Chapter 9 - FILL IN HERE

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Liberty of Conscience

and of Forms of Worship

“Under the seductive name of freedom of cult, they proclaim the legal apostasy of society.”

Leo XIII

It is in his Encyclical Libertas that Pope Leo XIII reviews the new liberties proclaimed by Liberalism. I will follow his exposé step by step.1 This pope says:

It is well for us to consider separately the diverse kinds of liberties that are given as the great acquisitions of our age.

The liberty of forms of worship (or liberty of conscience and of forms of worship) is the first: it is, as Leo XIII explains it, claimed as a moral liberty of the individual conscience and as a social liberty, a civil right recognized by the State.

First, in regard to individuals, let us examine this liberty so contrary to the virtue of religion, the liberty of cults, as it is called, a freedom that rests on this principle, that it is permissible for everyone to profess such a religion as pleases him, or even not to profess any. However, all to the contrary, it is indeed there, without any doubt, among all the duties of man, the greatest and the holiest, that which orders man to render to God a worship of piety and of religion. This duty is only a consequence of the fact that we are perpetually in dependence on God, governed by the will and the Providence of God, and that, having come forth from Him, we must return to Him.

If indeed the individual-king is supposed to be the source of his own rights, it is logical for him to attribute to his conscience a full independence with regard to God and religion. Leo XIII then passes to religious liberty as a civil right:2 quoted in the preceding chapter, from the Encyclicals Immortale Dei of Leo XIII, and Quanta Cura of Pius IX, and the following chapter.

Considered from the social point of view, this same liberty requires that the State render no worship to God, or authorize any public cult, that no religion be preferred to another, that all of them be considered as having the same rights, even when this people makes a profession of Catholicism.

If indeed society is only a purely conventional collection of individual-kings, it does not owe anything to God either; and the State considers itself exempt from all religious duties. This is manifestly false, says Leo XIII:

Indeed there can be no doubt, that the union of men in society is the work of the Will of God. This is clearly seen in its members, in its form which is authority, in its cause, or in the number and importance of the advantages which it procures for man.3 It is God who has made man for society and who has joined him to his fellow creatures, in order that the needs of his nature, to which his solitary efforts could not give satisfaction, can find this in association with others. This is why civil society, in so far as it is a society, necessarily has to recognize God as its principle and its author, and, consequently, render to His power and to His authority the homage of its worship. No, neither by justice nor by reason can the State be atheistic or, what would revert to atheism, have, with regard to all religions, as is said, the same dispositions, and grant them indiscriminately the same rights.

Leo XIII takes care not to neglect a necessary precision: when one speaks of religion in an abstract manner, he is speaking implicitly of the only true Religion, which is that of the Catholic Church:

Since it is necessary then to profess one sole religion in society, that one must be professed which is the only true one and which is recognized easily, especially in the Catholic countries, by the sign of truth of which it carries in itself the brilliant expression.

Therefore the State must recognize the true Religion as such and make a profession of Catholicism.4 The lines that follow condemn without appeal the pretended agnosticism of the State, its pretended neutrality in religious matters:

The heads of State must therefore preserve and protect this religion if they intend, as is their obligation, to provide prudently and usefully for the interests of the community. For the public power was established for the usefulness of those who are governed, and although it has as its proximate end only to bring the citizens to the prosperity of this earthly life, it is nevertheless a duty for it not to lessen, but on the contrary, to increase for man the faculty of attaining to that supreme and sovereign good in which the eternal bliss of men consists, which becomes impossible without religion.

I will come back to these lines, which contain the fundamental principle that regulates the relations of the State with religion—I always mean the true Religion.

The Encyclical Libertas appeared on June 20, 1888. One year later, Leo XIII came back to the liberty of forms of worship in order to condemn it anew in admirable terms and with a very apostolic zeal, in his Letter to the Emperor of Brazil.5 Here are some extracts that show the absurdity and the godlessness of the liberty of cults, since it necessarily implies State atheism:

Liberty of forms of worship, considered in its relationship to society, is founded on the principle that the State, even in a Catholic nation, is not bound to profess or to favor any cult; it must remain indifferent with regard to all and take them all into equal consideration legally. It is not a question here of that de facto tolerance which, in given circumstances, can be conceded to the dissident cults, but rather of the recognition granted to them of the very rights that belong only to the one true Religion, which God has established in the world and has designated with clear and precise characters and signs, so that everyone can recognize it as such and embrace it.

