EWTN News portal reports that the “bishop” of the Springfield diocese in the conciliar sect, Thomas Paprocki, has joined a Lutheran nursing home and four physicians in a federal lawsuit challenging Illinois’ “End-of-Life Options” assisted suicide statute. The complaint alleges the law compels medical professionals to facilitate self-murder despite conscientious objection and mandates that health-care entities promote the “benefits” of the suicide regime on-site. Paprocki invokes the “Catholic health service directives” of the United States Conference of “Catholic” “Bishops” (USCCB), claiming the law “undermines that mission by forcing Catholic hospitals and those who serve in them to push death onto their most vulnerable patients.” A parallel suit was filed by “Bishop” John Barres of Rockville Centre against New York’s analogous statute. This litigation exposes the conciliar sect’s total capitulation to the Masonic principle of libertas religiosa—a principle solemnly condemned by the pre-conciliar Magisterium—instead of proclaiming the Social Kingship of Christ over the civil order.
The Illegitimacy of the Conciliar “Episcopate”
The very foundation of this legal theater is a fiction. Thomas Paprocki and John Barres are not bishops of the Catholic Church. They are functionaries of the conciliar sect, a paramasonic structure occupying ecclesiastical edifices since the usurpation of the See of Peter by Angelo Roncalli (John XXIII) in 1958. The “ordination” and “consecration” rites they underwent were the novelty-riddled, Bugnini-engineered rituals of 1968, stripped of the forma and intentio required for validity by the unchanging tradition of the Church (Pius XII, Sacramentum Ordinis, 1947). As St. Robert Bellarmine teaches, a manifest heretic ipso facto loses all jurisdiction and cannot be head of the Church (De Romano Pontifice, II, 30). The “bishops” of the neo-church publicly profess the heresies of Vatican II—religious liberty, ecumenism, collegiality—and therefore possess no authority whatsoever to bind the faithful, to direct Catholic healthcare, or to litigate in the name of Christ. Their lawsuit is the act of private individuals masquerading as shepherds.
Religious Liberty: A Condemned Masonic Error
The core argument of the complaint—that the state must exempt the plaintiffs based on “conscience rights” and “religious freedom”—is theological poison. Pope Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors (1864) condemned the 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” (Error 77). He further anathematized the claim that “The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization” (Error 80). Leo XIII in Libertas Praestantissimum (1888) declared that true liberty is only freedom to obey the truth, not a license to error. By petitioning a secular court for “exemptions” within a legal framework that legitimizes murder, Paprocki and Barres acknowledge the competence of the Masonic state to define the limits of God’s law. They beg Caesar for crumbs of tolerance instead of demanding, ex officio, the repeal of an iniquitous statute that cries to heaven for vengeance. This is the hermeneutic of capitulation intrinsic to the conciliar revolution.
False Ecumenism: Alliance with Heretics
The plaintiff coalition includes a Lutheran nursing home. This is not a tactical coincidence; it is the modus operandi of the Church of the New Advent. Vatican II’s Unitatis Redintegratio and the 1983 Code’s canon 755 mandate “ecumenical collaboration” as a duty. But the Council of Trent anathematizes those who communicate in sacris with heretics (Session 7, Can. 13). Pope Pius XI in Mortalium Animos (1928) forbade any participation in non-Catholic religious enterprises, stating: “The union of Christians can only be promoted by promoting the return to the one true Church of Christ.” By joining a Lutheran entity in a legal brief, Paprocki publicly affirms the equality of the Catholic Church and a heretical sect before the civil magistrate. He treats the Lutheran “ministerium” as a legitimate partner in the defense of natural law, thereby denying the necessitas medii salutis—the necessity of the Catholic Church for salvation. This is apostasy in action.
The USCCB Directives: Modernist Bureaucracy Replacing Divine Law
Paprocki cites the “Catholic health service directives” of the USCCB as his normative guide. The USCCB is a canonically non-existent, episcopal conference invented by the 1965 decree Christus Dominus—a novelty unknown to the Ius Canonicum of 1917 and condemned by the very nature of the episcopate, which is immediate and personal, not collegial in a permanent bureaucratic structure. These “directives” are the product of committees staffed by modernist theologians who have gutted the moral theology of St. Alphonsus and the Summa Theologiae to accommodate the culture of death. They are not the voice of the Magisterium but the minutes of a Masonic lodge. To invoke them as “obligatory” is to substitute human precepts for divine commandments (Matt. 15:9).
Capitulation to the Secular State
The lawsuit accepts the jurisdiction of the U.S. District Court to adjudicate the morality of assisted suicide. This is a practical denial of Quas Primas (1925), where Pius XI teaches: “The State must leave… freedom to the members of Orders… but rulers and governments have the duty to publicly honor Christ and obey Him… His royal dignity demands that all relations in the state be ordered on the basis of God’s commandments.” By asking a secular judge to carve out a “conscience exemption” within a law that legalizes murder, the plaintiffs implicitly concede the state’s right to legalize murder provided it grants them a private opt-out. This is the heresy of Americanism condemned by Leo XIII in Testem Benevolentiae (1899): the delusion that the Church can thrive under the separation of Church and State, begging for “religious liberty” instead of demanding the Reign of Christ. The Syllabus Error 55 condemns: “The Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church.” Paprocki’s lawsuit operationalizes this condemned error.
The Silence on the Kingship of Christ
Nowhere in the EWTN report, nor in the plaintiffs’ public statements, is there a mention of Christ the King, His rights over nations, the duty of the state to profess the true religion, or the eternal damnation awaiting unrepentant suicide victims and their accomplices. The rhetoric is entirely anthropocentric: “dignity,” “accompaniment,” “conscience,” “healing work.” This is the cult of man denounced by St. Pius X in Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907) as the essence of Modernism: “They put the human person in the place of God.” The Lamentabili Sane Exitu decree (1907) condemns the proposition: “The dogmas of faith should be understood according to their practical function, i.e., as binding in action, rather than as principles of belief” (Prop. 26). The conciliar “bishops” have reduced the Depositum Fidei to a lobbying platform for “values”. They do not preach Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus; they negotiate intra saeculum aliquid salus.
Symptomatic of the Great Apostasy
This litigation is a perfect symptom of the abomination of desolation (Matt. 24:15) sitting in the holy place. The “bishops” of the neo-church, invalidly ordained, heretical in doctrine, and schismatic in communion, parade before Caesar’s tribunals demanding “rights” that flow from the Masonic Declaration of the Rights of Man, not from the Rights of God. They collaborate with heretics. They cite bureaucratic “directives” instead of the Canons of Trent and the Encyclicals of the true Popes. They seek tolerance for the Church instead of conversion of the State. As Pope Pius XI warned in Quas Primas: “When God and Jesus Christ were removed from laws and states… the foundations of that authority were destroyed… the entire human society had to be shaken.” The Illinois law is the fruit of that shaking. The lawsuit is the proof that the conciliar sect has no remedy, because it has abandoned the only remedy: Instaurare omnia in Christo—to restore all things in Christ the King. Non possumus.
Source:
Springfield Bishop Thomas Paprocki joins doctors, nursing home in suit against Illinois suicide law (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 12.08.2026