Chapter 28 - FILL IN HERE
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The Religious Liberty
of Vatican II
According to Vatican II, the human person would have the right, in the name of his dignity, not to be impeded from exercising his religious worship, whatever it might be, in private or in public, unless this troubles the public tranquility and morality.1 You will acknowledge that the public morality of the pluralist State promoted by the Council is not by nature going to cramp this liberty a great deal, any more than the advanced rotting of liberal society would limit the right to the liberty of partnership, if it were proclaimed in an indistinct way by the couples who are living together unwed, and the married couples in the name of their human dignity!
Thus you, Moslems, pray undisturbed in the very midst of our Christian streets; build your mosques and your minarets beside the steeples of our churches. The Church of Vatican II assures you that no one should hinder you from this, and the same goes for you Buddhists, Hindus…
In return for this, we Catholics will ask you for religious freedom in your countries, in the name of the liberty that we grant you in ours. We will also be able to defend our religious rights in the face of the Communist regimes, in the name of a principle declared by so dignified a religious assembly, and already recognized by the U.N. and Freemasonry. This is moreover the consideration that Pope John Paul II made to me on the occasion of the audience that he granted me on November 18, 1978: “You know,” he said to me, “religious liberty has been very useful for us in Poland, against Communism!” I wanted to respond to him, “Very useful, perhaps, as an argument ad hominem, since the Communist regimes have the freedom of worship inscribed in their constitutions,2 but not as a doctrinal principle of the Catholic Church!”
I | Religious Liberty and Truth
This is, at all events, what Father Garrigou-Lagrange answered in advance:
We can… make of the liberty of worship an argument ad hominem against those who, while proclaiming the liberty of worship, persecute the Church (secular and socializing States) or impede its worship directly or indirectly (Communist States, Islamic ones, etc.). This argument ad hominem is fair, and the Church does not disdain it, using it to defend effectively the right of its own liberty. It does not follow that the freedom of cults, considered in itself, is maintainable for Catholics as a principle, because it is in itself absurd and impious: indeed, truth and error cannot have the same rights.3
I would like to repeat this: only truth has rights; error has no rights. This is the teaching of the Church. Leo XIII writes:
A right is a moral faculty; and, as we have said and as it cannot be repeated too often, it would be absurd to believe that it belongs, naturally and without distinction or discernment, to the truth and to the untruth, to the good and to the bad. The truth is, the good has the right to be propagated in the State with prudent liberty, in order that a greater number profit from them; but the untrue doctrines, the most fatal pestilence of all for the mind…it is just that the public authority uses its solicitude to repress them, in order to prevent the evil from spreading out for the ruin of society.4
It is clear, in light of this, that the doctrines and the cults of the erroneous religions have of themselves no right to be allowed to express themselves and propagate themselves freely. In order to evade this tautology, it was objected at the Council that truth and error, properly speaking, have no rights: it is persons who have rights, who are “subjects of rights.” From there, they tried to dodge the problem by posing it on a purely subjective level, and thus, hoping to be able to leave the truth out of account! This attempt was to be in vain, as I am now going to show you, by placing myself into the very problem of the Council.
Put onto the subjective level of the “subject of rights,” religious liberty is the same right granted to those who adhere to religious truth and to those who are in error. Is such a right conceivable? Upon what does the Council base it?
The Rights of Conscience?
At the start of the Council, some people wanted to found religious liberty on the rights of conscience: “Religious liberty would be fruitless if men could not make the imperatives of their conscience pass over into exterior and public acts,” proclaimed Bishop De Smedt in his introductory speech (Documentation catholique, January 5, 1964, col. 74-75). The argument was the following: everyone has the duty to follow his conscience, because this is for everyone the immediate rule of action. Now this holds not only for a true conscience, but also for an invincibly erroneous conscience, in particular those of the numerous followers of the false religions. Thus, these people have the duty to follow their conscience, and therefore they must be left free to follow it and to carry on their worship.
The foolishness of this reasoning was quickly discovered, and they had to resign themselves to making a fire with other kindling. Indeed invincible error, that is, inculpable error, certainly excuses from all moral fault; but it does not make the action good5; consequently, it does not give any rights to its perpetrator! A right can be based only on the objective norm of the law, and in the first place on the divine law, which regulates in particular the manner in which God wants to be honored by men.
The Dignity of the Human Person?
