The National Catholic Register reports on the visit of King Charles III and Queen Camilla to Front Royal, Virginia, on April 30, 2026 — a small town that is home to Christendom College and the historic St. John the Baptist Catholic Church. The article, filed by senior editor Ann Schneible, describes the enthusiastic reception afforded to the British monarch: crowds waiting for hours, children dressed for the occasion, parishioners peering through binoculars from church steps, and residents comparing the event to a visit by Bing Crosby decades prior. The tone is one of breathless civic pride, historical wonder, and communal celebration. Not a single word is devoted to the Catholic Church’s teaching on the proper ordering of temporal power under Christ the King, the heresy of the Anglican schismatics who occupy the British throne, or the spiritual peril of a Catholic community treating a Protestant monarch’s motorcade as an “iconic moment” worthy of its collective memory. The silence is deafening — and damning.
A Town That Forgot Its King
Front Royal, Virginia, is no ordinary American town. It is home to Christendom College, an institution founded explicitly to form Catholic leaders in the tradition of the Faith. Its parish, St. John the Baptist, carries historical ties to the American Civil War — a conflict in which Catholic chaplains served and Catholic soldiers died. One would expect, therefore, that the residents of this town — and certainly the editors of a publication bearing the name National Catholic Register — would possess at least a rudimentary understanding of what the Church teaches about the relationship between temporal rulers and the supernatural order.
Instead, we are presented with Maria O’Brien, a parishioner of St. John’s, who declares that the visit of King Charles III is “really special to us because my children have all grown up here” and that she wanted her children present “not just for the opportunity to possibly see dignitaries from England, so much as what it means to Front Royal.” The community, we are told, is “coming together in a historic moment.”
Historic — but historic in what sense? The Catholic Church has always taught that the only King whose reign is absolute, universal, and eternal is Our Lord Jesus Christ. Pope Pius XI, in the encyclical Quas Primas (1925), established the Feast of Christ the King precisely to combat the modern error that temporal powers are autonomous, self-justifying, and worthy of public veneration independent of their submission to the Divine King. Pius XI wrote with unmistakable clarity: “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 authority of Christ over all nations is not merely a pious aspiration. It is a dogmatic truth. Pius XI continued: “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 inverse is equally true: those who refuse this public veneration, who treat temporal rulers as the highest objects of communal loyalty, commit a species of idolatry — substituting the creature for the Creator, the earthly crown for the Crown of Thorns.
The Anglican Heretic on the Throne
Let us be precise about who King Charles III is. He is the Supreme Governor of the Church of England — a heretical sect erected by Henry VIII in 1534 when he severed communion with the Roman Pontiff, the Vicar of Christ. The Church of England has never been in communion with the Catholic Church. Its orders were declared “absolutely null and utterly void” by Pope Leo XIII in Apostolicae Curae (1896). Its sacraments, to the extent they even claim to possess them, are invalid. Its bishops are not bishops. Its “clergy” are laymen in vestments.
King Charles III, as Supreme Governor of this schismatic body, holds a title that is inherently and formally opposed to the Catholic Faith. He is the heir of a line of monarchs who persecuted, imprisoned, tortured, and executed Catholics for centuries. The English Crown was the instrument by which St. Thomas More was beheaded, St. John Fisher was martyred, the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales were butchered, and the Catholic faith was driven underground for over three hundred years. The Penal Laws, enacted under the authority of the very crown Charles now wears, were designed to extirpate Catholicism from the British Isles.
And yet the parishioners of St. John the Baptist Church in Front Royal — a church with Civil War heritage, no less — watched this man’s motorcade pass by with binoculars, cheered, and called the event “epic.” Simone Lash, a student at a local Catholic private school, remarked that it is one thing to learn history, but another “to have the opportunity to drive less than 10 minutes, to maybe stand and wait for a while, but also have the opportunity to see someone who is living out history.”
Living out history — yes. But what history? The history of the schism? The history of persecution? The history of a crown that was wet with the blood of Catholic martyrs? If Miss Lash’s school taught her Church history, it apparently failed to teach her that the British monarchy is not a neutral cultural institution but an enemy of the Faith that has never repented, never reconciled, and never submitted to the authority of the Roman Pontiff. Pope Pius IX, in the Syllabus of Errors (1864), condemned the proposition that “Protestantism is nothing more than another form of the same true Christian religion, in which form it is given to please God equally as in the Catholic Church” (Proposition 18). To treat the Anglican monarch with civic reverence, as though his visit were a blessing upon a Catholic community, is to act in the very spirit of the indifferentism that Pius IX anathematized.
The Register’s Complicity in Religious Indifferentism
The National Catholic Register is not a secular newspaper. It claims to be a Catholic publication. Its senior editor, Ann Schneible, holds an S.T.L. in Institutional Church Communications from the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome. She has worked for ZENIT, EWTN, Vatican Radio, and L’Osservatore Romano. She is, by any measure, a woman with advanced formation in Catholic theology and communications.
