Louis Veuillot: The Liberal Illusion [1866]

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The Liberal Illusion

Chapter IX

Jesus Christ is the King of the world, He speaks to the world through His Priest, and the decrees of this Priest, being an expression of the  royal rights of Jesus Christ, are eternal. They apply not to one time alone, but to all times; not to one society alone, but to all societies; not to some men, but to all men. And since they have been prescribed in accordance with the nature of Humanity by the Creator Himself of Humanity, everywhere human society has need of them, everywhere its instinct calls for them by dint of cries, of sighs, of recurrent troubles, of unutterable pangs; for outside their empire nothing good exists, nor has anything good the fullness and assurance of life. That is the reason why there is no time, no society, no man from whom the faithful of Christ ought not to exact some form of obedience to the decrees of the Priest of Christ the King of the World.

The children of the Christ, the children of the King, are kings. They form an absolutely superior society, whose duty it is to take possession of the Earth and reign over it for the purpose of baptizing all men and of raising them to that selfsame supernatural life, that selfsame royalty and that selfsame glory for which Christ has destined them. They ought to strive for that goal, because the only way of realizing the ideal of universal liberty, universal equality, universal fraternity is to establish the universal reign of Christ. For the liberty that is man’s due is liberty to attain his supernatural end, which is union with Christ; and the only society ever known to recognize all men as equals and as brothers is the society of the disciples of Christ.

In the normal order, Christian society is maintained and extended by means of two powers that ought to be distinct — not separated; united — not confused; one above the other — not equal. The one is the head, the other the arm; the one is the supreme and sovereign word of the Pontiff, the other the social power.

Christian society, being firstly and above all Christian, submits wholly to this first law; and it puts all things in their place, because it first of all puts in His place its sole Lord and Master, Jesus Christ. It puts Him in His sovereign place in society, as all the faithful put Him in His sovereign place among souls; and out of this arises order, liberty, unity, greatness, justice, empire, peace.

Thus, across the breaches opened by human passions, by human weakness, and in spite of them, was formed in its magnificent variety that commonwealth of Europe which could be called the Christian Republic or even the Christian Family; a wonderful work, broken up by heresy just when the internal peace and the progress of the arts gave glorious promise of extending to the entire human race the fruits of the Redemption. Had Catholic unity been maintained until the XVIth century, there would no longer be any infidels, nor idolaters, nor slaves; the human race would be Christian to-day, and owing to the number and diversity of the nations coalescing in the unity of faith, it would be safe from the danger of universal despotism so imminent to-day.

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The Liberal Illusion

Chapter X

These two powers, united, distinct and one above the other, whereby Christian society is ruled, have been called the two swords. For the word would be of no avail, if it could not be at certain moments a sword. The meekness of Christ has willed that there should be two swords, so that the advent of repression might be delayed and the need of it forestalled.

The first sword, the one that cleaves nothing but darkness, remains in the patient and infallibly enlightened power of the Pontiff. The other, the material sword, is in the hand of the representative of society, and in order that it may make no mistake, it is in duty bound to obey the commandment of the Pontiff. It is the Pontiff who bids it come forth from the scabbard and who bids it return thereto. Its duty is to repress aggressive error, once it has been defined and condemned, to shackle it, to strike it down; to give protection to the truth, whether the latter is under the necessity of defending itself, or has need, in its turn, to go on the offensive.

The secular arm ought to clear the way for the truth, to assure it liberty of teaching, to guard afar the way of its ambassadors and of its followers. It has been said to the Apostles: “Going therefore, teach ye all nations; baptizing them.” It has been enjoined upon us to pray for the coming of the kingdom of God: Thy kingdom come. This commandment implies the duty on the part of all peoples to receive the messengers of Christ, and gives to Christian society the right at least to protect their lives. It is enough that they should endure exile, hunger, toil, insults, that they should die of want, that they should be devoured by wild beasts; the Christian commonwealth has certainly the right to demand that they shall not, besides all that, have to run the risk of falling into the hands of the executioner, and that the persons of their converts, who have entered the family, shall be as sacred as the persons of the missionaries themselves. Such are the duties of the power obedient to the commandment of the Pontiff. It is his part to see that this divine order, which was given to Peter after he was invested with the primacy, is carried out: “Arise, kill and eat.” That is to say, according to the interpretation of the Fathers: Kill error, which is death, and transform it into thy light, which is life.

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The Liberal Illusion

Chapter XI

Whenever we say such things, Free Thought raises the cry of “theocrat !“ as it would the cry of “assassin!” It pretends to take fright in a way that frightens us a good deal more than it is frightened itself. By means of this buffoonery, it steps up prudence to a point where it amounts to sheer hysteria, to a point where it amounts to downright betrayal of the truth. It suppresses the assertion, nay, even the bare mention, of the most elementary and necessary Christian right.

