Louis Veuillot: The Liberal Illusion [1866]

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The Liberal Illusion

Chapter XIX

This suggestion to follow the current is an unworthy one, one repugnant even to an elementary human sense of honor. Verily it is a sad reflection on our times that such a proposal can be made to men who have been signed with the Holy Chrism! Imagine a king driven from his throne, the forlorn hope of his conquered country, imagine such a one all of a sudden demeaning himself so low as to declare that he considered himself to have been justly dethroned and that all he asked for was to enjoy the status of a private individual, on the basis of the common right, under the protection of the despoilers of his people: think of the supineness of such a wretch! Nevertheless, his baseness would be as nothing compared with that to which we are asked to stoop.

This imaginary king would be guilty of an uncalled-for abasement. One would prefer not to believe him. Those to whom he made the offer to sell his rights and his honor would say to him: Fiddlesticks! You a king?

We would be doing something still more shameful, and for this reason people would be even less inclined to believe us. I may add that they would have the best of reasons for not believing us. For as was the case in former times with the jurors of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, we, too, would come to have our quota of repenters and retractors. Now, those who had remained Catholics pure and simple or who had become so again, would have their doubts about the sincerity of the ones who preferred to remain liberal Catholics. And then what stand would the latter take between the orthodox hurling anathemas at them and the unbelievers demanding of them guarantees? This is an eventuality they will most certainly have to face. If the liberal Catholics rejoin the faithful and accept the Church’s teaching in her assertion of rights over the whole world, they will have accomplished absolutely nothing. If, on the other hand, they give the guarantees demanded of them by the opposing camp, they decisively cut themselves off and will soon find out that Liberty imposes silence upon dissenters, they will be forced to lend a hand in persecution, becoming at once apostates of the Church and apostates of Liberty.

They can count on it that they will not escape the one or the other of these alternatives: Repentant liberals — or impenitent Catholics.

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The Liberal Illusion

Chapter XX

I shall make a hypothesis. I shall suppose all of us to be following the current. I say all, except the Pope, for that far the hypothesis may not go. What will be the result? There will be one force gone from the world. What force? Ah! — it will not be the force of barbarism or of brutality.

The force that will be lost to the world is the force by which it has pleased God to conquer the world, and the world up to now is still conquered by it. God triumphs through a small number of faithful; this small number, the little flock, to whom He said: “Fear not!”; this small number He has called the salt of the earth — If the salt lose its savor, wherewith shall it be salted?

O prophetic wisdom of the word divine! the grain of sand is God’s sentinel upon the strand and says to the Ocean: No further! That grain of sand is the strength of mountains and the fertility of plains.

We turn towards the Crucified of Jerusalem, towards the Crucified of Rome, to His truth forsaken and betrayed; we say to Him: I believe Thee, I adore Thee, I want to be trampled under foot like Thee, turned into an object of derision like Thee; I want to die with Thee! . . . We say that, and the world is conquered.

In no other way will it ever be conquered, in no other way will we ever be able to despoil it of its weapons, to the end of transfiguring them and sanctifying them in ourselves and in their employment to block every way of blasphemy and to level every obstacle interposed between the little ones of this world and everlasting truth.

For it is necessary that every man should know and pronounce these words, this Credo which alone can redeem the world, this “Thy kingdom come” which implores eternal peace.

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The Liberal Illusion

Chapter XXI


The first great word of liberty that was ever pronounced, the first great act of liberty that mankind ever saw done, was when those two poor Jews, Peter and John, proclaimed the duty of obeying God rather than men, and went on teaching what error and persecution, under the masks of justice and prudence, would have liked to suppress. 31 Whoever follows their example is free, free from false judges, free from false thinkers; he enters into the impregnable citadel; his thought, set free from cringing terrors, is subtracted from the empire of death; it provides a refuge from slavery for all whom it is able to persuade.

But there are two things to be noted.

In the first place, this act of liberty which the Apostles made towards the powers of Earth is at the same time a great homage of submission towards God, and they were so strong against the world only because they were obedient to God.

