EWTN portal reports that on April 23, 2026, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled that Hungary’s 2021 LGBTQ law “breaches EU founding values,” marking the first time the top EU court found an infringement of Article 2 of the Treaty of the European Union, which enumerates the so-called “values” upon which the union is founded. The Hungarian law, passed by the outgoing government of Viktor Orbán, contained amendments strengthening penalties against pedophilia, protecting minors, as well as limitations on promoting LGBTQ and gender-related issues and themes for minors, mainly in schools. The CJEU judges argued that several amendments “constitute a coordinated series of discriminatory measures” against “the rights of non-cisgender persons — including transgender persons — or nonheterosexual persons,” and are contrary to “respect for human dignity, equality, and human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities.” The court also lamented “the offensive and stigmatizing nature of the amending law” as well as “discrimination based on sex or sexual orientation,” and “a preference for certain identities and sexual orientations to the detriment of others.” Viktor Orbán reacted by stating: “Our patriotic government protected Hungarian children from aggressive LGBTQ propaganda. Brusselian empire now strikes back,” promising he would “not give up the fight for the soul of Europe!” The International Society of Natural Law Scholars noted that the ruling exposes a “tension between national authority over education, culture, and family policy” on one hand and “supranational enforcement of rights and nondiscrimination norms” on the other. The ruling comes shortly after Hungary’s parliamentary elections, in which Orbán’s party lost to the Tisza party led by Péter Magyar, who is expected to succeed Orbán and who stated after his election: “Everyone can live with whoever they love as long as they do not violate laws and are not harmful to others.” This ruling lays bare the fundamental incompatibility between the natural law, the perennial Catholic moral doctrine, and the idolatrous “values” of the post-Christian European order — an order in which the conciliar sect itself is complicit through its own internalized revolution against the Social Reign of Christ the King.
The Idolatry of “EU Founding Values” as a Counter-Morality
The CJEU’s ruling against Hungary represents nothing less than the formal juridical enthronement of a new counter-morality — one that dethrones the natural law and the divine positive law and replaces them with the autonomous, self-referential “values” of a supranational bureaucratic apparatus. Article 2 of the Treaty of the European Union, which the court invoked for the first time as a basis for finding an infringement, enumerates these so-called “values” as “respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities.” The court explicitly stated that Hungary’s law was contrary to “respect for human dignity, equality, and human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities.”
Let us be precise about what this means. The “human dignity” invoked by the CJEU is not the dignity that Catholic theology recognizes — the dignity of man created *ad imaginem Dei* (in the image of God), endowed with an immortal soul ordered toward the Beatific Vision, and subject to the moral law inscribed in his conscience by the Eternal Law. No. The “dignity” invoked by the European court is the autonomous, self-created dignity of the Enlightenment tradition — the dignity of man as the measure of all things, whose “rights” are self-generated and whose “identity” is self-determined. This is precisely the error condemned by Pope Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors, where he rejected the proposition that “human reason, without any reference whatsoever to God, is the sole arbiter of truth and falsehood, and of good and evil; it is law to itself” (Proposition 3), and that “all the truths of religion proceed from the innate strength of human reason; hence reason is the ultimate standard by which man can and ought to arrive at the knowledge of all truths of every kind” (Proposition 4).
The “equality” invoked by the CJEU is equally perverse. Catholic teaching recognizes the equality of all men in their common origin, common nature, and common supernatural destiny — but it also recognizes the hierarchy of orders established by God, the distinction between the lawful and the sinful, and the duty of the state to uphold the moral law. The “equality” of the EU is the radical leveling of all moral distinctions — the assertion that no sexual orientation or “gender identity” may be treated as disordered, that no “identity” may be preferred to another, and that any legal distinction based on the natural moral law constitutes “discrimination.” This is the very essence of the indifferentism condemned by Pius IX in Proposition 15: “Every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true,” and Proposition 17: “Good hope at least is to be entertained of the eternal salvation of all those who are not at all in the true Church of Christ.”
The court’s language is revealing. It spoke of “a preference for certain identities and sexual orientations to the detriment of others.” This is a direct assault on the natural law, which recognizes that the sexual act has a divinely ordained structure — the union of male and female ordered toward procreation and the mutual good of the spouses — and that any sexual act outside this structure is intrinsically disordered. The Catechism of the Council of Trent taught that the sixth commandment prohibits all sexual activity outside of the sacramental bond of marriage between one man and one woman. The assertion that the state may not “prefer” heterosexuality — that is, the natural, God-ordained sexual complementarity — is the assertion that the state has no competence to recognize or uphold the natural law. This is precisely the error of laicism that Pius XI condemned in Quas Primas: “It began with the denial of Christ the Lord’s reign over all nations; the Church’s authority to teach men, to issue laws, to govern nations, which authority she received from Christ the Lord to lead men to eternal happiness, was denied. And then, slowly, the Christian religion began to be equated with other false religions and shamelessly placed in the same category.”
