EWTN News portal reports on a Pew Research Center survey released May 14, 2026, which reveals that nearly half of U.S. Catholics (49%) support the federal government enforcing the separation of church and state, while 55% believe the Bible should influence U.S. law. The survey also found that 65% of Catholics hold a “positive view of religion,” and 37% believe religion is gaining influence in American life. These figures expose not merely statistical trends but the catastrophic spiritual fruit of decades of systematic Modernist indoctrination within the conciliar sect, demonstrating that the vast majority of those who identify as “Catholic” have internalized the very errors condemned by every pope up to Pius XII and now profess, whether knowingly or not, a doctrine diametrically opposed to the Social Kingship of Christ and the divine constitution of the Church.
The Idol of “Separation of Church and State” as Catholic Doctrine
The most damning revelation of this survey is that nearly half of self-identified Catholics (49%) affirm that the federal government should enforce the separation of church and state, with an additional 16% wanting the government to stop enforcing it altogether. This means that a combined 65% of those surveyed who call themselves Catholics either support or wish to further entrench the very principle that the Church has consistently condemned as contrary to divine law.
This is not a matter of prudential political judgment. The Church’s teaching on the relationship between the spiritual and temporal powers is not subject to opinion polling. Pope Pius XI, in the encyclical Quas Primas (1925), which the provided context document confirms, declared with unambiguous clarity:
> “The Kingdom of our Redeemer encompasses all men… 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.”
Pius XI further insisted that “rulers of states therefore [should] 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 encyclical explicitly derives from the foundational principle that Christ possesses all power in heaven and earth (Matt. 28:18) and that no sphere of human activity—whether individual, familial, or political—falls outside His royal jurisdiction.
The doctrine of “separation of church and state” as understood in the American constitutional tradition was formally condemned by Pope Gregory XVI in Mirari Vos (1832) as a pernicious error, and by Pope Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors (1864), where proposition 55 states: “The Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church” — a proposition placed among those condemned and rejected. The provided context document for the Syllabus further records Pius IX’s denunciation of those who claim “the State, as being the origin and source of all rights, is endowed with a certain right not circumscribed by any limits” (proposition 39) and who assert that “the teaching of the Catholic Church is hostile to the well-being and interests of society” (proposition 40).
Pope Leo XIII, in Immortale Dei (1885), taught with the full weight of the ordinary magisterium:
> “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 by its proper nature and special object. Each in its sphere is independent of the other… Hence, as the Church is a society, she must be a true society, entirely free, and endowed with proper and perpetual rights of her own, conferred upon her by her Divine Founder.”
The “Catholics” who tell Pew researchers that the government should enforce separation of church and state are, in the language of the Syllabus, professing a condemned error. They are not merely expressing a political preference; they are rejecting the Social Kingship of Christ, the divine constitution of the Church, and the binding obligation of civil society to recognize the Catholic Church as the one true religion. That nearly half of those surveyed hold this view is a measure of how thoroughly the conciliar revolution has destroyed even the most elementary understanding of Catholic ecclesiology among the nominal faithful.
The Bible “Influencing” Law: A Protestant Heresy Absorbed by Catholics
The survey reports that 55% of Catholics surveyed believe the Bible should have influence on U.S. law, compared to 43% who said it should not. This finding reveals a profound confusion that is itself a direct consequence of the post-conciliar demolition of Catholic doctrine on the relationship between Scripture, Tradition, and the Magisterium.
The notion that the Bible should “influence” law is a characteristically Protestant and Masonic idea, rooted in the sola scriptura heresy and the rationalist principle that individuals may interpret Scripture according to their private judgment. The Catholic Church has always taught that it is the Church alone, through her divinely constituted Magisterium, that authentically interprets the Word of God, whether written or handed down by Tradition. The Council of Trent decreed that “no one, relying on his own skill, shall… wrest the sacred Scripture to his own senses” (Session IV, Decree Concerning the Canonical Scriptures). The First Vatican Council defined that “all those things are to be believed with divine and Catholic faith which are contained in the word of God, written or handed down, and which by the Church, either in solemn judgment or through her ordinary and universal Magisterium, are proposed for belief as having been divinely revealed” (Dei Filius, Chapter 3).
The idea that the Bible should “influence” law apart from the authoritative teaching of the Church is not Catholic doctrine—it is the very error condemned in Lamentabili Sane Exitu (1907), where proposition 4 states: “The Magisterium of the Church cannot, even by dogmatic definitions, determine the proper sense of Holy Scripture,” and proposition 19: “Non-Catholic exegetes have grasped the true sense of Holy Scripture better than Catholic exegetes.” That a majority of self-identified Catholics now hold a view functionally identical to these condemned propositions demonstrates the utter success of the Modernist project of dissolving Catholic identity into a vague, Bible-centered naturalism indistinguishable from liberal Protestantism.
Furthermore, the survey’s framing—”should the Bible have influence on law?”—presupposes the very separation of church and state that the Church condemns. The Catholic position is not that the Bible should “influence” law as one factor among many in a pluralistic society; it is that the Catholic Church, as the divinely appointed interpreter of both Scripture and natural law, has the right and duty to guide the civil authority in all matters touching faith and morals. As Pius XI declared in Quas Primas: “The state must leave the same freedom to the members of Orders and Congregations, both male and female, who are indeed the most valiant helpers of the Pastors of the Church and contribute most to the expansion and establishment of Christ’s Kingdom.”
The “Positive View of Religion”: Indifferentism by Another Name
The survey’s finding that 65% of Catholics have a “positive view of religion” is, in the context of the conciliar sect, almost certainly not a positive view of the Catholic religion as the one true faith, but rather the indifferentism formally condemned by the Church. Pope Pius IX, in the Syllabus of Errors, condemned the propositions that “every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true” (proposition 15), that “man may, in the observance of any religion whatever, find the way of eternal salvation” (proposition 16), and 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).
