Chapter 19 - FILL IN HERE
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The Mirage of Pluralism:
Jacques Maritain
to Yves Congar
It is under the banner of progress that so-called Catholic Liberalism has arisen to the assault on the Church, just as I showed you in our previous topic. There was nothing lacking to it except to put on the mantle of philosophy in order to penetrate with all security the Church, which up to then had anathematized it! A few names too will illustrate this liberal penetration into the Church up to the eve of Vatican II.
Jacques Maritain (1882-1973)
One is not mistaken in calling Jacques Maritain the father of the religious liberty of Vatican II. For his part, Paul VI had nourished himself with the political and social theses of the liberal Maritain since 1926; and he acknowledged him as his teacher. St. Pius X assuredly had been better inspired in choosing as a teacher Cardinal Pie,1 from whom he borrowed the central passage of his inaugural encyclical, E supremi apostolatus and his motto, “To restore all things in Christ.”
Alas, Maritain’s motto, which would become that of Paul VI, was rather, “To set up all things in man!” In recognition of his old master, on December 8, 1965, the day of the closing of the Council, Paul VI confided to him the text of one of the final messages of the Council to the world. Now, here is what one of those texts declared, the message to the governors, read by Cardinal Lienart:
In your earthly and temporal city, he mysteriously builds his spiritual and eternal city, his Church. What does it ask of you, this Church, after almost two thousand years of vicissitudes of all sorts in its relations with you, the powers of the earth; what does it ask of you today? It has told you, in one of the major texts of this Council: It asks of you only liberty. The liberty to believe and to preach its faith, the freedom to love its God and to serve Him, the freedom to live and to bring to men its message of life. Do not fear it: it is in the image of its Master, whose mysterious action does not encroach on your prerogatives but heals everything human of its fatal decrepit state, transfigures it, fills it with hope, with truth, and with beauty.2
He thus canonizes the maritainian thesis of the “vitally Christian society,” according to which, in a progressive and necessary movement, the Church, renouncing the protection of the secular sword, emancipates itself from the bothersome guardianship of the Catholic heads of State, and, contenting itself henceforth with liberty alone, reduces itself now to being no more than the evangelical yeast hidden in the dough or the sign of salvation for humanity.
This “emancipation” of the Church is accompanied, Maritain acknowledges, by a reciprocal emancipation of the temporal from the spiritual, of civil society from the Church, by a laicization of public life, which, in certain respects, a “loss.” This loss is largely compensated for by the progress that liberty makes from it; and by the religious pluralism set up legally in civil society. Every spiritual family would enjoy its own juridical status and equitable liberty.3 There is thus, throughout human history, a law that is revealed, a “double law of the degradation and of the upsweeping of the energy of history”: the law of the emergence of the consciousness of the person and of liberty, and the correlative law of the degradation of the quantity of the temporal means put at the service of the Church and of its triumphalism:
While the wearing away of time and the passivity of matter naturally dissipate and degrade the things of this world and the energy of history, the creative forces which are the property of the spirit and of liberty…increase more and more the quality of this energy. The life of human societies advances and progresses thus at the expense of many losses.4
You will recognize the famous “creative energy” of Bergson and the not less famous “emergence of consciousness” of Teilhard de Chardin. This whole beautiful world—Bergson, Teilhard, Maritain—has dominated and corrupted Catholic thought for decades.
You will object to Maritain, what becomes of the social kingship of Our Lord, in your “vitally Christian society,” if the State no longer recognizes Jesus Christ and His Church? Listen closely to the philosopher’s answer: Christianity (or the social kingship of Jesus Christ) is capable of several successive historical realizations, essentially diverse but analogically one; medieval Christianity of the “sacral” and “theocratic” type (what ambiguities in those terms!), characterized by the abundance of temporal means at the service of unity in the Faith, must be succeeded today by a “new Christianity” characterized, as we have seen, by the reciprocal emancipation of the temporal and the spiritual, and by the religious and cultural pluralism of the city.