In a discourse held at Malines,32 an eloquent discourse, greatly celebrated among the Liberal Catholics, liberty of conscience was traced back to this first and famous non possumus, it was said to have been created and promulgated then. But, quite the contrary, according to the remark of an English publicist, 33 it was that day, it was by that very non possumus, that the human conscience recognized and accepted the curb of an unchangeable law. It was not a principle of liberal liberty to which St. Peter gave utterance: he proclaimed the imperishable, irrevocable duty imposed by God who made it a matter of obligation to preach His Revelation. He did not announce to the world the liberal emancipation of conscience: on the contrary, he put upon conscience the glorious burden of giving testimony to the truth; he did not emancipate men from God. Saint Peter could, on God’s behalf, demand of the pagans liberty for the Christians; he did not give nor did he dream of giving the Christians the license to put error on the same footing as truth, with the understanding that they were one day to treat both as equals, or that truth should ever come to acknowledge error as supreme by divine right in such and such a domain, provided truth on its part were left supreme or tolerated in some other domain. For how could such a humiliated and hobbled truth reply effectively to the countless sophisms of error?

In the second place, the Church alone has the mission to teach this truth that sets free, this unique truth, and she brings conviction of it only to souls that are full of Jesus Christ.

Wherever Jesus Christ is unknown, man obeys man and obeys him absolutely. Wherever the knowledge of Jesus Christ is obliterated, truth declines, liberty goes into eclipse, the old tyranny comes back and retrieves its former frontiers. When the Church is no longer able to teach Jesus Christ, whole and entire, when the people no longer understand that we must obey God rather than men, when no voice is raised any more to confess the truth, without disguising it or paring it down, then indeed will liberty have vanished from the Earth and human history be at an end.


31 Acts, 4:19-20.

32 Discourse of Montalembert to the General Assembly of the Catholics of Belgium in 1863. In it the great orator spoke on two particularly burning subjects: the growing progress of democracy and the relations of Church and State.

33 The Relations of Christianity with Civil Society, by Edward Lucas, discourse delivered before the Catholic Academy of London and published by Archbishop Manning. (Note of L. Veuillot .)

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The Liberal Illusion

Chapter XXII

Nevertheless, so long as one single man of perfect faith remains, he will be free from the universal yoke, and he will hold in his hands his own destiny and that of the world. The world will then exist solely for the sanctification of that one last man. And were that last man to apostatize, too, were he, likewise, to say to Antichrist, not that he was right in persecuting the Church, but simply that he was justified in withholding the use of his power to enable God to reign through the Church, the apostate would be thereby pronouncing his own doom and that of the whole world as well. For inasmuch as the Earth no longer paid to divine truth its due of homage and adoration, God would take away from it His sun, and in default of the counterpoise of obedience and prayer, its blasphemy would cease to mount heavenward, it would perish instantly. Of its own accord it would drop back into the abyss.

But the last word of the Church militant will not be one of apostasy. I picture to myself the last Christian standing before the supreme Antichrist, at the end of those terrible days, when the insolence of man will stupidly rejoice at having seen the stars fall from Heaven. They will drag him in bound, amid the jeers of that scum of Cain and Judas which will still go by the name of the human race — and it will, in fact, still be the human race, the human race arrived at the zenith of science, sunk to the nadir of moral degradation.

The angels will salute the only star that has not fallen, and Antichrist will gaze upon the only man alive who refuses to adore the lie and say that Evil is Good. He will still hope to seduce him; he will ask this Christian how he wishes to be treated. What think you that Christian will answer, and what other answer can he make except: “Like a king”? Last of the faithful, last priest, it is he who is indeed King. His is all the heritage of Abraham, his all the heritage of the Christ. In his shackled hands, he holds the keys to unlock eternal life; he can confer baptism, he can give absolution, he can administer the Eucharist; the one he faces can give nothing but death. He is King! And I defy even Antichrist, for all his power, to treat him otherwise than as king, because in fine the very dungeon is for him an empire and the gibbet itself a throne.

To whoever asks them the same question, Catholics should give that same answer. Modern liberalism wants the Church’s children to confer consecration on its unhallowed self and so it speaks to them as the Saracen king spoke to Louis of France: “If you wish your life spared, make me a knight.” 

The saintly prisoner replied: “Make yourself a Christian.”

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The Liberal Illusion

Chapter XXIII

Two powers are at war in our modern world: the Revelation and the Revolution. These powers are incompatible with each other, that is what the whole thing comes to.

