The Social Kingship Erased: St. John’s University and the Conciliar Sect’s War on Christ the King
The cited article from EWTN News reports on St. John’s University’s decision to cease recognizing faculty labor unions after 56 years. It frames the conflict as a tension between institutional sustainability and Catholic social teaching on labor rights, presenting statements from university spokesperson Brian Browne, faculty leaders like Sophia Bell and Christopher Denny, and external bodies like the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities (ACCU). The article concludes with faculty appeals to magisterial documents like Rerum Novarum and Caritas in Veritate, and references to statements by the antipope known as “Leo XIV.” The thesis of this analysis is that the entire debate, as presented, is a diabolical distraction from the central, non-negotiable dogma of the Social Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ, a truth systematically denied and undermined by the conciliar sect and its occupied structures, of which St. John’s University is a prime example.
1. The Myth of “Catholic Social Teaching” in the Conciliar Sect
The article operates on the false premise that there exists a coherent, authoritative “Catholic social teaching” within the post-conciliar structure that can be invoked to settle disputes. This is a fatal error. The “social teaching” referenced by Browne and Denny is not the immutable doctrine of the Catholic Church but the naturalistic, humanistic, and evolutionist “synthesis of all errors” condemned by St. Pius X.
Christopher Denny quotes Caritas in Veritate of Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI), an arch-heretic who propagated the errors of Lamentabili sane exitu and Pascendi Dominici gregis. Ratzinger’s encyclical is a masterpiece of Modernist ambiguity, reducing the Social Kingship of Christ to a vague “integral human development” that worships at the altar of “global governance” and “economic ethics” devoid of the exclusive reign of the Incarnate Word. Denny’s citation is therefore an invocation of a condemned document from a manifest heretic. The faculty’s appeal to “the Church’s magisterium” is an appeal to a phantom; the magisterium of the conciliar sect is a null and void teaching authority, as proven by its consistent denial of the necessity of the Social Reign of Christ over all nations, a truth defined by Pope Pius XI in Quas Primas.
Furthermore, Denny’s reference to “Pope Leo XIV” (Robert Prevost) is an act of formal schism and apostasy. The usurper on the Throne of Peter is a public heretic and apostate, whose “teaching” on labor is intrinsically poisoned by his rejection of the uniqueness of the Catholic Church and his promotion of religious liberty, a condemned error from the Syllabus of Errors (§§15-18). To cite such a figure is to demonstrate complete separation from the Catholic Faith.
2. The Erasure of Christ the King: Browne’s “Common Good” vs. Pius XI’s Teaching
University spokesman Brian Browne grounds the decision in the “common good” and “sustainability,” claiming it aligns with “Catholic social teaching.” This is a brazen distortion. The authentic Catholic concept of the common good is unthinkable without the explicit, public, and legal recognition of the reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ over individuals, families, and states. Pope Pius XI, in the encyclical Quas Primas (1925), which the article completely ignores, defined this with absolute clarity:
“His reign, namely, extends not only to Catholic nations or to those who, by receiving baptism according to law, belong to the Church… but His reign encompasses also all non-Christians, so that most truly the entire human race is subject to the authority of Jesus Christ.”
Pius XI further declared that the purpose of instituting the feast of Christ the King was to provide “a special remedy against the plague that poisons human society,” namely, “the secularism of our times, so-called laicism.” He explicitly links the removal of Christ from public life to the destruction of society:
“When God and Jesus Christ… were removed from laws and states… the foundations of that authority were destroyed, because the main reason why some have the right to command and others have the duty to obey was removed. For this reason, the entire human society had to be shaken.”
Browne’s language—“sustainable,” “innovate,” “flexibility,” “organizational mission”—is the precise vocabulary of the secular, managerial, naturalistic “world” that Pius XI condemned. It is the language of the “abomination of desolation” standing in the holy place. The “common good” of a Catholic institution cannot be defined by financial or operational metrics divorced from the primary duty to publicly confess and promote the exclusive kingship of Christ. By omitting any reference to this foundational dogma, Browne’s statement is a silent apostasy, reducing the university’s mission to a mere educational enterprise indistinguishable from any secular corporation.
