Louis Veuillot: The Liberal Illusion [1866]

[Stone]

The Liberal Illusion

Chapter XXXIX

What could be more inappropriate than discussions like these, in the presence of the problem that agitates the world, a problem of which it can be said that it is as vast in breadth and depth as humanity itself!

It is the existence of the Papacy that is at stake, and in this question the existence of Christianity itself is involved. In it, the whole of humanity, past, present and future, is concerned. The great question, the real question is to know whence humanity comes, what it seeks, whither it goes.

Is man the creature of God, and has God given His creature an inalterable law in the midst of the fluctuations permitted to its liberty? Has humanity been wrong in believing for eighteen centuries that Jesus Christ is the living and eternal Law-giver? Has it been wrong in believing that this God instituted a priesthood of which He is the sole, permanent and infallible head in the person of the Pope, called on this account the Vicar of Jesus Christ? Should humanity, which has heretofore believed this, cease to believe it any more? Is it to abjure Jesus Christ formally by outright denial of His divinity, or virtually by saying that His divinity was a hoax and has deceived the world, that He really did not found the Church, but left under that name nothing more than a fleeting work to which He gave none but unreliable promises, of whose failure the human mind has now become aware?

Finally, what will the religious leadership of the world be, when the Pope, dragged from his throne, relegated to the sacristy, demoted into a subject of a petty king who is himself the puppet of his people and their allies; when the Vicar of Christ, impotent vicar of a God dethroned, having passed through this succession of humiliations, will no longer be bearer of any spiritual message that will not be despised as foolishness or punished as a State offense; when this sacred majesty, having been mocked by the police, will be turned by the peoples into an object of derision? And humanity? Will it any longer have a God? And if humanity is no longer to have a God, or if it may have all the gods it pleases and will never be at a loss to manufacture more, then what is to become of humanity?

These are a few, but by no means all, of the questions comprised within the vast compass of preserving the Papacy: and it is in the face of this question that the faithful are minded to discuss the Pope proper for him to take!

Obedience, which alone can anchor us in the truth, puts into our hands, by that same token, the repository of life. Of this treasure let us not defraud humanity, lapsed though it be into madness. Never let us give it up, nor ever adulterate it. In time of trial and chastisement, ours be the word that confesses the truth, ours the word that never ceases to knock at the door of pardon; it shall speed the day of grace.

The world is on the way to lose along with Christ all that Christ has given it. The Revolution squanders this royal heritage, priding itself the while on having conquered it. Its victory has led to tyranny, to contempt of man, to the immolation of the weak for the benefit of the strong, and all this was done in the name of liberty, of equality, of fraternity. Let us preserve the liberty to proclaim that God alone is God, that no one else than He is to be adored and obeyed, be the masters who they may that His anger permits to stmt their hour upon the Earth. Let us preserve the equality never to bend the knee before force, or before talent, or before success, but only before the justice of God. Let us preserve the fraternity, that true fraternity which neither exists nor ever can exist upon Earth, unless we preserve there the paternity and royalty of Christ. 47


THE END


47. This brochure was published in 1866. Since that time, some of the leaders of those who were then liberal Catholics have become Old
Catholics. [NOTE: At the date when Louis Veuillot drafted this note, the sect of the Old Catholics, which was organized around Canon Dollinger, in revolt against the decrees of the Vatican Council and excommunicated, appeared to be still very strong and threatening and Louis Veuillot denounces here its influence or at least complicity in the persecutions of the Kulturkampf. It is well known that a few years later, the Kulturkampf, despite the power of Bismarck, was defeated by the German Center led by Windhorst and that the sect of Old Catholics went into decline.] This is a heresy abetted by certain governments in Germany where it persecutes the
Catholics. It lines them, imprisons them, hunts down the religious, the priests and the bishops. Everything points to the likelihood of this persecution becoming a bloody one.

The original liberal Catholics survive in France, where the decrees of the Council, the admonitions of the Pope and the example of Germany have disturbed and embarrassed them exceedingly, yet have not altogether availed to reclaim them.

June 16, 1875. (Note of L. Veuillot, added to the reprint of this brochure in the first volume of the Third series of the Melanges.)