The war between them has given rise to three parties:

(1) The party of Revelation, or the party of Christianity. The Catholic party is its head, so high above current ignorances and meannesses, that it might well seem to have no body at all; but, in spite of that, this body, often well-nigh invisible, does exist and is in reality the most powerful one on Earth, because, regardless of number, it alone possesses in very truth that unique superhuman force which is called the Faith.

(2) The Revolutionary party: the schools termed liberal are nothing but protean masks and the term itself is elastic and dishonest.

(3) The Third Party: it professes to take the other two in hand and force them to compose their differences.

The Third Party terms itself Eclecticism, but it is really Confusionism, that is to say, Futilitarianism.

By the very fact that the Third Party espouses the Revolution, it denies Christianity, of which the Revolution is the absolute contradiction and the precise negation. By the very fact that the Catholic party is the affirmation of Christian truth, it denies the Revolution, which is the antichristian lie; it denies both Liberalism and Eclecticism, which are, in most cases, nothing but the glossing over of that lie and, in a few cases, the upshot of being duped by its hoaxes. The Catholic party rejects them all. We reject them as our fathers rejected idolatry, heresy and schism; we reject them, even if we have to perish for it. We do so knowing that even if we do perish in this conflict, we shall not be defeated.

It is under the banner of the Third Party, under the auspices of its confusion and futility, that liberal Catholicism announces its would-be conciliatory compromises, which meet with a bad reception from both sides, being frequently repulsed with positive derision. The Catholics, who have their dogmatic conception and their historical practice of liberty, will have nothing to do with its schemes, complicated and cock-eyed as they are on no end of counts; the revolutionaries, the liberals and the eclectics, who pretend to share their Christianity, remand the Third Party to their own Church, whose yoke they have not altogether shaken off. They remind the latter that their Church does not allow such fraternization, that she even warns them to be on their guard against it. They give them to understand that the Church of the latter is not theirs; that into theirs no Christians may enter except by the gate of outright apostasy.

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The Liberal Illusion

Chapter XXIV

It is a sad thing to see deserving men, men who have done great things, striving might and main to disseminate among Catholics doctrines that the faithful reject as hostile to the rights and dignity of the Church, when all the while the adversaries and enemies of the Church consistently snub them as being still too much imbued with the Christian spirit. Their formulas, inspired by the spirit of compromise that effaces all boundary-lines, meet everywhere with the same rebuff.

They speak of the independence of the Church: that word alone is too much for the revolutionaries, and these enjoin upon them to strike it out; and when they speak, at the same time, from another angle, of the independence of the State, the Catholics notice that under cover of this word, by the very force of facts, they subordinate the Church to the civil power and make the material existence of Christianity dependent upon the benevolence of its enemies who, under all circumstances, show themselves not only indifferent to it but hostile, not only hostile but furious. It is always a question of reconciling the irreconcilable, of obtaining for the Church a favor that those in power are unwilling to grant, of making favors to the Church depend upon conditions that she cannot possibly accept. No wealth of eloquence can hide for long this depth of incurable misery, no words in any language have elasticity enough to harmonize or hold together such contradictions: Free co-operation, reciprocal independence of the two powers, and so forth. What is the meaning of that high-sounding cant? What follows practically from the “free co-operation” of the soul and the body, from the “reciprocal independence” of the material and the spiritual?

There are other phrases which are still more unfortunate, in that they have an import far more clear. The proposal made to the Church to relinquish all privilege is one of these sayings that do open violence to Catholic sentiment.

In point of fact, the Church has a Divine constitution, she lives by her own right, and not by virtue of privilege. Who, then, could possibly grant her a privilege that does not already belong to her from the very nature of things? The State? If so, then civil society is superior to religious society and has the power to take back from the latter whatever it has condescendingly granted. 34 History, in accord with Christian good sense, condemns the false view embalmed in this language. The Church was not made by the State; it was she, on the contrary, that made the State and society; and neither the State nor society ever granted any privileges to the Church; they recognized in her a status antedating their own existence, a right that did not in any sense emanate from them and which they could not modify except by way of an abuse against which the public interest obliged her to protest.

