The Mystical Body of Christ

and the

Reorganization of Society

by

Rev. Denis Fahey, C.S.Sp., D.D., D.Ph., B.A.

(Civil and Constitutional History, Political

Economy, and General Jurisprudence)

Professor of Philosophy and Church History, Holy Ghost Missionary College, Kimmage, Dublin

“About the ‘rights of man,’ as they are called, the people have heard enough: it is time they should hear of the rights of God.”

–Encyclical Letter, Tametsi, On Christ Our Redeemer, Pope Leo XIII, Nov. 1st, 1900

LORETO PUBLICATIONS

FITZWILLIAM NEW HAMPSHIRE

AD 2017

Imprimi potest: D. Murphy, C.S.Sp.,

Praep. Prov. Hib.

Nihil obstat: Patricius Sexton, D.D., V.G.,

Censor Deputatus.

Imprimatur: † Daniel,

Episcopus Corcagiensis

Corcagiae, Jan. 26, 1943.

First Published: 1945

2017 Edition - All rights reserved

ISBN: 978-1-62292-108-9

Loreto Publications

P. O. Box 603

Fitzwilliam, NH 03447

603-239-6671

www.LoretoPubs.org

Layout and cover design by Michael Hamilton

Cover art: Stained glass window from the Melkite Catholic Annunciation Cathedral

Printed and Bound in the United States of America

Dedication

To the Immaculate Heart of the Virgin Mary, Mother of God; to St. Joseph, Protector of the Universal Church; to St. Thomas Aquinas, the Catholic Church’s Chosen Teacher of Order; to St. Teresa of the Child Jesus, the Herald of the loving Fatherhood of God to an ungrateful world, this book is humbly and lovingly dedicated by the author.

“Queen of the Most Holy Rosary, Help of Christians, Refuge of the Human Race, We humbly prostrate Ourselves before thee, confident of obtaining mercy and of receiving grace and bountiful assistance in the present calamity, not because of Our own merits but solely through the great goodness of thy maternal heart.

“We, as common Father of the Christian family, as Vicar of him to whom was given all power in heaven and on earth and from whom We have received the care of all the souls, redeemed by his Precious Blood, that people the entire world, to thy Immaculate Heart, in this tragic hour of human history, We confide Ourselves and consecrate not only Holy Church, the Mystical Body of thy Son, which suffers and bleeds in so many places, and is sorely tried in so many ways, but also the entire world, torn by fierce strife and consumed with a fire of hate, victim of its own wickedness.” (Extract from Pope Pius XI’s Broadcast to Portugal, 31st October, 1942).

The Mystical Body of Christ

and the

Reorganization of Society

Table of Contents

Loreto Publications Introduction

Preface

the aim of this book • man’s response to god’s loving condescension or the theology of history • organized opposition to our supernatural life • members of one body under christ our head • some expressions of thanks

Part I: The Mystical Body of Christ

and the Divine Plan for Order

Chapter I: The Mystical Body of Christ

god is subsistent love of order • god’s unchanging purpose • naturalism and our supernatural life • social organization and the individual member of society • human personality and individuality • personality, individuality and the common good • appendix: social justice

Chapter II: The Kingship of Christ in its Essence

the priesthood and the kingship of christ • the kingship of christ • in our lord’s kingdom our blessed mother is queen and mediatrix of all graces • the church’s participation in the priesthood and in the spiritual kingship of christ • the kingship of christ and temporal rulers • christ’s spiritual kingship and that of the church • the spiritual kingship of the church and temporal affairs • what god desires • the thomistic doctrine on the relation between church and state • two other theories concerning church and state • the duty of catholics to christ the king • appendix 1: papal authority in temporal affairs • appendix 2: the scope of the indirect power of the church

Chapter III: The Kingship of Christ in its Integrity

meaning of the integrity of the kingship of christ • st. thomas and politics • st. thomas and economics • state and family • the role of money in economics • three ways of dealing in money • usury • the proper use of money • st. thomas and the ideal of national self-sufficiency • appendix: usury and confessors

Chapter IV: Program of Integral Acceptance of the

Kingship of Christ

social or practical modernism • social acceptance of the divine plan • acknowledgment of the spiritual kingship of the church’s rulers • duty of states towards religious orders and congregations • the duty of states with regard to secret societies • acknowledgment of the dignity of christian marriage • recognition of education as the formation of members of christ • solidarity of the mystical body reflected in economic organization • money is an instrument of economics • what is meant by liberalism? • the return to the gospel • the church’s program for the rights of god • appendix: pope benedict xv’s peace proposals, august 1, 1917

Chapter V: The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and the

Kingship of Christ in its Integrity

the relation between the mass and the kingship of christ • unifying influence of the mystical body • the ultimate aim of revolution • the solidarity of the mystical body and the duty of catholics • catholic solidarity is weakened by individualism and naturalism • priests and catholic solidarity

Part II: The Organized Opposition

to the Mystical Body of Christ

and to the Divine Plan for Order

Chapter VI: The Organized Opposition to the Mystical

Body of Christ

Chapter VII: The Invisible Organized Force, Satan

and His Fellow-demons

satan’s anti-supernaturalism • satan’s plans for disorder • satan’s hatred of the blessed eucharist

Chapter VIII: First Visible Organized Naturalistic Force,

The Jewish Nation

the jewish nation’s rejection of the supernatural messias • the tragedy of the jewish nation • the anti-supernatural influence of the jewish nation • the dual citizenship of the jews • the catholic church and anti-semitism • reason for special opposition to the jewish nation • divine providence and the jewish nation • the two camps • jewish conversions to christianity • the jewish problem by louis golding • appendix: contrasting programs

Chapter IX: The Second Visible Organized Naturalistic

Force, Freemasonry

naturalism and supernaturalism • teaching of the catholic church concerning the naturalism of freemasonry • final aim: naturalistic world-state or world republic • masonic constitutions • opposition of freemasonry to the catholic church • freemasonry and political action • masonic declarations of loyalty • is british masonry also moving to the left? • freemasonry and social justice

Chapter X: Links Between Organized Anti-supernatural Forces

the headship of satan according to st. thomas • the jewish nation and freemasonry • appendix: prayer for the conversion of the jews • israel’s prayer of reparation • prayer for the conversion of freemasons

Part III: Ockhamism or Nominalism

and Political and Economic Decay

Chapter XI: Thomism and Ockhamism or Nominalism

thomism ockhamism or nominalism • consequences of ockhamism or nominalism with regard to faith in the mystical body of christ • nominalism and separatism

Chapter XII: Nominalism and the Advent of Social Materialism

the two currents issuing from ockhamism • the first current, the nominalism of descartes • the second current, the nominalism of locke • locke on money • economic laws become exclusively physical laws

Part IV: Political Decay and the

Divine Plan for Order

Chapter XIII: The Protestant Revolt Against Order

the preparation of wrong national decisions • decay in the intellectual grasp of order • weakening of the will through the decay of the virtue luther and ockhamism • consequents of lutheranism

Chapter XIV: The French Revolution of 1789

the significance of the revolution • naturalism and revolution • the declaration of the rights of man • the jewish nation and the french revolution • consequences of the french revolution • the opposition between the french revolution and the catholic church • responsibility of freemasonry for revolutions • two currents issuing from the french revolution

Chapter XV: The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917

the role of england in the bolshevik revolution • the role of germany in the bolshevik revolution • the role of the jewish nation in the bolshevik revolution, (a) the jewish nation guides the communist movement, (b) the jewish bund and the bolshevik revolution, (c) the difference between the bolsheviks and the mensheviks, (d) the central jewish organization and the revolution at odessa in november, 1905, (e) in the hour of triumph, (f) the alliance of jewish finance with communism, appendix: lenin’s nationality

Chapter XVI: Reactions against the Naturalism of the

French Revolution

ordered reaction implies acceptance of christ’s kingship in its integrity • poland’s reaction • spain’s reaction • portugal’s reaction • ireland’s reaction • widespread ignorance of the meaning of naturalism • wolfe tone and the vicar of christ • wolfe tone and the jewish longing for the natural messias • wolfe tone, naturalism and anti-supernaturalism • wolfe tone’s ignorance of the real meaning of masonry • james connolly’s ignorance of the meaning and the aim of communism • james connolly’s ignorance of catholic teaching • the irish constitution of 1937 • the irish monetary system • germany’s reaction • prussia and judaeo-masonry • germany’s reaction is antagonistic to the catholic church • sources of the german race theory • the lutheran revolt • the philosophy of kant, fichte and hegel • german racial instinct replaces the german mind as the force molding the world • gobineau and h. st. chamberlain • the german race theory and personal liberty • prussian freemasonry and the national-socialist movement • italy’s reaction

Part V: Economic Decay and the

Divine Plan for Order

Chapter XVII: Some Aspects of Economic Decay

the english revolution of 1688 and the bank of england • the jews and william of orange’s expedition to england • the bank of england, locke, and freemasonry • defective principles adopted by the bank of england with regard to the issue of money, berkeley’s rediscovery of some sane principles concerning money • french economic life sacrificed in order to eliminate membership of christ: (a) frederick the great and the french revolution; (b) bismarck and gambetta; (c) the attack on the christian family by divorce; (d) financial cost of eliminating membership of christ from french schools; (e) legalized robbery under false pretences; (f) the warning of the great war unheeded • appendix: cardinal pie of poitiers and napoleon iii

Chapter XVIII: The Functioning of the Gold Standard

and Economic Decay

some financial principles of st. thomas aquinas • the bankers’ discovery • national finance and the gold standard • the meaning of inflation and deflation • some historical examples of planned deflations • international trade and the gold standard • the urge to war and destruction

Chapter XIX: The Economic Principles of St. Thomas

Aquinas and the Functioning of the Gold Standard

(a) usury or the consideration of the gold standard from the point of view of efficient causality, (b) money as a stable measure of things saleable, or the consideration of the gold standard from the point of view of formal causality, (c) two theories of money, the quantitative theory and the qualitative or commodity theory, or the consideration of the gold standard from the point of view of material causality, (d) the purpose of money, or the consideration of the gold standard from the point of view of final causality: (a) farming; (b) ruin of small owners and manufacturers; (c) bread: (d) regimentation of medical doctors: (e) advertisements of patent medicines: (f) family life

Chapter XX: The Political Principles of St. Thomas

Aquinas and the Functioning of the Gold Standard

money-manipulators and governments • the federal reserve system • naturalistic forces working for centralization • the german-jewish inspiration of the federal reserve system • the federal reserve board and the struggle for world financial supremacy

Chapter XXI: The Principles of St. Thomas Aquinas

and Monetary Reform

general principles • national monetary reform: (a) abandonment of the domestic gold standard: (b) issuing of lawful exchange-medium by state; (c) lending of lawful exchange-medium by banking guild; (d) stability of price level; (e) concluding remarks on national monetary reform • international trade and money: (a) the bank for international settlements and international trade; (b) international planning and the gold standard: (c) proposed reform of monetary system in view of international trade • international economic code • appendix: pope pius xii’s five peace points, pope pius xii’s allocution, christmas. 1941; the five essentials of a new order • some extracts from pope pius xii’s allocution, christmas, 1942: dignity and rights of the human person; the sense of social unity and especially of the family; dignity and prerogatives of labor; restoration of the rule of law; conception of the state according to the christian spirit

Loreto Publication’s

Introduction to

Father Denis Fahey

When Jesus Christ, our King and Master, taught us how to pray to His Father and Our Father, he used the phrase “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” In heaven God’s will is perfectly accomplished, but here on earth, fallen mankind cannot fulfill God’s will without the constant assistance of sanctifying grace communicated to the world through the sacraments of His church.

After the fall of Adam, a world perfectly ordered to God’s divine will was corrupted and dis-order became the ‘natural’ state of mankind and the created universe. It was the role of the Messias to re-order this fallen world—to bring a new state of order to the world His Father had created. The means for establishing that order by which a fallen world may return to God is the Catholic church and the life of sanctifying grace. As Christians newly born into the life of grace—a ‘supernatural’ state of being—we are all called to bring as much order to this world as is possible, all the while never forgetting that this world is in a fallen and corrupted state and that a ‘utopia’ is not possible here on earth. The Church of Christ is constantly opposed in this mission by all of the forces of ‘naturalism’ or dis-order, that is those forces opposed to the supernatural life of divine grace. It is the duty of all Christians of the Church Militant to battle against these forces.

This calling of Christians to the battle for order was the motto of the pontificate of Pope Saint X. That motto was Instaurare Omnia in Christo, “to restore all things in Christ”, taken from Saint Paul’s letter to the Ephesians 1:10. The modern popes have frequently warned us of the dangers of ‘naturalism’, which denies the supernatural life of grace and militates against it, and they have called us to fight in our private and public lives against this pernicious error. No priest has heeded that call and risen to defend the supernatural life of grace as clearly and as vigorously as Father Denis Fahey. He truly understood, and explained why, there is no salvation outside the Catholic church, either for individual persons or for the life of society and of nations.

A clear image of just what the life of a Christian in a society imbued from top to bottom with the social principles of Christ the King would be like, is not a widely shared understanding in much of the Christian world today, especially in America. We must remember that Christianity is a religion of world conquest! We are called to conquer the world for Christ and to do all that we can to subdue persons and nations to His will. A Catholic undertakes this battle first within himself and then within his family. Soon the influence of many families begins to pervade the community and then the nation or state. If Christian people do not have the full picture in their mind of exactly what God’s Plan for Order in this world would look like in its accomplishment, then they can have no long-term strategy for victory and little hope of achieving it. We have all of the tools required and all of the powers of heaven backing us. Let us take into our hearts and our minds the full plan and its potential for the realization of peace in the world and Christ the King of heaven and earth will bless our efforts. This was the permanent admonition of Fr. Fahey.

Father Fahey was a seminarian and was ordained in Rome during the pontificate of Pius X. The young priest was deeply influenced and inspired by that pope. When he penned a short Apologia for his work, Father Fahey expressed his vocation in this fashion:

“When in Rome I began to realize more fully the real significance of the history of the world, as the account of the acceptance and rejection of Our Lord’s Program for Order. I used to ask permission to remain at the Confession of St. Peter, while the other scholastics went round the basilica.

“I spent the time there going over the history of the world, and I repeatedly promised Saint Peter that if I ever got the chance, I would teach the truth about his Master in the way he and his successors, the Roman Pontiffs, wanted it done. That is what I have striven to do and am doing.”

Father Fahey not only clarified, explained, taught, and defended ‘Our Lord’s Program for Order’ in the world, he also actively fought and exposed the persons who were the enemies of that order. Because he did so, he has often been called ‘negative’ or ‘anti-Semitic’, or ‘much too concerned with Masonic conspiracies’. These are the pathetic terms of opprobrium hurled with such energy by those enemies of Christ whose plans he has effectively opposed. But in this he was in good company with St. Louis Marie de Montfort and Our Lady, who appears ‘terrible as an army set in battle array’ to the enemies of her divine son.

Listen to the words of St. Louis Marie as he stresses the two functions of our Blessed Mother, the positive one of making Our Lord known, and the negative one of making war upon His enemies.

“Mary must be manifested more than ever by her mercy, her power and her grace in these latter times; by her mercy, bringing back and lovingly welcoming the poor strayed sinners who will be converted and will return to the Catholic Church; by her power, against the enemies of God, idolaters, schismatics, Mohammedans, Jews, and men hardened in impiety, who will rise in terrible revolt to seduce all those who oppose them and to make them fall by promises and threats; she must also be made manifest by her grace animating and sustaining the valiant soldiers and faithful servants of Jesus Christ, who shall battle for His interests.

“And lastly, Mary must be terrible to the devil and his ministers, as an army in battle array, principally in these latter times, because the devil, knowing that he has but little time, and now less than ever, to damn souls, will every day redouble his efforts and his combats. He will before long raise up cruel persecutions and will lay terrible snares for the faithful servants and true children of Mary whom he finds more difficult to conquer than the others.”

Loreto Publications is committed to re-issuing all of the previously published works of Fr. Fahey and making them available to a much wider audience. The works of Fr. Fahey are critically important for Catholics to read, understand, and disseminate in our day when the forces of ‘organized naturalism’ or ‘anti-supernaturalism’ seem to be rampaging triumphantly through the Church and the world today. Arm yourselves for the battle!

Loreto Publications offers the

following works of Fr. Denis Fahey:

Mental Prayer According to the Teaching of Saint Thomas Aquinas (1927)

The Kingship of Christ According to the Principles of Saint Thomas Aquinas (1931)

The Social Rights of Our Divine Lord Jesus Christ the King (1932) Adapted from the French of Rev. A. Phillippe C.SS.R. by Fr. Denis Fahey C.S.Sr.

The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World (1935)

The Rulers of Russia (1938)

The Workingmen’s Guilds of the Middle Ages (1943)

A translation of the work by Dr. Godefroid Kurth C.S.G.)

The Kingship of Christ and Organized Naturalism (1943)

Money Manipulation and the Social Order (1944)

The Mystical Body of Christ and the Reorganization of Society (1945)

The Tragedy of James Connolly (1947)

The Rulers of Russia and the Russian Farmers (1948)

The Kingship of Christ and the Conversion of the Jewish Nation (1953)

The Church and Farming (1953)

The Duties of the Catholic State in Regard to Religion (1954)

(A translation of the work by Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani)

Editor’s notes

Loreto’s editions of the works of Father Fahey have been newly typeset and updated with some changes to the original text. The alterations are as follows:

1. We have changed the spelling of many words to match modern American spelling rules. Some examples are: neighbor for neighbour, show for shew, labor for labour, realize for realise, mold for mould, program for programme, etc.

2. We have made use of current punctuation and capitalization rubrics.

3. We have made a few minor corrections of typographical errors in the original texts but have NOT altered the words of Fr. Fahey nor made any deletions.

4. We have made uniform the notations of scripture references in the currently accepted fashion. For example, we use Mt. 24: 6–9 instead of Matt. xxiv 6, 7, 8, 9.

Preface

Preface

the aim of this book

In my book, The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World after having treated succinctly of the Divine Plan for Order, I stressed especially the opposition to that Divine Plan owing to the existence in the world of forces organized for the diffusion of naturalism or anti-supernaturalism. Naturalism is in practice the same thing as opposition to the Mystical Body of Christ, the Catholic Church, instituted by our divine Lord Jesus Christ as the visible expression as well as the divinely-accredited exponent of the Divine Plan for Order in the world. To that Divine Plan for Order there neither is nor can be any man-made alternative. Man has not even got the right to propose an alternative. His duty is simply to try to grasp what God has instituted and to bow down his head in humble acceptance. Thus alone can he fully acknowledge God’s rights. He may debate on how best to arrange the structure of society in accordance with God’s plan, in the varying concrete circumstances of different epochs, but not about whether he ought to accept God’s plan or draw up his own scheme. The world must conform to our Lord, not he to it.

In this book I have more especially stressed Christ’s program for order in the world as elaborated by the Church. It is the duty of those who believe in and love our Lord not to whittle down his program but to preach the integral truth and to urge the world to the one course befitting creatures—humble submission to order. “The general well-being and the security of states,” writes Pope Leo XIII in the Encyclical Letter, Tametsi, “demand that men should be brought back to him from whom they ought never to have departed, to him who is the way, the truth and the life, and not only isolated individuals but human society as a whole. Christ our Lord must be reinstated as the ruler of human society. It belongs to him as do all its members. All the elements of the commonwealth—legal commands and prohibitions, popular institutions, schools, marriage, home-life, the workshop, and the mansion, all must be got to come to that fountain and imbibe the life that comes from him.…Those whose minds refuse to acknowledge Christ, are obstinately striving against God.…

The law of Christ ought to hold sway in human society and in communities, so as to be the teacher and guide of public no less than private life. This being divinely appointed and provided, no one may resist with impunity.…

“By the law of Christ we mean not merely the precepts of natural morality, or those that the ancients received by revelation, all of which Jesus Christ perfected and raised to the highest plane, by his explanations, his interpretations and his sanctions. We mean, besides, all the rest of his doctrine and in particular all his institutions. Of these the Church is the chief. Indeed, what institution of Christ is there that she does not fully embrace and include? By the ministry of the Church, so gloriously founded by him, he willed to perpetuate the office assigned to him by his Father, and having, on the one hand, conferred upon her all effectual aids for human salvation, on the other, he ordained with the utmost emphasis that all men should be subject to her as to himself, and zealously follow her guidance in every department of life. ‘He that heareth you, heareth me; and he that despiseth you, despiseth me’ (St. Luke, 10:16). So the law of Christ is always to be sought from the Church, and therefore as Christ is for men the way, so likewise the Church is the way. He is so in himself and by his own nature, she by his commission and by a share in his power. On this account those who would strive for salvation apart from the Church, wander from the way and are struggling in vain. Governments are in much the same case as individuals: they also will inevitably run to their destruction if they depart from the way.”

Now this oneness of the Divine Plan for Order set forth by the Catholic Church and the paramount nature of God’s rights are difficult ideas for the modern mind to grasp, because of the ravages of religious indifference and the diffusion of French revolutionary ideas. The naturalistic Declaration of the Rights of Man has obscured in many minds the great truths that man’s true rights are based on his duties to God and that his duties to God can only be fulfilled through membership of Christ. Again, many are not as familiar as they ought to be with the outlines of the Divine Plan set forth in the Encyclical Letters of the last four Popes. After Pope Pius IX had catalogued the chief errors of modern times against God’s rights and the Kingship of Christ, Popes Leo XIII, Pius X, Benedict XV, and Pius XI set out the positive program by which God’s rights and the rule of Christ the King in its integrity are acknowledged.

man’s response to god’s

loving condescension or

the theology of history

To remedy the disorder introduced into the world by the sin of the first Adam, God came on earth in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ and put before the Jewish nation, from which he had taken his sacred humanity, the divine program for the ordered organization of the world. At the same time, he asked them to be its heralds. Our Lord’s program comprised the establishment of a supernatural, supranational kingdom to safeguard his teaching and diffuse the restored supernatural life of grace. Into this kingdom all men of all nations were called upon to enter, while continuing to be subjects of the different natural states and nations. The Jewish nation rejected the Divine Plan for Order. As a result of the growth of national self-centeredness, they refused to accept that there was any life higher than their national life and they would not hear of the non-Jewish nations coming in as members of the Messianic kingdom, on the same level as themselves. In spite of their persistent opposition, however, and notwithstanding the weakness of fallen human nature, Western Europe in the 13th century had come to acknowledge God’s rights, in accordance with the Divine Plan he had himself laid down, and had organized society on the basis that man’s supreme dignity is his supernatural and supranational life as a member of Christ. Since then until recently, there has been steady decay, with disastrous consequences. Before entering upon the consideration of that decay and its sad consequences and quoting what the Popes say about them, let us examine what God desires to see in human social organization.

All men are called by God to be members of Christ in the supernatural, supranational kingdom of the Catholic Church, and all are meant to lead ordered lives in accordance with that dignity, animating their activities with supernatural charity. Accordingly, God desires harmony and collaboration, not separation and conflict, between the two perfect societies, Church and state, to which men are subject. “God has divided between the ecclesiastical and the civil power the task of procuring the well-being of the human race. He has appointed the former to divine, the latter to human things. Each of them is supreme in its own sphere: each is enclosed within perfectly defined boundaries, delimited in exact conformity with its nature and principle. Each is therefore circumscribed within a sphere in which it can act and move by its own native right. But, inasmuch as each of these two powers has authority over the same subjects, and as it might come to pass that one and the same thing—related differently, but still remaining one and the same thing—might belong to the jurisdiction and determination of both, therefore God, who foresees all things, and who is the author of these two powers, has marked out the course of each in right correlation to the other. ‘For the powers that are ordained of God.[1] Were this not so, deplorable contentions and conflicts would often arise, and not infrequently men, like travelers at the meeting of two roads, would hesitate in anxiety and doubt, not knowing what course to follow. Two powers would be commanding contrary things, and it would be a dereliction of duty to disobey either of the two. But it would be most repugnant to have such an opinion of the wisdom and goodness of God.…There must, accordingly, exist between these two powers, a certain orderly connection, which may be compared to the union of the soul and body in man. The nature and scope of that connection can be determined only, as We have laid down, by having regard to the nature of each power, and by taking account of the relative excellence and nobility of their purpose. One of the two has for proximate and chief object the well-being of this mortal life; the other the everlasting joys of heaven.”[2] States, of course, as well as private individuals are called upon to acknowledge the order established by God. It is a sin for the state not to have a care for religion, as if it were beyond its scope or of no practical benefit; or out of many forms of religion to adopt that one which chimes with its fancy; for we are bound absolutely to worship God in that, way which he has shown to be his will.…Hence civil society, established for the common welfare, should not only safeguard the well-being of the community, but have also at heart the interests of its individual members, in such wise as not in any way to hinder, but in every manner to render as easy as possible, the possession of that highest and unchangeable good for which all should seek. Wherefore, for this purpose, care must especially be taken to preserve unharmed and unimpaired the religion whereof the practice is the link connecting man with God.[3] The right order of the world demands the recognition by states of the supernatural and supranational Catholic Church. It is clearly an insult to God to put man-made religions on the same level as the religion instituted by God. Other forms of divine worship may be tolerated. “The Church, indeed,” writes Pope Leo XIII, “deems it unlawful to place the various forms of divine worship on the same footing as the true religion, but does not, on that account, condemn those rulers who, for the sake of securing some great good or of hindering some great evil, patiently allow custom or usage to be a kind of sanction for each kind of religion having its place in the state. And in fact the Church is wont to take earnest heed that no one shall be forced to embrace the Catholic faith against his will.’”[4]

In proportion as the Divine Plan for orderly collaboration be tween the two powers is realised, there flourishes that relative peace and happiness that can be ours on the way to heaven. When, on the other hand, the Divine Plan is combated and opposed, the world inevitably suffers. The sovereign Pontiffs insist upon this. “There was once a time,” writes Pope Leo XIII, “when states were governed by the principles of the Gospel teaching. Then it was that the power and divine virtue of Christian wisdom had diffused itself throughout the laws, institutions, and morals of the people, permeating all ranks and relations of civil society. Then, too, the religion instituted by Jesus Christ, established firmly in befitting dignity, flourished everywhere, by the favor of princes and the legitimate protection of magistrates: and Church and state were happily united in concord and friendly interchange of good offices. The state, constituted in this wise, bore fruits beyond all expectation, whose remembrance is still, and always will be, in renown.…A similar state of things would certainly have continued had the agreement of the two powers been lasting. Even greater results might have been justly looked for, had obedience been given to the authority, teaching and counsels of the Church, and especially had this submission been marked by greater and more unswerving loyalty. For that should be regarded in the light of an ever-changeless law which Ivo of Chartres wrote to Pope Paschal II: ‘When the kingdom and priesthood are at one, in complete concord, the world is well ruled, and the Church flourishes, and brings forth abundant fruit. But when they are at variance, not only smaller interests prosper not, but even things of greatest moment fall into deplorable decay.’”[5]

Pope Pius XI proclaims the same great truth when he quotes the following passage from Pope Leo XIII: “It is generally agreed that the founder of the Church, our Lord Jesus Christ, wished the spiritual power to be distinct from the civil, and each to be free and unhampered in doing its own work, not forgetting, however, that it is expedient to both, and in the interest of everybody, that there be a harmonious relationship.… If the civil power combines in a friendly manner with the spiritual power of the Church, it necessarily follows that both parties will greatly benefit. The dignity of the state will be enhanced, and with religion as its guide, there will be at hand a safeguard and defense which will operate to the public good of the faithful.”[6]

Pope Leo XIII outlines the disastrous consequences of the so-called Reformation and of the French Revolution. “Sad it is to call to mind” he writes, “how the harmful and lamentable rage for innovation which rose to a climax in the sixteenth century, threw first of all into confusion the Christian religion, and next, by natural consequence, invaded the precincts of philosophy, whence it spread amongst all classes of society. From this source, as from a fountain-head, burst forth all those later tenets of unbridled licence which, in the midst of the terrible upheaval of the last century (the 18th), were wildly conceived and boldly proclaimed as the principles and foundation of that new jurisprudence which was not merely previously unknown, but was at variance on many points with not only the Christian, but even with the natural law.”[7] He stigmatizes in particular the rejection by the state of its duty to worship God in the way he has laid down and the putting of all religions on the same level, as well as the turning against the one infallible teacher of morality, the Catholic Church, “The state does not consider itself bound by any duty towards God. Moreover, it believes that it is not obliged to make public profession of any religion: or to inquire which of the very many religions is the only true one: or to prefer one religion to all the rest: or to show to any form of religion special favor; but, on the contrary, is bound to grant equal rights to every creed provided public order be not disturbed by any particular form of religious belief.…To exclude the Church, founded by God himself, from the business of life, from the power of making laws, from the training of youth, from domestic society, is a grave and fatal error. A state from which religion is banished can never be well regulated; and already perhaps more than is desirable is known of the nature and tendency of the so-called civil philosophy of life and morals. The Church of Christ is the true and sole teacher of virtue and guardian of morals. She it is who preserves in their purity the principles from which duties flow.”[8]

The rupture of the unity of the Divine Plan was followed by the disastrous effects of liberalistic or independent morality, condemned by Leo XIII in the Encyclical just quoted and in the one on Human Liberty, in regard to economics and finance. Pope Pius XI alludes to the failure of state authorities, bereft of sure guidance in the moral sphere, to cope with these effects. “A stern insistence on the moral law, enforced with vigor by civil authority, could have dispelled or perhaps averted these enormous evils (injustices of Limited Liability Companies. Fraudulent Speculations, etc., etc.) This, however, was too often lamentably wanting. For at the time when the new social order was beginning, the doctrines of rationalism had already taken firm hold of large numbers, and an economic science alien to the true moral law had soon arisen, whence it followed that free rein was given to human avarice. As a result, a much greater number than ever before, solely concerned with adding to their wealth by any means whatsoever, sought their own selfish interests above all things; they had no scruple in committing the gravest injustices against others…With the leaders of business abandoning the true path it is not surprising that multitudes of workingmen, too, sank in the same morass; all the more so, because very many employers treated their workmen as mere tools, without any concern for the welfare of their souls, indeed without the slightest thought of higher interests.”[9]

In the place of the right order in human affairs, by which money or token wealth is subordinated to the production, distribution and exchange of material goods or real wealth, and the production of material goods is made to subserve family life and the development of human personality, the revolt against the Divine Plan has substituted the subordination of family life and human personality to the production of material goods and the domination of production by money. Pope Leo XIII has spoken of the return of usury under another guise as one of the factors contributing to the quasi-enslavement of the proletariat. Those who control money have come to occupy a dominant position in states and their decisions have practically taken the place of those of the guardians of the moral law.

This reversal of order with regard to economics, family life and human personality, has partly resulted from, and in part contributed to, the domination of states by naturalistic anti-supernatural forces. The so-called Reformation sectioned off the Christian life from the life of the citizen, so that political and economic organization left membership of Christ out of account, but it did not set up a supranational organization in the place of the Catholic Church. That was reserved for the French Revolution, in which has witnessed the first appearance in public of the new ideal of a purely naturalistic society striving for the universality of the Catholic Church. Modern history since 1789 has been, to a large extent, the account of the domination of state after state by the naturalistic supranationalism of Freemasonry, behind which has been steadily looming up the still more strongly organized naturalistic supranationalism of the Jewish nation. That is why the post-revolutionary epoch has witnessed, in country after country, persistent attacks on the program of Christ the King in regard to the Church, the state, the family, education, the religious orders, the press, and private property. Soon after every successful Judaeo-Masonic Revolution, since the first in 1789 down to and including the Spanish Revolution of 1931, the world has begun to hear of the country’s entering upon the path of “progress” by the introduction of “enlightened” reforms, such as, the separation of Church and state, the legalization of divorce, the suppression and banishment of religious orders and congregations, the glorification of Freemasonry, the secularization of the schools, the nationalization of property and the unrestrained licence of the press.

As the revolt against the Divine Plan for Order in the world and the denial of God’s rights have spread, respect for man’s personal rights has diminished.[10] These rights are being denied and the world is threatened with the return of a slavery worse than that of Ancient Rome, in proportion as rulers of states no longer see in their subjects members of Christ. As the social organization of the world has been increasingly withdrawn from the rule of Christ the King, human beings are being treated more and more as mere individuals completely subject to the state, just as in the days before Christ.

Pope Leo XIII shows how inevitable all this was. “Never to have known Jesus Christ in any way,” he writes, “is the greatest of misfortunes, but it involves no perversity or ingratitude. But, after having known him, to reject or forget him, is such a horrible and mad crime as to be scarcely credible. For he is the origin and source of all good, and just as mankind could not be freed from slavery but by the sacrifice of Christ, so neither can it be preserved but by his power.…The case of governments is much the same as that of the individual; they also must run into fatal issues if they depart from the Way…Let Jesus be excluded, and human reason is left without its greatest protection and illumination; the very notion is easily lost of the end for which God created human society, namely, that by the help of their civil union the citizens should attain their natural good, but nevertheless in a way not to conflict with that highest and most perfect and enduring good which is above nature. Their minds busy with a hundred confused projects, rulers and subjects alike travel a devious road, bereft, as they are, of safe guidance and fixed principle.”[11]

J. Maritain has some apposite remarks in this connection. “The terrestrial state being ordained by nature,” he writes, “to the moral good of the human being, and therefore necessarily ordained in fact to eternal life as to its last end and to the good of the heavenly city, it is a metaphysical impossibility for the terrestrial state to attain its peculiar end and true prosperity in opposition to the good of the Church. Yet it believed that it could. The history of the modern world is the history of that illusion. The results are before our eyes.”[12]

We may look at the decay of social acknowledgment of the Kingship of Christ in Europe in another way. We have seen that Pope Leo XIII stigmatized the rejection by the state of the one true religion and the putting of all religions on the same level. Now all the countries of Western Europe once worshipped the Blessed Trinity in union with Christ as Priest in Holy Mass and strove to organize their social life under Christ the King in accordance with that protestation of homage. Satan succeeded first in getting the countries we now call Protestant to break away from that unity and reject the Mass. Then since the French Revolution, in one Catholic country after another, Satan has succeeded in setting up a native government hostile to the Mass and to the rule of Christ the King. There are still two exceptions—Poland and Ireland. It is true that the Mass has been attacked in both these countries and Catholic education has been persecuted, but Satan cannot yet boast that he has got a native Polish or a native Irish government to insult the Mass and attack the formation of children as members of Christ. But, as I point out in Chapter XVI, those two countries, so remarkable, for their traditional loyalty to God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ, whom he has sent, are weakening in their grasp of order. While other countries that had succumbed to the wiles of Satan and his emissaries in the past, have begun to react and are returning to our Lord and his Church, those two countries, in the wake of so many others in the past, have declared themselves indifferent to him.

Article 114 of the Polish Constitutional Law of March 17th, 1921, re-enactcd by the Constitutional Law of April 23rd, 1935, states: “The Roman Catholic Faith, being the religion of the great majority of the nation, occupies a leading position in the state among other religions, which, however, enjoy equal rights.” In Ireland, by Article 44 of the Constitution in operation from December 29th, 1937, “The state recognizes the special position of the Holy Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church as the guardian of the Faith professed by the great majority of the citizens” and recognizes equally the Protestant Sects and the Jewish Congregations as the Churches of minorities. Thus the Polish state and the Irish state, to put the matter succinctly, declare themselves, as such, indifferent to the struggle between the true supernatural Messias and the natural Messias.

“Since the Catholic religion is the only true religion,” writes Pope Leo XIII, “to put the other religions on the same level with it is to treat it with the gravest injustice and offer it the worst form of insult.”[13] This phrase of Pope Leo XIII occurs in an Encyclical Letter dealing with Satan’s efforts, through secret societies, to undermine the Kingship of Christ in the world. It is the considered judgment of the great Pontiff on what has been proclaimed, in country after country, to be one of the marks of modern “progress.”

Pope Pius XI insists upon the same point in the Letter Quas Primas (1925), On the Kingship of Christ. There the sovereign Pontiff declares that the naturalistic spirit gradually came to infect society and thus “by degrees the religion of Christ was put on the same level as false religions and placed ignominiously in the same category with them.” The insult to Christ the King involved in that attitude should make every Catholic resolve to undo it. That it does not is proof of how low we have fallen and of how sadly we have been influenced by our environment. We shall have a clearer understanding of these things at the “last judgment when Christ, who has been cast out of public life, neglected and ignored, will severely avenge such insults.”[14]

organized opposition to our supernatural life

In this book, as in The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World, I have treated at some length of the organized opposition to our Lord Jesus Christ and to his work of permeating the world with the influence of the supernatural life of the Blessed Trinity. The steady decay in social acknowledgment of the Kingship of Christ, which the world has witnessed for the past 150 years, is in great part due to the action of the visible naturalistic forces of the Jewish nation and Freemasonry, acting under the anti-supernatural inspiration of Satan. That action owes its success in large measure to secret organization. Needless to say, the plotting of secret societies does not suffice to account for everything in history, for the causes of historical events are very complex. But if these forces are left out of account, modern history becomes a puzzle. The art of maneuvering human beings towards a certain goal, without their being aware that they are being so maneuvered, has been brought to a pitch of perfection never before attained. The control of money facilitates the acquisition of the power to influence all the technical agencies for the formation of public opinion—the press, the radio and the cinema.

It is certainly true, as has been remarked, that it is in great measure because Catholics fail to live fully as members of Christ that our Lord’s enemies succeed in their designs. “If Jews control the fashions,” the question is asked, “who wear them?” But it is also true that Catholics succumb to the machinations of our Lord’s enemies largely because they are not trained for the real struggle in the world. They leave school without adequate knowledge of the organized opposition they will have to meet and with their minds hazy about the points of social organization for which they must stand and against which attacks are being directed. They do not realize that the opposition’s ultimate aim is the disruption of Christ’s order and they are not accustomed to think that they must co-operate with other young Catholics for our Lord’s program, that they must, for example, master the cinema and prevent it from undermining Christian marriage, the foundation of family life in their country. Thus they display a lamentable lack of cohesion and a pitiable want of enthusiasm for Christ’s interests, with the result that Catholics who stand for integral Christianity can always count on finding other Catholics in the service of the enemy. “Many times,” wrote Pope Pius XI in the Encyclical Letter, Divini Redemptoris, “Our paternal heart has been saddened by the divergencies…. which array in opposing camps the sons of the same Mother Church. Thus it is that the revolutionaries, who are not so very numerous… end by pitting Catholics one against the other.”

members of one body under

christ our head

The reaction against the organized propagation of naturalism will demand an integral grasp of our corporate oneness with Christ. We come into union with Our Lord not as isolated individuals but as members of a supernatural organism, the Mystical Body of Christ. Each baptized Christian enters into an interior vital relation with Christ through being incorporated into the organism of which Christ is the invisible. or, to express it more in accordance with reality, Christ unites each baptized Christian with himself by incorporating him or her into a living organism, of which he is the invisible head. That organism, supernatural and supranational, is destined to permeate the whole social life of states and nations with the spirit of supernatural solidarity in Christ. Of course, the end aimed at by this supernatural organism in its permeation of society is the development of the individual member’s personality through interior union with Christ. But the individual member will develop his interior personal life only in proportion as he forgets self for the sake of the head and the whole body. All of us as members of Christ, must strive to realize the fullness of St. Paul’s expression: “I live, now not I; but Christ liveth in me” (Gal. 2:20).

In the physical body an individual member can attain its full development only by fulfilling its function in perfect subjection to the head and in complete harmony with the other members, thus co-operating for the good of the whole body, so analogously in the Mystical Body of Christ, an individual member must, as it were, lose himself in order to find himself really. Many Catholics, unconsciously influenced by Protestant individualism, not only consider themselves as imitating Christ, our model, from outside, so to say, but regard themselves as having an isolated individual relation with Christ. They do not bring home to themselves sufficiently that all Christ’s members form one organism under Christ, battling for the divine order of the world, and that they can grow up in Christ, only by supplying their quotas of self-sacrifice in their places in the supernatural organism of his Mystical Body.

Other Catholics seem to be unconsciously influenced by the Lutheran separation of the Christian and the citizen and consider their spiritual life as a purely interior relation with Christ. The spiritual life is, as it were, sectioned off from ordinary everyday life. They are in danger of allowing the world around them to be organized against our Lord’s Program for Order, while they continue to practice their religion more or less unconcernedly. They do not sufficiently realize that we enter into vital relation with Christ through being incorporated into a visible organism and that we must take as the starting-point of our spiritual life the objective fact of this incorporation. We must not initiate our spiritual life by the soul’s looking at itself somewhat after the subjective fashion in which Descartes started intellectual life. The spiritual life is not the life of a “soul,” but the life of a member of Christ, composed of soul and body, occupying a place in an organic unity destined to mold the world for Christ.

The whole body grows in charity and union with Christ, when each part supplies what it is destined to give, according to its position and function. In Chapter IV of the Epistle to the Ephesians, especially in verses 11, 12, 15, 16, St. Paul insists upon this positional development. We have grown accustomed to considering ourselves as separate individuals looking at Christ from outside, each one living his or her individual life with Christ. We must consider ourselves as we really are, that is, as one with Christ and as being moved by him as a body for the molding and transformation of society. In this way did the early Christians transform the society of Imperial Rome, and in the same way all Catholics will be made ready to respond to a call such as was made by Pope Pius X to the French Hierarchy, in his Letter on the Sillon. “As in the conflict of interests,” wrote the Pope, “and most of all in the struggle against unjust forces, a man’s virtue does not always suffice to assure him his daily bread, and as the social machinery ought to be so organized as by its natural action to paralyze the efforts of the wicked, and to render accessible to every man of goodwill his legitimate share of temporal happiness, “We earnestly desire that you should take an active share in organizing society for that purpose.”

The return of the world to order means its return to the integral truth of Christ. “When an organism decays and becomes corrupt,” wrote Pope Leo XIII, “it is because it has ceased to be under the action of the causes which had given it its form and constitution. To make it healthy and flourishing again it is necessary to restore it to the vivifying action of those same causes.…Just as Christianity cannot penetrate into the soul without making it better, so it cannot enter into public life without establishing order.…If it has transformed pagan society…so, after the terrible shocks which unbelief has given to the world in our days, it will be able to put that world again on the true road, and bring back to order the states and peoples of modern times. But the return of Christianity will not be efficacious and complete if it does not restore the world to a sincere love of the one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. In the Catholic Church Christianity is incarnate. It is identified with that perfect spiritual society, sovereign in its own order, which is the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ and which has for its visible head the Roman Pontiff, successor of the Prince of the Apostles.… Society so sadly gone astray must re-enter the bosom of the Church, if it wishes to recover its well-being, its repose and its salvation.”[15]

some expressions of thanks

I am under a particular obligation to Miss G. M. Coogan, of Chicago, writer of Money Creators and Lawful Money Lectures, for guidance and instruction on the subject of finance, if this book proves helpful to others in understanding the relation of money to the real order of the world, it is in great part owing to Miss Coogan’s kindness. She not only assisted me with books and advice, but spurred me on to the effort required to help the poor on the one hand and to enlighten the bewildered on the other.

I must also thank Professor O’Rahilly of University College, Cork, for freely putting his profound learning at my disposal. I am only one of many whom this distinguished Irishman has made his debtors.

I beg to return my most grateful thanks to those firms and writers from whose books I have quoted at some length. The permission to do so has been most generously accorded. In particular, I wish to mention the following: The Economic Reform Club and Institute for The Root of All Evil, by Sir Reginald Rowe; Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, for America Conquers Britain, by Ludwell Denny; Messrs. Chapman and Hall, Ltd., for The Polish Jew, by Beatrice C. Baskerville; Mr. Geoffrey Crowther and Messrs. Thomas Nelson and Sons, Ltd., for Mr. Crowther’s book, An Outline of Money; Messrs. Chatto and Windus, for The Modern Idolatry, by Jeffrey Mark; Mr. A. N. Field, Nelson, New Zealand, for The Truth about the Slump, All These Things, Un-taught History of Money, The Truth about New Zealand, and Socialism Unmasked; The Controller of H.M. Stationery Office for The Report of the Select Committee on Patent Medicines (H.C. 414): K.R.P. Publications, for Tax-Bonds or Bondage, by John Mitchell: The Forum Press, for Our Daily Bread, by Professor Joseph Reilly; Dr. Douglas Boyd, for Barrier to Health; Miss G. M. Coogan, Chicago, for Money Creators and Lawful Money Lectures; Professor Alfred O’Rahilly and the Cork University Press, for Professor O’Rahilly’s book, Money; Wells Gardner, Barton & Co.. Ltd., for Professor Skinner alias Montagu Norman, by John Hargrave: The Food Education Society for Bread in Peace and War; George Routledge & Sons, Ltd., for The Role of Money, by Professor Soddy; The American Council on Public Affairs, Florida Avenue, Washington, D.C., for Interest and Usury, by Rev. B. W. Dempsey, S.J.; Faber and Faber, Ltd., for Alternative to Death, by the Earl of Portsmouth (Viscount Lymington); J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., for Look to the Land, by Lord Northbourne.

I beg to mention also Messrs. Simon and Schuster, Inc., of New York, and The Cresset Press, by whom permission to quote from Wall Street Under Oath was granted on special conditions.

Through the kindness of a friend, an Irish priest resident in France, I was able to get in touch with Desclée, De Brouwer et Cie, Paris, for La Juridiction de l’Eglise sur la Cité, by l’abbé Charles Journet, and Philosophie Economique by Monsieur J. Vialatoux; and with Beauchesne et Fils, Paris, for La Mysterieuse Internationale Juive, by M. Léon de Poncins. I beg to thank both those firms. My friend was not able to get in contact with the Éditions Spes, Paris, for La Leçon du Passé, by Mgr. Landrieux.

The permission kindly accorded by Messrs. Burns, Oates and Washbourne, Ltd., to quote from The Persecution of the Catholic Church in the Third Reich, was availed of only for small portions of the translations of two documents, which I had previously translated. In those two passages, the version of the above-mentioned book gave the meaning more accurately.

I beg to return thanks also to the editors of The Irish Catholic, The Standard, and The Irish Ecclesiastical Record, for permission to republish the portions of the book, which appeared in those periodicals.

I wish to make special mention of one book—though I have quoted only a few passages from it—because of the help it has been to me in seeing the history of the world in its true perspective, that is, in relation to Our Lord. That book is La Royauté Sociale de N. S. Jésus-Christ d’après le Cardinal Pie (The Kingship of Christ according to Cardinal Pie of Poitiers), by Père Théotime de St. Just. Pope Pius X told the students of the French Seminary, Rome, on audience, that he had read and re-read the works of Cardinal Pie, who was bishop of Poitiers from 1849 to 1880. Other sovereign Pontiffs, Pius IX, Leo XIII, Benedict XV have added their encomiums to those of Pius X. I may say that the great Cardinal’s ideas permeate every chapter of this book.

My gratitude is due to Rev. J. J. Ryan, C.S.Sp., M.A., of Blackrock College, for his kindness in reading the manuscript and for many helpful suggestions. I am also very grateful to the Scholastics of the Congregation of the Holy Ghost for typing the manuscript, correcting the proofs and compiling the Index.

Finally, a special word of thanks is due to the Printers, The Kerryman, Ltd., Tralee, and to the Publishers, The Forum Press, Cork, for their great kindness and consideration.

Denis Fahey, C.S.Sp.

Feast of the Most Pure Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary

[1]Rom. 13:1.

[2]Pope Leo XIII, Encyclical Letter, Immortale Dei, On the Christian Constitution of States.

[3]Pope Leo XIII, Encyclical Letter, Immortale Dei, On the Christian Constitution of States.

[4]Pope Leo XIII, Encyclical Letter, Immortale Dei, On the Christian Constitution of States.

[5]Pope Leo XIII, Encyclical Letter, Immortale Dei, On the Christian Constitution of States.

