EWTN News reports that the U.S. Supreme Court faces a May 11 deadline on whether telemedicine abortion pills will continue to be mailed nationwide, with Catholic figures offering commentary on the legal proceedings. The article presents the positions of Michael New, Carrie Severino, and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops regarding mifepristone access. What is profoundly absent from this entire discussion is the only language that Catholic moral theology demands when confronting the deliberate killing of innocent human beings: the language of intrinsic evil, mortal sin, and the absolute obligation of the state to suppress such crimes. Instead, the article reveals the complete capitulation of institutional Catholic leadership to the framework of secular legalism and public health bureaucracy, a capitulation that is itself a fruit of the post-conciliar revolution.
The Reduction of Murder to a Regulatory Dispute
The article frames the question of abortion pills as a matter of judicial procedure, administrative stays, and circuit court rulings. Michael New, described as an assistant professor at The Catholic University of America, speaks of the Supreme Court potentially “extend[ing] the stay,” “uphold[ing] the 5th Circuit Court’s decision,” or conducting “oral arguments.” This is the language of bureaucratic management, not of Catholic moral theology. The unborn child — a human person from the moment of conception, endowed with an immortal soul — is entirely absent as a subject of rights. The discussion revolves around whether the FDA should require “in-person dispensing” or whether mail-order access should continue.
Carrie Severino, President of the Judicial Crisis Network, frames the issue in terms of states’ rights and federal overreach: “the FDA’s ongoing approval of nationwide mail-order abortion effectively circumvents Louisiana law protecting unborn human life.” While one may acknowledge that Louisiana’s law is preferable to no law at all, the framing itself is catastrophic. The question is never whether a state may “circumvent” another state’s abortion restrictions. The question is whether the civil authority has the absolute duty, under pain of mortal sin, to prohibit and punish the killing of the innocent — in every state, without exception, and without appeal to federal regulatory frameworks.
Pius XI taught in Quas Primas that Christ’s reign “extends not only to Catholic nations or to those who, by receiving baptism according to law, belong to the Church… but His reign encompasses also all non-Christians, so that most truly the entire human race is subject to the authority of Jesus Christ.” The duty to protect unborn life is not a matter of state jurisdiction or circuit court jurisdiction. It is a divine law binding on every human authority, and any civil law that permits or facilitates abortion is null and void before God, as Pius IX declared in the Syllabus of Errors when he condemned the proposition that “moral laws do not stand in the need of the divine sanction” (Proposition 56).
The USCCB’s Bureaucratic Language as a Symptom of Apostasy
The article states: “The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has spoken out against the dangers of mail-order abortion drugs for women and urged the FDA to restore in-person visits to screen for life-threatening conditions such as ectopic pregnancies as well as abuse and human trafficking.”
This statement is a masterclass in the post-conciliar inversion of moral priorities. The USCCB — an institution of the conciliar sect, not of the true Church — frames its objection to abortion pills not primarily as an objection to the killing of children, but as a public health concern for women. The unborn child is not mentioned as the primary victim. The argument is that women need “screening” for ectopic pregnancies and protection from “abuse and human trafficking.” While these are legitimate concerns, their deployment here serves to shift the moral focus from the intrinsic evil of killing an innocent human being to the secondary question of women’s health and safety.
This is precisely the method condemned by St. Pius X in Pascendi Dominici Gregis: the modernist takes the language of the Church and empties it of its supernatural content, replacing it with naturalistic and humanitarian concerns. The true Church has always taught that abortion is direct murder, that it carries the penalty of excommunication latae sententiae (Canon 2350 of the 1917 Code), and that the civil authority has no right to permit it under any circumstances. The USCCB’s language — urging the FDA to “restore in-person visits” — implicitly accepts the legitimacy of the FDA’s regulatory authority over abortion and merely disputes the method of distribution. This is not the voice of the Catholic Church. This is the voice of a bureaucratic apparatus that has substituted the prophetic denunciation of evil for the management of evil.
The Silence on Excommunication and the Moral Obligations of Catholics
Nowhere in this article is there any mention of the canonical penalties attached to abortion. Nowhere is there any mention of the mortal sin incurred by those who procure, perform, or cooperate in abortions. Nowhere is there any mention of the duty of Catholic judges, legislators, and executives to refuse cooperation with the machinery of death. Nowhere is there any warning that receiving “Communion” in post-conciliar structures, where the Mass has been reduced to a table of assembly and the rubrics violate the theology of the propitiatory sacrifice, constitutes sacrilege if not idolatry.