We cannot chime in with the revolutionary ignorance or ingratitude which is at pains to hide this fact. We know that the Church became great in spite of pagan power, that she changed the face of the world, that she is, in a word, the mother and the founder of Christian States and that the superiority of European civilization is the result of her principles and will forever be dependent thereon. We know, too, that the Church could not have accomplished this sublime work, could not have defended it and could not have continued it, were it not for this constitution of hers given her by God, so that she might function in the world in her twofold capacity of Mother and Queen, mistress of the human race alike through her love, through her light and through her authority. And we of to-day dare to characterize the already much too restricted expressions of her maternal and royal supremacy by the ignoble designation of privileges, of human concessions that she ought, after all, to renounce!

The Church, at any rate, has far more right to renounce them than has society to abolish them, for society cannot be under any misapprehension as to where they came from and what purpose they are intended to serve. In the presence of the unbelieving or the heretical State, she may forego for a time the exercise of her Divine prerogative; she cannot proclaim that she has renounced it, that she repudiates as evil and superfluous what has been not only conferred, but imposed by God for the good of the world. When the Church concludes a concordat, she does not conduct herself as a subordinate, but as a superior; it is she who grants; she does not receive privileges, she accords them. She accords them with regret, for though she thereby wards off a greater evil, experience proves only too well that concessions of this sort are not at all conducive to the common good, that nothing which tends to weaken the Christian sentiment can possibly redound to the advantage of anybody.

The argument against principles that liberalism seeks to draw from these concessions is unworthy of the reasoning powers of a Christian. In the first place, the Church makes no concession at all on the matter of principles, she signs no treaties in which she does not make reservations as to these. In the second place, being exposed to the blows inflicted by brute force and having no weapons of her own beyond her patience, the Church, according to the profound observation of Joseph de Maistre, “does not refuse to the sovereignty which insists upon it anything that is not bound to create difficulties.”

34. Elsewhere (Univers , Dec. 2, 1851) L. Veuillot has well said: “The role of the Church in this world is not to die for governments, but to live in peace with them and to survive them, helping them to lead their peoples and exhorting them to procure their salvation.”

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The Liberal Illusion

Chapter XXV

The doctors of Catholic liberalism flatter themselves that they explain the famous slogan: “The Church free, in a free State,” in saying that by this they mean “the freedom of the Church founded upon the public liberties.”

That was not the way our forefathers looked at the matter. In promoting the liberties of the Church, as Cardinal Wiseman observes, they believed themselves to be promoting the progress of civil liberties; there is scarcely a charter that does not base its system of emancipation upon the liberty of the Church and the unlimited exercise of her rights. Are we to invert the ancient order of things, and instead of grounding these public liberties upon the Christian social order, make political liberty the foundation of religious liberty? That would be to base the unchangeable upon the changeable. Let us be on our guard against accustoming a whole generation to tolerate ambiguity in matters of vital importance. By praising so extravagantly the fairness with which our enemies are minded to apply certain untenable principles, we are giving our youth anything but the right preparation to fight the good fight and to face persecution.

The contention that the Church can only be free in the bosom of general liberty is ambiguous. But what else can it be intended to convey except that the Church’s liberty depends upon extrinsic causes? And yet the Christian society, existing as it does by the Divine will, and having for its head Jesus Christ, who has guaranteed it an imperishable duration, must of necessity be free by virtue of its very nature or essence; and this liberty it imparts to every society on which it exerts influence, permeating the latter with its own spirit, like leaven in dough, like the soul in the body.

It is inconceivable that slavery could exist in any society where the Church is truly free; while a society that allows the Church to be bound, will, however free it may appear to be, live to see itself bound hand and foot and, though libertine, will not be really at liberty. The police license many things that responsible liberty would forbid, or rather, refrain from doing, but the licenses given by the police should not be confounded with liberty; they are not and never will be liberty. In a society which restricts the liberty of the Church, the individual will, perhaps, be free to do whatever he wants with his body, and will want to do with it, we may be sure, nothing good; but he will no longer be able to call his soul his own, and presently not even charge of his body will be left to him.

To say that the Church cannot be free, except in the bosom of general liberty, is the same as saying that she cannot be free except on condition of seeing arrayed against her full liberty to give her the lie and to attack her with all the legalized weapons and tactics of offense that such an order of things would put in the hands of her enemies. And inasmuch as it is urged upon her, over and above all this, to relinquish her “privileges” — without which there would have been no such thing as general liberty at all — it follows that she would thus lose the power to impose upon men that interior restraint by virtue of which they become fit for liberty and feel themselves worthy of it. After that, as night follows day, political restraint will increase, and soon the evil hour will be at hand when society shall hear Caesar, with the consent of the “general liberty,” declare himself once more pontiff and god: Divus Caesar, imperator et summus pontifex — “Divine Caesar, Emperor and Supreme Pontiff.”

