2026-06-24

The Brazilian Homeschooling Persecution: A Symptom of the Post-Conciliar Dictatorship of Relativism and the Reign of the Naturalistic State

EWTN News portal reports on a Brazilian couple, Audato and Ieda Denardi, sentenced to 50 days in prison for the “crime” of intellectual neglect, simply because they dared to shield their children from the toxic gender ideology promoted by the state. This case is not an isolated incident of legal overreach but a glaring manifestation of the totalitarian spirit inherent in the post-conciliar world, where the secular state, acting as the enforcer of the world’s ideology, usurps the primary, inalienable right of parents to educate their children according to the immutable truths of the Catholic faith.

The Denardi case exposes the profound hypocrisy of a world that claims to champion “human rights” while systematically dismantling the most fundamental God-given right: the right of parents to raise their children in the fear and admonition of the Lord. The Brazilian court’s ruling, which criminalizes parents for failing to include state-approved “gender and sex education” in their curriculum, is a direct assault on the integrity of the family and the natural law. The judge’s reasoning—that the girls’ rejection of “morally questionable” popular music and their focus on classical piano and languages constitutes a “deficiency” in their cultural education—is a grotesque parody of justice. It reveals a state that views the formation of virtue and piety as a threat to its secularist agenda.

This persecution is a direct consequence of the post-conciliar Church’s capitulation to the world. The Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Christian Education, *Gravissimum Educationis*, while paying lip service to the role of parents, opened the door to state intervention by emphasizing the need for education to adapt to the “modern world” and promote a vague “solidarity” with all men. This conciliar document, a product of the modernist spirit, failed to reaffirm the absolute primacy of parents and the Church in education, instead ceding ground to the secular state. The Brazilian court’s actions are the logical fruit of this conciliar ambiguity. When the Church no longer asserts its divine mandate to teach all nations, the state will inevitably fill the void with its own dogmas of secularism, relativism, and ultimately, Satanism.

The case also highlights the utter bankruptcy of the “religious liberty” rhetoric promoted by the post-conciliar Church and its apologists. While organizations like ADF International rightly denounce this as a “grotesque abuse of criminal law,” they fail to trace the root of the problem. The root is not merely a bad law in Brazil; it is the entire post-conciliar framework that has reduced the Church to a mere “NGO” within the secular order, stripped of her divine authority and her mission to guide nations. The Brazilian state is simply applying the logic of the world: if there is no absolute truth, if all values are relative, then the state becomes the ultimate arbiter of what constitutes a “good” education. The Denardis are being punished for refusing to submit their children to the state’s new religion of gender ideology.

The persecution of the Denardi family is a stark reminder of the prophetic warnings of Pope Pius XI in his encyclical *Quas Primas*: “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.” The Brazilian state, by imprisoning parents for educating their children according to Christian values, has declared itself an enemy of Christ the King. This is not merely a “dictatorial” state, as Mrs. Denardi correctly perceives; it is a satanic state, one that seeks to destroy the family, the foundational cell of society and the Church. The only true response is a return to the integral Catholic faith, a complete rejection of the conciliar “Church” and its false “dialogue” with the world, and a public, unwavering profession of the social reign of Christ the King over all nations, including Brazil. Anything less is a capitulation to the abomination of desolation that now occupies not only the Vatican but increasingly, the courts of the world.