Louis Veuillot: The Liberal Illusion [1866]

[Stone]

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.