EWTN News / National Catholic Register reports that U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called assisted-suicide laws “abhorrent” during budget discussions, pledging to work with lawmakers to strengthen protections for people with disabilities. While Kennedy’s rhetoric against the institutionalization of euthanasia is commendable on the surface, a thorough examination from the perspective of integral Catholic faith reveals that his position—and the broader political framework he operates within—remains fatally constrained by the very naturalism and secularism that the pre-conciliar Church identified as the root causes of the culture of death. The article itself, originating from a nominally Catholic news outlet, exemplifies the conciliar sect’s characteristic failure to articulate the full supernatural dimension of the Church’s teaching on suffering, the redemptive value of the cross, and the absolute sovereignty of God over life and death. Kennedy’s appeal to “morality” without anchoring it in the immutable doctrine of the Catholic Church is a hollow gesture that leaves the door open for further erosion.
The Idolatry of “Morality” Without God
Kennedy declares, “I don’t think we can be a moral society — we can’t be a moral society around the globe if that becomes institutionalized throughout our society.” This statement, while superficially aligned with Catholic sensibilities, is theologically vacuous. It appeals to an abstract, humanistic notion of “morality” detached from the Divine Lawgiver. As Pope Pius XI taught in *Quas Primas*, “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.” A “moral society” that does not publicly confess Jesus Christ as King, whose laws are not ordered to the supernatural end of eternal salvation, and whose authority does not derive from God, is not moral at all—it is a collective of individuals subject to the tyranny of relativism and, ultimately, to the will of the strongest.
The article’s framing of the issue as a matter of “disability rights” and “discrimination” within a secular legal framework is a symptom of the modernist reduction of Catholic social teaching to mere humanitarianism. The Church has always taught that suffering, when united to the Passion of Christ, has immense redemptive value. To reduce the question of assisted suicide to one of “targeting people with disabilities” is to ignore the far graver spiritual reality: that every human life is a gift from God, and that no state has the authority to sanction the direct and intentional killing of an innocent person, regardless of their physical or mental condition. The Catechism of the Council of Trent teaches that the fifth commandment forbids not only murder but also any act that directly intends to destroy human life. The secular language of “rights” and “protections” is a poor substitute for the divine commandment, “Thou shalt not kill” (Exodus 20:13).
The Conciliar Sect’s Complicity in the Culture of Death
The article originates from EWTN News and the National Catholic Register, both of which operate within the structures of the conciliar sect. This is critical context. The post-conciliar “Church” has been a primary architect of the very culture of death it now pretends to oppose. The Second Vatican Council’s *Dignitatis Humanae*, which proclaimed the “right to religious freedom” based on the dignity of the human person, laid the philosophical groundwork for the autonomization of the individual from God’s law. If a man has a “right” to choose his religion, why not a “right” to choose his death? The conciar sect’s embrace of religious liberty—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”)—has logically and inexorably led to the proliferation of “rights” that contradict the natural law and the divine positive law.
Furthermore, the conciliar sect’s systematic dismantling of the theology of purgatory, its minimization of the reality of sin and hell, and its embrace of a saccharine, therapeutic spirituality that avoids the cross have created a spiritual vacuum in which euthanasia appears as a “merciful” solution to suffering. When the faithful are no longer taught that suffering can be meritorious, that the cross is the path to glory, and that death is the gateway to eternal judgment, they will inevitably seek to escape suffering by any means available. The conciar sect has sowed the wind and now reaps the whirlwind.
The Canada Warning: A Prophecy Fulfilled
Kennedy notes, “We just see in Canada today, I think the No. 1 cause of death is assisted suicide, and as you say, it targets people with disabilities and people who are struggling in their lives.” The article clarifies that euthanasia is the fifth-leading cause of death in Canada, with the country considering expanding MAID to those whose sole condition is mental illness. This is the inevitable terminus of the trajectory begun by the Enlightenment and accelerated by the conciliar revolution. Once the sanctity of life is subordinated to the autonomy of the individual, there is no logical stopping point. The slippery slope is not a fallacy; it is a law of moral gravity.
Pope Leo XIII, in *Immortale Dei*, warned that “the nature of human society requires that it should be governed by some supreme authority, and that this authority should be exercised in such a way as to promote the common good.” When that supreme authority is denied—when God is banished from the public square—the “common good” is redefined as the aggregate of individual desires, and the weakest are the first to be sacrificed. Canada is not an aberration; it is the future that awaits every nation that follows the path of secular liberalism.
The Failure to Name the Enemy
The article and Kennedy’s remarks fail to identify the true enemy. The enemy is not merely “assisted-suicide laws” or “discrimination.” The enemy is sin. The enemy is the devil, who “was a murderer from the beginning” (John 8:44). The enemy is the conciliar sect itself, which by its apostasy has weakened the Church’s witness and left the faithful defenseless against the assaults of the world, the flesh, and the devil.
St. Pius X, in *Pascendi Dominici Gregis*, condemned the Modernists who “lay the axe not to the branches and shoots, but to the very root, that is, to the faith and its deepest fibers.” The conciliar sect has done precisely this. It has undermined the faith, and now we see the fruits: a society in which the killing of the vulnerable is not only tolerated but celebrated as “compassion.”
Kennedy’s pledge to “work with” lawmakers is a palliative, not a cure. Until the social reign of Christ the King is restored, until the Catholic Church returns to her true mission of preaching the Gospel to all nations and baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, the culture of death will continue to advance. Political action divorced from supernatural faith is like building a house on sand. When the storm comes, it will fall, and great will be the fall of it (Matthew 7:27).
Source:
Health and Human Services Secretary Kennedy Calls Assisted-Suicide Laws ‘Abhorrent’ (ncregister.com)
Date: 23.04.2026