Secular Court Usurps Parental Right to Religious Formation in Maine Dispute
Catholic News Agency reports on November 19, 2025, that Maine’s Supreme Court is adjudicating whether Emily Bickford may expose her 12-year-old daughter to Christian worship at Calvary Chapel against the objections of the child’s father, Matthew Bradeen. A Portland District Court previously ruled such religious exposure “psychologically unsafe,” granting Bradeen exclusive authority over the girl’s participation in “other churches and religious organizations.” Liberty Counsel contends this order violates Bickford’s parental rights, noting Bradeen’s hostility toward biblical instruction. The court’s embrace of psychological alarmism over jus divinum parental authority exposes modernity’s systematic assault on Christ’s social reign.
State Usurpation of the Patria Potestas (Parental Authority)
The Portland court’s ruling constitutes a frontal assault on the primordial right of parents to direct their children’s religious upbringing – a right enshrined in divine law. Pope Pius XI’s encyclical Divini Illius Magistri (1929) declares:
“The family holds directly from the Creator the mission and hence the right to educate the offspring, a right inalienable because inseparably joined to the strict obligation, a right anterior to any right whatever of civil society” (n. 33).
By granting Bradeen veto power over religious formation, Maine’s judiciary commits sacrilege against the ordo iuris naturalis (order of natural law), elevating psychiatric speculation over the lex divina.
Psychological Reductionism as Anti-Religious Weapon
The court’s designation of church attendance as “psychologically unsafe” based on alleged panic attacks and eschatological notes reveals modernity’s pathological inversion of values. This medicalization of grace echoes the naturalism condemned by Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors (1864), particularly error #58:
“The rectitude and excellence of morality ought to be placed in…the gratification of pleasure.”
When courts pathologize a child’s engagement with divine revelation, they enact the regnum hominis (kingdom of man) denounced by Pius X in Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907) – reducing supernatural life to therapeutic categories.
Liberty Counsel’s Inadequate Defense
While correctly challenging the order’s breadth, Liberty Counsel’s First Amendment arguments remain imprisoned within Enlightenment presuppositions. Their appeal to judicial precedent ignores the regale sacerdotium (royal priesthood) of Christian parents, which demands not mere “religious freedom” but state subordination to Christ the King. Pius XI’s Quas Primas (1925) establishes:
“Rulers and legitimate superiors [must] be convinced that they exercise authority not so much by their own right as by the command and in the place of the Divine King.”
By framing the conflict as parental parity rather than divine right, the legal defense concedes the naturalist premise that religious formation is negotiable.
Father’s Hostility Toward Revelation as Symptom of Apostasy
Bradeen’s “wholesale objections to the Old Testament and the New Testament” epitomize the apostate spirit foretold in 2 Timothy 4:3-4. The court’s endorsement of this hostility constitutes formal cooperation with heresy, violating the mandate of Mirari Vos (1832) where Gregory XVI condemned “that absurd and erroneous opinion which claims that liberty of conscience must be maintained for everyone.” When civil authority shields children from Scripture, it becomes what Leo XIII termed in Immortale Dei (1885) “a State which recognizes no God” – the very definition of societal suicide.
Ecclesial Implications of State-Mandated Irreligion
This Maine case illuminates the terminal phase of America’s apostasy prophesied in Belloc’s The Crisis of Civilization. By prohibiting a mother from teaching her daughter “religious literature or religious philosophy,” the court enforces the educational tyranny condemned in the Syllabus (error #47):
“The best theory of civil society requires that popular schools…should be freed from all ecclesiastical authority, control and interference.”
Such rulings fulfill Pius XI’s warning in Divini Redemptoris (1937) that secular states inevitably become “regimes which ignore God” whose laws “strike at the very existence of the family.”
Source:
Maine court to rule if mother can take daughter to church over father’s objections (catholicnewsagency.com)
Date: 19.11.2025