Chapter 7 - FILL IN HERE

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Jesus Christ:

King of the Republics?

The majority does not make the truth; it is the truth that should make the majority.

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I still have much to say about Liberalism. However, I want you to understand well that it is not personal opinions that I am proposing to you. This is why I am desirous of advising you about papal documents and not about personal sentiments that would easily be attributed to an early formation received at the French Seminary in Rome. Father Le Floch, who was then the superior there, had indeed the reputation of a traditionalist to a very marked degree. Therefore it will be said of me, “He has been influenced by what was told him in the seminary!” Well, I do not deny this influence; even more, every day I thank the good Lord for having given me Father Le Floch as superior and as a teacher. He was accused then of making politics: and God knows whether it is a crime, or the opposite, to make the politics of Jesus Christ and to raise up political men who will use all the legitimate, even all the legal means in order to drive away from the city the enemies of Our Lord Jesus Christ!1 Indeed, Father Le Floch never meddled in politics, even in the thick of the plot put together against l’Action Française2 was misled and condemned L’Action Française. His successor, Pius XII, had to lift his sanction. The harm was already done: 1926 marked in France a decisive stage in the “occupation” of the Church by the liberal group, called “liberal Catholic,” and of the crisis which ensued at the time when I was a seminarian.

In return, what Father Le Floch constantly spoke to us about was the danger of Modernism, of Sillonism, of Liberalism. It was by basing himself on the Encyclicals of the popes that Father Le Floch succeeded in securing in us a firm, solidly supported conviction, founded on the immutable Doctrine of the Church, of the danger of these errors. It is this same conviction that I desire to communicate to you, like a torch that one passes on to his posterity, like a light that will preserve you from these prevailing errors that are more than ever in ipsis Ecclesiae venis et visceribus, in the very veins and bowels of the Church, as St. Pius X used to say.

You will understand therefore that my personal political thought on the government that is best suited to France, for example, is of little importance. Besides, the facts speak for themselves: what the French monarchy had not succeeded in doing, democracy has brought into being: five bloody revolutions (1789, 1830, 1848, 1870, 1945), four foreign invasions (1815, 1870, 1914, 1940), two plunderings of the Church, exilings of the religious orders, suppressions of Catholic schools, laicizations of institutions (1789 and 1901), etc. Still, certain people will say, Pope Leo XIII asked for the “rallying” of French Catholics to the republican regime.3 (This, by the way, provoked a political and religious catastrophe.) Others moreover criticize this act of Leo XIII by qualifying it, as well as its author, as liberal.—I do not believe that Leo XIII was a liberal or, even less, a democrat. No, he simply thought that he was forming a good political combination for the good of religion in France; but it is clear that he was forgetting the irremediably liberal, masonic, and anti-Catholic origin and constitution of French democracy.

The Democratic Ideology

Sprung from the liberal postulate of the individual-king, the democratic ideology then is built up logically: individuals go into their social state by means of a conventional pact: the social contract, which is, says Rousseau, a “total transfer of every associate, with all his rights, to the whole community.” From that derive:

-the necessary popular sovereignty: the people are necessarily sovereign, they have their power only from themselves, and they keep it even after they have elected their governors;

-the illegitimacy of every regime that does not have as a basis the popular sovereignty, or that in which the governors assure them that they receive their power from God.

As a consequence of this, we have, in practice:

-the struggle for the universal establishment of democracy;

-the “crusade of the democracies” against every regime that makes reference to divine authority, which would be called then a “sacral” or “absolutist” regime; in this regard, the treaty of Versailles of 1919, which suppressed the last truly Christian monarchies, was a liberal, precisely Masonic victory;4

-the political rule of the majorities, who are supposed to express the sacrosanct and infallible general will.

I would like to repeat, in case it is needed, in the face of this democratism which is now penetrating the Church by means of collegiality, that the majority does not make the truth: but without the truth and true justice towards God and our neighbor, what can be built that is solid?

Condemnation of the Democratic Ideology by the Popes

The popes have never ceased condemning this democratic ideology. Leo XIII did this ex professo in his Encyclical Diuturnum, of which I have already spoken to you:

A good number of our contemporaries, walking in the footsteps of those who, in the last century, bestowed upon themselves the title of philosopher, pretend that all power comes from the people; that, as a consequence, authority does not properly belong to those who exercise it, but only by virtue of a popular mandate, and under the condition that the will of the people can always take back from these trustees the power that it has delegated to them.

This is where Catholics separate themselves from these new teachers; they want to seek in God the right to govern, and they make it derive from Him as from its natural source and its necessary principle.

However, it is important to remark here that, if it is a question of designating those who should govern the republic, this designation can, in certain cases, be left to the choice and to the preferences of the majority, without Catholic doctrine putting the least obstacle to it. This choice, indeed, determines the person of the sovereign; it does not confer the rights of sovereignty. It is not authority that is established; it is decided only by whom it should be exercised.5

Therefore, all authority comes from God, even in a democracy!

All authority comes from God. This truth is a revealed truth, and Leo XIII devotes himself to establishing it solidly on Holy Scripture, the tradition of the Fathers, and finally reason: an authority originating from the people alone would not have the power to oblige in conscience under pain of sin:6 will say in Pacem in Terris, that one stirs up in everyone the search for the common good! Authority is above all a moral force.

It is not a man who has in himself or of himself what is necessary to curb the free will of his fellow creatures by a bond of conscience. God alone, in so far as He is universal Creator and Legislator, possesses such a power. Those who exercise it need to receive it from Him and to exercise it in His name.7

Finally Leo XIII devotes himself to showing the falsity of Rousseau’s social contract, which is the foundation of the contemporary democratic ideology.

