The EWTN News article from March 5, 2026, reports on Christian villagers in southern Lebanon who, facing evacuation orders amid the escalating Iran-Israel war, have chosen to remain in their towns. It describes their refusal to leave, their organization of local watch rotations with church bells as warning signals, their appeals to the Lebanese army and the apostolic nuncio for protection, and their determination to prevent Hezbollah from using their villages as military bases. The narrative frames their stance as one of “resilience” and “stubborn determination to stay,” rooted in love for their land and community, while expressing frustration at being caught in a war they did not choose. The article concludes by noting their faith as a sustaining factor. This humanistic and geopolitical account completely omits the Catholic doctrine of the Social Kingship of Christ over nations and the consequent obligation of the state to recognize and serve the Church, as defined by pre-1958 Magisterium. The villagers’ appeals to secular authorities (Lebanese army, UNIFIL, the “Vatican’s diplomatic channels”) and their reliance on natural means of self-defense, without a single reference to the necessity of a Catholic social order, expose a profound theological and spiritual bankruptcy: a Catholicism reduced to cultural identity and natural resistance, devoid of its supernatural mission to subject all human societies to the law of Christ the King.
The Naturalistic Foundation of a ‘Catholic’ Narrative
The article presents a purely naturalistic and geopolitical analysis. The Christians’ motivation is described in terms of “love for their land,” opposition to Hezbollah’s “Iranian-backed militia,” and the desire to avoid displacement. Their proposed solutions—appeals to the Lebanese state, the army, UN peacekeepers, and the apostolic nuncio for “international guarantees”—are all within the framework of secular diplomacy and human institutions. The only explicitly “Catholic” element mentioned is the ringing of church bells and the reference to “faith” as a sustaining factor. There is no mention of the Social Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Catholic doctrine that all human authority, including that of the state, is derived from and must be subordinate to Christ the King. This omission is not incidental; it is the direct fruit of the conciliar revolution’s embrace of religious indifferentism and the separation of Church and State, condemned by Pope Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors.
Linguistic Symptoms of Theological Decay
The language employed is that of modern journalism and humanistic resistance. Key phrases include “resilience,” “stubborn determination,” “strategic position,” “self-sufficient,” “volunteered to organize watch rotations,” and “diplomatic efforts.” The tone is one of pragmatic, almost secular, defiance. The supernatural vocabulary of Catholic social doctrine is entirely absent. There is no language of Christus Rex, of the City of God versus the City of Man, of the state’s duty to “render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Matt. 22:21) in the sense that Caesar himself must recognize God’s authority. The villagers’ “faith” is presented as an interior, personal resource, not as the basis for a public, social, and political order. This linguistic choice reveals a mindset that has fully internalized the modernist separation of the spiritual from the temporal, a separation Pius XI in Quas Primas called the root cause of societal collapse.
Theological Confrontation: The Missing Doctrine of Christ the King
The article’s central failing is its total silence on the doctrine so clearly and forcefully taught by Pope Pius XI in his 1925 encyclical Quas Primas, which established the feast of Christ the King precisely to combat the secularism described. Pius XI taught that the “plague” of his time was “the secularism of our times, so-called laicism,” which began with “the denial of Christ the Lord’s reign over all nations.” He stated unequivocally: “When God and Jesus Christ—as we lamented—were removed from laws and states and when authority was derived not from God but from men, the foundations of that authority were destroyed.” The encyclical declares that Christ’s reign “encompasses all men” and that rulers have a duty to “publicly honor Christ and obey Him,” ordering all state relations—legislation, justice, education—on the basis of God’s commandments.
The Lebanese Christians in the article are depicted as wanting to live peacefully in their villages, but their framework is entirely one of seeking protection from human powers (Lebanese army, UNIFIL, “Washington and European capitals”) against human aggressors (Hezbollah, Israel). They make no appeal to the divine right of Christ the King to rule, nor do they demand that the Lebanese state, if it were truly Catholic, would have the duty and power to defend them as part of its obligation to protect the Res publica Christiana. Their request to the apostolic nuncio is for diplomatic intervention, not for the preaching of the Catholic doctrine that the only true peace and security come from the public recognition of Christ’s sovereignty. This is a direct rejection of the teaching of Quas Primas: “If men were ever to recognize Christ’s royal authority over themselves, both privately and publicly, then unheard-of blessings would flow upon the whole society, such as due freedom, order, and tranquility, and concord and peace.”
Symptomatic of the Conciliar Apostasy: The Rejection of the Syllabus
The villagers’ position, as presented, is a lived-out embodiment of the errors condemned by Pope Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors (1864). Their reliance on secular state forces and international bodies assumes the very errors Pius IX anathematized:
- Error 39: “The State, as being the origin and source of all rights, is endowed with a certain right not circumscribed by any limits.” The villagers appeal to the Lebanese state as if it possesses autonomous, God-given authority to protect them, ignoring that a state not consecrated to Christ has no true authority to defend the just.
