Chapter 16 - FILL IN HERE

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The Liberal Catholic Mentality

“There are tyrannical weaknesses, evil deficiencies, and conquered ones deserving of being so.”

Charles Maurras

A Sickness of the Mind

More than a confusion, liberal Catholicism is a “sickness of the mind"1; the mind does not manage to repose simply in the truth. The mind does not dare to affirm anything, without the counter-affirmation immediately presenting itself to it, which it feels obliged to pose as well. Pope Paul VI was the type itself of this divided mind, of this double-faced being—this could be read even physically on his face—perpetually tossed about between contradictory things and enlivened by a pendulum movement oscillating regularly between tradition and novelty: an intellectual schizophrenia, will some people say?

I believe that Father Clerissac has most profoundly perceived the nature of this sickness. It is a “lack of integrity of the mind,” he writes,2 of a mind that does not have “enough confidence in the truth”:

This lack of integrity of the mind, in the ages of Liberalism, is explained on the psychological side by two manifest traits: Liberals are receptive and feverish; receptive, because they too easily assume the states of mind of their contemporaries; feverish, because out of fear of offending these varied states of mind, they are in a continual apologetic uneasiness. They seem to suffer themselves from the doubts that they are fighting; they do not have enough confidence in the truth; they want to justify too much, demonstrate too much, adapt too much, or even excuse too much.

To Put Oneself into Harmony with the World

To excuse too much! How well that is said: they want to excuse everything from the Church’s past: the Crusades, the Inquisition, etc… It is very timidly that they justify and demonstrate especially if it is a question of the rights of Jesus Christ. But to adapt—to that, for sure, they devote themselves, it is their principle:

They set out from a practical principle and from a fact that they judge to be undeniable: this principle is that the Church would not know how to be understood in the concrete sphere where it must accomplish its divine mission, without putting itself into harmony with it.3

It is thus that, later on, the Modernists will want to adapt the preaching of the Gospel to the false critical science and to the false immanentist philosophy of the age, “striving to render Christian truth accessible to minds trained to refuse the supernatural.“4

Therefore, according to them, in order to convert those who do not believe in the supernatural, an abstraction must be made of the revelation of Our Lord, of grace, of miracles—if you are dealing with atheists, do not speak to them of God, but put yourself onto their level, at their pitch; go into their system! By this means you are going to become a Marxist-Christian: it will be they who will convert you!

It is the same reasoning that the Mission of France5 held and that numerous priests hold still today with regard to the apostolate in the working world: if we want to convert them, we have to toil with the workers, not appear as priests, have their preoccupations, know their demands; and we will thus succeed in being the leaven in the dough. By this means there are priests who have been converted and have become union agitators! It will be said, “Yes, but, you understand, we had to be totally assimilated to this sphere, not offend it, not give it the impression that we want to evangelize it or force the truth onto it!” What an error! Those people who do not believe any more thirst for the truth, they are hungry for the bread of truth that these misled priests no longer want to break for them!

It is this false reasoning again that has been given to the missionaries: but no, do not preach Jesus Christ right away to these poor natives who above all are dying of hunger! First give them something to eat, then tools, next teach them to work, instruct them in the alphabet, in hygiene…and contraception, why not? But do not speak to them of God: their stomachs are empty! I will say this: it is precisely because they are poor and deprived of the goods of the earth that they are extraordinarily open to the Kingdom of heaven, to “Seek first the kingdom of heaven,” to the Good Lord, who loves them and has suffered for them, so that they can take part, by their miseries, in His redeeming sufferings. If on the contrary you pretend to place yourself onto their level, you will only wind up making them cry out about injustice and inflaming hatred in them, but if you bring God to them, you lift them up, you raise them and you genuinely enrich them.

To Be Reconciled with the Principles of 1789

In politics, liberal Catholics see in the principles of 1789 Christian truths, doubtless a little bit dissolute; but, once purified, the modern ideals are on the whole assimilable by the Church: liberty, equality, fraternity, democracy (ideology), and pluralism. This is the error that Pius IX condemns in the Syllabus: “The Roman Pontiff can and should be reconciled and come to terms with progress, Liberalism, and modern civilization.“6

The Catholic Liberal declares, “What do you want? One cannot indefinitely be against the ideas of his time, row without ceasing against the current, appear backward or reactionary.” The antagonism between the Church and the secular liberal spirit, without God, is no longer desired. They want to reconcile what is irreconcilable, make peace between the Church and the Revolution, between Our Lord Jesus Christ and the Prince of this world. We cannot imagine an enterprise more blasphemous, and more dissolving of the Christian spirit, of the good fight for the Faith, of the spirit of the crusade, that is to say, of the zeal to conquer the world for Jesus Christ.

