The National Catholic Register reports that the Diocese of Springfield, Illinois, together with the Pregnancy Care Center of Rockford, has filed suit in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit seeking to block provisions of the Illinois Human Rights Act that would compel religious employers to hire and retain employees who openly reject Catholic moral teaching on abortion, contraception, and sterilization. The district court dismissed the suit in March 2026 on the grounds of “standing,” ruling that the alleged violations were “speculative.” The Alliance Defending Freedom, representing both plaintiffs, has appealed, arguing that the state has refused to disavow enforcement and that the law directly proscribes constitutionally protected conduct. Bishop Thomas Paprocki stated that the diocese “cannot hire or retain employees based on our deeply held religious beliefs on pro-life teachings without being subject to disciplinary action.” The case exposes a fundamental question that the conciliar structures have spent decades evading: does the Catholic Church possess any right — natural or divine — to exist as a coherent moral community in a world that has declared war on the Law of God?
The Primacy of Divine Law Over Human Legislation
The Illinois Human Rights Act, as described in the cited article, represents a species of legislation that Pope Pius IX condemned with the utmost clarity in the Syllabus of Errors. Proposition 39 declares: “The State, as being the origin and source of all rights, is endowed with a certain right not circumscribed by any limits.” This is precisely the philosophical foundation of the Illinois law: the state presumes to itself an unlimited competence to dictate the terms upon which a religious employer may operate, including the moral qualifications of its own employees. The state does not merely regulate commerce or public safety; it reaches into the interior life of a Catholic institution and declares that the Church’s own moral teachings — teachings that predate the State of Illinois by approximately eighteen centuries — constitute actionable discrimination.
Pius IX further condemned, in Proposition 44, the claim that “The civil authority may interfere in matters relating to religion, morality and spiritual government: hence, it can pass judgment on the instructions issued for the guidance of consciences, conformably with their mission, by the pastors of the Church.” The Illinois law does not merely “interfere” in religious matters; it directly adjudicates the boundaries of conscience. It tells a Catholic diocese that it may not require its employees — persons who voluntarily associate with a Catholic institution — to refrain from conduct that the Church has always taught is gravely sinful. The state thus sets itself up as a rival magisterium, a competing authority on morals, and it does so with the coercive power of law.
The Catholic position, articulated with luminous clarity by Pope Leo XIII in Immortale Dei, is 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 supreme in its own kind, and each fixed within limits which are defined by its own nature and special object.” The Illinois legislature has not merely overstepped its competence; it has obliterated the distinction entirely, subjecting divine law to the arbitrary decrees of a secular assembly. This is not governance; it is tyranny, and it is precisely the form of tyranny that the popes of the nineteenth century warned would follow inevitably from the rejection of Christ’s social kingship.
The Social Kingship of Christ and the Duty of Rulers
Pope Pius XI, in the encyclical Quas Primas (1925), established the Feast of Christ the King not as a pious devotion but as a doctrinal and political act — a public reaffirmation that “the State must not refuse public veneration and obedience to the reigning Christ, but must fulfill this duty itself and with its people, if it wishes to maintain its authority inviolate and contribute to the increase of its homeland’s happiness.” The encyclical is unambiguous: the state that excludes Christ from its laws does not merely commit an act of omission; it actively undermines the foundation of its own authority. Pius XI wrote: “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, because the main reason why some have the right to command and others have the duty to obey was removed.”
The Illinois Human Rights Act is a textbook illustration of this principle. By declaring that a Catholic employer may not consider an employee’s stance on abortion as a relevant criterion for hiring, the state derives its authority not from God but from the autonomous will of the individual — in this case, the individual’s “right” to make “voluntary reproductive decisions” free from any moral accountability to the community in which they work. The state has, in effect, erected a sanctuary for moral anarchy and called it “civil rights.”
Pius XI further taught that the reign of Christ extends over all men without exception: “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.” There is no exemption for the State of Illinois. There is no carve-out for “democratic pluralism.” The law of Christ is universal, and every human law that contradicts it is, in the words of St. Thomas Aquinas, “no law at all, but a corruption of law” (Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 95, a. 2).
