In this installment, Don Pietro focuses further on the origins of the concept of ‘Religious Liberty’ which has wormed its way into the Church and minds and hearts of countless Catholics, contradicting centuries of Church teaching. We shall see in more detail how this notion of religious liberty reflects the concepts of the American Constitution and the French Revolution’s ‘Declaration on the Rights of Man’, emanating from the Freemasonic ideals and philosophy of the likes of Jean-Jacque Rousseau, an opposer of the order of natural morality, and one who believed in the concept of ‘The Sovereign People’ and their right to ‘self-determination.’ Don Pietro emphasizes that the Council’s obsession about religious liberty contradicts centuries of papal documents in which they denounce it as: ‘insanity’; ‘a monstrous error’; ‘most pernicious to the Catholic Church and the salvation of souls’; ‘the liberty of perdition’ ; ‘the pest of indifference’ ; ‘a public crime’ ; and ‘atheism, however it may differ in name’ (See the sources for these quotes in the footnotes of this installment).
F.R.
THE COUNCIL AND THE ECLIPSE OF GOD
by
Don
Pietro Leone
PART XVI
Part 2 of Chapter 4 on Religious Liberty
4. The Right to Propagate Error
i) ‘… within due limits, no men are forced to
act against their convictions nor are any persons to be restrained from acting
in accordance with their convictions in religious matters in private or public,
alone or in association with others’ (DH 2);
ii)
‘… to deny the free exercise of religion
in society, when the just requirements of public order are observed, is to do
an injustice to the human person and to the very order established by God for
human beings’ (DH 3);
iii)
‘… if it [the civil authority] presumes
to control or restrict religious activity it must be judged to have exceeded
the limits of its power’ (DH 3);
iv)
‘… provided the just requirements of
public order are not violated, these groups [religious communities]… must be
allowed to honor the supreme Godhead (supremum
numen) in public worship, help their members to practice their religion and
strengthen them with religious instruction, and promote institutions in which
members may work together to organize their own lives according to their
religious principles… [they have] the right… not to be prevented from freely
demonstrating the special value of their teaching for the organization of
society and the inspiration of human activity in general’ (DH 4).
These
texts declare that religious groups are not to be prevented from practicing
their religion in public, as long as public order is not violated. This
teaching corresponds to that condemned in the encyclical Quanta Cura as follows: ‘The best condition of human society is
that wherein no duty is recognized by the Government of correcting, by enacting
penalties, the violators of the Catholic religion, except when the maintenance
of the public peace requires it.’ The encyclical describes the proposition as
‘contrary to the teaching of the Holy Scriptures, of the Church, and of the
Holy Fathers’ and adds: ‘From this totally false notion of social government
they fear not to uphold… the insanity [1],
namely: “that the liberty of conscience and of worship is the peculiar (or
inalienable) right of every man, which should be proclaimed by law, and that
citizens have the right to all kinds of liberty...[including the freedom of
speech].” ’
Quanta Cura
rightly makes a connection between ‘not being prevented’ from violating the
Catholic religion and the liberty of worship. In the language of Dignitatis Humanae, we might express the
thought as follows: not to be prevented from practicing the religion of one’s
choice is equivalent to the freedom to do so (is equivalent, in other words, to
religious liberty). The reason for this is that the meaning of the term
‘freedom’ is nothing other than the concept of ‘not being prevented’, or of not
being impeded, from doing that thing. Furthermore, the right to religious
liberty in effect amounts to the right to error, in that the Catholic Religion
is the one true religion, so that giving some-one the right to choose another
religion is in effect giving him the right to error.
Religious
liberty, the belief that the State must accord equal freedom to truth and
error, has been condemned frequently and forcefully by the Popes [2],
for the Church teaches that the State should indeed repress falsehood and evil:
In the words of Pope Leo XIII: ‘Men have a right freely and prudently to
propagate throughout the State what things soever are true and honorable… but
lying opinions, than which no mental plague is greater, and vices which corrupt
the heart and moral life, should be diligently repressed by public authority,
lest they insidiously work the ruin of the State’ [3].
It is true that the State may tolerate falsehood and evil for motives of the
common good, but only to the minimal degree necessary: ‘To judge aright’,
declares the Pope in the same encyclical, ‘we must acknowledge that the more a
State is driven to tolerate evil, the further it is from perfection; and that
the tolerance of evil which is dictated by political prudence should be
strictly confined to the limits which its justifying cause, the public welfare,
demands.’
Corollary:
Historical Origins of the Right to Religious Liberty
Conceding
Religious Liberty to all men, then, and consequently the right to error, the
Council brings its social teaching into conformity with that of the American
Constitution: ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of
religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or of abridging the freedom
of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble,
and to petition the Government for a redress of grievance.’ [4] As
Father Courtney Murray himself commented: ‘The object or content of the right
to religious freedom, as specified both in the Declaration and in the American
constitutional system, is identical’ [5].
Now
although in the early drafts of Dignitatis
Humanae , the common good was still the criterion for tolerating falsehood
and evil in the State, the term was deliberately removed in deference to
Protestant objections, and replaced by ‘public order’, the term that can be
seen in texts (ii) & (iv) above [6].
In this way the declaration Dignitatis
Humanae was also brought into
conformity [7]
with article 10 of the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man’ of the French
Revolution [8]
which states: ‘No-one may be troubled regarding his opinions, even religious
ones, providing that their manifestation does not disturb the public order
established by law’ [9].
