The EWTN News portal (June 30, 2026) reports on a legal and propagandistic offensive launched by the “diocese” of Las Cruces, led by its “bishop” Peter Baldacchino and chancellor “deacon” Jim Winder, against the United States federal government’s exercise of eminent domain to construct a border wall on church-owned land adjacent to Mount Cristo Rey. The “diocese” frames its resistance as a defense of a pilgrimage site topped by a 1940 statue of Christ the King, claiming the wall would erect a “30-foot ‘Keep Out’ sign” beneath the image of the Savior. “Deacon” Winder insists the “diocese” supports “border security” but deems the wall a “political tool,” while “bishop” Baldacchino celebrated a Mass atop the mountain on June 28, 2026, labeled “completely apolitical” yet manifestly staged to galvanize opposition to sovereign border enforcement. This spectacle exposes the conciliar church’s radical inversion of the Social Kingship of Christ: the statue of the King of Nations is weaponized by His purported ministers to undermine the God-ordained duty of the State to protect its borders and the common good, revealing a theology reduced to humanitarian sentimentality and political resistance against the temporal order.
The Theft of the Kingship: Instrumentalizing Quas Primas for Open Borders
The central symbol of this dispute—the limestone statue of Christ the King dedicated in 1940 under the true Pope Pius XII—stands as an indictment of the very “clerics” who now exploit it. Pius XI, in Quas Primas (1925), instituted the Feast of Christ the King precisely to combat the “plague of secularism, so-called laicism,” declaring that “the state must leave the same freedom to the members of Orders and Congregations… but the annual celebration of this solemnity will also remind states that not only private individuals, but also rulers and governments have the duty to publicly honor Christ and obey Him.” The encyclical teaches that Christ’s reign “encompasses all men” and that “His royal dignity demands that all relations in the state be ordered on the basis of God’s commandments and Christian principles, both in the issuing of laws and in the administration of justice.”
The “diocese” of Las Cruces perverts this doctrine. By opposing a legitimate exercise of state sovereignty—border defense—the “bishop” and his “deacon” effectively deny the King’s rights over the temporal order. They posit a false opposition between the Kingship of Christ and the integrity of the nation, suggesting that a wall defending the common good is an “affront” to Christ. This is the precise error condemned by Pius XI: “When God and Jesus Christ… were removed from laws and states and when authority was derived not from God but from men, the foundations of that authority were destroyed.” The “deacon’s” rhetoric—contrasting the “image of Christ the King” with a “Keep Out sign”—constructs a blasphemous dichotomy: Christ the King versus the State’s duty of exclusion. In Catholic theology, the King is the Judge who separates the sheep from the goats (Matt. 25:32); a border wall is a temporal reflection of that divine discrimination. To call it a “political tool” while accepting motion sensors and access roads (as the “diocese” did in 2021 and 2023) reveals not principle, but partisan collaboration with the globalist dissolution of nations.
Linguistic Subversion: “Unity,” “Mercy,” and the Erasure of Law
The linguistic architecture of the article and the “clerics'” statements is saturated with the vocabulary of the conciliar revolution. “Deacon” Winder describes the mountain as a place of “unity of two nations and two states,” a “symbolism of that unity in Christ the King standing above it.” This is the language of Gaudium et Spes and the Masonic ideal of universal brotherhood without the Fatherhood of God. It ignores the Syllabus of Pius IX, which condemns the proposition that “The Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church” (Error 55) and that “In the present day it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the State” (Error 77). The “unity” proposed here is a unity of indifferentism—Mexico and the United States harmonized beneath a statue emptied of its doctrinal content, where the King’s law is replaced by the “mercy and discretion” demanded by the “U.S. bishops” from the Trump administration.
The “deacon” claims the Mass was “completely apolitical,” meant “to pray for the Church, and to pray for government leaders.” This is a lie detectable by its very phrasing. A Mass celebrated at the site of a pending eminent domain hearing, publicized by EWTN, attended by 400 faithful mobilized against the wall, is a political act of the highest order. It is the liturgy instrumentalized as protest—the lex orandi corrupted to serve the lex agendi of the neo-church. The “bishop” hiking the mountain in vestments is not a shepherd interceding for souls; he is a political actor staging a photo-op for the religion of humanity.
