A recent report from the Catholic News Agency (June 24, 2026) informs us that the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision along ideological lines, ruled that a Rastafarian inmate, Damon Landor, cannot sue prison guards in their personal capacities for violating his religious rights (shaving his dreadlocks). The Court held that the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), rooted in the Constitution’s Spending Clause, does not authorize lawsuits against individual officials for damages. This case reveals the profound inability of the secular legal order to render justice in matters of divine law, leaving the individual without a temporal remedy and exposing a system where God’s rights are rendered legally unenforceable. The dissent by Justice Jackson, warning that prisoners will be left “remediless,” inadvertently underscores the void left when positive law detaches itself from the natural law, which is a participation in God’s eternal law.
The ruling’s core legal reasoning states:
“Adopting Mr. Landor’s proposed cause of action would allow Congress to evade the consent requirement inherent in its Spending Clause authority and regulate directly the conduct of countless nonconsenting individuals in spheres traditionally reserved to the States.”
This argument prioritizes a positivist conception of state sovereignty and a distorted reading of the Spending Clause over the inherent, pre-political duty of man to God. From the perspective of integral Catholic faith, the state is not the source of rights but is itself bound by the Divine Law. The First Commandment demands that we love God with all our heart, and this duty extends to the external profession of one’s faith, which includes practices like the wearing of dreadlocks for a Rastafarian, provided they do not contradict divine revelation. The Court’s decision creates a legal fiction where an agent of the state can violate this duty with impunity, effectively placing the state above God’s law. This is a direct consequence of the laicism condemned by Pius XI in *Quas Primas*, which “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… was denied.”.
The linguistic framing of the decision is a masterpiece of secular double-speak, reducing a profound spiritual violation to a matter of “standing” and “consent.” The majority opinion transforms a clear violation of religious practice—an act of de facto persecution—into a technical legal question about the “consent” of the individual state actor. This mirrors the modernist method of emptying dogmas of their supernatural sense and reducing them to mere historical or juridical categories. Justice Jackson’s dissent, while sympathetic, operates within the same naturalistic framework, focusing only on the temporal consequence (“prisoners… will often be left remediless”) without acknowledging the supreme injury done to the soul and its freedom to serve God according to its conscience. Her warning that officials will have “little incentive to abide by federal law” is a tacit admission that the entire legal order lacks the supernatural sanction necessary for true justice, which must ultimately be enforced by the final judgment of Christ the King.
This case is a symptom of the post-conciliar abandonment of the Catholic social Kingship of Christ. The Court’s refusal to hold individual “public officials” liable for a “rights violation” is the logical fruit of a legal system that has expelled the supernatural from the public square. By ruling that the spending power cannot regulate individual conduct “without their express consent,” the Court enshrines a radical autonomy of the human will that is antithetical to the virtue of religion, which is a moral virtue rendering to God the worship due to Him by nature. The prisoner had provided the guards with a previous court decision, a fact that demonstrates the knowledge and intent that makes their action a deliberate violation of his legal rights. Yet, the system offers no recourse against the individual transgressors, only against the “entity” (the prison), which is a corporate abstraction. This is a justice of the Antichrist, where the individual sinner is shielded, but the institution is forced to pay, creating a bureaucratic parody of justice that leaves the victim uncompensated and the guilty unpunished.
The ruling also exposes the hypocrisy of the “religious liberty” paradigm when divorced from the true religion. The “Catholic-backed religious liberty lawsuit” mentioned in the article’s related links is part of the same naturalistic legal structure. True religious liberty, as defined by the Church, is the freedom to practice the true religion, not the freedom to practice any religion or none. The Rastafarian’s belief, while objectively erroneous in its totality, contains a kernel of natural religious sentiment regarding bodily integrity and its connection to the divine. The secular state cannot adjudicate this, as it lacks competence in supernatural matters. By refusing to grant a remedy, the state is not being neutral; it is actively favoring a secularist ideology that seeks to privatize and ultimately extinguish all public manifestations of faith. This is the “plague that poisons human society” described by Pius XI, which “began with the denial of Christ the Lord’s reign over all nations.”
The dissenting opinion, authored by Justice Jackson, warns of the practical consequences of the majority’s ruling:
“Prisoners like Landor who suffer violations of their religious freedom in state prisons — no matter how blatant — will often be left remediless. And encroachments on prisoners’ statutory rights are likely to happen with fair frequency, as state-empowered prison officials will have little incentive to abide by federal law…”
This is a prophetic indictment of a legal system that has severed itself from the fear of God. When justice is reduced to a procedural game, and when the individual soul’s right to serve God is subordinated to the “sovereignty” of the state, the result is a lawless tyranny masked as legal order. This is the “synagogue of Satan” at work, not through overt persecution, but through the cold, bureaucratic denial of justice. The only true remedy is the return to the integral Catholic doctrine that the state, as a perfect society, is subject to God’s law and must render justice to each individual soul, because each soul is more precious than the entire created order.
Source:
Supreme Court: Inmate cannot sue prison guards for religious rights violation (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 24.06.2026