[6]Quoted by Pope Pius XI in the Encyclical, Casti Connubii, On Christian Marriage, from the Encyclical Letter of Pope Leo XIII, Arcanum Divinæ Sapientiæ, On Christian Marriage. (Cf. the passage from Cardinal Antoniano quoted with the highest approval by Pope Pius XI: “The more closely the temporal power of a nation allies itself with the spiritual, and the more it fosters and promotes the latter, by so much the more it contributes to the conservation of the commonwealth.…How grave therefore is the error of those who separate things so closely united, and who think that they can produce good citizens by ways and methods other than those which make for the formation of good Christians! For let human prudence say what it will and reason as it pleases, it is impossible to produce true temporal peace and tranquillity by things repugnant or opposed to the peace and happiness of eternity” (Encyclical Letter, On the Christian Education of Youth).

[7]Pope Leo XIII, Encyclical Letter, Immortale Dei, On the Christian Constitution of States.

[8]Pope Leo XIII, Encyclical Letter, Immortale Dei, On the Christian Constitution of States.

[9]Encyclical Letter, Quadragesima Anno, On the Social Order.

[10]The chief of these rights will be enumerated in the text of Pope Pius XI quoted in Chapter I: “The right to life, to bodily integrity, to obtain the necessary means of existence; the right to tend towards his ultimate goal in the path marked out for him by God: the right of association and the right to possess and use property” (Encyclical Letter, Divini redemptoris, On Atheistic Communism).

[11]The Encyclical Letter, Tametsi, On Christ Our Redeemer.

[12]The Things that are not Caesar’s, p. 41.

[13]Encyclical Letter, Humanum genus, On Freemasonry.

[14]Encyclical Letter, Quas Primas, On the Kingship of Christ.

[15]Apostolic Letter, March 19th, 1902, Review of his Pontificate.

Chapter I

The Mystical Body of Christ God is
Subsistent Love of Order

God is the subsistent act of intelligence of the infinitely ordered being that is himself, so he may be described as the subsistent grasp of infinite order. He is at the same time the subsistent act of love of the infinite good that is himself. He is, therefore, subsistent love of order.[1] The world, his creation, is intended to reflect in its limited way the infinite love of order of its creator. St. Thomas points out that the inexhaustible magnificence and loveableness of the divine perfections are more strikingly brought home to us by the great diversity of created things, than they would have been if God had been less profuse in his generosity. “We must hold,” he writes, “that the distinction between created things and their multiplicity have been willed by the first mover, God himself. He brought things into being, in order to manifest his goodness by communicating to them a share in it. As his perfection and goodness could not be adequately represented by one creature, he created many different creatures in order that the divine beauty might be mirrored forth less inadequately. Thus one creature’s insufficiency as a representation of the divine goodness is compensated in some degree by another. Goodness, which in God is simple and undivided, is to be met with in creatures scattered in profusion in a variety of forms. Accordingly, the whole universe reflects the divine goodness more perfectly than any individual creature.”[2] The irrational creation is destined to mirror forth the divine perfections unconsciously; intellectual creatures are meant to reproduce them consciously and knowingly. Men (and angels) are bound to grasp the order of the world with their intelligences, accept it with their wills and express that acceptance in accordance with their natures. God’s rights, as creator and Father, to that recognition and that acceptance are irrefragable, and the one way for the rational creature to attain the development of true personality is by that recognition and that acceptance.[3] Now the center of order in the actual world is our Lord Jesus Christ, for it is through him alone that men can be in fully harmonious relation to God and amongst themselves. The culminating expression of mankind’s acceptance of order is the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. This is so because the Mass, being the renewal of the one supremely acceptable act of submission of Calvary, is the official act of submission to God in three divine persons, on the part of the Mystical Body of Christ, in union with its head. Accordingly, God’s rights are respected in the world, in proportion as love of and submission to the order established by the Blessed Trinity are expressed by all at Mass and find concrete realization in the organization of society.

Therefore, the study of the philosophy (or theology) of history must comprise above all the examination of progress or regress in the world’s acceptance of order in union with Our Lord in the Sacrifice of the Mass. That the import of these laconic statements may be fully understood, we must dwell at some length in successive chapters in this opening part, on the meaning of the Mystical Body of Christ, of the Kingship of Christ in its essence and in its integrity, and of the significance of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. We shall treat in this first chapter of the Mystical Body of Christ and of the ordered development of our personality through our membership thereof.

god’s unchanging purpose

In human beings, three kinds of life are to be found—sense life, rational life, and supernatural life.[4] Sense life, which we have in common with the animals, is the life of our senses of sight, hearing, touch, etc., including also, of course, instinct, imagination, and sense-memory. Rational life is the life by which we dominate over and are superior to the brute creation. Both of these forms of life, being due to us by our nature, are merely natural. By sanctifying grace, however, we have a created participation in the divine nature, a share in the divine life as it has been lived from all eternity by the three persons of the Most Holy Trinity. As that divine life, infinitely superior to all natural life, is, of all, the most real, so the life of grace is, in the fullest and truest sense, our most real life. divine grace is life. It is not a mere inanimate ornament, like a luminous coating of paint, but it is life and energy at their highest and sublimest. Grace is destined to enable the human soul to enter into relation with the Blessed Trinity present in it, in the obscurity of faith here below in preparation for the fullness of vision hereafter in heaven. Out of love for us human beings, God was not content with giving us merely natural life, that is, the natural equipment of soul and body due to us as members of the human race, but gave us besides a share in his own inner life in three divine persons. Why did he do this? Because he wanted to come to dwell in our souls as our guest and be welcomed there with a love of the same “texture” or “quality”—the expressions are material and defective—as that of the Holy Ghost for the Father and Son. It was because the Blessed Trinity wanted to draw us into the family circle of God and enter into relations of personal friendship and love with us that the life of grace was bestowed upon us at the beginning. Without the life of grace, we could have known and loved God as our creator, but we could not have known and loved God in three divine persons. Without that life we could not have aspired to the intimacy of the divine family circle. In consequence, there is an infinite difference in our destiny.

These different grades of life, however, are not now harmoniously interrelated in our being as they were in our first parents. God poured supernatural life into the souls of our first parents, in order, as has been said, to draw not only them but all their descendants into the cycle of his inner life in three divine persons. Along with human nature, supernatural life was to be communicated to every child of Adam so that God could be the personal friend of each and every one and find in him a love of order of the same “quality” as in himself. And to ensure that this friendship could be easily cultivated, human nature was not left to be a group of disorderly tendencies and appetites, each aiming at its proper object, its own good, irrespective of the right relation to the other powers and to the whole being. No! by a special preternatural gift called the Gift of Integrity, harmony was assured. Accordingly, ordered collaboration of all the resources of the two natural forms of life, sense life and rational life, with the interior movement of union with the Blessed Trinity in the supernatural love of charity was intended to be the characteristic note of human existence. By the other preternatural gift of Immortality, our first parents and their descendants could have lived by faith in union with the Blessed Trinity present in them and have moved forward to the vision of the Blessed Trinity without passing by the sorrowful gateway of death.[5]

If the gift of supernatural life had meant the direct vision of God, there would not have been any meaning in God’s asking Adam if he wished to accept supernatural life and happiness in friendship with the Blessed Trinity, for himself and his descendants. In virtue of his intellectual nature Adam was a free being, incapable of being deprived of his freedom of choice by the presentation of any created good, but incapable too of turning away from the vision of God face to face. Hence supernatural life was adapted to his faculties, in order that in the obscure light of faith, he might give a free answer to God’s loving question. We know by revelation that the answer was in the negative. Our first parents elected not to depend on God for their happiness but on themselves. In spite of the clearness with which they grasped order and the ease with which they could have adhered to it, they rejected supernatural friendship with God and put themselves instead of God in the center of the world. They did this at the instigation of Satan who, along with the other fallen angels, had already made the same self-centered choice. The fallen angels’ decision was, however, irrevocable. It was a declaration by the whole body of them together, of perpetual war on and unceasing opposition to the Blessed Trinity and the supernatural life of race.[6] The fall of the human race could be undone, because human beings can change their minds and the human race comes into existence successively by propagation from the first Adam.[7] It was in fact undone, and order was restored to the world by the second Adam, Our Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Virgin Mary, our Immaculate Mother. God did not abandon his cherished purpose of coming to dwell in our souls as our guest. Adam’s refusal to enter into his designs brought about a change of plan for the realization of his aim, but that aim remained the same, and fallen man was raised to the dignity of a member of Christ. Nor was that all. By the manner in which he set about undoing the Fall, God showed also that it was not through cold indifference or lack of affection that he did not prevent the sin of our first parents. Not only did he not remain aloof from the fallen race, but he accepted all the consequences of the Fall for himself become Man, except the one incompatible with his divine nature—sin.[8] The supernatural life of grace now becomes ours, not at our generation or conception, as would have been the case if Adam had not sinned, but by reason of our being incorporated into Our Lord’s Mystical Body by the sacrament of Baptism.

To use the words of Pope Pius XI, Baptism sets up in everyone in whom there is not an obstinate attachment to mortal sin the circulation of the life-blood of grace.[9] We are all one with the first Adam, our natural head, and receive from him at our conception a fallen nature with its tendency to make of self the center of life. We are all intended by God to become one with Christ, our supernatural head, and to receive the life of grace with its tendency to center life on the Blessed Trinity, through being engrafted on Christ by Baptism. St. Paul dwells at some length on the contrast between our solidarity in the first Adam and our solidarity in the second Adam, in the Epistle to the Romans, 5:12–21: “Wherefore as by one man sin entered into this world, and by sin death; and so death passed upon all men, in whom all have sinned… But death reigned from Adam unto Moses, even over them also who have not sinned after the similitude of the transgression of Adam, who is a figure of him who was to come. But not as the offence, so also the gift. For if by the offense of one, many died; much more the grace of God, and the gift, by the grace of one man, Jesus Christ, hath abounded unto many. And not as it was by one sin, so also is the gift. For judgment indeed was by one unto condemnation; but grace is of many offences, unto justification. For if by one man’s oifence death reigned through one; much more they who receive abundance of grace, and of the gift, and of justice, shall reign in life through one, Jesus Christ. Therefore, as by the offence of one, unto all men to condemnation; so also by the justice of one unto all men to justification of life. For as by the disobedience of one man, many were made sinners; so also by the obedience of one, many shall be made just.… And where sin abounded, grace did more abound. That as sin hath reigned to death; so also grace might reign by justice unto life everlasting, through Jesus Christ Our Lord.”[10]

naturalism and our supernatural life

Accordingly, we all come into the world, generation after generation, deprived not only of the preternatural gifts of integrity and immortality, but also of the supernatural life of grace. The loss of the gift of integrity leads to the revolt of the passions against reason and against the divine life; the loss of the gift of immortality leads to suffering, disease and death. Owing to the loss of supernatural life and our consequent aversion from God, our intelligence is darkened, our will is weakened and our sense-life is inclined to revolt against order. It is true that our nature is not corrupted in itself as Luther and the Jansenists held. The primordial inclination of our nature is to God and that essential inclination remains. It is, however, weakened by original sin, so that the concrete psychological manifestations of our moral life, even after the divine life of grace has been restored to us in Baptism, are generally selfish with a disordered love of self. Our concrete judgments are liable to be erroneous, and we are exposed in our acts of will to make of self the center of life.[11] We are bound to grasp the order of life, accept it and express it yet we easily lose sight of the ideal of living the whole of life here below in union with the Blessed Trinity as members of Christ, in preparation for the intimacy of heaven. God’s desire, then, is to draw us all into union with himself in three divine persons, through our willing acceptance of the duty of living life in full subjection to our Lord as his members. But God’s wish is in continual danger of being thwarted by our tendency to turn against his impulses and make of self the center of life, in this way hampering the development of our personality. We have to struggle with the aid of divine grace to acknowledge God’s rights to the full and not place self on the same level as God or on a higher level. Even if there were no organized naturalistic or anti-supernatural forces at work in the world, striving to mold social institutions to active hostility to the supernatural life, there are anti-supernatural tendencies in ourselves that have to be combated by self-discipline and social organization. We may speak of those forces or tendencies that are in each of us, as unorganized anti-supernatural or naturalistic forces, in contrast with the organized forces, visible and invisible, that are working for naturalism.

What is meant by naturalism? We can best describe it by contrasting it with the supernatural ideal of the Catholic Church. This supernatural ideal affirms: firstly, that the life of grace, a share in the inner life of the Blessed Trinity, is infinitely higher than the natural life of human reason; secondly, that the loss of supernatural life on account of the first Adam’s fall has been repaired through membership of the Mystical Body of the second Adam, our Lord Jesus Christ, who in the existing order is the unique source of that life; and, thirdly, as a logical consequence, that it is only through cultivation of our membership of our Lord’s Mystical Body that we can be good and true men as we ought to be. Accordingly, minds imbued with the supernatural ideal will proclaim that the Catholic Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, is infinitely higher and nobler than any natural society, while insisting at the same time that ordered love of country and native land must be sedulously cultivated. They will aim, not as isolated individuals, but fully conscious of their royal dignity as members of a living organism, at permeating all social life, political and economic, with the spirit of membership of Christ.

Naturalism, on the other hand, is described as follows by Pope Leo XIII: “The fundamental doctrine of the naturalists, which they sufficiently make known by their very name, is that human nature and human reason ought in all things to be mistress and guide. Laying this down, they care little for duties to God, or pervert them by erroneous and vague opinions. For they deny that anything has been taught by God: they allow no dogma of religion or truth which cannot be understood by the human intelligence, nor any teacher who ought to be believed by reason of his authority.… It is the special and exclusive duty of the Catholic Church fully to set forth in words truths divinely received and, besides offering other divine helps to salvation, to teach the authority of her office, and to defend the same with perfect purity…”[12] “What naturalists or rationalists aim at in philosophy, that the supporters of liberalism, carrying out the principles laid down by naturalism, are attempting in the domain of morality and politics. The fundamental doctrine of rationalism is the supremacy of human reason, which, refusing due submission to the divine and eternal reason, proclaims its own independence, and constitutes itself the supreme principle and source and judge of truth. Hence these followers of liberalism deny the existence of any divine authority to which obedience is due, and proclaim that every man is a law unto himself; from which arises that ethical system which they style independent morality, and which, under the guise of liberty, exonerates man from any obedience to the commands of God, and substitutes a boundless licence.”[13]

Accordingly, naturalism affirms that our highest life is the life of reason, and consequently, denies that there has been any such things as a fall from, or loss of, supernatural life or, at least, that we can know of it. Naturalism also logically affirms that it is a matter of indifference whether one worships Our Lord Jesus Christ or denies that he instituted a supranational society to set forth the Divine Plan for Order in the world and to diffuse that divine life by which alone we can be really good men as we ought to be.

The relation between naturalism, rationalism and liberalism is excellently outlined by Pére Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P. (De Revelatione, Vol. I, p. 221). He writes: “Although the term naturalism is frequently used with the same signification as rationalism, it rather designates the foundation of rationalism. For naturalism is properly the negation of the possibility of the elevation of our nature to the supernatural order, and rationalism is the application of this doctrine to human reason as liberalism is its application to human liberty. Hence rationalism has its proximate foundation in naturalism, just as on the other hand, the virtue of faith is founded in grace. If naturalism signifies not merely the denial of the possibility of knowing the order of supernatural truth, but the denial of the very existence of that order, then it has its foundation in pantheism. In order that no truth should be above the powers of our rational nature, our nature must be identified with the divine nature.”

Men imbued with the naturalistic attitude will insist that the highest social organization is the individual state or the whole group of states tending to coalesce into the World-State. They will aim at eliminating every vestige of the supernatural life from social organization. For those who are aware of the importance for the world of respect for the rights of God and who understand the meaning of the Redemption, naturalism is the forerunner of decay and death.

We see, then, that there are in us from Baptism two currents of life, so to say. There is the current of natural life, coming to us from the first Adam, with its tendency to revolt and self-centeredness, and there is the current of supernatural life coming from our Lord Jesus Christ, the second Adam, which aims at the ordered subjection of our whole life to him in view of union with the Blessed Trinity. By our natural generation we form part of the progeny of the first Adam.[14] By our supernatural regeneration in the Sacrament of Baptism, we are engrafted on our Lord Jesus Christ and incorporated into his Mystical Body.[15] Because of our natural descent, our personal life and our social life, both political and economic, are exposed to disorder and confusion. Owing to the continuous streams of supernatural life coming from our Lord’s sacred humanity into our souls, more abundantly now than before the Fall, we are enabled to strive to bring about supernatural order in our life and to struggle against naturalism.

social organization and the

individual member of society

As man is by nature a social being, and as the average member of society is, to an almost incalculable extent, at the mercy of his surroundings, he must be sustained, in his efforts to cultivate his personality, by a social framework permeated by the supernatural outlook. That framework in itself, of course, is not enough, but the order of life demands that we should ever and always strive for its realization, to the best of our ability. Our duty to God and to our fellow men demands this, because society is destined for the development of human nature. It is intended by the creator to acknowledge his rights and to co-operate harmoniously in completing the formation of a member of Christ, begun in the family. As such, social organization in all its forms is meant to accept God’s plan for orderly human development and co-operate with him in aiding its individual members to grasp the order of the world and accept it, instead of causing disorder and confusion by opposing and thwarting him. As man needs the help of a social framework based on the acceptance of the Kingship of Christ, so society, in virtue of its creaturehood, is bound to build up that framework. Pope Leo XIII, in the Encyclical Letter, Immortale Dei, is very emphatic concerning this obligation incumbent on society. “Nature and reason,” he writes, “which command every individual devoutly to worship God in holiness, because we belong to him and must return to him, since from him we came, bind also the civil community by a like law. Men living together in society are under the power of God no less than individuals arc, and society, not less than individuals, owes gratitude to God, who gave it being and maintains it, and whose ever-bounteous goodness enriches it with countless blessings. Since, then, no one is allowed to be remiss in the service due to God, and since the chief duty of all men is to cling to religion in both its teaching and practice—not such religion as they may have a preference for, but the religion which God enjoins, and which certain and most clear marks show to be the one and only true religion—it is a public crime to act as though there were no God. So, too, it is a sin for the state not to have a care for religion, as something beyond its scope, or as of no practical benefit: or out of many forms of religion to adopt that one which chimes in with its fancy: for we are bound absolutely to worship God in that way which he has shown to be his will.…Hence civil society, established for the common welfare, should not only safeguard the well-being of the community, but have also at heart the interests of its individual members, in such wise as not in any way to hinder, but in every manner to render as easy as possible, the possession of that highest and unchangeable good for which all should seek.”

“The citizens of a state are obliged to render to God the things that are God’s and to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, but Caesar, too, that is, the state as an organized community, is bound to fulfil its duty to God. If it does not, it will fail in its duty to its citizens, for it will not aid them as it should to develop their personality. “When the state,” writes Pope Leo XIII, “refuses to give to God what belongs to God, by a necessary consequence, it refuses to give to its citizens that to which they, as men, have a right. For, whether one likes it or not, the true rights of man spring precisely from his duties towards God. Hence it follows that the state, by failing in this way to accomplish the principal object of its institution, finally becomes false to itself and denies that which is the reason of its own existence.”[16]

The results of the state’s opposition to God are disastrous. “When the organization of the world,” writes l’Abbé Journet, “is out of harmony with the supernatural end of man, scarcely anybody except the saints and martyrs can avoid mortal sin and abide in charity. But when the organization of the world is adjusted to the demands of the divine life of souls, then thousands of Christians can live and die in the love of God. They are strong enough to accomplish their duty in the company of others and to perform acts of heroic virtue at certain exceptional moments, but they would have been too weak to breast the frightful anti-supernatural current of a perverted naturalistic world. Charity, then, urges us to strive for the restoration of a Christian temporal order.”[17]

It is quite true that nations or societies do not go to heaven. Human beings go to heaven one by one, to live in the family circle of the Blessed Trinity. But the individual member of society lives under the never-ceasing influence of his environment, in which, if we may not say that he is submerged, he is at least, deeply plunged. Social organization is required to aid the disciplining of self against the unorganized tendencies of formalism and naturalism that are in all of us.[18] It is still more indispensable in order to combat the organized anti-supernatural forces that are imbued with opposition to our Lord’s program for the world. If Catholics content themselves with inculcating the private practice of religion and allow their social institutions to be molded by those organized naturalistic and anti-supernatural forces, then, little by little, the average member of society will succumb to the influence of his surroundings. He will gradually cease to live as a member of Christ, though he may retain the name of Christian.

In countries with a Catholic majority and an age-long Catholic tradition, Satan and his fellow-demons, who form the organized invisible anti-supernatural force, profit by the lack of vigilance on the part of Catholics in regard to social organization, and gradually sap belief in the supernatural life of grace and in the reality of the Fall. Thus it has oftentimes happened that the work of the visible forces, aiming at the installation of naturalism, has met with little resistance in countries nominally Catholic. On the one hand, then, Catholics faithful to what they profess at Mass, must ever strive to permeate the framework of society with the influence of the supernatural life, so that the ordinary man may be always aided to act as a member of Christ, and not find himself, from the moment he leaves Church, urged by anti-supernatural currents to revolt against Christ. On the other hand, Catholic social institutions are not sufficient of themselves to maintain society Catholic. The indispensable requisite is a formation of the youth of both sexes which will be penetrated through and through with the doctrine of membership of Christ. That, formation will alone ensure whole-time Catholicism and will enable them to draw from their union with our Lord in Mass and Holy Communion the supernatural love that is required to diffuse throughout society the sense of the indwelling of the Blessed Trinity, through incorporation into Christ, and to work unceasingly for the program set forth by Christ. It was the sense of their solidarity as co-offerers and co-victims with Christ in the Mass that nerved Catholics for the long struggle for the reform of the pagan world. “It was Christianity,” writes Pope Pius XI in the Encyclical Letter, Divini redemptoris, “that first affirmed the real and universal brotherhood of all men of whatever race and condition.…Not bloody revolution but the inner force of the Church’s teaching made the proud Roman matron see in her slave a sister in Christ.” For the return of the modern world to Christ, we must insist upon the same great truth of our oneness in Christ.

human personality and individuality

It would greatly contribute to clearness of thought in regard to the questions involved in the reorganization of society and the establishment of order in the world, if the Thomistic distinction between personality and individuality were fully grasped and consistently kept in view. The neglect of either of these aspects of the whole truth, but especially of the former, leads to experiments that are disastrous for human happiness.

This distinction runs through all St. Thomas’s exposition of the order of being. As matter is the principle of individuation, it is clear that the individual human being, as such, is a part. “Each particular person is compared to the whole community as a part to the whole.”[19] “Now, in natural things,” he writes elsewhere, “everything which, as such, naturally belongs to another, is principally and more strongly inclined to that other to which it belongs, than towards itself.…For we see that a part by a natural inclination risks itself for the preservation of the whole, as the hand without hesitation exposes itself to a blow to save the whole body. And because reason copies nature we find this action reproduced in virtuous social action. A good citizen will not hesitate to expose himself to the danger of death to save the state. And if the citizen were a native (or natural part) of the state in question, the inclination to make the sacrifice would be natural. Accordingly, because God is the universal good, and because angels and men and all creatures, looked at from the point of view of their being and existence, are of God and belong to God, it follows that angels and men by natural inclination love God more than themselves.”[20] On the other hand, for St. Thomas, “a man is not ordained to the political community of which he forms part, in regard to his whole being and to all that is his.…for all that a man is and all that he can accomplish and can possess must be ordained to God.”[21]  The organization of society is intended to aid man, considered formally as a person destined for God, to attain union with him.[22] As an independent whole, man emerges above the order of society, and the common temporal good is ordained to him.

The human being is therefore both an individual and a person. Individuality is based on matter and therefore belongs to man because of his animal nature. Human nature, like animal nature, but unlike angelic nature, can be found realised in innumerable individuals of the same species, and these individuals are necessarily in relation with one another. In other words, they are obliged to form social groups (societies). First in order comes the family, and then civil society, which has for object the development of life. On account of his material nature and the mode of propagation of that nature, through the interrelation of different members of the same species, man resembles the lower animals.[23] Because man is an individual of the human species, he is an individual in society, a component part of the whole formed by the family or by civil society. From this point of view, he is ordained to the welfare of the state or social group as to the good of the whole of which he forms a part; he is subordinated to the common good which, as such, is of a nobler order than the good of the individual. He is thus, as an individual, directly ordered to society and through society to God, for society, being God’s creature, is bound in the nature of things to acknowledge its due subordination to God.

On the other hand, this due acknowledgment of dependence on God, on the part of the social groups of which he forms a part, is required for the proper development of man’s personality. Personality belongs to man because of his having an immaterial soul. Alone among visible beings, man can grasp with his intelligence and love with his will God, the supreme good, and the order of the world subject to him. Thus, while all other visible beings move to their end, because they are impelled thereto by the current of the world in which they are immersed, man alone can rise above that current and enter into direct relation with God. He is not immersed in the movement of the universe and in this respect resembles the angels.[24] Every human being, as a person, is ordained directly to God, and as such, society exists for him. The political and economic arrangements of society are therefore meant to subserve the spiritual and eternal interests of the human person. Accordingly, as in the actual order of the world, the human person is destined to supernatural union with God, the Divine Plan for harmonious social development, through membership of our Lord’s Mystical Body, must be grasped and accepted. Man as an individual, is for society, but society is for the person. “The good of the community (the common good)…is superior to the good of the individual looked at from the point of view of the terrestrial values according to which the individual forms part of the community. But these terrestrial values themselves are inferior to the dignity of the person.…The person stands out above the level of the society of which the individual forms a part.”[25]

“Man has a spiritual and immortal soul. He is a person, marvellously endowed by his creator with gifts of body and mind. He is a true ‘microcosm’ as the ancients said, a world in miniature, with a value far surpassing that of the vast inanimate cosmos. God alone is his last end, in this life and the next. By sanctifying grace, he is raised to the dignity of a son of God, and incorporated into the Kingdom of God in the Mystical Body of Christ. In consequence he has been endowed by God with many and varied prerogatives: the right to life, to bodily integrity, to obtain the necessary means of existence; the right to tend toward his ultimate goal in the path marked out for him by God; the right of association and the right to possess and use property… So likewise are the constitution and fundamental prerogatives of the family fixed and determined by the creator. In the Encyclical on Christian Marriage[26] and in Our other Encyclical on education, cited above, We have treated these topics at considerable length.…But God has likewise destined man for civil society according to the dictates of his very nature. In the plan of the creator, society is a natural means which man can and must use to reach his destined end. Society is for man, not man for society. This must not be understood in the sense of liberalistic individualism, which subordinates society to the selfish use of the individual; but only in the sense that by means of an organic union with society and by mutual collaboration the attainment of earthly welfare is placed within the reach of all. Further, it is society which affords the opportunities for the development of all the individual and social gifts bestowed on human nature.…Man cannot be exempted from his divinely-imposed obligations toward civil society, and the representatives of authority have the right to coerce him when he refuses without reason to do his duty. Society, on the other hand, cannot defraud man of his God-granted rights, the most important of which We have indicated above, or make their use impossible. It is therefore according to the dictates of reason that all earthly things should be for the use and benefit of man, and so, through him, be referred to the creator. This accords with the words of the Apostle of the Gentiles, who writes to the Corinthians on Christian salvation: ‘All things are yours, and you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.[27] While Communism impoverishes human personality by inverting the terms of the relation of man to society, to what lofty heights is man not elevated by reason and Revelation!”[28]

A man will be fully and actually a person, enjoying that independence of existence and consequent independence of action which belongs to him, as such, in proportion as the life of reason and free-will dominates in him over that of the senses and passions.[29] Without that domination, he will remain a slave to passing events and circumstances, always carried away by every passing sense-impression and bereft of that self-mastery which should be his. In a word he will show that dependence on matter which comes from his individuality. By his individuality he is essentially dependent on a certain environment, a certain climate, a certain descent. To develop one’s individuality means to lead a selfish existence, to become a slave to one’s passions, striving to make oneself the center of everything, and in the end becoming dependent on a thousand and one ephemeral things which bring a miserable pleasure of a moment. Personality, on the other hand, grows, in proportion as the soul lifts itself above the world of sense and attaches itself more and more, by the intellect and will, to that which constitutes the life of a spiritual being, namely, knowledge and love of the supremely perfect being as he is in himself. God alone possesses personality in the full sense of the word, for he alone is fully independent, in his being and in his action. Only he who is being itself has an existence that is independent, not merely of matter, but also of everything that is not himself. Accordingly, our personality is developed in proportion as our life tends towards God and is assimilated to God’s life, that is, in the actual order, in proportion as we live in union with the Blessed Trinity present in us by grace through membership of Christ and strive to share in the life of intelligence and love of the three divine persons. Personality in the order of action is thus God-centeredness in opposition to self-centeredness. As all things tend towards God by their nature, personality in action implies a firm grasp of that ordered tendency and an intense love of the order thus grasped. This love will manifest itself by a capacity for self-sacrifice, that is, by the power of suppressing the inclination to make self the center of life and of respecting the tendency of all beings to God, the common good of the universe.[30] Every sin is a conscious disordered manifestation of self-centeredness. As the movement of every being is towards God, in accordance with the powers bestowed on it, the conscious voluntary direction given to his being by a sinner in a sinful act is in opposition to his nature. He goes against order and prefers a partial passing good to God, thus lowering the level of his personality.[31]

This is what the saints understood. They realised that by sanctifying grace they had been made partakers of the life of God as he is himself, and were thus enabled to lift themselves up to that life in which the fulness of personality is to be found grace, being a participation of the divine nature coming to them from Our Lord, head of the Mystical Body, enabled them, on their level and with their limitations, to substitute progressively in the order of action, that is, of knowledge and love, Our Lord’s interior and exterior attitude, for their human self-centered way of judging and willing. Our Lord enjoyed the vision of the Blessed Trinity face to face in his human soul and all his exterior actions were animated with the supernatural love of the triune God springing from that vision. So his life was perfectly ordered and completely centered on God. The saints likewise as members of Christ strove to live with God in three divine persons present in them in the obscurity of faith and animated all their dealings with their fellow members of Christ’s Mystical Body, actual and potential, with the same supernatural love of the Triune God. The saints strove to die to self in order that God might reign in them. They ever sought the will of God instead of their own will, to love God infinitely more than themselves and above all. They grasped thoroughly that self-centeredness is the great obstacle to the development of our most real life, the life of our head in us. On account of our self-centeredness, we either do not grasp the objective order, that is, the lines of action incumbent on us, or if we see them, we refuse to sacrifice ourselves in the way indicated. By the sacrifice of self, the saints acquired in a certain sense what God has by nature, namely, complete independence with regard to all created things. They sought their own good of course, but in perfect order, that is, as became members of the Mystical Body of Christ loving their own particular good in perfect subjection to God, the common good of the universe.

personality, individuality,

and the common good

To the paramount rights of God correspond duties on the part of man, and these duties to God are the foundation of the true rights of man.[32] Thus the duty of tending to God in the way he has laid down, namely, as a member of Christ, is the foundation of the true rights of man as a human person. Because all men are called to love and serve the Blessed Trinity as members of Christ, freedom to worship the Blessed Trinity, in the Catholic way God desires, and to develop their personality after the model of Christ; are indisputable human rights. Now a sufficiency of what the body requires, is normally indispensable, as a secondary and quasi-instrumental condition, for the cultivation of human personality. Society ought, therefore, to be organized with a view to secure the becoming minimum of personal rights for all and for each of its members. As the due functioning of society is thus an intermediary end in view of the attainment of the supreme end of human persons, which is the possession of God in three divine persons, all of us, as individuals, are bound to keep always in view the common good of the society, that is, we all, both rulers and ruled, are bound to practice Social Justice.[33] It is only through membership of Christ that we can consistently keep in view the common good of the society in all our actions, and work steadily for the reign of Social Justice. It is only through full acknowledgment of the rights of God as proclaimed by Christ and his Church that the rulers of states will be able to practice Social Justice and respect the personal rights of their subjects without essential deviations from order. Human personality will not be respected as it ought to be, unless the rights of God are fully upheld, and the great triumphs of mankind in the realm of physical science will be utilised to reduce men to the level of mere individuals.

Hence the rights of God are the foundation of the duties and, consequently, of the rights of the human person, and those rights are, in their turn, the foundation of the duties of the individual member of society. For, in order that society may be able to respect the personal rights of its members, the citizens must fulfil their duties with regard to society. All must respect the legitimate authority which is directly charged with safeguarding the common good, and obey the just laws made in view of that good. Since, in the nature of things, the common good is ordained for the development of the personality of the citizens, all, both rulers and ruled, are bound to work for it, in order to have the right to make use of it in their turn. The more we love God as it is our personal duty as members of Christ to do, the more fully we shall be urged by our charity to discharge all our individual duties to the common good. Then, we in our turn shall be aided by it in the development of our personality.

On account of our individual inequalities, however, we cannot all serve the common good in the same way nor with the same intensity. A child and an adult, a woman and a man, an ignorant man and a learned one, cannot render the same services to society. Neither have they the same claims upon it. Each member of society can demand respect for his fundamental rights as a human person which, as we have seen, it belongs to Social Justice to secure.[34] But, once these rights have been safeguarded, each member of society has a right to share in the common good in proportion to his or her social value, that is, in proportion to the services rendered to the common good. These services vary with individual capacities and services. The state must never forget, in the proportionate distribution of social favors that the family is the nucleus of society. Family life must be favored and strengthened by every possible means.[35]

Accordingly, since society exists for the development of personality, in and through Christ, society, on which man as an individual is so dependent, must be organized along the lines indicated by our Lord himself.[36] In this way alone will the individual members be as efficaciously aided as they should be in grasping the order of the world, accepting it and expressing it in life. Thus alone also will Social Justice be respected and we shall have a social organization capable of harmonizing the fundamental equality of human persons as members of Christ with the inevitable inequality of individual conditions, in which the members of the Mystical Body are destined to work out their salvation. Admitting the inevitable inequality of human conditions, liberalism denies, in practice, the essential equality of human persons and the fundamental rights of human personality, by the legalized oppression of the weak and the feeble. Admitting the specific or essential equality of human beings, the Socialists and Communists, in their insane attempts to do away with individual inequalities, also legalize the denial of human personality. Both liberalism and Communism reach this level of degradation, because, owing to imperfect philosophy, they confuse the true freedom of the human person with an impossible independence of the human individual.

What are the lines of social organization indicated by Christ when he founded the Kingdom of his Mystical Body? To answer this question we must begin by an explanation of the Kingship of Christ in its essence. This will be the subject matter of the next chapter, in which we shall treat also of the relation between the Kingship of Christ and his Priesthood. Then, in the following chapters, We shall see the meaning of the Kingship of Christ in its integrity and set forth the outlines of social organization in subjection to Christ the King.

Appendix

social justice—

the meaning of social justice

The Thomistic doctrine on the meaning of Social Justice has been exposed with his customary lucidity by R. P. Gillet, O.P., in a lecture given by him on the occasion of the Semaine Sociale de France at Toulouse in 1921.[37] St. Thomas, he says, uses the term Legal Justice to designate the virtue which has for special object the public interest or the common good, and which enables both rulers and ruled to subordinate their private interests to the common good as they should. Legal Justice, according to the Angelic Doctor, is a virtue perfecting and strengthening the will,[38] a moving or propelling virtue, of which the essential function is to direct to the common good the acts of all the virtues, or, as he says elsewhere, all the acts of the virtues.[39]

It is by the analysis of this virtue of Legal Justice that St. Thomas begins his treatise on Justice. He first asks the question whether Justice is a general virtue and replies as follows: “Justice has as end to regulate the relations between men. Now a man may be looked upon in relation to another in two ways, either individually or socially. By the latter term we mean that a man may be in relation with another man inasmuch as he serves a social group and through the group all those who belong to it. For it is evident that all those who live in society are related to it as the parts to the whole. Now, the part, as such, is something of the whole. Thus the good of every virtue, both of the virtues which perfect us personally and those which perfect us in our relation with others, should be directed to the common good to which Justice ordains us. It follows from this that the acts of all the virtues depend on Justice which directs man to the common good. Accordingly, Justice is a general virtue.”[40]

“Nevertheless, this general character of Legal Justice does not prevent it from being a special virtue. Just as Charity can be termed a general virtue because it directs to the divine goodness the acts of all the virtues, so likewise Legal Justice is a general virtue inasmuch as it ordains the acts of all the virtues to the common good. Since we know that in the supernatural order a virtuous act is meritorious only inasmuch as it is under the influence of Charity, so we can conclude that individual virtues would cease to be virtues, if they did not bear the impress of Legal Justice and receive its fruitful impulsion. The general function of Charity does not prevent it from being in its essence a special virtue, since it has for special object the divine goodness. We must say exactly the same thing about Legal Justice. It is in its essence a special virtue, for it has for special object the common good.”[41]

It is only after having thus set forth the general function and the special object of Legal Justice that St. Thomas puts himself the question whether, besides this virtue, there are not other virtues of justice having for object, not the common good or the good of the whole group, but the private good of the individuals composing the group. He answers this question in the affirmative and distinguishes two kinds of Particular Justice: Commutative Justice and Distributive Justice. Commutative Justice regulates the relations of justice between individuals. Distributive Justice regulates the distribution of the common good to the subjects, by the authority in the society, according to their social value and the rights which flow from it.[42] That the most important virtue of justice for St. Thomas is Legal Justice is abundantly clear from the fact that the two forms of Particular Justice, Commutative Justice and Distributive Justice, are subject to its direction like all the other moral virtues, as they too must be directed to the common good.[43]

Between the common good of a society and the particular good of its individual members, there is the same specific difference as between the whole and its parts. The common good does not differ from the particular good merely as regards quantity. It is not a sum-total arrived at by the addition of the particular goods of the members, but a whole of a special kind which surpasses this sum-total in moral value as the society itself surpasses the mere collection of its individual members.[44] Therefore we must say that Legal Justice, in spite of its general motive function, is a special virtue which has for object the common good towards which it directs the acts of all the virtues. The other moral virtues, in spite of the particular character of their object, are social virtues in so far as Legal Justice makes them serve the common good.[45]

legal or social justice

Why does St. Thomas use the expression Legal Justice rather than Social Justice? He himself gives the reason. It is called Legal Justice, he says, because it keeps a man in harmony with the law whose function is precisely that of directing the acts of all the virtues to the common good.[46] In order to understand the importance of this answer, we must go back to St. Thomas’s Treatise on Laws. We know that for him every law, whether eternal, natural or human, is an order in accordance with right reason made with a view to the common good. The binding force of human law springs from the fact that it aims at the common good and it loses its power to oblige in conscience if it does not do so. On the other hand, all human positive laws drawn up and promulgated in view of the common good oblige in conscience.[47]

Since St. Thomas, then, employs the expression, Legal Justice, for General Justice, because it is the function of law to regulate the actions of man in view of the common good, he could just as well have used the term Social Justice. Why is this so? Because, according to him, the common good is the proper object of society. It is precisely for this reason that he says that Legal Justice “is found primarily in the ruler as chief commander and secondarily in the subjects as agents of execution.”[48] The rulers are directly charged with safeguarding the common good of society; it belongs to them to make and promulgate the laws regulating the conduct of their subjects and aiming exclusively at the common good. Social Justice is, therefore, primarily the virtue of rulers of societies, but it is also the virtue of the subjects, that is, of all those who form part of a society and precisely because they form part of it. Though the law regulates the acts of all the virtues in view of the common good, it cannot regulate every act. It is not even desirable that it should attempt to do so. Continual state-intervention is not good, either from the moral or the economic aspect. By paralyzing individual initiative, legal constraint will prove hurtful to the common good instead of favorable. The subjects must become conscious of their obligations as members of society and must show themselves just towards all by directing all their virtuous acts to the common good, both those that are regulated by law and those that are not. In the latter case, it is their sense of equity which will enable them to act as they should.[49]

Considered from this point of view, Social Justice is seen to be a sovereign virtue exercising its control over the thoughts, the sentiments and the acts of the citizens and subjecting them to its general impulsion. Far from annihilating personality, it combats only individualism. It demands that the citizens should serve the society in order to have the right to make use of it. They must direct to the common good the utilization of all their material, intellectual and moral resources, in order that the common good may return to each of them and enable all without distinction to develop their personality as fully as possible, that is, to realize the fulness of their human ideal by resemblance to Christ. That is the end for which men live in society.

Of course, all the members of a group have not the same social value. Some are more moral, or more intelligent, or more active, or stronger than others, and this will be a sufficient motive for the social authority to distribute the common good in proportion to the social value of the different individuals. All, however, whatever may be their social value as citizens in the society of which they are members, have the same human value. All are men created to the image of God and called to be members of Christ, and all, if they observe Social Justice, will have the right to receive from the common good what is strictly necessary in order to live in a manner befitting human persons.

Two remarks must be added in conclusion. In the first place, we have seen above that the laws enacted by rulers animated by the virtue of Social Justice should not attempt to regulate all the acts of their subjects. They should demand what is necessary,[50] and should, in addition, favor the education of the citizens as members of Christ.[51] In this way, the subjects will be helped to tend to the perfection of human personality. In the second place, it is only through full acknowledgment of the rights of God, proclaimed by Christ and his Church, that rulers of states are enabled to practice Social Justice, and respect the personal rights of their subjects. Accordingly, we need not be astonished that increasing opposition on the part of states to the Divine Plan for Order is accompanied by widespread elimination of those rights of the person and the family mentioned in the lext quoted above from. Pope Pius XI’s Encyclical Letter, On Atheistic Communism.[52] In proportion as those rights are denied by the state, human beings are treated as mere individuals subject to the state.

[1]According to the definition of St. Thomas, quoted by Pope Pius XI in the Encyclical Letter, Quadragesimo Anno, “order is the unity arising from the apt arrangement of a plurality of objects” (Summa Contra Gent., Ill, 71). It may also be described as the harmonious arrangement of things in relation to their principle and amongst themselves, according to priority and posteriority of nature, origin, causality, etc.

[2]Ia P., a.1.c. An aspect of this thought had been already expressed by the Angelic Doctor when he said: “The perfection of the whole order of the world is what is best in creation” IaP., Q.15, a.2,c. Cf. Ia P., Q.65, a. 2.

[3]“According to the philosophers, the final perfection to which the human soul can attain is that it should understand the whole order of the universe and its causes. This, they hold, is man’s final end, which we (Christians or Theologians) know to be the vision of God in three divine persons” (St. Thomas, De Veritate, Q.2, a.2). The supernatural end is an elevation and perfection of the natural end.

[4]Supernatural life is meant to be in all, according to the Divine Plan, though, unfortunately, it may not be, because of sin. Vegetative life is left out of account in this study, for it is not subject to our free will.

[5]In his work, The Holy Ghost, pg. 152–154, Rev. E. Leen, C.S.Sp., points out the lowering of the ideal of life that comes from the doctrine of God’s presence in the soul by grace being connected in childhood with the image of God as a watchful, inexorable Judge, instead of a loving tender Father, longing to dwell always in our souls. “What a change could be, wrought if it were brought home to all children from the beginning that God is, indeed, watchful, but watchful rather for the purpose of doing us good than of finding us at fault! What a different idea would be had of God, if the child were taught from the beginning that God’s vigilance was a vigilance of love and not of disapproval—the vigilance of the loving father and not that of the suspicious warder! Too frequently it is the idea of God as the just and inflexible judge that is stressed in the instruction of the young. This is a defective presentment of Christianity.”

[6]Ia P., Q.64, a.2 and Ia P., Q 63, a.3.

[7]Ia P., Q.64, a.2.

[8]When speaking of a change of plan in God, we are using human imperfect language. There is no change in God. St. Thomas treats the point with his customary lucidity: “I answer that the will of God is entirely unchangeable. On this point we must consider that to change the will is one thing; to will that certain things should be changed is another. It is possible to will a thing to be done now and its contrary afterwards; and yet for the will to remain permanently the same: whereas the will would be changed if one should begin to will what before he had not willed; or cease to will what he had previously willed. This cannot happen, unless we presuppose change either in knowledge or in the disposition of the substance of the willer.…Now it has already been shown that both the substance of God and his knowledge are entirely unchangeable (Q.IX, a.l: XIV, a.15). Therefore, his will must be entirely unchangeable” (Ia P., Q.XIX, a.7).

“It was necessary, dearly beloved, that the unchanging God, whose will cannot lose its kindliness, should accomplish in more obscure and mysterious fashion what in his paternal affection he had first arranged, in order that mankind, urged on to sin by the cunning of the evil one, should not be lost.…” (Second Sermon of Pope St. Leo the Great on the Nativity. Fifth Lesson of Matins for the Feast of the Annunciation).

[9]“Now every Christian receives the supernatural life, which circulates in the veins of the Mystical Body of Christ, that abundant life which Christ, as he himself says, came to bestow upon the world. Consequently, every Christian ought to diffuse that life to others who either do not possess it or who have it only feebly or merely in appearance.” (Letter of Pope Pius XI to the Cardinal Patriarch of Lisbon, Nov. 10, 1933).

[10]In IIIa P., Q.3, a.8, St. Thomas says it was most fitting that the second person of the Blessed Trinity should become man, because the Word, like the concept or idea of the artist, is the exemplar cause of all that God has made. Just as the artist, by the intelligible form of his art, whereby he produced his masterpiece, restores it when it has fallen into ruin, so God restores the order of the world disturbed by sin. “God indeed was in Christ reconciling the world to himself” (II Cor., 5:19).

[11]Cf. L’Amour de Dieu et la Croix de Jesus, pp. 305–315, by Père Garrigou-Lagrange,. O.P.

[12]Encyclical Letter, Humanum genus, on Freemasonry.

[13]Encyclical Letter, Libertas, on Human Liberty.

[14]Cone. Trid., can.3; S.T. Ia IIae, Q.81, a.4. Cf. Denzinger, 101–102.

[15]“Above the brotherhood of humanity and fatherland,” said Pope Pius XI, in his Allocution to the Spanish Refugees, 14th Sept., 1936, “there is a brotherhood which is infinitely more sacred and more precious, the brotherhood which makes us one in Christ, our Redeemer, namely, our kinship in the Catholic Church, the Mystical Body of Christ.”

[16]Encyclical Letter, Au milieu des sollicitudes (1892).

[17]L’Ordre Social Chrétien, in Nova et Vetera (1931), p. 377.

[18]The tendency to formalism is the tendency to be content with the external accomplishment of the rites of religion without entering into the inner spirit of them.

[19]IIa IIae, Q.64, a.2.

[20]Ia P., Q.60, a.5. Cf. IIa IIae, Q.61, a.l; IIa IIae, Q.64, a.5; and IIa IIae, Q.65, a.l. St. Thomas says: “Where one being is the whole cause of the existence and goodness of another being, that being is naturally more loved by the other than itself, because, as we said above, each part naturally loves the whole more than itself: and each individual naturally loves the good of the species more than its own individual good. Now God is not only the good of the species, but is absolutely the universal good; hence everything in its own way naturally loves God more than itself” (Ia P., Q.60, a.5, ad 1).

[21]Ia IIae, Q.21, a.4, ad 3. Cf. Maritain, Three Reformers, pp. 193–196.

[22]We speak formally, when we consider not the subject of certain characteristics, but the characteristics themselves, or rather the subject looked at from that point of view.

[23]The social theory of Hobbes, the social contract of Rousseau, Socialism and Communism, in stressing the resemblance of human society to a beehive, dwell exclusively on the animal nature of man. Their materialist philosophy denies man’s personality.

[24]Liberalism, Romanticism, the philosophy of Locke, and the state of nature as described by Rousseauist-Masonic revolutionary oratory, with their stressing of the independence of the individual human unit, misinterpret this resemblance of man to the angels. Both the liberalistic writers and legislators, as well as the Socialists and Communists mentioned in a previous note, start from one and the same false principle of the autonomy of the individual, thus confusing the whole basis of social organization, namely, the distinction between man as a person and man as an individual. Cf, Culture Latina et Ordré Social, by R. P. Gillet, O.P., pp. 40–56.

[25]Du Régime Temporel et de la Liberté, by J. Maritain, p. 63, and Three Reformers (English edition) pp. 22, 194. Cf. IIa IIae, Q.64. a.2; Ia IIae, Q.21, a.4, ad 3.

[26]Encycl., Casti connubii, Dec. 31, 1930.

[27]I Cor., 3: 23.

[28]Encyclical Letter, Divini Redemptoris, On Atheistic Communism.

[29]“Persona est per se subsistens et per se operans.”

