Mount Cristo Rey Desecrated: The American State Declares War on Sacred Ground
EWTN News reports that the United States government, through the Department of Homeland Security, has initiated an eminent domain action against the Diocese of Las Cruces in New Mexico, seeking to seize a parcel of land at the base of Mount Cristo Rey — the site of a 29-foot statue of Christ and an annual pilgrimage destination for thousands of the faithful. The government proposes to pay just over $183,000 for the privilege of erecting fencing, vehicle barriers, security lighting, cameras, and sensors on ground sanctified by Catholic devotion. The diocese, for its part, filed a response claiming the seizure would “substantially burden” religious freedom and rights of worship. This case is a microcosm of a far larger spiritual catastrophe: the systematic subordination of God’s rights to the idolatrous claims of the secular state, a subordination in which the conciliar sect itself is complicit through its own revolutionary doctrines on religious liberty.
The Reign of Christ the King vs. the Reign of Caesar
The fundamental question posed by this case is not one of legal procedure or constitutional interpretation. It is a question of sovereignty — and on this matter, the Catholic Church before 1958 spoke with absolute clarity. Pope Pius XI, in the encyclical Quas Primas (1925), established the Feast of Christ the King precisely to combat the “secularism of our times, so-called laicism, its errors and wicked endeavors.” He declared that “the Kingdom of our Redeemer encompasses all men” and that “men united in societies are no less subject to the authority of Christ than individuals.” He further stated: “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 state, therefore, has no authority independent of Christ the King. Its powers are derivative, not autonomous.
When the United States government invokes “eminent domain” against Church property, it acts upon the modernist premise condemned by Pope Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors (1864): that “the State, as being the origin and source of all rights, is endowed with a certain right not circumscribed by any limits” (Proposition 39). This is pure caesaropapism — the claim that the civil power is supreme in all things, including those pertaining to the sacred. The Catholic answer is unequivocal: Non possumus — we cannot yield. The Church’s property, dedicated to divine worship and the sanctification of souls, enjoys an immunity that no earthly power may legitimately violate. As Pope Pius IX wrote in his letter to the Bishops of Prussia: “No power in the world, however great it can be, can deprive of the pastoral office those whom the Holy Ghost has made Bishops in order to feed the Church of God.” If the state cannot strip a bishop of his office, neither can it strip the Church of her sacred property without committing an act of sacrilegious tyranny.
The Conciliar Sect’s Complicity in Its Own Dispossession
What is most damning in this affair is not the action of the secular government — which acts consistently with its own godless principles — but the response of the Diocese of Las Cruces. The diocese filed a court action claiming the seizure would “substantially burden” religious freedom. This language is revelatory. It is the language of Dignitatis Humanae, the conciliar declaration on religious freedom from Vatican II, which revolutionized Catholic teaching by asserting that the human person has a right to immunity from coercion in religious matters — a right rooted not in the objective truth of the Catholic faith, but in the subjective dignity of the human person as understood by modern liberal philosophy.
This doctrine was explicitly condemned by Pope Pius IX in the Syllabus, Proposition 79: “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 again, Proposition 77: “In the present day it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the State, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship.” Pope Gregory XVI, in Mirari Vos (1832), had already condemned this very error as “insanity” (deliramentum): the idea that liberty of conscience is a right inherent in every man.
By framing its defense in terms of “religious freedom” — a modernist concept — the diocese implicitly concedes the legitimacy of the framework within which the state operates. It argues not that the state has no authority whatsoever to seize sacred ground, but that doing so would “burden” a right. This is the language of a Church that has already surrendered its claim to sovereignty and now begs for tolerance from its enemies. It is the language of the conciliar sect, which has abandoned the integral Catholic doctrine that the Church is a societas perfecta — a perfect society — endowed by her Divine Founder with full independence from all civil authority (condemned as error in Syllabus, Propositions 19-20).
