Naturalistic Lobbying Masquerading as Religious Advocacy

The NC Register, a prominent post-conciliar “Catholic” news outlet, reports on a bipartisan letter from U.S. lawmakers to President Donald Trump, urging him to advocate at a summit for the release of Chinese Christian pastor Ezra Jin and other persecuted believers. The article frames this political intervention as a necessary defense of “religious freedom,” quoting the pastor’s daughter’s description of his work as establishing an independent “house church” to “let Christ be the center of our church,” in opposition to the state-controlled Three-Self Patriotic Movement. The piece details the Chinese government’s crackdown under the 2018 Regulations on Religious Affairs, listing abuses like arbitrary detention and surveillance. It concludes with the lawmakers’ call to use sanctions under the International Religious Freedom Act. This entire narrative, while appearing to champion the persecuted, is a profound manifestation of the secularist, naturalistic humanism condemned by the pre-1958 Magisterium, particularly in Quas Primas and the Syllabus of Errors. It represents a complete abandonment of the Catholic doctrine of the Social Reign of Christ the King, reducing the Church’s mission to a political lobby for “human rights” and enshrining the very errors of indifferentism and state supremacy over religious life that Pius IX anathematized.