The National Catholic Register, the flagship organ of the conciliar sect’s EWTN network, reports on the third annual Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference held in London from June 23–25, 2026. The gathering, co-founded by Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and British billionaire Paul Marshall, assembled over 4,000 attendees—including U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, Harvard professor Arthur Brooks, author Carrie Gress, and actor Kevin Sorbo—under the theme “The Age of Reconstruction.” Speakers from across the religious spectrum, including atheists, Jews, agnostics, evangelicals, and conciliar “Catholics,” debated the “spiritual foundations of the West,” liberty, demographics, and technology. EWTN’s Andreas Thonhauser notes the event was “not intended as a Christian conference” yet featured religion prominently, with former Aid to the Church in Need director Marc Fromager and lawyer Lorcán Price advocating a return to the “deposit of faith.” The Register presents this syncretic talk-fest as a serious effort to “rescue Western civilization.” This spectacle is not a restoration but a Masonic parody of the Social Kingship of Christ, substituting the Civitas Dei for a naturalistic “Alliance of Responsible Citizens” built on indifferentism, Protestantized anthropology, and the silent apostasy of the conciliar hierarchy.
The Naturalist Core: “Responsible Citizenship” vs. the Kingship of Christ
The very name—Alliance for Responsible Citizenship—betrays the naturalistic telos of the enterprise. The conference seeks to foster “human flourishing and prosperity by recognizing and drawing inspiration from the West’s ‘moral, cultural, economic, and spiritual foundations.'” Notice the deliberate omission: not the glory of God, not the salvation of souls, not the regnum Christi, but “human flourishing”—the summum bonum of Freemasonry and secular humanism. Pius XI, in Quas Primas, condemns this precise inversion: “When God and Jesus Christ… were removed from laws and states and when authority was derived not from God but from men, the foundations of that authority were destroyed… the entire human society had to be shaken, because it lacked a stable and strong foundation.” The ARC conference does not propose to restore the foundation; it proposes to build a taller tower upon the sand.
Konstantin Kisin’s opening address crystallizes the error: “‘Liberty’ is becoming a dirty word on both left and right… because many now mistakenly associate liberty with the grotesque excesses of liberalism, which has mutated from the pursuit of freedom from tyranny to the pursuit of freedom from reality.” This is the classic liberal distinction between “good” liberty (freedom from tyranny) and “bad” liberty (license), a distinction utterly foreign to Catholic doctrine. For the Church, libertas is not autonomy but the capacity to choose the true Good—libertas ad bonum. Leo XIII teaches in Libertas Praestantissimum that true freedom is “a faculty perfecting man, and hence it can be directed only to what is good.” Kisin’s “freedom from reality” is a secularized echo of the Catholic truth that error has no rights, yet he anchors it in “human connection, family, community” as ends in themselves, not ordered to the Beatific Vision. The Syllabus of Pius IX anathematizes the proposition that “Human reason, without any reference whatsoever to God, is the sole arbiter of truth and falsehood, and of good and evil” (Error 3). ARC’s entire project rests on this condemned proposition.
The Syncretic Stage: Indifferentism as the New Foundation
The article boasts of the conference’s religious diversity: “There were atheists and Jews, agnostics, evangelicals and Catholics.” Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an ex-Muslim atheist turned cultural “Christian,” argued for the superiority of the Christian religion, moderated by the conciliar apologist Ross Douthat. This is the ecumenism of the return inverted: not the conversion of all to the one Ark of Salvation, but a parliament of religions negotiating the terms of a secular peace. Pius IX condemns: “Every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true” (Error 15) and “Man may, in the observance of any religion whatever, find the way of eternal salvation” (Error 16). The ARC stage enacts these errors as virtues.
Kevin Sorbo, a Protestant actor, praises the conference for “reaching out to people that are like-minded and not wanting to create bigger divisions.” Unity in truth is replaced by unity in “like-mindedness”—a Masonic concordia that presupposes the relativity of dogma. The article notes the conference was “not intended as a Christian conference” yet “religion and faith were prominent themes.” This is the laïcité condemned by Pius XI: “The Church’s authority to teach men, to issue laws, to govern nations… was denied. And then, slowly, the Christian religion began to be equated with other false religions and shamelessly placed in the same category.” (Quas Primas). The “spiritual foundations of the West” panel, featuring a Jew, an atheist, and a “Catholic,” is not a witness to Christ the King but a witness to the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place.
The Peterson Cult: A Gnostic Guru for the Post-Christian Age
Jordan Peterson, the conference’s co-founder and intellectual lodestar, is presented as a “renowned Canadian psychologist, author and YouTube superstar.” He is, in reality, a Jungian gnostic who treats the Bible as a repository of archetypal “maps of meaning,” denying the historical facticity of the Resurrection and the Divinity of Christ while exploiting Christian symbolism for psychological utility. His “responsibility” ethic—“To take responsibility. Not by government diktat, not through the use of force, but by a voluntary choice exercised for the sake of not only your family and your community, but that of your own soul”—is a Pelagianized, self-actualization project stripped of grace, the Cross, and the necessity of the Church. Kisin’s invocation of Peterson as the one “brought into the world to remind us all to do” this borders on messianic blasphemy. The conciliar sect’s embrace of Peterson (evidenced by EWTN’s favorable coverage) signals its complete capitulation to the cult of man denounced by Pius XI: “The state is nothing else than a harmonious association of men… He is the author of prosperity and true happiness for individual citizens as well as for the state.” (Quas Primas, citing St. Augustine). Peterson offers the association without the Author.
