Chapter 20 - 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.
The Direction of History
I have tried to show you in the preceding chapters how the liberal Catholics such as Lamennais, Maritain, and Yves Congar have a not very Catholic view of the sense of history. Let us try to go deeply into their point of view and to judge it by the light of faith.
Sense or Nonsense?
For the Catholics called liberal, history has a sense, that is to say, a direction. This direction is immanent, it is from here below, it is liberty. Humanity is urged on by an immanent breathing in the direction of a growing consciousness of the dignity of the human person, setting out in the direction of an always more extensive freedom from all constraint. Vatican II will become the echo of this theory by saying, following Maritain:
The dignity of the human person is, in our time, the object of an ever more live consciousness; always more numerous are those who claim for man the possibility of acting by virtue of his own options and with all free responsibility.1
That it is desirable that man determine his own way freely towards the good, no one will dispute; but that our age, and that the direction of History in general, are marked by a growing consciousness of human dignity and freedom, that is what is very questionable! Only Jesus Christ, by conferring onto the baptized the dignity of children of God, shows men what consists in their true dignity, the freedom of the children of God of which St. Paul speaks.2 To the extent that the nations have submitted themselves to Our Lord Jesus Christ, human dignity and a healthy freedom indeed have been seen to develop. Since the apostasy of the nations set up by Liberalism, we have no alternative but to report on the contrary that, Jesus Christ no longer reigning, “the truths diminishing among the sons of men,“3 human dignity is more and more despised and crushed and liberty reduced to a slogan empty of content.
Has there ever been seen, in any era of history, so colossal and radical an enterprise of slavery as the Communist technique of the slavery of the masses?4 If Our Lord invites us to “discern the signs of the times,“5 then all the voluntary blindness of the Liberals and an absolute order of silence has been required in order that an ecumenical council, called together precisely to discern the signs of our time,6 fall silent on the most manifest sign of the times, which is Communism! This silence suffices by itself to cover this Council with shame and with reprobation in the eyes of all History, and to show the ridiculousness of the allegation from the preamble of Dignitatis humanæ that I have quoted to you.
Therefore, if History has a direction, it is to be sure not the immanent and necessary pushing of humanity towards dignity and liberty, which the Liberals invent “ad excusandas excusationes suas.“7
Jesus Christ, Center of History
Then, what is the true direction of history? Is there even a direction to history?
History is all ordered to a person, who is the center of history, and who is Our Lord Jesus Christ, because, as St. Paul reveals it:
In Him all things have been established in heaven and on earth, things visible and invisible, the thrones, the dominions, the principalities, the powers, all has been created by Him and in Him, and He Himself is before all, and all things have in Him their consistency. He is the head of the body which is the Church, He who is the principle…in order that in all things He holds the first place. For God has willed that all the fullness abide in Him; He has willed to reconcile through Him all things with Himself, those which are on the earth and those which are in the heavens, by making peace by the blood of His cross.“8
Jesus Christ is therefore the pole of history. History has only one sole law: “He must reign;“9 if He reigns, true progress and prosperity also reign, which are goods more spiritual than material! If He does not reign, it is decadence, decay, slavery in all its forms, the reign of the Evil One. This is what Holy Scripture promises besides: “The nation and the kingdom that will not serve Thee shall perish, those nations will be entirely destroyed.“10 Books have been written that are otherwise excellent on the philosophy of history, but I admit to you my surprise and my impatience in reporting that this absolute capital principle is omitted in these or not put into the place it deserves. Now it is the principle of the philosophy of History; and, what is more, it is a truth of faith, a veritable dogma revealed and a hundred times verified by the facts!
This is then the response to the question posed: what is the direction of History? Well, history has no direction, no immanent direction. There is no direction to history, there is a goal of history, a transcendant goal; it is the “recapitulation of all things in Christ,” it is the submission of the whole temporal order to His redemptive work, it is the mastery of the Church militant over the temporal city, which prepares the eternal reign of the Church triumphant in heaven. Therefore, faith affirms to us, and the facts show it, History has one first pole: the Incarnation, the Cross, Pentecost; it has had its full blossoming in the Catholic city, whether this is the empire of Charlemagne, or the republic of Garcia Moreno. It will have its appointed time, it will attain its final pole, when the number of the elect is complete, after the time of the great apostasy (II Thess. 2:3); are we not living this now?
A Liberal Objection against the Catholic City
You have indeed understood, I think, from what I have said, that in History there is no immanent law of the progress of human liberty, or any immanent law of the emancipation of the temporal city in regard to Our Lord Jesus Christ.