From Faint-heartedness to Apostasy

In all this so-called Catholic Liberalism, there is a lack of faith, or more precisely a lack of the spirit of faith, which is a spirit of totality: to submit all to Jesus Christ, to restore all, “to sum up everything in Christ,” as St. Paul says (Eph. 1:20). They dare not to insist on the totality of the rights of the Church; they are resigned without a struggle; they accommodate themselves even quite well to laicism; they finally arrive at approving of it. Dom Delatte and Cardinal Billot well characterize this tendency to apostasy:

A wide furrow henceforth divided [with Falloux and Montalembert on the liberal side of France in the nineteenth century] the Catholics into two groups: those who had as their first concern the Church’s liberty of action and the upholding of its rights in a society still Christian; and those who firstly endeavored to determine the measure of Christianity that modern society could tolerate, in order then to invite the Church to reduce itself to that.7

All of liberal Catholicism, says Cardinal Billot, is self-contained in a maintained ambiguity, “the confusion between tolerance and approval”:

The question between the Liberals and us is not to know whether, being given the malice of the world, it is necessary to tolerate with patience what is not in our power, and to work at the same time to avoid greater evils and to bring about all the good that remains possible; but the question is precisely whether it is fitting to approve [the new state of things], to celebrate the principles that are the foundation of this order of things, to promote them by word, by doctrine, by works, as the so-called liberal Catholics do.8

It is thus that a Montalembert with his slogan “Free Church in a free State"9 will make himself the champion of the separation between Church and State, refusing to admit that this mutual liberty will lead inevitably to the situation of an enslaved Church in a despoiling State. It is thus as well that a de Broglie would write a liberal history of the Church in which the excesses of the Christian Caesars prevail over the benefit of the Christian Constitutions. Therefore also, a Jacques Piou will make himself the herald of the rallying of French Catholics to the republic: not so much to the state of fact of the republican regime, as to the democratic and liberal ideology. Here is, quoted by Jacques Ploncard d’Assac,10 the canticle of the Popular Liberal Action of Piou in the 1900s:

We are for liberal action,

We want to live in freedom

Yes, or no, at will.

Liberty is our glory.

Let us cry out: “Long live Liberty!”

We want to believe or not to believe.

Let us acclaim liberal action,

Liberal, liberal,

That the law be equal for all,

Be equal.

Long live the liberal action of Piou.

The liberal Catholics of 1984 did no better when they struck up their canticle of the free school in the streets of Paris:

“Liberty, liberty, thou art the only truth!”

What a plague, these liberal Catholics! They put their faith into their pocket and adopted the maxims of the age. What incalculable harm they have caused the Church by their lack of faith and their apostasy.

I will conclude with a page from Dom Guéranger, full of that spirit of faith of which I have spoken to you:

Today, more than ever, society needs doctrines that are strong and consistent with one another. In the midst of the general dissolution of ideas, only an affirmation, a firm, well-founded, uncompromising affirmation, will be able to make itself accepted. Transactions become more and more fruitless, and each one of them carries away a shred of the truth. Show yourselves, therefore, to be such as you are in reality, convinced Catholics. There is a grace attached to the full and entire confession of the Faith. This confession, the Apostle tells us, is the salvation of those who make it; and experience demonstrates that it is also the salvation of those who hear it.11

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1 Fr. A. Roussel, Liberalism and Catholicism, p. 16.

2 Humbert Clerissac, O.P., The Mystery of the Church, ch. VII.

3 DTC, Tome IX, col. 509.

4 Jacques Marteaux, Catholics in Anxiety, passim.

5 The Mission of France was the “experiment” of the worker-priests in the 1950s.

6 Condemned proposition no. 80; Denz. 1780.

7 Life of Dom Guéranger, Tome II, p. 11.

8 Cardinal Billot, Light of Theology, pp. 58-59.

9 Speech at Malines, August 20, 1863.

10 The Occupied Church, D.P.F. 1975, p. 136.

11 The Christian Sense of History, Nouvelle Aurore, Paris, 1977; pp. 31-32.