What skill, in the usage made of the philosophical theory of analogy, very simply to deny the social kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ! Now, that Christianity can be realized in different manners in the monarchy of St. Louis and in the republic of Garcia Moreno, that is obvious; but that the maritainian society, the pluralist “vitally Christian” city, will still be Christendom and realize the social kingship of Jesus Christ, this is what I deny absolutely: Quanta cura, Immortale Dei, and Quas primas assure me, on the contrary, that Jesus Christ does not have thirty-six ways of reigning over a society; He reigns by “informing,” by modeling the civil laws according to His divine law. It is one thing to uphold a society in which there is in fact a plurality of religions, as in Lebanon for example, and to do what one can so that Jesus Christ will still be “the pole”; it is something else to advocate pluralism in a city that still has a large Catholic majority and to want—this is the last straw—to baptize this system with the name of Christianity. No! The “new Christianity” imagined by Jacques Maritain is only a dying Christianity which has apostasized and rejected its King.
Jacques Maritain, in actual fact, was dazzled by the civilization of the openly pluralist type in the United States, in the midst of which the Catholic Church, reveling in the system of mere liberty, saw a remarkable soaring in the number of its members and in its institutions. Is this a sufficient argument in favor of the principle of pluralism? Let us ask the popes for the answer.
Leo XIII, in the Encyclical Longinqua oceani, of January 6, 1895, praises the progress of the Church in the United States. Here is his judgment on it. He writes to the American bishops:
With you, thanks to the good constitution of the State, the Church not being constricted by the ties of any law, being defended against violence by common law and the fairness of judgments, has obtained the guaranteed liberty to live and to act without obstacle. All these observations are true; however, we have to beware of an error that one does not go on from there to conclude that the best situation for the Church is that which it has in America, or indeed that it is always permitted and useful to separate and to disunite the principles of civil affairs and those of sacred things as in America.
Indeed, if the Catholic Religion is honored among you, if it is thriving, if it is even growing, this has to be attributed entirely to the divine fruitfulness enjoyed by the Church, which, when no one is opposed to it, when nothing places an obstacle in its way, spreads out by itself and gains ground; yet it would produce still many more fruits if it enjoyed, not only freedom, but the favor of the laws too and the protection of the public authorities.5
More recently, Pius XII notes, like Leo XIII, that religious pluralism can be a sufficient favorable condition for the development of the Church; and he even emphasizes that there is in our time a tendency to pluralism:
[The Church] knows also that for some time events have been developing rather in the other direction, that is to say, towards the multiplicity of religious confessions and of conceptions of life within the one same national community, where the Catholics constitute a more or less strong minority.
It can be interesting and even surprising for History to encounter in the United States of America an example, among others, of the manner in which the Church succeeds in blooming out in the most dissimilar situations.6
The great pope indeed kept himself from concluding that it was necessary to put one’s shoulder to the wheel in the direction of the “wind of history” and to promote from now on the principle of pluralism! On the contrary, he reaffirms the Catholic doctrine:
The historian should not forget that, though the Church and the State knew hours and years of struggle, there were, from Constantine the Great down to the contemporary and even recent era, tranquil periods, often prolonged, during which they collaborated with full understanding in the education of the same persons. The Church does not hide that in principle it considers this collaboration as normal, and that it regards as an ideal the unity of the people in the true Religion and the unanimity of action between itself and the State.7
Let us firmly hold on to this doctrine and beware the mirage of pluralism. If the wind of History seems to be blowing right now in this direction, it is assuredly not the Breathing of the divine Spirit, but indeed rather, across two centuries of the work of undermining Christianity, the glacial wind of Liberalism and of the Revolution!8
Yves Congar and Others
Father Congar is not one of my friends. A periti at the Council, he was, with Karl Rahner, the principal author of the errors that I have since not ceased combatting. He wrote, among others, a little book entitled Archbishop Lefebvre and the Crisis in the Church. Now you are going to see Father Congar, following Maritain, initiate us into the hidden things of the evolution of the historical context and of the wind of history. He says:
It cannot be denied that such a text [the conciliar declaration on religious liberty] says materially anything but what the Syllabus of 1864 said, and even practically the contrary of propositions 15, 77, and 79 of that document The Syllabus also defended a temporal power which, taking note of a new situation, the papacy renounced in 1929. The historico-social context in which the Church is called to live and to speak was no longer the same, and we had learned of the results. Already in the nineteenth century, “Catholics had understood that the Church would find a better support for its liberty in the asserted conviction of the faithful than in the favor of the princes.“9
Unfortunately for Father Congar, these “Catholics” are none other than the liberal Catholics condemned by the popes; and the teaching of the Syllabus, far from being dependent on fleeting historical circumstances, constitutes a mass of truths logically deduced from revelation and as immutable as the Faith! Our adversary carries on and insists:
The Church of Vatican II, by the declaration on religious liberty, by Gaudium et spes—The Church in the modern world: significant title!—has been clearly situated in the pluralist world of today, and without abjuring the greatness it has had, has cut the chains that had kept it on the shores of the Middle Ages. One cannot remain fixed on one moment of history!10
There it is! The sense of history pushes on to pluralism. Let us allow the bark of Peter to go in that direction, and let us abandon the social Kingship of Jesus Christ on the remote shores of a past time. You will find these same theories in Father John Courtney Murray, S.J., another conciliar expert, who dares to write, with a pompous gravity equaled only by its self-conceit, that the doctrine of Leo XIII on the union between Church and State is strictly relative to the historical context in which it is expressed:
Leo XIII was strongly influenced by the historical notion of personal political power exercised in a paternalistic fashion over society as over a large family.11
So, the trick is played: the monarchy has been succeeded everywhere by the regime of “the democratic and social constitutional State,” which, as our theologian assures us, and Bishop De Smedt will repeat at the Council, “is not a competent authority to be able to pass a judgement of truth or of falsity in religious matters.“12 Let us allow Father Murray to proceed:
His proper work is marked by a strong historical consciousness. He knew the times in which he was living, and wrote for them with an admirable historical and concrete realism…13 For Leo XIII, the structure known by the name of Catholic confessional State…was never more than a hypothesis.14
What ruinous doctrinal relativism! With such principles, all truth can be relativized by making an appeal to the historical consciousness of a transient moment! Was Pius XI, writing Quas primas, a prisoner of historical points of view? St. Paul says this as well, when he affirms of Jesus Christ: “He must reign”. (I Cor.15: 25.)
I think that you have grasped, with Maritain, Yves Congar, and associates, the perversity of historical doctrinal relativism. We are dealing with people who have no idea of the truth, no concept of what can be an immutable truth. It is laughable to report that these same liberal relativists, who were the real authors of Vatican II, are coming now to dogmatize that Council that they however declared to be pastoral, and to want to impose the conciliar novelties onto us as definitive and untouchable doctrines! They get angry if I dare say to them: “Oh, you say that Quas primas, the pope would no longer write that today! Well, I say to you: It is your council that would no longer be written today; it is already overtaken. You cling to it because it is your work; but I hold on to Tradition, because it is the work of the Holy Ghost!”
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1 A priest from the diocese of Poitiers and a religious, recounts Father Theotime de St. Just, were received one day by St. Pius X. “Oh! the diocese of Cardinal Pie!” the pope said to them, raising his hands. “I have close by the works of your cardinal, and now for many years I have read a few pages from them almost every day.” Saying this, he took one of the volumes and put it into the hands of his visitors. From the thinness of the binding, they could confirm that it had to have belonged to the parish priest of Salzano or to the spiritual director of the seminary of Treviso a long time before getting into the Vatican.
2 Pontifical Documents of Paul VI, Ed, St. Augustin, St.-Maurice, 1965, p. 685.
3 Cf. Integral Humanism, Ch. V, pp. 180-181.
4 The Rights of Man and the Natural Law, p. 31.
5 Apostolic Letters of Leo Xlll, Bonne Presse, Tome IV, pp. 162-165.
6 Discourse at the Tenth International Congress of Historical Sciences, September 7, 1955. Pontifical Documents of Pius XII, Tome XVIL, p. 294.
7 Loc cit.
8 Cf. Archbishop Lefebvre and the Holy Office, pp. 54-55.
9 Op.cit, pp. 51-52.
10 Loc. cit.
11 Towards an Understanding of the Development of the Church’s Doctrine on Religious Liberty, in Vatican II, Religious Liberty, p. 128.
12 Relatio de reemendatione schematis emendati. May 28, 1965, document 4SC, pp. 48-49. A more cynical declaration of the official atheism of the State and of the denial of the social Kingship of Jesus Christ cannot be imagined, and this from the lips of an official reporter from the editing commission on the conciliar declaration on religious liberty!
13 One would think that he was reading Jacques Maritain: his “sundry historical heavens” and his “concrete historic ideal” (cf. Integral Humanism, pp. 152-153) make us wonder which has influenced the other!
14 Op. cit., p. l34.