Since conscience did not furnish a sufficiently objective foundation, they thought they could find one in the dignity of the human person. “The Council of the Vatican declares…that the right to religious liberty has its basis in the very dignity of the human person.“6 This dignity consists in the fact that man, gifted with intelligence and free will, is ordained by his nature itself to know God, which he cannot do if he is not left free.7 The argument is this: man is free; therefore he must be left free. Or again: man is endowed with free will; therefore, he has the right to freedom of action. You recognize the absurd principle of all Liberalism, as Cardinal Billot calls it. It is a sophism: free will is located in the domain of BEING; moral liberty and the liberty of action stem from the realm of ACTING. It is one thing what a man is by his nature, and it is something else what he becomes (good or bad, in the truth or in error) by his acts! The radical human dignity is indeed that of an intelligent nature, capable therefore of personal choice; but his final dignity consists in adhering in act to the true and to the good. It is this final dignity which merits for each one the moral liberty (faculty of acting) and the liberty of action (faculty of not being impeded from acting). To the extent in which man adheres to error or attaches himself to evil, he loses his final dignity or does not attain it and nothing more can be founded on it! This is what Leo XIII magnificently taught in two texts hidden from view by Vatican II. Speaking of the false modern liberties, Leo XIII writes in Immortale Dei:
If the intelligence adheres to false ideas and if the will chooses evil and attaches itself to it, neither the one nor the other reaches its perfection. Both of them fall short of their inborn dignity and become corrupt. It is therefore not permitted to bring to light and to expose to the eyes of men that which is contrary to virtue and to truth, and even less still to place this license under the tutelage of the protection of the laws.8
In Libertas, the same pope specifies what true religious liberty consists in and upon what it must be founded:
Another liberty that is also very loudly proclaimed is that which is named liberty of conscience. If it is understood by this that everyone can indifferently, at his pleasure, render worship to God or not, the arguments which have been given above suffice to refute this.9 It can be understood also in the sense that man has in the State the right to follow, according to the consciousness of his duty, the will of God, and to fulfill His precepts10 without anyone’s being able to impede him from this. This liberty, the true liberty worthy of the children of God, which so gloriously protects the dignity of the human person, is above all violence and all oppression. It has always been the object of the wishes of the Church and of its particular affection.11
There you have true dignity, true religious liberty; false dignity, false religious liberty!
Religious Liberty, a Universal Right to Tolerance?
Father Ph. André-Vincent, who was very much interested in this question, wrote to me one day to put me on my guard: “Be careful,” he said to me, “the Council is claiming for the followers of the false religions not the affirmative right to practice their cult, but only the negative right not to be impeded in the exercise, public or private, of their worship.” In short, Vatican II would have done nothing but to generalize the classic doctrine of tolerance.
Indeed, when a Catholic State, for the sake of the civil peace, for the cooperation of all in the common good, or in a general way to avoid a greater evil or to procure a greater good, judges that it should tolerate the practice of this or that false worship, it can either close its eyes on this worship by a tolerance, meaning not taking any coercive measures in opposition to it, or even concede to its followers the civil right not to be disturbed in the exercise of their worship. In this latter case, it is a question of a purely negative right. The popes, furthermore, do not fail to emphasize that civil tolerance does not grant any affirmative right to the dissidents, nor any right to practice their worship; for such an affirmative right can be based only on the truth of the worship that is considered:
If the circumstances require it, deviations from the rule can be tolerated, when they have been introduced with a view to avoid greater evils, without however elevating them to the dignity of a right, seeing that there cannot be any right against the eternal laws of justice.12
While conceding rights only to what is true and honorable, the Church is nevertheless not opposed to the tolerance that the public authorities believe that they should make use of with regard to certain things contrary to truth and justice. Consequently, with a view to a greater evil to be avoided or a greater good to obtain or preserve.13
No State, nor community of States, whatever may be their religious character, can give a positive mandate or a positive14 authorization to teach or to do what would be contrary to religious truth or to moral good…
An essentially different question is this: in a community of States, can one, at least in determined circumstances, establish the norm that the free exercise of a belief or of a religious practice in effect in a member-State not be impeded throughout all the territory of the community by means of coercive laws or ordinances of the State?15(The pope answers affirmatively: yes, “in certain circumstances” such a norm can be established).
Father Baucher sums up this doctrine in an excellent manner: he writes, “In decreeing tolerance, the legislator is supposed to intend to create, for the profit of the dissidents, not the right or the moral faculty to practice their worship, but only the right not to be disturbed in the exercise of this worship. Without ever having the right to act wrongly, one can have the right not to be prevented from acting wrongly, when a just law prohibits this hindrance for sufficient motives.“16
He justly adds: “The civil right to tolerance is one thing, when this is guaranteed by the law with a view to the common good of such or such a nation, under the determined circumstances; the pretended natural and inviolable right to tolerance for all the adherents of all religions is something else, when it is by principle, and therefore in every circumstance!”