The article treats the entire question as a matter of legal strategy and policy preference. Michael New says the Supreme Court should “absolutely” reinstate in-person requirements because “there’s some real serious public health issues at play here.” Public health. Not the salvation of souls. Not the eternal damnation of those who cooperate in murder. Not the obligation of the Catholic state to recognize the kingship of Christ. Public health.
This is the language of the secularized Catholic, the Catholic who has absorbed the categories of the Enlightenment and the modern bureaucratic state and who no longer thinks in terms of sin, grace, heaven, and hell. It is the language of a man who has been formed not by the Summa Theologica but by the Federal Register.
The Deeper Apostasy: Accepting the Framework of the Secular State
The most damning aspect of this article is what it reveals about the complete acceptance, by the figures quoted, of the legitimacy of the secular state’s authority to regulate — rather than prohibit — abortion. No one quoted in this article asserts that the FDA has no authority to approve abortion drugs because the civil power has no authority to permit what God forbids. No one invokes the teaching of Leo XIII in Immortale Dei that “the Almighty, therefore, has given the charge of the human race to two powers, the ecclesiastical and the civil, the one being set over divine, and the other over human, each being fixed within limits which are defined by its own nature and special object.” No one invokes the teaching of Pius XI that “the State is happy not by one means, and man by another; for the state is nothing else than a harmonious association of men” and that Christ’s authority extends over the state itself.
Instead, the entire discussion takes place within the framework established by Roe v. Wade and its progeny — a framework in which the killing of unborn children is a constitutional right and the only question is the method of execution. This is the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place. This is the logical consequence of the post-conciliar embrace of religious liberty, condemned by Pius IX in Proposition 77 of the Syllabus of Errors: “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.”
The conciliar sect, by embracing the doctrine of religious liberty at Vatican II, surrendered the Church’s claim to be the sole arbiter of moral truth in the public square. The result is that Catholic leaders now argue not that abortion must be prohibited because it is murder, but that abortion pills should be dispensed in person rather than by mail because of “public health” concerns. The salt has lost its savor. It is fit only to be cast out and trodden under foot.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Illusion of Secular Remedies
The article notes that “U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ordered the FDA to carry out a review of the abortion drug in May 2025, which is still ongoing.” This detail is presented without critical commentary, as though a review by a secular government agency could constitute a meaningful response to the systematic slaughter of innocents.
The Catholic who places hope in FDA reviews, Supreme Court stays, and circuit court rulings has already surrendered the supernatural order to the natural order. The true remedy for abortion is not regulatory review. It is the conversion of nations to Christ the King, the restoration of the social reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the confession by every state that “Jesus Christ is in the glory of God the Father” (Pius XI, Quas Primas). Until that conversion takes place, every legal victory will be temporary, every restriction will be partial, and every “pro-life” strategy will be built on the shifting sand of secular politics rather than the rock of divine revelation.
The article’s silence on this fundamental truth is not an oversight. It is the defining characteristic of a Catholic establishment that has lost the faith and replaced it with political activism.
Conclusion: The Bankruptcy of Institutional Catholicism
This article, and the figures quoted within it, demonstrate with painful clarity the spiritual bankruptcy of the post-conciliar Catholic establishment. Faced with the industrial-scale murder of unborn children — a slaughter that dwarfs the atrocities of every tyrant in human history — the response of institutional Catholicism is to debate FDA filing deadlines, circuit court jurisdictions, and in-person dispensing requirements.
The true Church, the Church of all ages, the Church that canonized the Ulma family (correctly: the Ulmans, and even then, the unborn child could not be considered a saint without baptism), the Church that excommunicated abortionists, the Church that taught kings their duty to God — that Church is not represented by the USCCB, by the Judicial Crisis Network, or by professors at The Catholic University of America who speak the language of public health rather than the language of eternal damnation.
The faithful who desire to save souls and protect the innocent must look beyond these institutions of the neo-church and return to the immutable teaching of the true Church: that abortion is murder, that the state has no right to permit it, that those who cooperate in it incur excommunication, and that there is no peace except in the Kingdom of Christ. Anything less is a betrayal of Our Lord Jesus Christ and a cooperation with the culture of death.
Source:
Catholics weigh in as Supreme Court faces deadline on telemedicine abortion ruling (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 09.05.2026