Louis Veuillot: The Liberal Illusion [1866]

[Stone]

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.)