The civil right to tolerance, indeed, even if the circumstances that justify it seem to be multiplying nowadays, remains nonetheless strictly relative to these circumstances. Leo XIII writes:
The toleration of evil belonging to the principles of political prudence must be rigorously encircled within the limits required by its reason for being, that is to say, by the public welfare. This is why, if it is harmful to the public welfare, or if it is for the State the cause of a greater evil, the consequence is such that it is not permitted to make use of it; for, under these conditions, the reason for being is absent.17
Thus, it would have been very difficult at Vatican II, relying on the acts of the previous magisterium, to proclaim a natural and universal right to tolerance. Furthermore, they carefully avoided the word tolerance, which seemed much too negative; for what is tolerated is always an evil. Contrarily, they wanted to put forward the positive values of all religions.18
Religious Liberty, a Natural Right to Immunity?
Without invoking tolerance, the Council thus defined a simple natural right to immunity: the right not to be disturbed in the practice of one’s worship, whatever it may be.
The craftiness, or at least the artful step, was obvious: not being able to define a right to the exercise of every form of worship, since such a right does not exist for the erroneous cults, they strained their ingenuity to formulate a natural right to immunity alone, which would hold for the adherents of all the cults. Thus, all the “religious groups” (a modest term concealing the Babel of religions) would naturally revel in the immunity from all restraint in their “worship of the supreme Divinity” (what divinity is this, for heaven’s sake?). They would profit also from the “right not to be prevented from teaching and from manifesting their faith (what faith?) publicly, by word of mouth and in writing.“19
Can a greater confusion be imagined? All followers of all the religions, the true one as well as the false ones, boiled down to absolutely the same base of equality, would enjoy one same natural right, under the pretext that this is only a “right to immunity.” Is this conceivable?
It is, rather, evident that of themselves, by the mere claim of their erroneous religion, the followers of this religion do not possess any natural right to immunity. Let me illustrate this truth through a concrete example. If the longing ever took hold of you to impede the public prayer of a group of Moslems on a street, or even to disturb their worship in a mosque, you would possibly sin against charity and assuredly against prudence; but you would not cause any injustice to these believers. They would not be wronged in any of the goods to which they have a right, or in any of their rights to these goods:20 in any of their goods, for their true good is not to carry on their false worship without obstacles, but to be able one day to exercise the true worship; in any of their rights, because they have a right precisely to practice the “worship of God in private and in public"21 and not to be impeded from this. The cult of Allah is not the worship of God! Indeed, God Himself has revealed the worship by which He wants to be honored exclusively, which is the worship of the Catholic Religion.22
If, therefore, in natural justice, one does not do any wrong to these believers in any way by disturbing or preventing their worship, the reason is that they do not have any natural right not to be disturbed in the exercise of it.
It will be objected that I am negative, that I know not how not to consider the positive values of the erroneous forms of worship. I have responded to this allegation by speaking to you above about searching.23 It will be retorted to me then that the basic orientation of the souls of the followers of the false cults remains upright and that it should be respected, and likewise the cult in which it is involved should be respected. I could not be opposed to the cult without shattering these souls, without breaking their orientation towards God. Thus, because of its religious error, the soul in question indeed does not have the right to practice its worship; but from the fact that it is notwithstanding, I would say, connected with God, from that claim, it would have a right to immunity in the exercise of its worship. Every man would have thus a natural right to civil immunity in religious matters.
Let us admit for the moment this alleged naturally direct orientation of every soul towards God in the practice of its worship. It is not at all obvious that the duty of respecting its worship for that reason is a duty of natural justice. It seems to me, rather, that it is a question of a pure duty of charity! If this is the way it is, this duty of charity does not grant to the adherents of the false cults any natural right to immunity, but prompts the civil authorities to grant them a civil right to immunity. Now the Council proclaims for every man, without proving anything, precisely a natural right to civil immunity. It appears to me that, on the contrary, the practice of the false cults cannot exceed the status of a simple civil right to immunity24 which is a completely different thing!
Let us carefully distinguish on the one hand the virtue of justice, which, by assigning their duties to some, gives to others the corresponding right, that is to say, the power to demand, and, on the other hand, the virtue of charity, which indeed imposes duties onto some, without however assigning any right to the others.
A Natural Orientation of Every Man towards God?
The Council25 invokes, beyond the fundamental dignity of the human person, his natural quest for the divine: each man, in the exercise of his religion, whatever it may be, would be in fact oriented towards the true God, even in an unconscious search for the true God, rooted in God, if you will; and by this claim, he would have a natural right to be respected in the practice of his worship.
If a Buddhist, therefore, burns sticks of incense before the idol of Buddha, according to Catholic theology, he commits an act of idolatry; but in light of the new doctrine uncovered by Vatican II, he expresses “the supreme effort of a man to search for God.“26 This religious act therefore has a right to be respected, this man has a right not to be impeded from performing it; he has a right to religious liberty.
First, there is an obvious contradiction in affirming that all men devoted to the false cults are of themselves, naturally, turned towards God. An erroneous cult, of itself, can only turn souls away from God, because it puts them onto a path which of itself does not lead to God.
