Louis Veuillot: The Liberal Illusion [1866]

[Stone]

The Liberal Illusion

Chapter XXXV

Our liberal Catholics sense the danger of the doctrine of 1789, hence these distinctions by which they endeavor to parry its practical consequences, and to construct a special version of the Revolution for themselves which will make them sufficiently revolutionary while allowing them still to remain Catholics. But it is a question of reconciling good and evil — a feat beyond man’s power to accomplish.

This is why they pronounce the shibboleth badly, and why the Revolution does not open its doors to them. The Revolution is fairer to them than they are to themselves. It detects their Catholicity, and it does them the honor of not believing them when they try to convince it that they are no more Catholic than people outside the Church, that nothing will come of their Catholicity, and that they will play to perfection their godless part in that ideal form of government without religion and without God. . . . And who would have dreamt that M. Dupin44 would come to unfurl the Liberal Catholic banner, after he had boasted that his regime of 1830 was a government of no religious profession!

But M. Dupin did make his profession, and the Revolution, which had no confidence in him, obstinately refuses to repose confidence in liberal Catholics. It knows what sort of applications it wants made of its own principle, it knows that Catholics will oppose it in this to their dying breath, that sooner or later they are bound to come to their senses, that they will retract and that when it comes to a showdown they will be ready to shed their blood to affirm the very thing they now make pretense to discard.

The prophet Quinet rules out of liberal society everyone who has received baptism and has not formally repudiated it. This gives evidence of intelligent and accurate foresight; it shows that M. Quinet appreciates the power of baptism and is not unaware of the incompatibility existing between liberal society and the society of Jesus Christ. Hence, liberal society will put the ban on baptism, and, naturally, will do everything in its power to deprive any baptized escaper from the catacombs of an opportunity to speak to the renegades; for, should such a one succeed in speaking to them, the renegades might then and there cease to be deaf. This being so, what hope is there for the liberal Catholics? They will say that they do not understand liberty as M. Quinet understands it. We know that quite well, the whole world knows it well; but the whole world will tell them: it is as M. Quinet understands it that it ought to be understood.


44. Jacques Dupin, called Dupin the Elder, was president of the Chamber under the Monarchy of July, Procurator General of the Court of Cassation under the Empire, member of the French Academy, and of the Academy of Moral Sciences, an eminent personage in the magistracy and in the State, jurisconsulte ecoute . . . and a strong Gallican in questions of ecclesiastical right. This is the man that Lonis Veuillot victoriously refutes in his Droit du Seigneur.