Certainly the prudence is not without excuse. For whenever the free-thinkers pretend to be alarmed, they think themselves dispensed from every consideration of reason and justice, and the Church is in for a persecution. The liberal Catholic never fails to play upon this sensitive chord: “Will nothing do you but to preach theocracy? Do you want to have us all stoned?” Yet, just because our opponents are incurably unjust, ought we like cowards to strike our colors, and can it be that not to see any longer, not to know any longer, not to think any longer is the primary condition on which we are to enjoy the liberty that befits us?

Let us scorn the trickery of words, and let not all the lackeys and henchmen of the praetorium, where Free Thought presumes to sit in judgment on the Christ, ever cow us into saying: “I know not the man!” We owe obedience to the Church within the limits that she herself has established, and which for the rest are ample enough, so that rebellion and pride may have no lack of leeway. If this obedience is theocracy, those that are sincerely afraid of it are not very much afraid of something else. In public life no less than in private life, there is but one way to escape from the kingdom of the Devil, and that is to submit to the kingdom of God. We have behind us in history, up to the very threshold of the present, and even in the present, lots of examples of the use which human autocracy has seen fit to make of the two swords. One would not have to search very long on the Earth to find the people that would have everything to gain, including in the first place life itself, were the Vicar of Jesus Christ, the spiritual King, able to say to the temporal king: “Put up thy sword into the scabbard.”

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The Liberal Illusion

Chapter XII

The Christian is priest, the Christian is king, and he is made for a higher glory. God must reign in us, God must reign through us, in order that we may merit to reign with God. Here we have certain rules of faith that we cannot keep apart from our rules of political life. Our rank is sublime, our dignity is divine; we cannot abdicate our present destiny, we cannot shirk its exceedingly high and exceedingly urgent duties — duties of the public no less than of the private order — without abdicating by that very fact our future dignity. We do not possess wealth, power, freedom, life for the sake of ourselves alone: attached to every gift bestowed on us is the obligation of using it to protect the multitude of our weak and ignorant brothers, both as regards their souls and as regards their bodies. Now, the main way to protect the
weak is to enact such laws as will make it easier for them to know God and to be in communion with God. Upon this point we shall be examined and judged, nor does any Christian believe for a moment that, on the day when he is called upon to give an account of the little ones he has contemptuously abandoned, or defended without courage and love, he will be able to excuse himself on Caine’s plea: Am I my brother’s keeper?

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The Liberal Illusion

Chapter XIII

What is the meaning of this argument of human liberty, which is forever cropping up in liberal Catholicism by way of a thousand tortuous and covert paths? Man has the power (or faculty) of doing evil and of not doing good. Who doesn’t know that and who denies it? But it is strange folly indeed to conclude that God, in granting man this power, gave him the example and precedent of impartiality between truth and error, between good and evil. The least reflection will bring to mind any number of divine and merciful barriers with which God has curbed the evil exercise of our power to choose and to refrain. He takes away from us the recourse of choosing annihilation and leaves us no choice except to decide between two eternities. To refrain from making that choice is to have already chosen. This is what is called with so much emphasis human freedom!

This miserable quid pro quo is the foundation on which the whole doctrine of liberalism is built. There is no such thing as human freedom in this perilous sense; God has not made weak creatures a present of this dangerous gift. God alone is free. To us He has given, not freedom, but free will. What we are really free to do is whatever we can do with impunity in the sight of an infinitely just God. Well and good, can we then with impunity refuse to obey God, refuse to serve Him, refuse to see to it that, so far as in us lies, God is obeyed and served? Can we with impunity refuse to hear the Church?

This is the question stated in its only true light. All efforts to dodge it, however much they may be applauded, amount to nothing more than futile displays of futile ingenuity.

The appearance of the Encyclical Quanta Cura23 was the signal for a new crop of these shallow quibbles. Various explanations of the Encyclical, more or less respectful in tone, reduced it to a few fundamentals that meant little more than nothing. By the end of a year it became apparent that it was the explanations that meant little more than nothing. We had read in the first days that the Encyclical
contained absolutely nothing “but the necessary and legitimate condemnation of unlimited liberty.”

The Encyclical does not bother at all about unlimited liberty, which is a folly and a heresy against the governments themselves, and one against which governments know quite well how to defend themselves; it warned Catholics of the danger to which they expose their brothers and themselves, by crying up, in spite of the Church’s teachings, certain rash affirmations which it brands in the aggregate as “the liberty of perdition.” Of this liberty the Encyclical traces in outline, the Syllabus in detail, the unmistakable features. Obviously the remarks having to do with the ravings of indifferentism, of infidelity, or of heresy have little or no reference to the faithful. But if one takes the trouble to peruse the errors stigmatized as contrary to the Church’s rights, to her authority, and to the obedience due to her, he will find out what the “liberty of perdition” means.

