The National Catholic Register portal (July 2, 2026) publishes an editorial defending the so-called “Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne” against New York State’s enforcement of a 2023 law mandating “gender-affirming” care in long-term facilities. The editorial frames the conflict as a defense of “religious liberty” and “constitutional rights,” celebrates the intervention of the federal Department of Justice, and appeals to the Catholic identity of Governor Kathy Hochul. The thesis is clear: the conciliar sect’s religious orders are merely seeking fair treatment within the Masonic order. This is not a defense of the Faith; it is a capitulation to the very principles that have enslaved the Church to the State since 1789.
The Heresy of Religious Liberty as the Conciliar Sect’s Only Shield
The editorial’s entire argument rests on the condemned doctrine of religious liberty. It speaks of “constitutional rights of religious expression,” “religious-liberty rights,” and the nuns as “faithfully Catholic American citizens.” This vocabulary is not Catholic; it is Masonic. Pope Pius IX, in the Syllabus of Errors (1864), condemned the proposition: “Every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true” (Error 15) and “The Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church” (Error 55). Leo XIII, in Libertas (1888), taught that “liberty of thinking, and of publishing, whatsoever one chooses, is a right which cannot be conceded to man” because “the true religion is the only one which has a right to exist.”
The Register editorial does not demand that New York recognize the Social Kingship of Christ the King over its legislation. It does not denounce the state’s laws as null and void because they contradict the divine law. Instead, it begs the secular magistrate for an exemption—a “carve-out”—for its own collaborators. This is the libertas ecclesiae of the revolution, not the libertas filiorum Dei of the Gospel. By invoking the First Amendment, the editorial acknowledges the legitimacy of a Constitution that derives authority “from the people” rather than from God, a principle explicitly anathematized by the Syllabus (Error 39: “The State, as being the origin and source of all rights, is endowed with a certain right not circumscribed by any limits”).
The Conciliar “Sisters”: Invalid Vocation, Invalid Sacraments, False Obedience
Who are these “Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne”? They are members of a post-conciliar “religious institute” erected under the 1983 Code of Canon Law—a code promulgated by the antipope John Paul II, which itself flows from the heretical ecclesiology of Lumen Gentium. Their profession of vows was likely made according to the new rite, which omits the explicit renunciation of the world and the binding to the perpetual observance of the evangelical counsels under pain of mortal sin, as required by the immutable tradition of the Church (cf. Council of Trent, Sess. 25, De Regularibus). They live under a “Rule” adapted to the “signs of the times,” imbued with the spirit of Perfectae Caritatis, the conciliar decree that secularized religious life.
Furthermore, the “Mass” offered at Rosary Hill Home is almost certainly the Novus Ordo Missae—the “table of assembly” fabricated by the Freemason Bugnini under the antipope Paul VI, which Luther himself would have approved. The editorial speaks of “loving Christian care” but is silent on the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the sacraments, the state of grace, and the salvation of souls. This silence is the loudest accusation. A true Catholic hospice exists primarily to prepare souls for the Particular Judgment through the Extreme Unction and the Viaticum. The Register mentions none of this. The “care” described is purely naturalistic—palliative comfort for the body, indifferent to the supernatural destiny of the immortal soul.
Quas Primas: The Kingship of Christ vs. The “Rights” of Man
Pope Pius XI, in Quas Primas (1925), the very encyclical instituting the Feast of Christ the King, provides the doctrinal hammer that shatters the Register’s entire framework. Pius XI teaches: “When once men recognize, both in private and in public life, that Christ is King, society will at last receive the great blessings of real liberty, well-ordered discipline, peace and harmony.” He condemns “the plague of secularism, so-called laicism” which “began with the denial of Christ the Lord’s reign over all nations.”
The Register editorial does the exact opposite. It accepts the secularist premise: the State is the arbiter of rights; the Church is a private association seeking tolerance. It quotes the Declaration of Independence—a Masonic document inspired by the Enlightenment—as the standard of justice. Pius XI warns: “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 Hawthorne sisters’ lawsuit, backed by the DOJ, is an attempt to prop up those destroyed foundations with the timber of “religious freedom.” It will fail, because “there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12)—not the Constitution, not the DOJ, not the “free exercise clause.”
The “DOJ Intervention”: Satan Casting Out Satan
The editorial rejoices: “the federal Department of Justice intervened in the case on behalf of the nuns.” This is the paramasonic structure of the United States government—itself a product of the Masonic Enlightenment—posing as the defender of religion. The same DOJ enforces the slaughter of the unborn, the redefinition of marriage, and the persecution of true Catholics who reject the conciliar apostasy. The Register’s joy at this intervention reveals its total identification with the City of Man. It seeks protection from the potestas civilis rather than trusting in the potestas ecclesiastica of the true Church.