The CJEU as Inquisitor of a New Totalitarianism
The CJEU’s ruling is not merely a legal decision — it is an act of ideological coercion by a supranational body that has assumed for itself the authority to define not only law but morality, not only policy but truth. The court found that Hungary’s law constituted “a particularly serious interference with several fundamental rights” such as private and family life and found a breach of the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) as well as the right to the protection of data. The court also lamented “the offensive and stigmatizing nature of the amending law.”
Consider the implications. A sovereign nation — Hungary, a country with a Christian heritage stretching back over a millennium, whose Saint Stephen I received his crown from the Pope and established the kingdom as a Catholic state — passed a law through its democratic institutions to protect children from the promotion of gender ideology and homosexual propaganda in schools. The European Commission, one of the main institutions of the EU, brought an action for “failure to fulfill obligations” before the Court of Justice. And the court ruled that protecting children from such promotion is itself a violation of “fundamental rights.”
This is the logic of the abyssus abyssum invocat (deep calls to deep) — the deep of moral corruption calling to the deep of juridical tyranny. The same court that claims to protect “human dignity” has declared that the state may not protect its most vulnerable citizens — children — from ideological manipulation that contradicts the natural law and the faith of their forefathers. The same court that claims to uphold “the rights of persons belonging to minorities” has declared that the majority may not legislate in accordance with the natural moral law if such legislation is deemed “offensive and stigmatizing” to those who publicly identify with disordered sexual inclinations.
This is not the rule of law — it is the rule of the lex regia of the new totalitarianism, in which the autonomous self and its desires become the supreme law, and any dissent is punished as “discrimination.” Pope Leo XIII, in Immortale Dei, taught that “the Almighty, therefore, has given the charge of the human race to two powers, the ecclesiastical and the civil, the one being set over divine, and the other over human, each the highest in its own kind, and each fixed within certain limits, defined by its own nature and special object.” The CJEU has transgressed every limit. It has set itself above the natural law, above the divine positive law, above the sovereignty of nations, and above the consciences of citizens. It is, in the fullest sense of the term, an abomination of desolation — a seat of authority that claims for itself what belongs to God alone.
The Complicity of the Conciliar Sect in the Revolution
It is necessary to state with the utmost clarity that the conciliar sect — the post-Vatican II structure that occupies the Vatican and controls the vast majority of Catholic institutions worldwide — bears a heavy share of responsibility for the moral and juridical revolution that has made rulings like this possible. The conciliar sect, since the “Second Vatican Council,” has systematically undermined the Church’s teaching on the natural law, the Social Reign of Christ the King, and the duty of the state to uphold Catholic moral doctrine.
The “Declaration on Religious Freedom” (Dignitatis Humanae), one of the most pernicious documents of the conciliar revolution, asserted that “the human person has a right to religious freedom” and that “this freedom means that all men are to be immune from coercion on the part of individuals or of social groups and of any human power, in such wise that no one is to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his own beliefs.” This document, which contradicts the perennial teaching of the Church as expressed by Pope Gregory XVI in Mirari Vos, by Pope Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors, and by Pope Leo XIII in Immortale Dei, effectively surrendered the Church’s claim to be the sole arbiter of moral truth in the public square and opened the door to the very laicism and indifferentism that the CJEU now enforces with the full weight of supranational law.
The conciliar sect’s embrace of “dialogue” with the modern world, its abandonment of the missionary imperative to convert all nations to Catholic truth, and its internalization of the liberal principle of the autonomy of the secular sphere — all of these have contributed to the creation of a post-Christian Europe in which the “values” of the EU have replaced the values of the Gospel. The conciliar sect did not merely fail to resist the revolution — it actively facilitated it by undermining the doctrinal foundations upon which resistance could have been built.
It is therefore deeply significant that the EWTN portal — itself a product of the conciliar sect, however much it may claim to be “traditional” — reports this ruling without any substantive theological critique of the CJEU’s moral framework. The article quotes Orbán’s reaction, the response of the International Society of Natural Law Scholars, and the concerns of “right-wing activists and political commentators,” but it does not once invoke the natural law, the teaching of the Magisterium on the duty of the state to uphold Catholic morality, or the Social Reign of Christ the King. This silence is itself a symptom of the conciliar sect’s apostasy — its inability or willingness to apply Catholic doctrine to the most pressing moral and political questions of the age.
The Natural Law and the Duty of the State
The perennial teaching of the Catholic Church is clear: the state is not morally neutral. The state has a duty — not merely a right, but a positive duty — to recognize the true religion, to uphold the natural law, and to protect its citizens, especially the young, from moral harm. Pope Pius XI, in Quas Primas, taught: “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.” And further: “The annual celebration of this solemnity will also remind states that not only private individuals, but also rulers and governments have the duty to publicly honor Christ and obey Him: for it will remind them of the final judgment, in which Christ, whom not only was cast out of the state, but was also forgotten and ignored through contempt, will very severely avenge these insults, because His royal dignity demands that all relations in the state be ordered on the basis of God’s commandments and Christian principles, both in the issuing of laws and in the administration of justice, as well as in the education and formation of youth in sound doctrine and purity of morals.”
