The National Catholic Register reports on a legal battle in Quincy, Massachusetts, where the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) seeks to prevent the installation of 10-foot bronze statues of St. Michael the Archangel and St. Florian—patron saints of police officers and firefighters—on a new public safety building. Seventeen residents, claiming the statues would make them feel excluded as non-Catholics, sued under the state constitution’s prohibition against favoring one religious sect. A state judge granted a temporary injunction in October 2025, and the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court is set to hear oral arguments on May 6, 2026. The case, which centers on the now-defunct federal “Lemon test” and state-level establishment clause jurisprudence, has the potential to reach the U.S. Supreme Court, with implications for religious imagery across the nation. This case is not merely a dispute over architectural aesthetics; it is a direct assault on the public reign of Christ the King and the Church’s perennial teaching that civil society must recognize the supernatural order.
The Abolition of Christ’s Social Kingship
At the heart of this legal assault lies the systematic denial of the most fundamental truth of Christian civilization: that Jesus Christ is King not only of individual souls, but of families, nations, and all human society. Pope Pius XI, in his encyclical Quas Primas (1925), declared with apostolic authority that “His reign, namely, extends not only to Catholic nations or to those who, by receiving baptism according to law, belong to the Church, even though their erroneous opinions have led them astray or discord has separated them from love, but His reign encompasses also all non-Christians, so that most truly the entire human race is subject to the authority of Jesus Christ.” The ACLU’s demand that statues of two saints be removed from a public building is not an act of neutrality—it is an act of rebellion against this divine constitution. It seeks to enforce the very “secularism of our times, so-called laicism” that Pius XI identified as a “plague that poisons human society,” a plague that “began with the denial of Christ the Lord’s reign over all nations.”
The plaintiffs’ claim that the statues “make me feel like I don’t count because I am not a Catholic” is a textbook example of the “heckler’s veto” that Professor Dwight Duncan rightly identified in the article. This sentiment, however, is not merely a subjective grievance; it is the fruit of the very indifferentism that Pope Pius IX condemned in the Syllabus of Errors (Proposition 15): “Every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true.” The Massachusetts Constitution’s ban on the “subordination of any one sect or denomination to another” is itself a legal embodiment of this condemned proposition, elevating a false notion of equality above the objective truth that the Catholic Church is the one true Church of Christ. To demand that the public square be stripped of all religious imagery in the name of “neutrality” is to demand that the state adopt a posture of practical atheism—a posture Pius XI explicitly warned against: “There was no lack of states that thought they could do without God and that their religion was impiety and contempt for God.”
The Linguistic Betrayal: “Neutrality” as Hostility
The language employed by the ACLU and the plaintiffs reveals the true nature of their enterprise. Jessie Rossman, the ACLU’s legal director, states that “Government neutrality toward religion is not hostility or discrimination — it is the exact opposite.” This is a breathtaking inversion of reality. True neutrality would require the state to acknowledge the true God and His Church as the sole arbiters of the supernatural order. What the ACLU calls “neutrality” is, in fact, the active suppression of the one true religion in favor of a false sect of secular humanism. It is the establishment of a new state religion—the religion of man, of progress, of liberty as defined by the Enlightenment and condemned by the Syllabus of Errors (Proposition 80): “The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization.”
The article describes the ACLU’s lawsuit as an “iconoclastic endeavor,” a term that is both accurate and revealing. The iconoclasts of the 8th and 9th centuries sought to destroy sacred images as idolatrous; the modern iconoclasts of the ACLU seek to destroy them as exclusionary. Both are enemies of the Incarnation, which sanctified matter and made it a vehicle for grace. The statues are dismissed as “overtly religious” and “specifically Catholic,” as if these were disqualifying characteristics rather than the very reason for their public honor. The city’s argument that St. Michael is also venerated by Anglicans, Lutherans, and even appears in the Quran is a desperate attempt to dilute the Catholic specificity of the images—a concession to the very indifferentism the Church condemns. The Catholic Church does not honor St. Michael because he is a figure in the Quran; she honors him because he is the Prince of the Heavenly Host, the champion of God’s people, and the patron of her police officers.
The Symptomatic Silence: Where is the Hierarchy?
The most damning aspect of this entire affair is the near-total absence of the Catholic hierarchy. The article mentions that Mayor Thomas Koch is a “practicing Catholic,” but there is no word of protest, no pastoral letter, no excommunication threatened against the Catholic plaintiffs who are suing to suppress the public honor of the Church’s saints. Where is the bishop of Boston? Where are the “cardinals” and “bishops” of the conciliar sect? Their silence is deafening and damning. It confirms the thesis that the post-conciliar hierarchy is not the true Church of Christ but a paramasonic structure complicit in the destruction of Catholic civilization. The true Church has always taught that the state has a positive duty to honor Christ and His saints. Pope Leo XIII, in his encyclical Immortale Dei (1885), wrote: “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 supreme in its own kind, and each fixed within limits which are defined with reference to its own nature and specialty.” The Quincy case is a direct violation of this divine ordinance, and the silence of the “clergy” is a betrayal of their sacred office.
