The EWTN News portal reports on a binational conference titled “¡Viva Cristo Rey! 100 Years of Faith and Freedom,” scheduled for October 3, 2026, in El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. The event is organized by the “Binational Pro-Family Pro-Life League” and features speakers from the post-conciliar hierarchy and lay organizations, including a priest of the Archdiocese of San Antonio, the president of Mexico’s “National Front for the Family,” a member of the “Mexican Center for Sindonology,” and a historian. The article frames the Cristero War (1926–1929) as a historical precedent for contemporary “pro-life and pro-family advocacy” and “religious freedom,” explicitly rejecting armed resistance in favor of “formation and active civic participation grounded in the Church’s social doctrine.” The piece cites the cross-border movement of clergy and religious during the persecution as a model for a “shared frontier faith community.” This celebration of the Cristero martyrs is perverted into a platform for Masonic religious liberty, stripping the Kingship of Christ of its social reign and reducing the martyrdom of the Cristeros to a mere precedent for democratic activism.
The Conciliar Media Apparatus Sanitizes Martyrdom for Liberal Democracy
The source of this report—EWTN News, the English-language arm of ACI Prensa—is a principal organ of the conciliar sect’s propaganda machine. Founded by the Franciscan modernist Mother Angelica and long the mouthpiece of the “neo-church,” EWTN has consistently promoted the false ecumenism, religious liberty, and democratic idol-worship condemned by the immutable Magisterium. The article’s author, David Ramos, boasts of covering the “beatification ceremony of today’s Saint Oscar Arnulfo Romero” and the “trips” of the antipope Bergoglio. This is not journalism; it is the liturgy of the abomination of desolation (Matt. 24:15), disseminating a counterfeit Catholicism that replaces the Social Reign of Christ the King with the Masonic trinity of liberty, equality, fraternity.
The very title of the conference—“100 Years of Faith and Freedom”—betrays the synthesis of Catholicism and liberalism that Pius IX anathematized in the Syllabus Errorum (1864). Error 77 condemns the proposition that “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 79 condemns the lie that “the civil liberty of every form of worship… conduce more easily to corrupt the morals and minds of the people.” The Cristeros died crying Viva Cristo Rey—not Viva la Libertad Religiosa. To drape their blood in the banner of “religious freedom” is a sacrilegious theft of their witness, a falsificatio that serves the synagogue of Satan (Apoc. 2:9) by teaching the faithful that the Church’s mission is to negotiate “rights” within a secular order rather than to conquer nations for the Regnum Christi.
Reduction of the Church’s Mission to Naturalistic Humanism
The organizer, Lorena Tabares of the “Binational Pro-Family Pro-Life League,” declares that “defending the Catholic faith today in both the U.S. and Mexico often involves pro-life and pro-family advocacy.” This is the heresy of humanitarianism. The Church’s mission is not the defense of “family values” or “life” as abstract natural goods, but the salvation of souls through the Unbloody Sacrifice of Calvary and the administration of the sacraments by valid priests. Pius XI, in Quas Primas (1925), teaches that “the hope of lasting peace will not yet shine upon nations as long as individuals and states renounce and do not wish to recognize the reign of our Savior”. He establishes the Feast of Christ the King precisely to combat “the secularism of our times, so-called laicism, its errors and wicked endeavors,” which “began with the denial of Christ the Lord’s reign over all nations.”
The article’s explicit parallel between the Cristero War and “present-day threats to religious freedom” inverts the theological order. The Cristeros fought because the Masonic government of Calles sought to destroy the Church’s divine constitution—suppressing the Mass, expelling religious, seizing property, and imposing a schismatic “patriotic church.” Today’s “threats” in Mexico and the United States are the fruit of the same Masonic principles, now enshrined in the constitutions of both nations and ratified by the conciliar sect at Vatican II’s Dignitatis Humanae. To propose “formation and active civic participation grounded in the Church’s social doctrine” as the remedy is to prescribe the poison as the cure. The “social doctrine” invoked is not the Rerum Novarum of Leo XIII or the Quadragesimo Anno of Pius XI, which presuppose the Kingship of Christ over society, but the post-conciliar “social teaching” that substitutes the Civitas Dei with the “civilization of love”—a Masonic counterfeit.
The “Priest” and the “Laity”: Ministers of the Neo-Church
The speaker “Father Rafael Becerra” is identified as “a priest of the Archdiocese of San Antonio.” Since the Archdiocese of San Antonio is a structure of the post-conciliar sect, its clergy are ordained in the novus ordo rite of 1968, which is doubtfully valid at best and sacrilegiously invalid at worst, having been fabricated by the freemason Bugnini to express a Protestantized theology of the “Lord’s Supper.” Even if validly ordained sub conditione by a traditional bishop, “Father Becerra” exercises no jurisdiction, for he serves a “bishop” who recognizes the usurper “Leo XIV” (Robert Prevost) as head of the Church. Ubi Petrus, ibi Ecclesia; where the false Peter sits, the Church is not. His “extensive study of the history of the Cristero War” is thus an academic exercise devoid of supernatural authority, serving only to legitimize the neo-church’s narrative.