It can be admitted that, in the false religions, certain souls can be oriented towards God; but this is because they do not attach themselves to the errors of their religion! It is not through their religion that these souls turn towards God, but in spite of it! Therefore, the respect that is owed to these souls would not imply that respect is owed to their religion.
In any case, the identity and the number of such souls, which God deigns to turn towards Him by His grace, remains perfectly hidden and unknown. It is certainly not a great number. A priest who came from a country of mixed religions informed me one day of his experience of those who live in the heretical sects; he told me of his surprise to ascertain how very stubborn these persons usually are in their errors and how little disposed to examine the remarks that a Catholic may make to them, and how little docile to the Spirit of Truth.
The identity of the souls truly oriented towards God in the other religions thus remains the secret of God and escapes human judgment. It is therefore impossible to found any natural or civil right on this. That would be to make the juridical order of society rest upon purely hazardous, even arbitrary suppositions. That would be to base the social order definitively upon the subjectivity of each one and to build a house on sand.
I will add this: I have been sufficiently in contact with the religions of Africa (Animism, Islam), but it can be said as much of the religion of India (Hinduism), in order to be able to affirm that the lamentable consequences of original sin are verified among their followers, in particular the blindness of the intellect and their superstitious fear. In this respect, to uphold, as Vatican II does, a naturally direct orientation of all men towards God is totally unrealistic
and a pure naturalistic heresy! May God deliver us from all subjectivist and naturalist errors! They are the unmistakable mark of the Liberalism which inspired the religious liberty of Vatican II. They can lead only to social chaos, to the Babel of religions!
Evangelical Mildness
Divine revelation, the Council assures us, “shows in what respect Christ held the liberty of man to be in the accomplishment of his duty of believing in the word of God.“27 Jesus, “meek and humble of heart,” gives an order, “let the cockle grow up until the harvest”; “He does not break the crumpled reed and does not put out the smoking wick.“28
Here is the response. When the Lord gives the order to let the cockle sprout, He does not grant it a right not to be uprooted; but He gives this advice to the harvesters “in order not to root up at the same time the good grain.” This is a counsel of prudence: it is better sometimes not to scandalize the faithful by the spectacle of the repression of unbelievers;29 at times it is better to avoid a civil war that non-tolerance would instigate. Likewise, if Jesus does not break the crumpled reed and makes of this a pastoral rule for His apostles, it is by charity towards those who are led astray, in order not to turn them farther away from the truth, which could happen if coercive means were used against their cults. It is clear that there is from time to time a duty of prudence and of charity, on the part of the Church and of Catholic States, towards the followers of false cults; but such a duty does not of itself confer on others any right! By not distinguishing the virtue of justice (the one that assigns rights) from the virtue of prudence and from that of charity (which of themselves confer only duties), Vatican II sinks into error. To make justice out of charity is to pervert the social and political order of the city.
Even if, by an impossibility, one should consider that Our Lord all the same gives to the cockle a right “not to be uprooted,” this right would remain quite relative to the particular reasons that motivate it. It would never be a natural and inviolable right! Saint Augustine writes, “Where we do not have to be afraid to uproot the good grain at the same time, let not the strictness of discipline go to sleep”;30 let not the practice of the false cults be tolerated! Saint John Chrysostom himself, so little a supporter of the suppression of dissidents, does not, however, exclude the repression of their forms of worship. He says, “Who knows, moreover, whether a certain part of this cockle would not be changed into good grain? If therefore you rooted it up at present, you would hurt the next harvest, by rooting out those who can change and become better. He [the Lord] does not forbid us, assuredly, to repress the heretics, to make them be quiet, to refuse them freedom of speech, to disperse their assemblies, to repudiate their oaths; what He prohibits is to spill their blood and to put them to death.“31 The authority of these two Fathers of the Church seems to me sufficient to refute the improper interpretation that the Council gives of evangelical mildness. Our Lord doubtless did not preach draconian behavior, but this is no reason to disguise Him as an apostle of liberal religious toleration!
The Liberty of the Act of Faith
Finally there is invoked the liberty of the act of faith.32 Therein we have a double argument, of which here is the first part: To impose, for religious reasons, limits onto the practice of a dissident cult would be indirectly to compel its adherents to embrace the Catholic Faith. Now the act of faith must be exempt from all compulsion: “Let no one be compelled to embrace the Catholic Faith against his will.“33
I answer, with sound moral theology, that such a constraint is legitimate, according to the rules of the voluntarium indirectum, the indirectly voluntary act or effect. It has indeed for its direct object to limit the dissident cult, which is a good,34 and for its only indirect and remote effect to urge certain non-Catholics on to be converted, with the risk that some may become Catholics more through fear or social expediency than from conviction: something which is not desirable in itself, but can be permitted when there is a proportionate reason.
