The National Catholic Register portal reports on a U.S. Department of Justice investigation revealing that the Biden administration systematically “weaponized” federal law — specifically the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act — against pro-life activists, while simultaneously pursuing leniency for violent pro-abortion defendants. The article further details an Arkansas lawsuit challenging pro-life protections for unborn children, a coalition of over 70 pro-life groups urging the DOJ to stop siding with the abortion drug industry, and an Oregon federal judge ruling that a state law mandating insurance coverage for abortion and contraception violates the conscience rights of Oregon Right to Life. These developments, while superficially presented as political and legal skirmishes, expose something far graver: the systematic rebellion of the civil order against the Kingship of Christ and the natural law inscribed by the Creator — a rebellion that the conciliar sect and its modernist clergy have done almost nothing to confront.
The FACE Act: A Weapon of the Abortion Cult Against the Faithful
The Department of Justice report lays bare what any Catholic possessing the virtue of prudence already knew: the Biden administration did not merely fail to protect the unborn — it actively persecuted those who publicly witnessed to the truth that the deliberate killing of an innocent human being is a mortal sin and a crime against the natural law. The report states that the Justice Department “affirmatively asked pro-abortion groups about pro-life individuals’ travel and constitutionally protected advocacy,” that prosecutors “monitored pro-life activists for years before charging them,” that they “knowingly withheld evidence” requested by defense counsel, “tried to screen out jurors based on religion,” and “authorized aggressive arrest tactics instead of allowing pro-life defendants to self-surrender.”
Let the gravity of this sink in. The federal government of the United States — a nation whose founding documents acknowledge the self-evident truth that all men are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” — deployed its prosecutorial apparatus to target citizens precisely because they professed, in word and deed, the truth that life begins at conception. This is not mere political disagreement. This is the civil power placing itself in direct opposition to the law of God.
Pius XI, in the encyclical Quas Primas (1925), established with crystalline clarity the doctrine that the civil state has a positive duty to recognize and obey the reign of Christ the King: “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 Biden administration did not merely “refuse” this veneration — it actively punished those who upheld the natural law that Christ the King promulgates. The FACE Act, originally presented as a neutral public safety measure, became an instrument of religious persecution — targeting citizens whose “crime” was praying, counseling, and peacefully demonstrating in defense of the unborn.
The report’s finding that prosecutors “tried to screen out jurors based on religion” is particularly revealing. This is the abortion cult’s inquisition in reverse: not the Church defending orthodoxy against heresy, but the secular state excluding from the jury box anyone whose Catholic faith would compel them to refuse cooperation with evil. Cuius regio, eius religio — except now the religion is the worship of autonomous choice, and the heresy is the belief that God’s law binds every human conscience.
The Arkansas Lawsuit: When the State Itself Becomes the Abortionist’s Accomplice
The article reports that six women and an OB-GYN, Dr. Chad Taylor, filed a lawsuit against Arkansas laws protecting unborn children, alleging that these laws are “unconstitutional per the state constitution” and “lack any rational relationship to protecting life, health, or any other legitimate state interest.” The 75-page motion includes testimonies from women who were denied abortions, including one who sought an abortion for her ectopic pregnancy out of state.
Here we encounter the deliberate confusion of terms that characterizes the abortion industry’s propaganda. An ectopic pregnancy is, by medical definition, a condition in which the embryo implants outside the uterus and cannot survive. The death of the child is inevitable. The principle of double effect, well-established in Catholic moral theology, permits medical intervention to remove a pathological tube or organ that threatens the mother’s life, even if the unintended and undesired secondary effect is the death of the child. This is not “abortion” in the moral sense — it is the tragic but licit treatment of a life-threatening medical condition. To conflate this with the elective killing of a healthy unborn child is a deliberate lie designed to erode all legal protections for the unborn.
The lawsuit’s claim that pro-life laws “lack any rational relationship to protecting life” is a direct contradiction of the most basic principles of natural law. Aristotle taught, and St. Thomas Aquinas confirmed, that the first precept of the natural law is bonum est faciendum et prosequendum, et malum vitandum — good is to be done and pursued, and evil is to be avoided. The deliberate destruction of innocent human life is the paradigmatic evil that every legitimate civil authority is bound to prohibit. Pius IX, in the Syllabus of Errors (1864), condemned the proposition that “the civil authority possesses not only the right called that of ‘exsequatur,’ but also that of appeal, called ‘appellatio ab abusu'” (Proposition 41) — and by extension, the civil authority has no right to claim jurisdiction over matters that properly belong to the moral law. The Arkansas lawsuit represents the logical terminus of the error condemned in Proposition 39: “The State, as being the origin and source of all rights, is endowed with a certain right not circumscribed by any limits.” When the state declares itself the arbiter of who may live and who may die, it has declared itself God — and this is precisely the sin of the Serpent: Eritis sicut dii (Gen. 3:5).
The Abortion Drug Epidemic and the Collapse of State Sovereignty
The letter from over 70 pro-life groups to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche highlights the devastating consequences of federal policies allowing mail-order abortion drugs. “When abortion drugs are available through the mail, there is no accountability, state laws are made impotent, and women and girls are hurt,” the letter reads. The article notes that Louisiana, Florida, Texas, Missouri, Idaho, and Kansas sued the FDA in three separate cases, and the Justice Department “dismissed all three cases.”
