EWTN News reports that on June 13, 2026, thousands gathered in Rome for the annual “Scegliamo della Vita” (Let’s Choose Life) March, opposing Italy’s abortion laws and potential euthanasia legislation. Prominent advocate Maria Rachele Ruiu stated they want to show that “choosing and protecting life is not only right, important, and necessary but also beautiful,” while spokesperson Massimo Gandolfini emphasized that “the right to life is the right that underpins every other right of a civil society and a democratic society.” The article presents secular arguments about human dignity and civil rights while remaining conspicuously silent about the supernatural foundations of the right to life, the sacramental order, and the Church’s divine mission — revealing the fundamentally naturalistic character of even well-intentioned Catholic activism within the conciliar paradigm.
The Right to Life Without the Author of Life: A Naturalistic Protest
The article’s framing of the pro-life cause is symptomatic of a deeper theological catastrophe. Gandolfini declares that “the right to life is the right that underpins every other right of a **civil society** and a **democratic society**.” This language is not merely imprecise — it is a capitulation to the very modernist errors condemned by the perennial Magisterium. Pius IX, in the Syllabus of Errors, condemned the proposition that “the best theory of civil society requires that popular schools… should be freed from all ecclesiastical authority” (Proposition 47) and that “the State, as being the origin and source of all rights, is endowed with a certain right not circumscribed by any limits” (Proposition 39). By grounding the right to life in “civil society” and “democratic society” rather than in the eternal law of God and the divine constitution of the Church, the marchers unknowingly echo the liberal errors the Church has consistently anathematized.
Pius XI, in Quas Primas, taught with absolute clarity: “His reign, namely, 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 right to life does not derive from democratic consensus or civil legislation — it flows from the sovereign dominion of Christ the King over every human person, from conception to natural death. To argue on the basis of “civil society” is to concede the secularist premise that the state, not God, is the arbiter of human dignity.
The Omission of the Supernatural Order
What is most striking about the article — and most damning — is what it does not say. Nowhere does it mention the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the sacraments, the necessity of baptism, the state of grace, or the eternal destiny of souls. The “right to life” is presented as a purely natural, civil, and political reality, stripped of its supernatural context.
This silence is the hallmark of Modernism as defined by St. Pius X in Pascendi Dominici gregis, where he exposed the modernist method of separating the natural from the supernatural, reducing Christianity to a merely human phenomenon. The 1907 decree Lamentabili sane exitu condemned the proposition that “the Church has no right to require any internal assent from the faithful to the pronouncements issued by the Church” (Proposition 7) and that “faith, as assent of the mind, is ultimately based on a sum of probabilities” (Proposition 25). When Catholics march for life without demanding the submission of the state to the Kingship of Christ, they reduce the faith to a matter of opinion — a “value” to be defended in the public square rather than a divine truth to be imposed by the authority of the Church.
Ruiu’s exhortation — “Young people, get married and have children!” — while superficially laudable, is presented in a purely naturalistic register. There is no mention of the sacramental nature of matrimony, the primary end of marriage being the procreation and education of children for heaven, or the necessity of raising children in the Catholic faith. The 1917 Code of Canon Law (Canon 1013) defined marriage’s primary end as “the procreation and education of children,” while Pius XI in Casti Connubii (1930) warned against those who “degrade the conjugal act” and reduce marriage to a merely natural contract.
The Conciliar Captivity of Pro-Life Activism
The article’s provenance — EWTN, a flagship media outlet of the post-conciliar establishment — is itself symptomatic. The conciliar sect has systematically co-opted pro-life activism, channeling Catholic energy into political demonstrations that operate entirely within the framework of liberal democracy, while simultaneously promoting the very modernist errors that make abortion and euthanasia intellectually defensible.
Vatican II’s Dignitatis Humanae proclaimed the “right to religious freedom,” a doctrine condemned by Pius IX in the Syllabus (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”) and by Gregory XVI in Mirari Vos (1832), which called religious liberty an “erroneous and absurd opinion, or rather madness” (deliramentum). By accepting the framework of religiously neutral democratic discourse, the marchers implicitly accept the legitimacy of the very system that has legalized the killing of the unborn.
The proper response to abortion is not to petition a secular parliament but to demand that the state recognize the authority of the Catholic Church and submit to the law of Christ the King. As Pius XI declared in Quas Primas: “The rulers of states… if they wish to maintain their authority inviolate and contribute to the increase of their homeland’s happiness” must not “refuse public veneration and obedience to the reigning Christ.” The marchers in Rome, however, gathered at the Piazza della Repubblica — a square named for the republic that usurped the Papal States — to plead with the heirs of that usurpation for crumbs of natural justice.
The Silence on the Abomination of Desolation
Perhaps the most telling omission is any reference to the current state of Rome itself — the city where an antipope occupies the See of Peter, where the Most Holy Sacrifice has been effectively abolished in favor of the Novus Ordo, and where the faithful are subjected to a liturgy that the pre-conciliar Magisterium would recognize as suspect at best and sacrilegious at worst. The marchers process through a city that has become, in the words of Our Lady of La Salette (whose approved message warns of the Church’s corruption), a place where “the Church will be in eclipse.”
To march for the right to life in Rome while remaining in communion with the conciliar structures is to protest the symptoms while embracing the disease. The legalization of abortion in Italy through Law 194 is a direct consequence of the Church’s loss of temporal and spiritual authority — an authority that was surrendered not by the faithful but by the modernist “popes” who convened Vatican II and dismantled the social reign of Christ the King. As St. Pius X warned in Pascendi, Modernism is “the synthesis of all heresy,” and its fruits include not only theological errors but the complete collapse of Christian civilization.
Conclusion: The Beautiful Lie of Naturalistic Activism
Ruiu says: “They always portray us, even in the press, as ugly and bad; we want to parade through Rome to show our true face: happy people.” But the true face of Catholic activism is not one of natural happiness — it is the face of the martyrs who died for the faith, the saints who embraced suffering for Christ, and the Church that has always demanded not the approval of the world but its conversion.
The “beauty” of choosing life is not a natural beauty to be displayed in a parade — it is the supernatural beauty of grace, of baptism, of the sacramental order, and of submission to the Kingship of Christ. Without these, the march is merely a protest — and protests do not save souls. Only the true Church, offering the true Sacrifice, administering the true sacraments, and demanding the true submission of states to the authority of Christ the King, can restore the culture of life.
Until Catholic activism recognizes this — until it rejects the conciliar sect, returns to the unchanging Tradition, and demands not merely the reform of legislation but the restoration of the social reign of Christ — it will continue to labor in the naturalistic wilderness of modernist apostasy, achieving nothing but the temporary postponement of evils that can only be permanently vanquished by the triumph of the Immaculate Heart — not through democratic process, but through the establishment of the true Church’s authority over all nations.
“The state is happy not by one means, and man by another; for the state is nothing else than a harmonious association of men” (St. Augustine, quoted by Pius XI in Quas Primas). Without Christ the King reigning over the state, there can be no true justice, no true right to life, and no true peace.
Source:
Life is beautiful: Thousands join annual pro-life march in Rome (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 15.06.2026