EWTN News portal reports that Bishop Mark Brennan of Wheeling-Charleston has issued a pastoral letter ahead of America’s 250th anniversary, calling Catholics to “renew their commitment to faith, human dignity, and the common good” while building a “culture of life” and “civilization of love.” The letter, framed as Brennan’s final pastoral as bishop, praises American constitutional stability, religious liberty, and Catholic contributions to social reform, while warning against secularism, relativism, and excessive individualism. Yet beneath this veneer of piety lies a document thoroughly infected with the very Modernism and Americanism that the pre-conciliar Magisterium condemned without equivocation — a letter that reduces the supernatural mission of the Church to naturalistic humanism, baptizes the errors of Liberalism, and ignores the absolute primacy of Christ the King over all nations.
The Americanism That Leo XIII Condemned, Repackaged for 2026
The pastoral letter opens with a call that sounds pious on its surface: “Catholics of West Virginia, be truly Catholic and truly patriotic.” But this very formulation — placing “Catholic” and “patriotic” as parallel and complementary virtues — is the hallmark of the heresy of Americanism that Pope Leo XIII condemned in his 1899 letter Testem Benevolentiae. Leo XIII warned against precisely this tendency: the exaltation of American-style liberty, the adaptation of the Church’s mission to democratic culture, and the implicit suggestion that the Church should accommodate herself to the spirit of the age rather than demanding that the age submit to Christ.
Brennan’s letter does not merely echo Americanism — it embodies it. The bishop praises “the stability of the nation’s constitutional system, religious liberty protections, and tradition of public service” as though these were goods to be celebrated rather than symptoms of a political order built on the explicit rejection of Christ’s social Kingship. The United States Constitution, let us recall, makes no mention of God as the source of authority, establishes no religion, and derives its legitimacy from “We the People” — a formula that Pius VI condemned as heretical in its assertion that authority flows from the people rather than from God. That Brennan can praise this system without a single word of theological critique reveals the depth of the post-conciliar apostasy.
Silence on the Social Kingship of Christ: The Gravest Omission
Perhaps the most damning feature of Brennan’s letter is what it does not say. There is not a single mention of the Social Kingship of Christ, the doctrine that Pius XI proclaimed as the remedy for all the ills of modern society in his 1925 encyclical Quas Primas. 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… 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: “The state is happy not by one means, and man by another; for the state is nothing else than a harmonious association of men.”
Brennan warns against “secularism” and “relativism” — but he never names the only true remedy: the public recognition of Christ the King by the state itself. Pius XI was explicit: “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.” Brennan’s letter, by contrast, operates entirely within the framework of the post-conciliar acceptance of the separation of Church and State — an error that the Syllabus of Errors condemned in its 55th proposition: “The Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church.”
The bishop quotes Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln on divine judgment — but Jefferson was a Deist who rejected the divinity of Christ, and Lincoln, whatever his personal beliefs, governed a nation whose founding documents enshrined religious indifferentism. That Brennan can invoke these figures as moral authorities without noting their theological errors is itself a symptom of the Modernist disease: the subordination of revealed truth to naturalistic pragmatism.
“Culture of Life” and “Civilization of Love”: Conciliar Buzzwords in Place of Catholic Doctrine
Brennan’s letter is saturated with the vocabulary of the post-conciliar revolution: “culture of life,” “civilization of love,” “human dignity,” “common good.” These phrases, while they may sound Catholic, are in fact the lingua franca of the conciliar sect’s accommodation to the world. They are deliberately vague, capable of being interpreted in ways that are either fully Catholic or entirely naturalistic — and in practice, they are almost always deployed in the latter sense.
The phrase “civilization of love” is particularly revealing. It was a favorite of Karol Wojtyła — the antipope John Paul II — whose entire pontificate was characterized by a systematic dismantling of the Church’s supernatural mission in favor of a naturalistic humanism dressed in Catholic vestments. Wojtyła’s “civilization of love” was the theological framework for his embrace of the United Nations, his Assisi gatherings with pagans and heretics, and his reduction of the Church’s social teaching to a program of humanitarian activism. That Brennan invokes this concept without any critical distance demonstrates his complete captivity to the conciliar paradigm.
Similarly, “human dignity” — a concept that, in its proper Catholic understanding, is rooted in the imago Dei and ordered toward eternal beatitude — has been hijacked by the post-conciliar church and transformed into a synonym for the secular notion of “human rights.” The Syllabus of Errors condemned the idea that “authority is nothing else but numbers and the sum total of material forces” (proposition 60) and that “right consists in the material fact” (proposition 59). Yet Brennan’s deployment of “human dignity” operates entirely within this materialist framework, divorced from the supernatural order.
The Pro-Life Movement: A Noble Cause Ensnared by Conciliar Compromise
Brennan devotes considerable attention to the defense of human life, condemning abortion, assisted suicide, and the death penalty. On these points, his moral conclusions are correct — but correct conclusions do not sanctify a flawed framework. The bishop praises the March for Life, pregnancy resource centers, and Catholic charitable works, yet he never addresses the root cause of the culture of death: the apostasy of the conciliar church itself.
Pius XI taught in Quas Primas that the “plague that poisons human society” is “the secularism of our times, so-called laicism, its errors and wicked endeavors.” He identified the origin of this plague: “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 abortion crisis is not merely a political problem to be addressed through marches and legislation — it is a supernatural crisis that can only be resolved through the restoration of Christ’s social Kingship and the conversion of nations to the Catholic faith.
