The National Catholic Register — a flagship organ of the Legionaries of Christ, that rotten fruit of the conciliar revolution — publishes a commentary by George Weigel, the court theologian of the neoconservative establishment, marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks. Weigel recounts a private dinner with the antipope John Paul II in the papal apartments, where he allegedly diagnosed 9/11 as a “turning-point in world history” and an “example of the mystery of evil at work through the corruption of an already defective monotheism.” He praises the Bush administration’s invocation of just-war principles, laments the failure of Western elites to recognize religious conviction as a geopolitical force, decries the collapse of national solidarity into conspiracy theories and antisemitism, and holds up the passengers of Flight 93 as models of civic virtue. The article is a masterclass in naturalistic political theology: it treats the supernatural order as non-existent, substitutes the City of Man for the City of God, and reveals the total capitulation of the conciliar sect to secularist categories of thought.
The Naturalistic Reduction of History: Absence of Christ the King
Not once in Weigel’s retrospective does the name of Jesus Christ appear as the sovereign Lord of history. Not once does he invoke the Social Kingship of Christ, solemnly defined by Pope Pius XI in Quas Primas (1925): “His reign extends not only to Catholic nations… but His reign encompasses also all non-Christians, so that most truly the entire human race is subject to the authority of Jesus Christ” (Encyclical Annum Sacrum, cited in Quas Primas). For Weigel, history is a chessboard of geopolitical forces — “strategic and international-political point of view,” “world order,” “American policy-making circles” — devoid of the mysterium iniquitatis that operates primarily through the apostasy of baptized nations from the true Faith. The Syllabus of Errors (1864) condemned the proposition that “The Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church” (Error 55), and that “The civil government… has a right to an indirect negative power over religious affairs” (Error 41). Weigel’s entire framework assumes precisely this separation: the State acts on “just-war principles” derived from natural law alone, while the “Church” (the conciliar sect) offers only vague “interreligious dialogue.” This is laicism baptized — the very plague Pius XI instituted the Feast of Christ the King to combat: “This plague is the secularism of our times, so-called laicism, its errors and wicked endeavors… It began with the denial of Christ the Lord’s reign over all nations” (Quas Primas). Weigel’s silence on the Kingship of Christ is not an omission; it is a profession of faith in the religion of the Civitas Terrena.
The “Defective Monotheism” Error: False Ecumenism and the Regensburg Delusion
Weigel characterizes Islam as a “corruption of an already defective monotheism” and cites the antipope Benedict XVI’s Regensburg address (2006) as an attempt to “suggest a serious agenda for interreligious dialogue on the question of Islam’s relationship to ‘the rest.'” This phrasing exposes the heretical core of conciliar “dialogue.” Mortalium Animos (1928), Pope Pius XI’s encyclical on religious unity, condemns the very concept of interreligious dialogue as a surrender of the unica fides: “The Apostolic See cannot take part in their assemblies, nor is it anyway lawful for Catholics to… support such attempts… since they proceed on the false assumption that all religions are more or less good and praiseworthy”. To speak of Islam’s “relationship to ‘the rest'” is to place the false prophet’s religion on a par with the vera religio, the Catholic Church, extra quam nulla salus. The “defective monotheism” formulation is a theological solecism: there is no monotheism apart from the Most Holy Trinity. Islam denies the Divinity of Christ, the Trinity, and the Redemption; it is not a “defective” version of the truth but a diabolical counterfeit (St. John of Damascus, De Haeresibus, c. 101). Weigel’s praise for Regensburg reveals his allegiance to the nouvelle theologie of the conciliar revolution, which replaces convertendo ad Dominum with dialogando cum mundo. The “low-comedy result” he mocks — the CBC’s diktat — is the inevitable fruit of the conciliar sect’s surrender to religious indifferentism, condemned by Pius IX in the Syllabus (Error 16: “Man may, in the observance of any religion whatever, find the way of eternal salvation”).
Just-War Theory as Cover for Americanist Imperialism
Weigel asserts that President Bush’s September 20, 2001 speech indicated military action “would be conducted according to just-war principles and not as a matter of vendetta or revenge.” This is the classic neoconservative instrumentalization of Catholic moral theology to legitimize the imperium of the Masonic United States. The traditional doctrine of bellum justum (St. Augustine, Contra Faustum XXII, 74; St. Thomas, II-II, q. 40) requires auctoritas principis — legitimate authority — which resides ultimately in Christ the King, not in a secular republic founded on Enlightenment liberalism and the separation of Church and State. The Syllabus condemns the proposition that “The State, as being the origin and source of all rights, is endowed with a certain right not circumscribed by any limits” (Error 39). The American state, by its very constitutional order, denies the Social Kingship of Christ; therefore, its wars cannot be “just” in the full theological sense, however they may satisfy natural-law criteria. Weigel’s invocation of just-war theory functions as a fig leaf for the projection of American power, a phenomenon Pius XI foresaw: “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” (Quas Primas, citing Ubi Arcano). The subsequent “inept American policy” and “retreat from global responsibility” Weigel laments are the logical consequence of a polity unmoored from the lex divina.