The Protestantized “Catholic” Presence: EWTN and the Conciliar Complicity
The article’s author, Andreas Thonhauser, is identified as “vice president and chief global officer of EWTN, based in Rome.” EWTN, the media arm of the conciliar sect, legitimizes this Masonic assembly by reporting it as a positive “conservative” endeavor. Marc Fromager, former director of the conciliar charity Aid to the Church in Need, is quoted saying: “Participants come from the United States, Australia, Great Britain, many European countries, but we all face the same challenges… We have the same problems also in France.” This is the language of the Civitas Terrena, not the Civitas Dei. The “challenges” are demographic, technological, geopolitical—never the loss of the Faith, the extinction of the Mass, the vacancy of the Holy See.
Lorcán Price, a lawyer, offers the only explicitly Catholic-sounding quote: “We should go back to the real source of Western civilization, which is the Catholic Church. Go back to the deposit of faith that helps solve all these technical problems of this age.” Even here, the Faith is instrumentalized: the “deposit of faith” becomes a toolkit for “technical problems.” This is the modernist heresy of pragmatism condemned by St. Pius X in Pascendi and Lamentabili Sane Exitu: “The dogmas of faith should be understood according to their practical function, i.e., as binding in action, rather than as principles of belief” (Lamentabili, Prop. 26). Price speaks of the “Catholic Church” but operates within the conciliar sect which has de facto abandoned the deposit of faith for the “spirit of the age.” His presence at ARC, alongside atheists and Protestants, as a mere “voice” among others, is the practical denial of Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus and the Social Kingship of Christ.
The Silence on the Social Reign: Quas Primas Betrayed
Nowhere in the article—nor, by implication, in the conference—is there a call for the public recognition of the Kingship of Christ. Pius XI instituted the Feast of Christ the King precisely “that the faithful, by meditating upon these truths, may gain much strength and courage, enabling them to form their lives after the true Christian ideal” and that “nations will be reminded that not only private individuals but also rulers and princes are bound to give public honor and obedience to Christ.” (Quas Primas). The ARC conference proposes “reconstruction” without the Cornerstone. Mike Johnson, a Protestant politician, speaks of “liberty” and “responsibility” but not of the Dei Gratia authority of the state. The Syllabus condemns: “The civil government… has a right to an indirect negative power over religious affairs” (Error 41) and “The Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church” (Error 55). ARC’s “Alliance” is the practical realization of Error 55: a civil society “reconstructed” by a coalition of religions and irreligions, prescinding from the rights of the true Church.
The conference’s theme, “The Age of Reconstruction,” is a blasphemous parody of the Instaurare Omnia in Christo of St. Pius X. They seek to instaurare omnia in homine—to restore all things in man, specifically in the “responsible citizen.” This is the anthropocentric turn of the Second Vatican Council’s Gaudium et Spes weaponized for a “conservative” political project. As Pius XI warned: “If the Kingdom of Christ truly encompassed all, as it rightfully does, should we doubt the peace which the King of Peace brought to earth?” ARC doubts it implicitly, seeking peace in a “parliament of worldviews” rather than the Pax Christi in Regno Christi.
The Masonic Architecture: Rebuilding the Tower of Babel
The symbolism is unavoidable. A “British billionaire” (Paul Marshall) and a global media celebrity (Jordan Peterson) convene 4,000 “influencers” in London—the historic heart of Anglo-Masonry—to “reconstruct” civilization. The topics—“climate change to artificial intelligence, the war in Ukraine and the Middle East, demographic decline, and new definitions of feminism”—are the agenda of the globalist Novus Ordo Seclorum. The “conservative” dissent permitted (e.g., disagreement with Hirsi Ali) is the controlled opposition inherent in the Masonic dialectic: thesis (progressive globalism), antithesis (conservative nationalism), synthesis (the New World Order).
The article mentions the “image of the flood” appearing “apropos at this conference” via Kevin Sorbo’s upcoming Noah film. This is an unconscious confession: they know the deluge is coming, but they build an Ark of “responsible citizenship” instead of entering the one Ark of Salvation, the Catholic Church. Alex Story’s concern—“The decline of Western civilization is becoming more obvious… They are not sure how to address it”—is the despair of those who have lost the principium cognoscendi of history: Jesus Christus, heri et hodie, ipse et in saecula (Heb 13:8).
The conciliar sect’s hierarchy, represented by EWTN and Aid to the Church in Need, does not condemn this naturalistic assembly; it participates in it, seeking a seat at the table of the City of Man. This is the great apostasy foretold by St. Paul (2 Thess 2:3), where the mysterium iniquitatis operates under the guise of “defending the West.” The true West—the Christendom of the Social Kingship—is not “declining”; it is being eclipsed by the abomination of desolation in the holy place. The ARC conference is a symptom, not a cure. Non praevalebunt—but not because of Jordan Peterson, Mike Johnson, or the “Alliance for Responsible Citizenship.” They will fail because “unless the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it” (Ps 126:1). The only “reconstruction” is the restoration of the Catholic Church, the Mass of Ages, and the public reign of Christ the King. Everything else is vanitas vanitatum.
Source:
International Conference Promotes the West’s Founding Principles (ncregister.com)
Date: 02.07.2026