And this sort of liberty the secular powers do not combat as they do the insanity of unlimited liberty; but, on the contrary, they positively favor it and even enforce it. In so doing, their instinct does not play them false! All that emancipates man from the power of God subjugates him to the powers of this world; the confines over which he vaults in defying the Divine prohibitions are always the confines of Eden.


23. The celebrated Encyclical of December 8, 1864, which promulgated the Syllabus.

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The Liberal Illusion

Chapter XIV

Such being the case in the sight of God, I deny to the Christian — to him who is bound to obey — the right to authorize disobedience to represent him. I deny him not only the right to create, but even the right to accept without protest, a power that sets itself up independently of God.

Liberal Catholicism denies that the civil power can be Christian; I deny that it can with impunity be anything else and that we can with impunity dispense ourselves from doing all our religion commands and commends in order to keep it Christian or to make it become Christian.

The power, which is not Christian and which is without other religion, is diabolical, it is theocracy in reverse. If we are forced to submit to such a misfortune and such a shame, it will be an even greater misfortune and shame for the world than it is for us. We, by the grace of God, will deliver ourselves from it, and we alone have the power to deliver the world from it. But to work for it, to build up with our own hands a government godless on principle, to hold as sacred this preposterous and vile thing, that would be treason against mankind. Humanity would call us to account for it before the tribunal of God. It would accuse us of having extinguished the lamp, of having been accomplices of the darkness in which death resides.

Methinks I hear Tertullian speaking to the Christian maker of idols: “Can you preach one only God, you who make of Him so many? Can you preach the true God, you who make of Him counterfeits? — I make them, you will say, I do not adore them. — The same reason that forbids you to adore them likewise forbids you to make them: in both cases it is the offense it gives to God. But you do adore them, you who make it possible for them to be adored. You do adore them and sacrifice to them your life and your soul; you immolate to them your genius, you offer in libation to them your sweat; for them you enkindle the torch of your thought. You are to them more than a priest, it is your work that gives them their divinity!”24


24 De Idolatria, VI.

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The Liberal Illusion

Chapter XV


It is true that Liberalism proclaims the contrary. The lamp, it says, will shine all the more brightly, and it is then that it will succeed in piercing the darkness. Once we have become toned-down Catholics, modified Catholics, in short, new Catholics, we shall convert the world.

In dilating on that point, liberal Catholics are inexhaustible. This illusion sets their minds at ease regarding the misgivings of their hearts; they hug it, and the eloquence with which they hold forth on the subject betrays the ravenousness of their Esau’s appetite — of their craving for the mess of pottage. Unfortunately for them, the seductive picture of the conquests religion may be expected to achieve as a result of co- operation on the part of the liberal mind, is spoiled by a remembrance all too hard to forget.

At the beginning of the Gospel according to St. Matthew, the Tempter drew nigh to where Jesus had retired in the desert, and perceiving that He was tormented by hunger, said to Him: “Command that these stones be made bread.” Jesus answered him: “Not in bread alone doth man live, but in every word that proceedeth from the mouth of God.” Then the Tempter took Him up and set him upon the pinnacle of the Temple and said to Him: “If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down, for it is written that He hath given His angels charge over thee, and in their hands shall they bear thee up, lest perhaps thou dash thy foot against a stone.” Jesus answered him: “It is written too, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.” The Tempter made a last effort, and gave away his secret. He took the Savior up into a very high mountain, and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them — “All these,” said he, “will I give thee, if falling down thou wilt adore me.” Jesus answered him: “Begone. It is written: The Lord thy God shalt thou adore, and him only shalt thou serve.” Satan withdrew, and at the same time angels came and ministered to Jesus.25

Finally, Liberalism utters its last word: I control the world and I will give you the world . . .

But it always imposes the selfsame condition: If, falling down, thou wilt adore me. Descend to, fall to, grovel on, the plane of equality with those who have no God, and defer to the people of means whom I shall commit to your charge after they have been put under oath never to cross the threshold of a place of prayer: then you will see how the world will honor you and listen to you, and how Jerusalem will be born anew more beautiful than before.

“The king of nothing,” said Saint Gregory VII, “promises to fill our hands. Thus do certain princes of the Earth, who are not assured of so much as a single day, dare to speak to the Vicar of Jesus Christ. They say: We will give you the power, the glory, the riches, if you recognize our supremacy, if you make us your God; if, falling down at our feet, you will adore us.”