The second argument is much more essential and demands some expansion. It rests on the liberal idea of the act of faith. According to Catholic doctrine,35 faith is a consent, a submission of the intelligence to the authority of God who reveals, under the impulse of the free will, itself moved by grace. On the one hand, the act of faith must be free, that is to say, must avoid all external restraint which would have as its object, or its direct effect, to extort it against the subject’s will.36 On the other hand, the act of faith being a submission to divine authority, no power and no third person has the right to thwart the beneficial ascendancy of the First Truth, which has an inalienable right to illuminate the intelligence of the believer. It follows from this that the believer has a right to religious liberty: no one has the right to compel him, and no one has the right to prevent him from embracing the divine revelation or from prudently performing the corresponding external cultic acts.
Forgetful of the objective, which is quite a divine and supernatural character of the act of divine faith, the Liberals, and following them the Modernists, make of the Faith the expression of the subjective conviction of the subject37 at the termination of his personal search,38 in order to try to respond to the great questions that the universe makes him ask.39 The fact of the external divine revelation, its being proposed by the Church, gives a place to the creative inventiveness of the subject; or at least the latter should do its best to go and meet the former.40 If this is the way it is, divine faith is reduced to the rank of the religious convictions of the non-Christians, who fancy themselves to have a divine faith, whereas they have only a human persuasion: their motive for adhering to their creed not being the revealing divine authority, but the free judgment of their mind. Now, there you have their basic inconsistency. The Liberals claim that they keep in this act of very human persuasion the marks of inviolability and of exemption from all constraint, which belong only to the act of divine faith! They assure us that by the acts of their religious convictions, the followers of the other religions are put into relation with God and that, from then on, this relation must be removed from all constraint that would be attempted on it. “All the religious faiths are respectable and untouchable,” they say.
These last allegations are manifestly false. For, through their religious convictions, the adherents of the other religions do nothing but cling to the imaginations of their own mind, human productions that have in themselves nothing of the divine, neither in their cause, nor in their object, nor in the motive for adhering to them.
That does not mean that there is no truth in their convictions, or that they cannot be keeping some traces of the primitive or subsequent revelation. The presence of these semina Verbi is not sufficient by itself to make of their convictions an act of divine faith! This is true more especially as this supernatural act. If God wanted to stir it up by His grace, He would in most cases be impeded by the presence of the multiple errors and superstitions to which these men continue to adhere.
In face of the subjectivism and naturalism of the Liberals, we must reaffirm today the objective and supernatural character of the divine faith which is the Christian and Catholic Faith. It alone has an absolute and inviolable right to respect and to religious liberty.
II | Vatican II and the Catholic City
Let us make a point. The conciliar declaration on religious liberty turns out, to begin with, to be contrary to the constant magisterium of the Church.41 Moreover, it is not located along the line of the fundamental rights defined by the recent popes.42 Furthermore, we have just seen that it does not rest on any foundation, rational or revealed. Finally, it is important to examine whether it is in accord with the Catholic principles which regulate the relations of the temporal city with religion.
Limits of Religious Liberty
Vatican II stipulates first of all that religious liberty must be confined within “just limits”,43 “according to the juridical rules…consistent with the objective moral order, which are required in order to effectively safeguard the rights of all…the authentic public peace…as well as the protection due to public morality.“44 That is all very reasonable, but leaves aside the essential question, which is this: does not the State have the duty, and therefore the right, to safeguard the religious unity of the citizens in the true Religion and to protect the Catholic souls against scandal and the propagation of religious error and, for these reasons only, to limit the practice of the false cults, even to prohibit them if need be?
Such is nonetheless the doctrine of the Church, set out with vigor by Pope Pius IX in Quanta cura, in which the Pontiff condemns the opinion of those who, “contrary to the doctrine of Scripture, of the Church, and of the holy Fathers, do not fear to affirm that ‘the best government is that in which the office of repressing the violators of the Catholic Religion by the sanction of penalties is not conceded to the government, except when the public peace demands it.45 The obvious meaning of the expression “violators of the Catholic Religion” is: those who publicly practice worship other than Catholic worship, or who, publicly, do not observe the laws of the Church. Pius IX teaches thus that the State governs in a better way when it recognizes that it has the function of repressing the public practice of the erroneous cults, for the sole reason that they are erroneous, and not simply to safeguard the public peace; on the exclusive grounds that they go against the Christian and Catholic order of the City, and not only because the public peace or morality would be affected by them.
This is why it must be said that the limits fixed by the Council onto religious liberty are only dust in the eyes, concealing the radical defect from which they suffer and which is not to take into consideration the difference between truth and error! Against all justice they pretend to attribute the same right to the true Religion and to the false ones, and they then strive artificially to limit the damages by barriers which are far from satisfying the requirements of Catholic doctrine. I would readily compare the limits of religious liberty to the security guard-rails on the highways, which serve to contain the swerving of the vehicles whose drivers have lost control. In the very first place, it would still be a question of reminding the drivers of their duty to follow the traffic laws!