The post-conciliar “Catholic” who has a “positive view of religion” in the abstract is, in practice, professing the very errors Pius IX condemned. The conciliar document Nostra Aetate (1965) initiated this disaster by declaring that the Church “regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men.” This was a radical departure from the consistent teaching of the Church, expressed by Pope Gregory XVI in Mirari Vos, that “the absurd and erroneous doctrines or ravings in defense of liberty of conscience are a pestilence—a pestilence more deadly to the State than any other.”
The Pew survey’s framing of “religion” as a generic positive category, rather than the Catholic Church as the one true religion, is itself a symptom of the Modernist dissolution of revealed truth into religious experience—precisely the error condemned in Lamentabili proposition 20: “Revelation was merely man’s self-awareness of his relationship to God.”
The Demographic Desertion of the Faith: Catholics Fleeing the Conciliar Sect
The appended related article from EWTN News notes that “more adults quit Catholic Church than enter it in most countries Pew surveyed.” This is not surprising. The conciliar sect, having abandoned the unchanging doctrine of the faith, replaced the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass with a Protestantized memorial meal, substituted the social reign of Christ the King with interreligious dialogue at Assisi, and traded the salvation of souls for climate activism and open borders, has rendered itself spiritually barren.
The faithful who still profess the integral Catholic faith—the faith of the Roman Catechism, of the Council of Trent, of the Syllabus of Errors, of Quas Primas, of Pascendi Dominici Gregis—recognize that the conciliar structures occupying the Vatican are not the Catholic Church but the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place (Matt. 24:15). The Pew survey’s “Catholics” are, for the most part, members of the conciliar sect who have been systematically formed in its errors. Their views on the separation of church and state, the Bible’s influence on law, and the generic “positive view of religion” are not Catholic views at all—they are the natural and inevitable fruit of the Modernist revolution that began in earnest with John XXIII’s convocation of Vatican II and has now reached its full, rotten maturity under the current usurper, Leo XIV (Robert Prevost).
The Silence of the “Bishops” and the Complicity of EWTN
What is most conspicuously absent from this EWTN News report is any principled doctrinal condemnation of the surveyed views. Nowhere does the article state that the position of the 49% of “Catholics” who support enforcing separation of church and state is heretical—that it contradicts the defined teaching of the ordinary and universal Magisterium. Nowhere does it cite Quas Primas, the Syllabus, or Immortale Dei. Nowhere does it call upon the faithful to reject the errors revealed by the survey.
This silence is itself a damning indictment. EWTN, while maintaining the external forms of pre-conciliar Catholicism (the Latin Mass, the rosary, the Brown Scapular), operates within the framework of the conciar sect, recognizing the authority of the antipopes and their “bishops.” Its reporting on this Pew survey treats the heretical views of nominal “Catholics” as interesting sociological data rather than as evidence of apostasy demanding pastoral correction. This is the fundamental contradiction of those pretending to be traditional Catholics: they retain the liturgical heritage of the Church while submitting to the authority of those who have destroyed the faith that heritage was meant to express.
As the provided context document on sedevacantism demonstrates through the authority of St. Robert Bellarmine, Pope Celestine I, the 1917 Code of Canon Law (Canon 188.4), and Pope Paul IV’s bull Cum ex Apostolatus Officio, a manifest heretic ceases to be a member of the Church and therefore cannot hold any office within it. The conciliar “popes,” having promulgated, approved, and enforced doctrines condemned by the pre-conciliar Magisterium—including religious liberty (Dignitatis Humanae), ecumenism (Unitatis Redintegratio), and the novel doctrine that the Church of Christ “subsists in” the Catholic Church rather than is the Catholic Church (Lumen Gentium 8)—are manifest heretics who have ipso facto lost any claim to the Chair of Peter.
The Duty of the Faithful: Reject the Conciliar Apostasy
The Pew survey of 206 is not merely a sociological curiosity. It is a spiritual diagnostic of the most catastrophic crisis in the history of the Church—a crisis not caused by external persecution but by internal treason. The fact that nearly half of self-identified Catholics support the enforcement of a principle condemned by the Church, that a majority believe the Bible should “influence” law apart from the Magisterium, and that most hold a generic “positive view of religion” indistinguishable from the indifferentism of the Enlightenment—all of this is the predictable fruit of the Modernist revolution that has consumed the conciliar structures.
The faithful who still profess the integral Catholic faith must recognize that the battle is not between “conservative” and “liberal” visions within the same institution. It is between the Catholic Church—the one, true, apostolic Church founded by Christ, which endures in the faithful who profess the unchanging faith and are led by bishops with valid orders—and the conciliar sect, a paramasonic structure that occupies the Vatican, usurps the titles and authority of the Church, and leads souls to perdition under the guise of Catholicism.
As Pius XI declared in Quas Primas, the feast of Christ the King was instituted precisely to combat the “secularism of our times, so-called laicism, its errors and wicked endeavors.” The Pew survey demonstrates that this laicism has penetrated even those who call themselves Catholic. The remedy is not accommodation, dialogue, or reform of the conciliar structures. The remedy is the uncompromising proclamation of the Social Kingship of Christ, the absolute rejection of religious liberty and separation of church and state as condemned errors, and the return to the immutable Tradition of the Church—the tradition that recognizes no “positive view of religion” in the abstract, but only the absolute, exclusive, and unyielding claim of the Catholic Church as the one ark of salvation outside which there is no salvation (extra Ecclesiam nulla salus).
Source:
Pew report details how Americans feel about religion’s influence on government and public life (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 14.05.2026