Louis Veuillot: The Liberal Illusion [1866]

[Stone]

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.”