It’s a piece about what the Catholic Church — and the world — needs from the next pontiff. As the moral and cultural tides continue to shift, the question of who will lead the Church is not just a matter for Catholics, but for civilization itself.

You can read it here: https://thefederalist.com/2025/05/07/the-next-pope-must-be-a-moral-voice-in-an-immoral-world/

I’ll continue publishing original essays here at Faith and Country, but I wanted to share this milestone with you all. Thank you for reading and being part of this growing community.

— Matt

The DOJ’s investigation is a critical and necessary move. But let’s not be naïve; Washington’s brazen disregard for the sacred didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s simply the most recent, most shameless expression of a trend that has been quietly gaining momentum across the country. The outrage this law provoked is justified, but it must not distract us from the larger story. The erosion of religious liberty in America is not a sudden collapse. It’s a slow rot, creeping through state legislatures, camouflaged by moral rhetoric. These attacks rarely declare themselves as such; they hide behind language of safety, progress, and reform. But the effect is the same: The creeping assumption that government has the right to dictate even the terms of moral conscience.

In the Catholic faith — and many others — the seal of confession is absolute. A priest may never, under any circumstances, reveal what is confessed. Not for personal gain. Not under threat. Not even to stop a crime. This isn’t policy, it’s doctrine. Breaking the seal means immediate excommunication. This is not just a matter of conscience, it’s a matter of salvation. To violate the seal is to sever a priest’s connection to the sacrament itself. It would be the equivalent of spiritual suicide. For Catholics, the confessional is not symbolic. It is sacred; a place where the penitent speaks not to a man, but to God. This is not a gray area. This is one of the clearest, most immovable lines in Catholic moral theology.

To those outside the Church, this may seem extreme. But the Constitution protects the right to hold and live out such beliefs, no matter how inconvenient they may be to the state. Religious freedom means nothing if it only applies to beliefs that are socially palatable or politically safe. The test of a free society is whether it can tolerate religious obligations that conflict with civil convenience. Washington’s law fails that test, and it does so proudly. It legislates over the objections of faith communities, deliberately overriding centuries of sacred tradition to make a political point. In doing so, it exposes its own hostility; not just toward abuse, but toward the faith itself.

Washington, New Hampshire, and West Virginia may be the only states that explicitly deny clergy-penitent privilege in abuse cases so far. But they are far from alone. In states like Texas, Tennessee, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Rhode Island, the law implicitly denies the privilege by designating "any person" as a mandatory reporter, with no stated exemption for clergy, effectively forcing the same outcome by omission. That might sound innocuous on paper, but in practice, it means a priest hearing confession could be prosecuted for obeying the Church’s command. The result is the same: Priests are placed in a legal bind. Violate their vows, or face the full weight of the law.

This dismantling of clergy-penitent privilege has gone largely unnoticed, but Washington’s move makes the pattern undeniable. This ought to send a chill down the spine of anyone who still believes in the separation of church and state; a principle meant not to constrain religion, but to protect it from state intrusion. When the government claims the power to insert itself into the confessional, it claims authority over the most private corners of the human soul. This is not simply an issue of religious liberty; it is an issue of metaphysical sovereignty. Are there places where Caesar must not go? Or do we now believe the state may sit even in the confessional?

All of this is happening while attorney-client privilege remains untouched. Doctor-patient confidentiality is still respected. Only clergy are singled out, as if the sanctity of the confessional is less real, less deserving of protection. This is not a neutral public safety measure. It is a declaration of mistrust. In a culture increasingly hostile to religious authority, the confessional becomes a target. The selective application of privilege betrays the deeper reality: Our culture no longer treats religious belief as legitimate. It treats it as a dangerous curiosity to be managed.

This is not about keeping children safe. If it were, the law would be broader. It would include secular privileges. It would recognize that abuse is not confined to religious settings. But that’s not what’s happening here. This is about which institutions the modern state trusts, and which ones it resents. The Church, with its moral claims and immovable doctrines, is a threat to the ideology of limitless state authority. And so, it must be undermined. The abuse crisis has become a pretext for redefining the place of religion in public life. It is no longer about rooting out evil. It is about asserting dominance.

There is no question that child abuse is a moral horror that must be met with justice. But this law doesn’t deliver justice. It doesn’t give victims recourse. It doesn’t hold perpetrators accountable. It simply declares that the government may intrude into what is meant to be inviolable and sacred. Justice requires prudence, not overreach. Laws like this one confuse vengeance with virtue. They don’t serve the innocent, they satisfy the powerful. That distinction matters. Justice without boundaries becomes a weapon, and in the hands of the state, that weapon is often turned on the very institutions that once restrained it.

This isn’t about stopping future abuse. The Church should certainly be held accountable when it fails, but the answer is not to criminalize confession. The answer is not to obliterate the line between Caesar and God. The sacramental seal is not an obstacle to justice, it is a boundary that prevents tyranny. If the state can force a priest to betray the confessional, it can force anyone to violate their conscience. The principle, once broken, will not be contained.

