Louis Veuillot: The Liberal Illusion [1866]

[Stone]

The Liberal Illusion

Chapter IV

The liberal had recovered his breath, he resumed his discourse. It was plain to see that what he had heard had made no impression on him, if indeed he had heard it at all. He added lots of other words to those he had already spoken in great profusion; but he said nothing new. It was all a hotch-potch of historical arguments against history, of biblical arguments against the Bible, of patristic arguments against history, Bible, Fathers and even against common sense. He showed the same disdain, I ought rather to say the same repugnance, for the bulls of the Sovereign Pontiffs, he lost himself in the same declamations and the same prophecies. He rehashed the same cant about the world being new, humanity emancipated, the Church asleep but soon to wake up and rejuvenate her creed. The dead past, the radiant future, liberty, love, democracy, humanity were interspersed here and there like the false brilliants that the ladies nowadays scatter through their equally false tresses. Nothing was made more clear than the first time he said it. He became aware of this eventually, and told us that we were separating ourselves from the world and from the living Church, too, which would presently repudiate us; he all but anathematized us, and left us, finally, filled with consternation at his folly.

Everyone expressed his regret and advanced certain arguments against the extravagances he had uttered. For my part, I too shared the regret of the others, to see so fine a man embedded in so great an error. But since that, after all, was a fact, I was not sorry to have witnessed the spectacle and learned from it a lesson.

Up till then I had not seen the liberal Catholic except as lost in the crowd of traditional and integral Catholics, that is to say, “intolerant” Catholics. I had only known the official thesis, which is never complete and which varies with every individual, presenting personal peculiarities that his party may disavow. This enthusiast contrived to give me the esoteric lore along with the exoteric thesis. From then on I understood the liberal Catholic through and through. I knew by heart his sophisms, his illusions, his fixations, his tactics. And alas! nothing of it all was new to me. The liberal Catholic is neither Catholic nor liberal. By that I mean — without any intention of questioning his sincerity — that he has no more the true notion of liberty than he has the true notion of the Church. Liberal Catholic though he fain would be, he bears all the ear-marks of a better-known character — a type only too familiar in the history of the Church. Everything about him betokens the SECTARY: that is his real name.

20 On the Nature of the Gods.
21 Osee, 13:11.