The EWTN News portal reports on a Pew Research Center survey revealing that 65% of American Catholics favor the death penalty for murderers, with 64% deeming it morally justified, in direct contradiction to the vocal opposition of the current usurper on the Chair of Peter, “Pope” Leo XIV (Robert Prevost), who parrots the 2018 doctrinal novelty of his predecessor, the apostate Jorge Bergoglio, declaring capital punishment “inadmissible.” This statistical snapshot lays bare the profound schism between the conciliar hierarchy’s Modernist improvisations and the remnants of Catholic sensus fidei still lingering among the laity, however deformed by decades of conciliar catechesis.
The Conciliar “Magisterium” vs. Perennial Catholic Doctrine
The article cites the “Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2267” as amended by Bergoglio in 2018: “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.” This is not a development of doctrine; it is a corruption of the deposit of faith. The Council of Trent, under pain of anathema, teaches that the civil power legitimately exercises the jus gladii (right of the sword): “If anyone says that the power of the civil magistrate is not from God… let him be anathema” (Session 23, Canon 4). Pope Pius XII, in his Address to the First International Congress of Histopathology of the Nervous System (1952), explicitly affirmed: “Even in the case of the death penalty the State does not dispose of the individual’s right to life. Rather public authority limits itself to depriving the offender of the good of life in expiation for his guilt, after he, through his crime, deprived himself of his own right to life.” The conciliar sect’s reversal is not a “deepening” but a rupture, condemned in advance by St. Pius X in Lamentabili sane exitu (1907), which anathematized the Modernist proposition that “Dogmas… are not truths of divine origin but are a certain interpretation of religious facts, which the human mind has worked out with great effort” (Prop. 22) and that “The progress of sciences requires a reform of the concept of Christian doctrine concerning God, creation, Revelation, the Person of the Incarnate Word, and Redemption” (Prop. 64). The 2018 change is the rotten fruit of this condemned evolutionism.
The Usurper “Leo XIV” and the Vacancy of the Holy See
The article treats the statements of Robert Prevost (“Pope Leo XIV”) as authoritative papal teaching. From the perspective of integral Catholic faith, this is impossible. As St. Robert Bellarmine teaches in De Romano Pontifice: “A Pope who is a manifest heretic, by that very fact ceases to be Pope and head, just as he ceases to be a Christian and member of the body of the Church.” The “Defense of Sedevacantism” file confirms: “By notorious and publicly manifested heresy, the Roman Pontiff, should he fall into it, is deprived ipso facto of his personal jurisdiction even before any declaratory sentence by the Church.” The line of usurpers began with Angelo Roncalli (John XXIII), who convoked the robber council Vatican II, a synod of apostasy teaching religious liberty, ecumenism, and collegiality — all condemned by the Syllabus of Errors (Props. 15, 16, 18, 55) and Quanta Cura. Prevost, as a willing participant in this counter-church, manifestly professes its heresies (religious liberty, false ecumenism, the new “mass,” the 2018 Catechism novelty). He is not the Vicar of Christ but a manifest heretic occupying the Vatican, an antipope in the strict theological sense. His “condemnation” of the death penalty carries zero magisterial weight; it is the private opinion of a layman in white, amplified by the paramasonic structures occupying Rome.
EWTN: Propaganda Arm of the Conciliar Sect
The source, EWTN News, is not a Catholic media outlet but an instrument of the neo-church, founded by the Modernist “Fr.” Mother Angelica, fully integrated into the conciliar apparatus. Its reporting frames the conflict as a tension between “the faithful” and “the pope,” implicitly accepting the false premise that Bergoglio and Prevost are true popes. This is the hermeneutic of the conciliar “recognize-and-resist” error, practiced by the Lefebvrians (FSSPX) and Indultists (FSSP), who “continuously acknowledged the validity of the usurpers in the Vatican” (per the Framework’s ideological assumptions). By publishing this survey without denouncing the sedevacancy, EWTN reinforces the Great Apostasy, presenting the death penalty issue as a mere “policy disagreement” rather than a divinely revealed truth of the natural and positive law that the conciliar sect has abandoned.
The Syllabus of Errors: Civil Authority and the Jus Gladii
Pope Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors (1864) condemns the proposition: “The Church has not the power of using force, nor has she any temporal power, direct or indirect” (Prop. 24) and “The civil government… has a right to an indirect negative power over religious affairs… In the case of conflicting laws enacted by the two powers, the civil law prevails” (Props. 41, 42). While the Syllabus defends the Church’s immunity, it implicitly affirms the State’s God-given authority over temporal justice, including capital punishment. The Catechism of the Council of Trent (Roman Catechism), the gold standard of pre-conciliar catechesis, states unequivocally: “Another kind of lawful slaying belongs to the civil authorities, to whom is entrusted power of life and death, by the legal and judicious exercise of which they punish the guilty and protect the innocent. The just use of this power, far from involving the crime of murder, is an act of paramount obedience to this Commandment which prohibits murder.” The conciliar sect’s denial of this is a repudiation of the Fifth Commandment’s traditional interpretation, substituting a Modernist, humanitarian sentimentalism for divine justice.