Rodrigo Iván Cortés, president of the “National Front for the Family,” represents the lay activism that usurps the Church’s teaching office. Pius X, in Vehementer Nos (1906), condemns the “law of separation” that “ruptures the bonds between Church and State” and “attributes to the laity a role in the governance of the Church.” The “pro-life/pro-family” movement is a sodalitium of the Church of the New Advent, designed to channel Catholic energy into the sterile sewers of democratic politics, rendering the faithful harmless to the Masonic state. Ivonne Kuri, of the “Mexican Center for Sindonology,” brings the pseudo-mysticism of the Shroud—a relic venerated by the conciliar sect as a “mystery of science” rather than a sign of the Passion of the God-Man. This “sindonology” is a modernist substitute for the theology of the Cross, appealing to sentiment and “scientific proof” rather than fides ex auditu.
Canonization by Antipope: The Theft of Sanctity
The article cites “St. Pedro de Jesús Maldonado” as a “Cristero-era martyr.” This “canonization” was performed by the antipope John Paul II (Wojtyła) in 2000. An antipope cannot canonize. Canonization is an act of the Supreme Magisterium exercising infallibility; a manifest heretic who has ipso facto lost the papacy (per Bellarmine, De Romano Pontifice, and Canon 188.4 of the 1917 Code) possesses no such authority. The “saints” of the neo-church—John Paul II, John XXIII, Paul VI, Romero, Kolbe, the Ulma family—are counterfeit saints, elevated to legitimize the conciliar revolution. To invoke “St. Pedro” as a model is to invoke a simulacrum, a tool of the paramasonic structure occupying the Vatican. The true Cristero martyrs—beati like Miguel Pro, beatified by Pius XI in 1929 before the apostasy—are dishonored by this association.
The “Safe Haven” of El Paso: Masonic Asylum, Not Catholic Refuge
Tabares celebrates El Paso as a “safe haven” where Mexican Catholics “crossed the border… to receive the sacraments” and where religious communities “established themselves… after being expelled.” This ignores the theological reality: the United States, founded on Masonic principles (Novus Ordo Seclorum), has never recognized the Social Kingship of Christ. The “sacraments” received in El Paso in the 1920s were administered by clergy of a hierarchy that, while still largely valid then, already collaborated with the Masonic state (e.g., the “Americanism” condemned by Leo XIII in Testem Benevolentiae, 1899). Today, the “Monastery of Christ the King” of the Perpetual Adorers in El Paso is a post-conciliar institution; its “adoration” is directed toward a “consecrated host” produced by the novus ordo “Eucharistic Prayer,” which omits the propitiatory sacrifice and the Canon Romanus, rendering it panis ordinarius at best, an idol at worst. The “safe haven” was and is a refugium peccatorum for the conciliar sect, not the Barque of Peter.
“Those Who Do Not Know History…”: The Secularist Motto as Catholic Pedagogy
Tabares invokes the aphorism “those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it”—a dictum of the secular humanist Santayana, not a Catholic principle. The Catholic principle is “Jesus Christ, yesterday, and today, and the same forever” (Heb. 13:8). History is not a cycle of repetition but a linear progression toward the Parousia. The Cristero War was not a “chapter in Church history” to be studied for “civic participation”; it was a crusade for the Rights of God (Jura Dei). The organizers’ explicit rejection of “armed uprising” in favor of “formation and active civic participation” is a formal capitulation to the Masonic state. St. Thomas Aquinas teaches that “a tyrannical government is not just, because it is directed not to the common good but to the private good of the ruler” (ST I-II, q. 96, a. 4). When the state becomes the enemy of the Church, resistance is not only a right but a duty. The Cristeros understood this; the “Binational Pro-Family Pro-Life League” does not, because it serves the City of Man, not the City of God.
The Binational Illusion: Erasure of the Church’s Territorial Integrity
The emphasis on a “cross-border faith community” and “binational” event manifests the heresy of indifferentism (Syllabus, Error 16: “Man may, in the observance of any religion whatever, find the way of eternal salvation”). The Church is una, sancta, catholica, et apostolica—not “binational.” The border between Mexico and the United States is a Masonic line drawn through the Corpus Christi of Christendom. To celebrate a “shared frontier faith” is to bless the division of nations that reject Christ’s Kingship. Pius XI in Quas Primas declares: “His reign encompasses not only 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 conference does not proclaim this truth; it proclaims the rights of man on both sides of the Rio Grande.
Conclusion: The Cristeros Betrayed by the Children of the Revolution
The Cristeros died for Christ the King and the Roman Catholic Church—the Church of Trent, of the Vetus Ordo, of the Syllabus, of Pascendi Dominici Gregis. They did not die for “religious freedom,” “pro-life advocacy,” “civic participation,” or a “binational community.” They died because they knew, with Pope Pius XI, that “when God and Jesus Christ… were removed from laws and states… the foundations of that authority were destroyed.” The EWTN-sponsored conference is a satanic inversion: it uses the blood of martyrs to water the tree of liberty that poisoned them. The true heirs of the Cristeros are not the “pro-family” activists shaking hands with the “bishop” of Ciudad Juárez, but the remnant who keep the Tradition intact, who reject the novus ordo, who deny the legitimacy of the usurpers in the Vatican, and who await the Social Reign of Christ the King—not the “kingdom of man” built on the U.S.-Mexico border. Viva Cristo Rey indeed—but not the “Christ” of the conciliar sect, who reigns only in the hearts of those who “render to Caesar the things that are God’s” (Matt. 22:21).
Source:
A shared frontier faith: Border cities El Paso and Ciudad Juárez remember Cristero War (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 24.09.2026