EWTN News portal reports (May 7, 2026): The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) has released a fact sheet recommending targeted sanctions against Russian officials and state agencies, including the Federal Security Service, alongside officials from the Taliban, Iraqi militias, Nicaragua, Nigeria, China, India, and other nations. The report advocates visa bans, asset freezes, and financial transaction blocks against individuals deemed responsible for religious liberty violations. This entire framework, however, rests upon the fundamentally modernist and liberal Catholic premise that “religious freedom” — a concept condemned by the Church — constitutes a universal human right that secular governments may define, adjudicate, and enforce through coercive economic measures.
The Idol of “Religious Freedom” as a Condemned Liberal Dogma
The very foundation upon which the USCIRF builds its recommendations is a heresy solemnly condemned by the Catholic Church. The document speaks of “religious liberty” as though it were an unqualified good, a principle to be promoted and defended across all nations. This is precisely the error that Pope Pius IX condemned in the Syllabus of Errors (1864), 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.” And further, 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.”
The Church has always taught that error has no rights (error non habet ius). The true Church, founded by Christ as a perfect society, demands for herself full freedom to teach, govern, and sanctify — but this is the freedom of truth, not the liberal fiction that all religions are equally valid paths to God. As Pope Leo XIII declared in Immortale Dei (1885): “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 the highest in its own kind, each fixed within certain limits, defined by its own nature and special object.” The USCIRF, by treating all religious expressions as equally deserving of state protection, inverts this divine order and enthrones the very indifferentism the Church has anathematized.
Pius XI, in Quas Primas (1925), which we have in our possession, explicitly states: “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 Kingdom of Christ admits no parity with the kingdom of Satan. To speak of “religious freedom” as though Islam, Hinduism, Orthodox schism, and Catholic truth stand on equal footing is to deny the royal dignity of Christ the King — the very dignity Pius XI sought to restore against the rising tide of secularism.
The Secular State as Arbiter of Divine Truth
The USCIRF document reveals the full absurdity of the liberal framework: a commission of the United States federal government presumes to judge which individuals and agencies in foreign nations are “violators of religious liberty.” This is the secular state — a power of purely natural origin — sitting in judgment over matters of divine worship and spiritual authority. It is precisely the error condemned in the Syllabus, Proposition 44: “The civil authority may interfere in matters relating to religion, morality and spiritual government: hence, it can pass judgment on the instructions issued for the guidance of consciences, conformably with their mission, by the pastors of the Church.”
The document recommends sanctions against the Taliban’s Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice — an Islamic body enforcing Sharia law. While the enforcement of false religious law is certainly unjust, the proper response is not for the United States government to impose visa bans and asset freezes. The proper response is the preaching of the Gospel, the conversion of nations to the Catholic faith, and the establishment of the social reign of Christ the King. 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.” True happiness for any nation — whether Afghanistan, Russia, or the United States — comes only through submission to the Catholic Church, the one ark of salvation.
That the USCIRF simultaneously recommends sanctions against Russian officials and agencies of the Russian Federation is particularly revealing. The Russian state, whatever its manifold sins and errors, at least nominally professes allegiance to the Orthodox faith and resists certain aspects of the liberal revolution — gender ideology, unrestricted abortion, the dissolution of the natural family. The conciliar sect and its allied institutions, however, view any state that resists the full program of liberal modernity as a target for coercion. The fact that Russia is listed alongside the Taliban and Chinese Communist Party officials demonstrates that the operative criterion is not the defense of genuine Catholic truth but the enforcement of the secular liberal order.
The Omission of the True Church and the True Faith
Most damningly, the entire document is silent about the Catholic Church — the one true Church founded by Christ — and her rights, her claims, her mission. There is no mention of the duty of all nations to recognize the Catholic Church as the sole true religion. There is no mention of the social kingship of Christ. There is no mention of the obligation of rulers to submit to the authority of the Church in matters of faith and morals. This silence is not accidental; it is the defining characteristic of the modernist mentality.
