The article from the National Catholic Register portal (June 12, 2026) by Joseph Pearce presents a commentary on the controversy surrounding the French film Sacré-Cœur: Son règne n’a pas de fin and the enduring conflict between Catholic devotion to the Sacred Heart and the secularist legacy of the French Revolution. Pearce frames the film’s success and the hostile reactions it provoked as evidence of a deeper spiritual war, noting that devotion to the Sacred Heart has historically been a rallying point for Catholic resistance against revolutionary and anti-Christian forces. He criticizes both secularist censorship and the opposition of “neo-liberal Catholics” who denounced the film as promoting “far-right ideas” and politicizing the Sacred Heart. While Pearce’s intentions are commendable, his analysis suffers from a fatal blindness: it treats the conflict as merely cultural and political, never once acknowledging that the true enemy of the Sacred Heart reigns not in the streets of Paris but in the very structures occupying the Vatican since 1958.
The Sacred Heart: A Sign of Contradiction Erased
Pearce correctly identifies the Sacred Heart as a provocation to the spirit of the world. He notes that “the revolutionary founding fathers of the secularist French Republic sought to wipe out all memory of the nation’s profoundly Christian past” and that “devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus inspired those who resisted the secular fundamentalist madness.” He recounts the heroic Catholic resistance of the Vendée, where “an image of the Sacred Heart was the emblem worn close to the heroic hearts of the peasants,” and the defeat of the Communards in 1871, after which “the great Sacré Coeur basilica of Montmartre was built in honor of the Sacred Heart.” These are facts of history, and they are true.
Yet Pearce’s narrative is fatally incomplete. He speaks of the Sacred Heart as though the battle ended with the Commune, as though the enemies of Christ were confined to the guillotine and the barricades. He does not see — or refuses to see — that the same spirit of laïcité, the same hatred of the Social Reign of Christ the King, has infiltrated the very heart of the Church’s institutional structures since the conciliar revolution. The “butchers of the French Revolution” are dead, but their spiritual heirs sit on the throne of Peter and occupy the episcopal sees of the world.
The Conciliar Betrayal of Christ the King
Pius XI, in his encyclical Quas Primas (1925), which Pearce would do well to study more carefully, proclaimed the Feast of Christ the King explicitly as a remedy against the “secularism of our times, so-called laicism, its errors and wicked endeavors.” The Pope wrote: “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.” And further: “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 conciliar sect, beginning with John XXIII and reaching its full monstrous expression in the teachings of Paul VI, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, Francis, and now Leo XIV (Robert Prevost), has systematically repudiated this doctrine. The “reconciliation with progress, liberalism and modern civilization” that Pius IX condemned as the eightieth error of the Syllabus of Errors — “The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization” — has been the guiding principle of the usurpers in the Vatican for over six decades. The “Church” of the New Advent has made peace with the Revolution, with secularism, with religious liberty, with the very forces that guillotined the faithful of the Vendée.
Pearce laments that “neo-liberal Catholics” in France denounced the film for promoting “the growing normalization of far-right ideas within the Christian community” and for putting “the Sacred Heart of Jesus at the service of a political agenda whose obsession is the reaffirmation of France’s Christian identity.” But these “neo-liberal Catholics” are not aberrations — they are the logical fruit of the conciliar revolution. When the “Church” embraces religious liberty (Dignitatis Humanae), when it declares that non-Catholic religions can be “ways of salvation” (Nostra Aetate, Redemptoris Missio), when it kisses the Koran and prays in the Assisi farce with pagans and idolaters, what possible basis remains within that sect for insisting on France’s Catholic identity? The “neo-liberal Catholics” who signed the letter in La Croix are merely being consistent with the apostasy that has been taught from the highest levels of the conciliar structure for sixty years. They are the children of Vatican II, and they are doing exactly what their fathers taught them to do.
The “Neo-Liberal Catholics” Are the Conciliar Sect Itself
Pearce quotes the open letter from La Croix, which expressed alarm that “the Sacred Heart of Jesus is being put at the service of a political agenda whose obsession is the reaffirmation of France’s Christian identity.” Pearce responds: “Is the desire for the conversion of one’s nation to the Sacred Heart of Jesus a far-right ‘obsession’? Is doing something practical to win converts to the Faith an ‘obsession’ or is it something commanded of us by Christ? What faux Catholics call ‘obsession,’ real Catholics call evangelization.”
