Louis Veuillot: The Liberal Illusion [1866]

[Stone]

The Liberal Illusion

Chapter VII

I do not say that the liberal Catholics are heretics. They must first have the will to be so. Of many of them I affirm the contrary; of the rest I know nothing, and it is not for me to judge. On this question the Church will pronounce judgment at the proper time, if there be occasion to do so. But whatever be their virtues and whatever the good intentions  that inspire them, I believe them to be introducing among us a heresy, and one of the most out-and-out heresies the world has ever seen.

I do not know whether the world will escape it. I doubt that it will. Catholic liberalism and the spirit of the world are blood brothers; they  shade into each other by imperceptible degrees. Amid the great mass of atheists, deists, eclectics, ignoramuses, and would-be inquirers there are a good many feeble consciences that want only a convenient and “tolerant” form of religion. Even within the Church, numbers of tired, tempted, timid souls are to be met with who would shrink equally from open apostasy and from an open break with the world. We see in Italy certain excommunicated priests who obstinately persist in celebrating Mass, but who would have vigorously protested had anyone predicted five or six years ago their present fall from grace. . . . The heresy that does not quite deny the truth, that does not quite affirm the error, opens a channel for these vain waters: they precipitate themselves into it from the two opposite slopes, and so contrive to swell the torrent.