The Church Does Not Condemn the Democratic Regime

What I want to show you now is that not every democracy is liberal. There is the democratic ideology, and there is the democratic regime; if the Church condemns the ideology, she does not condemn the regime, that is to say, the participation of the people in the power.

St. Thomas justified the legitimacy of the democratic regime:

If all have a certain part in the government, by this indeed the peace of the people is preserved. Everyone loves such an organization and looks after preserving it, as Aristotle says in Book II of his Politics.8

Without preferring democracy, the universal Doctor considers that in the concrete the best political regime is a monarchy in which all the citizens have a certain part of the power, for example in choosing those who govern under the monarchy. This is, says St. Thomas, “a government that well combines monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy.“9

The French monarchy of the Old Regime, like many others, was more or less of this type, no matter what the Liberals say. There existed then, between the monarch and the multitude of subjects, a whole order and a hierarchy of multiple intermediate bodies, which made the best of their competent advice in high places.

The Catholic Church, as far as she is concerned, does not indicate any preference for this or that form of government; she allows the peoples to choose the type of government best adapted to their own character and to the circumstances:

Nothing prevents the Church from approving government by one person alone or by several, provided that the government be just and ordered to the common good. This is why, as long as justice is safe, it is not at all forbidden to the peoples to give themselves such or such a political form which will be adapted best to their proper genius or to their traditions or to their customs.10

What is a Non-liberal Democracy?

I admit that a non-liberal democracy is a rare species, vanished today; but it is still not at all an idle fancy, as shown by the republic of Christ the King, that of Ecuador of Garcia Moreno in the last century.

Here are the characteristic traits of a non-liberal democracy:

First principle. The principle of popular sovereignty: first it limits itself to the democratic regime, and respects the legitimacy of a monarchy. Then it is radically different from that of the Rousseauist democracy: the power resides in the people, well and good, but neither originally nor finally. Thus, it is from God that power comes to the people, from God as the author and from the social nature of man, and not from the individual-kings. Once those in power are elected by the people, these last do not keep the exercise of the sovereignty.11

-First consequence: it is not a shapeless multitude of individuals that governs, but the people in established bodies: its heads of families (who will be able to legislate directly in some very small States, like that of Appenzell in Switzerland), its peasants and merchants, industrialists and workers, big and small property owners, military men and magistrates, religious, priests, and bishops; that is, says Mgr. de Ségur, “the nation with all its living forces, established in a genuine representative manner, and capable of expressing its wishes through its true representatives, of freely exercising its rights.12 Pius XII in his turn carefully distinguished the people and the mass:

People and shapeless multitude, or, as it is customary to say, “mass,” are two different concepts. The people lives and moves of its own life; the mass is in itself inert, and it cannot be moved except from the outside. The people lives of the fullness of the life of the men who compose it, each one of whom, in the place and in the manner that is proper to him, is a person conscious of his own responsibilities and of his own convictions. The mass, on the contrary, waits for an impetus from outside, plays easily into the hands of whoever exploits their instincts and their impressions, being quick to follow by turns today this flag and tomorrow that other one.13

Second consequence: elected governments, even if they are called, as by St. Thomas, “vicars of the multitude,” are such only in the sense that they do for it what it cannot do itself, that is, govern. Power comes to them from God, “from whom all paternity in heaven and on earth draws its name” (Eph. 3:15). The people in power are therefore responsible for their acts first of all before God, whose ministers they are, and only after that before the people, for whose common good they govern.

Second principle. The rights of God (and those of His Church, in a Catholic nation) are set down as the base of the constitution. The decalogue is therefore the inspirer of all legislation.

-First consequence: the “general will” is null if it goes against God’s rights. The majority does not “make” the truth; it has to keep itself in the truth, under penalty of a perversion of democracy. With reason Pius XII underlines the danger, inherent in the democratic regime, against which the constitution must react: the danger of deper-sonalization, of massification, and of manipulation of the multitude by pressure groups and artificial majorities.

-Second consequence: democracy is not secular, but openly Christian and Catholic. It conforms to the social doctrine of the Church concerning private property, the principle of subsidiarity, education left to the care of the Church and of the parents, etc…

To sum up: democracy, no less than any other governmental form, must bring about the social reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Democracy must, all the same, have a King: Jesus Christ.

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1 It is not because the left-wing bishops indulge in socialist or communist politics that the Church should abstain from delving into politics! The Church has a power, undoubtedly indirect, but real over the temporal domain and over the life of the city. The social reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ is an essential preoccupation of the Church.

2 Newspaper and political movement directed by Charles Maurras. L’Action Française was struggling against liberal democratism, using healthy natural truths. He was accused falsely of naturalism. Pope Pius IX, being deceived, uttered condemnation against his movement. His successor Pius XII lifted the sanction. But the evil had been done: 1926 marks for France a decisive step in the ‘occupation’ of the Church by the liberal fraction, called ‘liberal Catholic’.

3 Cf. Encyclical In the Midst of Solicitudes, February 16, 1892 to the bishops and faithful of France.

4 Cf. H. Le Caron, The Plan For World Domination of the Counter-Church, p. 22.

5 PIN. 94.

6 It could oblige by means of threat of punishments, but Pope John XXIII argued that this is not the way to promote the individual search for the common good! Authority is, before all else, a moral force.

7 Diuturnum, PIN. 96.

8 la IIæ, 105, 1.

9 Ibid.

10 Leo XIII, Encyclical Diuturnum PIN. 94

11 Cf. Diuturnum, quoted above, and also Mgr. de Ségur, The Revolution, p. 73.

12 Ibid.

13 Radio message for Christmas, December 24, 1944.

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