[30]The proximate principle of liberty thus displayed in the conquest of self is in the infinite vastness of the will, by which a man remains master of his practical decisions. The root principle of liberty is in the intelligence, which grasps the very idea of good and so can dominate the attraction of every object not completely exempt from imperfection. Faculties that grasp the order of being and the idea of good ultimately have their source in a being that is independent of matter. Cf. Ia P., Q. 18, art. 3, and Dieu, by Père Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., p. 624.

[31]Venial sin is a violation of order in regard to what leads to the end, in other words, a fault which does not make of self the end of life to the exclusion of God. By it, therefore, we do not withdraw ourselves completely from subjection to the guidance of Christ, our head. By mortal sin we reject completely the rule of Christ, for by it we make of self the end of life.

“Peccatum veniale est inordinatio exsistens circa ea quae sunt ad finem, servato debito ordine ad finem. Peccatum mortale est deordinatio circa finem ipsum.” Cf. Ia IIae, Q.89, a.3 et a.4.

[32]Man’s rights being founded on his duties to God, he has not a right to reject the Divine Plan for Order and go against God, either as an individual or as a member of society. Good faith excuses from formal sin but does not confer rights on error: these belong to truth alone. Man has not a right to do wrong. It is true that he has the right as a person not to be forced to accept what he does not as yet see that he ought to accept, but that is a very different thing. There can be no such thing as a right in opposition to God’s rights. A man may be excused from fulfilling his duty to God through inculpable ignorance, but a man has not a right to go against his duty to God.

[33]Social or Legal Justice is the virtue which enables us to subordinate to the common good the acts of all the virtues. “It is primarily in the prince or ruler as chief commander and secondarily in the subjects as agents of execution” (IIa IIae, Q.58, a.6). Cf. IIa IIae, Q.58, a.5, 6, 7; and Ia IIae, Q.60, a.3, ad 2. Cf. also Conscience Chrétienné et Justice Sociale, by R. P. Gillet, O. P., pp. 134–142.

“He who seeks the common good of the group to which he belongs, by that very fact seeks his own good also, and that for two reasons. Firstly, because the good of the individual cannot be complete unless the common good of the group, family, city and country, to which he belongs, be assured. Hence Maximus Valerius (Fact, et Diet. Mem., lib. 4, cap. 6) says of the ancient Romans that they preferred to be poor in a wealthy state rather than be wealthy in a poor one. Secondly, since a man forms a constituent part of a family and a state, if he acts prudently with regard to the common good, he will necessarily learn to seek his own good rightly, so that it may be advantageous to the common good. For the parts must be arranged so as to suit the whole. As St. Augustine expresses it in the third chapter of the Confessions: ‘It is unbecoming for a part not to fit harmoniously into the whole’” (IIa IIae, Q. 47. a. 10).

With regard to the subordination of the common good to the end of the human person, see Maritain, Du Régime Temporel et de la Liberté, pp. 60, 61, and l’Abbé Journet, L’Union des Églises, p. 266.

[34]Pope Pius XI insists upon the necessity of Social Justice in the Encyclical on Atheistic Communism. He stresses the fact that the citizens must fulfil their duties to the society, in order that the society may be able to provide for the personal rights of its individual members, but lays greater emphasis upon the primary obligation of the rulers to practice Social Justice. “Besides commutative justice,” he writes, “there is also social justice with its own set obligations, from which neither employers nor working men can escape. Now it is of the very essence of social justice to demand from each individual all that is necessary for the common good. But just as in the living organism it is impossible to provide for the good of the whole unless each single part and each individual member is given what it needs for the exercise of its proper functions, so it is impossible to care for the social organism and the good of society as a whole unless each part and each individual member—that is to say, each individual man in the dignity of his human personality—is supplied with all that is necessary for the exercise of his social functions. If social justice be satisfied, the result will be an intense activity in economic life as a whole, pursued in tranquillity and order.” Cf. Appendix on Social Justice.

[35]Cf. Culture Latine et Ordre Social, by R. P. Gillet, O.P., pp. 40–56.

[36]“The true good is the common good regulated according to divine justice” (Ia IIae, Q.92, a.l).

[37]The lecture deals with the whole question of social responsibility in regard to investments. Only the part treating of Social Justice is here summarised.

[38]IIa IIae, Q.58, a.4.

[39]IIa IIae, Q. 58, a,5, a.7, Ia IIae, Q. 60, a.3, ad 2.

[40]IIa IIae, Q.58, a.4, a.5, a.6, a.7, Ia IIae, Q. 60, a.3, ad 2.

[41]IIa IIae, Q.58, a.6.

[42]IIa IIae, Q.58, a.7.

[43]IIa IIae, Q.58, a.7, ad 1.

[44]IIa IIae, Q.58. a.7, ad 2

[45]IIa IIae, Q.58, a.6 (conclusion of the article).

[46]IIa IIae, Q.58, a.5 (conclusion of the article).

[47]IIa IIae, Q.96, a.4.

[48]IIa IIae, Q.58, a.6.

[49]In this connection we must remember that for St. Thomas “it was a most certain doctrine that the love of God must always be on the increase: ‘This is evident from the very form of the commandment, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God vdth thy whole heart: the whoIe is the same as the perfect… The end of the commandment is charity, as the Apostle says (I Tim., 1:5) and the end is not subject to a measure, but only such things as are subject to the end ‘ (IIa IIae, Q.184, a.3). And that is why the perfection of charity falls under a commandment and why everyone, according to his state of life, is strictly bound to strive after the perfection of charity” (Pope Pius XI, Encyclical Letter, On St. Thomas as Guide of Studies, 1923). With the increase of charity will go the increase of the moral virtues, including Social Justice.

[50]“It is of the essence of social justice to demand from each individual all that is necessary for the common good” (Pope Pius XI, Encyclical Letter. On, Atheistic Communism).

[51]“Civil society, established for the common welfare, should not only safeguard the well-being of the community, but also have at heart the interests of its individual members, in such wise as not in any way to hinder, but in every way to render as easy as possible the possession of that highest and unchangeable good for which all should seek” (Pope Leo XIII, Encyclical, On the Christian Constitution of States).

[52]Cf. p. 15.

Chapter II

The Kingship of Christ in its Essence

the priesthood and the

kingship of christ[1]

Our supernatural life of grace comes to us from our Lord Jesus Christ, head of his Mystical Body, the Catholic Church, while we continue to receive our disordered natural life from the first Adam. Our Lord is our supernatural head. For not only did the Son of God, when he came into this world, take to himself a human body, which with his human soul constitutes his sacred humanity; but he is, moreover, assuming another body, a many-membered one, of which we all become members by the character of Baptism. Our Lord is ever seeking to draw all human beings into the unity of that Body, so that they too may stand for his program and face life in the ordered way he himself faced life when on earth.

Our Lord has a twofold claim to the acceptance of his program head, and this constitutes an important difference between him and earthly leaders. He is head of the human race by a twofold title. First of all, he is head in virtue of the hypostatic union, that is, in virtue of the substantial union of the human nature with the divine nature in the second person of the Blessed Trinity. Then again, because of the rejection of his program by his own nation, he laid down his life, so that he has not only a natural right to the ordered submission of the human race but also a dearly acquired right. This is what Pope Pius XI insists upon so strongly, in the Encyclical, On The Kingship of Christ. “Christ’s Kingship,” he writes, “is founded on the ineffable hypostatic union. Hence it follows that Christ is to be adored by angels and men, not only as God, but that angels and men must obey and be subject to his sovereignty as man. Thus by virtue of the hypostatic union, Christ has power over all creatures. But what reflection can give us more pleasure and joy than the reflection that Christ is our King, not only by natural but by acquired right, by virtue of his Redemption?…We are no longer our own property, since Christ has purchased us with a great price (1Cor. 6:20): our very bodies are the members of Christ (1Cor. 6:15).[2]

It is a doctrine constantly insisted upon by St. Thomas that the imperfect is for the perfect, and that inferior beings in the service of superior beings achieve in them and by them their return to God, the final end of all things. By reason of this order and hierarchy of being, it can be seen that it belongs to the more perfect to rule and govern the less perfect. And if Christ, by the hypostatic union, is at the summit of creation, it is his right to rule it and to conduct all creatures to their end. Such is the reasoning of the Angelic Doctor. “For if, as St. Augustine says in III De Trinitate, the inferior and less perfect beings in any order are ruled by God through the intermediary of the higher and more perfect, then we must affirm that all creatures are ruled and governed by the soul of Christ which is at the summit of creation.”[3]

Now St. Thomas distinguishes a twofold function of the grace of headship, analogous to the double role exercised by the head, with regard to the members of the body. “The head” he writes, “has a twofold influence upon the members: an interior influence, because the head transmits to the other members the power of moving and feeling; and an exterior influence of government, because by the sense of sight and the other senses which reside in it, the head directs a man in his exterior action.”[4] The interior influence exercised by Christ is that of his priesthood, by which the supernatural life of grace is communicated to souls. Grace comes from God alone as principal cause, from the sacred humanity as instrumental cause united to the divinity, through the sacraments as instrumental causes separated from the Divinity. The exterior influence exercised by Christ is that of his spiritual Kingship, by his government and direction of his subjects. Here we have the broad outlines of the distinction between the two functions of our supernatural head.

It is not always easy, however, when treating of Our Lord’s acts, to separate those which are referred to one or other of these two prerogatives of his Priesthood and his Kingship. The task is all the less easy, because, at times, an act may be referred to both. For example, in regard to the grace which he bestows on man, Christ does not merely act as an intermediary but he also brings his governing and directing power into play. To merit grace, to produce it as an instrument, are essentially works belonging to Christ’s Priesthood, because their immediate effect is to unite man to God and because God always remains the principal author of this union. To arrange the order to be observed in this sanctification of souls, to accomplish God’s designs in the work of the Redemption, thus organizing the plan of salvation, all this supposes a hierarchical power altogether different from the sacerdotal power, but not exclusive of it. While it belongs, then, to Christ as Priest to merit grace, to Christ as King it pertains to establish a just proportion in the distribution of grace to the faithful so that “the whole body being compacted and fitly joined together, by what every joint supplieth,”[5] may continue to grow and develop in loving union with God in charity.

As a consequence of the doctrine outlined in the previous paragraph, there is an important difference between Christ as King and earthly rulers. The difference in question is intimately connected with the fact of his also being High Priest of redeemed humanity. In the ordinary course of events, it pertains to the King, on account of the powers vested in him, to conduct his subjects as a body to their social end in a visible manner: but it is not the king who is called upon to bestow on them the vital force or the physical capacity required for the attainment of the end. These he takes for granted. The role of the earthly king is to rule, not to transmit life to his subjects. Now the mission of Christ our Redeemer not only establishes him as Guide in the development of the supernatural life, but also as the source of that life.…He is destined to communicate men as a universal cause, the grace with which his sacred humanity is filled to overflowing. This does not mean that the grace of Christ is the principal physical and efficient cause of that of other men. It does mean that the sacred humanity is not only an inexhaustible source of merit and satisfaction for the world, but also a perfect instrument in the hands of the Word for the transmission of the divine life.

This sanctifying role belongs to Christ as Priest. The priest is called upon to be an intermediary between God and men. He presents the supplications of men to God and offers up their sacrifices, while in return he communicates to men God’s gifts and benefits. When Christ merits for us and satisfies for us by the oblation of his sufferings and death, he acts as Priest and not as King. When he communicates through his humanity, the instrument of the Word, the graces of pardon and regeneration and when he teaches the truth which transforms souls, again he acts as Priest and not as King. But he is not priest in the ordinary way. He need not “offer sacrifice first for his own sins, and then for the people’s.”[6] Our Lord has not to expiate for himself nor beg for the divine mercy. Again, his humanity is not an inert and passive instrument of the Word in the work of our sanctification. It is fully conscious of its role. It remains free, even when, in full accord with the divine will, It places itself under the omnipotent influence of that will to produce grace for us. Our Lord as man possesses perfect knowledge of the mysteries of predestination, and thus, it is with a full understanding of the eternal designs of God on the world that he freely concurs in the work of Redemption. As we have already seen, in the bestowal of grace, our Lord’s Kingship functions along with his priesthood. In organizing the plan of salvation for men, in drawing them to himself and in grouping the faithful around him in his Mystical Body, our Lord acts not merely as Priest and Mediator but as King. There are, however, certain acts which belong exclusively to Christ in his role as King. These we shall now set forth.

the kingship of christ

To Christ the King it belongs to set before the faithful the common end for which they should strive, and to point out to them the means to attain it. It may be objected that such teaching pertains also to his Priesthood. We can reply, however, that in this connection it is not question of promoting the development of the interior life but of guiding the exterior and visible movement of the whole Mystical Body towards its final goal. The teaching we speak of is delivered by an authority which commands and legislates. It is not simply a moral exhortation disposing souls to come under the influence of grace. This part of the role of Christ’s Kingship consists, then, in the proclamation of the order which God’s love wishes to see observed in the world.

It is also for Christ the King to determine the proper sanctions for the precepts he imposes and to reward and punish his subjects according to their desserts. He it is who must reward fidelity in the observance of the order instituted by God’s love and punish obstinate revolt against that order and resistance to his rule.

Finally, it is for Christ the King to conquer his Kingdom and defend his faithful subjects against the visible enemies who join forces with the invisible enemy, Satan. It happens at times in the natural order that, as a result of the bad will of his subjects or the opposition of his enemies, the King is obliged, if he wishes to exercise fully his prerogatives as head, to bring his subjects into complete subjection first of all, before he sets out to conquer his enemies. The King of souls too is often obliged to win souls by drawing them from sin. Once they are his, he must guard them against the snares which the world and the devil never cease to set for them, and he must preserve them also from their own passions.

As King, too, our Lord is continually offering graces of light and strength to all, even to his direst enemies, to get them to come into his camp and co-operate with him in establishing a social order that will sustain the weak and safeguard the strong in their efforts to reproduce in themselves on their level his life of Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Calvary. He aims not merely at the conquest of individual members of society but at the conquest of society itself, so that the individual members may be aided in the development of their personality. The same principle holds when, through the action of his ambassadors in pagan lands, namely, his missionaries, he proceeds to bring new realms under his sway. He wants not merely to convert individuals, but to organize society in accordance with the Divine Plan, so that the conquest may be lasting. Of course, in this work he expects the collaboration of his lieutenants, the Christian temporal rulers, in the territory under their sway. As God wants all men to be saved through the one Mediator, Jesus Christ, he wants co-operation and union between all those who share in Our Lord’s Priesthood and his Kingship down the ages. “For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God, our Savior, who will have all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God, and one mediator of God and man, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself a redemption for all.”[7] They are all meant, each in his own place, to live as members of Christ.

in our lord’s kingdom our

blessed mother is queen and

mediatrix of all graces

Our Blessed Mother is Queen of our Lord’s Kingdom. “God has constituted Her Queen of Heaven and Earth,” said Pope Pius IX in the Bull, Ineffabilis Deus, in which he defined the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. In the Encyclical, Ad diem ilium laetissimum (2nd Feb., 1904), on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the definition of that same sublime truth, Pope Pius X taught that Mary is always and everywhere the associate of Her divine Son in the work of our salvation: “Assuredly the dispensing of these treasures (amassed by our Lord Jesus Christ for us by his Death) belongs to nobody but Christ from the point of view of right, for they were purchased by his Death alone, and He, of natural right, is Mediator between God and man. Yet, because of the union of anguish and sorrow between Mother and Son this august Virgin has become for the whole world the most powerful Mediatrix and Advocate with her only Son. The fountain, therefore, is Christ and of his fulness we have all received.…But Mary, as St. Bernard truly observes, is the Aqueduct; or, she is, one may say, the mystic neck, which connects the head with the Body and conveys to all the members of the Body the energizing influence of the head. For, as St. Bernardine of Sienna says, “She is the neck of our head by which he communicates to his Mystical Body all spiritual gifts.”

Let us now see who are the representatives and lieutenants of Christ in the task of aiding human beings to love order and thus mirror forth the life of God on their level. We shall begin by representing the Divine Plan for Order in diagrammatic form as follows:

the church’s participation in the priesthood and in the spiritual

kingship of christ

As we have seen, the interior influence by which the supernatural life is communicated to souls comes from God alone as principal cause, from the sacred humanity of Christ as instrumental cause united to the divinity, and from the sacraments and their dispensers as instrumental causes separated from the divinity. The Pope, bishops and priests are destined to organize the worship of Christ’s Mystical Body and to administer the sacraments by their participation in the Priesthood of Christ through the sacramental character of Order. The faithful are prepared to take part in the worship instituted by Christ and to receive the sacraments by the participation of Christ’s priesthood bestowed on them by the sacramental character of Baptism. By the sacramental character of Confirmation, the baptized faithful are prepared to make public confession of their faith and also to defend Christian worship. This sacrament is the one which equips Christians for the work of Catholic Action under the Church’s Hierarchy. “By Baptism,” writes St. Thomas, “a man in his individual capacity receives the power to accomplish what concerns his own salvation, but, in Confirmation, be receives the power to do all that concerns the defense of religion against the enemies of the faith.”[8]

His Priesthood is shared in by the Pope, Bishops, and Priests, through the sacramental character of Orders, and by the faithful, through the characters of Baptism and Confirmation.

The Spiritual Kingship of Christ is shared in by the Pope and the Bishops.

Our Lord Jesus Christ Who, as Head of His Mystical Body, the Catholic Church, Supernatural and Supranational,

is High Priest and King of redeemed humanity.

GOD

(in Three Divine Persons)

His Kingship is both Spiritual and Temporal. The Spiritual Kingship comprises the right of Intervention in Temporal Affairs. The Temporal Royalty of Our Lord is Universal. Our Blessed Mother is Queen of His Kingdom.

The Universal Temporal Kingship of Our Lord is shared in by the Rulers of States and Nations.

Politics

Economics

To undo the Fall in regard to individual men and so restore order under the new head, God wants to draw all men into union with our Lord in the renewal of the expression of submission of Calvary in Holy Mass. He wishes that worship to be animated with the supernatural love of charity springing from the life of grace, which is a participation of the inner life of the Blessed Trinity. Holy Mass is meant to be the worship of the Father by members of Christ renewing on their level his filial attitude.

All the sacraments confer the divine life of grace, by which we share, in and through membership of Christ, in the inner life of God in three divine persons, three of them, namely, Baptism, Confimation and Order, confer, in addition, special characters, which are participations in the Priesthood of Christ. Through the power which the characters confer, men, in and through Christ, can offer fitting worship to the Blessed Trinity. “The sacraments of the New Law serve a double purpose. They act, first of all, as a remedy for sin, and secondly, they equip the soul in regard to what concerns the worship of God, according to the rite instituted by Christ. When anyone is appointed to a certain charge, he is usually distinguished from others by some rank or sign indicative of his function.”[9]

On the one hand, therefore, when the Church, through her priesthood and the sacraments, communicates grace to us, she is only the instrument used by Christ to vivify our souls. But when, on the other hand, the Church governs in the name of Christ, she is truly a proper and principal, though subordinate, cause of her government and direction of souls. Hence, as Spouse of Christ and true regent of souls on earth, she has the right to demand that we should recognize her authority, obey her laws and accept her guidance. As the Church has not received purely temporal royalty from her divine founder, we are treating here of spiritual Kingship only. As the mission of the Catholic Church, supernatural and supranational, is the spiritual one of the outpouring of the divine life, so the Kingship in which the Pope and bishops, as representatives of Christ, have part, is purely spiritual. The Pope and bishops alone share in the spiritual royalty of our Lord: they alone are the rulers of the Church. Priests and the ordinary faithful do not share in our Lord’s spiritual royalty, though they do share in his Priesthood by the characters of Order and Baptism, as we have just explained. To the Pope and the bishops it belongs to continue the mission of Christ the King down the ages by holding up before the world the supernatural ideal of life to be lived by all men and laying down the laws and precepts to be observed in order that that life may not be lost. To them it belongs to regulate the distribution of all the means confided to the Church by our Lord for the development of the life of grace, to establish fitting sanctions for all offences that jeopardize the interests of that life, and, finally, to carry or the struggle against the powers of evil, by every form of apostolate, following the example of Christ.

In a word, to the Pope and the bishops it belongs to proclaim the order that God wants all men to accept lovingly and to safeguard that order. Now, in order to safeguard it, the spiritual Kingship of Christ must comprise the power of intervention in temporal affairs in view of efficaciously opposing everything that could hinder the progress of the supernatural life and of obtaining from the rulers in the civil order the co-operation necessary therefore. This right of the rulers in the supernatural order to intervene in the strictly natural sphere is measured by the demands of the divine life of souls. It is for the Church alone to judge what is necessary in the matter of social organization in order to safeguard the life of grace. This is called the indirect power of the Church in temporal affairs. On account of its importance, we shall enter into some details concerning this power in a later section.

the kingship of christ

and temporal rulers

Though our Lord’s Kingship is primarily spiritual, and as such, specially concerned with the diffusion and safeguarding of the supernatural life of men, yet he is also King of the universe. His temporal royalty is universal, not particular, that is, not restricted to any one race or nation. Pope Leo XIII and Pope Pius XI insist both on the reality of Christ’s temporal sovereignty and on its universality. In the Encyclical Letter, On The Kingship of Christ, we read: “That Christ’s kingdom is in a special manner spiritual and concerned with things spiritual, is quite plain from the extracts from Scripture above quoted: and Christ’s own line of action confirms this view. For on many occasions when the Jews, and even the Apostles themselves, wrongly supposed that the Messiah would emancipate the people and restore the kingdom of Israel, he effectively rejected that idle hope and fancy. When the admiring throng surrounded him and would have proclaimed him king, he refused that title and honor by taking flight and lying in concealment. In presence of the Roman governor, he declared his kingdom was not of this world.…He, however, would be guilty of shameful error who would deny to Christ as man authority over civil affairs, no matter what their nature, since by virtue of the absolute dominion over all creatures he holds from the Father, all things are in his power.

“Nevertheless, during his life on earth he refrained altogether from exercising such dominion, and despising the possession and administration of earthly goods. He left them to their possessors then, and he does so today. It is well said: Non eripit mortalia qui regna dat caelestia—He does not seize earthly kingdoms Who gives heavenly kingdoms.[10] And so, the empire of our Redeemer embraces all men. To quote the words of Our immortal predecessor, Pope Leo XIII: ‘His Empire manifestly includes not only Catholic nations, not only those who were baptized and belong to the Church by right, though error of doctrine leads them astray or schism severs them from her fold: but it includes also all those who are outside the Christian faith, so that truly the human race in its entirety is subject to the power of Jesus Christ.’[11]

“Nor in this connection, is there any difference between individuals and communities, whether family or state, for collectivities are just as much under the dominion of Christ as individuals. The same Christ assuredly is the source of the individual’s salvation and of the community’s salvation: ‘Neither is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given to men whereby we must be saved.’[12]… If rulers, therefore, of nations wish to preserve their own authority and to promote and increase their country’s prosperity, let them not refuse, themselves and their people, to give public observance of reverence and obedience to the rule, of Christ.… If men recognized, both in public and private life, Christ’s royal power, wonderful blessings would immediately be vouchsafed to all society, such as, true liberty, discipline, tranquillity, concord and peace. For Our Lord’s royal dignity, just as it invests the human authority of princes and rulers with a religious significance, ennobles the citizen’s duty of obedience.… If princes and magistrates duly elected be convinced that they rule not by their own right, but by the mandate and in the place of the divine King, assuredly they will exercise their authority holily and wisely, and, in making laws and administering them, they will take into consideration the common good, and also the human dignity of their subjects. The result will be order and stable tranquillity, for there will be no cause of discontent remaining. Men may see in their king or in other rulers of the state, beings like themselves, unworthy perhaps and open to blame, but they will not for that reason deny their right to command if they see reflected in these rulers the authority of Christ, God and man.”[13]

All authority is from God, “for there is no power but from God.… he that resisteth the power, resisteth the order willed by God.”[14] Christ “holds absolute dominion over all creatures from the Father,” therefore all authority on earth is a participation of Christ’s authority. Of course, it is in itself and in its essential nature that authority comes from God. The mode of accession to power may be either legitimate or illegitimate; in the former case, it comes from God, in the second, from the perverted ambition of human beings. Finally, the exercise of power may be in conformity with or contrary to God’s laws.[15] When a government has been declared legitimate by the Church, that does not mean that the Church guarantees that all the actions of such a government are in accordance with the moral law. Just as a father who is lawful head of a household may act wrongly, so also a legitimate government may act wrongly towards its subjects.

Our Lord, then, as the sovereign ruler and supreme judge of all kings and rulers, has the right to rule them as a body, to dictate his laws to them, to reward or punish them for the good or bad use of their power. To the rulers of the earth it belongs to legislate in civil affairs, to determine sanctions for their laws and to judge their subjects guilty of transgressions of these laws. Our Lord reserves to himself the right of pronouncing the final judgment on the Last Day on the purely civil administration of all earthly rulers as well as on their attitude to the supernatural life. All temporal rulers will have to render an account of their subjects in matters purely political. All will, in addition, be judged on the manner in which they behaved towards the Divine Plan for Order, in proportion to their knowledge of it.

The objective order of the existing world demands that the temporal prosperity of society should be sought in such a way as to favor the development of the true personality of the members by the advance of their supernatural life and love. Temporal rulers must seek the natural common good of the states subject to them in a manner calculated to aid their subjects in the development of supernatural charity as members of Christ, so that they (the subjects) may advance steadily in love of God in three divine persons, and attain the goal of eternal life. “Civil society,” writes Pope Leo XIII, “established for the common welfare, should not only safeguard the well-being of the community, but have also at heart the interests of its individual members, in such wise as not in any way to hinder, but in every way to render as easy as possible the possession of that highest and unchangeable good for which all should seek.[16]

Our Lord Jesus Christ, the source of supernatural life of which the effect is resemblance to himself, will judge, not only the subjects of rulers, but rulers themselves, on their attitude towards him. “The very celebration of the Feast (of the Kingship of Christ),” writes Pope Pius XI, “by its annual recurrence, will serve to remind nations that not only private individuals but state officials and rulers are bound by the obligation of worshipping Christ publicly, and rendering him obedience. They will be thus led to reflect on that last judgment, in which Christ, who has been cast out of public life, despised, neglected, and ignored, will severely revenge such insults: for his kingly dignity demands that the constitution of the whole state should conform to the divine commandments and Christian principles, whether in the making of laws, the administration of justice, or in the molding of the minds of the young on sound doctrine and upright morals.”[17] “Christ Our Lord must be reinstated as the ruler of human society. It belongs to him, as do all its members.[18]

St. Thomas teaches that “kings are anointed at their coronation to acknowledge the fact that they receive from Christ the gift of their powers and that they are meant to reign under Christ over a Christian people.”[19]

christ’s spiritual kingship and

that of the church

A few words about the extent of the influence of Christ’s royalty compared with that of the Church will be opportune here. Since the sacred humanity of Christ is immediately united to the Word, his royalty as well as his priesthood receive thereby a fulness, a universality and a perfection which can be participated in by the Church only in a limited way. Temporal affairs as such, matters purely political, are under our Lord’s jurisdiction but do not fall under the jurisdiction of the Church, which is concerned exclusively with the divine life of souls. Christ is the sovereign Lord of all rulers, Christian and non-Christian, and judges all their actions. It is only in so far as the political and economic programs of Catholic rulers concern the divine life and the eternal salvation of souls that the Church, that is, the Pope and the bishops, has the right to pronounce on them. The Church gives judgment on matters that are purely spiritual, like the administration of the sacraments, or partially spiritual (mixed matters, such as the programs of schools and the effects of marriage), or on matters which though temporal by nature yet are accidentally spiritual, on account of the spiritual interests involved.

St. Thomas points out that Christ rules the men of all places, times and states, while the rulers of the Church either govern only in certain places for a limited time, like the bishops, or without limit as to place, but only for a limited time, as is the case with the Pope, the rule of both the Pope and the bishops being restricted to human beings here below.[20] In addition Christ commands by his own authority, for all things are subject to him. The rulers of the Church have only the authority communicated to them by Christ. It follows from what we have said, that the influence which Christ exercises on the world, by his Kingship as well as by his Priesthood, surpasses in extent and compass, even here below, the influence of the visible Church. All men, continues St. Thomas[21] belong to Christ, even though they be heretics or pagans, and on them Christ can act in an invisible manner, by providing them with the help they need for conversion, even by raising them to the divine life, if their inculpable ignorance keeps them outside the one true Church.

In these days of mental confusion, the oneness of the Divine Plan according to which the Catholic Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, is the ark of salvation for all, cannot be over-emphasized. Pope Pius IX urged the bishops of the whole world to do all in their power “to keep men’s minds free from the impious and fatally destructive opinion that the way of eternal salvation can be found in any religion whatever.’”[22] The complementary truth that there are souls in good faith outside the Catholic Church must, however, be stressed along with it. In the same allocution, the Pope declared; “It is of faith that no one can be saved outside the Apostolic Roman Church, that this Church is the one ark of salvation, and that he who does not enter therein will be overwhelmed by the deluge. Nevertheless, it must, also be held as certain that those who are invincibly ignorant of the true religion incur no guilt on that account in God’s sight. Now who will dare to claim that he can indicate the limits of invincible ignorance, in view of the nature and variety of peoples, countries, characters and so many other factors.”

In the Outline of the Dogmatic Constitution of the Church circulated amongst the Fathers of the Vatican Council, we read:…We reprove and declare detestable the doctrine, which is both impious and contrary to right reason, of one religion being as good as another. By this doctrine the children of this world, suppressing the distinction of truth and error, either proclaim that the gateway to eternal life is wide open to all, no matter to what religion they belong, or declare that with regard to the truth of a religion we can only have more or less probable opinions, not certitude.[23]

The Church always remains the visible center from which the divine life, which is found in its fulness in Christ, is diffused by him throughout the world. That divine life of sanctifying grace, coming from Christ, is ever drawing those outside the Church to enter her visible fold. By divine right, the Church is universal, and she is ever striving to have her influence here below co-extensive with that of her divine head and founder. Human beings are subject to the Priesthood and Kingship of Christ while yet outside the Church, but in order to reap the full benefit for their souls of this subjection to Our Lord, they must be fully incorporated into Christ, in accordance with the order he himself has established. They must be children of the Church.

the spiritual kingship of the

church and temporal affairs

We must, first of all, distinguish between temporal matters and spiritual, matters. Temporal matters are those which are ordained to the common good of the state as to their immediate and proximate end. The intellectual and moral activity of a general who studies the best method of defending his country against attack, that of a statesman who deliberates on how to maintain order in the state, that of a citizen who pays his taxes, that of a farmer who sows and reaps, that of a lighthouse keeper who carries out his lonely task, all these are concerned with temporal affairs.

The common good of the state is substantially natural, but it is both moral and material. Political life, being the social life of the rational animal, man, is both moral and material. As the social life of a person, who grasps the order of being, and sees it is incumbent on him to observe that order, it must be moral. As the social life of an animal who is an individual of a species like other animals, it is material and must take account of the production and distribution of wealth, as a prerequisite condition for the virtuous life of the multitude. Man as man, however, does not live on bread alone nor even is that his chief need. The state must look after roads and railways, treaties regarding imports and exports, and such like, but that is not its whole domain. Its principal care must be to combat with all its might everything that tends to lower the moral dignity of man, everything that is an obstacle to the development of his personality through membership of our Lord’s Mystical Body. “Two things are required for a good life on the part of the people,” writes St. Thomas, in a text which will be quoted at length further on, “the chief requisite is virtuous action… the other requisite, which is secondary and quasi-instrumental in character, is a sufficiency of material goods, the use of which is necessary for virtuous action.”[24]

Spiritual matters are those ordained to the supernatural common good of the Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, as to their proximate and immediate end. This supernatural common good is the personal union of all members with the Blessed Trinity through growth in resemblance to Christ. Spiritual matters are either regularly and habitually spiritual and supernatural—the two words (spiritual and supernatural) are used synonymously in these explanations—or they may be exceptionally supernatural and spiritual, though habitually temporal. Again, matters that are regularly supernatural and spiritual may be so entirely and exclusively, such for example, are measures concerning the preaching of the Gospel and the proper administration of the sacraments, or they may be so only partially. These latter are what are usually called mixed matters, as they concern both the Church and the civil authority. Such matters are, for example, the effects of marriage, which are partly religious and partly temporal, and the teaching in schools and universities which aims at forming Christian citizens. The matters that are regularly and by their nature temporal become spiritual accidentally in certain exceptional circumstances because of their morally necessary connection in those circumstances with the supernatural life of souls.

Corporeal things can be supernatural, not of course in their substance (quoad substantiam), but by the end towards which they are directed, and the manner in which they are referred to the Kingdom of God (quoad modum).[25]

We are now in a position to explain precisely in what the indirect power of the Church consists. The rulers of the Church have jurisdiction, that is, power in the proper sense of the term, over the matters that are regularly spiritual, whether they be so entirely amd exclusively or only partially (on the religious side). They also have it over matters that are regularly temporal but which become spiritual in certain exceptional circumstances. When the participation which the rulers of the Church have in the spiritual Kingship of Christ is concerned with matters of this last category, it is called the indirect power. The spiritual jurisdiction of the Church, in these cases, instead of being concerned with matters that are regularly spiritual, is exercised over matters that are regularly or directly temporal, but exceptionally or indirectly spiritual. This is the reason of the use of the term indirect power to designate the right of the rulers of the Church to intervene in these matters. It is not a power superadded to and distinct from the spiritual Kingship of Christ in which they share. It is comprised within the orbit of that spiritual royalty and has received the name of indirect power because the matters with which it deals are only indirectly, that is. exceptionally, spiritual, on account of special circumstances.

“It is question of real power, that is to say. of a power of jurisdiction, which gives orders and not merely advice, which can command and not merely persuade. It is question of an indirect power. This means that the Church has power over temporal matters, not directly or as such, but indirectly, that is, in view of the spiritual interests involved. Direct power over temporal matters belongs to the state. The Church has direct power over spiritual matters, but indirect over temporal matters because she deals with them only in so far as spiritual interests are involved.…If, instead of the expression ‘spiritual power over matters regularly temporal but become spiritual ratione peccati,’ the more succinct expression ‘temporal power’ (jurisdiction) ratione peccati,[26] is employed, then one can say that the Pope has two jurisdictions: spiritual jurisdiction and in certain cases temporal jurisdiction, in other words, that he has two powers: direct power and indirect power. This formula has become common amongst theologians since the time of St. Robert Bellarmine and Suarez. The traditional doctrine was not in the least changed. One has only to read St. Robert Bellarmine and the theologians who have suceeded him to be convinced of it, but… as the spirit of faith waned and the pretentions of secular governments to direct the whole of life increased, the expression ‘indirect power’ became less intelligible to the world. It came to be held to be a second power, a sort of human, political and extra-evangelical power, which the Popes have added in the course of ages to the spiritual power bequeathed by Our Lord to St. Peter. The indirect power thus appeared as something out of date and belonging to a past age, which might be freely admired or regretted in our day. but it had ceased to mean the divine, evangelical and spiritual jurisdiction of the Church over temporal matters in so far as they are ordained to spiritual matters.”[27] The restoration of order in the world demands the full recognition of the spiritual royalty of the rulers of the Church in temporal affairs when spiritual issues are at stake.

Pope Leo XIII uses the term mixti juris when speaking of the usurpation of the civil power in regard to matters like the effects of marriage. “With reference to matters that are of mixed jurisdiction,” he writes, “they who administer the civil power lay down the law at their own will, and in matters that appertain to religion defiantly put aside the most sacred decrees of the Church they claim jurisdiction over the marriages of Catholics, even over the bond as well as over the unity and the indissolubility of matrimony.”[28]

The same Pontiff had previously pointed out in his Encyclical Letter, On Christian Marriage that “no one doubts that Jesus Christ, the founder of the Church, willed her sacred power to he distinct from the civil power, and each power to be free and unshackled in its own sphere: with this condition, however,—a condition good for both, and of advantage to all men—that union and concord should be maintained between them; and that on those questions which are, though in different ways, of common right and authority, the power to which secular matters have been entrusted should happily and becomingly depend on the other power which has in its charge the interests of heaven. In such arrangement and harmony is found not only the best line of action for each power, but also the most opportune and efficacious method of helping men in all that pertains to their life here, and to their hope of salvation hereafter.[29] Pope Leo XIII here enunciates the supreme guiding principles for the social organization of the world, viz., distinction of the two supreme authorities of the Church and the state and their union by subordination of the lower to the higher.

We must complete this explanation of the spiritual royalty of the rulers of the Church by a few words about matters purely civil or temporal as well as about matters doubtfully or problematically spiritual. The rulers of the Church have no jurisdiction over temporal matters as such. It is true that the spiritual measures taken by the Church in her own sphere may affect matters of this nature, but it will be only by repercussion and by chance. In the case of matters of which the connection with the diffusion of the supernatural life is simply doubtful or problematic, the Church may advise certain measures but she may not enforce them by a command. It is. however, for the Church to appreciate the nature of the connection between temporal matters and the spiritual life of souls, because she has charge of the supernatural final end of man, the one which dominates all other subordinate ends.

As God is subsistent love of order, he wants order everywhere in creation. Accordingly, he desires orderly collaboration between those who share in the spiritual Kingship and those who share in the temporal Kingship of the one Mediator Christ Jesus. Those who share in the temporal Kingship are the rulers of the states and nations in which man, on account of his social nature, must develop.

Pope Leo XIII lays down the principles governing this harmonious collaboration of the Church and states. We shall see in particular that the great Pontiff insists upon the Church’s jurisdiction over matters that are regularly temporal when they, exceptionally or indirectly, become spiritual, as has been pointed out.

“The Almighty, therefore,” writes the Pope, “has appointed the charge of the human race between two powers, the ecclesiastical and the civil, the one being set over divine, and the other over human, things. Each in its kind is supreme, each has fixed limits within which it is contained, limits which are defined by the nature and special object of the province of each, so that there is, we may say, an orbit traced out within which the action of each is brought into play by its own inherent right. But inasmuch as each of these two powers has authority over the same subjects, and as it might come to pass that one and the same thing—related differently, but still remaining one and the same thing—might belong to the jurisdiction and determination of both, therefore God, who forsees all things, and Who is the author of these two powers, has marked out the course of each in proper relation to the other. ‘For the powers that are, are ordained of God.’”[30]

Were this not so, deplorable contentions and conflicts would often arise, and not infrequently men, like travellers at the meetings of two roads, would hesitate in anxiety and doubt, not knowing what course to follow. Two powers would be commanding contrary things, and it would be a dereliction of duty to disobey either of the two. But it would be most repugnant to think thus of the wisdom and goodness of God.…

‘‘There must, accordingly, exist, between these two powers, a certain orderly connection, which may be compared to the union of the soul and body in man. The nature and scope of that connection can be determined only, as We have pointed out, by having regard to the nature of each power, and by taking account of the relative excellence and nobility of their purpose. One of the two has for its proximate and chief object the well-being of this mortal life, the other the everlasting joys of heaven. Whatever, therefore, in things human is of a sacred character, whatever belongs either of its own nature or by reason of the end to which it is referred, to the salvation of souls, or to the worship of God, is subject to the power and judgment of the Church. Whatever is to be ranged under the civil and political order is rightly subject to the civil authority. Jesus Christ has himself given command that what is Caesar’s is to be rendered to Cæsar, and that what belongs to God is to be rendered to God.”[31]

To sum up, then, the rulers of the Church have no jurisdiction over matters that are merely human and temporal. Their jurisdiction extends exclusively to divine and spiritual matters. These latter, however, may be, in the first place, spiritual by nature, whether completely so, like ecclesiastical matters, such as fasting or the celibacy of the clergy, or partially so, like mixed matters such as education and the effects of marriage. They may, in the second place, be spiritual merely by accident or in exceptional circumstances. Pope Leo XIII has made a clear distinction between matters that are spiritual by nature and those that are spiritual by reason of their relation, in certain circumstances, to man’s supernatural destiny, and he has insisted that right order demands that all these matters be subject to the judgment of the Church. This is required, in order that the social environment may be not only not prejudicial but favorable to integral membership of Christ. “All the actions of a Catholic, inasmuch as they are either morally good or bad, that is to say, in agreement or disagreement with natural and divine law, come under the judgment and jurisdiction of the Church.”[32] The Catholic Church alone, in accordance with the Divine Plan, has charge of expounding and safeguarding the whole moral law, natural and revealed. Pope Leo XIII insists upon this fundamental truth. “The Church of Christ” he writes, “is the true and sole teacher of virtue and guardian of morals.”[33]

Pope Pius XI repeats Pope Leo’s teaching: “Put before proceeding to discuss these problems. We lay down the principle long since clearly established by Pope Leo XIII, that it is Our right and Our duty to deal authoritatively with social and economic problems.[34] It is not, of course, the office of the Church to lead men to transient and perishable happiness only, but to that which is eternal: indeed ‘the Church believes that it would be wrong for her to interfere without just cause in such earthly concerns.’[35] But she can never relinquish her God-given task of interposing her authority, not indeed in technical matters, for which she has neither the equipment nor the mission, but in all those that have a bearing on moral conduct. For the deposit of truth entrusted to Us by God, and Our weighty office of propagating, interpreting, and urging, in season and out of season, the entire moral law, demand that both social and economic questions be brought within Our supreme jurisdiction in so far as they refer to moral issues.”[36]

what god desires

Baptized human beings have to perform two kinds of actions. actions that are fundamentally and substantially natural from the point of view of the matter with which they are concerned, such as the production, distribution, and exchange of material goods, and actions that are substantially supernatural from the point of view of the matter with which they are concerned, such as the reception of the sacraments. Between the ends of these two sets of actions,[37] there is indirect subordination not direct, inasmuch as the natural works or forms of activity must not only not prove obstacles to the others but must on the contrary set up conditions favorable to them. This is the relation we have seen to exist between the two authorities, each supreme in its own sphere, to which human beings are subject.

If we now look at the end which the subjects of these two authorities ought to have in view in all their actions, the final end to which they ought to direct all their actions[38] there is but one, God loved above all. God desires that all the activities of human beings should be the fruit of infused moral virtues and be animated by supernatural charity. Thus even matters that are substantially natural are intended by God to be the fruit of activities that are substantially supernatural.[39] We may express this another way. The supernatural life, by which we can animate human actions concerning even matters themselves temporal or natural, comes to us through membership of Christ. All human beings are meant to be drawn into membership of Christ’s Mystical Body and when incorporated are intended to act fully as his members with his attitude, interior and exterior. His interior attitude is one of supernatural union with the Blessed Trinity expressing itself exteriorly with perfect prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance. All the actions of Christ’s members, whatever be their matter, are intended by God the Father to be subject to Christ and so supernatural by their animating force. “Whatever a Catholic does,” writes Pope Pius X, “even in temporal matters, he has not the right to neglect his supernatural interests, nay more, the prescriptions of Catholic teaching oblige him to direct everything towards the sovereign good as towards the last end of all things.”[40] God desires that the common good of the state, political and economic, should be sought by those in authority in such a manner as to favor the development of the supernatural life of the citizens.

the thomistic doctrine on the

relation between church and state

The doctrine of the relation between the two authorities instituted by God for the government and direction of the human race, which has been exposed in this chapter, is that of the essential sovereignty of the state and its accidental subordination to the Church. This is the teaching of St. Thomas, which has become the common doctrine of theologians.[41] For St. Thomas, the spiritual power and the temporal power are both supreme, independent and sovereign, each in its own sphere, but the political power is subordinate to the ecclesiastical power, inasmuch and in so far as the matters with which the former power is concerned, and which are regularly temporal, become spiritual accidentally by reason of the circumstances. Following his usual procedure of looking at all things from God’s side downwards, not from man’s side upwards, the Angelic Doctor says: “Both the spiritual authority of the Church and the secular authority of the state are derived from the authority of God. Accordingly, the secular power is subject to the spiritual power in so far as it has been placed under it by God, that is to say, in those things which concern the salvation of souls. Hence, in those matters, the spiritual authority must be obeyed rather than the secular. Where it is question of purely civil matters, the secular power must be obeyed rather than the spiritual, according to the expression: ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.”’[42]

“The secular power is not subject to the spiritual power universally and from every point of view. Thus, in (purely) civil matters the ruler of the state must be obeyed, and likewise in military matters the head of the army, rather than the bishop, who ought not to occupy himself with these things or with other temporal affairs, except in so far as spiritual interests are involved. But if anything in temporal affairs constitutes (becomes) an obstacle to the eternal salvation of his subjects, the bishop who intervenes by a command or a prohibition does not put his sickle into another’s harvest. He acts by his own rightful divinely-constituted authority. Where the eternal salvation of men is at stake, all secular powers are subject to the spiritual power.[43]

St. Robert Rellarmine, at a later date, used the comparison of the body and the soul or the flesh and the spirit to illustrate and explain the accidental subordination of the temporal to the spiritual authority. The body and the soul (or the flesh and the spirit), explains the learned Jesuit Doctor, have distinct functions and are even found separate from one another in the angels and the animals deprived of reason. In the animals we find flesh without spirit; in the angels we find spirit without flesh. Nevertheless, they are found united and joined together in the unity of the human person in such wise that the soul commands and the body obeys. The soul has the right of chastising the body and keeping it in subjection, by fasts and other means, lest it may hamper the activity of the spirit. The soul may even compel the body to sacrifice itself and sacrifice everything that it holds dear, up to and including life itself, as the martyrs have done, if this is indispensable in order that the soul may attain its end.

In the same way, and for similar reasons, since the Catholic Church is the Mystical Body of Christ, there must exist between the ecclesiastical and the civil power a union and ordered relation such that, when the eternal salvation of souls is concerned, the ecclesiastical authority may direct the political authority and command it to take a certain course of action. If necessary, the ecclesiastical authority can and ought to compel and force it to do so, lest the political authority may become an obstacle to the attainment of the supernatural final end of man. So the terrestrial kingdom must be at the service of the heavenly kingdom.[44]

M. l’abbé Journet points out that this comparison, so dexterously utilized by St. Robert Bellarmine, perfectly illustrates the problem of the jurisdiction of the Church and the accidental subordination of the state. It does not, however, as aptly bring out the fact that all the civic activity of a baptized person, though concerned with what is substantially natural, is intended to proceed in its entirety from supernatural charity animating the infused virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance, and so be purified and elevated.[45]

The Thomistic doctrine represents the traditional teaching of the Church.[46] “It can be affirmed with certitude that the Thomistic teaching is the normal doctrine of the Middle Ages. It may have been deformed in times of crisis, but it has always been set forth again, in its integrity, precisely and correctly, later on.”[47]

Both the ecclesiastical and secular power are from God. Now, whatever is from God, who is subsistent love of order, is in order. Accordingly, since “the divine right which comes from God does not destroy the human right which has its origin in man’s rational nature, the two powers must be harmoniously interrelated in a manner respectful of their God-given natures.[48] The traditional doctrine provides for this without sacrificing anything either of the essential natures of the two powers in question or of the order of the world. The other opinions fail to do this as we shall see.

two other theories concerning the relation between church and state

Over against the Thomistic doctrine of the accidental subordination of the state to the Church, in view of the harmonious cooperation between the two powers instituted by God to guide and govern man, there are two other opinions. The first proclaims that the subordination of the state to the Church is rather metaphorical than real: the second asserts, on the contrary, that the subordination of the state is essential. If, instead of speaking of the “accidental subordination of the state,” we speak of the “indirect power of the Church,” then, the corresponding phrase in the theory of the “metaphorical subordination of the state” will be “the directive power of the Church,” in the theory of “essential subordination” it will be “the direct power of the Church.”