As St. Pius X warned in Lamentabili sane exitu (1907), Proposition 54: “Dogmas, sacraments, and hierarchy, both in concept and in reality, are merely modes of explanation and stages in the evolution of Christian consciousness, which has multiplied and perfected, through external additions, the small seed hidden in the Gospels.” The USCIRF’s framework reduces religion to a matter of individual conscience and state policy — precisely the evolution of doctrine that St. Pius X condemned as Modernism, “the synthesis of all heresies.”
The document speaks of “naming and shaming” perpetrators, of “demonstrating solidarity with victims and survivors.” This is the language of secular humanitarianism, not of Catholic theology. The Church does not seek to “name and shame” through visa bans and asset freezes; she seeks the conversion of souls through preaching, the sacraments, and the authoritative exercise of her magisterium. The very concept of “targeted sanctions” as a tool for promoting religious freedom reveals the bankruptcy of the liberal approach: it substitutes economic coercion for the supernatural means of grace.
The Conciliar Sect’s Complicity in the Liberal Order
It is no coincidence that EWTN — an institution operating within the structures of the conciliar sect — reports on this document without a word of theological criticism. The conciliar sect, since the false Vatican II council, has embraced the very “religious liberty” condemned by Pius IX. The conciliar document Dignitatis Humanae (1965) proclaimed the right to religious freedom — a direct contradiction of the Syllabus of Errors and the entire pre-conciliar magisterium. This was not a development of doctrine but a corruption of it, as the Syllabus itself foretold in Proposition 5: “Divine revelation is imperfect, and therefore subject to a continual and indefinite progress, corresponding with the advancement of human reason.”
The USCIRF’s recommendations are, in effect, the practical application of the conciliar sect’s false teaching on religious liberty. When the Church teaches that error has no rights, the liberal state responds by claiming the right to protect all error equally. The conciliar sect, having abandoned the Church’s claim to exclusive truth, now finds itself allied with secular powers in enforcing a regime of religious indifferentism — all while the true faith is marginalized, persecuted, and driven underground.
As the Defense of Sedevacantism document makes clear, a manifest heretic loses his office ipso facto — by that very fact, before any declaration. The conciliar “popes” who proclaimed Dignitatis Humanae fell into manifest heresy. They ceased to be true members of the Church, and therefore could not be its head. The structures they occupy — including the institutions that produce and disseminate documents like the USCIRF fact sheet — are not the Catholic Church but the “abomination of desolation” standing in the holy place (Matt. 24:15).
The True Remedy: The Social Reign of Christ the King
The only true remedy for the religious persecution documented by the USCIRF is not targeted sanctions, visa bans, or asset freezes. It is the establishment of the social reign of Christ the King over all nations. As Pius XI declared in Quas Primas: “If rulers and legitimate superiors will have the conviction that they exercise authority not so much by their own right as by the command and in the place of the Divine King, everyone will notice how religiously and wisely they will use their authority.”
The duty of every Catholic — and indeed of every civil authority — is not to promote “religious freedom” in the liberal sense, but to recognize the Catholic Church as the one true religion and to order all laws and institutions according to the commandments of God. This is not coercion; it is the acknowledgment of objective truth. As the Syllabus teaches, Proposition 24: “The Church has not the power of using force, nor has she any temporal power, direct or indirect.” But this does not mean the Church is silent on the duties of states. She emphatically teaches that states must recognize her authority and conform their laws to the divine law.
The USCIRF, EWTN, and the entire apparatus of the conciliar sect offer only the false remedy of secular coercion in defense of liberal indifferentism. The true remedy is the return of all nations to the Catholic faith, the submission of all rulers to Christ the King, and the restoration of the Church’s full authority over the souls and bodies of men. Until this is accomplished, no amount of targeted sanctions will bring peace or justice to the world. “Unless the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it” (Ps. 126:1).
The faithful must reject the false framework of “religious freedom” entirely, recognizing it for what it is: a modernist heresy designed to reduce the Catholic Church to one sect among many, and to place the secular state in the position that belongs to Christ alone. The true Church endures — not in the structures occupying the Vatican, but in the faithful who profess the integral Catholic faith, who offer the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass according to the immemorial rite, and who await the restoration of all things in Christ.
Source:
Commission sees opportunities to expand targeted sanctions on religious liberty offenders (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 07.05.2026