Hungary’s law was an attempt — however imperfect, however compromised by the limitations of acting within a post-Christian political order — to fulfill this duty. The law sought to protect children from the promotion of gender ideology and homosexual propaganda in schools, to strengthen penalties against pedophilia, and to uphold the natural moral law in the public sphere. These are not “discriminatory measures” — they are acts of justice, rooted in the natural law and in the Church’s perennial teaching on the protection of the young and the common good.
The CJEU’s ruling that such protections constitute “discrimination based on sex or sexual orientation” is a direct contradiction of the natural law. The natural law does not recognize a “right” to have one’s disordered sexual inclinations affirmed by the state. The natural law recognizes the duty of the state to promote virtue and to restrain vice — not because the state is the arbiter of salvation, but because the common good requires that the conditions necessary for virtuous living be maintained. As Pope Leo XIII taught in Immortale Dei: “The best theory of civil society requires that popular schools open to children of every class of the people, and, generally, all public institutes intended for instruction in letters and philosophical sciences and for carrying on the education of youth, should be freed from all ecclesiastical authority, control and interference” — this was condemned by Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors (Proposition 47) as one of the “errors concerning the Church and her rights.” The state that removes the protection of the natural law from its schools does not thereby become “neutral” — it becomes an instrument of moral corruption.
The Timing of the Ruling and the Betrayal of Hungary
The timing of the CJEU’s ruling — coming shortly after the parliamentary elections in Hungary, in which Viktor Orbán’s party lost to the Tisza party led by Péter Magyar — raises serious questions about the political motivations behind the decision. The article notes that Magyar “largely avoided speaking about the gender issues during his campaign but said after his election: ‘Everyone can live with whoever they love as long as they do not violate laws and are not harmful to others.'” This statement, while couched in apparently moderate language, is a capitulation to the very ideology that the CJEU enforces. The phrase “everyone can live with whoever they love” is the standard slogan of the homosexualist movement — it implicitly affirms that homosexual relationships are morally equivalent to heterosexual ones, and that the state has no business making moral distinctions between them.
The Hungarian Conservative noted that “the future of the child protection law remains unclear” under the new government. This is the predictable consequence of a political order in which the natural law has been replaced by the “values” of the EU — a political order in which any attempt to uphold Catholic morality in the public sphere is subject to annulment by a supranational court that recognizes no authority above its own.
The International Society of Natural Law Scholars noted that the case “raises great concerns about whether courts are narrowing the space for states to legislate on moral or child-protection grounds.” This is an understatement of the highest order. The CJEU has not merely “narrowed the space” — it has effectively declared that the natural law has no place in the legislation of EU member states. Any law that distinguishes between heterosexuality and homosexuality, between biological sex and “gender identity,” or between the protection of children and the “rights” of adults to promote disordered sexual ideologies to minors, is now liable to be struck down as a violation of “EU founding values.”
The “Soul of Europe” Without Christ Is the Soul of Antichrist
Viktor Orbán declared that he would “not give up the fight for the soul of Europe.” But what is the “soul of Europe” if it is not the soul of Christendom — the civilization built on the foundation of the Catholic Faith, the natural law, and the Social Reign of Christ the King? The “soul of Europe” that the EU now enshrines in its treaties and enforces through its courts is the soul of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the sexual revolution — the soul of autonomous man, who recognizes no law above his own desires and no authority above his own will.
The CJEU’s ruling is a milestone in the long apostasy of Europe — an apostasy that began with the Reformation, accelerated with the Enlightenment, and reached its fullest expression in the sexual and gender revolutions of the 20th and 21st centuries. The conciliar sect, far from resisting this apostasy, has facilitated it by abandoning the Church’s claim to public truth, by embracing the liberal principle of religious freedom, and by internalizing the very “values” that the EU now enforces.
The only true “soul of Europe” is the Sacred Heart of Jesus — the Heart that is the source of all grace, all truth, and all justice. Until Europe returns to the Social Reign of Christ the King, until its laws are once more conformed to the natural law and the divine positive law, until its schools once more teach the truths of the Catholic Faith to its children, there will be no peace, no justice, and no true freedom. As Pius XI taught in Quas Primas: “Then at last, to use the words which our predecessor Leo XIII addressed to all bishops 25 years ago, 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, when all willingly accept the reign of Christ and obey Him, and every tongue will confess that our Lord Jesus Christ is in the glory of God the Father.”
The CJEU has chosen its side. It has declared that the “values” of the EU — the values of autonomous man, of radical sexual egalitarianism, of the abolition of all moral distinctions — are supreme, and that any nation that dares to uphold the natural law in its legislation is in breach of its obligations. Let those who profess the Catholic Faith choose theirs. Non possumus — we cannot serve two masters.
Source:
European Union Court rules Hungary’s LGBTQ law ‘breaches EU founding values’ (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 23.04.2026