This is the abrogation of the principle of subsidiarity — itself a Catholic social teaching, articulated by Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum and Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno — weaponized against the very people it was designed to protect. The federal government, rather than deferring to the sovereign states’ legitimate interest in protecting their citizens, has instead used its superior power to impose the abortion industry’s agenda on every state in the union. The FDA’s deregulation of abortion drugs — removing requirements for in-person medical supervision — is not a public health measure. It is the deliberate facilitation of chemical infanticide on a mass scale, with the federal government serving as the abortion industry’s enforcement arm.
St. Pius X, in Lamentabili Sane Exitu (1907), condemned the modernist error that “the Church is an enemy of the progress of natural and theological sciences” (Proposition 57). The abortion industry’s invocation of “science” and “health” to justify the killing of the unborn is precisely the kind of scientistic idolatry that St. Pius X warned against — the subordination of the moral law to a materialist conception of progress that recognizes no higher authority than human autonomy.
The Oregon Conscience Rights Ruling: A Rare Victory in a Spiritual War
The article reports a federal judge in Oregon ruling that the state’s Reproductive Health Equity Act — which compels all health insurance plans to cover abortion and contraception — violates the First Amendment rights of Oregon Right to Life. Judge Mustafa Kasubhai found that the law cannot apply to the pro-life group, noting that while the law has an exemption for religious beliefs, it does not extend to conscience rights.
This ruling, while welcome, exposes a profound problem: the very fact that a pro-life organization must seek legal protection from being forced to cooperate with the killing of the unborn reveals how far the civil order has fallen from its duty to God. In a truly Christian commonwealth — the kind that Pius XI envisioned in Quas Primas — there would be no need for “conscience exemptions” because the law itself would recognize the inviolable dignity of every human being from conception to natural death. The need to litigate for the right not to participate in evil is itself a sign that the state has ceased to fulfill its God-given function.
The Syllabus of Errors condemned the proposition that “Catholics may approve of the system of educating youth unconnected with Catholic faith and the power of the Church, and which regards the knowledge of merely natural things, and only, or at least primarily, the ends of earthly social life” (Proposition 48). By the same token, Catholics cannot approve of a civil order that treats the killing of the unborn as a “healthcare right” and forces conscientious citizens to fund it. The Oregon ruling is a small vindication of the principle that conscience binds even when the state commands otherwise — obedire Deo quam hominibus (Acts 5:29) — but it is a remedy applied to a symptom, not to the disease.
The Silence of the Conciliar Sect: Complicity Through Omission
What is most striking about this article — and about the broader landscape of Catholic commentary on these developments — is what it does not say. There is no mention of the Church’s infallible teaching on the inviolability of innocent human life. There is no citation of Casti Connubii, no reference to the Second Vatican Council’s own Gaudium et Spes (which, even in its compromised conciliar formulation, affirms that “from the moment of its conception life must be guarded with the greatest care”). There is no call to repentance, no mention of the Last Judgment, no warning that those who cooperate with the killing of the unborn — whether as perpetrators, accomplices, or silent bystanders — risk eternal damnation.
This silence is not accidental. It is the fruit of fifty years of modernist infiltration of the Church’s teaching apparatus. The conciliar sect has systematically replaced the supernatural order with a naturalistic humanism that treats abortion as a “political issue” rather than a mortal sin, that speaks of “conscience” without defining it as the faculty by which man judges particular acts in light of the natural law and the divine law, and that reduces the Church’s mission to “dialogue” with a world that is actively slaughtering its children.
St. Pius X, in Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907), identified the core of Modernism as the denial that the Church has any authority to teach definitive truth about matters of faith and morals — reducing all doctrine to the subjective experience of “religious consciousness.” The conciliar sect’s refusal to speak with clarity and authority on the abortion question is a direct consequence of this modernist infection. When the “bishops” and “priests” of the neo-church refuse to declare plainly that abortion is a mortal sin, that those who procure or cooperate with it incur excommunication latae sententiae, and that the state has no authority to legalize it — they are not being “pastoral.” They are committing the sin of scandal — leading the faithful to perdition by their silence.
The article quotes SBA Pro-Life America President Marjorie Dannenfelser saying, “Voters across the board strongly support it and the GOP base demands it.” This is the language of politics, not of faith. The Catholic does not defend the unborn because voters demand it, but because God commands it. Non nobis, Domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriam (Ps. 113:9). When the pro-life movement frames its arguments solely in terms of political majorities and electoral strategy, it has already conceded the most important ground — the ground of absolute truth.
The Duty of the Faithful in a Hostile World
The persecution of pro-life activists under the Biden administration, the Arkansas lawsuit, the abortion drug crisis, and the Oregon conscience rights case are not isolated incidents. They are interconnected manifestations of a single reality: the civil order in the United States — and throughout the formerly Christian West — has apostatized from Christ the King and has set itself against the law of God.
Pius XI warned in 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.” The inverse is equally true: when men refuse to recognize Christ’s authority — when the state legalizes the killing of the innocent, persecutes those who defend them, and compels conscientious citizens to cooperate with evil — the result is not “freedom” but slavery, not “progress” but barbarism, not “peace” but a culture of death.
The faithful Catholic, in the face of these developments, must resist the temptation to despair and the temptation to compromise. Despair is a sin against the virtue of hope; compromise with the culture of death is a sin against the virtue of fortitude. The duty of the Catholic is clear: to profess the truth without equivocation, to defend the unborn by every licit means, to pray for the conversion of sinners, and to place all trust in the promise of Our Lord that the gates of hell shall not prevail (Matt. 16:18) against His true Church — which endures, even now, in the faithful who refuse to bow before the idols of modernism, secularism, and the abortion cult.
Ad maiorem Dei gloriam.
Source:
Justice Department Report: Biden Administration Targeted Pro-Life Activists (ncregister.com)
Date: 18.04.2026