The National Catholic Register commentary by Andrea Picciotti-Bayer reports on the U.S. Supreme Court case Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections, in which a Rastafarian prisoner, Damon Landor, had his dreadlocks forcibly shaved by prison guards despite a federal court opinion affirming his rights under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA). The article frames the case as a test of whether “rights without remedies are rights at all,” and draws a parallel to the persecution of Catholic media tycoon Jimmy Lai in Hong Kong, who has been denied access to the Eucharist and Mass by Chinese Communist authorities. The author urges the Supreme Court or Congress to ensure that officials who violate religious freedom face personal liability for damages. Beneath the veneer of defending religious liberty, this article reveals the profound theological bankruptcy of a worldview that equates Rastafarian hair rituals with the Catholic Faith, treats “religious freedom” as a civil right granted by the state rather than a divine endowment, and remains utterly silent on the only true remedy for the crisis of faith in the modern world: the Social Kingship of Christ.
The Equivalence of All Religions: A Heresy Condemned
The article’s most fundamental error lies in its uncritical treatment of Damon Landor’s Rastafarian “Nazarite Vow” as a legitimate exercise of religious freedom worthy of legal protection and moral sympathy. The author writes without hesitation that Landor “honored the Nazarite Vow for nearly 20 years, growing his dreadlocks as a sincere expression of his faith,” and that guards “moved to shave him bald” three weeks before his release. The entire framing assumes that Rastafarianism — a syncretic movement blending elements of Christianity with Pan-Africanism, the deification of Haile Selassie, and the sacramental use of cannabis — possesses the same claim to religious liberty as the one true Catholic Church.
This is precisely the error condemned by Pope Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors, 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 15: “Every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true.” The Catholic Church has always taught that while the state may, in prudential circumstances, tolerate the exercise of false religions to avoid greater evils, it can never place them on equal footing with the true Faith. As Pope Leo XIII declared in Immortale Dei, the state has a duty to profess and protect the Catholic religion, and “the unrestrained freedom of thinking and of openly making known one’s thoughts is not inherent in the rights of citizens, and is by no means to be reckoned worthy of favor and support.”
The article’s author, writing for a nominally Catholic publication, commits the very indifferentism that the Church has consistently anathematized. There is not a single word distinguishing between the objective truth of Catholicism and the subjective sincerity of a Rastafarian prisoner. The implication is clear: what matters is not whether a religion is true, but whether its adherent is “sincere.” This is the essence of Modernism — the reduction of religion to internal sentiment, condemned by St. Pius X in Pascendi Dominici Gregis as the synthesis of all errors.
The Silence on Christ the King: The Missing Foundation
The article invokes the language of “rights” and “remedies” throughout, asking whether “rights without remedies are rights at all.” This framing is revealing in its omission. The only true foundation for religious freedom in the Catholic understanding is not the United States Constitution, not RLUIPA, not the Spending Clause, but the Social Kingship of Jesus Christ over all nations and all aspects of human life, including civil governance.
Pope Pius XI, in the encyclical Quas Primas (1925), established the Feast of Christ the King precisely to address the “secularism of our times, so-called laicism, its errors and wicked endeavors.” He declared: “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: “Rulers of states therefore should not refuse public veneration and obedience to the reigning Christ, but should 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 article is entirely silent on this doctrine. It treats religious liberty as a matter of statutory interpretation — whether RLUIPA’s phrase “appropriate relief” authorizes money damages against individual officials — rather than as a question of divine law. The author discusses the Spending Clause, qualified immunity, the Prison Litigation Reform Act, and the three-strikes rule with technical fluency, but never once mentions that the authority of the state itself derives from God, and that civil law which contradicts divine law is no law at all. As St. Thomas Aquinas taught, lex iniusta non est lex — an unjust law is no law.
This silence is not accidental. It is symptomatic of the post-conciliar abandonment of the Church’s social teaching, particularly after the Second Vatican Council’s declaration Dignitatis Humanae on religious freedom, which effectively inverted the Church’s traditional teaching by grounding religious liberty in the subjective dignity of the human person rather than in the objective truth of the Catholic Faith. The article operates entirely within this conciliar framework, treating “religious freedom” as a self-evident civil right rather than a prudential concession by a Catholic state.
The Jimmy Lai Parallel: Selective Outrage and Strategic Omission
The article draws a parallel between Damon Landor and Jimmy Lai, the Hong Kong Catholic media tycoon imprisoned by Chinese Communist authorities. The author writes movingly of Lai’s sketch of Christ crucified made from his solitary confinement cell, and notes that “Beijing has denied him access to the Eucharist and Mass — not incidentally, but as policy.” The author concludes: “It is right to condemn Beijing for trying to starve Lai’s faith of its sacramental life. Either the Supreme Court or Congress should make sure the same cannot be said of us.”
The sympathy for Lai’s plight is understandable, but the parallel is deeply misleading. Lai is a political prisoner whose “crime” was running a pro-democracy newspaper. His imprisonment is an act of political persecution by a totalitarian regime. Landor, by contrast, was serving a valid criminal sentence. The article acknowledges this distinction in passing — “Lai and Landor are not identically situated” — but then proceeds to treat them as equivalent cases of religious freedom violations.
