Chapter 18 - FILL IN HERE
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The Myth of Liberty by Itself:
From Lamennais to Sangnier
“They do not fear to make blasphemous reconciliations between the Gospel and the Revolution.”
St. Pius X
Catholic Liberalism, scarcely established, is going to rise up to the assault on the Church under the flag of progress. Let me call forth some names from this progressive Liberalism.
I | Lamennais (1782-1854)
Félicité de Lamennais, a priest who would be rebellious against the Church and unfaithful to his priesthood, founds his Liberalism on the myth of the progress of humanity, which is manifested by the growing aspirations of the peoples for liberty. This movement, he says, “has its indestructible principle in the first and fundamental law by virtue of which humanity tends to disengage itself progressively from the ties of infancy, to the extent that, the intelligence being emancipated by Christianity’s growing and developing itself, the peoples attain, so to speak, the age of man.“1 In the Middle Ages, humanity in its infancy needs the Church’s guardianship; today, having become adults, the peoples should liberate themselves from that guardianship by separating the Church from the State. As for the Church, it must adapt itself to this new order of things which it has created itself: “a new social order, founded on an immense development of freedom, which Catholicism has rendered necessary by developing itself in souls the true notion and the sentiment of the right.“2 The prospectus drawn up to present the program of the newspaper l’Avenir presents the perfectly liberal outcome of Lamennais’s theory:
All the friends of religion must understand that it needs only one thing alone: liberty.
This was to want to reduce the Church to the common right of all religious associations or confessions before the law. Pope Gregory XVI could not fail to condemn this error, and he did so in the Encyclical Mirari vos of August 15, 1832, condemning:
…those who wish to separate the Church from the State and to break the mutual harmony of the empire and the priesthood. [For, he explains,] what is certain is that this harmony, which was always so favorable and so healthful for the interests of religion and for those of the civil authority, is dreaded by the partisans of an unbridled liberty.3
In it he condemns as well:
This absurd maxim, or rather this delirium, that freedom of conscience must be assured and guaranteed to anyone, whoever he may be.4
To be sure, the Church could not put up with the revolutionary and liberal principle of freedom for all, of the same freedom recognized for all religious opinions without discrimination! As for the myth of the progressive emancipation of humanity, the Catholic Faith gives this its true name: apostasy of the nations.
II | Marc Sangnier and “The Sillon”
Despite the condemnations of the popes, progressive Liberalism continues its penetration into the Church. Father Emmanuel Barbier wrote a small book entitled The Progress of Catholic Liberalism in France under the Pontificate of Pope Leo XIII. (This work keeps all its value in spite of the prudential condemnation which affected it then.) He has a chapter that treats of “progressive Catholicism,” of which the author says this: “The expression ‘progressive Catholicism’ is that which Mr. Fogazzaro has an affection for in his novel Il Santo to indicate the ensemble of reforms that he asks of the Church in its doctrine, its interior life, and its discipline. There is almost an identity of leaning between the movement that we have studied in France and that of which Mr. Fogazzaro is right now the spokesman most listened to in Italy.”
This is to tell you that Modernism and liberal Catholicism are closely related behaviors and have related tactics, if it is known that Fogazzaro exposed shamelessly the plan to penetrate the Church through Modernism.5
It was in 1894 that Marc Sangnier founded his magazine Le Sillon, which would become a youth movement dreaming of reconciling the Church with the principles of 1789, Socialism, and universal democracy on the basis of the advances in human consciousness. The penetration of his ideas in the seminaries and the more and more indifferentist evolution of the movement impelled St. Pius X to write his Letter Notre Charge Apostolique, of August 25, 1910, which condemns the dream of the reform of society cherished by the leaders of the Sillon:
It is their dream to change its natural and traditional bases and to promise a future city built on other principles, which they venture to proclaim as more productive, more beneficial, than the principles on which repose the present Christian city…
The Sillon has the noble concern for human dignity. It understands this dignity in the manner of certain philosophers whom the Church is far from praising. The first ingredient in this dignity is liberty, understood in the sense that, except in matters of religion, every man is autonomous. From this fundamental principle, it draws the following conclusions: Today, the people are in guardianship under an authority distinct from themselves, and they must free themselves from it: political emancipation… A political and social organization founded on this double basis, liberty and equality, to which fraternity will soon come to join itself. That is what they call Democracy.