The Specious Language of “Religious Freedom”
The cited article employs the language of “religious freedom” and “religious liberty” as though these were self-evident goods that the state graciously permits. Bishop Paprocki himself is quoted as saying, “We must have the freedom to follow and express our convictions without government interference.” While the sentiment is understandable, the framing is theologically deficient and reveals the extent to which even orthodox-sounding bishops have absorbed the liberal categories that the pre-conciliar magisterium consistently rejected.
The Catholic Church does not ask the state for “freedom” as though freedom were a concession granted by civil authority. The Church demands recognition of rights that are inherent in her divine constitution and that no state has the competence to grant or revoke. As Pius IX taught, the Church is “a true and perfect society, entirely free, endowed with proper and perpetual rights of her own, conferred upon her by her Divine Founder” (Proposition 19 of the Syllabus, condemned). The Church does not petition the state for liberty; she exercises liberty as a matter of divine right, and the state’s duty is to recognize and protect that right, not to condition it upon the state’s own approval.
The very concept of “religious freedom” as understood in American constitutional law — the idea that the state is neutral among competing religious claims and that religious exercise is a private right subject to reasonable regulation — is itself a product of the liberal revolution that the Church has always condemned. Proposition 77 of the Syllabus declares: “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.” This is precisely the principle that undergirds the Illinois law: the state treats the Catholic Church’s moral teaching as one opinion among many, entitled to no special consideration, and subject to override whenever it conflicts with the state’s own vision of individual autonomy.
The Heresy of Indifferentism and Its Legal Fruits
The Illinois law is not merely a political error; it is the legal codification of the heresy of religious indifferentism, which Pius IX defined and condemned in Propositions 15–18 of the Syllabus. Proposition 15: “Every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true.” Proposition 17: “Good hope at least is to be entertained of the eternal salvation of all those who are not at all in the true Church of Christ.” The Illinois legislature, by refusing to recognize the Catholic Church’s right to maintain its own moral standards as an employer, implicitly affirms that the Church’s teaching on the sanctity of life is merely one “religious perspective” among many, and that the state has no obligation to defer to it.
This indifferentism is not neutral. It is, in practice, hostile to the Catholic faith, because it creates a legal environment in which the Church is free to profess her teachings but prohibited from acting upon them in any way that inconveniences the state’s preferred ideology. A Catholic diocese may teach that abortion is murder; it may preach it from every pulpit; it may print it in every catechism. But if it dares to refuse to hire an employee who has procured an abortion, or who intends to procure one, the state will punish it. This is not religious freedom; it is religious captivity dressed in the language of tolerance.
St. Pius X, in Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907), identified the core of Modernism as the claim that “the State must be separated from the Church” and that “the Church must be separated from the State” (Proposition 55 of the Syllabus). The Illinois law is a direct application of this modernist principle: the state separates itself from the Church’s moral authority and then uses that separation as a pretext to coerce the Church into compliance with secular moral norms.
The District Court’s Dismissal: Justice Deferred as Justice Denied
The district court’s dismissal of the lawsuit on the grounds that the plaintiffs lacked “standing” — that the alleged violations were “speculative” — is a procedural maneuver that merits scrutiny. The court, in effect, told the Diocese of Springfield and the Pregnancy Care Center that they may not challenge the law until the state has already begun to enforce it against them. This is analogous to telling a man that he may not seek an injunction against his murderer until after the knife has been plunged.
The Alliance Defending Freedom’s appeals brief correctly identifies this reasoning as “erroneous,” noting that “the ministries currently engage in constitutionally protected conduct that the [state law] arguably proscribes, and the State has repeatedly refused to disavow enforcement.” The state’s refusal to disavow enforcement is itself a form of coercion: it creates a climate of legal uncertainty in which religious employers must either conform their hiring practices to the state’s moral standards or risk prosecution at an indeterminate future date. This is the very definition of a “chilling effect” on religious exercise, and it is precisely the kind of indirect coercion that the pre-conciliar magisterium recognized as no less tyrannical than direct persecution.
