Secular Authority’s Half-Measures Against Child Abuse Fail to Uphold Divine Law
The Catholic News Agency article (December 18, 2025) reports that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. proposed regulations to restrict “sex-rejecting procedures” on minors. These include withholding Medicare/Medicaid funding from hospitals performing such procedures, banning federal CHIP funding for under-19 procedures, FDA warnings against breast binder manufacturers, and redefining “disability” to exclude gender dysphoria. Kennedy condemned these interventions as “malpractice” causing irreversible harm, citing a May 2025 HHS report documenting infertility, bone density loss, and cognitive damage. The measures implement President Trump’s January 2025 executive order against “chemical and surgical mutilation” of children, with endorsements from medical advocates and USCCB committee chairman Bishop Robert Barron.
Natural Law Acknowledgment Conceals Capitulation to Modernist Anthropology
While the HHS correctly identifies physical harms of “sex-rejecting procedures”, its framework remains imprisoned within the errors of Vatican II’s Gaudium et Spes by treating the human person as a biological machine rather than an ensouled body (corpore et anima unus, Vatican I). The regulations focus solely on medical risks while ignoring the metaphysical crime of violating the imago Dei through willful destruction of God-given sexual identity. This reduction of moral evil to clinical harm echoes the naturalism condemned in Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors (1864), which denounced the proposition that “moral laws do not stand in need of the divine sanction” (Error 56).
The terminology of “sex-rejecting procedures” constitutes a dangerous compromise, implicitly accepting the gnostic premise that biological sex can be “rejected” rather than affirming it as ontologically immutable. As Pius XI declared in Casti Connubii (1930), “the individual and society derive their origin and destiny from immutable laws placed by God in physical and spiritual nature”. The HHS regulations fail to criminalize these procedures entirely, permitting their continuation through private funding – a tacit endorsement of the modernist heresy that conscience autonomously determines morality.
Episcopal Complicity in Theological Modernism
Bishop Barron’s statement perpetuates the conciliar sect’s equivocation by reducing Catholic opposition to “false understanding of human nature” rather than condemning gender ideology as demonic rebellion against Creation. His reference to “authentic and bodily-unitive care” employs the ambiguous language of the 1983 Code of Canon Law (Canon 1095) rather than the precise theological vocabulary of pre-conciliar manuals. The USCCB’s failure to demand excommunication for perpetrators of child mutilation reveals its surrender to the heresy of religious liberty denounced in Pius IX’s Quanta Cura (1864): “the erroneous opinion that liberty of conscience and worship is each man’s personal right”.
True Catholic pastoral practice would follow St. Pius X’s Lamentabili Sane (1907), which condemned the proposition that “truth changes with man, because it develops with him” (Error 58). Instead, the conciliar sect’s bishops employ therapeutic language about “regrets” and “side effects”, reducing spiritual catastrophe to medical outcomes. They ignore the Council of Trent’s decree on Original Sin (Session V), which established that human nature’s disorder requires supernatural regeneration through baptism, not psychological manipulation.
Omission of Ecclesial Authority Undermines Christ’s Kingship
The article’s most grievous silence concerns the Church’s divine mandate to govern civil authorities. Pius XI’s Quas Primas (1925) established that “the empire of our Redeemer embraces all men… rulers of states must not refuse public veneration to Christ”. By framing the issue through executive orders and FDA regulations rather than demanding submission to canon law, the HHS and its Catholic collaborators deny Christ’s social reign.
No mention is made of:
- The canonical crime of mutilation (1917 CIC Canon 2350)
- The sacramental consequences for perpetrators (automatic excommunication under Canon 2294 for sterilization)
- The Church’s duty to establish penal sanctions against gender ideology promoters
This naturalistic approach fulfills Pius X’s warning in Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907) against modernists who “substitute for the authority of the Church the authority of conscience”. The proposed regulations treat child mutilation as a policy dispute rather than sacrilege demanding ecclesiastical tribunals.
Symptomatic of Conciliar Apostasy
The HHS measures – while superficially laudable – exemplify how post-conciliar structures abandon supernatural warfare. By collaborating with secular authorities like the FDA while ignoring the Church’s divine jurisdiction, the USCCB betrays Boniface VIII’s declaration in Unam Sanctam (1302) that “it is altogether necessary to salvation for every human creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff”.
The article’s focus on medical harm rather than spiritual destruction reflects the conciliar sect’s abandonment of extra Ecclesiam nulla salus. Nowhere does Bishop Barron warn that perpetrators risk eternal damnation or that victims require sacramental confession to heal their reatus culpae. This silence confirms St. Pius X’s condemnation of modernists who “omit the mention of eternal punishments” (Lamentabili Sane, Error 26).
Until civil authorities submit to the Social Kingship of Christ and pre-conciliar doctrinal clarity, such regulations remain fragile concessions to natural law – easily overturned by future administrations still enslaved to the “cult of man” denounced in Paul VI’s Homily for the Last Mass (June 30, 1978).
Source:
HHS announces actions to restrict ‘sex-rejecting procedures’ on minors (catholicnewsagency.com)
Date: 18.12.2025