In the expression “indirect power,” the word “power” signifies jurisdiction and the word “indirect” signifies that this jurisdiction can be exercised in political matters only if the interests of religion demand the intervention of the Church. Now the partisans of the “directive power” deny to the Church a true power of jurisdiction giving the Church the right to intervene authoritatively in political matters when the interests of religion demand it. They sacrifice the real order of the world, for “the temporal ruler… must be guided, helped and corrected in matters committed to his care by that higher power established to lead men to their loftier, eternal end.”[49] The partisans of the “direct power of the Church in temporal affairs” deny that the Church’s power is indirect and concerned with temporal affairs only in certain circumstances. Hence they falsify the real nature of both the powers established by God.[50]

It is not necessary to dwell at length on this latter opinion, held by a few medieval writers, namely, that the rulers of the Church have jurisdiction over temporal affairs as such. In this view the dependence of the state would he essential and absolute instead of relative and accidental. The Church has always rejected this doctrine of the “direct power” of the Church over temporal affairs.[51]

The partisans of the directive power hold that the Church has a primacy of honor but not of jurisdiction in regard to those civil questions in which the interests of souls are at stake. The Church, according to them, possesses the power of persuading but not of commanding. The word “power” in the expression “directive power” is thus to be taken, not in its proper sense, but in a figurative or metaphorical sense. Many liberal Catholics are partial to this opinion and try to explain the historical events of the Middle Ages by asserting “that the sovereign Pontiffs then intervened authoritatively in political affairs, not by reason of their authority as Vicars of Christ, but exclusively because of the public law of the Europe of that day. The tacit or express consent of Christian peoples had made the Roman Pontiff the supreme arbiter even of political matters. The worthlessness of these assertions, however, will be abundantly evident from even a cursory examination of the documents of the period.

“The sovereign Pontiffs continually appeal to the power of binding which was conferred on St. Peter, to the authority of Jesus Christ whose place on earth they take.… If by the public law of the Middle Ages is meant the acceptance and profession of the truth of the Divine Plan enshrined in the Gospel, and which was then universally acknowledged, it is true to say that this was the condition which allowed of the de facto exercise of the indirect power of the sovereign Pontiffs. If however, it is to be understood in the sense that the authority of the sovereign Pontiffs had its source in a law introduced by the will of the people, that assertion is erroneous.…Accordingly, all these attempts at explanation are of no value and are a clear proof of the presence of that deplorable fear of the integral truth which is the special malady of liberal Catholics. For, since the minds of their contemporaries are so imbued with the poison of the principles of the French Revolution that to most of them the principles we have been enunciating about the subordination of politics to religion seem to be ridiculous paradoxes, those weak Catholics do not dare to go against the tide and seek to whittle down the integral truth. They think, in their cowardice, that there is no other way to undertake the defense of the past than to seek the explanation of those illustrious events of the Church’s history, which are repugnant to modern ideas and prejudices, in contingent and mutable human law. That is purely and simply to be ashamed of the Gospel. From such a crime against his Majesty, may God preserve us!”[52]

Father Cappello, S.J., passes judgment on the Thomistic teaching and on the two other theories of which we have been speaking as follows: “The theory of the direct power is false. The theory of directive power cannot be admitted. The doctrine of the indirect power is common, certain and Catholic doctrine. This (the indirect powerJ is an essential right of the Church, since it springs from the Church’s nature, so it is clear that it cannot be lost either by custom or prescription, nor in any way restricted or changed.”[53]

the duty of catholics to christ the king

In the present state of the world, the exercise of the indirect power of the Church is hampered, but all Catholics, rulers and subjects alike, should proclaim with one voice the inalienable rights of the Church and show themselves ready to accept all the consequences that follow from them. These rights are simply a part of the Church’s participation in the spiritual Kingship of Christ. Catholics, therefore, should unite in proclaiming the unchangeable order of the Divine Plan. God entrusted the exposition of this order to St. Thomas, and we find it outlined in The Dogmatic Constitution of the Church which was drawn up for discussion at the Vatican Council.

In this outline we read: “We…teach that those who govern should follow the same rule of the divine law in the exercise of their power. For the divine law, whether manifested by the light of reason or by supernatural revelation, has been instituted not only for private citizens and their actions but also for those who are at the head of states, and for the discharge of public duties, for social and political action.…And it belongs to the supreme teaching office of the Church to judge of the laws of human conduct even for civil society and public affairs, inasmuch as it is for the Church to determine all questions of morals and to decide what is licit or illicit.”[54]

The Council had to disperse before these points could be discussed, but the Schema had been printed and circulated amongst the Fathers of the Council. Accordingly, we may say that we have in them a clear indication of the mind of the Church on this all-important aspect of Our Lord’s Kingship. One of the reasons why the Feast of the Kingship of Christ was instituted was to bring about union amongst Catholics in standing for his rights. They should close their ranks on this question and not allow themselves to be divided and drawn, in every country in greater or lesser numbers, into the naturalistic camp of the enemies of Our Lord.

If Catholics were at one in seeking first the interests of Christ, head of the Mystical Rody, they would exercise a powerful influence on the world. They would, for instance, draw many outside the Church freely to recognize the moral authority of the Roman Pontiff as indispensable for maintaining peace in any future association of states. “For no human institution exists which can impose upon the nations an international code, adapted to the present time, similar to the one which, in the Middle Ages, ruled that society of nations which was known as Christendom.…But there is a divine institution, which can guarantee the sanctity of the law of nations, an institution which, embracing all nations and transcending them, is endowed with supreme authority and evokes veneration through its plenary powers of rule—the Church of Christ. Because of its divine mission, of its nature, of its constitution, and the prestige which time has conferred upon it, it alone has shown itself equal to so great a task, and far from succumbing to the onslaught of war, it has emerged with vigor marvellously increased.[55]

Without the acknowledgment of the rule of Christ, peace, that relative peace which is possible in this fallen world, cannot be attained here below. The Roman Pontiff, the Vicar of Christ, and the bishops of the Catholic Church, are the representatives of Christ’s spiritual Kingship. It is through them that his royal will is proclaimed to the world. If this guidance is not accepted with regard to the moral aspect of questions, then we shall see an accentuation of the reign of brute force, under the domination of some section of the human race usurping the place of God, with disastrous results for the poor and the weak. Fear, of arousing anti-Catholic prejudice should not prevent Catholics from demanding that the Pope’s voice should be the deciding factor with regard to the morality of decisions to be taken by any future League of Nations, especially with regard to armaments and finance. They should continually point out that the calumnies uttered against the Mystical Body of Christ are in the main the work of the organized forces which wish to substitute for the reign of Christ their own naturalistic domination. They should, accordingly, understand thoroughly the meaning of naturalism and realise fully that there are visible organized forces at work under Satan propagating it. If they had a clear grasp of these vital points, they would see why so much of what is called “progress” and “enlightenment,” in politics and economics, leads to the decay of nations and to the enslavement of the masses, and they would not allow themselves to he inveigled into advocating policies utterly opposed to the rule of Christ the King. He is the center of order.[56]

“We are hoping for a new order of things,” writes Pope Pius XII, “which will govern the life of peoples and adjust their mutual relations, when these unnatural conflicts, these cruel butcheries, have died down at last. This new order must not be founded on the shifting standards of right and wrong, treacherous quicksands, which have been arbitrarily devised to suit public and private interests. It must stand firmly based on the immovable rock of natural law and divine revelation.…The troubles from which our age is suffering may be put down partly, no doubt, to the disturbing effects of economic maladjustment, partly to the competition between nations, each striving to get its fair share of the means God has given them for maintaining their life and developing their culture. But the root of them lies far deeper than that. The root of them is to he sought in the contrast between religious faith and the opinions which have been embraced, the standards which have been adopted, by the modern world. Those opinions, those standards, are corrupted at their source, because the people of the world are slowly losing touch with the principles of right dealing, with the unity of Christian faith and doctrine, which the untiring beneficence of the Church once instilled into them. The re-cducation, the remolding of the human race, if il is to produce the effects expected of it… must spring from the doctrine of the divine Redeemer, as its only possible fountain-source.”[57]

“The case of governments,” wrote Pope Leo XIII, “is much the same as that of the individual; they also must run into fatal issues, if they depart from the way.…Let Jesus be excluded, and human reason is left without its greatest protection and illumination: the very notion is easily lost, of the end for which God created human society, to wit: that by the aid of their civil union the citizens should attain their natural good, but, nevertheless, in a way not in conflict with that highest and most perfect and enduring good which is above nature. Their minds busy with a hundred confused projects, rulers and subjects alike travel a devious road, bereft as they are of safe guidance and fixed principle.”[58]

Appendix I

papal authority in temporal affairs[59]

1.  By divine right, the Pope has firstly, the power, as Supreme Teacher and Guardian of the Moral Law, to give to rulers, with regard to the government of their states, directions obliging in conscience. He has, secondly, the power to regulate temporal affairs in sovereign though indirect fashion, whenever he judges it indispensable for the interests of souls, that is to say, he has not only directive power over the temporal affairs of states but sovereign indirect power (St. Robert Bellarmine, De Rom. Pont., lib. V. c. VI).

2.  The universal recognition of this right by the peoples and rulers of the Middle Ages and the incorporation of this recognition into the constitutions of the various nations of Christendom, while it did not and could not add to the intrinsic force of the divine right, did add to it the extrinsic force of public law, and thus rendered the exercise of the divine right less difficult and more efficacious.

3.  The sovereigns of several states of the Middle Ages were vassals of the Holy See. With regard to the rulers of these states, the Pope had not only the indirect temporal power, founded upon the divine right and public law, but also a direct temporal power founded upon the right of suzerainty.

4.  One of the sovereigns of the group of Christian states held from the Pope, with the title of Emperor, the additional title of Official Defender of the Holy See and of all Christendom. With regard to this prince, the Pope had not only the indirect temporal power which he had with regard to all the other rulers, but a special power based on the origin and purpose of the Holy Roman Empire, as we have just explained.

5.  The Popes have been invested by divine providence with sovereign power over the state (or states) of the Church. With regard to this state, they enjoy a direct temporal power similar to that of other rulers in their respective states.[60]

A. Accordingly:

The powers exercised by the Popes of the Middle Ages over states were founded: with regard to all, originally and principally, on the divine right: secondly and in a subsidiary way, on the public law of the nations of Christendom: with regard to the states that were vassals of the Holy See, these powers were founded besides on the direct right of suzerainty: with regard to the Emperor, they were based in addition on a special right (sui generis), which had its origin in the Imperial dignity.

B. Consequently:

(a) The power of the Popes over states (called the indirect power) did not originate with Gregory VII.

(b) The power of the Popes over states (called the indirect power) had not its origin exclusively in the public law of the Middle Ages. We must hold this in opposition to Leibnitz, Hurter, Voigt, and most of the semi-liberals who in our day have undertaken the defense of the Church.[61]

Appendix II

the scope of the indirect

power of the church[62]

Principles:

(1)  The indirect power of the Church extends to all temporal affairs which are connected with the end of the Church, that is to say, which are related to the spiritual life.

This connection or relation is found in temporal matters on account of their being necessary for, or their being opposed, to the spiritual end of the Church, that is to say, inasmuch as the temporal matters are either necessary to attain this end or prevent its being attained and must therefore be removed.

Cardinal di Turrecremata has the following excellent statement of this doctrine: “Although the Roman Pontiff has not the full direct power in temporal matters that he has in spiritual matters, nevertheless he has this power by a necessary consequence and by his own right, insofar as is necessary for the safeguarding of spiritual interests, for the guidance of the faithful to their eternal salvation, for the correction of sinners, and for the maintenance of peace amongst the people of Christ.”[63]

(II)  Accordingly, the indirect power extends to all persons objects and actions, but exclusively from the point of view of their connection with the spiritual life.

Certainly all persons, both public personages and private individuals, by the fact that they are baptized, are subject to the jurisdiction of the Church and must be guided by her to holiness of life here below and eternal life hereafter. I have said expressly “whether public or private,” because the magistrate as such, the ruler as ruler, is subject to the Church. The ruler or magistrate is subject to the Church not merely as a private individual, as the Gallicans erroneously taught. Therefore, the Church must aid, direct, and guide him to eternal life not only as a private individual but also as a public functionary.

All objects and actions, whether profane or civil or political, may be moral or immoral, good or bad, in conformity with or divergent from the laws of justice and morality, and as such are subject to the power of the Church. For example, if in any country a social or political question gave rise to a controversy causing grave disturbance and serious dissensions amongst Caiholics to the great detriment of Christian charity and concord, the Church could, in order to safeguard charity and concord, impose silence on all concerned.

Pius X gives a fine exposition of this doctrine: “Whatever a Catholic does, even in temporal matters, he has not the right to neglect his supernatural interests, nay more, the prescriptions of Catholic teaching oblige him to direct everything towards the sovereign good as towards the last end of all things. All his actions, inasmuch as they are either morally good or bad, that is to say in agreement or disagreement with natural and divine law, come under the judgment and jurisdiction of the Church.”[64]

This explains why, in the course of history, the Roman Pontiffs have intervened in matters concerning the social question, economics or politics.

(III) This power is by no means to be restricted to cases of grave necessity, as several writers assert.[65] Cases of grave necessity are those in which the Church would be exposed to serious loss, unless she intervened. The question of right must not be confused with the question of fact. It is one thing to say that the Church does not in fact exercise her indirect power over each and every temporal matter, and that it is not always expedient that she should do so. If a temporal affair, no matter what its nature, is connected with spiritual interests, from that point of view it is always and necessarily subject to the jurisdiction of the Church. The Church could always exercise her power in a matter of that kind from that angle.

(IV) Since the indirect power is a public power of jurisdiction in the true and proper meaning of the term, it can be legislative, judicial and coactive.

Pius XI vindicates the claim of the Church to this power in eloquent language: “The Church indeed, does not claim to interfere without reason in the direction of temporal or purely political affairs, nevertheless of her full right, she claims that the civil power must not allege this as an excuse for placing obstacles in the way of those higher goods on which the eternal salvation of men depends, for indicting loss and injury through unjust laws and decrees, for impairing the divine constitution of the Church itself, or for trampling under foot the sacred rights of God in civil society.”[66]

The Code of Canon Law likewise claims this power for the Church in explicit terms: “The Church by her proper and exclusive right takes cognizance…of all matters in which is to be found a ratio peccati.…”[67]

The words “in which is to be found a ratio peccati,” used by Boniface VIII and by Innocent III, are not to be understood as referring exclusively to merely theological faults and therefore restricted to the domain of conscience, as some have wrongly maintained, but are to be understood as applying to all matters which are connected with the good of religion, that is, the end of the Church, either positively or negatively. Matters are connected positively, inasmuch as they are necessary for the good of religion, that is, for the attainment of the Church’s end; matters are connected negatively, inasmuch as they are obstacles to the attainment of that end and so must be eliminated.

That the words in question are not to be understood exclusively of matters pertaining to the internal forum is clear from the text, and the context. For Canon 1553, 1, 2°, is treating of the object of a judgment or ecclesiastical process, which is, of course, a matter belonging to the external forum.

Note:

I beg to add the following clear statement of Pius X, not quoted by Father Cappello: “We do not conceal the fact that We shall shock some people by saying that We must necessarily concern ourselves with politics. But anyone forming an equitable judgment clearly sees that the Supreme Pontiff can in no wise violently withdraw the category of politics from subjection to the supreme control of faith and morals confided to him” Consistorial Allocution, November 9, 1903).

[1]In treating of the relation between the Priesthood and the Kingship of Christ, free use has been made, with the kind permission of the author, of Le Mystìere du Christ, by Rev. C. V. Héris, O.P., and of articles by the same distinguished writer.

[2]Christ is head of the angels, but the angels have not been redeemed by him (IIIa P., Q.8, a.4).

[3]IIIa Pars, Q.59, a.6, ad 3.

[4]IIIa Pars, Q.8, a.6.

[5]Eph. 4:16.

[6]Heb. 7:27.

[7]I Tim. 2:3–6

[8]IIIa P., Q.72, a.5.

[9]IIIa Pars, Q.63, a.l. Cf. ibid., a.3 and a.6.

[10]Hymn for the Feast of the Epiphany.

[11]Encyclical Letter, Annum Sanctum, May 25, 1899.

[12]Acts 4:12.

[13]Encyclical Letter, Quas Primas.

[14]Rom. 13: l, 2.

[15]Cf. Comment. Thomae in Ep. ad Rom. (13:1).

[16]Encyclical Letter, Immortale Dei, On the Christian Constitution of States.

[17]Encyclical Letter, Quas Primas, On the Kingship of Christ.

[18]Encyclical Letter, Tametsi, On Christ our Redeemer.

[19]IV Sent., dist. 19, Q.I, a. I; Q.3, a.2.

[20]IIIa P., Q.8., a.6.

[21]IIIa P., Q.8, a.3. c. et ad 1.

[22]Singulari quadam, December 9th, 1854.

[23]Chap. 7. Cf. Chap. 6.

[24]De Regimine Principum, lib. I, c. 15.

[25]“Ecclesiastical punishments, such as censures, must be spiritual, not indeed in the sense in which spiritual is opposed to corporeal, but in the sense in which it is opposed to natural, and is the same as supernatural, whether that supernatural be corporeal or not” (John of St. Thomas, Cursus Theologicus, t. VII, p. 513). The canonists divide the spiritual things of which we are speaking into spiritual things, like grace and the virtues, and things connected with the spiritual, like rites, fasts, etc. Cf. Godex Juris Canonici, Can. 1553, S.J., No. 1.

[26]The expression ratione peccati has been used to designate every form of intervention on the part of the Church in temporal affairs, in view of the spiritual interests involved, whether it be to forbid sin or prescribe a good action. Cf. La Juridiction de l’Eglise sur la Cité, by by M. l’abbé Journet, p. 103, note.

[27]Op. cit., pp. 116–118.

[28]Encyclical Letter, Immortale Dei.

[29]Encyclical Letter, Arcanum Divinum Sapientiae (1880).

[30]Rom. 13:1.

[31]Encyclical Letter, Immortale Dei.

[32]Singulari quadam (Pope Pius X to the German Hierarchy, Sept. 24, 1912).

[33]Encyclical Letter, Immortale Dei.

[34]Encyclical letter, Rerum novarum.

[35]Encyclical Letter, Ubi arcana.

[36]Encyclical Letter, Quadregesimo anno.

[37]End here means the end to which by its nature a work or form of activity is directed, the finis operis, to use the scholastic expression.

[38]End here means the finis operantis, what the person intends or is aiming at.

[39]This is a very brief summary of Billot, De Ecclesia, Vol. II, pp. 67–79.

[40]Encyclical Letter, Singulari quadam.

[41]The whole question has been admirably treated in the excellent work of l’abbé Journet, already quoted, namely, La Juridiction de l’Eglise sur la Cité (Paris, Desclée). A summary of his conclusions is given here. He points out that St. Thomas in Comment. in II Sent., dist, 44, distinguishes between two kinds of subordination, namely, essential or absolute subordination and accidental or relative, and then goes on to describe the subordination of the state to the Church as relative, in two texts, of which one will be quoted here.

Father Cappello, S.J., while highly approving of the doctrine exposed, objects to l’abbé Journet’s use of the word accidental. He says that matters fall per accidens under the jurisdiction essentially inherent in the Church, but that the subordination itself cannot be spoken of as accidental. The objection is to the suitability of the words used to express the doctrine, not to the doctrine itself. Cf, Summa Juris Publici Ecclesiastici, p. 299.

[42]Comment. in II Sent., dist. 44.

[43]Cf. Cardinal Cajetan, Comment. in IIa IIae, Q-60, a.G.

[44]This is a free rendering of a part of what St. Robert Bellarmine has written in his De Romano Pontifice, lib. V. cap. 6. The great mystery of the Cross is thus applied to social organization, adds M. I’abbé Journet.

[45]La Juridiction de I’Église sur la Cité by M. l’abbé Journet, p. 161, note.

[46]Billot, S.J., De Ecclesia, Vol. II, p.86, says that St. Robert Bellarmine, in the preface to his treatise against Barclay, quotes more than seventy authors, including St. Thomas, St. Bonaventure, St. Antoninus, St. Bernard, St. Raymundus, Cajetanus, Turrecremata, Soto, Bannez, Molina, Hugh of St. Victor, Alexander of Hales, and Reginald Pole.

[47]Recherches sur l’Esprit Politique de la Réforme, by G. de Lagarde, p. 77.

[48]“Jus autem divinum quod est ex gratia, non tollit jus humanum quod est ex naturali ratione.” (IIa IIae, Q. 10, a. 10).

[49]Suarez, Defens. Fidei, 1.3, v. 5.

[50]La Juridiction de I’Église sur la Cité by M. l’abbé Journet, p. 124, 125.

[51]“Those who defended this doctrine were either lawyers little versed in theology or little known theologians such as Augustinus Triumphus, Alvarus Pelagias, etc. In so far as their reasons prove anything, they prove rather the absolute inanity of the opinion defended.” (Billot, S..T., De Ecclesia, vol. II, p. 80).

Of course, in studying the Papal power in the Middle Ages, we must distinguish between the spiritual jurisdiction of the Popes, of which alone it is question here, and the temporal jurisdiction exercised by the sovereign Pontiffs over some Christian states, such as Hungary, of which they were the Suzerains and Protectors. Cf. l’abbé Journet, op. cit., pp. 191 and foll.

[52]Billot, S. J., De Ecclesia, vol. II, p. 87–88.

[53]Summa Juris Publici Ecclesiastici p. 330.

“The theory of the ‘direct power’ is contrary to the common teaching. The theory of the ‘directive power’ taken in the strict sense, does not appear to be in conformity with the teaching of the Syllabus (of Pope Pius IX), the decrees of the sovereign Pontiffs, and the vast majority of theologians ‘‘ (Summa Apologetica de Ecclesia Catholica (1900) by Père de Groot quoted by l’abbé Journet in La Juridiction de I’Église sur la Cité p. 170, note).

[54]Canon XII of the same Constitution: “If anyone shall say that Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, has conferred on his Church only the power of directing by counsels and exhortations and not that of commanding even by laws and of compelling and constraining by fitting punishments the erring and contumacious, let him be anathema.”

[55]Encyclical Letter, Ubi Arcano Dei (1922).

[56]The morality of any arrangements made with regard to the Bank for International Settlements, an International Court, an International Army or Air Force, must be submitted to the sovereign Pontiff, the Vicar of Christ.

[57]Encyclical Letter, Summi Pontificatus.

[58]Encyclical Letter, Tametsi.

[59]Extract from Les Erreurs Modernes. Vol. II, pp. 399, 400, by Dom P. Benoit.

[60]Father Hubert Hull S.J. points out in Medieval Theories of the Papacy, p. II, that it would be well to reserve the term ‘temporal power’ for the power of the Pope as a civil prince. He says that the term ‘power in temporals’ should be used for the indirect power. Perhaps the term ‘power in matters temporal’ would be better.

[61]It is well to add, for the benefit of Irish readers, that this is the doctrine upheld by A. M. Sullivan in The Story of Ireland, p. 186. On pg. 187 of the same work he has some other very naturalistic remarks.

[62]Translated from Summa Juris Publici Ecclesiastici, pp. 313–316, 310. of Father F. M. Cappello. S.J. Rome, 1936.

[63]Summa de Ecclesia, lib. II. cap. 114.

[64]Encyclical Letter. Singulari quadam, Sept; 24th, 1912 (addressed to the German Hierarchy, on the subject of Workingmen’s Unions). Acta Apost. Sedis, IV, 658.

[65]Cf. Revet, l.e., p. 113, in note: Laurentius. l.c., n.958; Chalodi, l.c., n.27, not. 5; Pilati, Potere diretto, indiretto e direttiro. Rome, 1935.

[66]Encyclical Letter, Ubi Arcano, 23rd December 1922.

[67]Can. 1553, I, 2°.

Chapter III

The Kingship of Christ in its Integrity

meaning of the integrity

of the kingship of christ

The Divine Plan for Order in our fallen and redeemed world comprises, primarily, the supernatural social organism of the Catholic Church, and then, secondarily, the temporal or natural social order resulting from the influence of Catholic doctrine on politics and economics and from the embodiment of that influence in social institutions.[1] From the birth of the Catholic Church on Calvary and the solemn promulgation of her mission at the first Pentecost, the Kingdom of God in its essence has been present in the world. As a result of the gradual acceptance of the role of the Church by the temporal representatives of Christ the King, the social institutions of states and nations became deeply permeated with the influence of the supernatural life of Christ. It was only then that the Kingdom of God or the rule of Christ the King in its integrity could be said to exist. The Kingdom of God or the rule of Christ the King is present in its integrity only in so far as the whole social life of states, political and economic, is permeated with the influence of the Church. To put it in other terms. Christ fully reigns only when the program for which he died is accepted as the one true way to peace and order in the world, and social structures are evolved that are in harmony with it.

The Kingdom of God in its essence is always with us, but the influence of the Church on politics and economics, in other words the extension of the Kingdom of God in its integrity, has varied with the centuries. Broadly speaking, the 13th century has been, so far, the high-water mark of that influence. Since then, until recently, there has been steady decay. No particular temporal social order, of course, will ever realize all that the Church is capable of giving to the world. Each of them will be defective for several reasons. First of all, the action of the Church, welcomed by some Catholics, will be opposed by the ignorance, incapacity, and perversity of others. Secondly, even if all Catholics did accept fully, they could only reflect some of the beauty of the Gospel as the saints reflected some of the infinitely imitable holiness of Christ. Thirdly, there would still remain the vast numbers of non-Catholics to be won for Christ and whose social life would have to be organized under his rule. It is towards this latter goal that every generation of Catholics is called upon to work. The aim is not, needless to say, to bring back the Middle Ages, for the river of time does not turn back in its course, but the aim is to impregnate a new epoch with the divine principles of order so firmly grasped in the 13th century. For the sake of clearness, instead of the expression, the Kingdom of God in its integrity, it is better to use the expression, the rule of Christ the King in its fulness or integrity. We shall, therefore, in future speak of the Kingship of Christ or the rule of Christ the King. Before, however, we attempt to set forth the outlines of the organization which would be seen in the world, if it fully accepted the rule of Christ the King, it will be well to explain briefly the correct notions of politics and economics, according to St. Thomas.[2]

st. thomas and politics

Politics is the science which has for object the organization of the state in view of the complete common good of the citizens in the natural order, and the means that conduct to it. As the final end of man is, however, not merely natural, the state, charged with the temporal social order, must ever act in such wise as not only not to hinder but to favor the attaining of man’s supreme end, the vision of God in three divine persons. Political thought and political action, therefore, in an ordered state, will respect the jurisdiction and guidance of the Catholic Church, the divinely instituted guardian of the moral order, remembering that what is morally wrong cannot be politically good. In connection with this latter point we may quote the words of Pope Pius XI:

“It is part of the trend of the day to sever more and more not only morality, but also the foundation of law and jurisprudence, from true belief in God and from his revealed commandments. Every positive law, from whatever lawgiver it may come, can be examined in the light of the natural law, as to its implications, and consequently as to its moral authority to bind the conscience. The laws of man that are in direct contradiction to the natural law bear a terrible initial defect that no violent means, no outward display of power can remedy. By this standard must we judge the principle: ‘What helps the people is right.’ A right meaning may be given to the sentence, if it is understood as expressing that what is morally illicit can never serve the true interests of the people. But even ancient paganism recognised that the sentence, to be perfectly accurate, should be inverted and read: ‘Never is anything useful, if it is not at the same time morally good. And not because it is useful is it morally good, but because it is morally good, it is also useful’ (Cicero, De Officiis, III. 30). Cut loose from this rule of morality, that principle would mean, in international life, a perpetual state of war between the different nations. In political life within the state, since it confuses considerations of utility with those of right, it mistakes the basic fact that man as a person possesses God-given rights, which must be preserved from all attacks aimed at denying, suppressing, or disregarding them.”[3]

Therefore, the natural or temporal common good should always be aimed at by those in authority in the way best calculated to favor family life, in view of the development of true personality, in and through the Mystical Body of Christ. Political action and legislation, especially in economic matters, must ever seek to strengthen family life and, accordingly, must not only not admit divorce, but must always aim, as far as possible, at benefiting citizens through their families. True political science will insist not only that the exercise of political power be according to the principles above outlined, but that the mode of accession to power and the means employed to retain power be in perfect accord with the moral law. Finally, the society of nations must be brought about not by the ruin of all that is involved in the Catholic concept of native-land, but by the union of all states in the recognition of the rule of Christ the King through the Catholic Church, the only supranational society.

In some well-known passages of his work, On the Governance of Rulers,[4] St. Thomas sums up the aims of a good ruler of a state as follows: “Because the happiness and moral rectitude of the present life have as end the happiness of heaven, it belongs to the ruler to procure the common good of the people in such wise as to enable them to obtain celestial happiness. Accordingly, he ought to command what leads thereto and, as far as possible, forbid what is opposed to it. The road that leads to true happiness and the obstacles to be encountered thereon are made known to us by the divine law, and it is the office of priests to teach that law, according to what we read in the Prophecy of Malachias, 2:7: ‘For the lips of the priest shall keep knowledge, and they shall seek the law at his mouth.’…The ruler, therefore, instructed in the divine law should make it his chief aim to see that the people subject to him should he able to live a good life.

…Now that a man may lead a virtuous life two things are required. The chief requisite is virtuous action (for virtue is that by which (one leads a good life). The other requisite, which is secondary and quasi-instrumental in character, is a sufficiency of material goods, the use of which is necessary for virtuous action.” In the preceding chapter St. Thomas had pointed out that the ministry of guiding rulers of peoples belongs in an especial manner to the Vicar of Christ: “There is a certain good extraneous to man as long as he is living his mortal life here below, namely, final happiness, which is to be attained after death in the possession of God. For, as the Apostle says: ‘As long as we are in the body we are far from the Lord.’[5]
Hence the Christian man, for whom that happiness has been bought with the blood of Christ, and who, in order to attain it, has received the pledge of the Holy Ghost, needs additional spiritual care to guide him to the harbor of eternal salvation, and this care is bestowed on the faithful by the ministers of Christ’s Church.…Since man by a virtuous life is ordained to a higher end, which consists in the possession of God, as we have pointed out above, the end of men living together in society is the same as that of the individual man. Accordingly, the final end of men living together in society is not to live virtuously but by leading a virtuous life to attain to the possession of God. If this end could be attained by the power of human nature, then it would be part of the duty of the king to direct men thereto.…But because man does not attain his end, the beatific Vision, by human power, but by the power of God, according to the words of St. Paul: ‘By the grace of God, life everlasting,’[6] accordingly, the task of leading him thereto is a matter not for human government but for divine. It belongs to that King who is not only man but God, namely, to Our Lord Jesus Christ, who by making men the sons of God conducts them to the glory of heaven.

“This then is the kingdom which has been committed to Christ’s rule and which shall not pass away, on account of which he is called in Scripture not only Priest but King, as we read in Jeremias 23:5: ‘The king shall reign and he shall be wise.’ Hence a royal priesthood is derived from him and, besides, all the faithful who believe in Christ, inasmuch as they are his members, are called kings and priests. Accordingly, the ministry of this kingdom has been confided not to earthly kings but to priests, in order that there might be a clear distinction between spiritual and temporal matters. In an especial manner it has been entrusted to the chief priest, the successor of St. Peter, the Vicar of Christ, the Roman Pontiff, to whom all the rulers of Christian peoples ought to be subject as to Our Lord Jesus Christ himself. For those who have charge of intermediate ends must be subject to him who has charge of leading men to their ultimate end and be guided by him.”[7]

st. thomas and economics

“Has any other master explained better than St. Thomas the nature, method and division of philosophy?… The order of voluntary acts belongs to moral philosophy, which is divided into three parts; the first considers an individual man’s operations ordained to an end, and is called monastic; the second considers the operations of a domestic group and is called economic; the third considers the operations of man in a city or state and is called political” (Comment., in Ethic., Lect. 1).[8]

Etymologically, economy is the government of the home and the family. Economics is the science, which studies the component cells of the state, namely, families, in the constituent relations of their members and in their conditions of existence. “Economy, as its name indicates, studies the order of the human household, arranging, according to their respective values, persons and things.”[9] It aims at elucidating, primarily, the personal relations which constitute the family, the relations of husband and wife, parents and children, masters and servants, and then, secondarily, the relations that follow from the conditions of existence of the family, namely, the mutual relations of human persons owing to their need of external goods or real wealth. On the one hand, our nature brings us into relation with earthly resources which, by taking account of their nature and laws, we have to transform into real wealth capable of satisfying our corporeal needs. Such are the relations of men with minerals, stone, lime, copper, iron, petrol; with the flora and fauna that occupy the earth, air and water; with the nerves and muscles of our own bodies. On the other hand, from this necessary utilization of things, follow personal social relations between human beings: relations between cultivators of the soil and artisans, between employers and employed, between industrialists and merchants, between buyers and sellers. All these relations, however, are between human persons whose well-being is bound up with strong family life. Needless to say, the organization of family life, in view of providing its members with sufficient material resources, is, though secondary, a very important element of economics.

It is because of our material condition and of our need for material wealth that economics and an economic science arise. We may thus speak of man as homo œconomicus. This means that man is such by his nature that the qualification of œconomicus (economic) belongs to his species. But the homo œconomicus (economic man) of the classical economists has quite a different signification. They make it the fundamental notion of a science presented as autonomous. Their “economic man” is a fictitious entity constructed on the pleasure-seeking principle, according to which man naturally seeks the maximum of satisfaction at the cost of the minimum of effort. The “economic man” is man considered as withdrawn from any other influence but that, and subjected to its exclusive and absolute domination. Such a man recognizes no moral obligation and is impervious to patriotism and love of family. This fiction is formulated in John Stuart Mill’s description of political economy. Political economy for him is the science which maps out the laws of social phenomena resulting from the combined operations of humanity in relation to the production of wealth, in so far as these phenomena have not been modified by the pursuit of any other object. Mill admits that man is human and social, while at the same time, because of his liberalism, he withdraws man’s pursuit of wealth from subordination to ethics or moral science. Man’s pursuit of wealth must be in order, and it is not to Mill, but to St. Thomas, that we must go to learn about that order. “He is our source for economic and political science.”[10]

In modern times on account of the reversal of order, by which men are sacrificed to production, and production, distribution and exchange are sacrificed to money, many writers have given the title of political economy to what Aristotle and St. Thomas called the art of money-making. This art is in reality merely an auxiliary art intended to be at the service of the family and of the state. In the former context it subserves economics, in the latter politics. The art of manipulating money must be in close dependence on genuine economic and political science. Why is this? Practical sciences or arts are arranged in hierarchical order according to the hierarchical order of their ends. As the end of the art of money-manipulation is subordinate to the end of politics and economics, those engaged in the manipulation of money must be subordinate to those charged with the political and economic welfare of the state, in view of the common good. It is not for bankers to decide what the common good of the state demands. That is the function of the political rulers. Bankers are subjects not rulers. It is a reversal of order if they become rulers instead of subjects, and every reversal of order leads to disastrous consequences.

As St. Thomas points out a sufficiency of material goods is necessary for the virtuous life of the average human being. Hence we can understand the reason for the dignified place assigned to the science of the production, distribution and exchange of natural wealth, and to the auxiliary art of the proper utilization of money or artificial wealth. This text of St. Thomas is referred to by Pope Pius XI, where the Pope speaks of the necessity of every citizen having an opportunity to earn an honest livelihood, on account of the demands of the common good. “For then only,” he writes, “will the economic and social organism be soundly established and attain its end, when it secures for all and each those goods which the wealth and resources of nature, technical achievement, and the social organization of economic affairs can give. These goods should he sufficient to supply all needs and an honest livelihood and to uplift men to that higher level of prosperity and culture which, provided it be used with prudence, is not only no hindrance but is of singular help to virtue.”[11]

state and family

In his treatment of economics as the science of the family, St. Thomas is in complete opposition to the tendencies of an epoch like the present, when the priority of the family over the state is lost sight of or denied and the human person is ruthlessly sacrificed to money-making. He always keeps in view the fact, discoverable even by natural reason, that “Domestic and family life is more intimately bound up with human nature than political life ”[12] as well as the great revealed truth, that “marriage is a sacrament, because it is a holy sign which gives grace, showing forth an image of the mystical nuptials of Christ with the Church.”[13] To the family the human person is confided, as an individual member of the cell or fundamental social unit, to be trained as a member of Christ. We have already seen the law which governs the relation of the human person to the two species of natural society, the family and the state. According to it, the individual is for society, as the part is for the whole, the hand for the body, but society in its turn is for the development of the person. We may now say, proportionately, that the fundamental and more limited society of the family is in the wider and more developed society of the state as the part is in the whole and, from this point of view, is subject to it, but that, from another point of view, the family which provides the primary benefits of generation, nutrition and education is superior to the state which has for object the development of human life. “The family is more necessary than civil society, because the family is ordained to the acts indispensable for life, namely, generation and nutrition.[14] To save the state, a father of a family may be asked to give his life in battle, but the whole order of the state is meant to be at the service of the family, and through it, of the human person.[15]

This is the teaching of Pope Pius XI in his Encyclical On the. Christian Education of Youth. “It must be borne in mind that the obligation of the family to bring up children, includes not only religious and moral education, but physical and civic education as well, principally in so far as it touches upon religion and morality.

“Accordingly, in the matter of education, it is the right, or to speak more correctly, it is the duty of the state to protect in its legislation, the prior rights…of the family as regards the Christian education of its offspring, and consequently also to respect the supernatural rights of the Church in this same realm of Christian education.

“It also belongs to the state to protect the rights of the child itself when the parents are found wanting either physically or morally in this respect, whether by default, incapacity, or misconduct, since…their right to educate is not an absolute and despotic one, but dependent on the natural and divine law, and therefore subject alike to the authority and jurisdiction of the Church, and to the vigilance and administrative care of the state in view of the common good. Besides, the family is not a perfect society, that is, it has not in itself all the means necessary for its full development. In such cases, exceptional no doubt, the state does not put itself in the place of the family, but merely supplies deficiencies, and provides suitable means, always in conformity with the natural rights of the child and the supernatural rights of the Church.

“In general, then, it is the right and duty of the state to protect, according to the rules of right reason and faith, the moral and religious education of youth, by removing public impediments that stand in the way. It pertains to the state, in view of the common good, to promote in various ways the education and instruction of youth.…

“Over and above this, the state can exact, and take measures to secure that all its citizens have the necessary knowledge of their civic and political duties, and a certain degree of physical, intellectual and moral culture, which, considering the conditions of our times, is really necessary for the common good.”[16]

the role of money in economics

The art of manipulating money, according to St. Thomas, is meant to be in close dependence on genuine economic and political science. It does not, of course, form an integral part of it, but it plays the role of an auxiliary art, furnishing to politics and economics the instrument they need. To understand St. Thomas’s teaching about money we must bear in mind that the Angelic Doctor did not deal with any particular part of the Divine Plan for ordered human life, independently of the whole. That plan as a whole was always spread out before his mind like a vast panorama. It was clearly present to him when treating of money in his Commentary on Aristotle’s Politics, and in the Summa Theologica where he treats of the same subject with considerable additions.[17]

The order of the divine plan set forth by St. Thomas is the reverse of the disorder which prevails at present. Nowadays, the human person is subordinated to the production of goods or real wealth, and the production and distribution of real wealth are subordinated to money or token wealth. For St. Thomas, money is meant to facilitate families in procuring by exchange the sufficiency of material goods required for the virtuous life of their members, that is, for the ordered development of the human personalities composing the family. The relation of real wealth to personality is set forth in the text of the treatise, On the Governance of Princes, which has already been quoted more than once because of its importance. “That a man may lead a good life, two things are required. The chief requisite is virtuous action.…The other requisite, which is secondary and quasi-instrumental in character, is a sufficiency of material goods, the use of which is necessary for virtuous action.”[18] Again the Angelic Doctor writes: “For the imperfect happiness that can be obtained in this life, external goods are necessary: not that they belong to the essence of happiness, but inasmuch as they serve as instruments for the attainment of happiness, which consists in a virtuous life.…For in this life man needs the things the body requires for the pursuit of contemplation as well as for the virtues of the active life.”[19]

The subordination of money or token wealth to the production and distribution of natural wealth is indicated in the Summa Theologica: “Natural wealth is that by which natural wants are supplied, for example, food, drink, clothing, vehicles, dwellings, and such like. Artificial wealth is that which is not a direct help to nature, as for instance, money. This was invented by the art of man, for the convenience of exchange by serving as a common measure of things saleable.”[20] And again he writes: “Those things cannot be considered as real wealth which, if man’s sentiments happen to change, are no longer of any value or utility for the satisfaction of human needs. Such is the case with coins or token wealth, which are worth nothing, if those who use them change their minds. They become useless for all the purposes of life, if the ruler of the community decrees that they are without value.”[21] St. Thomas saw clearly that it was what we would now call the legal status given by the government stamp which makes a coin acceptable as money, not the metal or other substance independent of the stamp. The substance of which money is made is not important. What is summed up so accurately and succinctly here is treated at some length in the Commentary on Artistotle’s Politics, Book I. Let us follow St. Thomas’s reasoning.

In Lect. VI, the Angelic Doctor points out that one art can be at the service of another in two ways, either by preparing the matter the other requires or by preparing the instrument it needs. The art which makes the comb or other instrument used in weaving serves the art of weaving in the second way, while the art which prepares the bronze for the sculptor serves the artist in the first. The art of manipulating money—ars pecuniativa—serves economics rather by way of preparing the instrument it requires, than by furnishing its matter. “Money and all forms of wealth are instruments of economics,” writes St. Thomas, the true matter of economic science being the inter-relations of the human beings themselves who make use of the different kinds of wealth.

The possession of real wealth is natural to man, continues St. Thomas in Lect. VII, because food and such things are necessary for human life, but the possession of money is not from nature itself, for money has been invented by the art of man, turning to account the experience of life. The possession of money in one particular resembles the possession of real wealth, namely, inasmuch as by its means the necessaries of life can be easily procured in an ordered society. Money was invented precisely to facilitate the exchange of goods. By means of it, families can procure, by the process of exchange, far more easily than by the more primitive form of barter, that sufficiency of nature’s goods required for a virtuous life. Money, being a permanent proof that the owner of it is owed goods or services by the community, can easily be retained till the time of future need, if the owner happens not to be in immediate want of anything. “The coin is (acts as) a surety,” writes St. Thomas. “guaranteeing that a man who is not in need of anything at present, will be able to procure what he may require in the future on presenting the coin.”[22] Money is thus a permanently acceptable claim for goods and services. By that is meant, of course, that money is a socially acceptable instrument enabling its possessor to set up a claim for or to make a demand for what is for sale in the community. It does not confer upon its possessor a claim upon any definite goods in the community.

three ways of dealing in money

Money, that is, some intermediary or medium of exchange acceptable to both parties, became indispensable, when things began to be exchanged between people living at a great distance from one another. Bronze, iron, and silver soon came to serve as intermediaries because they were useful everywhere, and certain quantities of them could be easily transported, while their durability and their relative rarity made them very adaptable for the purpose of an exchange-medium. At first, the quantities of these metals had to be measured and weighed, but afterwards they were stamped to indicate the quantity.[23] Then, gradually, as foreign trade developed, there grew up the art of money-changing,[24] that is, the art of exchanging the currency or medium accepted in one country for the currency or medium accepted in another. Thus we have two ways of dealing in money (artes pecuniativae)—exchanging money for goods, and money for money.

The first of these ways of dealing in money—exchanging money for goods—is the servant of economics, inasmuch as by it the acquisition of what is necessary or useful for human life is facilitated. Money, as we have seen, is easily transported in the place of goods. This art of acquiring money by the sale of goods and keeping it till the need of other purchases arises and then utilizing it is in no way defective. “This form of exchange is not reserved to merchants or traders. It is more especially carried on by the heads of households or by rulers of states in view of providing families or states with the necessaries of life.”[25]

The second mode of dealing in money is by exchanging money for money, for example, the currency of one country for that of another. In this way, money is acquired by means of money. If this is done “not on account of the necessities of life, but for profit…. it panders to the greed for gain which knows no limit and tends to infinity.…If, however, anyone seeks that moderate profit which he makes in trade for the upkeep of his family or even to help the poor or if anyone engages in the business of money-changing for the public good, in order that his country may be provided with the necessaries of life, and so does not make gain the end at which he aims but simply looks upon it as the reward of his labor, then such trading is quite legitimate.”[26] Cardinal Cajetan, the learned commentator on St. Thomas, writes: “Since it is evident from experience that, many states would lack many necessaries unless there were merchants to supply them, and since these merchants could not carry on business without money-changing, it is needful and right that the art of money-changing should be allowed to be exercised in states, not indeed for its own sake, but inasmuch as it ministers to economics and politics. Thus money-changers not only may guard themselves against loss in the exercise of their trade but may even make a profit as a reward for their industry, for they carry on a business that is both lawful and useful to the state.”[27] St. Thomas’s reasoning is based on the fact that to engage in trade for the sake of gain, though neither necessary nor good in itself (honestum), does not imply anything vicious or contrary to virtue. Accordingly, there is nothing to prevent trading from being directed to a good end and so becoming legitimate.[28]

The reason why this second way of dealing in money—exchanging money for money (ars nummularia)—is rightly looked upon with distrust and disfavor is given at length by St. Thomas in the Commentary on the Politics and in the Summa Theologica. It is because of the ever increasing danger of its being abused by fallen nature. Man is a fallen being. This is clearly visible in the functioning of his passions, which he finds difficult to control. St. Thomas points out that nature imposes a certain limit on instinctive desires, which are always for something finite and determined, and always aim at maintaining the order required for life. We see this plainly in the case of animals. When reason, however, instead of controlling the passions, puts itself at their service, it will introduce infinity, in a certain way, into their craving for satisfaction and make them absolutely insatiable, so sacrificing the good of the whole being in a vain attempt to make the finite infinite. Reason can set up as an end what is only a means. Money and all forms of wealth are only means intended to satisfy the needs of life. If the amassing of money is made the end of commercial transactions, then “he who longs for riches can desire them, not merely up to a certain point, but he can simply aspire to be as rich as ever he can.”[29] As the end is desired for its own sake and not merely to a certain degree, “he who fixes the end of life in amassing wealth will have a longing for riches ad infinitum; whereas a man who desires wealth just for the needs of life wants only enough to satisfy these needs.”[30]

St. Thomas shows that concupiscence or desire can be infinite in two ways. He begins by distinguishing between a natural or ordered desire and an anti-natural or disordered one. The anti-natural desire is the result of the infinity introduced by reason into material longings. Then follows the text quoted: “Hence he who longs for riches can desire them not merely up to a certain point, but he can simply aspire to be as rich as ever he can.” He then goes on to say that another reason can be assigned why some desires are finite, while others are infinite: “The desire of the end is always infinite, for the end is always sought after for itself (per se). Hence better health is more desirable and so on indefinitely.…The desire of that which is a means to the end is not infinite, if it is regulated by what is suitable for the attainment of the end. So the man for whom money has become an end, has an insatiable desire for it, whereas the man who desires money in view of the needs of life desires sufficient for his needs, but not beyond. And the same holds for the desire of other things.”[31]

Commercial operations must always be examined in the light of the principle set forth by St. Thomas in his Commentary on Aristotle’s Politics. “The longing to attain a legitimate end is without limit, whereas the desire of what is a means towards the end is not limitless, but is measured and determined in view of the end. Thus a doctor’s desire to heal his patient is limitless; he does not, however, give the greatest possible quantity of medicine, but measures the dose according to the requirements of the case, in view of the patient’s complete return to health.”[32] The desire of gain is the desire of what is by nature a means. It must not be erected into an end, for that is disorder.