Pius XI’s encyclical is unequivocal: rulers and governments have a strict duty to publicly honor and obey Christ the King. A Catholic university, as an institution of higher learning forming the minds and characters of future citizens and leaders, has an absolutely non-negotiable duty to be a beacon of this Social Kingship. To dissolve a union for the sake of “agility” is to prioritize the temporal and material over the spiritual and hierarchical order willed by God. It is to act as if Christ’s kingship is a private matter of personal piety, not a public, juridical, and social reality that must govern all human associations, including universities.
3. The Heresy of Religious Exemption: A Syllabus Error in Practice
The article notes that Catholic colleges are independent from the federal labor board due to a “religious exemption,” a position supported by the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU) and the ACCU. This invocation of a “religious exemption” is a damning admission of the neo-church’s capitulation to the secular state’s framework. It accepts the state’s authority to grant or deny exemptions, thereby acknowledging the state’s ultimate sovereignty in temporal matters—a direct violation of the Social Kingship of Christ.
Pope Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors (1864) condemns this precise mentality with the utmost severity. Error #55 states:
“The Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church.”
Error #76 adds:
“The abolition of the temporal power of which the Apostolic See is possessed would contribute in the greatest degree to the liberty and prosperity of the Church.”
The entire legal strategy of seeking a “religious exemption” from a secular labor board is built on the condemned principle of the separation of Church and State. It treats the Church (or a “Catholic” institution) as a private association seeking permission from the sovereign secular state to operate according to its conscience. This is the exact inversion of the Catholic order, where the State is subordinate to the Church in the moral and social order, and the Church possesses inherent, God-given rights that no state can grant or revoke. The authentic Catholic position, as defended by Pius IX, is that the Church’s rights are antecedent to the state and must be recognized as such. The conciliar sect, by operating within the “exemption” framework, has accepted the secularist premise that the state is the primary sovereign, to which the Church must appeal for toleration.
Furthermore, the ACCU’s statement that it “respects the university’s choice… to invoke its religious exemption” is a scandalous abdication. A true Catholic association would demand that a Catholic institution act according to its divine right and the laws of Christ the King, not according to the permissions of a Masonic-inspired state apparatus. The silence on the Social Kingship is a scream of apostasy.
4. The Faculty’s Modernist Appeal: Misuse of Rerum Novarum and the Condemned “Evolution” of Doctrine
The faculty leaders, particularly Christopher Denny, attempt to ground their opposition in Rerum Novarum (1891) of Leo XIII. However, their interpretation is a classic Modernist hermeneutic of discontinuity. They extract a principle—support for workers’ associations—from its proper context within the pre-1958 organic, hierarchical, and Christ-centered social order, and re-implant it into the post-conciliar secular, rights-based paradigm.
Rerum Novarum was written for a world still conscious of the Social Kingship of Christ, even if imperfectly realized. It speaks of the “dignity of the Christian” and the “natural and divine law” as the foundation of society. It never advocates for a “right to unionize” as an autonomous, secular right. The encyclical assumes a Catholic society where the state and Church cooperate for the common good defined by the Faith. To apply it to a pluralistic, secularized university environment, where the primary mission is framed as “student outcomes” rather than the formation of Catholic souls for eternity, is to empty it of its meaning and twist it into a tool of naturalistic reformism.
Denny’s quote from Benedict XVI’s Caritas in Veritate is particularly execrable. Benedict XVI, a notorious Modernist, explicitly taught the evolution of doctrine and the “hermeneutics of continuity,” both condemned by St. Pius X. His call for unions to be “reborn each day at the peripheries” is Modernist jargon for a church that is a “field hospital” for the world, not a sovereign society for the salvation of souls. It is the language of the “Church of the New Advent,” which has no dogma but the evolving “signs of the times.” The faculty’s reliance on this document proves they are not fighting for Catholic doctrine but for a conciliar, post-Catholic ideology.
