The National Register commentary by Andrea M. Picciotti-Bayer celebrates a 5th Circuit Court ruling upholding Texas’ law requiring passive display of the Ten Commandments in public schools. The author praises Judge Kyle Duncan’s opinion as restoring “proper moorings” to Establishment Clause analysis, arguing that the ruling aligns with the nation’s “history and tradition” and that the specific text used is “nonsectarian” and compatible with Catholic teaching. The commentary frames this as a victory against decades of anti-religious judicial activism, particularly the Lemon test, and dismisses concerns about denominational bias or religious coercion. While superficially appealing to Catholic sensibilities, this commentary reveals a profound theological and spiritual bankruptcy, masking a dangerous capitulation to secularism and the very modernist errors that have hollowed out the Church’s public witness.
The Illusion of “Neutrality” and the Myth of the “Nonsectarian” Text
The commentary’s central argument hinges on the claim that the specific version of the Ten Commandments mandated by Texas law is “nonsectarian,” supported by a dubious appeal to the Douay-Rheims Bible, the 1921 Baltimore Catechism, and the current Catechism of the Catholic Church. This assertion is not merely historically inaccurate; it is a deliberate act of theological obfuscation. The Ten Commandments, as revealed by God to Moses, are not a collection of abstract moral platitudes amenable to interfaith consensus. They are the lex Dei, the Law of the Living God, given exclusively to His chosen people and fulfilled in the New Covenant by Our Lord Jesus Christ. To claim that a specific Protestant rendering of these commandments is “nonsectarian” is to deny their divine origin and purpose, reducing them to a humanistic ethical code acceptable to a pluralistic society.
The very attempt to find a “nonsectarian” version of God’s Law is a hallmark of modernist indifferentism, condemned by Pope Pius IX 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.” This proposition, and the broader error of religious indifferentism it represents, directly contradicts the Catholic teaching that there is only one true religion, the Catholic Church, and that all men are bound to seek and embrace it. The commentary’s embrace of a “nonsectarian” text implicitly accepts the premise that God’s Law can be divorced from its divine source and reinterpreted according to human reason and secular consensus. This is a direct assault on the integrity of divine revelation and the Church’s infallible Magisterium.
The False Promise of “History and Tradition” as a Legal Standard
The commentary lauds the Supreme Court’s abandonment of the Lemon test in favor of an “original meaning” and “history and tradition” standard for Establishment Clause analysis, attributing this shift to the “deep history and tradition of this republic.” This legal framework, while ostensibly more favorable to religious expression, is fundamentally flawed from a Catholic perspective because it grounds religious liberty in the American constitutional order rather than in the divine law and the rights of God. The American “tradition” of religious liberty is, at its core, a product of Enlightenment rationalism and Protestant individualism, not Catholic theology. It presumes a secular public square where religion is merely one voice among many, rather than the foundation of all just law and social order.
Pope Pius XI, in his encyclical Quas Primas, explicitly rejected the notion that the state can be neutral or indifferent to religion: “The manifold evils in the world were due to the fact that the majority of men had thrust Jesus Christ and His holy law out of their lives; that these had no place either in private affairs or in public affairs… When religion is removed, the very foundations of the state are shaken.” The commentary’s celebration of a legal standard that merely allows for passive displays of religious texts, while leaving intact the secularist framework that excludes God from public life, is a pathetic compromise. It mistakes a tactical victory for a strategic one, failing to grasp that the ultimate goal is not to “accommodate” religion within a secular state, but to establish the social reign of Christ the King, as demanded by Quas Primas: “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.”
The Absence of the Supernatural: A Symptomatic Silence
Perhaps the most damning indictment of this commentary is its complete silence on the supernatural realities that underpin the Ten Commandments. There is no mention of sin, grace, the sacraments, the necessity of faith and baptism for salvation, or the eternal consequences of violating God’s Law. The Commandments are presented as a historical artifact, a cultural touchstone, a legal precedent – anything but the living voice of the Almighty demanding obedience under pain of eternal damnation. This silence is not accidental; it is symptomatic of the modernist mindset that pervades even those who claim to defend religious liberty.
St. Pius X, in Pascendi Dominici Gregis, identified this naturalism as a core tenet of Modernism: “The Modernists… place the foundation of religious philosophy in that doctrine which is commonly called Agnosticism… Hence, for them, the origin of all religious life is to be found in a certain impulsus [impulse] of the soul… and in a certain sentiment [feeling] by which the soul, as it were, becomes conscious of God.” The commentary’s focus on legal precedent and historical tradition, while ignoring the supernatural origin and purpose of the Commandments, perfectly exemplifies this modernist reduction of religion to a purely natural phenomenon. It treats the Commandments as if they were a human invention, subject to human interpretation and legal adjudication, rather than the immutable Law of God.
The Danger of “Catholic” Collaboration with Secularism
The author, Andrea M. Picciotti-Bayer, is presented as a legal analyst for EWTN News and director of the Conscience Project, institutions that claim to represent Catholic interests. Yet her commentary reveals a deep entanglement with the very secularist forces she purports to oppose. Her praise for Judge Duncan’s opinion, rooted in a legal framework that denies the social kingship of Christ and reduces religion to a matter of individual conscience, is a betrayal of the Catholic faith. It is a form of clericalism in reverse, where lay Catholics, armed with legal expertise, attempt to secure a place for religion within a system that is inherently hostile to the fullness of Catholic truth.
This approach mirrors the errors of those who sought to reconcile Catholicism with liberalism in the 19th century, an effort repeatedly condemned by the Magisterium. Pope Leo XIII, in his encyclical Immortale Dei, warned against the separation of Church and State, arguing 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 supreme in its own kind… Each in its kind is fixed within the limits defined by its own nature and special object.” The commentary’s acceptance of a legal standard that confines religion to the private sphere, while allowing for only passive displays in public, is a capitulation to the liberal error. It fails to demand the full recognition of the Church’s authority and the primacy of divine law in all aspects of public life.
The Ultimate Heresy: Religious Liberty as a Human Right
The commentary’s ultimate error lies in its implicit acceptance of the modernist doctrine of religious liberty as a fundamental human right. This doctrine, condemned by Pope Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors (Proposition 79): “Moreover, it is false that the civil liberty of every form of worship, and the full power, given to all, of overtly and publicly manifesting any opinions whatsoever and thoughts, conduce more easily to corrupt the morals and minds of the people, and to propagate the pest of indifferentism,” and by Pope Gregory XVI in Mirari Vos, is a cornerstone of the American constitutional order. Yet it is fundamentally incompatible with Catholic teaching, which holds that error has no rights and that the state has a duty to suppress false religions in order to protect the common good and the salvation of souls.
The commentary’s celebration of a legal victory that merely allows for the passive display of the Ten Commandments, while leaving intact the broader framework of religious liberty, is a tragic compromise. It mistakes a tactical concession for a strategic victory, failing to grasp that the ultimate goal is not to “accommodate” Catholicism within a secular state, but to establish the social reign of Christ the King. Until Catholics reject the modernist errors of religious liberty, indifferentism, and the separation of Church and State, and return to the unchanging teaching of the pre-conciliar Magisterium, they will continue to be complicit in the very apostasy they claim to oppose. The Ten Commandments, stripped of their supernatural context and reduced to a legal precedent, are merely an idol of the secular state, a hollow symbol of a faith that has been emptied of its divine content.
Source:
Ten Commandments Can Return to Texas Classrooms, 5th Circuit Says (ncregister.com)
Date: 24.04.2026