Money or token wealth, it cannot be too often repeated, is meant to be subservient to the development of human personality through our Lord Jesus Christ, in accordance with social or legal and commutative justice. If it becomes the end, it simply means that man is pandering to his individuality, in other words, he is becoming the slave of his passions instead of developing his personality. The appetite of matter is always for other forms, irrespective of their intrinsic power to elevate; it is a desire for “otherness” as such, for what is new or the latest fashion, but not necessarily for what is better or nobler. This disordered desire for money as an end is the root cause of the furious rhythm of modern life. “The desire for natural riches is not unlimited, because they suffice for nature in a certain measure. But the desire for artificial wealth is unlimited, for it is the slave of disordered concupiscence.”[33]

In addition to the two ways of dealing in money already mentioned, St. Thomas refers to a third form. This mode of dealing in money is called usury, by which money begets money. This, he says, is most justifiably condemned and held in detestation, for it is in the highest degree contrary to nature.[34] Notice the gradation in the Angelic Doctor’s appreciation of these three forms of trading in money. The first—exchanging money for things useful for human life—is natural, for in it dealing in money is subject to economics, the science of the well-being of the household or family. The second—exchanging money for money—is very liable to perversion, for it can easily become the slave of disordered self-seeking and thus be turned against right order. A very great deal of what is termed speculation in modern times, if not all, is a perversion of this second mode of making money. Those who engage in it pursue merely unlimited personal gain instead of trying to advance the common good by facilitating the production and distribution of what people need.[35] It is also true that this second mode of dealing in money can render service to society by aiding states and families to procure that sufficiency of material goods required for the virtuous life of their members. This is especially the case, for example, where the ideal of self-sufficiency, so much insisted upon by St. Thomas in his treatise on government, cannot be attained by a state.[36] Accordingly, this second mode, given certain conditions, can be quite legitimate. The third mode, however, can never be lawful. This method of trafficking in money, namely, breeding money by means of money, we must now examine, in order to see clearly what St. Thomas means by usury.

usury

St. Thomas’s treatise On Evil (De Malo) is well calculated to bring home to all the nature of usury. “Aristotle,” he writes, “distinguishes between the two uses to which a thing may be put. There is, first of all, the principal or special use for which the object is destined and then the secondary or general use. Thus the principal use of footwear is to protect the feet, whereas the secondary use is to serve as an exchange-medium. In the case of money, it is the other way round, for its principal use is to serve as an exchange-medium, and it is for this purpose that it has been invented; its secondary uses are manifold, for it may, for example, be deposited as a pledge for something or put up for show. Whatever is exchanged for something else may be said to be used in such a way that the substance of the object exchanged is destroyed, in the sense that it is lost for him who has passed it to the other. That is the reason why a person who gives his money to another in exchange for something, so employing the money according to its proper and principal use, and who wants to get in return for it something over and above the capital (aliud extra sortem), sins against justice. If, however, the owner of a sum of money remits it to another for some other usage in which the money is not destroyed (in the sense that it has not ceased to be the property of the first owner), it is then assimilated to the other things which are not consumed by being used but can be legitimately hired out for a time or let on lease.”[37]

St. Thomas applies this distinction between the principal and the secondary use to the case of money in the Summa Theologica.[38] He points out that in the primary or principal use of money, the use of it is inseparable from the proprietorship or ownership of it, so it would be unjust to sell the two separately and to demand something over and above the substance of the money, for the use of it, since the primary use of it cannot be distinguished from the substance of the money. When money is employed in exchange, the ownership of it is given away by that very fact, and therefore no other compensation can be allowed in justice for money thus exchanged, except the strict equivalent of the sum handed over.[39] In its first or primary use, money is destroyed—in the sense that it no longer belongs to the person who lends it. Therefore, he who demands something simply for lending money, asks something for the use of money which does not belong to him. He wants something for nothing. This is against the natural law,[40] and of course, it is also forbidden by ecclesiastical law.[41] Money (in its primary use) is like wine or wheat—a fungible thing, as it is technically called—for in repayment the individual object is a matter of indifference, provided the quantity and quality be satisfactory.

“Money,” again writes St. Thomas. “has, according to Aristotle (Ethic., Lib. V, Cap. 5; Pofit., Lib. 1, Cap. 3), been invented principally in order to facilitate the process of exchange. Accordingly, its special and distinctive end is to be consumed, that is to say, expended, as is the case in buying and selling. On this account it is in itself unjust to receive payment for the use of money which has, through a loan, become the property of another. This is what is called usury.[42] And one is obliged to restore to its owner whatever has been received in usury, just as in the case of other goods unjustly acquired.”[43]

Usury is, therefore, profit that is unjustly received from a loan (mutuum); it consists in taking something simply for the act of lending. Pope Benedict XIV condemned the taking of interest even on a productive loan, declaring: “(1) that kind of sin, which is called usury, and which has its proper seat and place in the contract of loan (mutuum), consists in this, that anyone should, on the ground of the loan itself, which from its nature demands that only so much be repaid as was received, insist on getting back more than (the borrower) received, and so contend that, in consideration of the loan itself, a certain gain is due to him, over and above the principal. Accordingly, all gain of this sort, which exceeds the principal, is illicit and usurious.

“(2) Nor may anybody for the sake of exonerating himself from that guilt, avail himself of the pretext, that the gain itself was not exorbitant and excessive but moderate, not great but very small; or that the person from whom he demanded that gain solely by reason of the loan, was not poor but rich, or that he did not propose to allow the borrowed sum to lie idle, but intended to invest it most profitably, in order to increase his wealth or to purchase new estates, or to conduct gainful enterprises.”[44]

The distinction between productive and non-productive loans was introduced by Calvin, who was the first to break openly with the Catholic Church’s laws against usury. Calvin, followed in this by the jurisconsult, Dumoulin, allowed usury in the case of a productive loan.[45] For St. Thomas, money is not productive as such (formaliter), but it is so virtually. The mastery over nature which man has acquired in modern times enables this virtus or power to be readily actualized.[46]

Accordingly, for St. Thomas, it is usurious and, as such, forbidden by the seventh commandment, to sell money with the agreement that a larger quantity of money shall be returned for it. “Money,” he says, “may not be sold for a sum exceeding that handed over.”[47] “The usurer wishes in single transaction to exchange £100 for £105. This is the wrongness that the Church has seen to be forbidden by God’s natural law of justice. Is it a single transaction? Yes. Just as buying goods and paying money for them months after is a single exchange, so borrowing and paying is a single exchange: and in both transactions, equal must be exchanged for equal.”[48]

Then again, money by its nature is meant to facilitate exchanges of goods in view of the development of personality through ordered human living. It is by nature a means not an end. Now, in the transactions we have characterised as usurious, money from being a means is transformed into an end. The multiplication of operations thus perverted and disordered cannot but be fraught with disaster for society. “What is most disconcerting for the author of the Politics (Aristotle) in such transactions is probably not what has been so often said, namely, that money should beget progeny, but that token wealth which is destined to aid us to satisfy our material needs should become an end. so that it is no longer a means but the object towards which all striving is directed. This is for him something anti-natural and absurd. This perversion is all the more menacing, because of the readiness with which exchanges can be multiplied by means of money and also because of the temptation to which it gives rise to go on making additional profits with the money one has already amassed.”[49]

There may, however, be a legitimate reason for receiving profit on the occasion of making a loan, because of some incidental cost to the lender, loss, expense, labor, risk, etc. These are called extrinsic titles. They are “some circumstances, external to the intrinsic nature of the loan contract, separate considerations, that entitle the lender to charge interest on other grounds than the loan itself. Among these extrinsic considerations or titles are especially the following: (1) Resulting loss to the lender, who for this reason is entitled to indemnify himself (damnum emergens); (2) Gain given up by the lender (lucrum cessans);[50] (3) Risk of losing the whole or part of his principal (periculum sortis); (4) Liability to a penalty or forfeit imposed for deferring payment of the loan beyond the time agreed upon (poena conventialis),”[51] Moral theologians usually add as another extrinsic title that of the civil law (lex civilis or praemium legale).

When money is used in its secondary use, where the ownership of the money is retained for the purpose of trade or investment (locatio), the owner has a right to a share of the profits accruing from the business; and of course, if the enterprise results in a loss, he must bear his share. “He who entrusts a sum of money to a merchant or industrialist and forms a kind of society with him does not transfer the ownership of the money to the other, but retains it, so that he shares in the risks attached to the merchant’s commercial ventures or the industrialist’s business proposition. Accordingly, he will have the right to claim some of the profits resulting therefrom as they are in part due to the utilization of his property.”[52]

For St. Thomas, the root difference between a non-interest-bearing or free loan (mutuum) and an interest-bearing investment (locatio) is the axiom that a thing bears fruit for its owner (res fructificat domino). Since the ownership passes to the borrower in a free loan (mutuum), no interest may be charged, according to the Angelic Doctor, whether the loan be for production or consumption. In an investment (locatio), interest may be taken, because the ownership of the money is retained by the lender.

“Thus money has two uses. In the first (the primary use), the housewife’s kind of exchange, the use of the money goes with the ownership. When you give a man the use of the money, you give him the money itself.… In such exchanges inequality is injustice. This St. Thomas calls the proper and principal use of money, inseparable from the ownership. The trader sometimes has the use of other people’s money also, and must pay a share of profits to the owner of the money. The money can fructify only for its owner. In the trader’s hands, money is used as the material and the instrument by which profit is made. The use is separated from the ownership in every investment (secondary use). It is plain that when St. Thomas was proving that the use cannot be separated from the ownership and sold separately, he meant us to notice that he was here speaking of the first use only,… not of the use in which the owner entrusts his money to a merchant or trader to use in his business.… In the first no profit can be made by either party. In the second the trader or craftsman makes profits for the owners of the money he is using.…

“St. Thomas points out the crucial question which decides what kind of contract is made. Who now owns the money? And the test: If the money is lost, who bears that loss? He is the owner. In a loan: here is the money, to spend as you will. That makes you the owner, for I have transferred to you my right to spend it. In an investment: here is the money, to use in your business as we arranged. That leaves me the owner. In investing money in the business of production or exchange, I entrust my money to your use in the business. Your gain is the increase of business and profit from having a larger capital with which to work. My gain is a share in the profit. And the exchange between us is that I give you a trading-use of my money: you give me a proportionate share of each year’s profits when there are any.”[53]

Here it is well to draw attention to a point upon which we shall have to dwell a little more at length later on. The money about which the moral theologians and canonists speak and on which they say interest may be taken is a physical commodity. Like all fungible things it has an existence independent of the lender and borrower. Interest and extrinsic titles properly apply to money so existing, but they do not properly apply to the creation of money by the bankers. When moral theologians speak of money as a fungible thing, they suppose it to have an existence independent of the lender and the borrower. When a modern banker creates a deposit in favor of a borrower, he is not lending pre-existing money. He is bringing money into existence in the act of lending. The term interest cannot properly be applied to bank charges for the issue of bank money. “The expression bank interest.” writes Professor O’Rahilly, “is another example of an old word masquerading in a new meaning.…Borrowing, too, covers: (1) the transfer of pre-existing claims legitimately earned by the holders: (2) the creation of new money-claims.…The government does not and cannot borrow pre-existing money from the banks: all it can do is to pay them for creating new money.[54]

When bankers grant loans, they bring exchange-medium into existence, they create money. They are not simply lending exchange-medium having an existence independent of them and of the borrowers.[55] The creators, at the request of or with the permission of the state, are entitled to due remuneration for the services rendered. That is not usurious. As far back as the Fifth Lateran Council, the question was settled that a charge for working expenses was not usurious nor was it an incitement to others to practice usury. Charitable funds, called montes pietatas, were at work, lending to the poor without interest, but making a charge to cover working expenses. Without this charge, the organizers would have had to meet the perpetual drain of working expenses and bad debts, after having had to put up the initial sum for the purpose of helping the borrowers. The Pope, Leo X, gave this decision.[56] Of course, in this case, the charge was for the working expenses involved in lending pre-existing money-claims, but the principle holds good in regard to the expenses involved in issuing or creating money and keeping accounts

the proper use of money

Having seen the different ways of dealing in money, let us now give an outline of the function of money according to the principles of St. Thomas. According to the Angelic Doctor, money has been invented “for the convenience of exchange by serving as a measure of things saleable.”[57] It is, therefore, by its nature an instrument destined to help in providing that sufficiency of goods required by families for the virtuous life of their members. This it is intended to do by facilitating production and distribution, and for that purpose acting as a stable measure of value. First of all, then, money is meant for production and distribution. It is utterly against its nature if the production and distribution of goods must conform to the exigencies of money-making instead of the other way round. Money is meant to be the servant of economics, not the master, if it becomes the master, production and distribution will decay, the potentialities of the state’s resources will not be realised, and family life will suffer.

Secondly, it is the duty of the state to see that money is a stable measure of value. In other words, just as the state must maintain stable measures of weight and length, in view of commutative justice in buying and selling, so it must aim at stability of the price level, the price of a thing being the expression of its exchange-value in terms of money. “It is true,” writes St. Thomas, “that it is the same with money as with other things, namely, that one does not always get what one wants for it, because it is not always endowed with the same purchasing-power, that is, it is not always of the same value. But nevertheless, matters should be so arranged that it should be steadier in value than other things.…As a measure used for estimating the value of other things, money must keep the same value, since the value of all things must be expressed in terms of money. Thus exchanges can readily take place and, as a consequence, communications between men are facilitated.”[58]

Fluctuations in the price level make social life extremely difficult. St. Thomas insisted that stability of the price level should be the object of the state’s unceasing vigilance, though this was more difficult of attainment in his day when the exchange medium consisted mainly of metal coins, the substance of which was available in quantities not commensurate with the rate of progress in the production of goods.[59] Of course, needless to say, the state must see to it that the manipulators of money do not get control of the government. Money is meant to be an instrument of politics not the master of the state. If the government does not compel the bankers and money-changers to practice the virtue of social justice, namely, that justice which has for object the common good, the welfare of the whole nation will suffer grievously. If usury and the alteration of the price-level by alternate “boom” and “slump” are permitted to go unchecked, then the real sovereignty in the state will inevitably pass into the hands of the manipulators of money. The next stage will be a move to bring national sovereignty under the domination of some international organization subject to finance. That will make permanent and worldwide the anti-Christian perversion of order involved in the subordination of human persons to production, and of production and distribution to finance.

st. thomas and the ideal of

national self-sufficiency

In his treatise on the Governrnance of Princes, the Angelic Doctor writes: “There are two ways in which an abundance of the things it requires can be supplied to a state. The first, which we have already mentioned, is met with where the soil is so fertile that it abundantly provides for all the needs of human life. The second is by trade, by which the necessities of life are brought to the state from different places. It is quite clear that the former means is the better. For the higher a thing is in the scale of being, the more fully self-sufficient it is, since whatever needs another’s help is by that very fact shown to be defective. But that state is more fully self-sufficing which is supplied with all that it needs from its own territory, than is one which must obtain its supplies from abroad by trade. A state which has an abundance of food from its own territory is in a more dignified position than one which is supplied by merchants. It appears to be in greater security also, for the importing of supplies from abroad can be easily hindered, whether owing to the uncertain issue of wars or to the many dangers of the roads, and thus the state may be vanquished through lack of food. Again, this method is better for social morality. For the country which needs considerable imports for its support must tolerate continuous intercourse with foreigners… who, having been brought up under different laws and customs, behave in many ways differently from the inhabitants of the country, so that these latter are spurred on to act similarly, and social life is disturbed. Again, if the citizens devote their lives to trade, the way will be opened to many vices. For, since the aim of traders is especially to make money, familiarity with trade leads to the awakening of greed in the hearts of the citizens. The result is that everything in the state will be put up for sale, mutual confidence will be destroyed and an atmosphere favorable to deceit and fraud created. Everyone, growing careless about the common good, will seek only his own advantage. The cultivation of virtue will decline, since honor, the reward of virtue, will be bestowed indiscriminately upon all comers. Hence, in such a state, social morality will inevitably suffer….

“Accordingly, it is better that a state should be supplied with food and whatever it needs from its own territory than that it should be completely dependent on trade. This does not mean, however, that merchants should be altogether excluded from the state, for it is not easy to find a state so well provided with all that it needs in every department that it can do without foreign trade. Then, in addition, many of the inhabitants would lose heavily, if their surplus could not be marketed elsewhere by traders. Hence a well-balanced state will have recourse to trade and traders in moderate fashion.”[60]

Legitimate trading, then, is meant to be carried on with a view to supplementing the native resources of a country. Much of our modern trade is the result of the desire to get interest from weaker nations, by compelling them to accept loans from and buy the goods of the lending country. A modern loan from a foreign country, in addition to upsetting the price-level of the borrowing country, leaves the way open to the enslavement of the inhabitants to finance. Wars are frequently brought about by the endeavor to force a people to accept a loan, that is, to purchase goods in the creditor country. ‘‘To put it quite bluntly, the purpose of wars is to compel weaker nations to take surpluses off the hands of the stronger, running up debts, if need be, in order to pay for them. Then the threat of future war is necessary to ensure that the debts and the interest on them shall not he repudiated.”[61]

Appendix

usury and confessors

In Chapter XIX, I insist upon Pope Leo XIII’s teaching in Rerum Novarum that usury is actually being practiced under another guise by covetous men with disastrous consequences for the economic life of nations and individuals, as it has contributed powerfully to place control in the hands of a few. I there put forward as probable an explanation of what Pope Leo XIII meant by that other form of present day usury. With regard to this whole question, in addition to Canon 1543, the Instruction on Usury, sent in 1873 by the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, to its dependent bishops, Vicars and Prefects Apostolic, must be borne in mind. This instruction consists of copies of all the answers on the subject given by Rome since 1780, together with Pope Benedict XIV’s Encyclical, Vix Pervenit, of 1745, and a brief summing up of the position at the time, in his able article, Usury Sub Judice, in The Clergy Review (January, 1935), the Rev. J. B. McLaughlin. O.S.B., gives an outline of this summary as follows:

I. No profit whatever can be taken from a loan (mutuum) merely because of the lending.

II. If there is another title, not found in the very nature of every loan, profit may be taken.

III. When the only visible title to take profit or interest on a loan is that the law of the land allows it, this title can be taken as sufficient in practice, and confessors must not disquiet penitents about it so long as this question remains sub judice (undecided) and the Holy See has not explicitly decided it.[62]

IV. This tolerance cannot be invoked to cover the slightest usury exacted from the poor; nor excessive rates beyond the limits of natural justice.

V. “Excessive” rates cannot be defined by a general figure, since in each case we must consider each and every circumstance of place, person, and time.

Father McLaughlin then adds the following interesting comments: “So the problem of usury is still sub judice, and has been for centuries. In the series of answers, the warning constantly recurs that penitents are not to be disquieted about taking the legal interest, provided that they are willing to obey the decision of the Holy See when it comes. And a decision has been asked for repeatedly, but Rome has steadily refused to give it. A typical answer, in 1840: As to usury in general, consult the decrees already given. As to the excessiveness of the profit, consult the bishop, who will weigh the circumstances and the practice prevailing among conscientious men at the time of the transaction, and say what is to be done.

“The appeals for a decision arose, of course, from differences of opinion among the clergy; and Rome, as always, protected the freedom of each side to defend its own opinion on an undecided question; but not to defend extremes—that all interest is lawful, that no interest is lawful—nor to injure charity by calling the opposite opinion heretical. She also protected the freedom of the individual conscience, to take the interest which one side thought lawful. A confessor who thought it unlawful might tell penitents his private opinion, but must leave them to act on their own opinion. Similarly, a confessor who saw no harm in taking interest might express his opinion and state his reasons, but must not preach them as being the teaching of the Church. For the Church has not yet spoken.

“The position, therefore, is that there is a problem of usury which troubles consciences, and the Church has not decided it. Nor will she until discussion among theologians has been deep enough and accurate enough to lay bare the dividing line between ‘that fruit which is drawn from money by just right, and therefore can be kept both in law and in conscience; and that other fruit which is drawn from money wrongly, and therefore must be adjudged to be repaid, both by law and by conscience’.”[63]

[1]Cf. splendid article by l’abbé Journet in Nova et Vetera, 1931.

[2]Pope Pius XI, following Pope Leo XIII and Pope Pius X, orders us to go first to St. Thomas: “It was said of old to the Egyptians who were in need of corn: ‘Go to Joseph’, so to all who hunger for truth we would say, ‘Go to Thomas’ for the food of sound doctrine that will sustain the soul unto everlasting life.…There is no doubt that theology reached the apex of its dignity in the works of Aquinas, who combined an absolute knowledge of divine things with a force of intellect wonderfully fitted for philosophical argument. Wherefore, in our schools both of philosophy and theology, St. Thomas holds the supreme mastership.… And since he is so clearly perfect in his theology, he gives secure reasons and precepts, not only for the direction of man’s individual life, but likewise for domestic and civil society. Thus he is our source for economic and political science.… If in private, in public, and in international relations all these things that Thomas lays down were kept holy and inviolate, nothing more would be needed to reconcile man to ‘The Peace of Christ in the kingdom of Christ’ which the whole world so greatly desires” (Encyclical Letter, Studiorum Deum, 1923).

[3]Encyclical Letter, On the Persecution of the Church in Germany (1937).

[4]De Regimine Principum, lib. I, cap. XV. The authentic portion of the work does not extend beyond the middle of the fourth chapter of the second book. The rest is the work of Ptolemy of Lucca. For a clear outline of the whole question, cf. the Introduction to the translation of the authentic portion in the St. Michael’s College philosophical texts, by Rev. Gerald B. Phelan (Sheed and Ward). Cf. also article by Professor A. O’Rahilly in I. E. Record, June, 1928.

It is well to mention in passing that the author of the non-authentic portion of the De Regimine Principium, after having gone so far as to say (Lib. III, c. 10) that the spiritual power and action of St. Peter and his successors gives existence, power and action to the temporal jurisdiction of princes, immediately adds that in all the examples he mentions, the Popes have intervened in temporal matters only on account of some breach of the moral law (ratione delicti). Cf. La Juridiction de l’Église stir la Cité, p. 189, where l’abbé Journet quotes St. Robert Bellarmine.

[5]2 Cor. 5:6.

[6]Rom. 6:23.

[7]St. Thomas uses the word “king” for the ruler, remarking that the term “king” is applied to the “supreme ruler in temporal affairs.”

[8]Encyclical Letter of Pope Pius XI, Studiorum Deum, On St. Thomas as Guide of Studies. (Cf. IIa IIae, Q. 47, a.11: IIa IIae, Q.50. a. 3.

[9]Philosophic Economique, by J.Vialatoux, p. 78.

[10]Encyclical Letter, Studiorum Deum.

[11]Encyclical Letter, Quadregesimo Anno.

[12]Comment, in Ethic., Lib. VIII, Lect. XII. “Societas autem domestica… est prior quam societas civilis… unde patet quad homo-naturalius est animal conjugale quam politicum.” (The family… is prior to civil society… whence it manifestly follows that the demand for family life is more deeply rooted in human nature than that for civil society).

[13]Encyclical Letter of Pope Leo XIII, Arcanum Divinae Sapientiae (1880).

[14]“Societas domestica est etiam imagis necessaria (quam societas civilis) quia societas domestiea ordinatur ad actus necessarios vitae, scilicet generationem et nutritionem” (Comment. In Ethic. Loc. cit.).

[15]Cf. article by l’abbé Journet in La Vie Intellectuelle. October–December, 1929.

[16]Encyclical Letter, Divini Illius Magistri.

[17]Cf. Notes by Père Spicq, O.P., in the translation of the Summa Theologica published by the Revue des Jeunes, La Justice, vol. I, p. 272. The Commentary of St. Thomas on the Politics of Aristotle is authentic up to and including Lib. III, Lect. VI; the rest is the work of Petrus do Alvernia. Cf. article by Professor A. O’Rahilly in I. E. Record, December, 1927.

[18]De Regimine Principum, Lib. I, cap. XV.

[19]Ia IIae, Q.4, a.7.

[20]Ia IIae, Q.2, a.l. c.

“The Philosopher (Aristotle) says in Politics, cap. 5 and 6, that-bread, wine, and the like are natural wealth, while money is artificial wealth” (IIa IIae, Q.188, a.7, ad 5).

[21]Comment, in Politics., Lect. VII.

[22]Comment. in Ethics, Lib. V, Lect, IX.

[23]The process of exchange by means of an exchange medium with an intrinsic value may be said to be only a simplified form of barter. We shall see later that one of the defects of metals like gold and silver as currency or exchange-medium is the difficulty of obtaining enough of them to increase the flow of money in proportion to the people’s increasing ability to produce real wealth. Cf. Money Creators, by G. W. Coogan, p 15.

[24]“Cum denarii non sint a natura, ut dictum est, (ars) nummularia quae est permutatio denariorum, non est a natura” (Comment. in Polit., Lib. I, Leet. VII). The term ars campsoria (qua utuntur campsores denariorum) is also employed by St. Thomas to designate the same art or habitus.

[25]IIa IIae, Q.77, a.4, c.

[26]Ibid. St.Thomas speaks of exchanging money for money (denariorum ad denarios) or goods for money (quarumcumque rerum ad denarios), for he is treating of trading for profit in general.

[27]De Cambiis, cap. 5. Of course, as we shall see later, settlement of international trade balances must be controlled by the government of a country, in order to prevent attacks on the currency of the country and the manipulation of its price level for private gain. The government is bound to protect the currency and keep the price level stable for the sake of the common good.

[28]Père Spicq. O.P., in his note on IIa IIae. Q.77, a.4, in the edition published by La Revue des Jeunes, points out that this second part of the article is something new and unparalleled in St. Thomas’s writings. It is the first time that the Angelic doctor sets out to justify commerce and trading as such, he does it discreetly but clearly and definitely. In the first part of the article he renews the condemnation of it by Aristotle, which he had accepted in Commentary on the Politics (Lib. I, Lect. VIII): et ideo ista nummularia juste vituperatur, non enim ista pecuniatria est secundum naturum etc. In the second part, he stands out against the authority of Aristotle, and justifies the commercial development of the 13th century. He takes account of the common good of society, which Aristotle had failed to keep before his mind in this connection.

[29]Ia IIao, Q.30, a.J, e. “The universal which reason grasps is in a certain way infinite, inasmuch as it contains potentially an infinite number of singulars or individuals ‘‘ (Ibid., ad 2),

[30]Ibid

[31]Cf. Comment. in Polit.. Lib. f, cap. G.

[32]Comment, in Polit., Lib. 1, Lect. VIII.

[33]Ia. IIae, Q.2, a. I, ad 3.

St. Thomas More alludes to this folly in his own inimitable fashion: “And of a truth while a man desireth riches not for any good godly purpose but for only worldly wealth, it must needs be that he shall have little conscience in the getting; but by all evil ways that he can invent shall labor to get them and then shall he either niggardly heap them up together (which is as you wot well damnable) or wastefulIy misspend them about worldly pomp, pride and flattery with occasion of many sins more. And that is yet much more damnable” (The Third Book of Comfort Against Tribulation, by St. Thomas More, Chap. XII).

[34]“Maxime praeter naturam’’ (Comment, in Pol., Lib. I, Lect. VIII)

[35]The finis operis, to use the scholastic term, that is, the gain or profit (duerum tamea quod est negotionis finis), is also the finis operantis. The finis operantis should be the common good (…cum aliquis negotiationi intendit propter publicam utilitatem). Cf. IIa IIae. Q.77. a.4, with commentary of Père Spicq, O.P. in the edition of La Revue des Jeunes.

[36]De Regimine Principum, Book II, Chapter III. We shall treat of this later.

[37]De Malo, Q.13, a.4. sol. 15.

[38]II a. IIae, Q.78, a.l: a.2. ad 5.

[39]Cf, Usury sub Judicae, by Rev. J. B. McLaughlin, O.S.B., in The Clergy Review, January. 1935. This article is an excellent exposition of the Church’s teaching and of the doctrine of St. Thomas. It is in perfect agreement with the conclusions of Père Spicq, O.P., in his notes on IIa IIae, Q.78, in the Edition of La Revue des Jeunes.

[40]See Merkelbach, O. P, Summa Theologiae Moralis, vol. II, no. 573. Noldin, S.J., De Praeceptis no. 577, shows clearly how usury is against the natural law, and answers objections that might be made to this teaching.

[41]Codex Juris Canonici, Can. 1543. “If a fungible thing is given to someone to be his, and he is to return the like quantity of the same goods later on, no profit can be taken by reason of this contract.” Fungible things are those of which one may be freely used instead of the other in paying debts or making restitution. The individual object in such cases is a matter of indifference provided the quantity and the quality be satisfactory, for example, wine, wheat, money. A fungible thing, of course, has an existence independent of lender and borrower.

[42]This is usury in the technical sense. The word is also used to designate an exorbitant rate of interest, even though there may be an extrinsic title. “Whatever is taken beyond what an extrinsic title allows seems to be taken simply on account of the loan itself. Cf Merkelbach, op. cit., no. 572.

[43]IIa IIae. Q.78, a.l. With regard to the comparison between this text of the Summa and III Sent., dist. 37, q. 1, art. 61, cf. Père Spicq, O.P., op. cit., p. 475.

[44]Encyclical Letter, Vix pervenit (1745). A decree of the Holy Office (29th July, 1836), approved by Pope Gregory XVI, declared that this Letter, originally sent only to the Bishops of Italy, was binding on the universal Church.

Cf. Père Spicq, O.P., op. cit., p. 478, and L’Encyclique Vix Pervenit by l’Abbé Tiberghien, p. 29.

[45]Cf. article by Rev. G. B. O’Toole in Catholic Worker (U.S.A.); Père Spicq, O.P., op. cit., p. 467.

[46]“Qui habet pecuniam… habet lucrum in virtute” (Ia IIae. Q. 82, a.4, sol. 1–2). Cf. Père Spicq. op. cit., pp. 350. 479, 483.

[47]“Ad quartum dicendum quod pecunia. non potest vendi pro pecunia ampliori quam sit quantitas pecuniae mutuatae, quae restitutenda est.” (IIa IIae, Q. 78, a.2, ad 1).

[48]Article by Father McLaughlin, O.S. B., p. 21. With regard to the question of the lapse of time, cf. notes by Père Spicq in the Edition of La Revue des Jeunes, p. 464.

[49]La Traité “de usure” deRobert de Courçon, pp. vi-vii, by G.Lefèvre.

[50]Père Spicq. O.P., deals with the question of lucram cessans (gain sacrificed by the lender) as an extrinsic title on pp. 468, 469, 484.

[51]Article by Rev. G. B. O’Toole, S.T.D., in Catholic Worker, U.S.A.

[52]This principle governing the second use of money is expressed in the Code of Canon Law: “But in lending a fungible thing it is not in itself wrong to stipulate for the legal interest unless this is known to be excessive, or even for a higher interest if there be a just and adequate reason” (Canon 1543). Notice the distinction between the giving (or the transfer of ownership) of a fungible thing in the first part, of the Canon (quoted in note 41) and the lending of it in the second part. Cf. article by Rev, J. B. McLaughlin, O.S.B., p. 12: Père Spicq, op. cit., pp. 349, 350.

[53]Article in The Clergy Review, Jan. 1935, by Rev. J. B. McLaughlin, O. S. B., pp. 19, 20, 21.

[54]Money, pp. 102, 561, 360.

“Money, as such, apart from its material record, is something immaterial, a moral relationship instituted by man. It is a socially recognized right-to-buy transferable from one person to another. It is issued or created as a person makes a promise or creates a contractual relationship. The state, representing the community, issues money, which is usually recorded on bits of paper or pieces of metal, but may be recorded merely by a few figures in ink on the books of the Central Bank. The banks issue money by bank notes and still more by mere entries on their books, which we transfer to one another by checks, that is, by directing the banker to alter his book entries’’ (Professor O’Rahilly in The Standard, April 17, 1942).

[55]With regard to creation of money or exchange-medium by bankers, cf. Money, pp. 80, 118, 290, 298, 477, 480, by Professor O’Rahilly.

[56]Inter multiplices (May 4, 1515).

[57]Ia IIae, Q.2, a.l, c.

[58]Comment, in Ethic., Lib. V, Lect. IX.

[59]Père Spicq, O.P., op. oit., p. 431, mentions the monetary reforms of St. Louis, King of France, as contemporaneous with St. Thomas’s insistence on the necessity of the stability of the price level. He also alludes to the rise in prices in the second half of the 13th century, in spite of the increase in production, because silver and gold were made available in still greater abundance.

[60]Op. cit., Lib. II, cap. III.

[61]The Role of Money, by Frederick Soddy p. 15.

[62]Donec quaestio haec sub judice pendeat, nec S. Sedes ipsam explicite definierit.

[63]Benedict XIV, Vix pervenit.

Chapter IV

Program of Integral Acceptance of the Kingship of Christ

social or practical modernism

Many acknowledge in theory the paramount rights of God and their own corresponding duties. They know that Christ the King, by the voice of the Catholic Church, has set forth the Divine Plan embodying those rights, but in practice they act as if they had never been proclaimed. They know that they should stand for those rights as one united body under Christ their head, but instead, they allow themselves to be pulled hither and thither by the organized naturalistic forces working against the Divine Plan for Order, and they pay little or no heed to the fact that all those effects are resulting in the more widespread treatment of human beings as mere individuals, not as members of Christ. This contrast between theory and practice was deplored in striking terms by Pope Pius XI in the Encyclical Letter. On the Peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ. “How many there are,” he wrote, “who accept and profess the Catholic teaching in matters regarding civil authority and the duty of obeying it, regarding the rights of property or the rights and duties of agricultural and industrial laborers, the mutual relations between states or between employers and employed, regarding the relations between the ecclesiastical and civil power, the rights of the Holy See and the Roman Pontiff, the prerogatives of bishops, and, finally, the rights of the creator, Redeemer and Lord, Christ himself, over men and nations. Yet these very same men, in their writings and pronouncements and in their whole manner of life, act as if the teaching and oft-repeated precepts of the sovereign Pontiffs Leo XIII, Pius X, and Benedict XV had lost their efficacy or were completely out of date. In all this We recognize a kind of moral, juridical and social Modernism, and We condemn it as strongly as We do dogmatic Modernism. Those teachings and precepts to which We have referred must be insisted upon, and the ardor of faith and divine charity, which alone can secure their proper understanding and observance, must be aroused in the souls of all men. In the education of Christian Youth, it is Our wish that these things be particularly attended to, especially in the case of those who aspire to Holy Orders.”[1]

Having studied the meaning of Christ’s Kingship in its integrity and the correct notions of politics and economics, let us now see what the acceptance of the fulness of Christ’s Kingship will mean in practice.

social acceptance of the divine plan

First of all, states and nations are meant to acknowledge the Catholic Church as the supernatural and supranational Mystical Body of Christ and to unite with Christ as Priest in the renewal of the humble submission of Calvary in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. States and nations as such, that is, as organized developments of human life dependant on God, are bound to worship God in the way he has indicated that he wants to be worshipped.” It is a sin for the state not to have a care for religion… or out of many forms of religion to adopt that one which chimes in with its fancy: for we are bound absolutely to worship God in the way which he has shown to be his will.’’[2]

Pope Leo XIII in his Encyclical Letter, On Human Liberty, writes: “Since, then, the profession of one religion is necessary in the state, that religion must be professed which alone is true and which can be recognised without difficulty, especially in Catholic states, because the marks of truth are, as it were, engraven upon it.[3] He had previously, in the same Encyclical, stigmatised false “liberty of worship, as it is called” saying: “This kind of liberty, if considered in relation to the state, clearly implies that there is no reason why the state should offer any homage to God, or should desire any public recognition of him: that no one form of worship is to be preferred to another, but that all stand on an equal footing, no account being taken of the religion of the people, even if they profess the Catholic Faith.…Justice, therefore, forbids, and reason itself forbids, the state to be godless, or to adopt a line of action which would end in godlessness—namely, to treat the various religions (as they call them alike, and to bestow upon them promiscuously equal rights and privileges.” Pope Pius XII points out that where “the divine authority and the influence of its laws are set aside, it necessarily follows that the civil power usurps those absolute…rights which belong to the creator alone.”[4]

We must grasp firmly the great truth that God himself came down into the world and elaborated a Divine Plan for mankind’s ordered return to him, through membership of his Mystical Body, the Catholic Church. When we realize that the Catholic Church is the one society divinely instituted for return to God, then we shall readily see that the order of the world demands that the state, being a creature of God, shall acknowledge the Church. Then, too, we shall have no difficulty in understanding what Pope Leo XIII says in his Encyclical Letter. On Catholicity in these United States: “Thanks for the prosperous condition of Catholicity are due to the equity of the laws which obtain in America and to the customs of your well-ordered Republic. For the Church amongst you, unopposed by the Constitution and government of your nation, fettered by no hostile legislation, protected against violence by the common laws and the impartiality of the tribunals, is free to live and act without hindrance. Yet, though all this is true, it would be very erroneous to draw the conclusion that in America is to be sought the type of the most desirable status of the Church, or that it would be universally lawful or expedient for the state and Church to be, as in America, separated and divorced.[5]

“That Church and state ought to be separated is an absolutely false and pernicious error. Based as it is on the principle that the state should not make profession of any religious worship, this doctrine is, first of all, a grave insult to Almighty God. For the creator of mankind is also the founder of human societies, and he preserves them just as he maintains individuals in existence. To give him due honor, we owe him then not only private veneration, but public, and social worship. Besides, this thesis involves the unconcealed denial of the supernatural order. It limits the action of the state exclusively to the pursuit of public prosperity during this life, though this is only the proximate raison d’etre of political societies.…Since the present temporal order of things is subordinate to the conquest of man’s supreme and absolute good, eternal happiness, the civil authority ought not only not to hinder that victory but should efficaciously contribute thereto.[6]

As an example of the type of relation which should exist between Church and state, we may take the Lateran Convention: “This might well be a striking example to all,” says Pope Pius XI, “of how, even in this Our own day (in which, sad to say, the absolute separation of the civil power from the Church, and indeed from every religion, is so often taught), one supreme authority can be united and associated with the other without detriment to the rights and supreme power of either, thus protecting Christian parents from pernicious evils and menacing ruin.”[7]

In a famous pastoral letter, Cardinal Mercier wrote as follows: “In the name of the Gospel, and in the light of the Encyclicals of the last four popes, Gregory XVI, Pius IX, Leo XIII and Pius X, I do not hesitate to affirm that this indifference to religion, which puts on the same level the religion of divine origin and the religions invented by man, in order to include them all in the same scepticism, is the blasphemy which, far more than the sins of individuals and families, calls down God’s chastisements on society.”[8]

acknowledgment of the spiritual kingship of the church’s rulers

As a consequence of the recognition of the Divine Plan, states and nations will acknowledge the right of the rulers of the Catholic Church, the Pope and the bishops, as the visible representatives of the spiritual Kingship of Christ, to decide what favors or opposes the divine life of grace coming from Christ as Priest. The development of the social life of a state or of the national life of a nation is not the complete final end of the state or nation. The complete final end of every state is the development of the national life in such wise, as not only not to hinder but to favor the supernatural life of its citizens. National life is thus meant to favor the living of life as members of Christ. Each nation has its own way of being Christlike, as we see in its fully representative members, its saints.

Loyalty to the Church will lead to loving acceptance of the guidance of her rulers. Pope Leo XIII, in his Encyclical Letter, On the Christian Constitution of States, points out that “the Church of Christ is the true and sole teacher of virtue and guardian of morals.”[9] He enlarges upon this and upon the role of the Pope and the bishops as spiritual guides and as rulers, in his Letter, On the Chief Duties of Christians as Citizens: “In defining the limits of the obedience owed to the pastors of souls, but most of all to the authority of the Roman Pontiff, it must not be supposed that it is only to be yielded in relation to dogmas of which the obstinate denial cannot be disjoined from the crime of heresy. Nay, further, it is not enough sincerely and firmly to assent to doctrines which, though not defined by any solemn pronouncement of the Church, are by her proposed to belief, as divinely revealed, in her common and universal teaching, and which the Vatican Council declared are to be believed with Catholic and divine faith. But this likewise must be reckoned amongst the duties of Christians, that then allow themselves to be ruled and directed by the authority and leadership of the bishops, and above all of the Apostolic See.…Wherefore, it belongs to the Pope to judge authoritatively what things the Sacred Oracles contain, as well as what doctrines are in harmony, and what in disagreement, with them; also for the same reason, to show forth what things are to be accepted as right, and what to be rejected as worthless: what it is necessary to do and what to avoid doing, in order to attain eternal salvation. For otherwise, there would be no sure interpreter of the commands of God, nor would there be any safe guide showing man the way he should live.”[10]

“If the natural law, “writes Pope Leo XIII, “enjoins on us to love devotedly and to defend the country in which we had birth, and in which we were brought up, so that every good citizen hesitates not to face death for his native land, very much more is it the urgent duty of Christians to be ever quickened by like feelings towards the Church. For the Church is the holy city of the living God, born of God himself, and by him built up and established.…We are bound then to love dearly the country whence we have received the means of enjoyment that this mortal life affords, but we have a much more urgent obligation to love, with ardent have, the Church to which we owe the life of the soul, a life that will endure for ever. For it is fitting to prefer the good of the soul to the well-being of the body, inasmuch as duties towards God are of a more hallowed character than those towards men. Moreover, if we would judge aright, the supernatural love for the Church and the natural love of our own country proceed from the same eternal principle, since God himself is their author and originating cause, consequently, between the duties they respectively enjoin there can be no conflict.”[11]

Pope Pius XI has the same doctrine. “The right order of Christian charity,” he writes. “does not disapprove of lawful love of country, and a sentiment of justifiable nationalism; on the contrary, it controls, sanctifies, and enlivens them. If, however, egoism, abusing this love of country and exaggerating this sentiment of nationalism, insinuates itself into the relations between people and people, there is no excess that will not seem justified: and that which between individuals would be judged blameworthy by all is now considered lawful and praiseworthy, if it is done in the name of this exaggerated nationalism. Instead of the great law of love and human brotherhood, which embraces and holds in a single family all nations and peoples with one Father who is in heaven, there enters hatred, driving all to destruction. In public life, sacred principles, the guide of all social intercourse, are trampled upon.”[12]

Again the same Pontiff writes: “The Church founded by the Redeemer is one—for all peoples and nations. Beneath her vault, that like God’s firmament arches over the whole earth, there is a place and home for all peoples and tongues, there is room for the development of all the particular qualities, points of excellence, missions, and callings, that God has assigned to individuals and peoples.’’[13]

The duty of Catholics to their native country is not merely a negative one, namely the avoidance of exaggerated nationalism, which is one of the consequences of the revolt against the Divine Plan for Order. Catholics must positively love their native land and must strive to defend it not only against external enemies, but also against the naturalistic forces that are striving to disrupt its internal organization.

the duty of states towards religious orders and congregations

In a state fully respectful of the longing of Christ the King for the diffusion of the divine life of grace, and the bringing of all men into subjection to his sacred royalty, the religious orders and congregations of the Catholic Church will be respected and their action favored. The Contemplative Orders discharge their function of loving and serving the Blessed Trinity, which is humanity’s highest duty. The active orders and congregations aim at gradually permeating society with the idea of membership of Christ’s Mystical Body. Pope Leo XIII in his Letter of Dec. 23rd, 1900, to the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris, points out the origin and object of the religious orders. “The religious orders, as every one knows,” writes the learned Pontiff, “have their origin and the reason of their existence in those sublime evangelical counsels which our divine Redeemer gave to those, who, in every succeeding age, would attain to Christian perfection—to those brave and generous souls who by prayer and contemplation, by pious austerities and the observance of certain rules, endeavor to climb to the highest summits of the spiritual life. Born and cradled under the action of the Church, whose authority gives sanction to their government and administration, the religious Orders form a chosen portion of the flock of Jesus Christ.…Their vows, made freely and spontaneously,… have ever been regarded and respected by people in every age as sacred things and sources of the rarest virtue. Their object is twofold: first, the raising of those who take them to a higher degree of perfection: and secondly, by purifying and strengthening their souls, to prepare them for a ministry which is exercised for the everlasting salvation of their neighbor and for the alleviation of the numberless miseries of humanity.…Some, devoted to teaching, instruct the young in secular knowledge and the principles of religious virtue and duty, upon which public peace and the welfare of states absolutely depend. Others, consecrated to various works of charity, afford effective aid to every physical and moral misery in the numberless houses wherein they tend the sick, the infirm and the aged, the orphan, the deranged, and the incurable, without allowing the danger or unpleasantness of their work or the ingratitude they may meet with to dampen their courage or check their ardor.”

The same Pontiff had previously laid down the duty of states towards the religious Orders “which have arisen by the Church’s authority and the piety of Christian men,” saying: “In their religious aspect, they claim rightly to be responsible to the Church alone. The rulers of the state accordingly have no rights over them, nor can they claim any share in their control; on the contrary, it is the duty of the state to respect and cherish them, and, if need be, to defend them from attack.[14]

In a striking passage, Pope Leo XIII speaks of the ultimate reason for the persecution of religious, namely, the organized opposition to the supernatural life, in which secret societies play so important a part. “The sad reality,” he writes, “is brought only the more vividly before men’s eyes, that the true reason for which religious are persecuted is that deep-seated hatred which the world cherishes against the Catholic Church, the City of God: that the real intention is if possible, to nullify in society the healing action of Jesus Christ from which such beneficent results universally flow. No one is ignorant of the fact that religious of both sexes form a chosen body in the City of God: that they represent particularly the spirit and the mortification of Jesus Christ: that, by the practice of the Evangelical Counsels, they tend to carry Christian virtue to the summit of perfection and that, in a multitude of ways, they powerfully second the action of the Church. Hence it is not astonishing that today, as in other times, under other iniquitous forms, the City of the World rises against them, and chiefly those men who, by a sacrilegious compact, are most intimately united and most servilely bound to him who is Prince of this world.”[15]

the duty of states with

regard to secret societies

What then should be the attitude of fully ordered states to secret societies, and particularly to Freemasonry? It should be one of uncompromising opposition. To enter a society, in which men surrender their wills blindly and unreservedly to the heads of the society, in other words, to profess unqualified obedience to them, is an immoral act, contrary to man’s God-given rational nature. Men thereby implicitly declare that they are ready to carry out unquestioningly whatever their leaders enjoin, no matter what may be its relation to the moral law. Such an act is more irrational still if the leaders are unknown, and matters are still worse if an oath is taken to maintain secrecy about the proceedings of the society and to obey those unknown leaders. “No man has a right to put himself under the command of another without the reserve of his own conscience and of the moral law.…A man who takes an unconditional oath in a secret society may never be told to do anything wrong. That is not the point. By such an oath he binds himself to do anything without reserve, whether it be right or wrong.…[16] There is no parallel between an oath taken in a secret society and the vows taken by religious. “The vow of obedience in religious orders is in no sense a blind or unreserved vow. It is a vow taken with vision and reserve. It is a vow to obey on condition that what is commanded is according to the Constitutions of the Order, all of which must be explained to the Novice before he is allowed to pronounce his vows. Hence the vow of obedience in a religious order applies only to actions in which there is no sin. A member of a religious order, if ordered to go against the ordinary laws of morality, to tell a lie, for instance, would not only not be bound to obey, but would be bound not to obey.”[17] Moreover, the Constitutions of every religious order and congregation are guaranteed by the Church in the name of Christ the King.

The faithful of the Catholic Church are forbidden under pain of excommunication to become members of the Masonic Society or similar associations plotting against the Church or the civil authorities. This excommunication is incurred ipso facto and absolution from it is reserved to the Holy See in simple form.[18] The faithful are gravely forbidden, though not under pain of excommunication, to become members of secret societies which oblige their associates to take an oath never to divulge the secrets of the association and to give unqualified obedience to hidden leaders.[19]

The supreme perversion of order in this respect seems to be reached by entering the Masonic Society. It is already a revolt against Christ the King to profess blind and unqualified obedience to any body of men. but it is a still more heinous revolt against him, when one does so by becoming a member of a society which makes open profession of naturalism. ‘The Masonic Society not only inculcates indifference to the divine life of grace, but puts itself above the Mystical Body of Christ. As there are only two camps here below, to revolt against Christ the King is to enter the camp of Satan.