The Silence on Mount Cristo Rey’s True Significance
The article and the diocese’s legal filing both reference the religious significance of Mount Cristo Rey — the statue, the pilgrimages, the shrine. But neither articulates the full theological weight of what is at stake. A mountain dedicated to Christ the King, crowned with His image, standing on the border between two nations, is not merely a “place of worship” in the anodyne, protestantized sense. It is a profession of faith — a public, visible, permanent declaration that Jesus Christ reigns over this land and over all lands. To desecrate such a site by running a wall of Caesar through its base is not merely an inconvenience to pilgrims; it is an act of apostasy — a denial, in stone and steel, of the very kingship that the statue proclaims.
Pius XI warned in Quas Primas: “When God and Jesus Christ — as we lamented — were removed from laws and states and when authority was derived not from God but from men, the foundations of that authority were destroyed.” The border wall is a monument to the religion of the modern state — the religion of national security, of ethnic fear, of material self-preservation. It is the opus of a civilization that has rejected Christ the King and substituted the idol of the Nation-State. That the conciliar sect, which itself proclaimed the autonomy of temporal affairs in Gaudium et Spes, should be surprised by this development is a measure of its own self-deception.
The EWTN Report: Compassion Without Doctrine
The EWTN article, while reporting the facts, is itself symptomatic of the conciliar malaise. It presents the case as a regrettable conflict between two legitimate interests — the government’s need for security and the Church’s need for worship — without once raising the doctrinal question of Christ’s social kingship. There is no mention of Quas Primas, no reference to the Syllabus, no invocation of the Church’s divinely ordained immunity from state encroachment. The tone is one of polite concern, not prophetic denunciation.
This is consistent with EWTN’s broader posture as a media arm of the conciar sect: it reports on the Church’s conflicts with the secular world without ever arming the faithful with the doctrinal weapons necessary to understand and resist those conflicts. The result is a Catholicism that is informative but not formative — that tells the faithful what is happening without telling them why it is happening or what must be done about it according to immutable Catholic principle.
The Broader Context: A Church Without Teeth
This case does not occur in a vacuum. It occurs within a conciliar sect that has systematically dismantled the Church’s legal and theological defenses against state encroachment. The doctrine of Dignitatis Humanae has been used repeatedly — not by the Church against the state, but by the state against the Church. When the Church herself proclaims that religious freedom is a “right” rooted in human dignity rather than in the objective truth of the Catholic religion, she provides the secular state with the very language it needs to claim supremacy: if religion is a “freedom,” then it is a freedom that the state may regulate, burden, and even revoke when it deems necessary.
The 1917 Code of Canon Law, Canon 1499 §1, declared that res sacrae — sacred things — are subject to the authority of the Church and cannot be disposed of without just cause and proper canonical procedure. The state has no jurisdiction over such matters. But the conciliar sect, having embraced the autonomy of the temporal order, has effectively ceded this ground. The Diocese of Las Cruces finds itself in court not because the Catholic Church has no answer to the state’s claims, but because the conciliar sect has abandoned that answer.
Conclusion: Render Unto Caesar — But Not This
Our Lord said: “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s” (Matt. 22:21). But He also made clear that Caesar’s authority is not unlimited — it is subordinate to God’s. When Caesar reaches for what belongs to God — sacred ground, the rights of the Church, the public reign of Christ — the faithful must respond not with legal briefs invoking “religious freedom,” but with the Non possumus of the martyrs.
Mount Cristo Rey belongs to Christ the King. No government has the right — natural, divine, or constitutional — to seize it. The tragedy is not that the state acts as the state always acts when unrestrained by Catholic principle. The tragedy is that the conciliar sect, having surrendered the doctrine of Christ’s social kingship, has left the faithful defenseless before the advancing tyranny of Caesar.
“Then at last,” as Leo XIII wrote, “so many wounds can be healed, then there will be hope that the law will regain its former authority, sweet peace will return again… when all willingly accept the reign of Christ and obey Him.” Until that day, every seizure of sacred ground, every burden placed on worship, every wall erected across the foot of a mountain crowned with Christ’s image, stands as a monument to the apostasy of our times — and to the complicity of a Church that forgot how to say no.
Source:
U.S. government moves to seize land from New Mexico diocese to build border wall (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 13.05.2026