Quas Primas: Christ the King Over the State’s Sword
Pius XI’s encyclical Quas Primas (1925) establishes the Social Kingship of Christ: “His reign encompasses also all non-Christians, so that most truly the entire human race is subject to the authority of Jesus Christ… Let rulers of states therefore not refuse public veneration and obedience to the reigning Christ… For 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 death penalty is an exercise of the State’s delegated authority from Christ the King. By declaring it “inadmissible,” the conciliar sect dethrones Christ from the temporal order, handing the State over to the “secularism of our times, so-called laicism” which Quas Primas condemns as “the plague that poisons human society.” The survey shows that even conciliar “Catholics” instinctively grasp that the State retains the jus gladii — a vestige of the natural law written on their hearts (Rom 2:15) — which the neo-church hierarchy has obscured by its apostasy.
Modernist “Development” vs. Immutable Truth
The article notes the 2018 change as a “relatively new magisterial teaching.” This language exposes the Modernist mentality condemned in Lamentabili: “Truth changes with man, because it develops with him, in him, and through him” (Prop. 58) and “Christian doctrine was initially Jewish, but through gradual development, it became first Pauline, then Johannine, and finally Greek and universal” (Prop. 60). The death penalty’s legitimacy is not a “teaching” subject to evolution; it is a permanent conclusion of the natural law and revealed theology, rooted in Genesis 9:6 (“Whosoever shall shed man’s blood, his blood shall be shed: for man was made to the image of God”), affirmed by the Fathers (Augustine, Aquinas), the Councils (Trent), and the pre-1958 Magisterium (Pius XII). The conciliar sect’s “development” is a deformation, a “corruption of dogmas” (Lamentabili, Intro).
The Statistical Symptom: Schism Within the Sect
The partisan divide (84% Republicans vs. 51% Democrats favoring the death penalty) reveals that political ideology, not Catholic faith, drives the conciliar laity. The 65% of “Catholics” supporting capital punishment do so largely from a naturalistic, retributive mindset, not a supernatural appreciation of the jus gladii as participation in God’s justice. Yet their “instinct” is more Catholic than their “pope’s” heresy. This is the paradox of the conciliar sect: its laity often conserve more natural law than its hierarchy conserves divine law. But this is not a sign of health; it is a sign of the total disintegration of the magisterial bond. As Pius XI warned in Quas Primas: “When God and Jesus Christ… were removed from laws and states… the entire human society had to be shaken, because it lacked a stable and strong foundation.” The survey is a seismograph of that shaking.
Canon 188.4 and the Automatic Loss of Office
The “Defense of Sedevacantism” file cites Canon 188.4 of the 1917 Code: “Every office becomes vacant by the mere fact and without any declaration by reason of tacit resignation… if the cleric: … 4. Publicly defects from the Catholic faith.” Bergoglio’s 2018 alteration of the Catechism, ratified by Prevost, is a public defection from the Catholic faith on a matter of doctrine (the morality of capital punishment). By this very fact, they lost any claim to the papal office ipso facto, sine ulla declaratione. The Pew survey, therefore, measures the opinion of conciliar “Catholics” regarding a layman’s opinion, not the faithful’s dissent from the Pope. The true Pope — the last being Pius XII (d. 1958) — teaches the legitimacy of the death penalty. The conciliar “Catholics” agreeing with Pius XII are, materially, aligning with the true Magisterium against the antipope. Deo gratias for that much natural light.
Conclusion: The Abomination of Desolation Speaks
The EWTN article is a document of the Great Apostasy. It presents the antipope’s novelty as “magisterial teaching,” the conciliar sect’s Catechism as authoritative, and the laity’s adherence to perennial truth as “dissent.” In reality, the 65% of American “Catholics” favoring the death penalty — however imperfectly motivated — stand closer to the immutable teaching of Christ the King than the white-clad usurper in the Vatican. The remedy is not “dialogue” with the antipope, nor “reform” of the neo-church, but total separation from the conciliar structures and adhesion to the sedevacantist bishops and priests who preserve the integral Catholic faith, the Traditional Latin Mass (the Unbloody Sacrifice of Calvary), and the unchanging doctrine on the jus gladii. “You shall not follow the multitude to do evil” (Ex 23:2). The death penalty remains just; the conciliar sect remains apostate; the See remains vacant. Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat.
Source:
Pew report finds most American Catholics favor death penalty for those convicted of murder (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 13.08.2026