Chapter 3 - Our Lord Jesus Christ and Liberalism

“The truth will make you free!”

Our Lord Jesus Christ

After having explained that Liberalism is a revolt of man against the natural order conceived by the Creator, which leads to the individualistic, egalitarian, and concentration-camp-like city, it remains for me to show you how Liberalism also grapples with the supernatural order which is the plan of Redemption—that is to say, how Liberalism has for its final purpose to destroy the reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ, as much over the individual as over society.

With regard to the supernatural order, Liberalism proclaims two new kinds of independence which I will now explain.

1. The independence of reason and of science in regard to faith: this is rationalism, for which reason, sovereign judge, and measure of truth is self-sufficient and rejects any foreign domination.

This is what is called rationalism.

Liberalism here wishes to free reason from the Faith, which imposes dogmas on us, formulated in a definitive way, to which the intellect has to submit itself. The simple hypothesis that certain truths can go beyond the capacities of reason is inadmissible. Dogmas therefore must be constantly re-submitted to the test of reason and science because of the scientific progresses. The miracles of Jesus Christ, the supernatural elements in the lives of the saints have to be reinterpreted, demythologized. It will be necessary to carefully distinguish between the “Christ of faith,” a construction of the faith of the Apostles and of the primitive communities, and the “Christ of history,” who was only a mere man. You can grasp how much rationalism is opposed to the divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ and to the divine revelation!

I have already explained how the Revolution of 1789 was accomplished under the sign of the goddess of Reason. Already in 1751 the frontispiece of the Encyclopedia of Diderot represented the picture of the crowning of Reason. Forty years later, the deified Reason became the object of a public religious cult:

On the 20th brumaire¹ three days later, a few priests, the metropolitan bishop Gobel at their head, became “un-priested” before the Assembly, Chaumette proposed to solemnize that day when “reason had regained her empire.” They hastened to put such a noble idea into effect, and it was decided that the Cult of Reason would be celebrated in a splendid way at Notre Dame of Paris, which was specially adorned by the solicitude of the painter David for this occasion. At the top of a mountain of papier-maché, a small Greek temple sheltered a pretty dancing lady, who was very proud of having been promoted to Goddess of Reason; groups of young girls crowned with flowers were singing hymns. When the festival had been completed, remarking that the representatives were not a great number, they left in a procession with Reason, to go to visit the national Convention, whose President embraced the goddess.²

This overly radical rationalism did not please Robespierre. When, in March 1794, he had knocked down the “exaggerated ones,”

It seemed to him that his all-powerfulness should be founded on some high-mindedly theological foundations and that he would put a crowning touch onto his work by establishing a Cult of the Supreme Being, of which he would be the high priest. On the 18th floréal, Year II,³ he gave a speech “on the relations of religious and moral ideas with the republican principles, and on the national holidays,” on which the Convention voted its impressions. He affirmed in it that “the idea of the Supreme Being and of the immortality of the soul” is a continuous recall to justice, and that it is therefore social and republican. The new cult would be that of virtue. A decree was voted in, according to which the French people recognized the two axioms of Robespierre’s theology; and an inscription consecrating the fact was to be placed in the front of the churches. A list of the non-working holidays followed, which took up two columns. The first one on the list was that of the “Supreme Being and Nature”; it was decided that it would be celebrated on the 20th prairial.⁴ Thus was the celebration: beginning in the garden of the Tuileries where a gigantic pyre devoured in its flames the monstrous image of atheism, while Robespierre was pronouncing a mystical discourse, after which the crowd chanted hymns fit for the occasion, it continued with a parade up to the Champs-de-Mars, where all the people in attendance followed a chariot draped in red, drawn by eight oxen, loaded with ears of wheat and foliage, among which there sat enthroned a statue of Liberty.⁵

The very incoherences of rationalism, the “variations” of this “religion within the limits of simple reason,”⁶ sufficiently demonstrate their falseness.

2. The independence of man, of the family, of the professions, above all of the State, with regard to God, to Jesus Christ, to the Church; this is, according to one’s point of view, naturalism, laicism, latitudinarianism (or indifferentism)…from this you have the official apostasy of the peoples pushing away the social kingship of Jesus Christ, failing to recognize the divine authority of the Church.

