The Naturalistic Abyss: When Freedom Becomes Apostasy
The cited article, published on the National Catholic Register portal on April 3, 2026, employs the historical figures of Abraham Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth, and Judas Iscariot, alongside psychiatrist Karl Stern’s conversion narrative, to meditate on the “terrible abyss” of human freedom. It posits a fundamental divide between those who accept truth and those who reject it, framing this as a mysterious, personal solitude where individuals can “inure themselves against any form of help,” amounting to “being in hell while still on earth.” The article concludes that the solution is vigilance, prayer, humility, and following Christ, while cherishing relationships with those who share “the same truth.”
From the perspective of integral Catholic faith, this meditation is not merely insufficient; it is a symptomatic expression of the post-conciliar apostasy. It reduces the supernatural economy of salvation to a vague, naturalistic philosophy of freedom, omitting the essential pillars of Catholic doctrine: the unique, exclusive role of the Catholic Church as the sole ark of salvation, the absolute necessity of sacramental grace, the hierarchical magisterium, and the Social Kingship of Christ the King. The “abyss” it describes is not between truth and falsehood in the abstract, but between the Catholic truth of the pre-1958 Church and the modernist, humanistic relativism of the conciliar sect. The article’s silence on these non-negotiable dogmas is its most damning feature, revealing a theology stripped of its supernatural substance and reduced to mere ethical exhortation.
1. Reduction of Salvation to Naturalistic Humanism
The article’s core error is its complete subordination of salvation to a concept of “freedom” devoid of grace. It quotes St. Thomas Aquinas out of context: “because man ‘originates from nothingness,’ he has ‘the power to turn to nothingness.’” This is used to explain the “abyss” of betrayal. However, the article ignores the full Thomistic context: man’s power to turn to nothingness (sin) is precisely why he requires gratia (grace) to turn to God. St. Thomas teaches that without habitual grace, man cannot perform any supernatural act worthy of eternal life. The article presents a stark, Pelagian view where individuals, by sheer will, choose “truth” or “negation,” with the “teacher” (Christ or Lincoln) blameless. This is a denial of the Catholic doctrine of gratia Christi.
Pope Pius XI, in his encyclical Quas Primas on the Kingship of Christ, defines the nature of Christ’s reign: “His kingdom, as the Gospels present it, is such that men who wish to belong to it prepare themselves through repentance, but cannot enter except through faith and baptism, which, although performed with an external rite, signifies and brings about an internal rebirth.” The article mentions “following Christ” but is utterly silent on the sacramental means—Baptism, Confession, the Eucharist—by which grace is conferred and the kingdom entered. This omission is not accidental; it is the hallmark of the modernist “hermeneutic of discontinuity,” which reduces religion to interior experience and moral example, stripping away the sacramental, hierarchical, and juridical structures willed by Christ.
The article’s use of Karl Stern’s conversion is particularly deceptive. Stern’s journey, as recounted in The Pillar of Fire, was to the “Church” of his time—which, from an integral Catholic perspective, was already succumbing to the rising tide of modernism. His “abyss” was between his Jewish past and a Catholicism that, even then, was beginning to compromise with the world. The article presents this as a model of personal decision, but the true Catholic conversion is not a “cosmic abyss” between two friends, but a passage from the kingdom of Satan to the kingdom of Christ, effected through the sacrament of Baptism and incorporation into the Mystical Body. The article’s silence on this ecclesiological reality is a denial of the Faith.
2. The Omission of the Social Kingship of Christ
The article discusses Lincoln’s address on reconciliation and the “binding up of the nation’s wounds,” presenting it as a parallel to Christ’s message. This is a profound error. Pope Pius XI, in Quas Primas, established the feast of Christ the King specifically to combat the secularism that removes Christ from public life. He writes: “When God and Jesus Christ—as we lamented—were removed from laws and states and when authority was derived not from God but from men, the foundations of that authority were destroyed.” The article celebrates Lincoln’s “charity for all” and “firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right” while completely ignoring the Catholic doctrine that all legitimate authority derives from God and must publicly recognize Christ as King.
Lincoln’s statecraft, however noble in a natural law context, operates within the sphere of caesaropapism or, at best, generic theism. The Catholic doctrine, defined by Pope Leo XIII in Immortale Dei and Sapientiae Christianae, is that the State has a duty to publicly honor Christ and conform its laws to His. The article’s failure to distinguish between natural civic virtue and the supernatural obligation of the Social Reign of Christ is a capitulation to the indifferentism condemned by Pope Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors (Proposition 77: “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”).
Furthermore, the article’s analogy between Lincoln’s “malice toward none” and Christ’s passion is blasphemous in its implications. Christ’s sacrifice was propitiatory, an act of infinite value to satisfy divine justice and redeem humanity. Lincoln’s plea was for political reconciliation. To place them in parallel as “greatest men” with “greatest messages” is to reduce the Unbloody Sacrifice of Calvary to a mere moral exemplar. This is the very error of the modernist: to make Christ a “great moral teacher” rather than the God-Man, King and Priest, whose sacrifice is the sole means of salvation.