The faculty also claims the administration is violating “centuries of Catholic social teaching.” This is a lie. The authentic, unchanging Catholic social teaching, as defined by the Popes before the apostasy of Vatican II, is that all human associations, including universities, must be ordered to the ultimate end of man: the glory of God and the salvation of souls through the reign of Christ the King. The decision of St. John’s, while perhaps imprudent from a purely naturalistic management perspective, is not a violation of this teaching because the university, as a conciliar institution, has already abandoned that teaching in principle. Its mission statement, its pluralistic identity (“39% Catholic”), its operational autonomy from the Church’s hierarchical governance—all these are declarations of independence from the Social Kingship. Therefore, the faculty’s complaint is not that a Catholic institution is failing to be Catholic; it is that a conciliar institution is failing to conform to the secular, naturalistic model of “shared governance” they prefer. Both sides are fighting over the carcass of the true Catholic university, which ceased to exist when the Vatican II sect took over.
5. The Symptomatic Silence: The Godless Foundation of the Conciliar Sect
The most damning aspect of the entire article and the debate it reports is the total silence on the supernatural. There is no mention of:
- The salvation of souls as the primary law of the Church.
- The necessity of the state to recognize the Catholic Church as the sole religion and to prohibit public worship of false gods.
- The duty of Catholic rulers to suppress heresy and schism for the common good.
- The fact that a university truly Catholic would have no “39% Catholic” identity but would be exclusively Catholic in doctrine, worship, and governance.
- The terrifying reality of mortal sin and the loss of sanctifying grace, which is the only true “dignity” of the worker.
- The Final Judgment, where every human act, including administrative decisions and union contracts, will be judged by the law of Christ the King.
This silence is not accidental; it is the very essence of the conciliar sect’s religion. It is a “Catholicism” reduced to ethics, community, and “mission” in this world. It is the “cult of man” denounced by Pope Pius XII. The true Catholic social order, as taught by Pius XI in Quas Primas and Leo XIII in Immortale Dei, is built on the foundation that “there is no power but from God: and those that are, are ordained of God” (Romans 13:1). Therefore, all human law must be a participation in the eternal law of God as revealed by Christ. The moment a “Catholic” institution frames its mission in terms of “sustainability,” “innovation,” and “student outcomes” without explicit subordination to the “sweet yoke” of Christ’s legislation, it has apostatized.
St. John’s University, under the leadership of “Father” Brian Shanley, OP, is a typical product of this apostasy. The Dominican Order, since the mid-20th century, has been a hotbed of Modernism. Shanley’s decision, whatever its naturalistic merits, is made within a framework that has already surrendered the primary battlefield: the public, juridical, and social reign of Christ. The faculty’s opposition, similarly, is fought on the naturalistic battlefield of labor rights and institutional tradition, not on the supernatural battlefield of dogma and the salvation of souls.
Conclusion: The Only Solution—Integral Catholicism
The article presents a false dilemma between a managerial “sustainability” model and a labor-rights model. Both are products of the same Modernist, secular mindset that has infected the conciliar sect. The true Catholic position, held by the tiny remnant of the integral faith before 1958 and preserved in the sedevacantist remnant today, is that there is no “social teaching” apart from the dogma of the Social Kingship of Christ.
As Pope Pius XI thunderously proclaimed:
“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… Then at last… so many wounds can be healed, then there will be hope that the law will regain its former authority, sweet peace will return again, swords and weapons will fall from hands.”
Until the conciliar sect and all its occupied structures—like St. John’s University—publicly and unconditionally accept this dogma, and until they are governed by a true Pope and bishops who will enforce it, every debate about “Catholic social teaching” is a meaningless charade. The faculty unions and the administration are two factions of the same apostate body, fighting over the spoils of a ship that has already sunk. The only remedy is the total rejection of the Vatican II revolution and a return to the immutable Faith of the centuries, which demands that every human institution, from the family to the university to the state, be explicitly and juridically subject to Christus Dominus.
“He must reign, and all power must be taken from His enemies.” (Pius XI, Quas Primas).
Source:
St. John’s University in New York no longer recognizes faculty labor unions (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 06.03.2026