The article, sourced from EWTN News (May 22, 2026), reports on three ostensibly “pro-life” developments: a Washington state lawsuit against Providence hospital system for failing to accommodate pregnant and nursing employees, a Pennsylvania attorney general’s appeal to restore a ban on Medicaid abortion funding, and Maine Senator Susan Collins’ absence from abortion-related committee meetings. On the surface, these appear to be incremental legal and political maneuvers in defense of unborn life. However, when examined through the lens of integral Catholic doctrine — the immutable teaching of the Church before the Modernist revolution of 1958 — these efforts are revealed as tragically insufficient, structurally compromised, and symptomatic of a far deeper apostasy that pervades even those institutions that claim to defend life.
The Idolatry of Secular Legalism Over Divine Law
The Washington lawsuit, brought by Attorney General Nick Brown against Providence hospital system, is framed entirely within the categories of secular employment law: the “Healthy Starts Act” and the “Washington Law Against Discrimination.” Nowhere in the article is there any reference to the divine natural law, the commandment “Thou shalt not kill”, or the Church’s infallible teaching that abortion is a gravely sinful act that incurs ipso facto excommunication (Canon 2350, 1917 Code of Canon Law). The suit concerns accommodations for pregnant employees — women whose pregnancies are presumably intended to result in live births. This is a matter of workplace equity, not a defense of the inviolable right to life from conception. The article conflates employment discrimination against pregnant women with the defense of the unborn, thereby reducing the most fundamental human right — the right to exist — to a matter of labor policy.
Pope Pius XI, in Casti Connubii (1930), taught with unmistakable clarity: “Any use whatsoever of matrimony exercised in such a way that the act is deliberately frustrated in its natural power to generate life is an offense against the law of God and of nature, and those who indulge in such are branded with the guilt of a grave sin.” The article’s silence on this teaching is not accidental — it is the hallmark of a mentality that has substituted the supernatural order with the naturalistic order, seeking justice in human legislation rather than in the recognition of God’s sovereign dominion over life and death.
The Pennsylvania Charade: Defending a Law That Permits Murder
The Pennsylvania case is, if not “just” more cynical, then at least more revealing of the bankruptcy of the conciliar approach to the abortion question. Attorney General Dave Sunday appeals a lower court ruling that struck down the state’s ban on Medicaid funding for abortion. He states: “My responsibility as attorney general is to defend the rule of law and defend statutes without interference of personal opinion or political posturing.” This is the language of legal positivism — the heresy condemned by Pope Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors (proposition 59: “Right consists in the material fact. All human duties are an empty word, and all human facts have the force of right”). Sunday defends a statute that, even if restored, would merely prevent state funding of abortion — it would not outlaw abortion itself. The unborn child’s right to life is thus subordinated to budgetary considerations.
Moreover, the case originated in 2019 — seven years of litigation to determine whether taxpayers should be compelled to finance the slaughter of innocents. The very framing of the question — funding rather than the intrinsic evil of the act — demonstrates the complete capitulation of Catholic political thought to the liberal paradigm. As Pope Leo XIII taught in Immortale Dei, the state is not the source of rights; God is. A law that permits abortion in any circumstance is no law at all but a corruption of law, and no Catholic attorney general can in conscience defend a legal order that tolerates the killing of the innocent while merely arguing about who pays for it.
Susan Collins and the Theater of Political Absence
The report that Maine Senator Susan Collins has not attended abortion-related Senate committee meetings since the overturn of Roe v. Wade in 2022 is presented as a form of protest or conscientious objection. Yet Collins is the same senator who confirmed Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court in 2018, explicitly stating that she believed he would not vote to overturn Roe. Her subsequent absence from committee meetings is not a principled stand but a political calculation — an attempt to maintain plausible deniability with pro-life voters while having actively enabled the judicial framework that permitted abortion for decades.
This is the quintessential modus operandi of the post-conciliar Catholic in public life: the performance of concern without the substance of action, the substitution of presence at hearings for obedience to divine law. The Church has never taught that absence from a legislative body constitutes a defense of the faith. On the contrary, Pope Pius XI in Quas Primas (1925) declared: “Let rulers of states therefore not refuse public veneration and obedience to the reigning Christ, but let them fulfill this duty themselves and with their people, if they wish to maintain their authority inviolate and contribute to the increase of their homeland’s happiness.” Collins’ absence is not obedience to Christ the King; it is cowardice dressed in the garments of moderation.
The Omission That Condemns: Silence on the Conciliar Sect’s Role
Perhaps the most damning aspect of this article is what it does not say. There is no mention of the conciliar sect’s own complicity in the abortion catastrophe. The structures occupying the Vatican under the line of usurpers beginning with John XXIII have, for over six decades, systematically undermined the Church’s teaching on the sanctity of life. The “pastoral” approach of the post-conciliar church — its emphasis on “accompaniment,” “mercy,” and “individual conscience” — has created the very conditions in which abortion is tolerated, funded, and even celebrated by those who claim to be Catholic.
The article references EWTN, an institution that, while occasionally critical of abortion, operates within the framework of the conciar sect and recognizes the authority of the usurpers on Peter’s throne. This is the fundamental contradiction: one cannot defend the unborn while simultaneously submitting to a magisterium that has abandoned the lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi of the Catholic faith. The conciliar sect’s liturgical revolution — the replacement of the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass with the Novus Ordo memorial meal — has severed the faithful from the very source of grace necessary to combat the culture of death.
As St. Pius X warned in Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907), Modernism is the “synthesis of all heresies,” and its inevitable fruit is the dissolution of objective truth into subjective experience. The article’s reliance on secular legal mechanisms, its silence on divine law, and its failure to identify the conciliar apostasy as the root cause of the abortion crisis are all symptoms of this Modernist disease.
The Only True Remedy: Return to Christ the King
The Catholic answer to abortion is not lawsuits about workplace accommodations, appeals to restore Medicaid funding bans, or senatorial absenteeism. The Catholic answer is the social reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ — the recognition by every nation, every government, and every individual that Christ is King, and that His law is the supreme law of the land. As Pope Pius XI declared in Quas Primas: “His reign, namely, extends not only to Catholic nations or to those who, by receiving baptism according to law, belong to the Church, even though their erroneous opinions have led them astray or discord has separated them from love, but His reign encompasses also all non-Christians, so that most truly the entire human race is subject to the authority of Jesus Christ.”
Until this truth is proclaimed — not as a pious aspiration but as a binding obligation on every state and every soul — the abortion holocaust will continue, and the efforts described in this article will remain what they are: rearrangements of deck chairs on the Titanic. The true Church, enduring in the faithful who profess the integral Catholic faith and are led by bishops with valid sacraments, alone possesses the authority and the grace to combat the culture of death. All other efforts, however well-intentioned, are built on the shifting sand of human will and secular law, and they will be swept away by the tide of apostasy.
Non possumus — we cannot compromise with evil. We cannot seek justice in systems that deny the sovereignty of Christ. We cannot defend life while submitting to a magisterium that has abandoned the faith. The only path forward is the path of the saints: instaurare omnia in Christo — to restore all things in Christ.
Source:
Washington sues hospitals over treatment of pregnant, nursing employees (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 22.05.2026