Louis Veuillot: The Liberal Illusion [1866]

[Stone]

The Liberal Illusion

Chapter XXXVI

In the face of the impossible, it is superfluous to discuss the impracticable. I do not undertake to bring home to the Liberal Catholic Church the difficulties standing in the way of its installation. If I did, I should seem to be outraging common sense; the contingencies it would necessitate foreseeing, not to mention the memories it would be sure to evoke, would cast on these pages a reflection against which the seriousness of the subject and the sincerity of the men I am opposing would alike protest. I shall mention only the divisions that would be sure to break out in these emancipated churches; the conflicts that would have to be gone through at once and ever after with the dissenters, who would pay no more attention to excommunications than the Government itself, and who would present petitions to have the religious edifices turned over to themselves. Soon it would become necessary to ask the State, as the Protestants had to do, for a civil constitution, which would promptly set up a pontiff and regulations of faith. Then watch the organic articles begin to multiply! Consider only what is happening to-day in Switzerland, where the worthy and saintly Bishop of Basel, persecuted by the Government, is yet more grievously persecuted by a party of his own people, who are all worked up to teach him tolerance.45 There we have liberal Catholicism in action. Certainly, this is the acme of all that is most odious, revolting and ridiculous.

But in the liberal system, what remedy is there for such a situation? Either the State, true to its own role, will not interest itself in the merits of the quarrel, and the bishop will have either to compromise or get out, while the faithful people fall victims to the oppression of a factious minority; or else the State will intervene, such being its good pleasure, and it will lay down the law like a master — a hostile master at that. Here, then, you have a pontiff not only secular, but heretical, but atheistic. . . I leave it to the reader’s judgment whether such an outcome would be long deferred among us.

I will readily admit that liberal Catholicism is an error of the rich. It could never occur to a man who had lived among the people and had seen the difficulties with which the truth has to contend, especially today, as it seeks to reach down and hold its own on levels where it stands in crying need of every available protection, but most especially of good example in high places. The people instinctively associate an idea of intellectual superiority with rank, with power, with command. The inferior will not easily allow himself to be persuaded of the necessity of being a Christian when his superior is not such. And the superior himself entertains a somewhat similar notion, for moral elevation in his inferior is distasteful to him, it irritates him and soon becomes odious in his eyes. Hence the zeal, as ardent as it is devilish and insensate, with which so many scoundrels labor in season and out of season to destroy religion in the souls of their subordinates. That the State should officially cease to practice religion, should break up public worship and desist from participating in the ceremonies, that such a thing as this should come to be rumored and remarked: that in itself already constitutes persecution, than which, perhaps, it would be hard to conceive anything more dangerous. The effects might not be immediately noticed in the cities; the rich, for a certain time, might not be aware of them at all; but out in the country it would be a shrieking and disastrous fact. I am saying nothing of the other consequences of godlessness on the part of the State. I am confining myself to the effects of example alone. Let us take into account the significance of this in a country which has been Catholic for so many centuries, and in which, for the first time, the shoulder-belt of the gendarme begins to be something more sacred to the crowd than the stole of the priest.



45.  Bishop Eugene Lachat, of the Congregation of the Precious Blood, Bishop of Basel from September 28, 1868, a learned theologian, whom the Protestants and radicals had already persecuted, end who, even after the Council, was exiled from his diocese thanks to the agitations of the “Old Catholics.” He died in 1886, Administrator Apostolic of Tessin.