“After the human race,” writes Pope Leo XIII, “through the envious efforts of Satan, had been guilty of the unspeakable crime of turning away from God, the creator and the giver of heavenly blessings, it became divided into two distinct and mutually hostile camps. One of these steadily combats for truth and virtue, the other for all that is opposed to virtue and truth. The former is the Kingdom of God on earth, namely, the true Church of Jesus Christ.…The latter is the Kingdom of Satan, under whose sway and in whose power are all those who, following the baneful example of their leader and of our first parents, refuse to obey the divine and eternal law.…The two armies have always been engaged in conflict down the ages.… in our day, however, the partisans of evil seem to be drawing closer together and, as a body, to be animated with extraordinary energy, under the leadership and with the assistance of the widely diffused and strongly organized association known as Freemasonry. No longer concealing their designs, with the greatest audacity they are egging one another on to attack God himself.…

“From the anti-social character of the errors We have mentioned, it is clear that very great dangers lie ahead for states.…Nay more this complete change and revolution are being deliberately planned and openly extolled by numerous allied bodies of Communists and Socialists. Now, to their plans, not only is the Masonic Sect not opposed, but it looks upon them with the greatest favor, since its principle tenets are quite in harmony with them.…Knowing these things, both princes and people would act in a manner completely in accord with prudent statesmanship and absolutely indispensable for public welfare, if, instead of uniting with the Freemasons to overthrow the Church, they joined forces with the Church to resist their attacks.…To your fidelity and vigilance We commend in a special manner the young, who are the hope of human society. Let their formation be the chief object of your solicitude and let there be no limit to the zeal and watchfulness you display in order to keep young people from masters and schools where the pestilential influence of the Masonic sect is to be feared. Under your guidance, let parents, religious teachers and priests having the charge of souls, avail of every opportunity, in their explanations of Christian Doctrine, to warn their children and their pupils of the criminal nature of these societies, so that they may learn in good time to beware of the many deceitful artifices by which their recruiting-agents are accustomed to ensnare people. And those who prepare the young for the fitting reception of the sacraments will act wisely, if they induce each and all of them to take the resolution never to enter any society without the knowledge of their parents, or the advice of their parish priest or spiritual director.[20]

“Some seem to imagine that these Papal Constitutions do not hold where the (Masonic or similar) sects are permitted by the civil powers.…Such subterfuges are vain, as is evident from the words of Pope Pius IX: ‘It is Our wish that the Masonic Society and all associations of the same class be held as forbidden and reprobate by all tbe faithful of Christ to whatever condition or social standing they may belong, and in whatsoever country they may be.’…Consequently these associations are to be held as reprobate and forbidden, because… they are of their own nature unnatural and unlawful. For…by unnatural and treacherous means, they set up within the bosom of the state another organism completely distinct from the natural and lawful organism of the state.”[21]

Pope Pius IX pointed out how opposed to the rights of God are the so-called “liberties” of conscience and of the press: “You well know, Venerable brethren, that there are many at the present time, who, applying to civil society the impious and absurd principle of naturalism, as it is called, dare to proclaim that the best interests of the state and the progress of civilization absolutely demand that human society should he constituted and governed without any consideration for religion, just as if it did not exist, or at least that no distinction should be made between true and false religions.…Given this utterly false idea of the constitution of society, they do not hesitate to put forward the view which is not only opposed to the Catholic Church, but very pernicious for the salvation of souls, an opinion which Gregory XVI, Our predecessor, called absurd. This is the view that liberty of conscience and of worship is the strict right of every man, a right which should be proclaimed and affirmed by law in every properly constituted state, and that, in addition, citizens have the right to the fullest liberty, unrestrained by ecclesiastical or civil authority, of expressing and publishing, whether orally or in print or any other way, for all to hear and read, any ideas they may have. When they rashly make these statements, they do not realize or recall to mind that they are advocating a liberty of perdition (St. Augustine, Ep. 105).[22]

Pope Gregory XVI spoke of the liberty of the press or of publication as “the most deadly, and most execrable that can be conceived.” He deplores the fact that men are to be found who hold that the “deluge of error to which this so-called liberty gives rise is abundantly compensated by the publication of an odd book in defense of truth and religion.” “What sane man,’’ he adds, “will ever dare to hold that poisons should be freely spread abroad, publicly sold and hawked about, nay even, swallowed greedily, because forsooth, there exists a remedy to which one may have recourse and which has occasionally saved from death those who have had recourse to it.”[23] Again. Pope Leo XIII insists that “it is contrary to reason that error and truth should have equal rights.”[24]

acknowledgment of the dignity of christian marriage

Given whole-hearted allegiance to Christ the King, states and nations will recognize the unity and indissolubility of the marriage contract, foundation of the Christian family, which in its turn is the nucleus of society. If we seek the reason why the marriage contract is one and indissoluble, it is. in the last resort, because the union of husband and wife is meant to mirror forth to the world the union of Christ and his Mystical Body. St. Paul was called upon by God to be the Apostle of a Mystery, namely, the great mystery of Christ and the Church which is symbolically expressed in Christian marriage: “the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the Church” (Eph. 5:23). As the Church can never be separated from Christ, so Christian marriage is indissoluble. Divorce is Satan’s supreme effort to get human beings to deny and deride that union, but every sneer at “old-fashioned ideas” of marriage and every legislative enactment which glorifies the unmarried companion and puts her on the same level as the legitimate wife and helpmate are steps taken under his direction, consciously or unconsciously.[25]

Innumerable are the texts in which the sovereign Pontiffs have exalted Christian marriage. Only a few will be quoted. “Marriage,” writes Pope Leo XIII, “is a sacrament, because it is a holy sign which gives grace, showing forth an image of the Mystic Nuptials of Christ with the Church.…Since the husband represents Christ, and since the wife represents the Church, let there always be, both in him who commands and in her who obeys, a heaven-born love guiding both in their respective duties. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the Church.…Divorces are in the highest degree hostile to the prosperity of families and states, springing as they do from the depraved morals of the people, and, as experience shows us, opening out a way to every kind of evil-doing alike in public and in private life.”[26] “If we wish,” writes in his turn Pope Pius XI, “with all reverence to inquire into the intimate reason of this divine decree (of indissolubility), Venerable brethren, we shall easily see it in the mystical signification of Christian marriage which is fully and perfectly verified ‘in consummated marriage between Christians. For as the Apostle says in his Epistle to the Ephesians (5:32), the marriage of Christians recalls that most perfect union which exists between Christ and the Church.”[27]

Pope Pius XII depicts the happiness of truly Christian family life and deplores the ravages of divorce, in a lovely passage of his Letter to the Hierarchy of the United States in 1939: “What can there be on earth more serene and joyful than the Christian family? Taking its origin at the altar of the Lord, where love has been proclaimed a holy and indissoluble bond, the Christian family, nourished in the same love by supernal grace, is consolidated and receives increase.…Tranquil walls resound with no quarrelling voices nor do they witness the secret martyrdom which comes when hidden infidelity is laid bare: unquestioning trust turns aside the slings of suspicion: sorrow is assuaged and joy is heightened by mutual affection. Within those sacred precincts, children are considered not heavy burdens but sweet pledges of love: no reprehensible motive of convenience, no seeking after sterile pleasure bring about the frustration of the gift of life, nor cause to fall into disuse the sweet names of brother and sister… . It is also supremely necessary to see to it that the dogma of the unity and indissolubility of matrimony be known in all its religious importance, and that it is sacredly respected by those who marry.…Oh! If only your country had come to know from the experience of others rather than from examples at home, of the accumulation of ills which derive from the plague of divorce!”

recognition of education as the formation of members of christ

The Christian family is the cell prepared by God for the formation of children as members of Christ. Accordingly, where the rule of Christ the King is fully accepted, the whole educational system of the country will aim, above all, at inculcating the great reality of membership of Our Lord’s Mystical Body. “The proper and immediate end of Christian education,” writes Pope Pius XI, “is to co-operate with divine grace in forming the true and perfect Christian, that is, to form Christ himself in those regenerated by Baptism, according to the emphatic expression of the Apostle: ‘My little children, of whom I am in labor again, until Christ be formed in you.’[28] For the true Christian must live a supernatural life in Christ…and display it in all his actions that the life also of Jesus may be made manifest in our mortal flesh.’[29]

“The family holds directly from the creator the mission and hence the right to educate the offspring, a right inalienable because inseparably joined to the strict obligation, a right anterior to any right whatever of civil society and of the state, and therefore inviolable on the part of any power on earth.[30] All other educators are simply co-operators and auxiliaries of the parents in the formation of Christ in children. Pope Leo XIII insists that the rights of God impose duties on parents to educate their children properly. To these duties correspond inviolable human rights, which no power on earth can whittle down.[31]…“A teacher never is and never can be a civil servant and should never regard himself or allow himself to be so regarded. Whatever authority he may possess to teach and control children and to claim their respect and obedience, comes to him from God, through the parents, and not through the state, except in so far as the state is acting on behalf of the parents.”[32]

To form Jesus in the young, his life of grace and the Divine Plan for its communication to the world must be the central point in the teaching of every subject, as far as possible. “The mere fact that a school,” writes Pope Pius XI, “gives some religious instruction (often extremely stinted) does not bring it into accord with the rights of the Church and of the Christian family, or make it a fit place for Catholic students. To be this, it is necessary that all the teaching and the whole organization of the school, and its teachers, syllabus, and text books in every branch, be regulated by the Christian spirit, under the direction and maternal supervision of the Church; so that religion may be in very truth the foundation and crown of the youth’s entire training; and this in every grade of school, not only the elementary, but the intermediate and the higher institutions of learning as well. To use the words of Leo XIII; ‘It is necessary not only that religious instruction be given to the young at certain fixed times, but also that every other subject taught, be permeated with Christian piety. If this is wanting, if this sacred atmosphere does not pervade and warm the hearts of masters and scholars alike, little good can be expected from any kind of learning, and considerable harm, will often be the consequence’.”[33]

What a difference it would make, for example, in the teaching of History, if it were taught from God’s point of view and if its theme were the acceptance and rejection by states and nations of the Mystical Body of Christ, with an account of the consequences ! Again, such points as: the lengthy naturalistic resistance of the Roman Empire to God’s Plan for order by its persecution of the Mystical Body of Christ, with its own consequent inevitable exhaustion; the development of a new literature with a loftier note under the action of supernatural charity; the gradual permeation of Roman Law with the Catholic spirit, all these would be stressed in the teaching of Latin.

Particular attention would be paid to philosophy. Pope Pius XI in the Encyclical, On the Christian Education of Youth, from which we have been quoting, says; “The noble traditions of the past require that the youth committed to Catholic schools be fully instructed in the letters and sciences in accordance with the exigencies of the times. They also demand that the doctrine imparted be deep and solid, especially in sound philosophy.… In this connection, Christian teachers should keep in mind what Leo XIII says in a pithy sentence: Greater stress must be laid on the employment of apt and solid methods of teaching, and what is still more important, on bringing into full conformity with the Catholic faith, what is taught in literature, in the sciences, and above all in philosophy, on which depends in great part the right orientation of the other branches of knowledge.’”[34] When dealing with the restoration of Catholic philosophy, Pope Leo XIII points out that “whosoever seeks a reason for the troubles that disturb public and private life must come to the conclusion that a fruitful cause of the evils which now afflict, as well as of those which threaten us, lies in this: that false conclusions concerning divine and human things, which originated in the schools of philosophy, have crept into all the orders of the state, and have been accepted by the common consent of the masses.” Hence, later in the same Encyclical, Pope Leo reminds the bishops that his “first and most cherished idea is that you should all furnish to studious youth a generous and copious supply of those crystal rills of wisdom flowing in a never-ending and fertilizing stream from the fountain-head of the Angelic Doctor.

“Many are the reasons why we are so desirous of this. In the first place, since, in the tempest that is on us, the Christian faith is being constantly assailed by the machinations and craft of a certain false wisdom, till youth, but especially those who are the growing hope of the Church, should be nourished on the strong and robust food of doctrine, that so, mighty in strength and armed at all points, they may become capable of advancing the cause of religion with force and judgment.”[35]

Thus, every boy and girl would leave school convinced of the great truth that as a member of Jesus, the whole of life with all its attitudes and decisions must be lived in subjection to Christ. They would be trained to realize that Our Lord is always seeking to speak and act through them for the furtherance of his life throughout the whole Body and for the incorporation of those who are not yet members. They would never forget that Christ’s members are not isolated units and are not meant to consider themselves as such. Catholics of all countries are meant to act as a solid phalanx for the Divine Plan for supernatural life. “Above the brotherhood of humanity and of fatherland,” said Pope Pius XI in a text already quoted, “there is the infinitely more sacred and more precious brotherhood of the Mystical Body of Christ.” That bond transcends class and frontier. Catholic youth should also come forth from school into the world with a clear vision of the fact that, if they do not mold the social organization of the world, political and economic, so as to have the supernatural spirit of the Mystical Body prevail, the world will be molded by the organized forces striving for the elimination of supernatural life and for the spread of naturalism.

solidarity op the mystical body

reflected in economic organization

Where the Divine Plan for Order is accepted, the supernatural union of the Mystical Body will be reflected, not only in the way that masters and servants, employers and employed treat one another, but also in the organization of the production, distribution and exchange of the material goods of which, as we have seen, a sufficiency is normally required for the development of human personality.[36] In order that those material goods which are destined for the use of the human race, may serve their end in orderly fashion and be available in greater abundance, and fliat peaceful conditions favorable to the development of human personality may prevail, private ownership of productive wealth must be favored and safeguarded.[37] Pope Leo XIII insists that “the great labor (juestion cannot be solved save by assuming as a principle that private ownership must be held sacred and inviolable. The law, therefore, should favor ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many as possible of the humbler class to become owners. Many excellent results will follow from this: and first of all, property will certainly become equitably divided.

… A further consequence will be in the greater abundance of the fruits of the earth… and a third advantage would spring front this: men would cleave to the country in which they were born.”[38]

Pope Leo XIII emphasised two other very important points. The first is that the diffusion of property and the holding of it should not be made difficult by taxation. “The state,” he says, “would be unjust and cruel if under the name of taxation it were to deprive the private owner of more than is fitting.’”[39] Taxation is the chief means, according to the Fabian (Socialist) Society Tract No. 127, “to make private enterprise throw up the sponge and quit.” The second is that holding of even a little property favors independence and guards the weaker and poorer members of the community from a state of complete subjection to greedy speculators and heartless manipulators of money. “The first concern of all,” he writes, “is to save the poor workers from the cruelty of greedy speculators, who use human beings as mere instruments of money-making.’’[40]

Pope Pius XI lays down the same principles, dwelling even more at length upon the evils resulting from the control of credit by a (relatively) few private individuals, as we shall see later “‘The right to possess private property,’ writes Pope XIII in Rerum novarum, ‘is derived from nature, not from man and the state has by no means the right to abolish it, but only to control its use and bring it into harmony with the interests of the public good.’ However, when the civil authority adjusts ownership to meet the needs of the public good, it acts not as an enemy but as the friend of private owners.…There is a double danger to be avoided. On the one hand, if the social and public aspect of ownership be denied or minimised, the logical consequence is ‘individualism,’ as it is called; on the other hand, the rejection or diminution of its private and individual character necessarily leads to some form of ‘collectivism.’ ”[41]

The solidarity of the members of Christ will show itself in the formation of guilds or vocational groups, for production, distribution and exchange.[42] The guilds of the Middle Ages prevented the development of the satanic spirit of the class-war as well as the uprise of the evils due to unchecked competition and ruthless individualism. They helped to maintain the sane orientation of social and economic life, according to which, money is for production and production is for the development of the human personality of members of families. The duty incumbent on employers and employees to respect one another as human persons and fellow members of Christ’s Mystical Body, the duty of property-owners to keep primarily in view the common good by the observance of social justice, and the duty of all citizens to respect property, all these the guilds inculcated. Pope Leo XIII deplores their suppression in the Encyclical, Rerum Novarum, and longs for their return in a form adapted to modern conditions: “The ancient workingmen’s guilds,” he writes: “were abolished in the last century, and no other organization took their place. Public institutions and the very laws have set aside the ancient religion. Hence by degrees it has come to pass that workingmen have been surrendered, all isolated and helpless, to the hard-heartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition.…The most important of all (associations and organizations for the return of social justice) are workingmen’s unions, for these virtually include all the rest. History attests what excellent results were brought about by the artificers’ guilds of olden times. They were the means of affording not only many advantages to the workmen themselves, but in no small degree of promoting the advancement of art, as numerous monuments remain to bear witness. Such unions should be adapted to the requirements of this our age.”[43]

Pope Pius XI insists upon the duty of states to re-establish vocational groups. “On account of the evil of individualism,” he writes, “things have come to such a pass that the highly developed social life, which once nourished in a variety of prosperous institutions organically linked with each other, has been damaged and all but. ruined, leaving thus virtually only individuals and the state.…Now this is the primary duty of the state and of all good citizens, to abolish conflict between classes with divergent interests, and so foster and promote harmony between the various ranks of society. The aim of social legislation must therefore be the re-establishment of vocational groups. Society today still remains in a strained and therefore unstable and uncertain state, being founded on classes with contradictory interests and hence opposed to each other, and consequently prone to enmity and strife.…The demand and supply of labor divide men on the labor-market into two classes, as into two camps, and the bargaining between these parties transforms this labor-market into an arena where the two armies are engaged in combat.…

“There cannot be question of any perfect cure, except this opposition be done away with, and well-ordered members of the social body come into being anew, vocational groups namely, binding men together not according to the position they occupy in the labor-market, but according to the diverse functions which they exercise in society.…These groups, in a true sense autonomous, are considered by many to be, if not essential to civil society, at least its natural and spontaneous development.…hi these associations the common interests of the whole group must predominate; and among these interests the most important is the directing of the activities of the group to the common good.…It is hardly necessary to note that what Leo XIII taught concerning the form of political government, can. in due measure, be applied also to vocational groups. Here too, men may choose whatever form they please, provided that both justice and the common good be taken into account.[44] Accordingly, in order to maintain that healthy family life which is indispensable to the well-being of the state, vocational groups must be revived.

money is an instrument of economics

The Divine Plan for Order calls for a monetary system so organized as facilitate the production and exchange of material goods in view of the virtuous life of members of Christ in happy families. Money is for the production, distribution and exchange of material goods, and the production, distribution and exchange of material goods are meant to favor the development of human personality in Christ. There is an anti-Christian as well as an anti-natural perversion in the existing reversal of order by the subordination of human persons to production and of production and distribution to finance. How has this perversion of order been brought about?

To keep money, which, as we have seen, is meant to be an instrument of economics, in its proper place in social organization, two things should be the object of the strictest vigilance on the part of the authorities of the state. The first is the prevention of usury. The second is to watch over the function of money as a stable measure of exchange. The prevalence of usury and violent fluctuations in the general price level of a country have disastrous repercussions on human personality, family-life and private ownership, and finally lead to the domination of those who manipulate the exchange-medium and to terrible international struggles. The uprise of liberalism consequent on the rending of the Catholic unity of Europe in the 16th century, together with the development of the modern system of money-creation and manipulation of general price levels, have led, not only to the concentration of property in relatively few hands, but also to the control of those few and of the state itself by the moneyed interests.

what is meant by liberalism?

Liberalism does not consist merely in withdrawing the creation and manipulation of money from subordination to politics but in the further step of withdrawing both politics and finance from subjection to the moral law, natural and revealed, binding on members of Christ.[45] Perhaps we may best describe liberalism by saying that it consists in erecting some particular section or aspect of human activity, economic or political, into a separate domain with its own autonomous end completely independent of the final end of man as a member of Christ. The great liberalistic principle of the orthodox English and French political economists, Adam Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, Stuart Mill, Bastiat, Quesnay and the Physiocrats, was that economic affairs, including, of course, the manipulation of money or exchange-medium, were governed by physical laws of nature, which no political law should attempt to regulate in view of favoring membership of Christ. “At the time when the new social order was beginning,” wrote Pope Pius XI, “the doctrines of rationalism had already taken firm hold of large numbers, and an economic science alien to the true moral law had soon arisen, whence it followed that free rein was given to human avarice.”[46] Liberalism is rationalism applied to politics and finance.

We need not be surprised then that usury has come back in another form. In the Encyclical Letter, Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII, immediately after having deplored the suppression of the guilds, goes on to say: “Public institutions and the very laws have set aside the ancient religion. Hence by degrees it has come to pass that workingmen have been surrendered, all isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition. The mischief has been increased by rapacious usury, which, although more than once condemned by the Church, is nevertheless, under a different guise, but with the like injustice, still practiced by covetous and grasping men. To this must be added the uprise of powerful monopolies controlling enterprises worked by contract and all branches of commerce; so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than slavery itseif.”[47]

Fluctuations in the price-levels of countries have been far more violent since the development of modern banking than before it. A few extracts from the excellent pamphlet by A. N. Field, The Untaught History of Money, will illustrate the point in the case of Great Britain. “Up to round about 1660 all money transactions in England,” he writes, “were effected by handing over coin. After that date banking began, and checks and bank-notes came into use, and what is known as bank credit began to prevail. The distinguishing feature of the earlier period, when all money business was done with the King’s money and none at all with bank money, was the great stability of prices. There was one notorious money juggle in this earlier period, when Henry VIII in 1542 debased the coinage by alloy. As a result, prices rose by 20 to 25% in five years, and by 1551 a pound would buy only about half of what it bought nine years before.…The absence of slumps and booms, every few years, such as we now know, was not due to any superior merit in metal coins over paper money, but simply to the fact that it was the constant care of the Crown to maintain a sufficient quantity of money in circulation for the people’s needs. There were very stringent laws against the export of coin.…

“After 1650 banking and bank credit came into the picture, and the price-level jumps from 180 to about 320 in 1750 shooting up in the next fifty years to about 560. A later price-level chart at hand, covering the period from 1780 to 1932 (and taking prices in 1913 as 100), shows a continuous series of enormous fluctuations throughout.…By 1913 the level has crept up to 100 again. Then after the Great War it soars to 225 in 1920: drops back down to about 100 in the next, year, runs along around this figure for a few years and then in 1930 is away on a slide down in the world depression to 66 in 1932, the lowest point in a century and a half.…After the bankers were in their stride, British history is one long procession of the most violent monetary fluctuations, with incessant disturbance of prices, and ruinous results.…That is the difference between having the Crown control money to preserve justice, and having private bankers control it for their own selfish advantage at the expense of the nation.”

Rapid fluctuations in the price-level are disastrous in their effects especially on smaller businesses. The rise of prices swindles all creditors for the benefit of debtors. All contracts for future periodic payments for services, such as wages, salaries, interest, and rents, and those fixed by law or custom such as transport fares, postal services, and professional fees, are vitiated, with consequent loss to those who receive money. The fall of prices by the calling in of loans and the restriction of credit swindles all debtors for the benefit of creditors. It results in bankruptcies and foreclosures, unemployment, and then concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, who are the real controlling power in the state.[48]

In the Encyclical Letter, Quadragesimo Anno, Pope Pius XI speaks at some length of the terrible power wielded in our days by those who control finance and then goes on to depict the evils resulting from this disorder. “In the first place, then, it is patent that in our days not alone is wealth accumulated, but immense power and despotic economic domination is concentrated in the hands of a few, and that those few are frequently not the owners, but only the trustees and directors of invested funds, who administer them at their own good pleasure. This power becomes particularly irresistible when exercised by those who, because they hold and control money, are able also to govern credit and determine its allotment, for that reason supplying, so to speak, the life-blood to the entire economic body, and grasping, as it were, in their hands the very soul of production, so that no one dare breathe against their will. This accumulation of power, the characteristic note of the modern economic order, is a natural result of limitless free competition, which permits the survival of those only who are the strongest, which often means those who fight most relentlessly, who pay least heed to the dictates of conscience. This concentration of power has led to a threefold struggle for domination.

“First, there is the struggle for dictatorship in the economic sphere itself; then the fierce battle to acquire control of the state, so that its resources and authority may he abused in the economic struggle; finally, the clash between states themselves.…Unbridled ambition for domination has succeeded the desire for gain; the whole economic life has become hard, cruel, and relentless in a ghastly measure.…The state…has become a slave bound over to the service of human passion and greed. As regards the relations of peoples among themselves a double stream has issued forth from this one fountain-head; on the one hand, economic nationalism or even economic Imperialism; on the other, a not less noxious and detestable Internationalism or international Imperialism in financial affairs, which holds that where a man’s fortune is, there is his country.”

What Pope Pius XI means by “Economic Nationalism or Imperialism” is the action of a state which places its power at the service of some of its financiers and industrialists, in order to invade or even enslave other countries economically. To take one example, a bitter struggle went on for years for Mexican oil between the Standard Oil Company of America on the one side and the Mexican Eagle together with the Royal Dutch Shell representing the British Empire on the other. We read in The World-Struggle for Oil, by P. de la Tramarye, that “The Standard Oil practically enjoyed a monopoly in Mexico up to the time when the deposits at Tampico were discovered. President Diaz, to put an end to the monopoly, granted important concessions to the British firm of Pearson, which shortly afterwards founded the Mexican Eagle. These concessions were the signal for the newspaper campaign which was let loose against Porfirio Diaz in the United States, and for the outbreak of the Maderist insurrection in Sonora and Chihuahua. Rockefeller and Pearson made war on each other with the help of the Mexican Condottieri. The United States supported Madero, Great Britain Porfirio Diaz.”[49]

St. Paul sums up the Gospel as the work of re-capitulation or re-establishment of all things in Christ.[50] The human race has been given a new head, the second Adam. Under him, through social acceptance of the role of his Mystical Body, the individual members of the race are to be brought into supernatural union with the Blessed Trinity. It is only by this supernatural union that a human being is fully in order in the actual world. We have just seen in outline what social acceptance of the Divine Plan entails. It is simply the general program of the reign of Christ the King which has been elaborated by his Church, in the course of centuries, in view of enabling all men to live a supernatural life, in conformity with their expression of submission to the Blessed Trinity along with Christ in Holy Mass. By the sacramental character of Baptism, the soul-structure of each individual is made conformable to that of Our Lord Jesus Christ and is enabled to assimilate the supernatural life of the head, as a plant by its internal structure is fitted for the process of incorporating into itself the elements of vegetative life. Now, just as a plant needs a favorable environment for its development, so does the supernatural life of the baptized Christian. It is with a view to creating this favorable environment that the Catholic Church lays down the principles of political and economic organization and draws the general conclusions therefrom, without, however, determining the mode of application of these conclusions to particular circumstances.

Thus, the Church does not prefer one of the three forms of government: Monarchy, Aristocracy, or Democracy, to the others, but she does insist that whatever form of government a people may give itself, Caesar shall acknowledge the Divine Plan for Order. “The Church,” writes Pope Leo XIII, “always the guardian of her own rights and most observant of those of others, holds that it is not her province to decide which is the best amongst many diverse forms of government and civil institutions of Christian states, and amid the various forms of state rule she does not disapprove of any, provided the respect due to religion and the observance of good morals be upheld. By such a standard of conduct should the thoughts and mode of acting of every Catholic be directed.”[51] Again, the Church does not say how classes in schools should be arranged or time-tables planned, but she does insist that the whole organization of a Catholic school and its teachers, syllabus and text-books in every branch should promote the harmonious formation of members of Christ.[52] The Church also insists upon the need of private ownership of property and upon the formation of guilds or vocational groups, but “provided that the natural and divine law be observed, the public authority, in view of the common good, may specify more accurately what is licit and what is illicit for property-owners in the use of their possessions.’’[53] The Catholic Church stands for the integral observance of the 7th Commandment and condemns usury, but it is not for the Church to indicate the precise method by which this is to be done, or to lay down how stability of prices is to be secured and arbitrary manipulations of the volume of exchange-medium to be excluded.

the church’s program for the rights of god

The naturalism of the French Resolution which put the rights of man in the place of the rights of God resulted in the diffusion of a number of errors opposed to the Divine Plan for Order. As all the naturalistic agencies so skilfully marshalled by Jewry and Freemasonry worked zealously for the propagation of these erroneous doctrines, many Catholics were led astray. Pope Pius IX catalogued these errors in the Syllabus, so giving Catholics what we may call a negative test of fidelity to the Kingship of Christ.[54] Since the appearance of that splendid document, with the significance of which every Catholic should be familiar, the succeeding Popes have elaborated a positive program of respect for the rights of God by integral fidelity to Christ the King.

The supernatural life of the Mystical Body has been treated of by Pope Leo XIII in his Encyclicals on the Reunion of Christendom[55] and on Christ Our Redeemer[56] as well as by Pope Pius XI in his Letters on Reparation to the Sacred Heart[57] and on True Religious Unity.[58] The obligation of social acceptance of the Divine Plan has been explained by Pope Leo XIII in his teaching on Human Liberty,[59] the Christian Constitution of States [60]and the Chief Duties of Christians as Citizens[61] Pope Pius X deals with the same matter in his admirable Letter on the Sillon[62] and Pope Pius XI in his Encyclical on the Peace of Christ.[63]

The Catholic concept of patria or native land has been dealt with by Pope Pius XI in his Encyclicals on the Kingship of Christ[64] and on the Troubles of Our Times[65] after Pope Leo XIII had spoken of it in such admirable terms.[66] Pope Pius XI has stressed the sublime truth that Catholics must look upon the struggle to re-christianize public life as a combat to be waged, under the banner of Christ the King, by every member of his Mystical Body.[67] He has also treated of the Christian Social Cell, the family[68] following Pope Leo XIII,[69] and of the personality of the Child, in his lofty teaching on the Christian Education of Youth.[70]

A positive economic program with regard to property, production and distribution has been developed in the Encyclical Letters of Popes Leo XIII,[71] Pius X,[72] and Pius XI.[73] Pope Leo XIII pointed out that usury had come back in another guise and that it was leading to the enslavement of the many by the few.[74] Pope Pius XI shows that the evil results of usury and the control of what is called credit have grown apace since the publication of Rerum Novarum.[75] Not only individuals are now enslaved but states themselves are in the power of those who control finance.

In the sphere of international relations. Pope Benedict XV sent a Peace Note to the leaders of the belligerent peoples engaged in the World War, on August 1st, 1917, outlining concrete proposals as the basis for a just and durable peace. The Pope’s plan was rejected and a naturalistic League of Nations was set up from which the Vicar of Christ was rigidly excluded. [76] In 1940, when the world is again at war, it is pathetic to read the contemptuous terms in which the Masonic President of the United States dismissed Pope Benedict’s Peace Plan. “To deal with such a power (Germany),” wrote President Wilson, “by way of peace, upon the plan proposed by His Holiness, would, as far as we can see, involve a recuperation of its strength and a renewal of its policy, and would make it necessary to create a permanent hostile combination of the nations against the German people who are its instruments.[77] The Peace of Versailles and the League of Nations, inspired by pure naturalism, have certainly not averted the war on account of which Pope Benedict XV’s plan was haughtily cast aside. Pope Pius XI pointed out, in the Encyclical Letter, On the Peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ, that the one hope of international peace and concord lies in the acceptance of the moral authority of the Catholic Church. “It alone,” he wrote, “is able to establish the peace of Christ, not only at the present time, but also to consolidate it for the future, by averting those new dangers of war to which We have already referred.”

The Catholic Church, then, is always aiming at permeating social organization with the sense of the reality of the supernatural life and of the oneness of the Divine Plan for its maintenance and diffusion. Through the Church, God wants to draw all men into union with Our Lord in the renewal of the expression of submission of Calvary in Holy Mass, and he wants that worship animated with the highest possible degree of supernatural charity springing from sanctifying grace. Accordingly, he wants society to be organized under Christ the King so as to draw as many as possible into membership of Christ and to favor development of the life of sanctifying grace that comes from him. Every member of Christ proclaims at Holy Mass that he intends to work for the acceptance of the program of Christ the King in its integrity. Thus alone will the rights of God, our heavenly Father, be fully acknowledged and the development of human personality be adequately safeguarded.

It would be a sign of hope for the future if we had come to the end of the period of exclusion of the sovereign Pontiff from the counsels of nations. The end, however, has not yet been reached. At the First Hague Conference the Papacy was excluded from the deliberations. “Again at the second Hague Conference in 1907, the Convention for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes precluded the Holy See from officially subscribing to the rules for mediation and arbitration. Article 94 of that Convention laid down that the conditions on which uninvited Powers might subsequently be invited to adhere to the Convention should be decided by further agreement (“l’objet d’une, entente ultérriere”) among the contracting Powers. Such further agreement is still in the future.”[78]

The Secret Treaty of London of April 26th, 1915, is one of the most shameful incidents of modern times. Under this secret treaty, Italy, which was at the time bitterly Judaeo-Masonic and anti-Catholic, agreed to come in on the side of the Allies, on certain conditions. Clause 15 of the Treaty reads: “France, Great Britain, and Russia undertake to support Italy, in so far as she does not permit the representatives of the Holy See to take diplomatic action with regard to the conclusion of the peace and the regulation of questions connected with the war.”

Clause 16 says: “The present Treaty is to be kept secret.” The Treaty was signed in four copies by Sir Edward Grey (England), Jules Cambon (France), Imperiali (Italy), and Beckendorff (Russia).

The Mystical Body of Christ Appendix

Pope Benedict XV’s Peace Proposals,

August 1, 1917

arbitration and diminution of armaments

First, the fundamental point should be that the moral force of right should replace the material force of arms; hence a just agreement between all for the simultaneous and reciprocal diminution of armaments, according to rules and guarantees to be established, to the extent necessary and sufficient for the maintenance of public order in each state; then, in the place of armies, the establishment of arbitration with its exalted pacifying function, on lines to be concerted and with sanctions to be settled against any state that should refuse either to submit international questions to arbitration or to accept its awards.

freedom of the seas

The supremacy of right once established let every obstacle be removed from the channels of communication between peoples, by ensuring, under rules likewise to be laid down, the true freedom and common enjoyment of the seas. This would, on the one hand, remove manifold causes of conflict, and would open, on the other, fresh sources of prosperity and progress to all.

condonation of damages and cost of war

As to the reparation of damage and to the costs of war, We see no way to solve the question save by laying down, as a general principle, complete and reciprocal condonation, which would, moreover, be justified by the immense benefits that would accrue from disarmament; all the more, since the continuation of such carnage solely for economic reasons would be incomprehensible. If, in certain cases, there exist, nevertheless, special reasons, let them be weighed with justice and equity.

evacuation of occupied territories

But these pacific agreements, with the immense advantages they entail, are impossible without the reciprocal restitution of territories now occupied. Consequently, on the part of Germany, there should be the complete evacuation of Belgium, with a guarantee of her full political, military, and economic independence towards all Powers whatsoever; likewise the evacuation of French territory. On the part of the other belligerent parties, there should be a similar restitution of the German colonies.

fair settlement of territorial questions

As regards territorial questions like those at issue between Italy and Austria, and between Germany and France, there is reason to hope that in consideration of the immense advantages of a lasting peace with disarmament, the parties in conflict will examine them in a conciliatory spirit, taking account, in the measure of what is just and possible, as We have before said, of the aspirations of the peoples and, as occasion may offer, coordinating particular interests with the general weal of the great human society.

The same spirit of equity and justice must reign in the study of the other territorial and political questions, notably those relating to Armenia, the Balkan states, and to the territories forming part of the ancient Kingdom of Poland, to which, in particular, its noble historical traditions and the sufferings endured, especially during the present war, ought justly to assure the sympathies of nations.

Such are the principal bases upon which We believe the future reorganization of peoples should be founded. They are such as to render impossible a return of similar conflicts, and to prepare the solution of the economic question, so important for the future and the material welfare of all the belligerent states.

[1]The Modernists, condemned by Pope Pius X in the Encyclical Letter, Pascendi (1907); distinguished in one and the same individual between the believer and the scientist or the historic critic, and said that the critic could deny or leave out of account what the believer accepted. It was a revival in modern form of the old error of the two truths. Pope Pius XI here condemns a similar sectioning of life in practice.

[2]Cf. Pope Leo XIII’s Encyclical Letter, Immortale Dei on the Christian Constitution of States, already quoted in Chapter I.

[3]Encyclical letter, Libertas præstantissimum.

[4]Encylical letter, Summi pontificatus.

[5]Encylical letter, Longinqua oceani.

[6]Encyclical Letter of Pope Pius X Vehementer, 11th Feb. 1906.

[7]Encyclical Letter, Casti Connubii, On Christian Marriage.

[8]The Lesson of Events.

[9]Immortale Dei.

[10]Sapientiae Christianae.

[11]Sapientiae Christianae.

[12]Encyclical Letter, Caritate Christi compulsi.

[13]Encyclical Letter, Mit brennender sorge, On the persecution of the Church in Germany.

[14]Encyclical Letter, Rerum Novarum.

[15]Letter to the Superiors of the Religious Order and Institutes of France, June 29th, 1901.

[16]Irish Rosary, January, 1940, pp. 3, 4.

[17]Ibid.

[18]Godex Juris Canonici, Canon 2335.

[19]Cf. Prummer, O.P. Manuale Juris Ecclestiastici, p. 938, where the decree of the Holy Office of May 10th, 1884, is referred to, in the case of societies forbidden but not under pain uf excommunication.

[20]Encyclical Letter, Humanum genus, April 20th, 1881.

[21]Instruction on papal condemnations of Freemasonry in Acta Sanctae Sedis, vol. I, quoted by Rev. E. Cahill, S.J., in Freemasonry and the Anti-Christian Movement, p. 225.

[22]Encyclical Letter, Quanta cura.

[23]Encyclical Letter, Mirari vos.

[24]Encyclical Letter, Libertas.

[25]Recent war legislation in Germany and England is specially alluded to in this paragraph, written in the spring of 1940.

[26]Encyclical Letter, Arcanum Divinae (1880).

[27]Encyclical Letter, Casti connubii, On Christian Marriage.

[28]Gal. 4:19.

[29]II Cor. 4:2.

[30]Encyclical Letter, Divini Illius Magistri.

[31]Cf. Encyclical Letter, Officio Sanctissimo.

[32]Pronouncement of the English Hierarchy (no. 7), Low Week, 1929.

[33]Encyclical Letter, Divini Illius Magistri.

[34]Encyclical Letter, Inscrutabili.

[35]Encyclical Letter, Aeterni patris.

[36]“The enjoyment of the good things of the earth and the lawful pleasures attached to their use may even serve to increase virtue and to recompense it… God is the author of nature and of grace does not wish one to be an obstacle to the other.” (Leo XIII. E Supremi Apostolatus, Sept. 1. 1883).

[37]IIa IIae, Q.66, a.2. Cf. De Principiis Functionis Socialis Proprietatis Privatae, by P. J. Pèrez Garcia, O.P., up. 76, 77.

[38]Encyclical Letter, Rerum Novarum, On the Condition of the Working Classes.

[39]Encyclical Letter, Rerum Novarum, On the Condition of the Working Classes.

[40]Encyclical Letter, Rerum Novarum, On the Condition of the Working Classes.

[41] Encyclical Letter, Quadragesimo Anno, On the Social Order.

[42]In an excellent pamphlet, The Religious Guilds and their Suppression, by Olga, Hartley (English C.T.S.), it is stated that “the word ‘Gild’ is the Anglo-Saxon word meaning ‘payment.’ The spelling guild,’ though common, is incorrect.”

[43]Pope Leo XIII was referring to the suppression of the guilds (Les Corporations Ouvrières) in France and elsewhere at the French Revolution. The guilds were suppressed in England at the so-called Reformation. “There seems to be a curious conspiracy of silence about the suppression and spoliation of the English gilds in the official Protestant histories of the Reformation. Historians have plenty to say about the suppression of the convents and monastic institutions; the destruction of the gilds is not mentioned, but neither is their existence. John Richard Green in his Short History of the English People does mention the existence of gilds, when he is writing of the Middle Ages; he says not a word about the wicked and wanton rapacity that suppressed them when he writes of the Reformation.… If the case for the suppression of the convents and monasteries was false and feeble, there was no case at all for suppressing the gilds, and, to do Henry VIII justice, he did not attempt to make out a case; he coolly said he needed their money. The Act of 37 Henry VIII, passed in 1545, stated that the confiscation of public property it authorized was necessary ‘for the maintenance of the present war’ and into one group to be robbed went ‘colleges, free chapels, chantries, hospitals, fraternities, brotherhoods, and guyldes.’ The Act of Edward VI, C. 14, devised by Somerset, was rather more cunning. It attacked the doctrine of Purgatory, pleading that the Gilds’ benefactors were burdened with the ‘superstitious use’ of prayers and Masses for the souls of the dead. To camouflage the fact that be was plundering public property, Somerset inserted a hint of grammar schools into his act of spoliation.…There were already grammar schools, some of them actually supported by the gilds…. the ruffians who devised this wholesale robbery (Somerset and the other courtiers) gorged themselves on the plunder” (The Religions Guilds and their Suppression, by Olga Hartley, pp. 19, 20). Cf. The Workingmen’s Guilds of the Middle Ages, by the present writer (Loreto Publications).

[44]Encyclical Letter, Quadragesimo anno, On the Social Order. The Encyclical Letter of Leo XIII to which Pius XI refers is Immortale Dei, On the Christian Constitution of States.

[45]Historically, the refusal to accept the due subordination of politics to the order established by Christ has been followed by the withdrawal of money-manipulation from due subordination to politics. Fallen man cannot maintain the rational order of life except by accepting due subordination to God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

[46]Encyclical Letter. Quadragesimo Anno, On the Social Order. All the above-mentioned economists were influenced by John Locke’s Nominalism and Liberalism, of which the foundations are laid in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. That work as well as Mill’s Principles of political economy are on the Index.

“What naturalists or rationalists aim at in philosophy, that the supporters of liberalism, carrying out the principles laid down by naturalism, are attempting in the domain of morality and politics. The fundamental doctrine of rationalism is the supremacy of the human reason, which, refusing due submission to the divine and eternal reason, proclaims its own independence and constitutes itself the supreme principle and source and judge of truth. Hence these followers of liberalism deny the existence of any divine authority to which obedience is due, and proclaim that every man is the law to himself; from w-hich arises that ethical system which they style independent morality, and which, under the guise of liberty, exonerates man from any obedience to the commands of God, and substitutes a boundless licence” (Pope Leo XIII, Encyclical Letter, Libertas, On Human Liberty’).

[47]Pope Leo XIII then speaks of the Socialist and collectivist reaction to the abuse of private property. This movement, as we shall see later, is under the control of naturalistic supranational organizations, and thus, by its opposition to Christ the King and the supernatural Divine Plan for Order, is dragging the workingman down to a state worse than the slavery from which our divine Lord freed him.

[48]“As one well-known writer on these subjects has pointed out, the money factor is like the tides of the ocean, and commodity demand-and-supply factor is like the waves of the sea.…The tides are the big factor determining the level of the water, and the waves a comparatively small factor even in the greatest storm. The money factor is like the tides, and is the principal thing in determining the price level” (The Truth About New Zealand, by A. N. Field, p. 134.) Cf, The Role of Money, by Professor Soddy, pp. 71–75.

“A proper proportion between different wages is also a matter of importance, and with this is intimately connected a proper proportion between the prices obtained for the products of the various economic groups, agricultural, industrial, and so forth. Where this harmonious proportion is kept, men’s various economic activities combine and unite into a single organism and become members of a common body, lending each other mutual help and service.” (Encyclical Letter, Quadragesimo Anno).

[49]Those who wish to read more about the history of the struggle for Mexican oil will find an amount of information in Ludwell Denny’s America, Conquers Britain (pp. 240–252). For the effect of the struggle on religion and for Masonic responsibility in regard to the religious persecution in Mexico, the books No God Next Door, by Rev. Michael Kenny, S. J., and Mexico, the Land of Blood-drenched Altars, by Bp. Francis C. Kelly, should be read. From the Catholic Herald (London) of Jan. 24, 1941, we learn that the New York Herald Tribune had published a recent announcement of an offer by twenty U.S. bankers to put Mexican industries on their feet again by a loan of 100 million dollars. “The plan is believed to be contingent on action by President Camacho to protect profits against any attempts to continue the Mexican revolution.”

[50]Cf. Eph. 1:3–10. “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ… Who hath predestinated us unto the adoption of children through Jesus Christ unto himself… according to his good pleasure, which he had purposed in him, in the dispensation of the fulness of times to re-establish all things in Christ, that are in heaven and on earth.

[51]Encyclical Letter, Sapientiae Christianae. Cf. Encyclical Letter, Immortale Dei.

[52]Cf. Encyclical Letter, Divini Illius Magistri, On the Christian Education of Youth.

[53]Pope Pius XI, Encyclical Letter, Quadragesimo Anno, On the Social Order.

[54]The text of the Syllabus and a brief commentary on the errors contained in it will be found in The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World, pp. 120–142.

[55]Praeclara Gratulationis Publicae.

[56]Tametsi.

[57]Miserentissinvus Redemptor.

[58]Mortalium Animos. The beautiful Encyclical Letter of Pope Pius XII, Mystici Corporis Ecclesiae, reached the present writer too late to be utilized in this book.

[59]Libertas.

[60]Immortale Dei

[61]Sapientiae Christianae.

[62]This Letter stresses the folly of attempting “to establish upon earth above the head of the Catholic Church, the reign of justice, and of charity, by means of agents from everywhere, of all religions and of no religion, with or without creed, provided they forget what divides them, that is, their religious and philosophic convictions, and provided they place at the common service what unites them, namely, a noble idealism, and moral force derived ‘no matter whence.’

[63]Ubi Arcano Dei.

[64]Quas Primas.

[65]Caritate Christi Compulsi.

[66]Sapientiae Christianae.

[67]Ubi Arcano Dei and Quas Primas.

[68]Casti Connubii.

[69]Arcanum Divinae Sapientiae.

[70]Divini Illius Magistri.

[71]Rerum Novarum, On the Condition of the Working Classes, and Graves de Communi, On Christian Democracy.

[72]Fin Dalla Prima, On the Social Question: Singulari, Quadam, On Workingmen’s Associations, Catholic and Mixed; Il Fermo Proposito, On Christian Social Action.

[73]Quadragesimo Anno, On the Reconstruction of Society.

[74]Rerum Novarum.

[75]Quadragesimo Anno and Caritate Christi Compulsi.

[76]Cf. Société des Nations, Super-État Maçconnique, by Léon de Poncins. He shows that the destruction of the Austrian Empire as well as the setting up of the League of Nations was systematically prepared at a Masonic Congress held at Paris in June, 1917.

[77]Benedict XV, Pope of Peace, by Rev. H. E. CL Rope, M.A. On pages 129 and 127 of this work Father Rope alludes to the well-known efforts of the Czecks, Masaryk and Benes, to get the Great War prolonged in 1917 and the peace proposals of the Emperor Charles of Austria rejected. Benes avowed that he preferred the Anschluss with Germany to the preservation of what remained of the Kingship of Christ in the Austrian Empire. He has had the Anschluss since. It is not quite certain that Masaryk was a Mason though he always favored naturalism, but the Masonic character of Benes seems certain. Cf. Article in R. I. S. S., Nov. 1, 1937.

For the proofs of the Masonic character of President Wilson, see the documents quoted in Les Pourquoi de la Guerre Mondiale, by Mgr. H. Delassus, vol. II, pp. 391–393.

[78]The Catholic Church and International Order, by A. C. F. Beales.

Chapter V

The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and the Kingship of Christ in its Integrity

the relation between the mass

and the kingship of christ

We have seen, then, that God’s aim is to come to dwell in human souls in the Trinity of his persons, through membership of Our Lord’s Mystical Body. It is for that the world exists and it is to promote that indwelling that He wants to draw all into union with Our Lord in the fervent offering of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. In order to favor union with Christ as Priest in Holy Mass, God wants the world organized under Christ as King. We have seen, too, something of what the order of the world would be like if the rights of God and of Christ the King were fully acknowledged. We shall now see that at Holy Mass all Christ’s members express the determination to strive for the integral realization of the rights of God and of Christ the King in the world. Thus, the more fully the Kingship of Christ is realised, the more abundantly the life of Christ the Priest will be diffused, and the more ardently union with Christ the Priest in Holy Mass is cultivated, the more eagerly will his members strive to have God’s rights acknowledged. On the other hand, the rejection of God’s rights and of the Kingship of Christ will lead to corruption and decay in society and, in proportion as minds lose their hold on the great truth of membership of Christ, to the treatment of human beings not as persons but as mere individuals.

By the character of Baptism, we are one with Our Lord in the unity of his Mystical Body, and the very character by which we are incorporated into that sublime unity is a certain participation in his Priesthood. So when Our Lord renews the act of submission of Calvary on the altar, he renews it as he now is, that is, as head of that Mystical Body in which all the baptized are one with him. On the Cross, Christ was alone. his members were engrafted on him only potentially. At the altar, he is no longer alone: it is the “whole Christ,” to use St. Augustine’s phrase, that is, Christ and his members, who now offers sacrifice to the Blessed Trinity, the members being co-offerers with the Invisible Principal Offerer and his visible ministerial offerer, the priest. And we can be co-offerers, because the character of Baptism is a participation on our level in the Priesthood of Our Lord, enabling us to look upon Christ’s act of submission on the Altar as ours and unite our act of submission with His. The supreme function of Christ as Priest is the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, in which the whole Mystical Body professes its readiness to stand as he did for his integral Program for Order. For that program, He was obedient unto death on Calvary. All the baptized are called upon to unite actively in expressing submission to God the Father in Holy Mass and in animating that submission with all the supernatural love of their hearts.[1] Now the will of the Father is always the same: “This is my beloved Son; hear ye him” (St. Luke, 9:35). Every member of Christ by his assistance at Mass declares his readiness to stand for the integral program of the rights of God, for which the head of the Mystical Body suffered death.