This is a fine rhetorical flourish, but it dodges the real question. The issue is not whether evangelization is commanded — it is, absolutely (“Going therefore, teach ye all nations,” Matthew 28:19). The issue is: who is evangelizing, and with what authority? The conciliar sect has abandoned evangelization in the proper sense — the conversion of souls to the Catholic Faith and their incorporation into the true Church — in favor of “dialogue” with the world. The “neo-liberal Catholics” who signed that letter are not defending authentic Catholic evangelization; they are defending the conciliar project of accommodation with modernity. They are defending the very spirit of laïcité that Pearce claims to oppose, because the conciliar sect has made its peace with secularism.
Pius XI warned in Quas Primas: “The plague is the secularism of our times, so-called laicism, its errors and wicked endeavors… It began with the denial of Christ the Lord’s reign over all nations; the Church’s authority to teach men, to issue laws, to govern nations, which authority she received from Christ the Lord to lead men to eternal happiness, was denied.” The conciliar sect did not merely fail to resist this plague — it embraced it. And now the faithful who remain attached to the structures of that sect are horrified when any Catholic dares to assert the Social Kingship of Christ, because such an assertion contradicts everything the conciliar revolution has stood for since 1958.
The Blindness of Institutional Loyalty
Pearce writes as though the Catholic Church still exists in its pre-conciliar integrity, as though the battle were simply between faithful Catholics and secularist outsiders. He does not once mention the conciliar revolution, the New Mass, the apostasy of the usurpers, or the theological bankruptcy of the structures occupying the Vatican. His call to “give praise to God” for the film’s success is admirable in sentiment, but it is spiritually incoherent if it does not reckon with the fact that the very “Church” institutions under which he operates have betrayed the Sacred Heart more thoroughly than any French revolutionary ever could.
The Revolution killed bodies. The conciliar revolution kills souls — by emptying the Faith of its content, by replacing the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass with a Protestantized memorial meal, by denying the necessity of conversion to the Catholic Church, by declaring that religious liberty is a natural right, by fraternizing with heretics and pagans. The guillotine was terrible, but it sent martyrs to heaven. The conciliar sect sends the faithful to hell with a smile and a handshake.
St. Pius X, in Lamentabili Sane Exitu (1907), condemned the modernist proposition that “the Church is an enemy of the progress of natural and theological sciences” (proposition 57) and that “truth changes with man, because it develops with him, in him, and through him” (proposition 58). The conciliar sect has embraced these condemned propositions wholesale. The “hermeneutic of continuity” invented by Benedict XVI — himself a heretic and usurper — is nothing but the evolution of dogmas condemned by St. Pius X dressed up in sophisticated language.
The Sacred Heart Demands the Social Reign of Christ
The devotion to the Sacred Heart is not merely a private piety. It carries within it the full theological weight of the Social Kingship of Christ. When Our Lord appeared to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, He did not ask for personal devotion alone — He demanded the public consecration of nations, the establishment of His reign over societies and states. This is why the enemies of God have always hated this devotion. The Revolutionaries knew it. The Communards knew it. And the conciliar sect knows it too, which is why it has systematically downplayed the Social Kingship of Christ in favor of a privatized, interiorized, “spiritualized” faith that poses no threat to the liberal order.
Pearce is right that “what faux Catholics call ‘obsession,’ real Catholics call evangelization.” But real evangelization begins with the recognition that the conciliar structures are not the Church — they are the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place (Matthew 24:15). One cannot evangelize France — or any nation — while remaining in communion with a sect that has denied everything France’s Catholic martyrs died for.
Conclusion: The Heart of the Matter
The “Sacred Heart of the matter” is precisely what Pearce’s commentary refuses to confront: the Catholic Church, as an institution, has been hijacked by the very spirit of laïcité that the French Revolution unleashed. The enemies of the Sacred Heart are not only in the Paris municipal government or the editorial offices of La Croix — they are in the Vatican, on the Chair of Peter, in the “episcopal” conferences, in the “seminaries,” in the “religious orders” that have been emptied of all Catholic content.
The Sacred Heart of Jesus demands not merely that individuals love Him, but that nations recognize His kingship. Pius XI proclaimed this. The saints of the Vendée died for it. The peasants who wore the Sacred Heart on their breasts knew it. The conciliar sect has betrayed it. And until Catholic commentators like Pearce have the courage to name this betrayal for what it is — the greatest apostasy in the history of the world — their commentaries, however eloquent, will remain exercises in evasion. The Sacred Heart deserves better. The faithful deserve better. And the souls perishing under the spiritual devastation of the conciliar revolution deserve the full, unvarnished truth: extra ecclesiam nulla salus — outside the Church there is no salvation, and the Church is not the conciliar sect that occupies the Vatican.
Source:
The Sacred Heart of the Matter (ncregister.com)
Date: 12.06.2026