Brennan’s letter reduces the fight against abortion to a program of political activism and charitable works, entirely within the framework of the existing secular order. There is no call for the conversion of the United States to Catholicism. There is no demand that the state recognize the authority of Christ and His Church. There is no acknowledgment that as long as the American constitutional order persists in its foundational rejection of divine authority, the culture of death will continue to flourish. This is not Catholic social teaching — it is Catholic social teaching eviscerated of its supernatural content and reduced to a pale imitation of secular humanitarianism.
Immigration: Charity Without Catholic Principle
Brennan’s treatment of immigration is similarly deficient. He calls for “welcoming immigrants while respecting the dignity of every person” and highlights the contributions of immigrants to American growth, noting that Catholicism grew from 1% to 20% of the population largely through immigration. But he never addresses the Catholic principles that should govern immigration policy.
The Church has always taught that the common good of the state includes the right and duty to regulate immigration in accordance with the spiritual and temporal welfare of its citizens. Leo XIII in Immortale Dei taught that the state exists for the common good, which includes the spiritual welfare of its citizens. A Catholic approach to immigration would prioritize the preservation of the Catholic faith and culture of the receiving nation, not the indiscriminate “welcoming” that Brennan advocates. Moreover, the bishop’s celebration of immigration-driven Catholic growth ignores the reality that much of this growth has been accompanied by a dilution of Catholic identity — the very Americanism that Leo XIII warned against.
The “Common Good” Without God: A Contradiction in Terms
Brennan repeatedly invokes the “common good” — but his understanding of this concept is severed from its Catholic roots. In authentic Catholic teaching, the common good is defined by St. Thomas Aquinas as the good of the community ordered toward the ultimate good of the beatific vision. Pius XI in Quas Primas was explicit: “He is the author of prosperity and true happiness for individual citizens as well as for the state: The state is happy not by one means, and man by another; for the state is nothing else than a harmonious association of men.”
Brennan’s “common good,” by contrast, is a purely naturalistic concept — the sum of material and social conditions that enable individuals to pursue their own conceptions of happiness. It is the “common good” of John Rawls, not of St. Thomas Aquinas. This is the inevitable result of the post-conciliar abandonment of the supernatural mission of the Church: when the beatific vision is no longer the telos of human society, the common good collapses into utilitarianism.
Warning Against Secularism While Embracing Its Framework
Brennan warns against “secularism, relativism, and excessive individualism” and echoes “concerns raised by Pope Benedict XVI” about excluding religion from public life. But this warning is hollow — because Brennan himself operates entirely within the framework he claims to critique.
The post-conciliar church, of which Brennan is a faithful servant, invented the very secularism it now claims to oppose. The declaration Dignitatis Humanae of the Second Vatican Council — a council convened by the antipope John XXIII and continued by his successors — enshrined the error of religious liberty that the Syllabus of Errors condemned in its 77th proposition: “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.” Benedict XVI — the antipope Ratzinger — spent his career attempting to reconcile this conciliar revolution with Catholic tradition through his “hermeneutic of continuity,” a project that St. Pius X would have recognized as the very essence of Modernism: the attempt to reconcile irreconcilable opposites.
Brennan’s warning against secularism is like a arsonist warning against fire. The conciliar church is the secularism it claims to oppose — it has simply baptized it with Catholic language.
The “Soul of the Nation” Without the Soul of the Church
Brennan concludes his letter with the stirring declaration: “The very soul of our country is at stake.” But what is the “soul” of a nation that was founded on the explicit rejection of Christ’s authority? The United States was born not from Catholic principle but from Enlightenment rationalism, Masonic ideology, and Protestant individualism. Its founding documents enshrine religious indifferentism, popular sovereignty, and the pursuit of happiness as an end in itself — all of which are incompatible with Catholic social teaching.
The only true “renewal” that America could undergo would be its conversion to the Catholic faith and the public recognition of Christ the King. This is what Pius XI demanded in Quas Primas: “If men were ever to recognize Christ’s royal authority over themselves, both privately and publicly, then unheard-of blessings would flow upon the whole society, such as due freedom, order, and tranquility, and concord and peace.” Brennan’s letter, by contrast, calls for Catholics to “keep” America as it is — to preserve a political order that is fundamentally ordered against the Kingship of Christ.
Conclusion: A Pastoral Letter Unworthy of the Name
Bishop Brennan’s pastoral letter is not a Catholic document. It is a document of the conciliar sect, written in the language of that sect, operating within the assumptions of that sect, and serving the purposes of that sect. It baptizes the American experiment with Catholic language while leaving the anti-Catholic foundations of that experiment entirely intact. It warns against secularism while embracing the conciliar framework that produced it. It calls for a “culture of life” while ignoring the only source of true culture: the social Kingship of Christ.
The faithful who desire authentic Catholic teaching must look not to the documents of the conciliar sect but to the immutable Magisterium of the true Church — to Quas Primas, to the Syllabus of Errors, to Immortale Dei, to Pascendi Dominici Gregis, and to all the documents that define the Catholic faith against the errors of modernity. These documents teach what Brennan’s letter refuses to teach: that there is no true common good without Christ the King, no true human dignity without the Catholic faith, and no true renewal without the conversion of nations to the one true Church of Jesus Christ.
The 250th anniversary of the American founding should be for Catholics not a cause for celebration but a call to repentance — repentance for the sins of a nation that rejected Christ, and repentance for the sins of a church that has abandoned the mission Christ entrusted to her.
Source:
America at 250: U.S. bishop calls on Catholics to lead renewal (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 16.06.2026