Christ’s members are meant to belong to him entirely. They ought to come forth from Mass determined to maintain harmony between the submission to God the Father they have expressed in the Holy Sacrifice and their individual lives. They should be resolved, under the leadership of Christ the King, to permeate the whole social life of the state and country, political and economic, with the spirit of the Mystical Body, so that it may not only not hamper their efforts and the efforts of their fellow members to live their daily lives as members of Christ, but may favor them. All Catholics are, by the fact of their membership of Christ, whole-time Christians, and should be intimately convinced of their solidarity with Christ and with their fellow members of his Mystical Body in the really vital struggle that is going on in the world. Their attitude, when leaving the Church after Mass, is not intended to be merely the negative one of not allowing themselves to be carried in the direction of naturalism by the current of life around them, but the positive one of striving to organize the whole framework of society under Christ the King and of impregnating the state, family-life, education, and economic organization, with the great truth of human solidarity in Christ’s Mystical Body.[2] Their co-operation with Our Lord is meant to enable him, since he condescends to make use of them, to permeate all forms of human activity, social and individual, with the life of that supranational, supernatural organization, the Catholic Church. True members of Christ will feel fully at ease in any state or nation only when the great realities of the loss of our supernatural life by the Fall and of its restoration by membership of the Mystical Body of Christ are acknowledged in the social structure of that state or nation. Everything that savors of naturalism or anti-supernaturalism will have for them an odor of decay and death.

It is quite true that states or nations do not go to heaven. Human beings go to heaven one by one, to live in the intimacy of the Blessed Trinity in the enjoyment of the Beatific Vision. But the individual member of society lives under the never-ceasing influence of his social surroundings. If Catholics content themselves with merely inculcating the individual practice of religion and do not seek to mold the world for Christ the King, then the social institutions, even of countries with a Catholic majority, will be molded by the well-organized visible and invisible naturalistic and anti-supernatural forces, of whose activities many Catholics seem to be unaware. The average member of society will then fall a ready prey to naturalism. He will gradually cease to live as a member of Christ, though he may retain some Christian customs as remnants of a once Christian outlook. Satan profits by the lack of watchfulness and energy on the part of Catholics in regard to social organization, and by the help of his visible subordinates, he injects the poison of naturalism into the social organism. Thus it has oftentimes happened that revolutionaries, aiming at the violent installation of a naturalistic regime, have succeeded in overthrowing the rule of Christ the King in countries nominally Catholic, on account of the preliminary work of corruption and weakening, systematically carried out by the press, the cinema, the school, and the stock-exchange.

On the one hand, then, Catholics, faithful to what they profess at Mass, must ever strive to permeate the framework of society with the influence of the supernatural life. In this way the ordinary man will be helped to act always as a member of Christ and will not find himself, from the moment he leaves the Church after Mass, urged by anti-supernatural currents to revolt against his most real life. On the other hand, Catholic social institutions, great though their influence may be, do not suffice to maintain society fully Catholic. The indispensable requisite is a formation of the youth of both sexes thoroughly penetrated with the doctrine of the Mystical Body as a mighty living organism ever seeking to bring the world into union with Christ and through Christ with the Blessed Trinity.[3] That formation alone will ensure what we have called “whole-time Catholicism” and will enable all to draw from their union with Our Lord in Mass and Holy Communion the supernatural love required to diffuse throughout society the sense of solidarity in Christ and of the indwelling of the Blessed Trinity in souls, through incorporation into Christ. Our Lord will pour his life into souls in Holy Communion, in proportion as they are thus one with him in mind and will, for progress in personal sanctification or growth in holiness is simply the development of the spirit of the Mystical Body. It was the sense of their oneness with their co-offerers and co-victims with Christ in the Mass that strengthened the Catholics of the early centuries for the long struggle for the recognition of the rights of God and the Kingship of Christ in their integrity. It was the acceptance of the fact that the bodies of the baptized are the members of Christ that brought forth those lovely flowers of chastity amidst the thorns of paganism, in the decadent Roman Empire.
The realization of the same inspiring truth is needed in order to withstand the systematic propagation of selfishness and impurity to which young people are subjected nowadays, and to begin the counter-attack. For the return of social justice in the modern world, the same great truth must be unceasingly insisted upon. If we define social justice in the members of a society as the virtue by which the members of a society are enabled to direct all their actions towards the common good of the society, we can hope for its triumph over the cold, calculating naturalism of liberalistic individualism and over the harsh, brutal Naturalism of materialistic collectivism, only when Christ’s members have again grown accustomed to their solidarity in him. When once men realize that what is done for their fellow men is done for Christ and to Christ, they will readily see that social life must be so organized that each member of Christ may have a just and fair opportunity of living in accordance with his sublime dignity. It was the realization of the great truth of the slaves’ membership of Christ that gradually brought about the abolition of slavery in the ancient world. “It was Christianity,” wrote Pope Pius XI, “that first affirmed the real and universal brotherhood of all men of whatever race and condition. This doctrine the Church proclaimed by a method, and with an amplitude and conviction, unknown to preceding centuries: and with it she powerfully contributed to the abolition of slavery. Not bloody revolution, but the inner force of the Church’s teaching made the proud Roman matron see in her slave a sister in Christ. It is Christianity that adores the Son of God, made man for the love of man, and become not only the “Son of a Carpenter” but himself a carpenter’.[4] It was Christianity that raised manual labor to its true dignity.”[5] The practical living of the same great truth of our membership of Christ will be required in order to avert the return of a worse form of slavery in the modern world.

unifying influence of the mystical body

With the growth of fuller comprehension of the doctrine of the Mystical Body and the spread of a more intense desire to live life fully as members of Christ, we may hope to see many practical consequences in the international sphere as well as in the national life of peoples. Our Lord in the Blessed Eucharist, the head of the Mystical Body, whom all His members receive in separate hosts, is not many Christs but One, coming to give himself to all, that all may be one in him in mind and will. Pope Leo XIII emphasizes this truth at great length in the Encyclical Letter on the Most Holy Eucharist. “This then,” he writes, “is what Christ intended when he instituted this venerable sacrament, namely, by awakening charity towards God to promote mutual charity among men. For the latter, as is plain, is by its very nature rooted in the former, and springs from it by a kind of spontaneous growth. Nor is it possible that there should be any lack of charity among men, or rather it must needs be enkindled and flourish, if men would but ponder well the charity which Christ has shown in this sacrament.…Having before our eyes this noble example set us by Christ. Who bestows on us all that he has, assuredly we ought in love and help one another to the utmost, being daily more strongly united by the strong bond of brotherhood.

“Add to this that the external and visible elements of this sacrament supply a singularly appropriate stimulus to union. On this topic St. Cyprian writes: “In a word, the Lord’s sacrifice symbolizes the oneness of heart, guaranteed by a persevering and inviolable charity, which should prevail among Christians. For when Our Lord calls his body bread, a substance which is kneaded together out of many grains, he indicates that we his people, whom he sustains, are bound together in close union; and when he speaks of his Blood as wine, in which the juice pressed from many clusters of grapes is mingled in one liquid, he likewise indicates that we, his flock, are by the commingling of a multitude of persons made one’ (Ep. 96 ad Magnum, n.5). In like manner the Angelic Doctor, adopting the sentiments of St. Augustine (Tract XXVI, in Joann., nn. 13, 17), writes, ‘Our Lord has bequeathed to us his Body and Blood under the form of substances in which a multitude of things have been reduced to unity, for one of them, namely bread, consisting as it does of many grains, is yet one, and the other, that is to say, wine, has its unity of being from the united juice of many grapes; and therefore St. Augustine elsewhere says: ‘O Sacrament of Mercy, O Sign of Unity, O Bond of Charity!’ (IIIa P., Q.79, a.l). All of which is confirmed by the declaration of the Council of Trent that Christ left the Eucharist to his Church ‘as a symbol of that unity and charity whereby he would have all Christians mutually joined and united…a symbol of that one body of which he is himself the head, and to which he would have us, as members, attached by the closest bonds of faith, hope, and charity’ (Conc. Trid., Sess. XIII, 1 De Eucharist., c. 2). The same idea had been expressed by St. Paul when he wrote: ‘For we, being many, are one bread, one body, all we who partake of the one bread’ (1Cor., 10:17).”[6]

As the unifying influence of Our Lord makes itself felt, we may expect that Catholics all over the world will come to realize that the unity of the Mystical Body is infinitely stronger than national unity, that, for example, the supernatural unity between French and German Catholics, resulting from the character of baptism, is on an infinitely higher level than the unity between Germans with German, or French with French, on the merely natural national level. St. Paul stresses the paramount character of this solidarity, when he insists that natural distinctions disappear, as it were, in comparison with it: “Where there is neither Gentile nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian nor Scythian, bond nor free. But Christ is all, and in all” (Coloss., 3:11). The Apostle did not, of course, mean to convey that the distinctions or the duties resulting from them disappeared in fact, for he lays stress upon the reciprocal obligations of master and servant in the Epistle to Philemon, but he wanted to bring home to all that our oneness in Christ causes all the distinctions on a lower level to dwindle into insignificance. It is only want of familiarity with St. Paul’s teaching on the Mystical Body that makes the text of Pope Pius XI, already quoted in Chapter I, about our brotherhood in the Mystical Body being infinitely more sacred and more precious than the brotherhood of humanity and of fatherland, seem exaggerated to us.

The deepening of the conviction of this supernatural solidarity will lead to a realization of the subordinate place of nationality as a force of inspiration, but, while stressing the infinite distance separating the natural from the supernatural, it will not deny it fitting recognition. It is important also to point out that the exaggerated place taken by nationality in men’s lives today is in part due to the need for national reactions against the corrupting and deforming influence of the naturalistic supranationalism of Jewry and Freemasonry which, since the French Revolution, has usurped the place of the supernatural, supranational influence of the Mystical Body. Love of country is a noble sentiment and there is an ordered love of our native land as of our own race, and of their glory, which will be respectful of their due subordination to the Mystical Body of Christ. It is true that Satan has frequently tried to use nationalism for his purposes, yet when Catholics quote from Papal Encyclicals about the evils of exaggerated nationalism, they must not leave out of consideration the complementary texts wherein the Popes insist on legitimate love of country, and they must bear in mind the need for a reaction against the corruption and deformation resulting from naturalism.

The knowledge and love of our solidarity in Christ will combat effectively the terrible evils of the class-war, so sedulously cultivated by naturalistic supranationalists, in view of the enslavement of workingmen for their own ends. Pope Leo XIII stresses the fact that it was to promote charity and union among men that Our Lord instituted the Blessed Eucharist: “If any one,” he writes, “will diligently examine into the causes of the evils of our day, he will find that they arise from this, that as charity towards God has grown cold, the mutual charity of men among themselves has likewise cooled. Men have forgotten that they are children of God and brethren in Jesus Christ: they care for nothing except their own individual interests: the interests and the rights of others they not only make light of, but often attack and invade. Hence frequent disturbances and strife between class and class: arrogance, oppression, fraud on the part of the more powerful: misery, envy, and turbulence among the poor. These are evils for which it is in vain to seek a remedy in legislation.…Our chief care…ought to be…to secure the union of classes in a mutual interchange of dutiful services, a union which, having its origin in God, shall issue in deeds that reflect the true spirit of Jesus Christ and a genuine charity. This charity Christ brought into the world, with it he would have all hearts on fire.…And whereas it is right to uphold all the claims of justice as between the various classes of society, nevertheless it is only with the efficacious aid of charity, which tempers justice, that the equality which St. Paul commended (2 Cor., 8:14), and which is so salutary for human society, can be established and maintained. This then is what Christ intended when he instituted this venerable sacrament, namely, by awakening charity towards God to promote mutual charity among men.”[7]

Catholics must, therefore, on the one hand, guard against any collaboration with naturalistic revolutionary movements promoted by Jewry and Freemasonry, whether national like Mazzini’s Young Italy or supranational like Socialism and Communism, and on the other hand, they must be careful not to support disordered naturalistic national reactions against the efforts of Jewry and Freemasonry. Our Lord Jesus Christ has a positive supernatural program towering far above the disorders, divisions and confusion to which naturalism inevitably gives rise. Catholics must endeavor to grasp fully what Our Lord is aiming at when he is seeking to have the influence of the Mystical Body accepted in the life of the state, in the family, in education, and in economic organization. He is striving for ever wider participation in, and profounder comprehension of, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, in view of deepening supernatural union with the Blessed Trinity in souls. They will then have a keener perception of the ultimate aim of revolution and will be quicker to see the signs that herald its approach.

the ultimate aim of revolution

Just as the members of the human body are always meant to function in such wise as to promote the common good, which it is the office of the head to discern, so Catholics, as members of the vast organism of the Mystical Body, must always strive to further the program of Christ their Head and impregnate society with the spirit of membership of Christ.[8] The Christian organization of society sustains the ordinary man in the difficult task of living his daily life in harmony with the supernatural act of submission to the Blessed Trinity he makes at Mass. In fact, this organization of society under Christ is indispensable for the average man, firstly, because of the tendency of the natural life of the fallen children of the first Adam to revolt against their supernatural life and imperil their true happiness, and, secondly, because there are organized naturalistic forces in existence ready to pander to the self-centeredness of human beings and thus strive to hurl them against Christ the King and the supernatural life. The Christian framework of society is meant to serve as a bulwark against these organized naturalistic or anti-supernatural forces, two of which are visible, while one is invisible. The invisible host is that of Satan and his fellow-demons: the visible forces are those of the Jewish nation and Freemasonry.[9] They aim, first, at de-supernaturalizing social life, political and economic, so that, from the moment he leaves Church after Mass, the average human being will find himself impeded in his efforts to live his life as a member of Christ. When that process has gone on long enough to have stirred up the seeds of revolt against the supernatural life in a large portion of the social organism, then the attack on the Mass itself is begun. The revolt of the social organism as such against the Mass, the supremely acceptable act of worship of the Blessed Trinity and, if possible, its complete elimination, is the ultimate aim of revolution.

Revolutions against the Catholic Church and the Mass are not spontaneous uprisings of the people. They are movements skilfully prepared a long time in advance by the naturalistic forces above-mentioned and their subordinates. “Revolution is an art,” writes Oldstock Ryder in The Great Conspiracy, “but the revolutionaries would have us believe that it is a natural cataclysm, as inevitable as a volcanic eruption—a spontaneous up-rush of popular revolt against insufferable wrongs.…The art of revolution is that by which a small but well-organized minority compels an unwilling but unorganized majority to submit to the overthrow of the state and the dictatorship of a few professional agitators who grasp power in the name of the people. The method remains the same today as it was in 1789–1793, first, to create a revolutionary atmosphere by exploiting the existing grievances or hardships of any part of the population. Secondly, where none exist, popular grievances must be created.…Thirdly, having thus prepared the stage, demonstrations must be organized which will give the movement an appearance of being a spontaneous uprising of the masses. Fourthly, trade and industry must be hampered and ultimately paralysed by strikes and revolutionary threats, creating widespread unemployment and discontent.…Lastly, forces of aliens, criminals, and hooligans must be enlisted and armed to overpower the forces of the state and to terrorize the law-abiding majority into submission. And this tragic farce is to be enacted in the name of the whole people, and is applauded as a noble revolt against tyranny and injustice.” The poor deluded actors on the stage of revolution are, perhaps in the majority of cases, unaware that they are the instruments of higher forces.

The steps outlined in the quotation from Oldstock Ryder have now been expressed more succinctly, thanks to the development of the art of revolution in the hands of those who control Russia. The program of Moscow was outlined very accurately in The Times of May 3rd, 1938, as follows: “Loudly as the Barcelona government may denounce the unprovoked aggression of General Franco’s rebels, their mentors in Moscow have already claimed the instigation of the Civil War as a triumph of their own subversive diplomacy. For this is one of the essential stages of the desired revolution which must, it is dogmatically asserted, follow the same course in every country. These steps to the compulsory millenium, are four in number: the first is the United Front; the second, strikes and disorders; the third, civil war: and the fourth, Soviet government.”[10] The first three of these stages correspond to the steps outlined by Oldstock Ryder. The fourth is not a stage in the advance to power. It is in reality the taking over of power by the rulers of Russia after they have successfully utilised the natives in the preliminary stages. Both Oldstock Ryder’s and Moscow’s statements of the steps required for the preparation of revolution deal with the last or final stages of the advance to power by the hidden plotters and schemers.

Previously, however, wherever the people of a country have accepted the Divine Plan for Order, a long period of agitation is usually required to diminish the attachment of the people thereto. As we have seen, the framework of the Divine Plan comprises the following points: Recognition of the truth of the Catholic Church as the Mystical Body of Christ, national life respectful of due subordination to the Mystical Body, Christian marriage, Christian education, private ownership of property with guild or vocational group organization, and finally, an exchange-medium functioning for the common good as a stable measure of things saleable and, therefore, not abandoned to the manipulations of private speculators. The long-distance preparation for revolution will consist, then, in loosening the hold of minds upon these principles of order by the inculcation of naturalism, and in weakening wills. As Our Lord always aims at harmonious functioning of the supernatural and the natural, so Satan aims at division and discord, with a view to disorder and decay. All the means that the manipulation of money will permit will be employed in this work: cinema, press, radio, stock-exchange, speculations, different forms of association for amusement, and so on.

In the process of disruption, particular attention will be paid to the inculcation and propagation of impurity. St. John Chrysostom points out that “it is impossible for anyone who leads an impure life not to grow weak in the faith.”[11] St. Thomas Aquinas, in his turn, insists that the higher faculties of man, namely, the intelligence and the will, are disturbed most of all by sins of impurity. In its effect on the intelligence, this vice is productive of blindness as well as of precipitation, want of reflection and inconstancy. On the will it produces: on the one hand, love of self and hatred of God, Who is looked upon as standing in the way of pleasure; on the other hand, love of the things of this life along with carelessness and recklessness about eternal happiness.[12]

The demons know how difficult it is for human beings to extricate themselves from the meshes of this vice,[13] so we can well understand why, in view of the preparation of a revolution, every means will be employed to propagate sins of the flesh. such as the cinema, the press in both pictures and advertisements, the new forms of dress and recreation for youth, and so on. The instructions of the Italian Masonic Alta Vendita, taken from the documents captured in 1846, are well known: “Let us spread vice broadcast among the multitude. Let them breathe it through their five senses, let them drink it in and become saturated with it.… Make men’s hearts corrupt and vicious and you will have no more Catholics. Draw away priests from their work, from the altar and from the practice of virtue. Strive skilfully to fill their minds and occupy their time with other matters.…Large-scale corruption is our aim, the corruption of the people through the clergy and of the clergy by us, a corruption such that it will enable us to lay the Church in the tomb. Recently one of our friends, laughing at our projects, said to us: ‘To overcome the Catholic Church, you must begin by suppressing the female sex.’ There is a certain sense in which the words are true; but since we cannot suppress woman, let us corrupt her along with the Church…, The best poniard with which to wound the Church mortally is corruption.”[14] When human beings have been brutalised by impurity, they will allow themselves to be enslaved without making any attempt to react. The resistance to the propagation of weakness and selfishness through impurity must be firmly grounded upon the doctrine of our membership of, and solidarity in, Christ. Every sin is a betrayal of the cause of the Mystical Body.

the solidarity of the mystical

body and the duty of catholics

It is pathetic to see Catholics accepting the purposely misleading statements in the newspapers about the cause of the ferocious attacks on the Mass and on priests and nuns, during revolutionary outbreaks in different countries. These attacks are ascribed to the peculiarly excitable character of the inhabitants of these countries, stirred up by the sight of the wealth of the Church and the religious orders, and by the fact that the priests and nuns were “reactionary” and opposed to “progress.” The same stories are repeated about country after country, and it is curious to see Catholics in neighboring countries swallowing them, without reflecting that the same things will be said about themselves, when the turn comes for the attack on the supernatural life of their country. Surely it is time for Catholics to grasp the fact that there are organized anti-supernatural forces, visible and invisible, and to gird their loins for the struggle before their Good Friday dawns. A greater sense of the supranational solidarity of the Mystical Body of Christ should be inculcated in the teaching of history.

Again, when the hierarchy of a country make a pronouncement concerning the attack on the supernatural life of that country, it is sad to see Catholics in other countries upholding their own views of the interests of Our Lord in that country, in opposition to the representatives of Christ the King. A flagrant instance in recent history was in regard to the Collective Letter of the Spanish Hierarchy of July 1, 1937. The writings of certain non-Spanish Catholics, on that occasion, furnished a clear proof of the great need for a fuller realization of the meaning of the Kingship of Christ and of the solidarity of Christ’s members. The case is even worse when the Holy Father makes a solemn pronouncement about a persecution being waged on Our Divine Lord in a particular country, or countries. It is particularly painful to hear such statements being denied or questioned by Catholics, because it shows that the concept of the Mystical Body is even more obscured in their minds. Let us take for example the words of Pope Pius XI to the College of Cardinals on Christmas Eve, 1937: “We must call things by their right names. In Germany there is in fact a religious persecution. For long they tried to make us believe that there was no persecution. We know, however, that there is a persecution, nay more, that there has rarely been a persecution so serious, so painful and so disastrous in its widespread effects. This is a persecution in which neither the exercise of force, nor the pressure of threats, nor the subterfuges of cunning and artifice, have been spared.” How can Catholics continue to assert that the Church is not persecuted in Germany?

catholic solidarity is weakened by individualism and naturalism

The individualism of the so-called Reformation has propagated the idea that we come into relation with Our Lord as isolated units. The so-called Reformation, however, did not attempt to set up a supranational organization in the place of the Catholic Church. It simply resulted in the separation of different sections, calling themselves National Churches, from the one true Church of Christ. The setting-up of a supranational organization was reserved for the French Revolution of 1789. Modern history, since that Masonic Revolution, is, to a large extent, an account of the diffusion of the principles of 1789 throughout Europe and America. The spread of these principles has resulted in the domination of the naturalistic supranationalism of Freemasonry, behind which has been gradually emerging the still more strongly organized naturalistic supranationalism of the Jewish nation. “Russia” or “Moscow” is merely a prolongation of the principles of 1789 and a materialistic adaptation of them to action, on the part of these naturalistic organizations.[15]

Catholics must endeavor to permeate national reactions with the spirit of the Mystical Body of Christ. We come into contact with Our Lord Jesus Christ, not as isolated individuals, but as forming one living organism with him, and we are meant to work in harmonious union for God’s rights, according to his program, always bearing in mind that it is only through the supernatural life coming from Christ that national as well as individual selfishness can be effectively combated. There should be perfect union amongst Catholics with regard to the general principles and universal conclusions of Christ’s program. “The defense of Catholicism, indeed,” writes Pope Leo XIII, “necessarily demands that in the profession of doctrines taught by the Church all shall be of one mind and all steadfast in believing; and care must be taken never to connive, in any way, at false opinions, never to withstand them less strenuously than truth allows.…Let this be understood by all that the integrity of the Catholic faith cannot be reconciled with opinions verging on naturalism or rationalism, the essence of which is utterly to devitalize Christianity, and to install in society the supremacy of man to the exclusion of God. Further, it is unlawful to follow one line of conduct in private and another in public, respecting privately the authority of the Church, but publicly rejecting it.

… In these our days it is well to revive the examples of our forefathers. First and foremost it is the duty of all Catholics worthy of the name and desirous of being known as most loving children of the Church… to endeavor to bring back all civil society to the pattern and form of Christianity which We have described.[16]

Catholics may differ about the best manner of applying these principles and embodying the conclusions in social organization, but these differences must not cause them to forget that they must approach the discussion of all these questions as members of one Body with a vast program accepted by all.

“It is scarcely possible,” writes Pope Leo XIII in the same Encyclical, “to lay down any fixed method by which these purposes are to be attained, because the means adopted must suit places and times widely differing from one another. Nevertheless, above all things, unity of aim must be preserved, and similarity must be sought after in all plans of action. Both these objects will be carried into effect without fail if all will follow the guidance of the Apostolic See as their rule of life and obey the bishops whom the Holy Ghost has placed to rule the Church of God.”[17]

It is quite true that “in mere matters of opinion it is permissible to discuss things with moderation, with a desire of searching into the truth, without unjust suspicion or angry recriminations… (and) in matters merely political, as, for instance, the best form of government and this or that system of administration, a difference of opinion is lawful.”[18] But all Catholics must take account of the organized naturalistic opposition to the program of Christ the King for which they stand and make sure that their divisions over secondary points will not lead to any of them being pulled into the anti-supernatural camp and used as pawns in the struggle against Christ the King and the supernatural life of the country as a whole. Alas! what happens only too often is that differences which are merely political cause them to lose sight of the main struggle. Ignorance of membership of the supernatural organism of the Mystical Body and its mission allows merely political matters to become of primary importance. When the interests of Our Lord are threatened by the organized anti-supernatural forces, all divisions should immediately cease.

Pope Leo XIII insists upon this closing up of the Catholic ranks in the Encyclical Letter, On the Chief Duties of Christians as Citizens. “There is no doubt,” he writes, “but that in the sphere of politics ample matter may exist for legitimate differences of opinion, and that, the single reserve being made of the rights of justice and truth, all may strive to bring into actual life the ideas believed likely to be more conducive than others to the general welfare.…Religion should, on the contrary, be accounted by everyone as holy and inviolate; nay in the very public order of states…it is always urgent, and indeed the main preoccupation, to take thought how best to consult the interests of Catholicism. Whenever these appear by reason of the efforts of adversaries to be in danger, all differences of opinion among Catholics should forthwith cease, so that, like thoughts and counsels prevailing, they may hasten to the aid of religion, the general and supreme good to which all else should be referred.…This is not now the time and place to inquire whether and how far the inertness and internal dissensions of Catholics have contributed to the present condition of things; but it is certain at least that the perverse-minded would exhibit less boldness, and would not have brought about such an accumulation of ills, if the ‘faith that worketh by charity’ (Ep. ad Gal., V. 6), had been generally more energetic and lively in the souls of men.”[19]

It is pathetic now’’ to read the Letter addressed to the Bishop of Madrid by Pope Pius X, in 1906, on the necessity of united action by Catholics, when those whose object was the destruction of religion and society were seeking political power. Amongst other things, the saintly Pontiff said: “All must remember that nobody has the right to remain indifferent, when religion or the public welfare is in danger. Those whose object is the destruction of religion and civil society aim above all at getting control, as far as possible, of the direction of public affairs and at having themselves chosen as legislators. It is therefore necessary that Catholics should strive with all their might to avert that danger.” It was only when Spain was on the brink of destruction that Catholics came together to save their country. And even then, how many were beguiled into the camp of Satan!

Pope Pius XI in his turn inculcates the necessity for union in regard to guiding principles: “Thus even in the sphere of social economics, although the Church has never proposed a definite technical system, since this is not her field, she has nevertheless clearly outlined the guiding principles which, while susceptible of varied concrete applications according to the diversified conditions of times and places and peoples, indicate the safe way of procuring the happy progress of society.” [20] Then, in another passage of the same letter he points out the woeful consequences of disunion: “To all our children, finally, of every social rank and every nation, to every religious and lay congregation in the Church, We make another and more urgent appeal for union. Many times Our paternal heart has been saddened by the divergencies—often idle in their causes, always tragic in their consequences—which array in opposing camps the sons of the same Mother Church. Thus it is that the revolutionaries, who are not so very numerous, profiting by this discord are able to make it more acute, and end by pitting Catholics one against the other. In view of the events of the past few months. Our warning must seem superfluous. We repeat it nevertheless once more, for those who have not understood, or perhaps do not desire to understand. Those who make a practice of spreading dissension among Catholics assume a terrible responsibility before God and the Church.”

priests and catholic solidarity

It is in order to facilitate such unity of action amongst Catholics and to emphasize before the world the infinite dignity of the supernatural life and the paramount claims of the head of the Mystical Body that bishops and priests are recommended to keep themselves above parly-politics. “Certainly nobody,” wrote Cardinal Gasparri, Secretary of State of Pope Pius XI, “would deny the right of bishops and parish priests to have, as private citizens, their personal opinions and political preferences, so long as these are in harmony with the dictates of an upright conscience and with the interests of religion. It is no less evident that, as bishops and parish priests, they must remain aloof from party-struggles, keeping themselves on a plane superior to every purely political contention.… In doubtful cases, as well as in all those where the action of the bishop or the parish priest might compromise the religious interests committed to their care, the enlightened zeal of faithful pastors of souls will not hesitate to stand aside.”[21]

Undue emphasis upon particular controverted questions during their theological course and too little attention to the central unifying doctrines of the Mystical Body of Christ and of the lifeblood of that Body, namely, sanctifying grace, may have the effect of hampering some priests in keeping things in their proper perspective. The really important thing is to grasp the relation of the controverted points to the central unifying doctrines just mentioned and, at the end of one’s course, to have a synthetic view of the Divine Plan for Order in the world through membership of Christ’s Mystical Body, and to have accustomed oneself to weighing everything, including the controversies, from “the point of view of God’s rights and of the interests of Our Head.

St. Thomas, the official theologian of the Catholic Church, always looked at things from the side of God and of his rights. When a priest’s mind is trained in this fashion, he will so form young Catholics that they will be accustomed to think of themselves as they really are, that is, as members of one Body engaged in a struggle for the organization of the world under Christ, their head. He will be “all things to all men,”[22] that is, he will be sympathetic to the right elements in the aspirations of all men, in order to aid them to bring these aspirations into harmonious subjection to the interests of the Mystical Body of Christ.

He will train them to keep in proper perspective the different factors that may tend to divide them from their fellow Catholics, such as, membership of a political party or of a certain school or college union. These things are all very secondary and must not be allowed to obscure the view of the great primary truth of our membership of Christ, in whom we are all one, and the duty incumbent upon all Catholics not to allow members of organized anti-supernatural forces to get political or economic control over Christ’s members.

Familiarity with the doctrine of membership of Christ during his years of formation will powerfully stimulate the future priest to cultivate detachment from earthly goods and show himself always and everywhere interested in everything from the point of view of the real life of Christ’s members. Such detachment and such unselfishness are especially necessary in our day in order to win back the toiling masses for Christ. “The greatest scandal of the nineteenth century,” said Pope Pius XI to Canon Cardijn, “is that the Church has lost the working-class.”[23] The spectacle of a life lived unselfishly for Christ’s members will prove an irresistible argument for the truth of the doctrine of our oneness in Christ and will promote union and solidarity for the Kingship of Christ in spite of differences on secondary matters.

The need for this supernatural unselfishness is insisted upon by Pope Pius XI in his Encyclical Letter, On the Catholic Priesthood: “Surrounded by the corruptions of a world,” he writes. “in which everything can be bought and sold, the Catholic priest must pass through them utterly free from selfishness. He must holily spurn all vile greed of earthly gains, since he is in search of souls, not of money, of the glory of God, not his own.…He is not indeed forbidden to receive fitting sustenance.…The Lord ordained that they who preach the Gospel should live by the Gospel’ (1Cor. 9:14). But, a priest must expect no other recompense than that promised by Christ to his Apostles.…Woe to the priest who, forgetful of these divine promises, should become ‘greedy of filthy lucre’ (Tit. 1:7)… Judas, an Apostle of Christ, was led down to the abyss of iniquity precisely through the spirit of greed for earthly things. Remembering him, it is easy to grasp how this same spirit could have brought such harm upon the Church throughout the centuries.…A priest who is poisoned by this vice (of greed), will, consciously or unconsciously, make common cause with the enemies of God and of the Church, and co-operate in their evil designs.

“On the other hand, by sincere disinterestedness the priest can hope to win the hearts of all. For detachment from earthly goods, if inspired by lively faith, is always accompanied by tender compassion towards the unfortunate of every kind. Thus the priest becomes a veritable father of the poor. Mindful of the touching words of his Savior: “As long as you did it to one of these my least brethren, you did it to me,[24] he sees in them, and, with particular affection, venerates and loves Jesus Christ himself.”[25]

[1]“The faithful member of Christ) has a twofold destiny; primarily and principally, he is destined to be admitted to the Beatific Vision, and for this he is stamped with the seal of divine grace…. secondly, he is destined to receive and to deliver to others whatever concerns the worship of God, and for this purpose he is stamped with the sacramental character. Now the whole rite of the Christian religion is derived from the Priesthood of Christ. Accordingly, it is clear that the sacramental character is in an especial way the character of Christ, to whose Priesthood the faithful are conformed by the sacramental characters, which are nothing else than participations after a certain fashion in the Priesthood of Christ, derived from Christ himself” (IIIa P., Q.63, a.3).

[2]We have already seen the meaning of naturalism in Chapter I. It was there defined as the attitude of mind which denies the reality of the divine life of grace and of our Fall therefrom with our consequent liability to revolt against the order of the divine life, when it has been restored to us by our membership of Christ. This attitude of mind also maintains that all social life should be organized on the basis of the non-existence of any life higher than our natural life.

[3]“Christ’s incorporated member must continue to grow up in Christ in order to become more and more conformable to him. But the vital relationship with him includes far more than this personal side; the life in Christ also signifies a participation in his apostolic work, in his mission. The object of the incorporation is to unite the members as such with him, enabling them to grow up ‘unto the measure of the age of the fulness’ of the head: its further object being to help them to live for Christ and to co-operate with him for the increase of the Mystical Christ… Through the character of the sacraments, each member is destined and qualified to co-operate actively with the work of Christ. Incorporation, corresponding to the degree of sacramental character, enables the member to share in the dignity of Christ, but it also places him under the obligation, as an instrument of Christ, to labor for the other members and for the growth of the whole body” (The Mystical Body of Christ, by Dr. F. Jurgensmeier, pp. 225, 226).

[4]Cf. Mt. 30: 55: and Mk 6:3

[5]Encyclical Letter, Divini Redemptoris, On Atheistic Comunism.

[6]Encyclical Letter, Mirae Caritatis, On the Most Holy Eucharist.

[7]Encyclical Letter, Mirae Caritatis, On the Most Holy Eucharist.

St. Thomas points out that “The fruit of this sacrament (the Blessed Eucharist) is the unity of the Mystical Body” (IIIa P., Q.73, a.3, c). “By this sacrament we enter into communion with Christ, partaking of his flesh and coming under the influence of his divinity, and by it we enter into communion and union with one another,” he adds in the following article.

[8]It is the Sacrament of Confirmation which fully equips the member of Christ, incorporated into him by Baptism, for this work of molding society. This Sacrament brings him to the perfect age of spiritual life by conferring an interior strength of soul, as St. Thomas points out (IIIa P., Q.72, a.5, “Confirmatio est quaddam spiritualis augmentum promorens hominem in spiritualem octatem perfectam”). When a man has attained to full development, he must work not for himself alone but for others and the whole Mystical Body. (Homo autem cum ad perfectam aetatem pervenerit, incipit jam communicare actiones suas ad alios; antea., vero quasi singulariter sibi ipsi vivit” (IIIa P., Q.72, a.2). The forehead of the person being confirmed is marked with the sign of the Cross to signify his being equipped to do battle for the supernatural organization of society, not only against invisible enemies, but against those who are visibly banded together for its overthrow (Cf. IIIa P., Q.72, a.4, 5).

[9]Mohammedanism is left out of account, because it is question in this work of the struggle for and against the Divine Plan within the countries where the Divine Plan was accepted and which are still at least nominally Christian. Mohammedanism conquered certain countries that were once Christian, but it is an outside thing, so far as Europe and America are concerned. Cf. The Great Heresies, by H. Belloc, pp. 73–140.

Of course, not every member of the two visible naturalistic bodies, the Jewish nation and Freemasonry, is fully aware of what he implicitly stands for by the fact of his membership of these groups. These bodies are, as such, naturalistic or anti-supernatural. That is the point here stressed.

[10]Revolutionary Socialism, p. 58 by Arnold Lunn.

[11]St. John Chrysostom, Serm. I, De Verbis Apost.

[12]IIa IIae, Q. 153, a.5, c.

[13]Ia IIae, Q. 73. a.5. ad 2.

[14]Crétineau-Joly, L’Eglise Romaine en face de la Revolution, vol. II, pp. 128–129.

[15]In The Rulers of Russia (Third Edition, p. 55), it is pointed out that the form and method followed by national reactions against Judaeo-Masonry show traces in some cases of the process of deformation to which the nations have been subjected. Germany’s reaction under the leadership of Prussia, as we shall see later in Chapter XVI, is permeated with the spirit of the 16th century revolt against the unity of the Mystical Body of Christ, and with the pantheism of Fichte and Hegel. These are facts of history of which Catholics should be fully aware.

[16]Encyclical Letter, Immortale Dei, On the Christian Constitution of States.

[17]Encyclical Letter, Immortale Dei, “This likewise must be reckoned amongst the duties of Christians that they allow themselves to be ruled and directed by the authority and leadership of bishops, and above all of the Apostolic See” (Encyclical Letter, Sapientiae Christianae, On the Chief Duties of Christians as Citizens).

[18]Encyclical Letter, Immortale Dei.

[19]Encyclical Letter, Sapientiae Christianae.

[20]Encyclical Letter, Divini Redemptoris, On Atheistic Communism, 19th March, 1937.

[21]Letter of October 2, 1922, to the Italian Hierarchy. The same recommendation to keep themselves “aloof from contentious political disputes and from divisions in local administrative bodies,” is made to “the Irish clergy, especially to parish priests and those having the care of souls, without prejudice to the right they enjoy as private citizens… (Maynooth Statutes, No. 82, 1927).

[22]I Cor. 9:22

[23]Quoted in Jèsus-Ouvrier, Doctrine et Culte, par l’abbé J. B. Bord.

[24]Matt., 25:40.

[25]Encyclical Letter, Ad Catholici Sacerdotii.

Part II

The Organized Opposition

to the

Mystical Body of Christ

and the

Divine Plan for Order

Chapter VI

The Organized Opposition to the Mystical Body of Christ

There is unorganized opposition to the supernatural life in each one of us, owing to the Fall. This unorganized opposition of individuals inevitably leads to the formation of little anti-supernatural groups here and there, even without the concerted action of vast organized forces. But the fact that there exists concerted anti-supernatural action on the part of organized bodies is so far removed from the preoccupation of the average Catholic that it needs to be specially stressed and its aim made clear. That is the reason for these chapters.

We have seen already that social organization is meant to be permeated with the reality of the supernatural life of the Mystical Body of Christ, in view of aiding us to bring our daily life into harmony with our protestation of loyalty to the Blessed Trinity, in union with Christ as Priest, in Holy Mass. By this permeation of society with the reality of membership of Christ, the Kingship of Christ in its integrity is acknowledged. We have also seen that, conversely, assistance at Mass in union with Christ as Priest urges us to strive to realize the Kingship of Our Lord in its integrity, in a Christian framework of society. The Christian framework of society is destined not only to aid us in attaining union with Christ but to serve as a bulwark against the assaults of the forces organized against our supernatural life. These forces are three in number, one being invisible, the other two visible. The invisible host is that of Satan and the other fallen angels, while the visible forces are those of the Jewish nation and Freemasonry. The Jewish nation is not only a visible organization, but its naturalistic or anti-supernatural character is openly proclaimed, by its refusal to accept the supernatural Messias and by its looking forward to a naturalistic messianic era. The Masonic Society or group of societies is a visible organization, but its naturalistic or anti-supernatural character is secret or camouflaged. The naturalism or anti-supernaturalism of its end, as well as of its ritual and symbolism, is clearly grasped by only relatively few of the initiated. The pantheistic deification of man, which is the consequence of this naturalism, is the supreme secret of Freemasonry. Both of these visible societies, however, make use of subterfuge and secrecy in their modes of action against the supernatural life of the nations of the world.

Accordingly, the most vitally real struggle in the world is that waged by those naturalistic or anti-supernatural armies, under the leadership of Satan, against those who accept the supernatural life of grace, participation of the life of the Blessed Trinity, under the leadership of Our Lord Jesus Christ. This vital struggle is depicted in striking terms by Pope Leo XIII in the opening sentences of the Encyclical Letter, On Freemasonry. “After the human race, through the envious efforts of Satan, had been guilty of the unspeakable crime of turning away from God, the creator and giver of heavenly blessings, it became divided into two distinct and mutually hostile camps. One of these steadily combats for truth and virtue, the other for all that is opposed to virtue and truth. The former is the Kingdom of God on earth, namely, the true Church of Jesus Christ, and all who wish to belong to it sincerely and in a manner worthy of salvation must serve God and his Only-Begotten Son with all the vigor of their minds and all the strength of their wills. The latter is the kingdom of Satan, under whose sway and in whose power are all those who, following the baneful example of their leader and of our first parents, refuse to obey the divine and eternal law, and in a multitude of ways either show contempt for God or revolt against him.

“St. Augustine had a clear vision of these two kingdoms, and he accurately described them under the image of two states with laws diametrically opposed, because of the completely divergent ends to which the respective states tended. In a few concise, well-chosen phrases he indicated the efficient cause of each as follows: ‘Two loves have formed two cities; the love of self reaching to contempt of God, an earthly city; the love of God reaching to contempt of self, a heavenly one.’[1] While the two armies have always been engaged in conflict down the ages, the equipment of the combatants and the mode of warfare have varied considerably, as well as the force and the vigor of the attack and the defense. In our day, however, the partisans of evil seem to be drawing closer together and as a body to be animated with extraordinary energy, under the leadership and with the assistance of the widely diffused association known as Freemasonry. No longer concealing their designs, with the greatest audacity, they are egging one another on to attack God himself. They are planning the utter overthrow of Holy Church openly and publicly, with the intention of despoiling completely the Christian nations of the benefits procured for them by Jesus Christ, our Savior, if that were possible.…From what We have already said, it is indisputably evident that their ultimate aim is to root out completely the whole religious and political order of the world which has been set up by Christianity and to replace it by another in harmony with their way of thinking. This will mean that the foundation and laws of the new structure will be drawn from pure naturalism.[2]

Let us now take each of these naturalistic and anti-supernatural forces in turn.

[1]The City of God, Book XIV, c. 17.

[2]Encyclical Letter, Humanum genus. A translation of this Letter will be found in The Kingship of Christ and Organized Naturalism by the present writer.

Chapter VII

The Invisible Organized Force—Satan and His Fellow-Demons

satan’s anti-supernaturalism

Pope Leo XIII has insisted upon the leadership of Satan in the ceaseless warfare of naturalism against the supernatural life of grace. Satan’s headship of the camp of evil must never be forgotten or lost sight of. This remark is particularly necessary in our days, because the triumphs of applied science in modern times tend to give human beings the illusion that they are the spiritual masters of the universe and obscure the all-important truth that, behind the visible veils, there are other intelligences more powerful than theirs striving for and against Our Divine Lord. The existence, then, of the good angels, permanently anchored in supernatural life, and of the fallen angels, always fiercely opposed to the supernatural, must be constantly borne in mind.

Satan everywhere combats and everywhere seeks to eliminate the supernatural life of grace, participation in the life of the Blessed Trinity. His act of rebellion was a refusal to depend on the Blessed Trinity for his happiness and perfection. By that act he not only forfeited the life of grace but declared war on it. The whole being of that pure spirit, all that relentless, untiring energy, of which we, poor creatures of nerves and muscles, cannot form an adequate idea, is always and everywhere directed against submission to the Blessed Trinity in supernatural love. We change our minds and we need sleep and rest. With Satan it is not so.[1]

It is because Satan knows how effective such institutions as the press, the cinema and the monetary system can be, when brought into play against the supernatural life of a country, that he has been so intent on transforming them into agencies for the propagation of naturalism. In the October (1938) issue of The Southern Cross, we read: “An American student of statistics has made a detailed investigation of 500 films. In them he counted 100 murders, 91 suicides, 103 adulteries, 38 seductions, 352 robberies and 43 frauds or swindles. In these 500 films there was thus a more-or-less veiled defense or condonation of 727 major crimes or immoralities.” A Swiss citizen, Professor Malhabec, reports the result of a similar investigation in Berne, where he found that of 3,300 children of school years, 1,700 were more-or-less regular cinema-goers. In 1,250 films presented for their entertainment there were exhibited 1,163 seductions, 1,120 adulteries, 1,224 homicides, 1,170 robberies, 1,171 shootings or various murders, and 765 suicides.”

Satan’s invariable appeal is to liberty. That is the pretext he alleges in order to lead men astray. “The end at which the devil aims,” writes St. Thomas, “is the revolt of the rational creature from God.…This revolt from God is conceived as an end, inasmuch as it is desired under the pretext of liberty (or autonomy)” (IIIa P., Q.8, a.1). Satan, needless to say, is well aware of the fact that his efforts against Our Divine Lord and the supernatural life of the world cannot lead to order but will result in chaos and disorder. His dupes, however, do not see that, at least, not clearly. If, at times, a vision of what they are heading for is mercifully vouchsafed to them by God, they shut their eyes to it, except in rare instances.

Satan’s sin was a refusal to accept the truth that for the perfection and happiness of his being he should depend upon God and not upon himself alone. He wanted to get rid of the dependence and subjection which are inseparable from his condition of creature. The result was an eternity of misery. The way of spiritual childhood of Saint Teresa of Lisieux with its insistence on complete dependence on and absolute trust in the love of God, our Father, is in complete opposition to the spirit of Satan. Hence we need not be astonished at the role assigned to the Little Flower in the present struggle in the world.

All the frightful energy, then, of Satan’s hatred is specially directed against the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, which is the renewal of the expression of submission of Calvary. Arrayed with him and animated with the same hatred, there is an army of invisible satellites of the same nature. Forgetfulness of these facts makes it hard for people, who read only the newspapers and frequent the cinema, to understand, for example, the hatred of the Mass and of the priesthood displayed by the Communist and Masonic “Democracy” of Spain. Even the formation given by “Moscow,” that is, by the Jews who control Russia, does not suffice to account for it.[2]

We must distinguish between the end Satan had in view in the Crucifixion of Our Lord and the end he now has in view in directing and provoking attacks on those who celebrate Mass and those who assist thereat. Satan urged the leaders of the Jewish nation to get rid of Our Lord, for he was conscious of the presence in the Man, Christ Jesus, of an exceptional degree of that supernatural life which he hates, but he did not want to enter into the Divine Plan for man’s return to order. His pride, however, obscured his vision of God’s way of proceeding. By his action on the minds and wills of the leaders of the Jewish nation and again on the passions of the crowd, disappointed and disillusioned at the sight of the acclaimed liberator of Israel discomfited and helpless, he prepared the way for the sublime display of obedience and humility of the God-Man on Calvary. The demons did not know that the act of submission of Calvary meant the return of order to the world, by the restoration of supernatural life to the human race. St. Paul insists that “If they (the princes of this world) had known it, they would never have crucified the Lord of Glory” (1Cor. 2:8). St. Thomas writes: “If the demons had been perfectly certain that Our Lord was the Son of God and had known in advance what the effect of his Passion and Death would be, they would never have got the Lord of Glory crucified.”[3] But they are quite well aware of the meaning of the Mass. All their efforts are directed towards preventing its celebration, by exterminating the priesthood, and towards thwarting its effects, by limiting it to the role of a rite bereft of significance for man’s social life, political and economic. If Satan cannot succeed in completely doing away with the one acceptable act of worship, he will strive to restrict it to the minds and hearts of as few individuals as possible. One has only to look at the world to see how far he has succeeded since the French Revolution.

satan’s plans for disorder

Satan’s refusal to depend on the supernatural life of the Blessed Trinity for his happiness was at the same time a declaration of war on that life. He is ever warring against all those ways in which, as we have seen, the rule of Christ the King is acknowledged in society. His technique, since the so-called Reformation but more especially since the French Revolution, has largely consisted in utilizing the appeal of nationality against ordered submission to the Mystical Body of Christ. He has deceitfully striven, and alas! with success, in country after country, to persuade men that love of their country demands a refusal of obedience to the Catholic Church. He has, of course, also utilised the longing of the normal man for a suitable condition of life in order to allure men into Socialist and Communist movements. Pope Pius XI has stressed this latter point in the Encyclical Letter, On the Troubles of Our Time: “The leaders of this campaign of Atheism,” he writes, “turning to account the present economic crisis, inquire with diabolic reasoning into the cause of this universal misery.…They strive, and not without effect, to combine war against God with men’s struggle for their daily bread, with their desire to have land of their own, suitable wages. and decent dwellings, in fine, a condition of life befitting human beings.”[4] Satan is, however, indifferent as to the means he employs to turn man against Christ. He will utilize any form of naturalism, such as the cult of blood and race, which will favor his designs.