Even on its own terms, this law fails. Confession, in any context, only works when trust is absolute. Nobody discloses wrongdoing if they expect it to be reported to the state. The seal of confession isn’t a loophole, it’s the very condition that makes confession possible. Eliminate the seal, and you eliminate confession. What this law offers is not transparency, it’s sabotage. It will not help bring abusers to justice. It will only guarantee that they remain hidden. Worse still, it will train the faithful to see their priests not as shepherds, but as agents of the state.

What’s left isn’t a community free of heinous crime. It’s silence. And that silence protects no one. It robs the penitent of redemption, the priest of his vocation, and the law of its legitimacy. It turns a sacred encounter into a legal risk, and in doing so, destroys it. Where once there was a path to grace, there will now be fear and avoidance. The net result is not safety, it is spiritual desolation disguised as public policy.

The First Amendment doesn’t need to be repealed to be destroyed. It only needs to be eroded one law, one court ruling, one precedent at a time. And that’s exactly what’s been happening. Every exception carved into religious liberty is a doorway left ajar. And through those doors creep policies that would once have been unthinkable. We are watching, in real time, the shrinking of the sacred into the permitted. And what is merely permitted can soon be forbidden.

We should be grateful the DOJ is investigating this law. But the battle is bigger than one statute. This is about whether America still recognizes that some things are beyond the reach of state power. We are not simply fighting for priests. We are fighting for a principle; that some things belong to God alone. That there are lines the state cannot cross, not because the Church says so, but because the state has no jurisdiction over the soul.

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At the heart of the case is school curriculum in Montgomery County, Maryland, where public schools introduced a set of LGBT-themed books to students as young as four years old. These are not biology or health education materials. They are storybooks, some featuring romantic same-sex plotlines, others promoting transgender identity to children still learning to read. There is a world of difference between teaching teenagers to think critically and expecting kindergartners to process concepts like same-sex romance or gender transition. These are formative years, and the line between education and indoctrination is thinnest when children are too young to question what they are told. These materials are not neutral. They are loaded with ideology, presented as moral fact and delivered without context or room for dissent.

When parents asked to opt out, the school district said no. The opt-out policy, once available, was revoked. The message was clear: If your faith tells you something different from what the district is teaching, that is your problem and your child will sit through it anyway.

The district claims that honoring opt-out requests would place too heavy a burden on schools, making it impractical to offer alternatives. But constitutional rights do not vanish simply because they are inconvenient for administrators. If respecting freedom of conscience becomes optional whenever it causes paperwork or scheduling challenges, then those freedoms are meaningless. The burden of protecting individual rights has always rested on the government, not the governed. That burden is not a flaw in our system. It is the cost of living in a country that respects diverse convictions over coercion.

This is not about teaching children to respect differences. It is about the state deciding which values are acceptable to believe and using the classroom to enforce that judgment on children before they are old enough to push back.

Books like Prince & Knight, Love, Violet and Born Ready do not simply present characters with different identities. They portray romantic relationships, gender transitions and ideological claims about sex and identity as good, brave and beyond question. For many religious families, these are not just controversial themes. They are teachings that directly contradict what is taught at home, in church and in conscience.

Opting out does not mean removing the book from the school curriculum. It does not mean shutting down discussion or denying anyone else access. It simply means giving families the dignity to say, "This lesson crosses a line for us, and we would prefer our child not be part of it." That is not disruption. It is accommodation. It is how a free society balances competing convictions without coercion.

The Supreme Court has long recognized that parents are the primary educators of their children. In Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925), the Court affirmed that "the child is not the mere creature of the State," and that parents, not the government, hold the right to direct their children's upbringing. That principle has stood for nearly a century. Now, it is being quietly hollowed out under the name of inclusion.

If the Court rules against the parents, the consequences will not stop with these books. If the state can compel your child to absorb teachings on sexuality that violate your faith, where are the limits? Could it one day force participation in political reeducation programs? Could it compel attendance at clinics or workshops that directly oppose a family's religious or moral beliefs? When parental rights are treated as administrative inconveniences, they cease to be rights at all.

This precedent would give license to districts anywhere to mandate moral and ideological content of any kind, with no regard for the convictions of the families they serve. Today it is gender identity. Tomorrow it might be partisan narratives about race, politics or history. Once the state gains unrestricted power to shape what your child is taught about right and wrong, your rights become conditional, and conditional rights are no rights at all.

Tolerance does not mean forcing every family to agree. It means allowing space for peaceful disagreement, space for faith, conscience and conviction to coexist in a diverse society. When the government closes that space, it is not fostering unity. It is imposing orthodoxy.

This case is not about tolerance; it is about control. It is not about books; it is about boundaries. If the Supreme Court gets this wrong, the state will not just be in the classroom. It will be in the living room, too. Americans need to remind schools that they work for us and not the other way around. If we don’t stand up now, they’ll take our silence as surrender.