The Liberals say, like Prince Albert of Broglie in his book The Church and the Roman Empire in the Fourth Century, the government that you advocate, with the union between Church and State, which was that of the Christian Caesars, Romans or Germans, has always led to the subjection of the Church by the Empire, to a bothersome dependence of the spiritual power vis-á-vis the temporal sword. The alliance of the throne and the altar has never been, says the author, “either durable, or sincere, or effective.“11 The freedom and mutual independence of the two powers therefore is of no value.
I leave to Cardinal Pie the care of responding to these liberal accusations; he does not hesitate to qualify these foolhardy affirmations as “revolutionary banalities”:
If several princes, still neophytes and too little disaccustomed to the absolutist aspects of pagan Cæsarism, have changed their legitimate protection since the beginning into oppression; if they have (ordinarily in the interest of heresy and at the request of heretical bishops) proceeded with a rigor that is not according to the spirit of Christianity, there have been found in the Church men of faith and men of courage, such as our Hilarys and our Martins, such as the Athanasiuses and the Ambroses, to call them back to the spirit of Christian gentleness, to repudiate the apostolate of the sword, to declare that religious conviction is never imposed by violence, finally to proclaim eloquently that the Christianity that had propagated itself in spite of the persecution of the princes could still do without their favor and did not have to give itself in vassalage to any tyranny. We know and we have weighed each one of the words of these noble athletes of the Faith and of the freedom of the Church their mother. While protesting against the excesses and the abuses and while reprimanding the reversions that are ill-timed and unintelligent, sometimes even challenging to the principle and to the rules of priestly immunity, never have any of these Catholic doctors doubted that it was the duty of the nations and of their heads to make a public profession of Christian truth; to conform to this their acts and their institutions; and even to forbid by laws, whether preventive or repressive, according to the dispositions of the times and the minds, the injuries that assumed a character of obvious impiety and brought trouble and disorder to the bosom of civil and religious society.12
That the system of “liberty alone” means progress over the realm of the union between the two powers is an error that I have already underscored and that this text of Cardinal Pie well illustrates. The Church has never taught that the direction of History and progress consisted in the ineluctable tendency to reciprocal emancipation of the temporal in relation to the spiritual. The sense of History of the Jacques Maritains and the Yves Congars is only a misinterpretation. This emancipation that they describe as progress is only, in point of fact, a ruinous and blasphemous divorce between the city and Jesus Christ. All the impudence of Dignitatis humanæ was needed to canonize this divorce, and this—the supreme imposture— in the name of revealed truth!
“Our society,” declared John Paul II, on the occasion of the conclusion of the new concordat between the Church and Italy, “is characterized by religious pluralism”; and he drew the consequence from this: the separation of Church and State is postulated by this evolution. At no time has John Paul II passed judgement on this change, either in order to deplore the laicization of society, or to say simply that the Church was resigning itself to a situation of fact. No! His declaration, like that of Cardinal Casaroli, was made by praising the separation of Church and State as being the ideal system, the outcome of a normal and providential historical process in which there is nothing to criticize! In other words: “Long live the apostasy of the nations—in this is progress!” Or again: “We must not be pessimists! Down with the prophets of misfortune! Jesus Christ no longer reigns? What is the difference? All is going well! The Church is, in any case, on the march towards the accomplishment of its history. Then, after all, Christ is coming, alleluia!” This smug optimism amidst so many ruins already piled up, this peculiarly half-witted eschatologism, are they not the fruits of the Spirit of error and of aberration? All of that seems absolutely diabolical to me.
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 Declaration on Religious Liberty, preamble.
2 Rom. 8:21.
3 Ps. 11:2.
4 Read Jean Madiran, The Old Age of the World, DMM, Jarze, 1975.
5 Mt. 16:4.
6 Cf. Vatican II, Gaudium et Spes, n.4, #1, 11 #1.
7 Ps. 140, v. 4: “incline not my heart to evil words; to make excuses in sins” excuse their Liberalism, to cover with the specious mask of progress the biting north wind that Liberalism has made to blow for two centuries over Christianity.
8 Col. 1:17-21.
9 I Cor. 15:25.
10 Is. 60:12.
11 Op. cit, Tome IV, p. 424, quoted by Father Théotime de St. Just, p. 55.
12 Third synodal instruction on the principal errors of the present time, Works V, 178.
Part III
The Liberal Conspiracy of Satan Against the Church and the Papacy