And thus, thanks to the “general liberty” and its invariable corollary, the “suppression of privilege,” religion will come to occupy an even lower position in the world than the one it holds at present.

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The Liberal Illusion

Chapter XXVI

Such is the affinity of one error for another and so inevitable is the drift of particular errors towards the general error, that we see liberal Catholicism, for all its truculent pose of independence, tend spontaneously towards Caesarism just as the Revolution did. And it is in the name of liberty of conscience that men are verging toward this wholesale subjugation of the human conscience! The principles of Christianity must be brought into conformity with those of modern society; modern society demands this, so there is nothing left for us but to fall into line, to accept all its conditions, to do away with whatever displeases it, to protest against any return to the ideas it no longer likes.

But what of those who find modern society to be in the wrong; who think that this capricious, not to say fantastic, personage puts forward sinful and insufferable pretensions? . . . Such persons, be their dignity or their number what it may, will have to knuckle down, to disappear from a world whom their presence annoys. Liberal society, emancipated humanity does not propose to put up with their opposition any longer. The thing to do is to rush pell-mell into that unity in reverse with which Liberalism fondly hopes to frustrate the realization of the unity the Divine Shepherd desires; the thing to do is to accept the unity of Hell, which proposes to place the flock exclusively under the pastoral crook of Caesar!

Evidently, the doctors of liberal Catholicism, following the lead of the other doctors of the Revolution, entertain the notion that one and the same mode of life can and should be set up in all European States. As for the differences of race, of religions and political traditions that will have to be demolished and razed in order to bring about such a standardization, they give no thought to them whatever; modern society demands this sacrifice, shall liberty of conscience refuse to make it? Isn’t it imperative to go with the stream, to keep in step with “modern society,” to save the liberty of perdition?

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The Liberal Illusion

Chapter XXVII

As I pen these lines, the newspapers report the message of Pius IX. His words are fraught at once with sadness, with light and with firmness, and they have a bearing on the subject of my reflections. I interrupt my writing to listen with the respect and love we owe to the Father of Christians.

The Holy Father says that he deplores and condemns the usurpations, the increasing immorality, the hatred towards religion and the Church. He adds this solemn warning:

"But even in deploring and condemning, I do not forget the words of Him whose representative on Earth I am, and who, in the garden of His agony and on the Cross of His sufferings, raised towards Heaven His dying eyes and said: Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do! I, too, in the face of the enemies of the Holy See and of the Catholic doctrine itself, repeat: Father, forgive them, for they know not . . .

There are two classes of men opposed to the Church. The first comprises certain Catholics who respect her and love her, but who criticize whatever emanates from her. They would fain, as one Catholic thinker remarks, reform all the canons of the Church from the Council of Nicaea up to the Council of Trent. From the decree of Pope Gelasius on the Sacred Books up to the bull defining the Immaculate Conception, they find it needful to revamp everything, to revise everything. They are Catholics, they claim to be our friends, but they forget the respect they owe to the authority of the Church. If they do not take care, if they do not come back promptly to their own side, I fear that they will lose their footing on that inclined plane and plunge into the abyss into which the second class of our adversaries have already fallen.

The latter are the more outspoken and the more dangerous. They consist of philosophers, of all those who desire to attain truth and justice with no other resource than their own unaided reason. But they only succeed in verifying of themselves what the Apostle of the gentiles, St. Paul, said eighteen centuries ago: Ever learning and never attaining to the knowledge of the truth. They search and search, and though the truth seems ever to elude them, they are always hoping to find it and to announce to us a new era wherein the human mind will by itself dissipate all darkness.

Pray for these misguided men, you who do not share their errors. You are indeed the disciples of Him who said: I am the way, the truth and the life. You know, too, that the world has not been called to interpret His Divine word, that it does not belong to the philosophers to explain His doctrine, but only to His ministers to whom He gave the mission to teach in saying to them: He that heareth you, heareth me; when you speak to men, it is My voice that they will hear."35

35. Reply of the Holy Father to the address of the faithful of different nations gathered at Rome, the 17th of March, 1866. (Note of L. Veuillot.)