The EWTN News portal reports that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has filed an amicus brief in *Viramontes v. Cook County*, urging the Supreme Court to uphold a local ban on over one hundred types of semiautomatic firearms, including the AR-15 platform. The brief argues that the “autonomy of local authority” reflects the Catholic principle of subsidiarity and that modern weaponry is “fundamentally dissimilar” to eighteenth-century arms, rendering them “dangerous and unusual” and thus subject to regulation. The conciliar prelates thereby invoke a bureaucratic reading of federalism to justify the disarmament of the faithful, surrendering the natural law right of self-defense to the positive law of the secular state.
The Conciliar Structure Masquerades as the Church
The entity styling itself the “U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops” is not an organ of the Catholic Church but a juridical construct of the conciliar sect occupying the Vatican since the usurpation of John XXIII in 1958. Its members—“bishops” ordained in the invalid Pauline rite of 1968 or consecrated by those who were—lack sacramental orders and jurisdiction. As St. Robert Bellarmine teaches, a manifest heretic ipso facto loses all jurisdiction and membership in the Church (De Romano Pontifice, Lib. 2, Cap. 30). The signatories of this brief are public adherents of the Second Vatican Council’s heresies: religious liberty (Dignitatis Humanae), false ecumenism (Unitatis Redintegratio), and the collegiality that subverts the monarchical constitution of the Church. They are, in the strict canonical sense, non-Christians exercising a usurped authority. Their “amicus brief” carries no more ecclesiastical weight than a press release from the Rotary Club; it is the political maneuvering of a paramasonic NGO seeking favor with the secular arm.
Perversion of Subsidiarity: The State as Source of Rights
The brief’s central argument—that subsidiarity empowers local governments to regulate fundamental rights out of existence—is a satanic inversion of Catholic social doctrine. Pope Pius XI, in Quadragesimo Anno (1931), defined subsidiarity as the principle that “it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do”. It is a principle of assistance and non-interference, not a charter for the totalitarian micromanagement of natural liberties. The conciliar “bishops” cite subsidiarity to legitimize the positive law of the state over the natural law of God.
This is precisely Error 39 of the Syllabus of Errors condemned by Pope Pius IX: “The State, as being the origin and source of all rights, is endowed with a certain right not circumscribed by any limits.” By arguing that the Constitution “does not require every community to exercise … its authority to regulate weapons identically,” the brief concedes that the source of the right to bear arms is the state’s concession, not the Creator’s endowment. It accepts the Masonic dogma that authority comes from the people (vox populi, vox dei), denying that all power is from God (Rom 13:1). As Leo XIII taught in Diuturnum (1881), “The power to command is from God alone… he who obeys the civil power obeys God, provided the command is not contrary to the law of God.” A command to disarm the innocent is contrary to the natural law of self-preservation and therefore null and void ab initio.
The Natural Right of Self-Defense: Immutable and Inalienable
The Catechism of the Council of Trent, the supreme doctrinal standard of the Church’s constant teaching, declares: “There is a certain law of nature… that we should defend our life against anyone who attempts to take it away.” St. Thomas Aquinas, the Doctor Communis, establishes that “it is natural to everything to keep itself in being as far as possible” (ST II-II, q. 64, a. 7) and that “an act which proceeds from a good principle… may become evil if it is disproportionate to the end.” The right to the means of self-defense is correlative to the duty of self-preservation. To deny the faithful the most effective instruments of defense—the “AR-15 platform and similar semiautomatic rifles” which are the ordinary militia arms of the age—is to deny the right itself.
The brief’s assertion that such arms are “fundamentally dissimilar” to eighteenth-century muskets and thus “dangerous and unusual” embraces the Modernist heresy of the evolution of dogma and right, condemned by St. Pius X in Lamentabili Sane Exitu (1907). Proposition 58: “Truth changes with man, because it develops with him, in him, and through him.” Proposition 59: “Christ did not proclaim any specific, all-encompassing doctrine suitable for all times and peoples, but rather initiated a certain religious movement, applied or applicable to different times and places.” The conciliar “bishops” apply this evolutionism to the natural law: as technology advances, rights contract. This is the hermeneutic of rupture applied to the Second Amendment and the lex naturalis simultaneously. They argue that because the militia of 1791 carried flintlocks, the militia of 2026 may be restricted to… what? Flintlocks? This is reductio ad absurdum in service of tyranny.
