The EWTN News portal reports that exit polling from the 2026 midterm elections reveals Catholics nearly evenly split between the Democratic and Republican parties, a shift from 2024 framed by conciliar academic Andrew Chestnut as a “notable shift” reflecting “considerable diversity of American Catholicism” rather than a unified Catholic political identity. The article treats the secular electoral process as the normative arena for Catholic action, cites the antipope Leo XIV as a legitimate spiritual authority, and reduces the Church’s mission to demographic voting blocs—white versus Hispanic, young versus old—while abortion advances in three states under the victorious Democrats. This reportage exposes the conciliar sect’s complete assimilation to the condemned errors of laicism and religious indifferentism, celebrating the dissolution of the Social Kingship of Christ into the chaos of partisan politics.
The Factual Level: Democratic Process as Idol, Abortion as Footnote
The cited article presents the 2026 midterm results as a horseshoe of statistical parity: 50% of self-identified Catholics for Democrats, 49% for Republicans. It notes the demographic fissures—56% of white Catholics for Republicans, 65% of Hispanic Catholics for Democrats, 65% of Catholics under 29 for Democrats—with the clinical detachment of a sociologist observing a laboratory culture. Nowhere does the report confront the objective moral reality that the Democratic Party, the beneficiary of this Catholic fragmentation, campaigned explicitly on the expansion of abortion, the murder of the innocent. The related article linked at the bottom—”Abortion wins in 3 states amid major Democratic victories”—is treated as a separate news item, not as the crimen nefandum that should render any Catholic cooperation with that party excommunicable by divine and canon law (Canon 1398, 1917 Code; Pius XI, Casti Connubii; Pius XII, Allocution to Midwives).
The “expert” cited, Andrew Chestnut, holds the “Bishop Walter F. Sullivan Chair in Catholic Studies” at Virginia Commonwealth University—a secular, state-funded institution. Sullivan himself was a notorious modernist bishop of the Richmond diocese, a promoter of the charismatic movement and ecumenical experimentation. That a chair named for him exists at a public university is itself a monument to the Catholic studies’ surrender to the sæculum. Chestnut’s analysis—that the Catholic vote reflects “differences in ethnicity, generation, and political outlook, rather than any unified Catholic political identity”—is not an observation; it is a confession of the death of the Catholic conscience in the conciliar sect. A unified Catholic political identity is not an option; it is a mandatum divinum: Instaurare omnia in Christo (Eph 1:10), to restore all things in Christ, including the temporal order.
The Linguistic Level: Bureaucratic Newspeak Masking Apostasy
The language of the article is the novilinguum of the conciliar sect: “faith community,” “voting bloc,” “electoral significance,” “religious coalition,” “pivotal constituency.” These are the vocabularies of political science and marketing, not of theology. The word “sin” appears nowhere. “Grace” appears nowhere. “Salvation” appears nowhere. “Christ the King” appears nowhere—except implicitly mocked by the reference to “Pope Leo XIV,” the current usurper on the Chair of Peter, whose “public criticism” by Trump is cited as a possible electoral factor.
The phrase “unified Catholic political identity” is deployed as a straw man to be dismissed. But the Church has never taught a “political identity” in the partisan sense; she teaches the Kingship of Christ over nations (Quas Primas, 1925). The substitution of “political identity” for “submission to the Social Reign of Christ” is the semantic sleight of hand by which the conciliar sect empties the Faith of its temporal consequences. The article speaks of “Catholics” as a demographic category, like “Muslim voters” (86% Democrat) or “Jewish voters” (68% Democrat) or “nones” (78% Democrat). This lumping of the One True Church with false sects and the irreligious under the rubric of “religious affiliation” is the very definition of indifferentism, condemned by Gregory XVI (Mirari Vos, 1832), Pius IX (Syllabus, props. 15-18), and Leo XIII (Immortale Dei, 1885).
The Theological Level: The Syllabus Realized, Quas Primas Betrayed
Pius XI, in Quas Primas (1925), the very encyclical provided in the context, declares with unmistakable clarity: “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, because the main reason why some have the right to command and others have the duty to obey was removed.” The 2026 midterms, as reported by EWTN, are the liturgy of that removal. The article celebrates the functioning of a system where authority derives from the ballot box, not from God; where the “will of the people” replaces the Voluntas Dei; where the “Catholic vote” is a commodity to be courted by parties that both reject the Crown Rights of Christ the King.
The Syllabus of Pius IX (1864) condemns as errors:
- Prop. 55: “The Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church.”