The Silence on the Social Kingship of Christ and the Necessity of Conversion
The gravest accusation against Weigel’s commentary is its total silence on the necessitas medii — the necessity of the Catholic Church for salvation — and the duty of nations to publicly profess the true Faith. Quas Primas teaches: “Let rulers of states therefore not refuse public veneration and obedience to the reigning Christ, but let them 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”. Weigel speaks of “secularist biases in the analysis of world politics” but never names the remedy: the conversion of the United States and all nations to the Catholic Faith, the recognition of Christ’s Kingship in constitutions and laws, the restoration of the Confessional State. Instead, he bemoans “conspiracy theorizing” and “virulent antisemitism” as signs of “cultural decay” — a sociological diagnosis that ignores the theological root: “The fool hath said in his heart: There is no God” (Ps. 13:1). The Syllabus condemns the error that “The teaching of the Catholic Church is hostile to the well-being and interests of society” (Error 40). Weigel’s neoconservatism implicitly accepts this liberal premise by seeking a “public square” stripped of confessional specificity. His “moral challenge” is a challenge to build a Civitas Dei without God — the definition of the Tower of Babel.
Antisemitism and the Failure to Name the Theological Root
Weigel condemns “a virulent antisemitism that, like all such eruptions of Jew-hatred and Jew-baiting, is always a sign of cultural decay.” While the condemnation of racial hatred is warranted, the analysis remains superficial. The theological reality, taught by the Fathers and the Magisterium, is that the rejection of the Messias by the Synagogue and its subsequent history are bound up with the mysterium iniquitatis in a unique way (St. Augustine, Contra Faustum XII, 10; Council of Trent, Sess. VII, Can. 1 on the Old Law). The modern phenomenon of “antisemitism” is often a reaction — however disordered — to the revolutionary role of secularized Jewish elites in the dismantling of Christendom (cf. Pius XI, Divini Redemptoris, 1937, on the “Judeo-Masonic” character of Communism). Weigel, a promoter of the conciliar sect’s Nostra Aetate revolution, cannot articulate this because he has accepted the modernist redefinition of the Church’s relationship to the Jews — a redefinition that effectively denies the necessity of their conversion for the plenitudo gentium (Rom. 11:25). His “cultural decay” is a euphemism for apostasia.
Flight 93: Naturalistic Heroism vs. Supernatural Martyrdom
Weigel concludes by exalting the passengers of United Flight 93 who “decided to risk dying as free men and women rather than certainly dying as jihadist cannon fodder.” He presents their action as a model for “civil society and a political community.” This is the apotheosis of virtus pagana — natural virtue elevated to the supreme norm. Catholic theology distinguishes sharply between fortitudo naturalis and fortitudo christiana, which is animated by caritas and ordered to beatitudo supernaturalis (St. Thomas, II-II, q. 123-124). The passengers’ courage, however naturally admirable, is not martyrdom — testimonium rendered to the Faith. To propose it as the inspiration for “doing better as a civil society” is to propose a pelagian program of self-redemption through civic heroism. Pius XI warned against this in Quas Primas: “It would, of course, be the task of Catholics to prepare and hasten this return [to Christ the King] through their work and activity; however, many of them do not hold the position in so-called social life… This unfavorable situation may perhaps be attributed to the laziness and timidity of the good”. Weigel inverts this: he makes the “good” the agents of a purely temporal salvation, ignoring that “unless the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it” (Ps. 126:1).
Symptomatic Conclusion: Weigel as Propagandist for the Neo-Church’s Secular Agenda
George Weigel’s commentary is not an anomaly; it is the modus operandi of the conciliar sect’s neoconservative wing. It functions to baptize the Americanist project, to legitimize the “war on terror” as a crusade of “freedom” against “tyranny,” and to distract the faithful from the only true crisis: the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place (Matt. 24:15) — the usurpation of the Petrine See by a line of manifest heretics since 1958 (John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, Francis, and now “Leo XIV” Robert Prevost). As St. Robert Bellarmine teaches (De Romano Pontifice, II, 30), “A manifest heretic… by that very fact ceases to be Pope and head… A non-Christian in no way can be Pope… a manifest heretic cannot be Pope”. The “papal apartment” dinner Weigel describes was an audience with a usurper. The “new springtime of the human spirit” proclaimed at the UN in 1995 was the rhetoric of the Civitas Terrena, not the Kingdom of Christ. Weigel’s retrospective, a quarter-century on, demonstrates that the conciliar sect — whether “progressive” or “neoconservative” — has nothing to offer but a Christianized secularism. The true lesson of 9/11, unlearned by Weigel and his masters in the Vatican, is that “there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12) — and that no political order, no “just war,” no “interreligious dialogue,” and no civic heroism can substitute for the regnum Christi established in the una, sancta, catholica et apostolica Ecclesia, which subsists today only in the remnant faithful to the integral Tradition and the valid episcopate, sede vacante since 1958. Non praevalebunt.
Source:
Unlearned Lessons of 9/11, a Quarter-Century Later (ncregister.com)
Date: 09.09.2026