More importantly, the article’s outrage at Beijing’s denial of the Eucharist to Lai is selective and incomplete. The author does not ask the obvious question: why is the Catholic Church herself complicit in starving the faithful of the sacraments? The post-conciliar structures occupying the Vatican have, for decades, systematically undermined the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, replacing the propitiatory sacrifice of Calvary with a Protestantized “memorial meal,” suppressing the traditional rites of ordination, confirmation, and extreme unction, and effectively denying the faithful access to valid sacraments. If it is a crime for Beijing to deny Lai the Eucharist, what shall we say of the conciliar sect that has denied billions of Catholics the true Mass and valid sacraments since 1968?
The article’s author, writing for the National Catholic Register — a publication fully aligned with the post-conciliar establishment — cannot ask this question without undermining the very institution that employs her. This is the fundamental dishonesty of the article: it condemns external persecution while remaining silent on the far greater internal apostasy.
The Remedy That Cannot Be Named
The article’s central question — “are rights without remedies rights at all?” — is a legal question masquerading as a theological one. The author’s proposed remedy is either a Supreme Court ruling authorizing personal damages against officials under RLUIPA, or congressional amendment of the statute to make personal liability explicit. Both proposals assume that the solution to religious persecution lies in the American legal system.
But the Catholic Church has always taught that the ultimate remedy for the evils of the world is not legal reform but the restoration of the Social Kingship of Christ. Pope Pius XI declared 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.” And further: “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, because the main reason why some have the right to command and others have the duty to obey was removed.”
The article’s author cannot see this because she operates within the very framework of secular liberalism that Pius XI identified as the “plague that poisons human society.” The entire discussion of RLUIPA, the Spending Clause, qualified immunity, and the Prison Litigation Reform Act presupposes that religious freedom is a gift of the state, to be protected or withdrawn by legislative and judicial action. This is the exact error condemned by Pius IX in the Syllabus, Proposition 19: “The Church is not a true and perfect society, entirely free — nor is she endowed with proper and perpetual rights of her own, conferred upon her by her Divine Founder; but it appertains to the civil power to define what are the rights of the Church, and the limits within which she may exercise those rights.”
The true remedy for the crisis of religious freedom is not a Supreme Court ruling or a congressional amendment. It is the conversion of nations to the Catholic Faith, the recognition of Christ the King as the supreme authority over all civil powers, and the restoration of the Church’s full freedom and independence from secular authority. Until that remedy is pursued, all legal protections for religious liberty will be, at best, temporary and contingent — subject to the shifting winds of judicial interpretation and political power.
The Language of Rights Without the Language of Duty
Throughout the article, the language of “rights” predominates, while the language of “duty” is entirely absent. The author speaks of Landor’s “right” to keep his hair, Lai’s “right” to the Eucharist, and the “right” of prisoners to practice their religion. But Catholic teaching has always insisted that rights are inseparable from duties. As Pope Leo XIII taught in Rerum Novarum, every right carries with it a corresponding duty, and the exercise of rights must be ordered toward the common good and the glory of God.
The article’s author never asks whether Landor’s “sincere expression of faith” has any objective moral content, or whether the state has any interest in distinguishing between true and false worship. The entire framework is one of radical individualism — the autonomous self choosing its own “faith expression” and demanding that the state accommodate it. This is the very essence of the liberal heresy condemned by the Church for centuries.
Moreover, the article’s discussion of “egregious” violations of religious freedom — the officer who “threw the opinion in the trash” and “handcuffed him to a chair” — reveals a purely naturalistic understanding of justice. The wrong is identified as a violation of procedural norms (disregarding a court order) and human dignity (forcible shaving), not as an offense against God. The article never considers that the true “egregious” violation is the state’s claim to authority over matters of faith — a claim that belongs to Christ alone.
Conclusion: The Dead Letter of Liberal Religious Freedom
The article’s title asks whether “rights without remedies are rights at all.” From the perspective of integral Catholic faith, the answer is clear: rights granted by the state without reference to God are not rights at all, but privileges — revocable, contingent, and ultimately meaningless. The entire edifice of American religious liberty law, from the First Amendment to RLUIPA, rests on the liberal fiction that the state is the source of rights, and that religious freedom is a matter of individual conscience rather than objective truth.
The post-conciliar Church, of which the National Catholic Register is a faithful organ, has embraced this liberal framework wholeheartedly. It speaks the language of “religious freedom” while surrendering the Church’s divine mission to teach, govern, and sanctify all nations. It condemns Communist persecution of Catholics while remaining silent on the far greater apostasy within its own structures. It defends the “rights” of Rastafarians and Catholics alike, as if the truth of the Catholic Faith were merely one option among many in the marketplace of religious ideas.
The true remedy for the crisis of our times is not a Supreme Court ruling, not a congressional amendment, not a more robust enforcement of RLUIPA. It is the restoration of the Social Kingship of Christ, the conversion of nations to the Catholic Faith, and the rejection of the liberal heresy that has poisoned both Church and state. Until that remedy is pursued, the “rights” defended by this article will remain what they have always been: a dead letter, devoid of supernatural life, and incapable of saving souls.
Source:
SCOTUS: Are Rights Without Remedies Rights at All? (ncregister.com)
Date: 17.06.2026