The EWTN News portal reports that Professor Joanna Howe, a self-described pro-life activist and Rhodes Scholar at Adelaide University, has initiated proceedings in the Federal Court of Australia against her employer after enduring what she terms an “avalanche of investigations and complaints” regarding her public opposition to abortion and gender ideology. The article, adapted from *The Catholic Weekly* — the official organ of the conciliar Archdiocese of Sydney — frames the dispute as a defense of “academic freedom” and “free speech” for “conservative” and “Christian” academics. This narrative reveals the utter theological bankruptcy of the neo-church’s engagement with the modern world: it seeks not the Social Kingship of Christ, but a seat at the Masonic table of secular liberty.
Reduction of the Catholic Mission to Secular Rights Discourse
The cited article relates that Professor Howe declares: “Academic freedom means nothing if it doesn’t protect views the activists don’t like” and frames her battle as one for “every conservative student, every Christian, and every junior academic who has learned to keep their head down.” Here lies the fundamental apostasy. The integral Catholic faith knows no such category as “academic freedom” — a liberal chimera condemned by Pope Pius IX in the *Syllabus of Errors* (Error 13: “The method and principles by which the old scholastic doctors cultivated theology are no longer suitable to the demands of our times and to the progress of the sciences”) and by Pope St. Pius X in *Pascendi Dominici Gregis* as a cloak for Modernist infiltration. The Church teaches libertas vera — freedom ordered to Truth, which is Christ (John 8:32) — not the liberal libertas falsa which claims a right to error. By invoking “academic freedom,” Professor Howe and her neo-church promoters at EWTN and *The Catholic Weekly* concede the Masonic principle that truth and error have equal rights in the public square, a principle explicitly anathematized by Pope Leo XIII in *Libertas Praestantissimum* (1888): “To hold, therefore, that there is no difference in matters of religion between forms that are unlike each other, and even contrary to each other, most clearly leads in the end to the rejection of all religion in both theory and practice. And this is the same thing as atheism, however it may differ from it in name.”
Submission to the Secular State as Supreme Arbiter
The article notes that Professor Howe “is prepared to fight her case all the way to the High Court” after previously prevailing in the Fair Work Commission. This recourse to secular tribunals — creatures of the Masonic Australian Constitution which knows not God — is a practical denial of the Kingship of Christ over civil society. Pope Pius XI in *Quas Primas* (1925), provided in the context, teaches authoritatively: “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… 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.” By dragging a Catholic dispute before a godless court, the professor and her neo-church backers implicitly recognize the “State, as being the origin and source of all rights, is endowed with a certain right not circumscribed by any limits” (*Syllabus*, Error 39) — the very error of statism the Church condemns. The true Catholic remedy is not litigation but the corporate profession of the Faith by the baptized, demanding the State’s subjection to Christ the King, not begging for “rights” within a Satanic order.
Silence on the Supernatural Order: The Gravest Omission
Nowhere in the article — nor, by implication, in Professor Howe’s public posture — is there mention of the Social Reign of Christ the King, the duty of the State to profess the Catholic Faith (*Quas Primas*; *Syllabus*, Error 55: “The Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church” — condemned), the necessity of the Sacraments, the state of grace, or the Final Judgment. The combat is reduced to a procedural grievance about “vexatious complaints” and “corrective actions.” This is naturalism pure and simple — the “pest” condemned in *Quanta Cura* and the *Syllabus* (Section IV: Socialism, Communism, Secret Societies). The neo-church’s “pro-life” activism, severed from the integral Faith, becomes mere humanitarianism. As Pius XI warns in *Quas Primas*: “If rulers and legitimate superiors will have the conviction that they exercise authority not so much by their own right as by the command and in the place of the Divine King, everyone will notice how religiously and wisely they will use their authority.” Professor Howe seeks not the conversion of the university to the Kingship of Christ, but a carve-out for her “views” within the reign of Antichrist.
The Neo-Church Media Apparatus: EWTN and The Catholic Weekly as Propagandists for Liberal Catholicism
The article originates from *The Catholic Weekly* — the mouthpiece of the conciliar “Archdiocese of Sydney” — and is amplified by EWTN News, the global media arm of the neo-church. Both entities operate entirely within the novus ordo framework, recognizing the usurpers on the Throne of Peter (John XXIII through “Leo XIV”) as legitimate Vicars of Christ. Their promotion of this lawsuit serves the ecumenical, democratic agenda of the conciliar revolution: to present Catholicism as one “voice” among many in the “marketplace of ideas,” demanding “tolerance” from the secular powers. This is the hermeneutic of continuity with error — the very Modernism condemned by St. Pius X in *Lamentabili Sane Exitu* (Prop. 58: “Truth changes with man, because it develops with him, in him, and through him”) and *Pascendi*. The “pro-life” label, stripped of the doctrinal integrity that abortion is a sin crying to heaven for vengeance (Gen 4:10; *Catechism of the Council of Trent*), becomes a political slogan compatible with the Masonic “human rights” framework.
Symptomatic Level: The Fruit of Vatican II’s Religious Liberty
This episode is the direct, rotten fruit of *Dignitatis Humanae* — the conciliar declaration that the human person has a “right to religious freedom,” a proposition that contradicts the unanimous teaching of the pre-1958 Magisterium (Pius IX, *Quanta Cura*; Leo XIII, *Libertas*; Pius XI, *Quas Primas*; Pius XII, *Ci Riesce*). By internalizing the lie that error has rights, the neo-church produces “Catholics” who fight for “space” in the public square rather than for the Conversion of all nations to the Catholic Faith (Matt 28:19-20). Professor Howe’s expertise in “the legal regulation of temporary labor migration, labor law, and migration policy” — secular positive law — further illustrates the displacement of the ius divinum by the ius humanum. The 200+ complaints against her are not the persecution of the Church (John 15:20), but the inevitable purge of dissent within a totalitarian liberal order that the neo-church helped build and now feebly resists on its own terms.
Conclusion: No Justice Apart from the Kingship of Christ
The lawsuit is a farce. A Catholic professor appeals to a Masonic court for “academic freedom” — a liberal right — to oppose abortion and gender ideology, while the neo-church media cheers her on as a defender of “conservative values.” This is not the militia Christi; it is the militia Mundi. True Catholics, adhering to the immutable Tradition and the vacant See since 1958, reject this spectacle. They know, with Pope Pius XI, that “Peace is only possible in the Kingdom of Christ” (*Quas Primas*), and that no Federal Court, no “High Court,” no “Fair Work Commission” can deliver justice — only the Rex Regum can. The professor’s battle is already lost, for she fights on the enemy’s ground, with the enemy’s weapons, for the enemy’s concept of “rights.” Non est in eo salus.
Source:
Pro-life professor in Australia takes Adelaide University to federal court (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 28.10.2026