And yet her article contains not a single critical reflection on the theological implications of a Catholic community celebrating a Protestant monarch’s visit. There is no mention of the fact that the Church of England is a schismatic sect. There is no mention of the martyrdoms carried out under the English Crown. There is no mention of the Church’s teaching on the social reign of Christ the King. There is not even a passing acknowledgment that the enthusiasm described in the article might be, from a strictly Catholic perspective, spiritually problematic.
Instead, the article reads like a press release from the British embassy. The tone is celebratory, warm, and entirely uncritical. The royal couple “smiled and waved at the crowds.” The town held a “block party” and a parade. The local cinema was “aptly named (for the occasion) Royal Cinemas.” The article even embeds an Instagram post from the official Royal Family account — as though the social media apparatus of a Protestant monarchy were a legitimate source of news for Catholic readers.
This is not journalism. This is propaganda. It is the propaganda of religious indifferentism — the notion that all religions are equal, that all rulers are worthy of honor regardless of their relationship to the true Faith, and that Catholic identity is a matter of cultural nostalgia rather than supernatural conviction. It is the propaganda of the conciliar sect, which has spent sixty years dismantling the Church’s missionary identity and replacing it with a vapid “dialogue” with the world — including with the very institutions that once sought to destroy the Church.
The Omission That Condemns
The most revealing aspect of this article is not what it says but what it omits. Consider the following questions that any authentically Catholic journalist would have asked:
- What is the theological status of the Church of England, and why is it not in communion with the Catholic Church?
- What did the English monarchy do to Catholics during the Reformation and the Penal Laws era?
- What does the Church teach about the obligation of Catholic communities to profess the social reign of Christ the King over all temporal powers?
- Is it appropriate for Catholic parishioners to cheer and celebrate the passage of a schismatic monarch’s motorcade past their church?
- What message does this send to the faithful about the relative importance of earthly kings versus the Eternal King?
None of these questions are asked. None are even hinted at. The article proceeds as though the Catholic Faith has nothing to say about the matter — as though the visit of King Charles III is a purely civic event, devoid of any theological significance.
This is the hallmark of the post-conciliar apostasy: the systematic evacuation of supernatural content from Catholic life. When Catholic publications treat the visit of a Protestant monarch as a reason for communal celebration, while remaining silent on the Church’s teaching about the Kingship of Christ, they reveal that they have internalized the very secularism that Pope Pius XI condemned in Quas Primas. Pius XI identified the root of modern evils in the fact that “very many have removed Jesus Christ and His most holy law from their customs, from private, family, and public life.” The residents of Front Royal, and the editors of the Register, have done precisely this — not by denying Christ explicitly, but by acting as though He has no claim on the public order, no authority over temporal rulers, and no right to be confessed as King in the streets of a Catholic town.
The False Memory of Earthly Glory
Maria O’Brien compared the royal visit to a previous visit by Bing Crosby, which prompted the town to name its baseball stadium after the celebrity. “I imagine this,” she said of the royal visit, “is going to be pretty epic in our town and community’s history in the long run.”
Here we see the substitution of collective memory rooted in earthly spectacle for the living memory of the Faith. A Catholic community’s “collective memory” should be formed by the martyrs it venerates, the saints it invokes, the sacraments it receives, and the Kingship of Christ it professes. Instead, the residents of Front Royal are invited to remember a Protestant king waving from a BMW — and to call it “epic.”
St. Augustine, in the City of God, drew the definitive distinction between the Civitas Dei (City of God) and the Civitas Terrena (Earthly City). The earthly city is built on love of self unto the contempt of God. The City of God is built on love of God unto the contempt of self. The residents of Front Royal, by their own testimony, are building their collective memory on the passing glory of an earthly king — a king whose ancestors murdered Catholics for professing the very Faith that the parishioners of St. John the Baptist claim to hold.
The irony is suffocating — and it is entirely lost on those who should know better.
Conclusion: Restore the Kingship of Christ
The visit of King Charles III to Front Royal, Virginia, is a small event in the grand scheme of world affairs. But small events reveal great truths. What this episode reveals is that Catholic identity in the post-conciliar era has been reduced to a cultural veneer — a thin layer of nostalgia spread over a foundation of religious indifferentism and secular civic pride.
The remedy is not complicated. It is the remedy prescribed by Pope Pius XI nearly a century ago: the annual, public, solemn profession of the Kingship of Christ over all nations, all rulers, and all communities. It is the remedy of Quas Primas — not as a historical artifact, but as a living, binding, dogmatic truth.
Until Catholic communities, Catholic publications, and Catholic educators recover this truth — and until they have the courage to proclaim it even when it means refusing to cheer for earthly kings — the Faith will continue to be hollowed out from within, replaced by the empty spectacle of a world that has forgotten its King.
“His power is an everlasting power, which shall not be taken away: and his kingdom, that which shall not be corrupted” (Daniel 7:14). Let Front Royal — and every Catholic community — remember which Kingdom this is, and act accordingly.
Source:
Royals in Front Royal: The Day the King and Queen Came to Town (ncregister.com)
Date: 01.05.2026