- Prop. 77: “In the present day it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the State…”
- Prop. 79: “…it is false that the civil liberty of every form of worship… conduce more easily to corrupt the morals and minds of the people…”
The conciliar sect, of which EWTN is a primary propaganda organ, has made these condemned errors its modus vivendi. The article’s casual acceptance of the “religiously unaffiliated” as a legitimate “electoral coalition” partner for Catholics is the practical application of the heresy of religious liberty (Dignitatis Humanae, Vatican II), which the provided Lamentabili Sane Exitu (1907) and Pascendi (1907) condemn as the synthesis of Modernism. St. Pius X teaches that the Modernist holds: “The Church listening cooperates… with the Church teaching… the Church teaching should only approve the common opinions of the Church listening” (Lamentabili, prop. 6). Here, the “Church listening” is the demographic data; the “Church teaching” is the EWTN reportage approving the fragmentation.
Canon 188.4 of the 1917 Code, cited in the provided “Defense of Sedevacantism” context, states that an office becomes vacant ipso facto if a cleric “publicly defects from the Catholic faith.” The hierarchy of the conciliar sect, by endorsing the democratic idol and the separation of Church and State, has publicly defected. The “bishops” cited by EWTN—like the “U.S. bishops” in the related article urging Catholic voters to “Start with…”—are functionaries of a paramasonic structure occupying the visible patrimony of the Church. They have no jurisdiction, no mission, no authority. They are, in the words of Bellarmine cited in the context, “not Christians… not members of the Church… therefore cannot be Pope [or bishops].”
The Symptomatic Level: The Conciliar Sect as the Anti-Church in Action
This article is not a bug; it is a feature. The conciliar sect, born of the pseudo-council Vatican II (1962-1965), exists to accommodate the Church to the world, to baptize the revolution. The “shift” of Catholic voters toward the party of abortion, sodomy, and gender ideology is the direct fruit of fifty years of “dialogue,” “religious freedom,” “collegiality,” and the “hermeneutic of continuity” that is in reality a hermeneutic of rupture.
The reference to “Pope Leo XIV” (Robert Prevost) as a factor in the election—Trump’s “public criticism” of him possibly influencing voters—reveals the personality cult of the antipope that has replaced the Kingship of Christ. The faithful of the conciliar sect are shepherded not to the Regnum Christi but to the regnum hominis, where the “pope” is a political actor among actors, a “moral voice” in the marketplace of ideas, not the Vicar of Christ wielding the potestas clavium to bind and loose on earth what is bound and loosed in heaven (Mt 16:19).
The “pseudo-traditionalists” of the FSSPX and indult communities will doubtless issue their own analyses, lamenting the “scandal” while recognizing the “pope” and the “bishops” who produce this scandal. They are, as the context states, “a schism within a schism of the neo-church,” staging the Traditional Latin Mass while accepting the Novus Ordo hierarchy, the false “saints” (John Paul II, John XXIII, Paul VI), and the ecumenical orientation that makes articles like this EWTN piece possible. They are the controlled opposition, the safety valve for Catholic instinct, directing it back into the conciliar sewer.
The “Fatima” apparatus—mentioned in the context as a Masonic psychological operation—served for decades to channel Catholic eschatological hope into a “consecration of Russia” that never happened on the terms demanded, while the real apostasy (Modernism inside the Church, warned by St. Pius X) metastasized. The EWTN article is the status quaestionis of that victory: a “Catholic” media outlet reporting on the Catholic vote as a demographic slice, indifferent to the massacre of the unborn, submissive to the antipope, oblivious to the Kingship of Christ.
Conclusion: No King But Caesar
The EWTN report is a document of spiritual bankruptcy. It reveals a “Church” that has become a voting bloc, a “Faith” that has become a demographic variable, a “Hierarchy” that has become a lobby group. The 50/49 split is not a political statistic; it is a signum contradictionis of the conciliar apostasy. “We have no king but Caesar” (Jn 19:15) cried the chief priests. The conciliar sect, in the person of its media apparatus, its academic hirelings, and its false shepherds, cries the same today. The true Church—Ecclesia militans—remains where it has always been: among those who hold the integrum depositum fidei, who reject the false “popes” from John XXIII to Leo XIV, who know that “there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12), and that this Name must reign “from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth” (Ps 71:8). The 2026 midterms are not a “shift.” They are a judgment. Deus non irridetur (Gal 6:7).
Source:
Exit polling shows Catholics almost evenly split between Democrats, Republicans in 2026 midterms (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 06.11.2026