After having denounced, after Leo XIII, the false slogan of liberty-equality, St. Pius X makes out the sources of the progressive Liberalism of the Sillon:
Finally, at the basis of all the falsifications of the fundamental social ideas, the Sillon sets out a false concept of human dignity. According to it, man will be truly man, worthy of the name, only on the day when he has acquired a conscience enlightened, strong, independent, autonomous, able to do without a master, obeying only itself, capable of assuming and carrying the most serious responsibilities without forfeit. These are the grand words with which the sentiment of human pride is exalted…
Well! Mistrust towards the Church, their mother, is inspired in your Catholic youth; they are taught that for nineteen centuries it has not yet succeeded in the world in establishing society on its true bases; that it has not understood the social ideas of authority and of liberty, of equality, of brotherhood, and of human dignity… The breath of the Revolution has passed this way… We do not have to demonstrate that the advent of universal democracy is of no consequence to the action of the Church in the world…
St. Pius X then denounces the indifferentism of the Sillon, which takes after that of Vatican II like a brother:6
What must be thought of this respect for all the errors and of the strange invitation, made by a Catholic to all the dissidents, to strengthen their convictions by study and to make of them ever more abundant sources of new powers? What must be thought of an association in which all religions and even free thought7 can be loudly manifested as they like?
The holy pope goes to the bottom of the issue:
The Sillon…henceforth constitutes only a miserable tributary of the great organized movement of apostasy, in all the countries, for the establishment of a universal Church which will have neither dogmas, nor hierarchy, nor order for the mind, nor restraint for the passions… We know only too well the murky dens where these pernicious doctrines are worked out… The leaders of the Sillon have not been able to defend themselves from this: the exaltation of their sentiments…has carried them away towards a new Gospel…their ideal being connected with that of the Revolution, they do not fear to make blasphemous reconciliations between the Gospel and the Revolution…
Finally the holy pontiff concludes by restoring the truth on the genuine social order:
…The Church, which has never betrayed the happiness of the peoples by dangerous alliances, does not have to escape the past… It is enough for it to recover, with the cooperation of the true workers of social restoration, the organisms broken by the Revolution8 and to adapt them, in the same Christian spirit which inspired them, to the new surroundings created by the material evolution of contemporary society:9 for the true friends of the people are neither revolutionaries nor innovators, but traditionalists.
We can see thus in what energetic and precise terms Pope St. Pius X condemns progressive Liberalism and defines the truly Catholic attitude. It is my greatest consolation to be able to testify for myself that I am faithful to the doctrine of this canonized pope. The passages that I have quoted for you clarify in a unique way the conciliar doctrines in this matter, which I am soon going to dwell on.
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1 Complete Works, Tome X, pp. 317-318, quoted by DTC, Tome VIII, col. 2489.
2 Right (in Latin) means here, and in many other places in this book, what one is entitled to. The Church has always taught justice (iustitia, from ius, in Latin, which is an outward movement of the soul “to give to others what we owe them” (St. Thomas). But preaching to respect the rights of our neighbor by giving them what we owe them is an attitude of mind very different from the modern liberal attitude of claiming from our neighbors what they owe us! The first attitude is giving of self, the second is self-centered. There is no need of virtue for the second one! The whole modern confusion about “social justice” is a confusion of these two attitudes. (Note of Editor of The Angelus Press.)
3 Cf. Denz. 1615.
4 PIN, 24; cf. Denz. 1613.
5 Cf. Ploncard d’Assac, The Occupied Church, ch. XV: A Secret Society within the Church?
6 Cf. Dignitatìs humanæ, no. 4.
7 Free thought is only a ramification of Freemasonry.
8 St. Pius X is indicating here the professional corporations, agents of social harmony, all of them opposed to the trade-unionism that is the agent of the class struggle.
9 Evolution concerns a material and technical progress, but man and society remain subject to the same laws. Vatican II, in Gaudium et spes, will ignore this distinction and will founder anew in the progressivism of the Sillon.