How often has this form of seduction been tried! To the Popes whom he persecuted, Frederick of Germany promised a vast development of the Faith; Cavour thought to trap Pius IX by means of this mirage; the Parliament of Florence, multiplying insults and robberies, rehashed the same old argument — mockery mingled with stupidity. None of them ever makes the least variation on the original theme: To leave the camp of Israel, to quit the sterile Rock of Rome, to close the ear to the responses of this sacred Ark that never utters new oracles; finally, to fall down, to adore the Liar and to believe him alone!

25 Matth. ch. IV.

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The Liberal Illusion

Chapter XVI

What a horrible thing and what a horrible farce! It is to the people of Christ that the proposal is made to accept, to choose for their civil rulers ignoramuses who know not that Jesus Christ is God, or blackguards who know it, yet pledge themselves to govern as if they knew it not. And divine blessings are promised to the men and the societies that are capable of this folly and this baseness! This is not what the Holy Ghost tells them. The children of Israel, having consecrated themselves to Beelphegor, God said to Moses: “Take all the princes of the people, and hang them up on gibbets against the sun: that my fury may be turned away from Israel.” 26 There you have a note to enter in the annals of freedom of worship — of religious liberty. It is said besides that “justice exalteth a nation: but sin maketh nations miserable.”27 What does Liberalism make out of this oracle? Does it declare it repealed or is it minded to pretend that the justice in question here is the impracticable art of preserving just the right balance between Jesus, Luther, Mahomet and Joe Smith,28 between God and Belial? Jesus wants no such equilibrium: “He that is not with me, is against me.”29

“Know, Emperor, wrote St. Gregory the Great, know that power has been given you from on high, in order that virtue may be aided, that the ways of heaven may be widened, and that the empire of Earth may serve the empire of Heaven.” This is Bossuet’s translation.

But, undeniably, these are old sayings and old divine ideas. To begin with, the world has changed, and when all is said and done, one has to follow the current.



26 Numbers, 25:4.
2 7 Proverbs, 14:34.
28 Founder of the American sect of the Mormons.
29 Matth., 12:30.

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The Liberal Illusion

Chapter XVI


“To follow the current,” this is what all these famous discoveries and grand airs of Catholic liberalism come to in the end!

And why, pray, have we to follow the current? We were born, we were baptized, we were confirmed precisely in order to swim against the current. This current of the creature’s ignorance and crime, this current of falsehood and sin, this turbid current that bears men down to perdition, is just what we ought to breast and labor to dry up. Beyond that we have nothing really important to do in the world.

Our history is the record of God’s triumph, through truth disarmed of all the weapons of human statecraft so far as the world and its rulers were concerned. The pagans were liberals. They were very desirous of coming to terms with the Church. They asked of her only to demean her Christ a little, demoting Him to the rank of a particular divinity. Then religious worship would have been free; Jesus would have had temples like Orpheus and like Aesculapius, and the pagans themselves would have recognized His superior philosophy and would have adored Him.

In negotiating this adjustment, and with a view to helping things along, the public authority, egged on by the philosophers, the men of letters, the Jews, the astrologers and the apostates, persecuted the Christians. It came to such a pass, in the provinces, that the persecution arrested at one fell swoop an entire Church. The bishop, the clergy, the faithful, the children, the neophytes were dragged before the proconsul. Frequently the proconsul begged them to dissemble at least for the sake of enabling him to acquit them; he demanded of them nothing more than a sign. Those Christians did not deliberate, they did not say: What will become of the Church and who will serve God if we die? They confessed the One God and they died. That was the way they caused the blade to fall from the hands of the executioner, took the sword out of the hands of the Emperor, and rescued mankind from the abyss. And what they had affirmed when persecuted, they did not deny when victorious. They had affirmed the royalty of the Christ, they established that, and so the cross of the Labarum came to dominate the imperial crown itself.

The Fallen One, the grand artisan of heresy, is called Satan, Adversarius; the adversary of the right, the true, the good; and whatever he proposes is the thing we ought not to accept. As of yore he proposed absorption, so now, with the same intent, by like means, by the same hostile and lying organs, at one time threatening, at another time seducing, he proposes separation. He said to the first Christians: Give up liberty, enter into the empire. He says to us to-day: Give up the empire, enter into liberty. Formerly: Join; nowadays: Separate. Formerly, a union that would have degraded the Church; nowadays a separation that would degrade society.
Neither would that union have been befitting then, because it would have meant absorption; nor would this separation be a good thing now, because it would mean repudiation. The Church does not repudiate human society, nor does she wish to be repudiated by it. She has not lowered her dignity, she will not abdicate her right, that is only another way of saying, her royal liberty. To rob the crown of the cross and the cross of the crown is to act in the interest of the Adversary, not in the interest of society.