Christ the King vs. The Secularist Leviathan
Pope Pius XI, in Quas Primas (1925), instituted the Feast of Christ the King precisely to combat the “plague… of secularism, so-called laicism” which “began with the denial of Christ the Lord’s reign over all nations.” The encyclical declares: “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.” The USCCB brief, by contrast, operates entirely within the immanent frame of secular jurisprudence. It cites Heller, McDonald, Bruen, Rahimi—the positive law of a Masonic republic—but never once invokes the Kingship of Christ, the natural law, or the duty of the Catholic citizen to resist tyranny.
The brief’s silence on the supernatural is the gravest accusation. It does not warn that a state which disarms the law-abiding while arming criminals and tyrants acts against the jus gentium and the lex aeterna. It does not remind the “Supreme Court” that “the Father has appointed Christ heir of all things… and He is to reign until He has put all His enemies under the feet of God the Father” (Heb 1:2; 1 Cor 15:25, cited in Quas Primas). It renders unto Caesar the sword of the just, keeping for Christ only the sentimentality of the “Light-Life” movement. This is the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place: the neo-church functioning as the chaplaincy of the Antichrist’s kingdom.
The Masonic Strategy of Disarmament
The push for “assault weapons bans” is not a pastoral concern for “gun violence”; it is a Masonic operational objective. The False Fatima Apparitions document details the “disinformation strategy” of the Lodge: “Stage 3 (1958-2000): Takeover of the narrative by modernists, concealment of the Third Secret, ecumenical reinterpretation.” The current stage is the physical disarmament of the remnant. The “bishops” who kneel before the idols of Pachamama and the “spirit of Assisi” now kneel before the idol of State Monopoly on Violence. They compare the AR-15 to a “dangerous and unusual” weapon, echoing the talking points of the Synagogue of Satan (Apoc 2:9) which seeks a “world where only the government has guns”.
History confirms the pattern. The Syllabus condemns Error 55: “The Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church.” The USCCB embodies this separation: it acts as a lobbyist for the secular state against the libertas Ecclesiae and the libertas filiorum Dei. By begging the Supreme Court to affirm the power of Cook County to ban rifles, they beg the Beast to tighten its chains on the faithful. They are the “dumb dogs that cannot bark” (Is 56:10), silent while the flock is prepared for the slaughter.
The Sedevacantist Imperative: No King But Christ
From the perspective of the integral Catholic faith, this brief is a manifesto of apostasy. It proves that the “hierarchy” of the conciliar sect are hirelings (Jn 10:12), fleeing the wolf of secular totalitarianism and handing the sheep over to be devoured. True subsidiarity demands that the father of the family, the pastor of the parish, the valid bishop—not the county commissioner—determine the means of protecting the innocent. The Cum ex Apostolatus Officio of Pope Paul IV declares that any prelate who “has defected from the Catholic Faith or fallen into some heresy… his promotion or elevation… shall be null, void, and of no effect.” The signatories of this brief, by their adherence to Vatican II and their collaboration with the Masonic state, have defected from the Faith. They hold no office. They bind no conscience.
The Catholic response is not to file a counter-brief in a Masonic court. It is to ignore the usurpers, keep the arms God and nature provide, form communities under valid priests (ordained before 1968 in the traditional rite), and prepare for the Social Reign of Christ the King. “He who gives the Kingdom of Heaven does not take away earthly things” (Quas Primas, citing the hymn Crudelis Herodes)—but He demands they be ordered to Him. The AR-15 in the hands of a Catholic father defending his family is ordered to Christ the King. The pen in the hand of the “bishop” signing this brief is ordered to the Prince of this World.
“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… the foundations of that authority were destroyed.” — Pope Pius XI, Quas Primas (1925)
The conciliar “bishops” have removed Christ from the courtroom. They have placed the Second Amendment on the altar of Subsidiarity and sacrificed the Natural Law upon it. They are antichrists (1 Jn 2:18). Non possumus.
Source:
U.S. bishops urge Supreme Court to allow communities to regulate firearms under Second Amendment (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 09.09.2026