Louis Veuillot: The Liberal Illusion [1866]
#36
The Liberal Illusion


Chapter XXXIV

But it is high time to uncover the secret of 1789, and to find out at what point the liberal Catholic faith will have to cease and become either revolutionary or Catholic. There exists one principle of 1789 which is the Revolutionary principle par excellence. No one is a revolutionary until the moment that he admits it; no one ceases to be a revolutionary until the moment that he abjures it; in one sense or another, it covers everything; it raises between revolutionaries and Catholics a wall of separation over which the liberal Catholic Pyramuses and the revolutionary Thisbes will never make anything pass but their fruitless sighs.

This unique principle of 1789 is what the revolutionary politeness of the Conservatives of 1830 called the secularization of society; it is what the revolutionary frankness of the Siecle, of the Solidaires42 and M. Quinet brutally calls the expulsion of the theocratic principle; it is the breaking away from the Church, from Jesus Christ, from God, from all acknowledgment, from all ingression and all appearance of the idea of God in human society.

To tell the truth, the liberal Catholic principle does not have to be pressed very much to lead that far. It arrives at this point by the same route, the same steps, the same necessities of circumstance, the same promptings of pride that brought the Protestant principle of private judgment to eventual denial of the divinity of Our Lord. The Fathers of the Reformation never set themselves the goal that their posterity has reached by now, and one may affirm that not even the boldest among them would have contemplated this without horror. But what they professed to retain of dogma as being more than sufficient to induce human reason to accept it whole and entire, their children have denied and denied, always denied; they have laid the axe to every point at which the dogmatic sap produced a legitimate, that is to say, a Catholic, shoot; and, finally, after laying it to the trunk and finding that the indefectible truth sprang up always the same and always cried out to them that it was necessary to become a Catholic, they have said at length: Let us pull up the last roots and cease to be Christians in order to remain Protestants!

A like fate overtook the philosophical schools of antiquity that sought to withstand Christianity; logic in reverse plunged them back into the absurdities of pagan theurgy, denying all truth, making pretense of believing every folly.

Among us, the separated philosophers go to the extreme of virtually denying morality for the sake of the bright idea of making morality independent of religion. Under Louis-Philippe, the University told us, as if speaking of something beautifully simple: “From three centuries back, it has been the effort of the reason of man and of societies to operate this scission which the French Revolution definitively opened in our customs and in our institutions.”

Alas! that would be a tragic mistake: the human mind’s great danger is the will to be right, and, whenever it loosens the rein of obedience, this danger becomes imminent peril. Whosoever committeth sin, is the servant of sin.43 This is as true of doctrinal sin as it is of material sin.


42. A labor organization in Belgium characterized by communist and antireligious tendencies; it specialized in demonstrations staged on occasion of the secular funerals of its members.

43. John, 8:34.
"So let us be confident, let us not be unprepared, let us not be outflanked, let us be wise, vigilant, fighting against those who are trying to tear the faith out of our souls and morality out of our hearts, so that we may remain Catholics, remain united to the Blessed Virgin Mary, remain united to the Roman Catholic Church, remain faithful children of the Church."- Abp. Lefebvre
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RE: Louis Veuillot: The Liberal Illusion [1866] - by Stone - 07-09-2025, 07:05 AM

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