The National Register commentary by Andrea Picciotti-Bayer reports on the U.S. Supreme Court’s 6–3 decision in *Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections and Public Safety*, which held that the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) does not allow prisoners to sue individual prison officials personally for money damages for religious‑rights violations. The author laments that Damon Landor, a Rastafarian inmate whose dreadlocks were forcibly cut despite prior accommodations and a federal court ruling protecting them, will receive no compensation. She frames the case as exposing a “gap in the law” and urges Congress to remedy it. The commentary treats the decision as a technical legal problem, ignoring the deeper theological and moral collapse of a legal order that has severed rights from objective truth and reduced religious practice to a conditional privilege granted by the state.
The Right to Religious Liberty Reduced to a “Contract” with Caesar
The central reasoning of the majority opinion, as presented in the article, is that under the Spending Clause Congress cannot impose personal liability on individual prison officials unless they have voluntarily consented to be sued. Justice Gorsuch, quoted in the commentary, states that “Congress cannot just dictate whatever other sanctions it might wish for violating conditions found in Spending Clause legislation” and that such sanctions require “the voluntary and knowing consent of those who must bear them.” The commentary paraphrases the Court’s approach: “To ‘sort out whether consent exists,’ the court turned to contract principles.”
From the perspective of integral Catholic faith, this reasoning is a monstrous inversion of the order willed by God. The natural law, which is participation in the eternal law, imposes obligations that do not depend on the consent of those who hold office. The duty to respect the free exercise of religion is not a contractual term that a state employee may accept or reject; it is a divine command. The Church has always taught that human law must conform to the natural law and to the divine positive law. A legal system that makes the protection of an inmate’s religious practice—here, the Nazarite vow of a Rastafarian—contingent on whether a guard or warden has “voluntarily and knowingly consented” to be sued is a system that has formally repudiated the sovereignty of God over human affairs. It reduces the divine right of the human person to a negotiable item in a contract with the state.
The commentary’s own language reveals the secular framework it operates within. It speaks of “a federal law protecting the religious rights of prisoners” and of RLUIPA as providing a “shield” that now lacks a “sword.” This metaphor of a shield and a sword, drawn from Roman military equipment, is telling. It frames religious liberty as a piece of defensive equipment granted by the state, not as an inherent right of the person flowing from his creation in the image of God. The commentary never once mentions the supernatural foundation of religious liberty, the duty of every human society to acknowledge the true God, or the fact that the state is itself bound by the natural law to respect the legitimate autonomy of the Church and the family. It treats the entire question as a matter of statutory interpretation and congressional intent, a purely horizontal affair between branches of government.
The State as the Ultimate Arbiter of Religious Practice
The article describes the facts of Landor’s case in a way that highlights the arbitrary power of the state. Landor had worn dreadlocks for nearly twenty years as an act of religious devotion. Prison officials knew this and had accommodated him. A federal appeals court had already ruled that forcing Rastafarian inmates to cut their hair violated federal law. Yet, with three weeks left in his sentence, he was transferred, a guard threw the court decision in the trash, and the warden ordered his head shaved. The commentary quotes the warden’s reply when Landor offered to call his lawyer: “[t]oo late for that.”
This episode is a perfect illustration of the behavior of a state that has no higher law than its own will. The warden’s contempt for a federal court ruling is not an anomaly; it is the logical consequence of a legal positivism that sees law as the command of the sovereign, not as a participation in right reason. When the sovereign is the state, and the state’s will is the ultimate source of law, then a prison warden, as an agent of the state, can override a court’s decision simply because he has the physical power to do so. The commentary does not draw this conclusion. It merely laments that Landor will not receive a dollar and calls on Congress to “make clear that no prison officials can ignore the religious rights of inmates under their charge and walk away with no consequences.”
The Catholic position, rooted in the teaching of Pope Leo XIII in *Immortale Dei* and Pope Pius XI in *Quas Primas*, is that the state is not the source of rights. Rights are antecedent to the state. The state exists to promote the common good, which includes the material and moral welfare of its citizens. The common good requires that society acknowledge the true God and the legitimate autonomy of the Church. A state that treats religious practice as a mere privilege to be granted or revoked at the discretion of prison officials, and that makes the protection of that privilege dependent on the consent of those officials, is a state that has abdicated its duty to God. It has become, in the words of St. Augustine, a “robber band” writ large.
The Dissent’s Naturalism: “Sleight of Hand” Without a Supernatural Foundation
The commentary reports that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justices Kagan and Sotomayor, dissented, condemning the “severance of rights and remedies” as a “sleight of hand.” The dissenters argued that the majority “magically transforms a federal statute into an invitation to be accepted or declined, deemed binding only if each particular defendant has explicitly agreed to be penalized.” They also pointed to the Court’s unanimous decision in *Tanzin v. Tanvir*, which allowed damages against individual officials under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), and asserted that “RLUIPA’s Spending Clause underpinning does not rob the statute’s text of its plain meaning.”
The commentary presents this dissent as a reasonable alternative interpretation of the law. From a Catholic perspective, the dissent is equally naturalistic. It operates entirely within the framework of legal positivism and statutory interpretation. The dissenters do not appeal to the natural law or to the divine right of the human person. They argue about the “plain meaning” of a statute and the consistency of one statute with another. They are like two groups of lawyers arguing over the fine print of a contract, while the house burns down. The fundamental question—whether a state official can forcibly shave an inmate’s head in violation of a sincerely held religious practice rooted in the Book of Numbers, and whether the state can then shield that official from personal responsibility by invoking the lack of “consent”—is a question that cannot be answered by looking at the text of RLUIPA alone. It requires an appeal to a higher law.
