Chapter 2 - The Natural Order and Liberalism

“Liberty is not at the beginning, but at the end. It is not at the root, but in the flowers and the fruits.”

Charles Maurras

There is a work that I recommend particularly to those who want to have a concrete and complete outline of Liberalism, in order to be able then to prepare exposés on Liberalism, intended for people who are little conversant with this error, with its ramifications, and who are accustomed to “think liberally,” even among Catholics attached to tradition. There are often those who do not realize the depth of the penetration of Liberalism in all of our society and in all of our families.

It is easily recognized that the “advanced Liberalism” of a Giscard d’Estaing in the years around 1975 brought France to Socialism; but it is believed in all good faith that the “liberal right” can deliver us from totalitarian oppression. Some well-meaning people do not know really whether they should approve or find fault with the “liberalization of abortion,”

but they would be ready to sign a petition to liberalize euthanasia. In actual fact, everything that carries the label of liberty has been, for two centuries, surrounded with the halo of prestige that surrounds this word that has become sacrosanct. Nonetheless, it is by this word that we are perishing; it is Liberalism that is poisoning civil society as well as the Church. Therefore, let us open this book of which I am speaking to you: Liberalism and Catholicism by Father Roussel, published in 1926; and let us read that page which depicts Liberalism very concretely (pages 14-16), adding to this a little commentary:

The Liberal is a fanatic for independence; he extols it to the point of absurdity, in every domain.

So there you have a definition. We are going to see how it is applied, what are the liberations that Liberalism insists on.

1. The independence of the true and of the good in regard to being: this is the relativistic philosophy of mobility and of becoming. The independence of the intelligence with regard to its object: being sovereign, the reason does not have to submit itself to its object; it creates it; whence the radical evolution of truth; relativistic subjectivism.

Let us emphasize the two key words: subjectivism and evolution.

Subjectivism means introducing freedom into the intelligence, whereas on the contrary the nobility of the intelligence consists in submitting itself to its object, that is, in the adæquatio or conformity of the thinking subject with the known object. The intellect works like a camera; it must fit with precision the intelligible touches of reality. Its perfection consists in its fidelity to the real. It is for this reason that the truth is defined as the conformity of the intellect with the thing. Truth is that quality of thought by which it is in accord with the thing, with that which is. It is not the intellect that creates the things; it is the things that impose themselves onto the intellect, such as they are. Therefore the truth of what is affirmed depends on that which is; it is an objective thing. The person who is searching for the truth has to renounce himself, to renounce any construction of his own mind, to renounce any idea of “inventing” the truth.

On the contrary, in subjectivism, it is the reason that constructs the truth: we have the submission of the object to the subject! The subject becomes the center of all things. Things are no longer what they are, but what I think. In such a case, man disposes of truth according to his own taste. This error will be called idealism in its philosophical aspect, and Liberalism in its moral, social, political, and religious aspect. As a consequence, the truth will be different according to individuals and social groups. The truth is then necessarily shared. No one can claim to have it exclusively in its wholeness; it is made and it is sought after without end. It can be guessed how contrary that is to Our Lord Jesus Christ and to His Church.

Historically, this emancipation of the subject in relation to the object (to that which is) was brought about by four persons. Luther, at first, refused the magisterium of the Church and kept only the Bible. Since he rejected every created intermediary between man and God, he introduced the free investigation, starting with a false notion of Scriptural inspiration: individual inspiration! Then Descartes, followed by Kant, systematized subjectivism: the intellect is closed up on itself, and it knows only its own thought. This is the “cogito” of Descartes, the “categories” of Kant. Things themselves are unknowable. Finally, in Rousseau, emancipated from its object, having lost common sense, the subject is left without defense faced with the common opinion. The thought of the individual is going to be dissolved into the public opinion, that is to say in what everyone or the majority thinks; and this opinion will be created by the techniques of group dynamics organized by the media, which are in the hands of the financiers, the politicians, the Freemasons, etc. By its own impulse, intellectual Liberalism falls into the totalitarianism of thought. After the rejection of the object, we are seeing the evanescence of the subject, which is thus ripe for undergoing all forms of slavery. Subjectivism, by exalting freedom of thought, results then in the crushing of thought.

The second mark of intellectual Liberalism, we have mentioned, is evolution. By rejecting the submission to the real, the Liberal is drawn to reject the immutable essences of things; for him there is no nature of things, there is no stable human nature ruled by definitive laws set down by the Creator. Man is in perpetual progressive evolution; the man of yesterday is not the man of today; one collapses into relativism. What is more, man himself creates himself; he is the author of his own laws, which he has to refashion incessantly according to the sole inflexible law of needed progress. Then it is evolutionism, in all realms: biological (Lamarck and Darwin), intellectual (rationalism and its myth of the indefinite progress of human reason), moral (emancipation from the “taboos”), political-religious (emancipation of societies with regard to Jesus Christ).

