Chapter 11 - FILL IN HERE
Chapter here. Chapter here. Chapter here. Chapter here. Chapter here. Chapter here.
Chapter here. Chapter here. Chapter here. Chapter here. Chapter here. Chapter here.
Freedom of the Press
“A deadly and abominable freedom, the true oppression of the masses.”
Leo XIII
If you continue reading the acts of the popes, you can take them one after the other and all of them have said the same thing about the new liberties springing from Liberalism: freedom of conscience and of forms of worship, freedom of the press, freedom of education—these are poisoned freedoms, false freedoms: because error is always easier to spread than truth, evil easier to propagate than good. It is easier to say to the people, “You can have several wives,” than “You can have only one for your whole life.” It is easier therefore to establish divorce, as if to counterbalance marriage! Likewise, grant indifferently to the true and the false the freedom to make their way publicly, and most assuredly you will have favored error at the expense of truth.
People like to say today that the truth makes its path solely by its intrinsic power and that, to triumph, it does not need the unseasonable and bothersome protection of the State and its laws. The favoritism of the States towards the truth is immediately accused of injustice, as if justice consisted in holding an equal balance between the true and the false, virtue and vice. This is false: the first justice in regard to minds is to facilitate for them access to the truth and to forewarn them of error. That is also the first charity: “veritatem facientes in caritate:“1 In charity, let us do what is true. The balancing among all opinions, the toleration of all kinds of behavior, moral or religious pluralism, are the mark of a society in full decomposition, which is the liberal society desired by Freemasonry. Now, it is against the establishment of such a society that the popes of whom we speak have reacted without ceasing, affirming on the contrary that the State—the Catholic State primarily—does not have the right to permit such liberties, like religious liberty,2 freedom of the press, and freedom of education.
Freedom of the Press
Leo XIII reminds the State of its duty to moderate justly, that is, to say, according to the requirements of the truth, the freedom of the press:
Now, let us proceed with these considerations on the subject of the freedom to express by word or by the press everything that one wants to. Assuredly, if this liberty is not justly moderated, if it goes beyond limit and measure, such a liberty—it is hardly necessary to say it— is not a right; for a right is a moral faculty; and, as we have said and as it cannot be repeated too much, it would be absurd to believe that it belongs naturally, and without distinction or discernment, both to truth and to a lie, to good and to evil. The true and the good have the right to be propagated in the State with a prudent freedom, in order that a greater number profit from them. Yet, deceitful doctrines, the most fatal pestilence of all for the mind, and the vices that corrupt the heart and morals, it is just for the public authority to practice solicitude in repressing them, so as to impede evil from spreading for the ruin of society. The deviations of a licentious mind, which, for the ignorant multitude, easily become a real oppression, must in all justice be punished through the authority of the laws, no less than criminal attempts of violence committed against the weak. This repression is the more necessary against these artifices of style and these subtleties of dialectic, especially when all this pleases the passions, and the unquestionably more numerous part of the population cannot in any way, or cannot without very great difficulty, stand on guard. Grant to everyone unlimited freedom to speak and to write, and nothing remains sacred and inviolable, nothing will be spared, not even those first truths, those great natural principles which should be considered a noble common patrimony for all humanity. Truth is thus, little by little, invaded by darkness; and the denomination of the most pernicious and the most diverse errors is seen to be established, something that often happens.3
Before Leo XIII Pope Pius IX, as we have seen, branded freedom of the press with infamy in the Syllabus (Proposition 79); and, still more, Gregory XVI in Mirari vos:
To that is connected freedom of the press, the most deadly liberty, an abominable liberty, for which we will never have enough abhorrence, and which certain men dare with so much turmoil and so much insistence to ask for and to spread everywhere. We tremble, venerable Brethren, when we consider with what monstrous doctrines, or rather with what prodigies of error we are overwhelmed; errors disseminated far and on all sides by an immense multitude of books, booklets, and other writings, small, it is true, in bulk, but huge in perversity, from which results the curse that covers the face of the earth and makes our tears flow. There are however men carried away by such an excess of impudence, who do not fear to uphold stubbornly, that the deluge of errors which follow from there is rather abundantly compensated by the publication of a few books printed to defend the truth of religion in the midst of this heap of iniquities.4
You see here unveiled by the pontiff the pseudo-principle of liberal “compensation,” which pretends that it is necessary to compensate the truth with error, and conversely. This idea, we shall see, is the primary maxim of those who are called the Liberal Catholics, who do not support the pure and simple affirmation of the truth, but demand that it be immediately counterbalanced with opposing opinions. Reciprocally, they judge that there is nothing to criticize in the free spreading of errors, provided that the truth has permission to make itself heard ever so little! This is the perpetual Utopia of the liberal, so-called Catholics, to which I will come back.
chapter-00.md chapter-01.md chapter-02.md chapter-03.md chapter-04.md chapter-05.md chapter-06.md chapter-07.md chapter-08.md chapter-09.md chapter-10.md chapter-11.md chapter-12.md chapter-13.md chapter-14.md chapter-15.md chapter-16.md chapter-17.md chapter-18.md chapter-19.md chapter-20.md chapter-21.md chapter-22.md chapter-23.md chapter-24.md chapter-25.md chapter-26.md chapter-27.md chapter-28.md chapter-29.md chapter-30.md chapter-31.md chapter-32.md chapter-33.md chapter-34.md parse.sh raw.txt chapter-00.md chapter-01.md chapter-02.md chapter-03.md chapter-04.md chapter-05.md chapter-06.md chapter-07.md chapter-08.md chapter-09.md chapter-10.md chapter-11.md chapter-12.md chapter-13.md chapter-14.md chapter-15.md chapter-16.md chapter-17.md chapter-18.md chapter-19.md chapter-20.md chapter-21.md chapter-22.md chapter-23.md chapter-24.md chapter-25.md chapter-26.md chapter-27.md chapter-28.md chapter-29.md chapter-30.md chapter-31.md chapter-32.md chapter-33.md chapter-34.md parse.sh raw.txt chapter-00.md chapter-01.md chapter-02.md chapter-03.md chapter-04.md chapter-05.md chapter-06.md chapter-07.md chapter-08.md chapter-09.md chapter-10.md chapter-11.md chapter-12.md chapter-13.md chapter-14.md chapter-15.md chapter-16.md chapter-17.md chapter-18.md chapter-19.md chapter-20.md chapter-21.md chapter-22.md chapter-23.md chapter-24.md chapter-25.md chapter-26.md chapter-27.md chapter-28.md chapter-29.md chapter-30.md chapter-31.md chapter-32.md chapter-33.md chapter-34.md parse.sh raw.txt
1 Eph. 4:15.
2 See the preceding chapter.
3 Encyclical Libertas, PIN. 207.
4 PIN. 25.