Falsification of the Temporal Common Good
Let us go on now to the most basic flaws in religious liberty. The conciliar argumentation rests in reality upon a false personalistic conception of common good reduced to the sum of private interests, or, as it is said, to respect for the rights of persons—to the detriment of the common work to be accomplished for the greater glory of God and the good of all. John XXIII’s in Pacem in terris already tends to adopt this partial and therefore warped view. He writes:
In contemporary thought, the common good resides especially in the safeguarding of the rights and of the duties of the human person.46
Pius XII, confronted by the contemporary totalitarianisms, no doubt legitimately contrasted with them the fundamental rights of the human person;47 but this does not mean that Catholic doctrine limits itself to that. By dint of mangling the truth in a personalistic sense, one ends up by entering into the game of frantic individualism that the liberals have succeeded in introducing into the Church. As Charles de Koninck (De la primauté du bien commun contre les personnalistes) and Jean Madiran Le principe de totality have emphasized, it is not by exalting the individual that one genuinely fights against totalitarianism, but by recalling that the true temporal common good is not an end in itself but is ordained positively, even if indirectly, for the good of the city of God here below and in heaven! Let us not make ourselves accomplices of the personalists in their secularization of right!
In other terms and concretely, before bothering to find out whether the Moslems, the Krishna people, and the Moonies are not overly bullied by the law, the State (I am not speaking about non-Christian countries) must be vigilant to safeguard the Christian soul of the country, which is the essential element of the common good in a nation that is still Christian. Some would say that this is a question of emphasis! No! It is a basic question: is the all-inclusive idea of the Catholic city a Catholic doctrine, yes or no?
Ruin of the Public Law of the Church
The worse thing, I would say, about the religious liberty of Vatican II is the consequences: the ruin of the Church’s public Law, the death of the social reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and finally the religious indifferentism of individuals. According to the Council, the Church can still enjoy, in fact, a special recognition on the part of the State; but it does not have a natural and primordial right to this recognition, even in a nation that has a great Catholic majority: it is all finished for the principle of the confessional Catholic State, which had created the happiness of the nations that have remained Catholic. The clearest application of the Council has been the suppression of the Catholic States, their laicization by virtue of the principles of Vatican II and even at the request of the Vatican. All these Catholic nations (Spain, Colombia, etc.) have been betrayed by the Holy See itself in application of the Council! The separation of Church and State was vaunted as the “ideal system” by Cardinal Casaroli and by John Paul II, at the time of the reform of the Italian concordat!
The Church finds itself reduced on principle to the common right recognized by the State for all religions. Through a nameless impiety, it finds itself on the same footing of equality as heresy, treachery, and idolatry. Consequently, its public right is radically wiped out.
Nothing stands, in doctrine and in practice, of what had been the system of public relations of civil society with the Church and the other religions, which can be summed up in these words: recognition of the true Religion, possible and limited tolerance of the other religions. Thus, the Fuero de los Españoles, the basic charter of the rights and the duties of the Spanish citizen, wisely foresaw in its article 6, before the Council:
The profession and the practice of the Catholic Religion, which is the religion of the Spanish State, will enjoy official protection. No one will be disturbed, either for his religious beliefs, or in the private exercise of his worship. There will not be permitted either external ceremonies or demonstrations other than those of the State religion.48
This very strict non-tolerance of the dissident cults is perfectly justified: on the one hand, it can be imposed onto the State in the name of its cura religionis, its duty to protect the Church and the faith of its members; on the other hand, the religious unanimity of the citizens in the true Faith is a precious and irreplaceable good, which it must protect at any cost, no matter what, for the temporal common good itself of a Catholic nation. This is what the schema on the relations between the Church and the State written up for the Council by Cardinal Ottaviani expressed. This document simply set forth the Catholic doctrine on that question, a doctrine wholly applicable in a Catholic nation:
Hence, therefore, the same as the civil authority considers that it has the right to protect public morality, likewise, in order to protect the citizens against the seductions of error, in order to keep the City in the unity of faith, which is the supreme good and the source of manifold, even temporal benefits, the civil power can, of itself, regulate and moderate the public manifestations of other cults and defend the citizens against the diffusion of the false doctrines which, in the judgment of the Church, put their eternal salvation in danger.49
The Confusions that Are Kept Up Reveal
the Hidden Apostasy!
The Fuero de los Españoles, as we have seen, tolerates the private practice of the erroneous cults; but it does not allow their public manifestations. That is a completely classical distinction that Dignitatis humanæ refused to apply. The Council defined religious liberty as a right of the person in religious matters, “in private as in public, alone or associated with others.” The conciliar document justified this refusal of all distinction: “The social nature of man indeed itself requires that he express externally the internal acts of religion, that in religious matters he has to have give-and-take with others, that he profess his religion in a communal form” (DH.3).