The crest of evolutionary delirium is reached with Father Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), who affirms, in the name of a pseudo-science and a pseudo-mysticism, that matter becomes spirit, that nature becomes the supernatural, that humanity becomes the Christ: a triple confusion of an evolutionist monism irreconcilable with the Catholic Faith.

For the Faith, evolution is death. They speak of a Church that evolves, they want an evolving faith. “You must submit to the living Church, to the Church of today,” they were writing to me from Rome in the mid seventies, as if the Church of today should not be identical to the Church of yesterday. I answered them, “Under those conditions, tomorrow it will no longer be what you are saying today!” Those people have no concept of truth, of being. They are Modernists.

2. The independence of the will in regard to the intellect: an arbitrary and blind force, the will must not at all be concerned with the judgements of reason; it creates the good just as reason brings forth the true.

In a word, it is the arbitrary: “Sic volo, sic jubeo, sit pro ratione voluntas!—Thus I will, thus I order, let my will be my reason!”

3. The independence of the conscience with regard to the objective rule, and to the law; conscience sets itself up as the supreme rule of morality.

According to the Liberal, law limits freedom and imposes onto it a constraint which is first of all moral: the obligation; and finally physical: the sanction. The law and its constraints run counter to human dignity and to conscience. The Liberal confuses liberty and license. Now Our Lord Jesus Christ is the living Law, being the Word of God; from there we can gauge once more how deep the opposition of the Liberal towards Our Lord is.

4. The independence of the anarchical powers of feeling with regard to reason: this is one of the characteristics of romanticism, the enemy of the primacy of reason.

The romantic takes pleasure in brewing up slogans; he condemns violence, superstition, fanaticism, integrism, racism, because of what those words conjure up in the imagination and in the human passions. In the same spirit, he makes himself the apostle of peace, of liberty, of tolerance, of pluralism.

5. The independence of the body in regard to the soul, of the animal nature in regard to reason—this is the radical overthrowing of human values.

They exalt sexuality, they sacralize it. They reverse the order between the two ends of marriage (procreation and education on the one hand, allaying of concupiscence on the other) by determining for it as a primary end carnal pleasure and “the self-fulfillment of the two spouses” or the two “partners.” That will be the destruction of marriage and of the family; this is without mentioning the aberrations which transform the sanctuary of marriage into a biological laboratory or which reduce the infant not yet born to a lucrative ingredient in cosmetics.¹

6. The independence of the present with regard to the past, whence the contempt for tradition and the morbid love of novelty under the pretext of progress.

This is one of the causes that St. Pius X attributes Modernism to:

The remote causes seem to Us capable of being reduced to two: curiosity and pride. Curiosity, by itself, if it is not wisely regulated, suffices to explain all the errors. This is the opinion of our predecessor Gregory XVI, who wrote: “It is a lamentable spectacle to see how far the wanderings of human reason go once the spirit of novelty is given way to.”²

7. The independence of the individual in regard to all of society, all natural authority and hierarchy: independence of children vis-a-vis their parents, of woman with regard to her husband (women’s liberation); of the worker in regard to his employer; of the working class towards the bourgeois class (class struggle).

Political and social Liberalism is the reign of individualism. The basic unit of Liberalism is the individual.³ The individual is supposed to be an absolute subject of rights (the “Rights of Man”), without there being a question of duties which bind him to his Creator, to his superiors, or to his fellow-creatures, or, above all, of the Rights of God. Liberalism makes all the natural social hierarchies disappear; but in doing this, in the end it leaves the individual alone and without defense in regard to the crowd of which he is only an interchangeable element, and which swallows him up entirely.

The social doctrine of the Church, on the contrary, affirms that society is not a shapeless mass of individuals,⁴ but an arranged organism of coordinated and hierarchically arranged social groups: the family, the enterprises and trades, then the professional corporations, finally the State. The corporations unite employers and workers in the same profession for the protection and the promotion of their common interests. The classes are not antagonistic, but naturally complementary.⁵ The law called Le Chapelier of June 14, 1791, by prohibiting the associations, killed the corporations which had been the instrument of social peace since the Middle Ages. This law was the fruit of liberal individualism, but instead of freeing the workers, it crushed them. In the nineteenth century, the assets of the liberal bourgeoisie had crushed the formless mass of workers who had become the proletariat, a way was found, at the initiative of the socialists, to regroup the workers in trade unions. The trade unions only made the social war worse by extending the factitious opposition of capital and proletariat to the scale of all of society. It is known that this opposition, or “class struggle,” was at the origin of the Marxist theory of dialectical materialism: so that a false social problem created a false system: Communism.⁶ Now, since Lenin, the class struggle has become, by means of communist usage, the privileged weapon of the Communist Revolution.⁷

Let us then hold on to this undeniable historical and philosophical truth: Liberalism leads by its natural propensity to totalitarianism and to the Communist Revolution. It can be said that it is the soul of all the modern revolutions and of the Revolution itself in short.