St. Robert Bellarmine, cited in the Defense of Sedevacantism source, teaches that a manifest heretic cannot be Pope because “he cannot be the head of something of which he is not a member.” The same principle applies to the State: a government that legislates sodomy and gender rebellion has ipso facto lost its legitimate authority, for “authority is from God” (Rom 13:1) and “he who resists the authority resists the ordinance of God”—but only when that authority acts in the Lord. The Register’s appeal to Caesar is an appeal to a usurper.
Lamentabili Sane: The Modernist Method of the Conciliar Apologists
The editorial’s rhetoric is pure Modernism, condemned by St. Pius X in Lamentabili Sane Exitu (1907) and Pascendi Dominici Gregis. It uses the language of “rights,” “dialogue,” “inclusion,” and “compassion” to mask a surrender of principle. Proposition 58 of Lamentabili condemns: “The science of philosophical things and morals and also civil laws may and ought to keep aloof from divine and ecclesiastical authority.” The Register does exactly this: it argues the case on purely civil, naturalistic grounds, divorced entirely from the rights of God.
Proposition 63 condemns: “The Church is incapable of effectively defending evangelical ethics, because it steadfastly adheres to its views, which cannot be reconciled with modern progress.” The Register implicitly agrees: it does not defend evangelical ethics (the condemnation of sodomy as a sin crying to heaven, Gen 18:20; the duty of the State to repress public vice). It defends a procedural “right” for its own faction. This is the hermeneutic of continuity with the world, not with Tradition.
The “Catholic” Governor: A Judas in the Sanctuary
The editorial appeals to Governor Hochul: “Gov. Hochul, who is Catholic herself, should immediately instruct her state’s healthcare bureaucrats to stop treading on the Dominican Sisters.” This is the most damning admission. A “Catholic” governor enforces laws mandating participation in gender mutilation. The Register does not call her to repentance, to confession, to resignation from office rather than cooperate with evil. It treats her as a fellow “Catholic citizen” who might be persuaded by political pressure. This is the clerico-liberal error condemned by Pius IX (Syllabus, Error 77: “In the present day it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the State”). Hochul is not a Catholic in the supernatural sense; she is a manifest heretic and apostate who, by her public acts, has defected from the Faith. Canon 188.4 of the 1917 Code (cited in Defense of Sedevacantism) declares that an office becomes vacant ipso facto by “public defection from the Catholic faith.” The Register’s appeal to her “Catholic identity” is a mockery of the very concept of the Faith.
The False Opposition: Gender Ideology vs. Conciliar Humanism
The editorial opposes “gender ideology” but accepts the anthropological premises that birthed it: the autonomy of the human will, the dignity of “the person” abstracted from the Creator, the primacy of conscience over divine law. The conciliar sect’s own documents—Gaudium et Spes, Dignitatis Humanae, Amoris Laetitia—have dissolved the natural law into “personalist” subjectivism. The “Theology of the Body” of the antipope John Paul II, with its phenomenological focus on “the nuptial meaning of the body,” paved the way for the separation of gender from sex. The Register fights the fruit while watering the root.
True Catholic opposition to the sodomitical agenda is not based on “comfort” for patients or “religious liberty” for nuns. It is based on the honor of God, the salvation of souls, and the objective disorder of the acts themselves (Rom 1:26-27; 1 Cor 6:9-10; Catechism of the Council of Trent). The Hawthorne sisters, by operating a facility licensed by the Masonic State, accepting its funding (Medicaid/Medicare), and submitting to its regulations for 120 years, have long since made their peace with the world. Their current lawsuit is not a martyrdom; it is a negotiation for the terms of their continued collaboration.
Conclusion: No King But Caesar
The Register editorial ends with a plea: “allow them… to continue their loving Christian care… without any further unjustified interference.” This is the cry of the servi Caesaris, not the servi Christi. The true Church, the Ecclesia Militans persevering in the catacombs of the true Mass and the true Faith (sedevacantist communities), does not ask Caesar for permission to exist. She obeys God rather than men (Acts 5:29). She knows that “the kingdom of Christ… encompasses all men… individuals, families, or states” (Pius XI, Quas Primas). She knows that the only solution to the tyranny of gender ideology is the Social Reign of Christ the King, established by the conversion of nations to the one, true, Catholic Faith, and the restoration of the Confessional State.
The Hawthorne sisters and their defenders at the Register have chosen the “broad way” of compromise with the world (Mt 7:13). They have their reward: a temporary injunction, perhaps, or a legislative carve-out. But they have lost the kingdom of heaven, for “whosoever shall deny me before men, I will also deny him before my Father who is in heaven” (Mt 10:33). Non possumus. We cannot serve two masters. The editorial is not a defense of the Faith; it is a manifesto of the Great Apostasy.
Source:
Don’t Tread on the Hawthorne Dominican Sisters (ncregister.com)
Date: 02.07.2026