Beyond any doubt, religion is an assemblage of acts not only interior to the soul (devotion, prayer) but exterior (adoration, sacrifice), and not only private (family prayer) but also public (religious functions in the buildings of worship—let us say the churches—processions, pilgrimages, etc.). That is not the problem. The issue is to know with what religion we are dealing: whether it is the true one or a false one! In regard to the true Religion, it has the right to practice all the above-mentioned acts “with a prudent liberty,” as Leo XIII says,50 that is to say, within the limits of public order, in a not unseasonable fashion.
The acts of the erroneous cults must be carefully distinguished from one another. Acts that are purely internal avoid all human power by their nature itself.51 The private external acts, in return, can be sometimes subject to the regulation of a Catholic State if they disturb the Catholic order: for example, prayer meetings of non-Catholics in private apartments. Finally, the public acts of worship fall by themselves under the power of the laws which aim at forbidding, if necessary, all advertising to the erroneous cults. How was the Council able to agree to make these distinctions, since it refused at the outset to distinguish the true Religion from the false ones and likewise to distinguish between the Catholic State, the confessional non-Catholic State, the Communist State, the pluralist State, etc. On the contrary, Cardinal Ottaviani’s schema did not fail to make all these absolutely indispensable precise points. But, precisely here, the inanity and impiety of the conciliar scheme are understood. Vatican II intended to define a right which could suit all forms and shapes, independently of the truth! This is what the Freemasons had asked for. Thus, you had there a hidden apostasy from the Truth, which is Our Lord Jesus Christ!
Death of the Social Reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ
Now, if the State no longer recognizes in itself a singular duty towards the true Religion of the true God, the common good of civil society is no longer ordered to the heavenly city of the blessed; and the City of God on earth, that is to say, the Church, finds itself deprived of its beneficial and unique influence on all of public life! Whether one wants it or not, social life is organized outside the truth, outside the divine law. Society becomes atheistic. This is the death of the social Reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
This is indeed what Vatican II did, when Bishop De Smedt, chairman of the schema on religious liberty, asserted on three occasions: “The State is not a competent authority to pass a judgment of truth or falsity in religious matters.“52 What a monstrous declaration, that Our Lord no longer has the right to reign, to reign alone, to permeate all the civil laws with the law of the Gospel! How many times had Pius XII not condemned such a juridical positivism,53 which claimed that the juridical order must be separated from the moral order, because the distinction between the true and the false religions could not be expressed in juridical terms! Read the Fuero de los Españoles again!
Furthermore, unsurpassable blasphemy, the Council intended that the State, freed of its duties towards God, become, for the future, the guarantee that no religion “be prevented from freely manifesting the particular efficacy of its doctrine in organizing society and enlivening all human activity.“54 Vatican II thus invites Our Lord to come organize and enliven society, in conjunction with Luther, Mohammed, and Buddha! This is what John Paul II wanted to bring about at Assisi! An irreligious and blasphemous plan!
Formerly, the union between the Church and the Catholic State had as its fruit the Catholic City, the perfect realization of the social reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Today, the Church of Vatican II is married to the State which it wants to be atheistic; the fruit of this adulterous union is pluralistic society, the Babel of religions, the indifferentist City, object of all the desires of Freemasonry!
The Reign of Religious Indifferentism
“To each his religion!” it is said. Or, “The Catholic Religion is good for the Catholics, but the Moslem one is good for the Moslems!” Such is the motto of the citizens of the indifferentist City. How do you expect them to think otherwise, when the Church of Vatican II teaches them that other religions “are not devoid of significance and of value in the mystery of salvation”?55 How do you expect them to consider the other religions differently, when the State grants to them all the same liberty? Religious liberty fatally breeds the indifferentism of individuals. Pius IX was already condemning in the Syllabus the following proposition:
It is false that the civil liberty of all forms of worship, and the full power left to all to manifest all their thoughts openly and publicly, more easily throws the peoples into corruption of morals and of the mind, and propagates the pestilence of indifferentism.56
This is what we are living: since the declaration on religious liberty, the great majority of Catholics are convinced that “men can find the path to eternal salvation and obtain salvation, in the worship of any religion whatever.“57 There again the plan of the Freemasons is accomplished; they have succeeded, by means of a Council of the Catholic Church, in “giving credence to the great error of the present time, which consists in…putting all the religious forms onto the same footing of equality.“58
Did all those conciliar Fathers who gave their vote to Dignitatis humanæ and proclaimed religious liberty with Paul VI realize that they had in fact uncrowned Our Lord Jesus Christ by tearing away the crown of His social royalty? Did they grasp that they had very concretely dethroned Our Lord Jesus Christ from the throne of His divinity? Did they understand that, making themselves the echo of the apostate nations, they were making those abominable blasphemies rise up towards His throne: “We do not want Him to rule over us"59; “We have no king but Cæsar”?60
But He, making light of the confused murmur that rose up from this assembly of senseless people, withdrew from them His Spirit.