Further, such a liberty indeed places on the same level truth and error, faith and heresy, the Church of Jesus Christ and any human institution whatever; it establishes a deplorable and deadly separation between human society and God its Author; it leads finally to the sad consequences of State indifferentism in religious matters, or, what comes to the same thing, its atheism.

Those are words of gold! Those are words that should be learned almost by heart. The liberty of forms of worship implies State indifferentism to all religious forms. Religious liberty necessarily means State atheism. For, professing to recognize or to favor all the gods, the State in fact recognizes none, especially not the true God! That is what we say when someone presents the religious liberty of Vatican II to us as a conquest, as progress, as a development of Church doctrine! Is atheism then progress? Is the “theology of the death of God” inscribed in the line of tradition? The legal death of God! That is unimaginable!

You can easily see that that is what we are dying of at the present time: it is in the name of the religious liberty of Vatican II that the States that are still Catholic have been suppressed, that they have been laicized, that the first article from the constitutions of these States has been erased, which proclaimed the submission of the State to God, its Author, or in which the State made a profession of the true Religion.6 The Freemasons did not want any more than that; now they have found the radical means: to compel the Church, by the voice of its Magisterium, to proclaim religious liberty, nothing more. By this the laicization of the Catholic States would be accomplished by an inescapable conclusion.

You know well as a historical fact published in the New York newspapers then, that Cardinal Bea, on the eve of the Council, went to pay a visit to B’nai B’rith, the “sons of the alliance,” a Masonic sect reserved for the Jews only, very influential in the Western one-world movement.7 In his position as Secretary of the Secretariat for Christian Unity, just founded by John XXIII, he asked them, “Freemasons, what do you want?” They answered him, “Religious liberty. Proclaim religious liberty, and the enmity between Freemasonry and the Catholic Church will cease!” Well, they obtained it, this religious liberty; consequently the religious liberty of Vatican II is a Masonic victory! This is corroborated by the fact that a few months ago, President Alfonsin of Argentina was officially received at the White House in Washington and by the B’nai B’rith in New York. He was decorated by these Freemasons with the medal of religious liberty because he had set up a regime of liberty of cults, of liberty of religion.8

So, we refuse the religious liberty of Vatican II; we reject it in the same terms in which the popes of the nineteenth century rejected it and we base ourselves on their authority and nothing but their authority. What greater guarantee can we have of being in the truth than to be strong with the very force of tradition, of the constant teaching of Popes Pius VI, Pius VII, Gregory XVI, Pius IX, Leo XIII, Benedict XV, etc., who all condemned religious liberty, as I will show you in our next chapter.

I will content myself with concluding this chapter by quoting for you again that passage from the Letter E giunto where Pope Leo XIII gives us once again proof of an admirable clearsightedness and force in his judgment on religious liberty (which he calls here liberty of cults):

It would be superfluous to insist on these reflections. On several occasions already, in official documents addressed to the Catholic world, We have shown how erroneous the doctrine is of those who, using the seductive name of liberty of cult, proclaim the legal apostasy of society, thus turning it away from its divine Author.

Religious liberty is the legal apostasy of society: remember this well. For this is what I answer to Rome every time they want to oblige me to accept all-inclusively the Council, and especially the Declaration on Religious Liberty. On December 7, 1965, I refused to put my signature at the bottom of this conciliar act; twenty years later, my reasons for refusing this signature have only increased. One does not sign an apostasy!

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1 PIN. 201. sq.

2 Cf. the texts of the previous chapter, quoting the encyclicals Immortale Dei of Leo XIII and Quanta Cura of Pius IX. See also the following chapter.

3 Note of the Editor: The pope is here referring to the scholastic concept of the “four causes.” For example, in a car the material cause is the steel, plastic and other material of which it is built; the formal cause is its shape and arrangement of its parts; the efficient cause is its builder; the final cause is for the owner to drive safely. The material cause of society is its members; the formal cause is the authority; the efficient cause is the Creator of man’s nature; the final cause is all the benefits society brings.

4 That is, write into the Constitution the principle of this recognition.

5 Letter E giunto, of July 19, 1889, PIN 234-237.

6 Cf. below, Chapter XXXII, page 236-237.

7 Cf. H. le Caron, op. cit., p. 46.

8 Journal de Genève, Saturday, March 23, 1985.