The Theological Bankruptcy of Conciliar “Border Theology”
The “diocese’s” position—that sensors and roads are “adequate” but a wall is a “political symbol”—collapses under the slightest doctrinal scrutiny. St. Thomas Aquinas teaches that the primary duty of the civil power is the bonum commune, the common good, which requires the defense of the polity’s integrity. The Syllabus condemns the error that “The civil government… has a right to an indirect negative power over religious affairs” (Error 41) only to affirm the State’s direct authority over temporal matters, including territorial integrity. By conceding the “adequacy” of sensors while rejecting the wall, the “deacon” admits the legitimacy of border enforcement in principle but denies the State the means proper to its nature—a physical barrier. This is the heresy of pacifism applied to the polis, a Modernist refusal to acknowledge that the City of Man requires coercion to restrain evil (Rom. 13:4).
Furthermore, the “bishop” and “deacon” are silent on the supernatural reality. There is no mention of the salvation of souls, the necessity of baptism, the conversion of Mexico to the Catholic Faith, or the kingship of Christ over legislation. The statue becomes an idol of a vague “spirituality,” divorced from the Social Reign taught by Pius XI: “It would be the task of Catholics to prepare and hasten this return through their work and activity… if all the faithful understood that they must fight bravely and always under the banner of Christ the King.” The “faithful” of Las Cruces are fighting under the banner of the ACLU and the globalist NGO complex, using the King’s image as a shield for the dissolution of His ordained temporal order.
Symptomatic Analysis: The Conciliar Church as Agent of the Antichrist’s Structure
This episode is not an anomaly; it is the modusua manifestatio of the conciliar church’s essence. Since the false “pope” John XXIII and the robber council Vatican II, the structures occupying the Vatican have systematically dismantled the doctrine of the Two Powers (Duo Sunt, Gelasius I), replacing the hierarchy of Grace over Nature with a horizontal “dialogue” where the Church becomes the chaplain of the Masonic city of man. The “bishop” Baldacchino (ordained in the invalid post-1968 rite, likely by a “bishop” consecrated in the invalid Paul VI rite) possesses no jurisdiction, no sacramental character to offer the Holy Sacrifice, and no authority to teach. His “Mass” on Mount Cristo Rey was, at best, a Protestantized communion service; at worst, a sacrilegious simulation.
The collaboration of the “diocese” with federal immigration officials in 2021 and 2023—building roads, placing sensors—reveals the true relationship: the conciliar church functions as a subcontractor of the secular state, managing the flow of bodies while pretending to defend the soul. When the State asserts its sovereign right to build a wall, the “church” screams “affront,” not because the King is dishonored, but because its role as managing partner of the border-industrial complex is threatened. The “deacon’s” admission that the terrain is “really rough… a pretty effective barrier in and of itself” confirms the wall’s military redundancy—exposing the “diocese’s” opposition as purely ideological, a signaling of fidelity to the open-borders consensus of the “pope” Leo XIV (Prevost) and the paramasonic structure he heads.
The “Two Lucia Sisters” theory regarding Fatima—exposing the Masonic manipulation of false apparitions to distract from the internal apostasy—finds a grim parallel here. The statue of Christ the King (1940, pre-conciliar) is the “true Lucia”; the “diocese” and its “bishop” are the impostor, replacing the authentic witness of the Social Kingship with a counterfeit that serves the revolution. The faithful who climbed that mountain on June 28 were not honoring Christ the King; they were venerating the neo-church’s idol of humanitarianism, erected on the corpse of Catholic doctrine.
Conclusion: No King But Caesar
The dispute at Mount Cristo Rey lays bare the final logic of the conciliar apostasy: Non habemus regem nisi Caesarem (John 19:15). The “bishop,” the “deacon,” and the EWTN mouthpiece have declared that the temporal power may not exercise its God-given right of the sword (Rom. 13:4) to defend the nation, because the neo-church’s ideology demands open borders. They drape the statue of the King in the mantle of the Revolution. True Catholics—those adhering to the immutable Faith, the valid Sacraments, and the true Bishops preserving the Apostolic Succession outside the occupying structures—recognize this for what it is: the Abomination of Desolation standing in the holy place (Matt. 24:15). The wall will be built or not by the providence of God acting through secondary causes; but the Kingship of Christ is not defended by “deacons” who call His justice a “Keep Out sign,” nor by “bishops” who hike mountains for cameras. It is defended by the integral profession of the Faith, the rejection of the conciliar errors, and the restoration of the Priesthood and the Sacrifice. Viva Cristo Rey—the true one, not the plaster idol of the neo-church.
Source:
A New Mexico mountain with Christ at the top is the latest battleground in U.S. immigration debate (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 30.06.2026