Louis Veuillot: The Liberal Illusion [1866]

[Stone]

The Liberal Illusion

Chapter XIII

What is the meaning of this argument of human liberty, which is forever cropping up in liberal Catholicism by way of a thousand tortuous and covert paths? Man has the power (or faculty) of doing evil and of not doing good. Who doesn’t know that and who denies it? But it is strange folly indeed to conclude that God, in granting man this power, gave him the example and precedent of impartiality between truth and error, between good and evil. The least reflection will bring to mind any number of divine and merciful barriers with which God has curbed the evil exercise of our power to choose and to refrain. He takes away from us the recourse of choosing annihilation and leaves us no choice except to decide between two eternities. To refrain from making that choice is to have already chosen. This is what is called with so much emphasis human freedom!

This miserable quid pro quo is the foundation on which the whole doctrine of liberalism is built. There is no such thing as human freedom in this perilous sense; God has not made weak creatures a present of this dangerous gift. God alone is free. To us He has given, not freedom, but free will. What we are really free to do is whatever we can do with impunity in the sight of an infinitely just God. Well and good, can we then with impunity refuse to obey God, refuse to serve Him, refuse to see to it that, so far as in us lies, God is obeyed and served? Can we with impunity refuse to hear the Church?

This is the question stated in its only true light. All efforts to dodge it, however much they may be applauded, amount to nothing more than futile displays of futile ingenuity.

The appearance of the Encyclical Quanta Cura23 was the signal for a new crop of these shallow quibbles. Various explanations of the Encyclical, more or less respectful in tone, reduced it to a few fundamentals that meant little more than nothing. By the end of a year it became apparent that it was the explanations that meant little more than nothing. We had read in the first days that the Encyclical
contained absolutely nothing “but the necessary and legitimate condemnation of unlimited liberty.”

The Encyclical does not bother at all about unlimited liberty, which is a folly and a heresy against the governments themselves, and one against which governments know quite well how to defend themselves; it warned Catholics of the danger to which they expose their brothers and themselves, by crying up, in spite of the Church’s teachings, certain rash affirmations which it brands in the aggregate as “the liberty of perdition.” Of this liberty the Encyclical traces in outline, the Syllabus in detail, the unmistakable features. Obviously the remarks having to do with the ravings of indifferentism, of infidelity, or of heresy have little or no reference to the faithful. But if one takes the trouble to peruse the errors stigmatized as contrary to the Church’s rights, to her authority, and to the obedience due to her, he will find out what the “liberty of perdition” means.

And this sort of liberty the secular powers do not combat as they do the insanity of unlimited liberty; but, on the contrary, they positively favor it and even enforce it. In so doing, their instinct does not play them false! All that emancipates man from the power of God subjugates him to the powers of this world; the confines over which he vaults in defying the Divine prohibitions are always the confines of Eden.


23. The celebrated Encyclical of December 8, 1864, which promulgated the Syllabus.