California’s Legal “Victory” for Parents Reveals the Apostasy of Naturalistic Catholicism
The cited article reports that a federal judge ordered California to pay $4.5 million in attorneys’ fees to the Thomas More Society, a self-described Catholic legal advocacy firm, after the U.S. Supreme Court blocked California state policies that prohibited schools from informing parents about their children’s claimed transgender identities. The judge found California guilty of “litigation intransigence.” Peter Breen of the Thomas More Society stated the ruling “sends an unmistakable message to state governments and school districts across the country: If you trample the constitutional rights of parents, you will pay for it — literally.”
This case is presented as a triumph for parental rights and a rebuke to state overreach. Yet, from the perspective of integral Catholic faith, it represents a profound and damning compromise—a battle fought on purely naturalistic, constitutional grounds that utterly ignores the supernatural order, the exclusive rights of God and His Church, and the true nature of the parental duty. The “victory” is a symptom of the apostasy that has consumed the post-conciliar world, where even those who style themselves as “Catholic” defenders reduce the immutable law of God to the shifting sands of civil rights jurisprudence.
A Battle Fought on the Enemy’s Terrain: The Reduction of Divine Law to Constitutional “Rights”
The entire legal strategy and the celebratory framing of the outcome rest on the foundation of U.S. constitutional law and the concept of “parental rights” as a civil liberty. The article quotes the Supreme Court’s language that parents have a “right not to be shut out of participation in decisions regarding their children’s mental health.” This is the sole framework within which the dispute was waged and won.
From the unchanging doctrine of the Catholic Church, this is a catastrophic surrender. Pope Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors (1864) condemns in the most absolute terms the very premise that the state possesses any original or independent authority over the family or the education of children. Error #45 states: “The entire government of public schools… may and ought to appertain to the civil power… and belong to it so far that no other authority whatsoever shall be recognized as having any right to interfere.” This is precisely the error California enacted, and the lawsuit, while opposing a specific application of that error, never challenged the error itself. Instead, it accepted the state’s presumptive jurisdiction and merely argued for a parental exception within the state’s framework.
The true Catholic position, defined by the 1917 Code of Canon Law and the social teaching of Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI, is that parents have a duty, not a “right” granted by the state, to raise their children in the Catholic faith, and that the state has no right to interfere with that duty, much less to impose policies that directly oppose it. Pius XI’s encyclical Quas Primas (1925) on the Kingship of Christ teaches that all authority, including that of parents and the state, is derived from and subject to the reign of Christ the King: “All power in heaven and on earth is given to Christ the Lord… it is clear that there is no power in us that is exempt from this reign.” The lawsuit never invoked the primacy of God’s law or the exclusive jurisdiction of the Church over the formation of conscience. It fought for a place at the table of the secular, liberal state, thereby ratifying the state’s usurped authority. The article’s language of “constitutional rights” and “judicial resources” is the language of the Syllabus’s condemned “moderate rationalism” (Errors #8-14), which seeks to subject theological and moral questions to the standards of civil law and “progress.”
The “Catholic” Legal Firm: A Mirror of Conciliar Compromise
The Thomas More Society is held up as a champion of Catholic values. Yet, its methodology is a perfect reflection of the post-conciliar “Church of the New Advent.” It does not argue from the deposit of faith, the natural law as defined by the Church, or the social kingship of Christ. It argues from the U.S. Constitution and precedents of the U.S. Supreme Court. This is the essence of the “hermeneutic of continuity” rejected by integral Catholic doctrine: the attempt to synthesize Catholic teaching with the principles of liberal, secular modernity.
St. Pius X’s condemnation of Modernism in the encyclical Pascendi Dominici gregis (1907) and the decree Lamentabili sane exitu (1907) is directly applicable. Modernism, as the “synthesis of all heresies,” seeks to adapt the faith to the “progress” of the modern world. Proposition #57 of Lamentabili states: “The Church is an enemy of the progress of natural and theological sciences.” The Thomas More Society’s approach assumes the opposite: that the Church can and must use the “progress” of secular jurisprudence to defend her interests. This is a capitulation to the error condemned in the Syllabus, Error #80: “The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization.” A truly Catholic legal argument would have declared California’s policy an offense against the immutable law of God and the exclusive right of the Church to guide souls, regardless of any “constitutional” consideration. By accepting the state’s framework, the Society implicitly accepts the separation of Church and state condemned in Error #55 (“The Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church”) and the subordination of the spiritual to the temporal.