The article notes that organizations like the Fraternal Order of Police have filed briefs in support of the statues, arguing that “First responders of all stripes, religious creeds, and political affiliations — and not just Catholics or Christians — cherish both saints for their symbolic importance to the profession.” This is a naturalistic reduction of the saints to mere symbols of professional solidarity. The Catholic understanding is far more profound: St. Michael and St. Florian are not mere symbols; they are real intercessors in heaven, whose patronage invokes supernatural protection upon those who serve the common good. The state’s duty is not to honor a vague “religion in general” but to honor the true God through His Church. As Pius XI taught, “the state is happy not by one means, and man by another; for the state is nothing else than a harmonious association of men.”
The Legal Heresy of the “Lemon Test” and Its Ghosts
The legal arguments in this case revolve around the “Lemon test,” a judicial standard from the 1971 U.S. Supreme Court case Lemon v. Kurtzman, which required that a law affecting religion have a “secular legislative purpose” and a primary effect that “neither advances nor inhibits religion.” The U.S. Supreme Court formally abandoned this test in 2022 in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, calling it “ahistorical” and “atextual.” Yet the ACLU of Massachusetts clings to it, arguing that its abandonment at the federal level “does not compel this Court to do the same.” This is a legal strategy of desperation, seeking to preserve a standard designed to marginalize religion in the public square.
The “Lemon test” is itself a product of the very modernism that has infected not only theology but jurisprudence. It assumes a false dichotomy between the “secular” and the “religious,” as if the state could operate in a realm devoid of any reference to the supernatural order. This is the heresy of laicism, condemned by Pius XI in Quas Primas: “the Christian religion began to be equated with other false religions and shamelessly placed in the same category; then it was subordinated to secular power and almost surrendered to the arbitrament of government and rulers.” The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s 1979 decision in Colo v. Treasurer, which invoked the “Lemon test” while upholding legislative chaplaincies, is a contradictory mess, typical of a jurisprudence that tries to reconcile the irreconcilable—the Catholic faith with the liberal state.
The friend-of-the-court briefs supporting the city, including one from the Islam and Religious Freedom Action Team, argue that the trend in the U.S. Supreme Court is to “uphold public displays of religion because they don’t require anybody to do anything.” This is a utilitarian argument, not a Catholic one. The Catholic position is not that religious displays are permissible because they are passive, but that they are obligatory because they are true. The state does not have the “right” to display religious art as a matter of tolerance; it has the duty to honor the true God as a matter of justice. Justitia est constans et perpetua voluntas ius suum cuique tribuendi—justice is the constant and perpetual will to render to each his due. What is due to God? Honor, worship, and public acknowledgment of His sovereignty.
The Conciliar Sect’s Complicity in Apostasy
This case is a perfect illustration of the spiritual bankruptcy of the post-conciliar Church. The “Catholic” plaintiffs who sued to remove the statues are acting in perfect conformity with the spirit of Vatican II, which, in its declaration Dignitatis Humanae, proclaimed the right of every person to religious freedom—a right condemned by Pope Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors (Propositions 15, 77, 78) and by Pope Gregory XVI in Mirari Vos (1832). The conciliar sect has spent decades dismantling the Church’s missionary zeal, replacing the command to evangelize all nations with a saccharine “dialogue” with false religions. Is it any wonder that Catholics, formed in this atmosphere of indifferentism, now sue to remove the saints from their own city’s buildings?
The article from the National Catholic Register, while ostensibly reporting the facts, fails to provide the theological framework necessary to understand the gravity of the situation. It quotes lawyers and legal scholars but not a single theologian, not a single Father of the Church, not a single papal encyclical. This is symptomatic of the conciliar mentality: the reduction of Catholicism to a legal and cultural phenomenon, stripped of its supernatural content. The Register’s own framing—”Are St. Michael and St. Florian Headed to the Supreme Court?”—treats this as a mere legal curiosity, not as a spiritual battle for the soul of a nation.
Conclusion: The Duty of Resistance
The Quincy statues case is not an isolated incident; it is a skirmish in the war against Christ the King that has been raging since the French Revolution and was formalized in the modernist apostasy of the 20th century. The ACLU’s campaign to remove the saints from the public square is the logical consequence of the Church’s failure to assert her social kingship. The conciliar sect, by embracing the principles of liberalism and religious indifferentism, has disarmed the faithful and left them vulnerable to the very attacks we now witness.
The true Church, the Church of all ages, teaches that the state must recognize the kingship of Christ, that public honor must be given to His saints, and that the suppression of religious truth in the name of “tolerance” is not neutrality but hostility. As Pope Pius IX declared in the Syllabus of Errors (Proposition 80), the Roman Pontiff cannot and ought not reconcile himself with “progress, liberalism and modern civilization.” The faithful must resist this apostasy—not with lawsuits, but with prayer, penance, and the uncompromising proclamation of the full Catholic faith. The statues of St. Michael and St. Florian belong on that building, not because they are “beautiful public art,” but because they are witnesses to the truth that Christ is King, that His saints reign with Him, and that no power on earth can banish Him from the public square without facing the judgment of God.
Source:
Are St. Michael and St. Florian Headed to the Supreme Court? (ncregister.com)
Date: 28.04.2026