- Error 55: “The Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church.” Their entire strategy operates within this separated framework. They do not call for a Lebanese state that is officially Catholic and thus has the right and duty to expel Hezbollah as an anti-Catholic, Iranian-backed militia. They accept the secular state as a neutral arbiter, which is precisely the modernist error.
- Error 77: “In the present day it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the State, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship.” By not demanding a Catholic Lebanon, they implicitly accept the indifferentist principle that the state can be religiously neutral, a principle condemned by Pius IX.
Their fear of “displacement” and desire for “guarantees” from international powers reflects the modern, naturalistic hope in human treaties and balances of power, which Pius XI in Quas Primas contrasted with the hope placed solely in Christ’s reign: “the hope of lasting peace will not yet shine upon nations as long as individuals and states renounce and do not wish to recognize the reign of our Savior.”
The Omission of Supernatural Means and the Error of Naturalistic Resistance
The gravest theological failure is the article’s complete silence on the supernatural means of defense and victory. It mentions “faith” as an abstract sustainer but says nothing of:
- The Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass as the true source of strength and the primary weapon against evil.
- The necessity of the state of grace and frequent reception of the sacraments for any hope of divine protection.
- The role of the Blessed Virgin Mary as Queen of Lebanon and Protectress, and the efficacy of consecration to her Immaculate Heart, as taught by the true (pre-1958) Church.
- The doctrine of martyrdom: that ultimate victory comes through suffering and death offered in union with Christ, not through successful human self-defense.
This omission is not neutral; it is a symptom of the modernist “hermeneutics of discontinuity” that reduces religion to ethics and social action. The villagers’ plan—to ring bells, organize watches, and appeal to armies—is a purely naturalistic “resistance.” A Catholic analysis, from the integral faith perspective, would first and foremost call for public penance, processions of the Blessed Sacrament, solemn Masses of reparation, and the explicit consecration of Lebanon to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary, as Leo XIII and Pius XI commanded. Without this supernatural foundation, any human effort is built on sand, as the Syllabus teaches: “When God and Jesus Christ were removed from laws and states… the foundations of that authority were destroyed.”
The Tragedy of Appealing to the Conciliar Nuncio
The article notes that a delegation appealed to the apostolic nuncio, Archbishop Paolo Borgia. From the perspective of integral Catholic faith, this is a tragic irony. The “apostolic nuncio” is a diplomat of the conciliar sect occupying the Vatican, led by the antipope “Pope” Leo XIV (Robert Prevost), a manifest heretic who, according to St. Robert Bellarmine and Canon 188.4 of the 1917 Code, has ipso facto lost the papacy. The conciliar “Church” has explicitly embraced the errors of religious liberty (Dignitatis Humanae) and ecumenism, which are condemned in the Syllabus (Errors 15-18) and by St. Pius X in Lamentabili sane exitu. To seek “diplomatic channels” from such a source is to seek water from a poisoned well. The conciliar sect has no power to consecrate nations to Christ the King, as it has formally rejected the doctrine of the Social Kingship in its documents and practice. The villagers’ appeal is therefore not only futile but spiritually dangerous, as it lends credibility to a false ecclesiastical structure that is the primary cause of the very apostasy and weakness they suffer from.
Conclusion: The Need for a Catholic Lebanon, Not a ‘Resilient’ One
The EWTN article, while sympathetic, presents a Catholicism that is culturally identifiable but doctrinally eviscerated. It reduces the faith to a marker of ethnic identity and a source of personal fortitude in a secular conflict. It completely fails to proclaim that the only solution to the war in Lebanon is the public and official recognition of Our Lord Jesus Christ as King of Lebanon, with the Lebanese state bound by Catholic law in its constitution, its legislation, its education system, and its foreign policy. This is not a “political” program but the essence of the Catholic faith applied to society, as defined by Quas Primas: “Let rulers of states therefore not refuse public veneration and obedience to the reigning Christ, but let them fulfill this duty themselves and with their people, if they wish to maintain their authority inviolate and contribute to the increase of their homeland’s happiness.”
The villagers’ natural courage is admirable, but without the supernatural principle of Christ’s Kingship, it is ultimately a resistance that cannot succeed, because it fights on the enemy’s naturalistic battlefield. The true Catholic resistance, as taught by the pre-1958 Magisterium, is to demand the conversion of the nation and its rulers to the Catholic faith, the expulsion of anti-Catholic forces like Hezbollah as a matter of ecclesiastical and civil justice, and the establishment of a social order where “every tongue will confess that our Lord Jesus Christ is in the glory of God the Father” (Phil. 2:11), not as a private sentiment, but as the public law of the land. The article’s failure to articulate this is not a journalistic oversight but a theological surrender to the modernist spirit of the age, which the Syllabus and Quas Primas condemned with such severity.
Source:
Christians in South Lebanon refuse to leave their towns as war escalates (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 05.03.2026