The Omission of the Supernatural: The Gravest Accusation
The article’s analysis is entirely confined to the natural, psychological, and civil spheres. It speaks of “mental health,” “gender identification,” “parents’ rights to information,” and “constitutional rights.” There is not a single mention of sin, of the state of grace, of the eternal destiny of the child’s soul, of the obligation to form a child in the Catholic faith, or of the Sacraments as the sole means of salvation. This silence is the most damning evidence of the apostasy.
Pius XI, in Quas Primas, defines the Kingdom of Christ as primarily spiritual: “this kingdom is opposed only to the kingdom of Satan and the powers of darkness—and requires its followers not only to renounce earthly riches… but also to deny themselves and carry their cross.” The California policy, promoting a denial of God-created nature (sex) and encouraging a path of mortal sin (the rejection of one’s God-given sex), is an assault on the Kingdom of Christ. The correct Catholic response is not to file a lawsuit for “parental inclusion” but to excommunicate the public officials responsible, declare their laws null and void as contrary to the divine constitution of the Church (as Pius IX did in his letter to the bishops of Prussia), and organize Catholic resistance based on the spiritual arms of prayer, penance, and the defense of the Faith.
The article’s heroes, the Thomas More Society, are fighting to ensure parents can be “included” in a process that leads their children to hell. They are fighting for a right to be informed about a mortal sin, as if the duty to prevent mortal sin were a matter of civil procedure. This is a spiritual bankruptcy of the highest order. It treats the salvation of souls as a matter of administrative transparency rather than of supernatural obligation. The Syllabus condemns the notion that “the faith of Christ is in opposition to human reason” (Error #6) and that “all the truths of religion proceed from the innate strength of human reason” (Error #4). The Thomas More Society’s argument proceeds entirely from the “innate strength” of constitutional law, ignoring the supernatural revelation that defines the true good of the child.
The Symptom of the Conciliar Revolution: From Christ the King to “Rights”
This case is a direct fruit of the conciliar revolution. Vatican II’s document Dignitatis Humanae on religious freedom introduced the error that the state must guarantee a “right” to religious freedom for all, a concept anathema to the pre-conciliar Magisterium (see Syllabus Errors #15-17). This principle was then extended by the “abomination of desolation” occupying the Vatican to all forms of “human rights,” including the right to self-identify one’s gender. The modern state, having accepted the principle of religious indifferentism, now applies it to the very nature of the human person.
The “Catholic” response, therefore, is not to reclaim the state for Christ the King—as Pius XI commanded in Quas Primas, demanding that “rulers and governments have the duty to publicly honor Christ and obey Him”—but to demand a seat at the table of the secular, pluralistic state. This is the ultimate triumph of the “errors of Modernism” condemned by St. Pius X: the adaptation of Catholic practice to the spirit of the age. The Thomas More Society’s victory is a victory for liberalism, not for the Social Reign of Christ. It strengthens the false principle that the state is the arbiter of family life, provided it is “inclusive.” The true Catholic position, as articulated by Pope Leo XIII in Immortale Dei (1885), is that the state must recognize the Catholic religion as the sole religion of the state and govern its laws accordingly. California’s policy is therefore an intolerable usurpation, but the remedy is not a better lawsuit; it is the restoration of a state that publicly acknowledges Christ the King and executes the laws of God, as defined by His Church.
Conclusion: The Need for Integral Catholic Resistance
The $4.5 million award to the Thomas More Society is not a Catholic victory. It is a stark illustration of the depth of the apostasy. A “Catholic” firm uses the tools of the enemy (secular constitutional law) to win a skirmish that leaves the fundamental error intact: the state’s claim to authority over the education and formation of children, and the reduction of the child’s eternal salvation to a matter of parental “information rights.”
The unchanging Catholic faith teaches that the family is a domestic Church, under the immediate authority of the father and mother, who are the primary educators of their children in the Faith, with the Church having an exclusive and supernatural right to guide and correct them. The state’s role is purely negative: to maintain public order so that the Church and families can fulfill their divine duties. Any state policy that obstructs the Catholic formation of children is an act of tyranny and must be opposed not with lawsuits but with the spiritual authority of the Church, which has the right and duty to declare such laws null and to call the faithful to resistance, even to the point of martyrdom.
The Thomas More Society, by accepting the premises of the secular state, has become a part of the problem. It offers a “conservative” alternative within the modernist system, thus giving the illusion of a Catholic solution while perpetuating the apostasy. True integral Catholic resistance must reject the entire framework of “rights” imposed by the godless state and call for the public and official recognition of the Social Kingship of Jesus Christ over every nation, law, and institution—a doctrine so clearly defined by Pius XI in Quas Primas and so violently rejected by the modern world and its conciliar collaborators.
Source:
California to pay $4.5 million to Catholic law firm after losing lawsuit over gender secrecy rules (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 02.04.2026