It requires you to notice one thing: pride refusing to submit, and to remember that everything else on this list tends to follow from it, given enough time.

If you see a teacher, a seer, or a movement that cannot bear correction, cannot stay small, and cannot wait patiently for the Church’s own slow, careful discernment, you’re not looking at something new. You’re looking at the oldest pattern there is, the one that began when pride first led an angel to be cast out of heaven.

Maybe you’ve felt that same pull toward a sign or a seer yourself. If so, it’s worth asking honestly why.

Is it fear? Fear can make us want certainty so badly that we’ll accept it from anywhere, just so the uncertainty stops. Is it a lack of knowledge? If you’ve never read the whole of Scripture, never really sat with the Catechism, it makes sense you’d feel unequipped to hear God for yourself, and look for someone who sounds equipped to do it for you.

Or is it something quieter than either of those? Maybe prayer has felt dry, or silent, and somewhere along the way you started to believe God speaks clearly to other people, dramatically, but stays distant from you.

If that’s true for you, hear this gently: God is not withholding Himself because you’re not spiritual enough to earn a vision. He has already given you everything you need, in Scripture, in the sacraments, in the quiet practice of showing up to pray even when it feels like nothing is happening. That ordinary faithfulness isn’t the consolation prize. It is the real thing.

If you’re seeking a sign because you’re afraid, unequipped, or tired of the quiet, the answer was never to find someone louder to listen to instead. It was to let that fear and that quiet draw you closer to the God who has been speaking all along, patiently, through the ordinary means He already gave His whole Church.

In our final piece, we’ll look at the answer to the chain of vices rooted in pride that infect a false prophet and deceive his or her followers. 

Humility and charity are the cure for this spiritual deception. This goes for the false prophet as well as the followers. In Part Four of our False Prophecy series we will hear some real case studies and reflect on what real surrender to God looks like, and how this cures us of our need for prophetic messages and the spiritual leader’s need for producing and disseminating them.