Louis Veuillot: The Liberal Illusion [1866]

[Stone]

The Liberal Illusion

Chapter XXXVII

It is only too evident that, considering the present state of the world, liberal Catholicism has no value whatever either as a doctrine or as a means of defending religion; that it is powerless to insure for the Church a peace which would bring her the least advancement or glory. It is nothing but an illusion, nothing but a piece of stubbornness — a pose. One can predict its fate. Abandoned in the near future by generous minds, to whom it may provide a certain outlet for sentiment, it will go on to merge itself with the general body of heresy. The adherents whom it drags after it may then be turned into fanatical persecutors, in keeping with the usual inconsistency of weak intellects obsessed with the false spirit of conciliation! Certain minds seem to be as susceptible to error as certain constitutions to disease. Everything that is unwholesome finds lodgment in them; they are carried away by the very first wind and ensnared by the very first sophism; they are the property, the booty, the chattels of the powers of darkness, and one may define them as antiquity defined slaves, non tam viles quam nulli — “not so much vile beings as nobodies.”

Let us undertake not so much to convince them as to set them an example that may save them.

In harmony with faith, reason exhorts us to unite and make ourselves strong in obedience. To whom shall we go? Liberals or not liberals, beset with the terrible perplexities of these troublous times, we know only one thing for a certainty: it is that no man knows anything, except the man with whom God is for aye, the man who possesses the thought of God.

It behooves us to lock arms around the Sovereign Pontiff, to follow unswervingly his inspired directions, to affirm with him the truths that alone can save our souls and the world. It behooves us to abstain from any attempt to twist his words to our own sense: “When the Sovereign Pontiff has proclaimed a pastoral decision, no one has the right to add or to suppress the smallest vowel, non addere, non minuere. Whatever he affirms, that is true forever.”46 Any other course can but result in dividing us further and in fatally disrupting our unity. That is the misfortune of misfortunes. The doctrines known as liberal have riven us apart. Before their inroad, favored only too much, alas! by a spell of political bad humor, few as we were, we amounted, nevertheless, to something: we formed an unbroken phalanx. We rallied in such a phalanx whenever we chose to do so; it was no more than a pebble if you will: that pebble had at least its compactness and its weight.

Liberalism has shattered it and reduced it to so much dust. I doubt if it still holds its place: dispersal is not expansion. At all events, a hundred thousand specks of dust would not furnish ammunition for a single sling. Let us aim now at but one goal, let us work with but one mind to attain it: let us throw ourselves wholeheartedly into obedience; it will give us the cohesion of rock, and upon this rock, hanc petram, Truth shall plant her victorious foot.


46. Mgr. Bertreaud, Bishop of Tulle. (Note ofL. Veuillot.)