I will illustrate these errors by means of a few considerations:

Naturalism maintains that man is limited to the sphere of nature and that he is in no way destined by God to the supernatural state. The truth is completely different: God did not create man in the state of pure nature. God constituted man at the outset in the supernatural state: God, says the Council of Trent, had formed the first man “in the state of holiness and of justice.”⁷ That man was deprived of sanctifying grace was the consequence of original sin, but the Redemption maintains God’s design: man remains destined to the supernatural order. To be reduced to the natural order is for man a violent state that God does not approve of. Here is what Cardinal Pie teaches, showing that the natural state is not in itself bad, but that it is the removal from the supernatural order which is bad:

You will teach, then, that human reason has its own power and its essential competence; you will teach that philosophical virtue possesses a moral and intrinsic goodness that God does not disdain to remunerate, in individuals and in peoples, by certain natural and temporal rewards, at times even by some loftier favors. You will also teach and you will prove, by arguments inseparable from the very essence of Christianity, that the natural virtues, that the natural lights, cannot lead man to his last end, which is the heavenly glory.

You will teach that dogma is indispensable, that the supernatural order in which the very Author of our nature has established us, by a formal act of His will and of His love, is obligatory and unavoidable; you will teach that Jesus Christ is not optional and that outside His revealed law there does not exist, there will never exist, any philosophical and peaceful golden means where anyone, a chosen soul or a vulgar soul, can find the repose for his conscience and a just rule for his life.

You will teach that it is important not only that man does the good, but that it is important that he does it in the name of the Faith, by a supernatural impulse, without which his acts will not attain the final goal that God has indicated for him, that is to say, the eternal happiness of heaven…."⁸

Thus, in the state of humanity concretely willed by God, society cannot be constituted or exist outside Our Lord Jesus Christ: this is the teaching of Saint Paul:

It is in Him that all things have been created, those that are in the heavens and those that are on the earth all has been created by Him and for Him. He is before all things, and all things subsist in Him.⁹

God’s plan is to “sum up everything in Christ,”¹⁰ that is to say, to bring back all things to one sole head, the Christ. Pope St. Pius X took this same expression of St. Paul as his motto: “Omnia instaurare in Christo,” to re-establish, to restore all in Christ: not only religion, but civil society:

No, Venerable Brethren—it must be recalled energetically in these times of social and intellectual anarchy, when everyone sets himself up as a teacher and a legislator,—society will not be built other than as God has built it. Society will not be built up, if the Church does not lay the foundations and direct the construction; no, civilization is no longer to be invented, or the new city to be built, in the clouds. It has been, it is; it is Christian civilization, it is the Catholic city. It is a question only of setting up and continually restoring it upon the natural and divine foundations against the ever reborn attacks of an unhealthy Utopia, of revolt, and of impiety: “omnia instaurare in Christo.”¹¹

Mr. Jean Ousset, in his masterpiece, Pour qu’ll règne¹² has some excellent pages on naturalism, in its second part entitled “The Oppositions Made to the Social Kingdom of Our Lord Jesus Christ”; he takes up three categories of naturalism: a “naturalism aggressive or clearly displayed” which denies even the existence of the supernatural, i.e., that of the rationalists (cf. above); then a moderated naturalism which does not deny the supernatural but refuses to grant it preeminence, because it holds that all religions are an emanation from the religious sense: this is the naturalism of the Modernists; finally there is the inconsequent naturalism, which recognizes the existence of the supernatural and its very divine preeminence, but considers it to be an “optional matter”—this is the practical naturalism of many lax Christians.

Laicism is a political naturalism: it contends that society can and should be constituted and that it can subsist, without taking into account at all God and religion, without considering Jesus Christ, without recognizing the rights of Jesus Christ to reign, that is to say, to inspire with His doctrine all legislation of the civil order. As a consequence, the laicists want to separate the Church from the State: the Church would be reduced to the common law of all associations before the State, and no account whatsoever would be taken of its divine authority and of its universal mission. From then on there would be instituted an instruction and even an education that are “public,” at times even obligatory, and lay, that is to say, atheistic. Laicism is State atheism without the name!

I will come back to this error, proper to the Liberalism of today, which enjoys the favor of the declaration on religious liberty of Vatican II.

Indifferentism proclaims that the profession of one religion or of another by man is indifferent. Pius IX condemns this error: “Man is free to embrace and to profess the religion which, led by the light of his reason, he has judged to be true” (Syllabus, condemned proposition number 15); or: “Men can find the path of salvation in the worship of any religion” (number 16); or again: “One can indeed hope for the eternal salvation of all those who do not find themselves at all in the true Church of Christ” (number 17).

It is easy to guess the rationalist or modernist roots of these propositions. To this error is added the indifferentism of the State on religious matters: the State poses as a principle that it is not capable (agnosticism) of recognizing the true Religion as such, and thus that it has to concede the same freedom to all the cults.