3. The False and Vague Notion of “Truth”
The article repeatedly refers to “the same truth” as the bond between those who avoid the “terrible abyss.” But what is this “truth”? It is never defined. In Catholic doctrine, “truth” is not a subjective consensus or a shared ethical framework. It is depositum fidei, the revealed doctrine of the Catholic Church, guarded by the magisterium. The article’s “truth” is a naturalistic, ecumenical concept that could include Jews, Protestants, and even atheists who share “values.” This is the indifferentism of the Syllabus (Proposition 16: “Man may, in the observance of any religion whatever, find the way of eternal salvation”).
St. Robert Bellarmine, in his De Romano Pontifice, explains that the Pope, as the visible head of the Church, is necessary for unity in faith. The article’s call to “cherish our relationships with those with whom we share the same truth” implicitly rejects the necessity of Catholic unity. It suggests a “unity in diversity” of beliefs, which is the heresy of latitudinarianism. The true Catholic, following the doctrine of the extra ecclesiam nulla salus (outside the Church there is no salvation), as defined by Pope Boniface VIII in Unam Sanctam and reiterated by the Council of Florence, knows that those not in communion with the true Church are in grave danger of damnation. The article’s soft, inclusive language is a betrayal of this dogma.
4. The Symptomatic Silence on the Conciliar Apostasy
The most damning evidence of the article’s modernist pedigree is its total silence on the catastrophic reality of the post-conciliar “Church.” It mentions “following Christ” as if the current structures occupying the Vatican are the same Church that Christ founded. From the perspective of integral Catholic faith, this is a lie. The line of antipopes beginning with Angelo Roncalli (“John XXIII”) has promulgated a new religion—the religion of “man” and “the world”—in the documents of Vatican Council II and subsequent magisterial acts. The “abyss” the article laments is precisely the abyss between the Catholic Faith and the conciliar sect’s apostasy.
The article’s author, Donald DeMarco, is a professor emeritus at institutions (“St. Jerome’s University,” “Holy Apostles College”) that are part of the conciliar sect. He writes for the National Catholic Register, a publication that, while sometimes more conservative, fully accepts the legitimacy of the antipopes and the conciliar reforms. His critique is therefore not from the perspective of integral Catholic faith, but from a position of pseudo-traditionalism within the modernist system. He can decry “egoism” and call for “humility” while remaining in formal schism by recognizing the usurpers. This is the ultimate “terrible abyss”: those who claim to speak for Christ while supporting His enemies.
The article’s solution—vigilance, prayer, humility—is empty without the concrete means provided by the true Church: the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass (not the invalid “Novus Ordo” abomination), the sacrament of Penance, the authority of validly ordained bishops who have not sold out to the conciliar revolution. It offers a spirituality without dogma, a morality without grace, a community without hierarchy. This is the “dogmaless Christianity” condemned by St. Pius X in his encyclical Pascendi Dominici gregis and the decree Lamentabili sane exitu as the synthesis of all modernism.
5. The Real Abyss: Between the True Church and the Conciliar Sect
What the article calls the “terrible abyss” between Lincoln and Booth, or Christ and Judas, is but a pale shadow of the real abyss that separates the Catholic Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, the pillar and ground of the truth (1 Tim. 3:15), from the conciliar sect, the “abomination of desolation” standing in the holy place (Matt. 24:15). Judas’s betrayal was personal and temporal. The betrayal of the modernists is ecclesial and eternal: they have handed over the House of God to the enemy, destroyed the sacrifice, polluted the sacraments, and taught souls to seek salvation outside the necessary means.
The article’s final exhortation to “shun egoism” is ironic, coming from a man who, by his professional affiliation, supports a system that has enshrined the cult of the human ego (“the religion of man” as described by Pius IX in the Syllabus, Proposition 80). The true Catholic shuns not just personal egoism, but the ecclesiastical egoism of the conciliar “reformers” who placed human pastoral “needs” above divine law, who made the liturgy a “celebration of the community” rather than the propitiatory sacrifice, who turned the Church from a perfect society into a democratic federation.
There is no “narrow gate” in the article’s presentation. The gate is not merely “narrow” because few find it; it is exclusively the Catholic Church. As the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) dogmatically defined: “There is but one universal Church of the faithful, outside which no one at all is saved.” The article’s silence on this dogma is a rejection of it. Its “abyss” is therefore not a mystery of freedom, but a clear, defined division: between those who hold the integral Catholic faith and those who, in any degree, adhere to the errors of modernism, whether as radical progressives or as compromising pseudo-traditionalists.
The “terrible abyss” is not a psychological or philosophical problem to be meditated upon in vague terms. It is a theological and ecclesiological reality. It is the chasm between the City of God and the City of Man, between the sacramental order and the naturalistic order, between the reign of Christ the King and the reign of “the prince of this world” (John 12:31) who now sits in the temple of God, claiming to be the Vicar of Christ. The article, by its omissions and its naturalistic framework, places itself squarely on the wrong side of that abyss.
Source:
The Terrible Abyss: Lincoln, Stern and Judas (ncregister.com)
Date: 03.04.2026