Father Denis Fahey (1883 – 1954) - scholar and theologian
Father Denis Fahey points out that the Constituent
Assembly of the French Revolution responsible for the Declaration, of which
more than 300 members were Masons, and given ‘the naturalism of Freemasonry,
the Declaration... is simply a formal renunciation of allegiance to Christ the
King, of supernatural life, and membership of His Mystical Body’ [10].
The same eminent priest and Professor explains that
Freemasonry in effect substitutes itself for the Mystical Body of Christ and
substitutes the purely natural deification of man for the supernatural one [11].
He traces Masonic social theory to the theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose
writings were to be found on the table of the Committee for Public Safety of
the French Revolution. ‘Rousseau’s revolt was against the order of natural morality, by the exaltation of
the primacy of our sense-life. The little world of each one of us, our
individuality, is a divine person, supremely free and sovereignly independent
of all order, natural and supernatural’ [12].
‘Rousseau’s revolt was
against the order of natural
morality, by the exaltation of the primacy of our sense-life.’
The
State, consisting in the sum total of all sovereign individuals, constitutes
the sovereign people, the ‘Divinity State, leading on to the World-State, or
Humanity-God’ [13].
The thesis of the ‘Sovereign People’, together with the thesis that universal
suffrage creates right and justice, constitutes the illicit, Rousseauist type
of democracy, in contrast to the licit form which simply holds that governors
should be designated from the whole people and by them.
Two
particular features of the Rousseauist democracy worthy of note are its
egalitarianism and its theory concerning the source of power. Its
egalitarianism consists in its vision that each individual is sovereign in his
own right, which entails that he should not be differentiated on the basis of private
property or of any other criterion; as to the origin of power, it places it in
the people, and holds that the people use it to determine their own ends: their
subjective, common good. According to the Catholic vision of government, by
contrast, power comes from above, which the government uses to further the
objective common good of the people.
The
Council inserts itself, in conclusion, into a self-deifying current of thought
originating in Rousseau and in his conceit of the Sovereign People. It does
this not only in advocating the right to propagate error, but also in its
egalitarianism [14];
in its glorification of revolutionary ‘fraternity’; and in its suggestions that
power comes from the people and that man is sovereign in society. In regard to
the last two elements we read: ‘… humanity… is and it ought to be the
beginning, the subject and the object of every social organization’ (GS 25). In
the following section we shall see what this deification of man signifies for
the doctrine of Christ the King.
Pope Pius X, author of the Ant-Modernist Oath of 1907 - abolished by Paul VI in 1967
We
observe finally that the Church’s bounden duty to denounce and, if possible, to
suppress falsehood and evil which was renounced by the Council for the World,
was to be renounced by Pope Paul VI for the Church Herself in the two years
following the Council: with the abolition of the Index in June 1966 and with
the abolition of the Anti-Modernist Oath in July 1967; while his deposition of
the tiara in 1964 while the Council was still in full course, although
apparently motivated by the desire to succour the poor and needy, may be
understood on a deeper level as a symbol of his renunciation of the Papal
exercise of the munus regendi altogether.
Abandonment of the Papal Tiara by Pope Paul VI on November 11, 1964
[1] deliramentum, Pope Gregory XVI Mirari Vos, 1832
[2] they have described it as ‘a disastrous and ever to be deplored heresy’ (Pius VII, letter to Mgr. de Boulogne); ‘insanity’ (see above); ‘a monstrous error’ Bl. Pius IX, Qui Pluribus); ‘most pernicious to the Catholic Church, and to the salvation of souls’ (Quanta Cura); ‘the liberty of perdition’ (Quanta Cura); something which will ‘corrupt the morals and minds of the people’ (Syllabus); which propagates ‘the pest of indifferentism’ (Syllabus); ‘a public crime’ (Pope Leo XIII, Immortale Dei); ‘atheism, however it may differ in name’ (Immortale Dei); ‘contrary to reason’ (‘Libertas Humana’) MD rl p.62
[3] Pope Leo XIII, Libertas Humana, 23
[4] ‘the First Amendment’, 15th December
1791
[5] MD rl p. 101
[6] MD rl, p. 186
[7] at least verbally, because
the authors of DH defined the sense of ‘public order’ more broadly than the
sense in which it had been understood in the declaration of the French
Revolution (MD rl ch. XX).
[8] We
note in particular the phrase ‘to honour the numen supremum’. The phrase, apparently intended to include the
worship of the One True God, the Most Blessed Trinity, has a Deist ring,
evoking the cult of the pagans, of the Masonry, and of such revolutionaries as
Robespierre (cf. Sinossi, p.106). The text also denotes the ‘special value’ of religious groups as
their ‘teaching for the organization of society and the inspiration of human
activity in general’. What of the ‘special value’ of the one true Religion for
teaching the nature of Eternal Life? we might ask, and for ‘inspiring the human
activity’ (namely Charity) which alone can secure its possession?
[9] Nul ne doit être inquiété pour ses opinions, même religieuses, pourvu que leur manifestation
ne trouble pas l’ordre public établi par la loi.
[10] MD rl p.80
[11] The Mystical Body of Christ
in the Modern World, Christian Book Club of America, CA, 1939, p.26
[12] ibid. p.29 The author
contrasts Rousseau’s revolt with Luther’s which was against the supernatural
order who, while pretending to remain attached to Christ, promised a return to
Him against the exigencies of the supernatural order which He had established
for that return.
[13] ibid. p.33
[14] in the section on the
Church’s Hierarchy in chapter 1
4.