The commentary’s failure to make this appeal is its most glaring omission. It never mentions the natural law, the Ten Commandments, or the duty of the state to God. It treats the entire dispute as a technical problem of federal funding and statutory interpretation. This is the language of a Church that has been secularized, a commentary that has lost the sense of the supernatural. It is the language of a world that has decided that God is not relevant to the public square.
The “Gap in the Law” Is a Gap in the Moral Order
The commentary concludes by stating that Landor “has done something important by carrying a case that exposed a real gap in the law all the way to the highest court in the country.” It then asks, “The question now is whether Congress is paying attention.” The “gap” exposed by this case is not merely a gap in RLUIPA. It is a gap in the moral order of a nation that has formally rejected the authority of God over its laws.
The Catholic Church teaches that the state is bound by the natural law. The natural law is not a set of suggestions; it is a command of right reason, flowing from the eternal law of God. A state that permits its officials to violate the religious rights of inmates with impunity, and then shields those officials from personal responsibility by invoking the lack of “consent,” is a state that has placed itself above the natural law. It has declared that its own will is the highest law. This is the very definition of tyranny, however mild its form may appear in a particular case.
The commentary’s call for Congress to “make clear that no prison official can ignore the religious rights of inmates under their charge and walk away with no consequences” is a call for a more just law within the existing secular framework. It does not challenge the framework itself. It does not ask whether the state has the authority to define what “religious rights” are, or whether the state can grant or revoke those rights at will. It assumes that the state is the proper authority to adjudicate religious liberty claims. This is the fundamental error of modern liberalism, condemned by Pope Pius IX in the *Syllabus of Errors* and by Pope St. Pius X in *Lamentabili sane exitu*. The Church has always taught that the state is not the arbiter of religious truth. The state must acknowledge the true God and the legitimate autonomy of the Church. A state that treats religious liberty as a statutory privilege, to be granted or revoked by Congress, is a state that has usurped the place of God.
The Silence on the Supernatural: The Gravest Accusation
The most damning feature of the commentary is its complete silence on the supernatural dimension of religious liberty. Landor’s practice of wearing dreadlocks is described as “an act of religious devotion rooted in his Rastafarian faith—a practice modeled on the Nazarite vow described in the Book of Numbers.” The commentary does not evaluate the truth of the Rastafarian faith. It does not mention that the Nazarite vow is a divine command given by God to Moses in the Book of Numbers. It does not mention that the natural law requires every human being to honor his Creator. It treats Landor’s practice as a mere “religious preference” that the state has an interest in accommodating.
This silence is the gravest accusation against the commentary. It reveals a mentality that has lost the sense of the supernatural. The Catholic faith teaches that religious liberty is not a right to do whatever one wants in matters of religion. It is a right to do what God commands. The state must respect this right because the state is itself bound by the natural law to acknowledge the true God. A state that treats religious practice as a matter of personal preference, to be balanced against the state’s interest in “compelling reason” and “least intrusive means,” is a state that has denied the existence of a transcendent moral order. It has reduced religion to a private hobby, to be tolerated as long as it does not inconvenience the state.
The commentary’s call for Congress to act is a call for a more just law within a fundamentally unjust framework. It does not challenge the secular order. It does not call for the restoration of the social kingship of Christ. It does not demand that the state acknowledge its duty to God. It merely asks that the state be more consistent in enforcing its own statutes. This is the language of a Church that has been tamed by the world, a commentary that has forgotten the words of Our Lord: “He who is not with Me is against Me” (Matthew 12:30).
Conclusion: The Verdict of Integral Catholic Faith
The *Landor* decision, as reported in the National Register commentary, is a symptom of a legal and moral order that has formally rejected the sovereignty of God. The commentary itself, by framing the case as a technical problem of statutory interpretation and by calling for congressional action within the existing secular framework, reveals the bankruptcy of a Catholic commentary that has lost the sense of the supernatural. The “gap in the law” is not a gap in RLUIPA. It is a gap in the moral order of a nation that has decided that the state is the ultimate arbiter of religious practice.
From the perspective of integral Catholic faith, the only true remedy is the restoration of the social kingship of Christ. The state must acknowledge the true God, the natural law, and the legitimate autonomy of the Church. It must recognize that religious liberty is not a statutory privilege but a divine right. It must understand that its officials are not sovereign agents but ministers of God, bound by the natural law to respect the rights of the human person. Until this restoration occurs, every “gap in the law” will be filled by the arbitrary will of the state, and every cry for justice will be answered with the cold logic of contract principles.
The commentary’s final sentence—“It is time for Congress to make clear that no prison official can ignore the religious rights of inmates under their charge and walk away with no consequences”—is a plea for a more just law within a system that is itself unjust. It is a plea that will remain unanswered until the state acknowledges that there is a law higher than the will of Congress, a law that binds every human soul, and a law that no prison warden, no Supreme Court, and no Congress can ever justly ignore.
Source:
Supreme Court Rules 6-3 Against Prisoner Seeking Damages for Religious Rights Violation (ncregister.com)
Date: 23.06.2026