It is worth noting that the district court’s reasoning reflects a broader trend in American jurisprudence: the systematic narrowing of “standing” requirements to prevent religious plaintiffs from challenging laws that infringe upon their rights until after the damage has been done. This is not judicial restraint; it is judicial complicity in the erosion of religious liberty. The courts, like the legislatures, have absorbed the modernist premise that religious claims are private preferences that must yield to the public interest as defined by the state.
The Deeper Apostasy: Why the Conciliar Structures Cannot Defend the Faith
The cited article, while reporting on a genuine legal conflict, omits the most important context: the reason the Diocese of Springfield finds itself in this position is not merely because of an Illinois state law, but because the conciliar Church has spent six decades systematically dismantling the theological, canonical, and institutional framework that would have made such a law unthinkable.
Before the conciliar revolution, the Catholic Church in the United States operated within a robust network of Catholic institutions — schools, hospitals, universities, charitable organizations — that were understood to be extensions of the Church’s divine mission, governed by canon law, and staffed by persons who professed the Catholic faith. The Church did not ask the state for permission to maintain these institutions; she exercised her inherent right to do so, and the state, however imperfectly, recognized that right.
The conciliar revolution changed this fundamentally. The embrace of “religious liberty” as defined by Dignitatis Humanae (1965) — a document that directly contradicts the teaching of Pius IX, Leo XIII, and every pope who addressed the subject — signaled to the secular world that the Church no longer claimed a unique public status. If the Church herself teaches that religious freedom is a civil right grounded in the dignity of the human person, rather than a divine right grounded in the truth of the Catholic faith, then the state is logically entitled to define the scope of that right and to condition it upon compliance with secular norms.
The conciliar Church, in other words, sowed the wind and is now reaping the whirlwind. The Illinois Human Rights Act is not an aberration; it is the natural and predictable consequence of the Church’s own abandonment of her claim to public truth. When the “bishops” of the conciliar sect proclaimed that the state has no obligation to recognize the Catholic religion as the sole true religion, they forfeited the only principled basis upon which the Church could defend her institutional autonomy. The state is merely holding the conciar Church to its own stated principles.
The Duty of the Faithful: Resistance, Not Accommodation
The faithful who profess the integral Catholic faith — the faith of the pre-conciliar magisterium, the faith of the Council of Trent, the faith of the Fathers — must recognize that the legal battle in Illinois, however well-intentioned, is ultimately a rear-guard action fought on enemy territory. The fundamental question is not whether the Diocese of Springfield can win an exemption from the Illinois Human Rights Act; the fundamental question is whether the Catholic Church will once again proclaim, without equivocation, that the social kingship of Christ is a dogma of faith, that every human law contrary to divine law is null and void, and that the state has no competence to adjudicate matters of morals and conscience.
Until that proclamation is made — and it cannot be made by the conciliar structures, which have formally and materially repudiated it — the faithful must resist the encroachments of the secular state by every lawful means available, while recognizing that true justice and true authority reside only in the Church as she existed before the modernist usurpation. The Church of Christ does not beg the state for crumbs of liberty; she exercises liberty as a divine inheritance, and she calls all men — including the legislators of Illinois — to submit to the reign of Christ the King.
As Pius XI declared in Quas Primas: “The annual celebration of this solemnity will also remind states that not only private individuals, but also rulers and governments have the duty to publicly honor Christ and obey Him: for it will remind them of the final judgment, in which Christ, whom not only was cast out of the state, but was also forgotten and ignored through contempt, will very severely avenge these insults, because His royal dignity demands that all relations in the state be ordered on the basis of God’s commandments and Christian principles.” Let the State of Illinois — and every state that presumes to place itself above the Law of God — take heed. The judgment of Christ the King is not speculative. It is certain, and it is eternal.
Source:
Illinois Diocese Asks Court to Block Law Requiring It to Hire Nonbelievers (ncregister.com)
Date: 04.06.2026