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1 Cf. Declaration on Religious Liberty, Dignitatis humanae, n. 2.
2 Alongside the right of anti-religious propaganda!
3 Cf. Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., De Révélatione, Tome II, p. 451, 8th objection (Ferrari and Gabalda, editors, 1921).
4 Encyclical Libertas, PIN. 207.
5 St. Thomas, Ia IIae, 19, 6 and ad. 1.
6 Dignitatis humanae n.2.
7 Ibid.
8 PIN. 149.
9 It is a question of the religious indifferentism of the individual.
10 It is obviously a question, speaking concretely, of the precepts of the true Religion!
11 PIN. 215.
12 Pius IX, Letter Dum civilis societas, of February 1st, 1875, to Mr. Charles Perrin.
13 Leo XIII Libertas, PIN. 219.
14 Or, let us say, affirmative.
15 Pius XII, allocution Ci riesce to Italian jurists, of December 6, 1953.
16 DTC, Tome IX, col. 701, article Liberté.
17 Líbertas, PIN. 221.
18 I have said what should be thought of these values in Chapter XXVI. I will not come back to that here.
19 Dignitatis humanæ, 4t.
20 This distinction is brought about by Pius XII on the subject of the organic taking of parts done on the bodies of the deceased. Cf. Discourse to specialists in eye surgery, May 14, 1956.
21 Pius XII, Christmas radio message, December 24th, 1941. PIN. 804.
22 This explanation, as brief as it is, avoids for me the necessity of using the rather complicated terms, objective and subjective right, concrete and abstract right.
23 Cf. Chapter XXIV.
24 Which the government may or may not grant, according to a judgment of prudence
25 Dignitatis humanæ 2-3.
26 John Paul II, discourse to the general audience, October 22, 1986.
27 Dignitatis humanae, 9
28 Ibidem, 11; cf. Mt. 13:29, Isaias 42:3.
29 Note from Editor of Angelus Press: St Paul said that God reserves for Himself the punishment of the wicked: “Revenge is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord.” The duty to punish the wicked is difficult to exercise with virtue. Though the civil authorities have received from God this duty (Rom. 13:4), it is oftentimes prudent for them to apply it only in the cases of manifest wickedness.
30 Contra epist.. Parmeniani, 3, 2; quoted by Saint Thomas, Catena aurea, in Mattheum XIII, 29-30.
31 Homily 46 on Saint Matthew, quoted by Saint Thomas, loc. cit. The question of putting heretics to death is of no importance to our purpose here.
32 Dignitatis humanæ, 10.
33 Canon Law of 1917,Canon 1351.
34 It is a good for the Catholic Religion, and even for the temporal common good, when it is based on the religious unanimity of the citizens.
35 Vatican I, Dogmatic constitution Del Filius Denz. 1789, 1810; Saint Thomas IIa IIæ, q2, a9; q4, a2.
36 Cf. above.
37 Cf. St Pius X, Encyclical Pascendi, n. 8; Denz. 2075.
38 Cf. Vatican II, Dignitatis humanæ, n. 3.
39 Cf. Vatican II, Nostra ætate, n. 2.
40 Father Pierre-Reginald Cren, O.P., shamelessly opposes his personalist conception of revelation to the Catholic notion of the faith: “Revelation: dialogue between the divine liberty and human liberty”; he gives this title in his article dedicated to the freedom of the act of faith (Lumière et Vie, n. 69, Religious liberty, p. 39).
41 Chapter XXVII, first part.
42 Ibid, second part.
43 Dignitatis humanæ, 1.
44 Ibid, 7.
45 PIN. 39; Denz. 1690.
46 April ll, 1963; n. 61 of the Encyclical.
47 Cf. Especially of the radio message of Christmas 1942.
48 Quoted by Cardinal Ottaviani, The Church and the City, Vatican Polyglot Press, 1963, p. 275.
49 See the whole text of this document in the appendix of the present work.
50 Libertas, PIN. 207.
51 If the power of the Church over its subjects is accepted, it is a power that is not purely human.
52 Relatio de reemendatione schematis emendati, May 28, 1965, document 4, SC.
53 Pius XII, Letter of October 19th, 1945, for the Nineteenth Social Week of Italian Catholics, AAS. 37, 274; Allocution Con vivo compiacimento of November 13th, 1945, to the Tribunal of the Rota, PIN. 1064, 1072.
54 Dignitatis humanæ 4.
55 Decree on ecumenism, Unitatis redintegratio, n. 3.
56 Proposition 79.
57 Syllabus, condemned proposition no. 17.
58 Leo XIII, Encyclical Humanum Genus on the Freemasons, April 20, 1884.
59 Luke 19:14.
60 John 19:15.