It would agree to grant to the Catholic Religion, if need be, a de facto precedence, because it is the religion of the majority of the citizens. To recognize it as true, that would be, it says, to want to re-establish theocracy; this would be in any case to attribute to the State a competence that it does not have, it asserts, to ask it to judge on the truth or the falsity of a religion.

Bishop Pie (not yet a Cardinal) ventured to expose this profound error, as well as the Catholic doctrine on the social Reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ, to the emperor of the French, Napoleon III. In a memorable interview, with a true apostolic courage, he gave the prince a lesson on Christian law, on what is called the public law of the Church. With this famous conversation, I will finish this chapter.

It was on March 15, 1856, Father Théotime of Saint Just tells us, from whom I am borrowing this quotation.¹³ To the Emperor, who was boasting of having done for religion more than the Restoration itself,¹⁴ the bishop replied:

“I am eager to render justice to the religious tendencies of Your Majesty, and I know how to recognize, Sire, the services that you have rendered to Rome and to the Church, particularly during the first years of your government. Has not the Restoration perhaps done more than you? Let me add that neither the Restoration, nor you, have done for God what should have been done, because neither the one nor the other of you has raised His throne again, because neither the one nor the other of you has disavowed the principles of the Revolution whose practical consequences nonetheless you are fighting, because the social gospel on which the State inspires itself is still the declaration of the rights of man, which is nothing else, Sire, than the formal denial of the Rights of God.

Now, it is the right of God to govern over the States as over individuals. There is nothing else that Our Lord came to look for on earth. He must reign here by inspiring the laws, by sanctifying the morals, by enlightening education, by directing the councils, by ruling over the actions of the governments as over those of the governed. Everywhere where Jesus Christ does not exercise this rule, there is disorder and decadence.

Now, I have the right to tell you that He is not reigning among us and that our Constitution is not that of a Christian and Catholic State—far from that. Our public law indeed establishes that the Catholic Religion is that of the majority of the French, but it adds that the other forms of worship have the right to an equal protection. Is this not tantamount to proclaiming that the Constitution equally protects truth and error? Well! Sire, do you know what Jesus Christ answers to governments who make themselves guilty of such a contradiction? Jesus Christ, King of heaven and earth, replies to them, " I too, governments who succeed one another by overturning one another, I also grant you an equal support. I have conceded this protection to your uncle the emperor; I have given the same patronage to the Bourbons, the same defense to Louis-Philippe, the same shelter to the Republic; and to you likewise the same protection will be granted.”

The emperor stopped the bishop: “Yet, do you believe that the age in which we are living admits of that state of things, and that the moment has come to establish that exclusively religious reign that you ask of me? Do you not think, Your Excellency, that that would be to let loose all the evil passions?”

“Sire, when the great political men like Your Majesty raise the objection to me that the moment has not come, I can only yield, because I am not a great political person. But I am a bishop, and as a bishop I reply to them, “The moment has not come for Jesus Christ to rule,—well! Then the moment has not come for the government to endure.”¹⁵

To close these two chapters on these aspects of Liberalism, I would like to try to emphasize what is the most fundamental in the emancipation that it proposes to men, alone or joined in society. Liberalism, as I have explained is the soul of all revolution; it is equally, since its birth in the sixteenth century, the omnipresent enemy of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the God Incarnate. From that point on, there is no doubt; I can affirm that Liberalism is identified with the revolution. Liberalism is the revolution in all spheres, the radical revolution.

Bishop Gaume wrote some lines on the Revolution, which seem to me completely to characterize Liberalism itself.

If, tearing away its mask, you ask it (of the Revolution): “Who are you?” it will say to you, “I am not what is thought. Many people speak of me, and very few know me. I am neither carbonarism, nor rioting, nor the change from monarchy to republic, nor the substitution of one dynasty for another, nor the temporary disturbance of the public order. I am not the howlings of the Jacobins, nor the furies of la Montagne, nor the battle of the barricades, nor looting, nor arson, nor the agrarian law, nor the guillotine, nor the drownings. I am not Marat, or Robespierre, or Babeuf or Mazzini, or Kossuth. These men are my sons, they are not I. These things are my works, they are not I. These men and these things are transitory facts, and I am a permanent state.

I am the hatred of all order which man has not established and in which he is not king and God all together. I am the proclamation of the rights of man without care for the rights of God. I am the foundation of the religious and social state upon the will of man instead of the will of God. I am God dethroned and man in His place. This is why I am called Revolution, that is to say, overthrow….”¹⁶