On the one hand, Our Divine Lord incorporates human beings into himself and urges them to mold the world in accordance with his program, so as to bring about harmonious submission to his Father at Holy Mass. On the other hand, Satan strives to undo the organization respectful of the supernatural order and life, and, when he has succeeded in propagating naturalism, he will move to the direct attack on the Mass. Accordingly, he will always strive either to bring about what is called separation of Church and state or to prevent their union, that is, the recognition by the state of the Catholic Church, as the one Church divinely instituted, the supernatural and supranational Mystical Body of Christ, the ark of salvation for all. Satan knows well the value of social acceptance of order. That men, not only as individuals, but as linked together in states and nations should recognize the Catholic Church, as supernatural and supranational, and should bow down in submission to the Blessed Trinity in the holy sacrifice of the Mass are utterly repugnant to him. Of course, the struggle against order will be carried on in the name of “progress,” “enlightenment,” “liberty of conscience,” and “duty to one’s country and one’s race,” etc.

Secondly, as a consequence, Satan will oppose the acknowledgment of the right of the Pope and bishops to decide what favors or opposes the life of grace. He will, therefore, do all in his power to prevent the admission of the Pope to the Councils of Nations and he will aim at national legislation opposed to true morality. When bishops insist that the development of national life and racial culture is meant to favor the life of the Mystical Body of Christ, he will strive to get them accused of being the enemies of nationality. As Satan succeeds in propagating naturalism in a country, he prepares the direct attack on the religious orders and congregations of the Catholic Church. Every revolutionary government since 1789, with monotonous regularity, has decreed the suppression of these orders and congregations. Satan will, on the contrary, favor secret societies and particularly the chief one, Freemasonry, he will also favor the admission of the Jews to full citizenship, so that they may prepare for the natural Messias.

Thirdly, Satan will work unceasingly for the introduction of divorce, since Christian marriage is the symbol of the unity and indissolubility of that supernatural union of Christ and his Mystical Body, which he detests. He will not only attack the Christian home directly by divorce, but indirectly by the glorification of impurity. Lust will not be termed self-seeking but emancipation. Immoral unions may be excused and even lauded on account of the “paramount duty to the race.”

Fourthly, needless to say, he will do all in his power to hamper true Catholic education, that is, the formation of young men and women with a full sense of their responsibility as members of Our Lord’s Mystical Body. That young people should be trained to consider the life of grace as their most real life and that they should be convinced of their solidarity with Our Lord and with one another are, of course, utterly hateful to him. Thanks to such a formation they would come forth after their formative years with an insight into the efforts being made to organize society on naturalistic, that is, on anti-supernatural, lines, and they would be alive to the activities of the organized forces working for the advent of naturalism, under Satan’s invisible guidance. It is a pity that Catholic teachers are not always fully conscious of what they are called upon to do for Christ. They should all have an accurate knowledge of the position of their particular subject in relation to the order of the world under the Mystical Body of Christ, and they should never fail to put first things first. They sometimes forget that a boy is primarily a member of Christ and that his formation as a prizewinner or as a footballer is of real importance only inasmuch as it favors his standing integrally for Christ throughout his whole life.

Fifthly, Satan will do his utmost to prevent the formation of guilds or vocational groups which reflect in economic organization the solidarity of the Mystical body. His hatred of union and order amongst the members of Christ was gratified by the destruction of the guilds at the so-called Reformation in England and at the French Revolution in France. He knew that the resultant disorder would make it difficult for human beings to lead a truly virtuous life. The feverish competition of liberalistic individualism, the task of making a living absorbs so much energy that, there is none left for the life of union with the blessed Trinity. Satan foresaw with malignant pleasure the ruin of souls that would result from this unbridled individualism. Pope Pius XI stresses the point in the Encyclical Letter, On Atheistic Communism. “Even on Sundays and holidays” he writes, “labor shifts were given no time to attend to their essential religious duties. No one thought of building churches within convenient distances of factories or of facilitating the work of the priest. On the contrary, laicism was actively and persistently promoted, with the result that we are now reaping the fruits of the errors so often denounced by Our Predecessors and by Ourselves. It can surprise no one that the Communistic fallacy should be spreading in a world already to a large extent estranged from Christianity.”[5]

The same Pontiff had already pointed out, in the Encyclical Letter, On the Social Order, how favorable to Satan’s efforts was the state of things that accompanied everywhere what is termed ‘‘Industrial Progress”: “Very many employers treated their workmen as mere tools, without any concern for the welfare of their souls, indeed without the slightest thought of higher interests. The mind shudders if we consider the frightful perils to which the morals of workers (of boys and young men particularly) and the virtue of girls and women, are exposed in modern factories; if we recall how the present economic regime and, above all, the disgraceful housing conditions prove obstacles to the family tie and to family life: if we remember the insuperable difficulties placed in the way of a proper observance of holydays. How universally has the true Christian spirit become impaired, which formerly produced such lofty sentiments even in uncultured and illiterate men! In its stead man’s one solicitude is to obtain his daily bread in any way he can. And so bodily labor, which was decreed by Providence for the good of man’s body and soul even after original sin, has everywhere been changed into an instrument of strange perversion; for dead matter leaves the factory ennobled and transformed, while men are corrupted and degraded. For this pitiable ruin of souls, which, if it continues, will frustrate all efforts to reform society, there can be no other remedy than a frank and sincere return to the teaching of the Gospel.”[6]

Satan has profited by the above-mentioned abuses resulting from individualistic liberalism to bring about the ruin of multitudes of souls. He fans the flames of the Communist reaction against these abuses with even greater vehemence, because the organization of society under Communism is still more radically opposed to the loving service of God. “Where Communism has been able to assert its power,” writes Pope Pius XI in the Encyclical Letter, On Atheistic Commimism, “it has striven by every possible means, as its champions openly boast, to destroy Christian civilization and the Christian religion by banishing every remembrance of them from the hearts of men, especially from the young.”[7] The same Pontiff had already alluded to the satanic character of Communist warfare on God in the following terms: “This is the most dreadful evil of our times, for they (the enemies of all social order) destroy every bond of law, human or divine: they engage openly and in secret in a relentless struggle against religion and against God himself; they carry out the diabolical program of wresting from the hearts of all, even of children, all religious sentiment; for well they know that, once belief in God has been taken from the hearts of mankind, they will be entirely free to work out their will. Thus we see today, what was never before seen in history, the satanical banners of war against God and against religion “brazenly unfurled to the winds in the midst of all peoples and in all parts of the earth.”[8]

But again, Satan will also rejoice if, while inculcating opposition to Communism, youth are drawn away from the Mass and religious instructions, to sports and gymnastic exercises, under pretext of the physical training indispensable for racial development.

Satan will favor the continuance of a monetary system which insists upon the destruction of food and other necessaries of life, in spite of widespread poverty, in order to keep up prices and thus make sure of the “interest” levied on the creation of money. One of the ablest of the writers who have exposed the evils of the existent monetary system, Professor F. Soddy, has shown the disastrous consequences of this policy for human society. He writes: “In our day it is not the agitator fomenting class-hatred who can start…a revolution. But empty milk into the Potomac; import pests to destroy the cotton crop; burn wheat and coffee as fuel; restrict the production of rubber; set up tariff-barriers; permit trusts, federations, cartels, and lock-outs; allow trade-unions to develop ca’canny methods to reduce output; maintain misery, insecurity and idleness, masses of unemployed who are not allowed to better their lot by making the very things of which they stand in need; and revolution in some form is not probable, but certain. The ideas that govern men are outraged. Instead of a few striking illustrations of incompetence or worse, they begin to see universal chaos instead of order. Their institutions, so far from protecting them in their peaceful avocations on which they rely for a livelihood, appear leagued together to keep them in…unnecessary servitude and dependence.”[9]

Pope Pius XI had already stressed this same truth, coupling with it a strong warning not to allow the paid Communist agitator to spread the seeds of disorder: “We cannot contemplate without sorrow,” he wrote, “the heedlessness of those who seem to make light of these imminent dangers, and with stolid indifference allow the propagation far and wide of those doctrines (of Communism) which seek by violence and bloodshed the destruction of all society. Even more severely must be condemned the foolhardiness of those who neglect to remove or modify such conditions as exasperate the minds of the people, and so prepare the way for the overthrow and the ruin of the social order.”[10] Many Catholics, in their interpretation of this latter text, fail to ascend to the financiers who control the volume of the exchange-medium and who are ultimately responsible for the policy of destruction. They see only the few rich, industrialists or others, who have succeeded in the struggle.

Catholics are frequently deceived in regard to this point by Communist propaganda. Following in the footsteps of Marx, Communists carefully avoid the distinction made by the German economist, Feder, between “Loan-Capital” and what he called Creative-Capital.” “A Rothschild or a Morgan,” writes Wyndham Lewis in Count your dead—They are alive!, ‘‘makes his money in a very different way from a Nuffield or a Ford. The former deals in money itself, as a commodity. His business is essentially that of a moneylender, he makes nothing, he toils not, neither does he spin. But for all that he is no lily, as a rule! The latter, on the other hand, of the Nuffield-Ford type, are creative in the sense that they do at least make something.…Without ‘Loan-Capital’ there would be no Communism. The straight Bolshevik-—say a Pollit or a Strachey—though perfectly aware of the deep significance of Herr Feder’s distinction, ignores it. He even resents its being mentioned. As a matter of fact, what Herr Feder’s calls a ‘creative capitalist’ the Russian Communist calls a ‘kulak.’ Even Henry Ford is only a gigantic ‘kulak.’ And of all things on earth the Marxist hates the ‘kulak’ most. With ‘Loan-Capital,’ on the other hand, he has many affinities. Indeed, if ‘Loan-Capital’ were allowed to proceed on its way without interference, it would automatically result in Communism.…“I felt that the Soviet was altogether too thick with the Capitalists.…It is perfectly clear that the category of ‘capitalist’ with whom the Soviet Empire is so friendly is of the kind described by Herr Feder as a ‘loan-capitalist.’…I remarked that these Lords of Capital, who do not seem to hate Communist Russia quite so much as you would expect, did not belong to us.

… We get nothing out of these people, but they get a great deal out of us. The richer they become—and they are very few—the poorer we become. And it is mathematically certain that we shall all end up on the dole, unless we can shoo them out and slam our door.”[11]

satan’s hatred of the blessed eucharist

As the Blessed Eucharist contains Our Divine Lord, the supernatural life in person, It is the object of special animosity on the part of Satan. Attacks on it play an important part in the preparation of revolutions in Catholic countries. Historically, there has been a noticeable difference between the mode of procedure adopted by Satan for the elimination of the supernatural life from Protestant and from Catholic countries. In Protestant countries, on account of the public official rejection of the Divine Plan for Order in the world, the gradual ousting of the remnant of Our Lord’s doctrine from the constitution and the public life of the country is inevitable. Thus, as the advent of naturalism in these countries is only a question of time, forcible steps have not in general been taken to uproot the past. Satan can afford to bide his time, so to say. That does not mean, however, that these countries may not be called upon to endure the agony of revolution. Satan’s hatred of belief in the Divinity of Our Lord, his fear of even the possibility of return to the Mass, the longing of the Jewish nation for the future Messianic Age, any one of these may be responsible for a recrudescence of violence in the effort to uproot every vestige of Christianity.

In Catholic countries, however, violent revolution is always aimed at, in order to get rid of the existing social structure, in which the Kingship of Christ is respected, and so to install naturalism. Now, profanation of the Blessed Eucharist has, on many occasions at least, been part of the preparation of apostate Catholics to be fitting instruments of revolution or of anti-supernatural legislation. The Reminiscences of a feminine agent of a Parisian Lodge, published some years ago, relate how she was sent on Spy Wednesday and Holy Thursday to collect fifteen Consecrated Hosts for the horrible profanations in the Lodge on Good Friday.[12] In that very useful work, The X Rays in Freemasonry, by A. Cowan, there is an interesting quotation from Waite’s Devil Worship in France (1896) concerning these sacrilegious attacks on Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. Waite was a non-Catholic, a Rosicrucian in fact, so he cannot be suspected of partiality to the Catholic Church.[13]

[1]“To find the cause, then, of this obstinacy, it must be borne in mind that the appetitive power is in all things proportioned to the apprehensive, whereby it is moved, as the movable by its mover.…Now the angel’s apprehension differs from man’s in this respect, that the angel, by his intellect apprehends immovably…whereas man by his reason apprehends movably.…Consequently man’s will adheres to a thing movably…whereas the angel’s will adheres fixedly and immovably.” (Ia P., Q. 64, a.2).

[2]Cf. The Rulers of Russia, in which some of the documentary evidence is given, which proves that the Jews are the real controlling force in Russia.

[3]Ia P., Q.64, art. 1, ad 4. Cf. IIIa P., Q.44, art. 1, ad 2.

Cf. also the following extract from the Sermon of Pope St. Leo the Great which is read in the second Nocturn of the Office of Palm Sunday: “If the proud and cruel enemy of God and man had been aware of the merciful design of God, he would have tried to soften the minds of the Jews rather than have sought to stir up their unjust hatred, lest in attacking the liberty of action of the one who was not in his debt, all his human captives should be set free. The malignity of his mind kept him from grasping the truth. He got the Son of God condemned to death and that condemnation became a remedy for the fall of the human race.” Satan’s disordered pride prevented him from understanding the ordered self-sacrificing humility of God become Man.

[4]Encyclical Letter, Caritatis Christi Cumpulsi.

[5]Encyclical Letter, Divini Redemptoris.

[6]Encylical Letter, Quadregesimo Anno.

[7]Encyclical Letter, Divini Redemptoris.

[8]Encyclical Letter, Caritate Christi Compulsi, On the Troubles of our Time.

[9]The Role of Money, p. 22.

[10]Encyclical Letter, Quadregesimo Anno, On the Social Order.

[11]Later on, in Chapter XVI, we shall have to call attention to the fact that James Connolly, through blindly following Karl Marx, never grasped the distinction made by Feder and never realised that Communism is merely an instrument in the hands of a section of the Loan-Capitalists.

[12]Cf. L’Elue du Dragon, pp. 109, 110. The Foreword says that two manuscript copies of these Mémoires are in existence, bearing date, 1885.

[13]A letter in The Catholic Herald (London), 11th August, 1934, from the pen of the Rev. J. B. Reeves, O.P., mentioned similar sacrileges in France and England, which had come to his knowledge.

Chapter VIII

The First Visible Organized Naturalistic Force—The Jewish Nation

the oneness of the divine plan for order

We have seen the oneness of The Divine Plan for Order in the world. This great truth needs to be stressed, for the age-long struggle of the Jewish nation against the supernatural life of the Mystical Body of Our Lord Jesus Christ, that is, the naturalism of the Jewish nation, does not stand out as clearly in the minds of Catholics today as it did in former ages. Again and again, the Popes have insisted upon the fact that the Catholic Church is the ark of salvation for all. For example, Pope Pius IX spoke of those who would be saved through invincible ignorance of the true religion of Christ,[1] but he urged the bishops of the whole world to do all in their power “to keep men’s minds free from the impious and fatally destructive opinion that the way of eternal salvation can be found in any religion whatever.” He insisted also that “it is a well-known Catholic dogma that nobody can be saved outside the Catholic Church and that those who are knowingly and willingly separated from the unity of the Church and from the Roman Pontiff successor of St. Peter cannot obtain eternal salvation.”[2]

The order of the world, then, demands the acceptance by all men of the supernatural life, which is a participation in the inner life of the Blessed Trinity. It is only through that divine life that our natural life, individual and social, can be lived in order.[3] The unique source of that life is Our Lord Jesus Christ, and human beings are intended to receive communication of that life by being incorporated into him through membership of the supernatural society of his Mystical Body, the Catholic Church. All nations are meant to enter the Mystical Body of Christ and to organize their national life so as to allow Our Lord to manifest his treasures of supernatural sanctity in every clime and in every latitude.

The world, as we have seen in the extract quoted from Pope Leo XIII’s Encyclical Letter, On Freemasonry, is divided into two camps.[4] On the one side, there is the camp of those who accept the supernatural life of grace under the leadership of Our Lord and, on the other, the naturalistic camp which, under the leadership of Satan, rejects that life. The Jewish nation is the most strongly organized visible force in the naturalistic camp. This fact must be emphasised more strongly than ever now that another organized force, in the same naturalistic and anti-supernatural camp, namely, the government set up by the National-Socialist Party, which is in control of the German national reaction, is attacking not only the Mystical Body of Christ but also the Jewish nation. Jewish propaganda against National-Socialism, when appealing to Catholics, stresses, the deadly opposition of the National-Socialist regime to the Catholic Church and the anti-Catholic character of the race theory. It does not point out that the quarrel between the National-Socialist government and the Jewish nation is between two sections of the naturalistic army, both of which are hostile to the Catholic Church. The Jews, as a nation, refuse to accept the Divine Plan for Order. They, as well as the National-Socialists, want to impose on God their plans for the glory of their race and nation. They deify their own nation. Hence both the Jewish nation and the National-Socialist movement reject our true divinization, through Our Lord Jesus Christ.[5] The ideals and aims of both these sections of the naturalistic army are opposed to the Catholic, ideal and infinitely inferior to it. And both these forces are being used by Satan to inflict disaster on the world. There is laughter in hell when human beings succumb once more to the temptation of the Garden of Eden and put themselves in the place of God, whether the new divinity be the Jewish race or the German race.[6]

We must now study more closely the significance of Jewish naturalism. There is need for clear thinking in this connection. We must distinguish accurately between opposition to the domination of Jewish naturalism in society and hostility to the Jews as a race. The latter form of opposition, namely, hostility to the Jews as a race, is what is designated by the term, anti-Semitism. The former opposition is incumbent on every Catholic and on every true lover of his native land.

the jewish nation’s rejection

of the supernatural messias

The Jewish nation was chosen by God to maintain acceptable worship of the one true God in preparation for the coming of him who was to re-establish order in the world by the restoration of supernatural life. The Jewish nation was at the same time destined to be the source of the individuality of the supernatural Messias to come. His personality was to be from on high. Our Lord Jesus Christ, the supernatural Messias, true God and true Man, is at one and the same time the second person of the Blessed Trinity and a Jew of the house of David. Two of the essential points of his teaching roused the stubborn hostility of the leaders of the Jewish nation, “The Pharisees who formed the dominant sect in the last years of the political existence of our nation brought about a veritable religious revolution amongst the Jews who followed them. To the Church of Jesus Christ which is the development of the historical Synagogue of Israel, to that Church which had its origin in Jerusalem and had at first no adherents other than the descendants of Abraham, the proud and perverse Pharisees set up in opposition a false foreign Synagogue, founded on traditions of their own fabrication and on the arbitrary interpretations and hairsplitting decisions dictated by their hypocritical zeal (Cf. Mk 7:9 and Mt. 15:9). This has been for our unhappy nation ‘a root bringing forth gall and bitterness’ (Deut. 29:18).[7] The Jews refused, firstly, to accept that the supernatural life of his Messianic Kingdom was higher than their national life and, secondly, they utterly rejected the idea of the Gentile nations being admitted to enter into the Messianic Kingdom, on the same level as themselves. Thus they put their national life above the supernatural life of grace and set racial descent from Abraham according to the flesh on a higher plane than spiritual descent from Abraham by faith.[8] Having put their race and nation in the place of God, having in fact deified them, they rejected the supernatural Messias and elaborated a program of preparation for the natural Messias to come. “Our Lord spoke a heavenly language to them (the Jews),” wrote a great Jewish convert, Father Libermann, C.S.Sp., and they interpreted his words in a mean and ignoble fashion, according to their low and narrow ideas.…Their souls were half-brutalized by sin and the domination of sense-life, with the result that they were incapable of grasping heavenly things.”[9]

“Jews,” writes another distinguished convert, “may be broadly classified as the Orthodox (or pious) Jews and the Reform (or enlightened) Jews.…The Orthodox want…a return to Jerusalem—the rebuilding of the Temple and the reinstitution of the sacrifices under the ministration of the descendants of Aaron. There, in the Holy City, they want to await the coming of the Messianic Age, the coming of a personal Messiah. The Reform Jew holds to the belief in the Messianic Age, while he rejects the belief in a personal Messiah.”[10]Another distinguished Jewish writer, not a convert, expresses this hope as follows: ‘‘The most sceptical with regard to the Mission of Israel dispersed among the nations consider… as the ultimate ideal of the nation and the accomplishment of its destiny, the establishment of a union of all peoples fully reconciled and morally united in a spirit of definitive peace, social justice and fraternal solidarity.…Jewish faith aims at procuring the emancipation of Israel, suffering and down-trodden, and at the same time collaborating in the emancipation of humanity, for which it has still the ambition to be a light and an instrument of salvation.”[11]

The Jewish ideal of a future Messianic Age is opposed to the real order of the world in a two-fold manner.

In the first place, the Jewish nation opposes the Divine Plan for the union of all nations in the Catholic Church, the Mystical Body of Christ. The Catholic Church is supranational and, by the aid of the supernatural life of grace, can work at eliminating the particular form of selfishness of each nation, so that the union of all may be achieved in a manner perfectly respectful of the variety of national qualities and characteristics. God wanted the Jews as a people to accept his Only-begotten Son and be the heralds of the supernatural, supranational life of his Mystical Body. They were thus offered the privilege of proclaiming and working for the only mode of realizing the union and brotherhood of nations which is possible since the Fall. Their pride or lack of humility and docility caused them to set their faces against God. When they refused to enter into his designs, God permitted the crime of deicide and, by the supreme act of humble submission of Our Lord on Calvary, the life of grace was restored to the world. Calvary, however, was a consequence of the refusal of the Jews to submit humbly to God the Father and accept his Son. In his Commentary on St. Matthew, 26:39, St. Thomas quotes the opinion of St. Jerome that Our Lord, by his prayer in the Garden of Gethsemani, “My Father, if it be possible, let this chalice pass from me,” asked to have the redemption of the world accomplished without the crime of the Jews, his own people, but bowed down to what his Father was permitting, namely, the abuse of their free will by that people, with all its dire consequences for himself and for his Mystical Body, “Nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt.” The Jews freely rejected Christ before Pontius Pilate, as they freely reject him today. God the Father drew good out of evil then, as he does now, but the rejection was and is against the order of the world and therefore evil. These great truths must be emphasised in face of such blasphemies as the following: “As a matter of fact, if, as Christianity teaches, the Only-begotten Son of God was to be crucified as a vicarious atonement to save the sinful world and God used the Jews as a vehicle to bring about the crucifixion, why blame the Jews? The fault rests with God.”[12] The per se order or order desired by God in accordance with his infinite holiness, was that the Jewish nation should receive Christ as true God and true man and put its natural qualities at his disposal for the undoing of the effects of original sin. The per accidens order, or order consequent on God’s permitting the Jews freely to prefer their national life to the acceptance of the Divine Plan, is the one in which, in actual fact, the combat against original sin has been waged historically, with the Jews in the forefront of the naturalistic or anti-supernatural army.[13]

In his commentary on the text of St. Matthew, 27:46: “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken Me?” St. Thomas writes: “It is manifest that Our Lord utters these words as Man.…The expression ‘forsaken,’ expresses by a simile that what we have we have received from God. Hence, just as when anyone is exposed to an evil or a misfortune, he is said to be abandoned or forsaken, so when God allows man to fall into a fault or meet with suffering, he is said to be forsaken. Accordingly, Christ is said to be abandoned, not in the sense that he was deprived of union with the Word, or that he was deprived of grace, but to express that his Passion was permitted…Christ says ‘why?’ not out of irritation against or discontent with the divine will, but to indicate a feeling of compassion towards the Jews. That is why he uses the expression only after darkness has spread over the earth. Hence he means: Why did you will that I should have to undergo this passion and that they (the Jews) should be blinded and in darkness? He at the same time expresses admiration for God’s wonderful charity.”

The Jewish ideal of a future Messianic Age is opposed to God’s will in a second way. The Jews reject the supernatural Messias and his supranational Kingdom, while they continue to look for another Messias. This means that they long for a Messianic age which must of necessity be purely natural.[14] Whether this Messias be taken to be an individual or the race, it means that the Jews, as a nation, must strive to impose their particular national form on other nations. This imposition of the Jewish national form inevitably spells decay for other traditional national forms. The imposition by any nation of its national form on other nations leads to the decay of the other nations, and this is all the more emphatically the case when the attempted imposition is accompanied by the rejection of the one true order of the world, which can be achieved only through Our Lord Jesus Christ.[15]

The Jewish Messianic ambition, therefore, contains a twofold source of corruption and decay for other nations. It corrupts the national life on the natural level, and by its opposition to the supernatural life coming from Our Lord Jesus Christ, it rejects that succour, by which alone human life, individual and national, can he lived in order. Father Joseph Lémann, a Jewish convert priest, emphasizes the total lack of natural prudence displayed in the admission of Jews to French citizenship at the French Revolution and contrasts the folly of revolutionaries with the supernatural foresight of the Catholic Church. “The Church is very far-seeing.” he writes, “…She would not allow a Jew to hold any key position in Christian society, in the 18th century any more than in the 10th century. She would not allow a Jew, for example, to teach Christians, to sit under a crucifix as judge over Christians, to take part in the drawing up of laws for a Christian state. The Church’s line of conduct is always the same. The Church tolerates Jews, treats them kindly, has compassion on them, but on condition that they remain apart in their own quarters and do not seek to enter into the bosom of Christian societies. She knows well that, if they once obtain entrance, they will get control of the heart of these societies and upset its proper functioning.”[16]

the tragedy of the jewish nation

“The case of governments.” wrote Pope Leo XIII, “is much the same as that of individuals: they also must run into fatal issues, if they depart from the way.…Let Jesus be excluded, and human reason is left without its greatest protection and illumination: the very notion is easily lost of the end for which God created human society.…Their minds busy with a hundred confused projects, rulers and subjects alike travel a devious road, bereft as they are of safe guidance and fixed principle. Just as it is pitiable and calamitous to wander out of the way, so it is to desert the truth. But the first absolute and essential truth is Christ, the Word of God, consubstantial and co-eternal with the Father, who with the Father is one.”[17] Pius XI is just as explicit as Leo XIII “No belief in God,” he writes, “will in the long run be preserved pure and genuine, if it is not supported by belief in Christ.…Belief in Christ will not be preserved true and genuine, if not supported and protected by belief in the Church, the pillar and the ground of truth (1Tim. 3:15). Christ himself, God praised forever, has erected this pillar of faith. His command to hear the Church (Mt. 18:17), to hear his words and commandments (Lk. 10:16) in the words and Commandments of the Church, is meant for the men of all times and places.…The moral conduct of mankind is grounded on faith in God kept pure and true. Every attempt to dislodge moral teaching and moral conduct from the rock of faith, and to erect them on the shifting sands of human regulations, sooner or later leads the individual and the community to moral destruction.[18]

These principles of Pope Leo XIII and Pope Pius XI apply with greater force to the Jewish nation and its leaders than to others, for they have rejected greater graces and turned against God with direr ingratitude. They are Our Lord’s own people according to the flesh. It is no wonder, then, that we find terrible divagations from order in the books or codes which their leaders have compiled to guide and direct their relations with God and their fellow-men. The Kabbala contains, chiefly, but not exclusively, the divagations from order with regard to mystical union with God and the growth of the spiritual life. The Talmud contains, chiefly, but not exclusively, the deviations from right order concerning social relations with non-Jews.

In view of the possible accusation of exaggeration, it will be well to quote an unimpeachable witness with regard to the Talmud. In his splendid work, De L’Harmonie entré L’Église et la Synogogue, the Ex-Rabbin Drach, highly honored and decorated for his learned works by Popes Leo XII, Pius VIII and Gregory XVI, writes as follows: “For a long time it was my professional duty to teach the Talmud and explain its doctrines, after having attended special courses for many years, under the most renowned of contemporary Jewish Doctors. Now that by the grace of God I have been led to abjure its false dogmas, I can speak of it with full knowledge of its contents, as a result of my studies, but I will endeavor to do so with complete impartiality. On the one hand, I have devoted the best years of my life to the study of it, on the other hand, it means nothing to me now. I shall therefore set forth both what is good in it and what is defective.

“Talmud (more correctly Thalmud),…. is a Hebrew word used by the Rabbins to signify ‘doctrine’ or ‘teaching.’ It designates more particularly the great body of Jewish doctrine, to which the greatest doctors in Israel have successively contributed at different epochs. It is the complete civil and religious code of the synagogue.…The judicious reader of the Talmud is often saddened by the presence of many of those strange aberrations into which the human mind falls, when bereft of the true faith, and very frequently the baseness of rabbinical cynicism makes him blush for shame. The Christian also is horrified by the insane and atrocious calumnies which the impious hatred of the Pharisees hurls at everything he holds sacred. Nevertheless, the Christian theologian therein discovers useful data and precious traditions for the explanation of many difficult texts of the New Testament as well as for the purpose of convincing our religious opponents of the antiquity no less than the holiness of Catholic teaching.… “The Talmud is divided into the Mischna, commonly called Misna, which forms the text, and the Ghemara, which is the commentary and the development of the text. The Ghemara is twofold, comprising both the Commentary of Jerusalem and the Commentary of Babylon.…In the Ghemara, there are at least a hundred passages which are insulting to the memory of Our adorable Savior, the more than angelic purity of his holy Mother, the Immaculate Queen of heaven, as well as the moral character of Christians, whom the Talmud represents as practising the most abominable vices. There are also passages which declare that the precepts of justice, equity and charity towards one’s neighbor do not bind in the case of Christians; nay more, they even go so far as to condemn as guilty of crime anyone who observes these precepts in his relations with his Christian neighbors. The Talmud expressly forbids a Jew to save a non-Jew from death or to restore to him his lost possessions, etc., or to take pity on him.[19] The rabbins declare also: ‘Since the life of an idolator is at the discretion of the Jew, a fortiori his goods.[20] Quotations of this nature could be multiplied almost indefinitely. In the Mischna, there are only about four or five of these impious, malignant and horribly intolerant passages, and, in addition, the expressions show a certain moderation.

“In the edition of the Talmud printed in 1581 by Froben of Basle, the Censors, Marcus Marinus, Italus Brixiensis and Petrus Cavallerius, suppressed the most important of these passages we have just mentioned, as well as the whole treatise, Aboda-Zara, which deals with the question of idolatry. As is well-known, the rabbins consider Catholics as idolators, because they give to Our Lord Jesus Christ the worship of latria and to the Blessed Virgin and the saints the worship of dulia.[21] Some time afterwards, however, the Jews restored the suppressed passages, in an edition published by them at Cracow. As these passages brought forth indignant protests from Catholics with a knowledge of Hebrew, the Jewish Synod, held in Poland in 1631, prescribed that they should be suppressed in the subsequent editions. The following is the passage of the circular letter by which the Synod communicated this decision: ‘Hence we enjoin upon you, under pain of major excommunication, not to print anything in the future editions of the Mischna and the Ghemara, relating to the acts of Jesus of Nazareth.…Consequently we order you to leave blank in the editions the passages treating of Jesus of Nazareth and to put in place of them a circle like this: O. This will he an indication to the rabbins and teachers to acquaint their pupils with these passages only orally. By means of this precaution, the learned amongst the Nazarenes (Christians) will have no excuse for attacking us on the point.’’[22]

To the testimony of M. Drach, can be added that of the Civiltá Cattolica.[23] The great Jewish family dispersed over the earth constitutes a foreign nation in the midst of the nations among which it dwells and is at the same time the sworn enemy of their prosperity. The very essence of Talmudism consists precisely in the oppression and spoliation of the peoples that give hospitality to those that follow its behests. ‘This is why St. Paul already in his day, spoke of the Jews as ‘displeasing to God and adversaries of all men’ (1Thess. 2:15). That the sinister Talmudic code, in addition to horribly immoral rules of conduct, enjoins hatred of all who are not of Jewish blood and especially of Christians, and allows them to be plundered and maltreated as noxious brutes, are no longer matters of controversy. The testimony of the gravest and most judicious students of the Mischna which contains the text of the Talmud and of the Ghemara which is the commentary thereon, including that of several of the most learned rabbins of the past and present makes the matter absolutely certain.

“To convince the most stubborn doubters it will be sufficient to consult the work of Achilles Laurent. This book has been almost completely removed from circulation by the Jews, because it reveals in masterly fashion the secrets of Talmudism in their application to the annihilation of Christian civilization. Besides, we have in the past given irrefutable proofs of our affirmations, so it would be superfluous to go over them again.…The other point which renders the organization of the Jews in Christian countries most dangerous and multiplies a hundredfold the aversion of which they are the object, is the superstitious belief fostered by the Talmud that the Israelites not only constitute the noblest race of the human species, all the others being inferior to them, but that by full divine right the universe belongs to them and will be theirs one day.…One can say that this insane belief is the chief dogma of what they call their religion.”

As the existence of the immoral ceremony called the Kol Nidre has been called in question, it will be well to quote M. Drach concerning it. In his book from which we have already quoted (vol. 1, p. 559), we read: “Before the chorister of the synagogue intones the first prayer of the Feast of Expiations, three men, forming a tribunal and occupying a place in front of the assembly, annul by their full authority all the vows, engagements and oaths of every member of the assembly, both those of the year just elapsed and those of the year just beginning. This is called Kol (Col) Nidre, some rabbins have tried to hold that this is only valid for the future. Of course the effect would be the same, even if this were true, since the ceremony is repeated every year. But these rabbins have been victoriously refuted by others who prove that one can profit by it for the past as well as for the future.…According to grave and learned rabbins, a Jew is obliged to get himself thus released only from the promises he may have made to a fellow-Jew, for he cannot contract any obligation at all towards a non-Jew.”[24]

In presence of this ceremony and of the official teaching of Jewry, we can conclude that Jews who faithfully follow the practices of their religion (the “good” Jews, as they are sometimes called) will strive to eliminate Our Lord’s supernatural influence from society quite as effectively as the “bad” (non-practicing) Jews.

Such is the Talmud, the code which has been used for centuries to mold and form the attitude of the Jewish nation towards other nations. Taking into account the principles laid down by Pope Leo XIII and Pope Pius XI concerning the consequences of opposition to Our Lord Jesus Christ and his Church, we see that it was morally inevitable that the Jewish nation should draw up some such code of national self-seeking as we find in the Talmud. It was morally inevitable also that the true concept of Jehovah should become obscured for growing numbers of Jews and that they should fall a prey to the pantheistic deification of their race in the Marxian materialist form and in others.

the anti-supernatural influence

of the jewish nation

Every Jew, in so far as he is at one with his race and nation in looking forward to another Messiah or to a Messianic Age, stands for a naturalistic or anti-supernatural organization of society. Thus his influence makes for disorder. We may express this truth in another way, in a commentary on the statement sometimes heard, to the effect that “there, are good Jews and bad Jews.” Can we make a distinction between “good” Jews and “bad” Jews, in respect of naturalistic aims and anti-supernatural influence? It seems to be logically impossible, as we have seen. All Jews, with a vigor proportionate to their oneness with the leaders of their nation, reject the supernatural Messias, Our Lord Jesus Christ, and stand for an anti-supernatural organization of society. They all refuse to accept Our Lord as the Messias and look forward to a Messianic Age organized without him and against him. If those who are termed “good” Jews come to dominate in society, they will organize it in opposition to Our Lord just as surely as those that are called “bad” Jews. They all suffer from that terrible blindness (obcaecatio) with regard to the light of truth which we beg God to remove from their hearts in the touching prayer of Good Friday. The English translation of this prayer runs as follows: “Let us pray also for the perfidious Jews: that our God and Lord may remove the veil from their hearts: that they also may acknowledge Our Lord Jesus Christ. Almighty and Eternal God, Who dost not exclude from Thy mercy even the perfidious Jews: hear our prayers, which we offer for the blindness of that people: that acknowledging the light of Thy truth, which is Christ, they may be delivered from their darkness. Through the same God Jesus Christ, Who livest and reignest with God the Father in the unity of the Holy Ghost, through all the ages of ages. Amen.”[25] It does seem ridiculous to pray for deliverance from blindness for the Jews and, at the same time, allow those blind guides to direct our political and economic arrangements.

Doubtless there are Jews in whom may be seen excellent natural qualities and Our Lord does not refuse the aid of divine grace to those who in good faith may be combating him and his Church, but we must always bear in mind that the real struggle in the world is for the overthrow of naturalism and the return to the Divine Plan for Order. We have to undo the social apostacy of Europe, and this makes it imperative to combat both Jewish and Masonic naturalism. There are Masons too, as well as Jews, in whom excellent natural qualities are present, but the Masonic Society, as such, is naturalistic. And the Jewish nation affirms its naturalism much more openly.

The Jews, as a nation, are objectively aiming at giving society a direction which is in complete opposition to the order God wants. It is possible that a member of the Jewish nation, who rejects Our Lord, may have the supernatural life which God wishes to see in every soul, and thus be good with the goodness God wants, but, objectively the direction he is seeking to give to the world is opposed to God and to that life, and so is not good. If a Jew who rejects Our Lord is good in the way God demands, it is in spite of the movement in which he and his nation are engaged. Our Lord Jesus Christ alone is the source of the goodness God wants to see in every human being, the goodness due to participation in the inner life of the Blessed Trinity. No Jew, in virtue of what he objectively stands for, is supernaturally good as God wants him to be.

Hence there would seem to be a regrettable confusion of thought in the article on The Jews in Ireland, which appeared in The Standard (Dublin), March 3rd 1939. The article stated: “The Standard stands for the practical application of Christian principles in the public life of Ireland.…Doubtless there are good Jews and bad Jews, just as there are good and bad non-Jews in every country. We may praise the good and reprobate the bad…”

The article in The Standard was perfectly correct in insisting upon the Christian principle of exclusion of hatred of the Jews as a race. The inculcation of that spirit of charity towards the Jews, however, is not the only Christian principle that has a bearing on the problem. To work for the return of society to Christ the King, thus securing the triumph of the supernatural spirit of the Mystical Body in social life, is surely a Christian principle. The Jewish nation is an organized entity opposed to the treatment of our fellow human beings as members of Christ. We must therefore combat their naturalism. Some Catholics seem to forget that the Jews who were plotting the crime of deicide were so “pious” and “God-fearing” and “good” that they would not go into the hall of Pilate’s palace,” that they might not he defiled but that they might eat the pasch” (Jn. 18:28). Pilate had to yield to their scruples and go out to them, yet they were intent on the most awful crime ever committed.

Needless to say, there are divisions amongst the Jews in spite of the “United Front” which they certainly present to non-Jews. There are, for example, as well as the division into Orthodox and Reformed, the division between the Sephardim and the Askenazim—a sort of survival of the old rivalry between the Sadducees and the Pharisees—and that between the Zionists and the non-Zionists. But they all agree in the rejection of Our Lord Jesus Christ as the Messiah and they all look forward to a Messianic era in which they, as a nation, will play the role of “Chosen People” over the nations of the world.
That is what is meant in practice by their naturalism. It is this naturalistic ideal of domination of the Jewish race and nation, the inevitable consequence of their perversion of the Divine Plan for Order, that is stressed in this book. It is, in fact, simply the consciousness of what they hold to be their national mission. As a consequence, in every country, they conduct themselves as a separate and distinct nation destined to mold the others. Anyone who had occasion to observe the world-wide efforts of the Jews at the time of the Dreyfus case in France is not likely to have any doubt about their national solidarity in spite of their dispersion all over the world.

M. Drach is very instructive on this subject. Referring to his own painful experience in trying to recover his kidnapped children, he writes: “The police spent nearly two years in fruitless attempts to discover what every Jew knew quite well, even the children, not only in France and England, but in every country where the race of Jacob is to be found. The universally admitted skill of the French police was powerless to discover the truth, because of the secrecy and discretion which the Jews observe in their dealings with the Goyim (non-Jews), whenever there is question of a matter of national interest.”[26]

As we have seen, the Jewish nation has gradually become the most strongly organized non-secret visible force working for the elimination of the supernatural outlook in society and for the installation of naturalism. The supernatural outlook insists that we are a race whose highest life, the divine life of grace, by which the Blessed Trinity dwells in our souls, was lost by the fall of Adam but restored by Our Lord Jesus Christ. Naturalism denies the existence of any life higher than natural life and maintains that social relations must be organized on that basis. As members of Christ, we are bound to work for the return of society to our loving Savior. Pope Pius XI insists upon this in the Encyclical on the Kingship of Christ.

Let us now take two examples of how our efforts to combat naturalism will bring us into conflict with Jews in their preparations for the naturalistic Messias. The first example will deal with the political, the second with the economic, organization of the world.

States and nations are bound to acknowledge the Catholic Church as the one true Church. Pope Pius XI, in the same Encyclical Letter, shows that the naturalistic spirit has gradually come to infect society, because “by degrees the religion of Christ was put on the same level as false religions and placed ignominiously in the same category with them.’’ Previously, Pope Pius VII had written: “By the fact that the freedom of all forms of worship is proclaimed, truth is confused with error, and the holy and immaculate Spouse of Christ, outside of which there can be no salvation, is placed on the same level as heretical sects and even as Jewish perfidy.”[27] Now, since the French Revolution, states have placed erroneous religious bodies on the same level as the Mystical Body of Christ, and the Jews have been admitted as full citizens of the once Christian states. “The sententious maxims, which in 1789 were declared to be the synthesis of the rights of man, were, in point of fact, merely the rights of the Jews, to the detriment of those peoples amongst whom those ‘rights’ were enthroned.”[28] By granting full citizenship to members of the Jewish nation, the state, to all intents and purposes, gives free rein to the naturalistic molding process pursued by the Jewish nation, in view of the elimination of membership of Christ and the inauguration of the new Messianic era. It thus shows itself indifferent in the struggle between the true supernatural Messias who has come, and the naturalistic Messias, to whom the Jews look forward.

In his work, Questions de Conscience, J. Maritain seems to hold a different view with regard to this last point, he writes as follows: “The emancipation of the Jews, realised by the French Revolution, is a measure that civilized peoples, if they wish to remain such, must consider as definite.” This is quoted with approval by l’Abbé Journet in Nova et Vetera, July–September, 1939. It seems to the present writer that the profession of indifference to Our Lord Jesus Christ involved in that state attitude is wrong and renders impossible that integral return to Our Lord Jesus Christ, which is the foundation of order.

Of course, there need be no difficulty about allowing Jewish non-citizens, who may be permitted to reside in a country not their own, freedom of worship in their synagogues. That is a totally different question from the one with which we are concerned. The point at issue here is the naturalistic disorder by which, in all revolutionary constitutions since 1789, the state rejects the Divine Plan for Order and puts all religions on the same level. Having thus entered the camp of the natural Messias, the state as a necessary corollary, admits the Jews to full citizenship and allows them in practice to work freely for the supremacy of their own nation over the native one and to prepare for the Messianic era.

It may be well to quote here some prominent Catholic writers who have advocated that the full citizenship of states, accorded to the Jews by the French Revolution, should be withdrawn from them. We shall begin with the Marquis de la Tour du Pin, the great French social writer. In his book, Vers une ordre Social Chrétien, he says that down to the French Revolution “the Catholic Church and the rulers who governed according to her maxims kept the Jews at a distance from Christians. They did not persecute the Jews; they did not treat them as enemies, because that would he repugnant to charity, but they treated them as foreigners, that is to say, as citizens of another nation. They did not attack Jewish worship or Jewish laws or Jewish customs; on the contrary, they protected the free exercise of them, but on the condition that the Jews respected the Christian organization of the state and did not attempt to undermine it.… Jewish perfidy was an object of distrust, and to those Jews who disguised themselves in order to penetrate into the Christian state and destroy it, the chastisement of traitors was justly meted out…The Christian (pre-revolutionary) state, we hasten to remark, did not content itself merely with repressing Jewish rapacity. It protected itself against it, especially by its strong economic constitution comprising the corporative organization of labor and the feudal organization of property. Thanks to the former, it prevented labor from being exploited and its fruits confiscated by foreign capital: by the latter, it prevented the land from being taken away from the native owners and kept the roof over their heads.…Thus the usurious arts of the Jews were sometimes tolerated without the defenses of the Christian state being broken down.…The Jews inevitably act as a solvent on the Christian state, because they, as a nation, continue to be convinced that the empire of the world belongs to them (under the natural Messias to come).…As the primary condition of our emancipation, we must go back to our ancestral mode of action and treat the Jews only as foreigners and as dangerous foreigners.”

This text of the Marquis de le Tour du Pin is cited by Monsieur Léon de Poncins.[29] This distinguished Catholic authority on the question of secret societies quotes with approval the above passage and adds: “There remains one solution of the Jewish problem, namely, the Ghetto.…Why are the Jews so powerful today? Because, deceived by seductive and insidious formulae, the West has allowed itself to be penetrated and impregnated with the Jewish mentality, a mentality which began to show itself at the epoch of the Reformation and triumphed at the French Revolution…The domination of Israel is the consequence of this triumph…The modern world sprung from the Reformation and the Revolution of 1789, this world impregnated with the naturalism of Freemasonry and Judaism, is dying before our eyes.”

Another distinguished author, Mgr. Henri Delassus, Doctor in Theology, writes as follows: “The first thing to do is to change French legislation. French law, for the last 120 years, is legalizing a falsehood. It considers as French those who are not French, since they are Jews. French legislation, should be in harmony with truth. It ought to restore to the Jews their Jewish nationality, in conformity with reason, history, justice and humanity. The legislation introduced by the Revolution represents the Jew as French. He is not French.…The Jews must cease to be officers, magistrates, professors, civil servants, barristers, attorneys, doctors in the public service.…We must repeal the law by which Jews have been allowed to usurp the title of French citizens and declare them deprived of French citizenship.…Without  any foolish acceptation of persons, without a trace of inhuman violence, by an abstract legal provision which cannot wound anybody’s self-love and of which, consequently, nobody can complain, Jewish functionaries must be obliged to resign from government positions.…It is especially to financial centralization that the Jews owe the greater part of their strength. But that financial centralization could not have been maintained if the Jews had not succeeded in securing political centralization.…Accordingly, without a change in the legislation introduced by the Revolution, the restoration of the French state is impossible.”[30]

Perhaps the most forcible testimony to the necessity of this measure is that to be found in the series of articles contributed to the Civiltá Cattolica in October, November and December, 1890. These articles form a complete treatise on The Jewish Question in Europe; its causes, its effects and the remedies advocated. After having spoken of various unsatisfactory remedies, the writer continues: “In order that the Christian nations may be delivered from the yoke of Judaism and Freemasonry, which is daily growing more oppressive, the only way open to them is to go back along the road they have traversed, to the point where they took the wrong turning. If the Jews are not rendered harmless by means of special laws depriving them of that civil equality to which they have no right, nothing useful or lasting will be accomplished. In view of their presence in different countries and their unchangeable character of foreigners in every nation, of enemies of the people of every country that supports them, and of a society segregated from the societies amongst which they live: in view of the Talmudic moral code which they follow and the fundamental dogma of their religion which spurs them on to get hold of the possessions of all peoples by any means in their power, as, according to it they are entitled to rule the world: in view of the fact that the experience of many centuries and our present experience have proved conclusively that the equality of civil rights with Christians, granted them in Christian states, has had for effect the oppression of Christians by them, it follows as a necessary consequence that the only way to safeguard the rights of Christians, where the Jews are permitted to dwell, is to regulate their sojourn by laws such that it will be impossible for them to injure Christians.

“This is what was done in the past. This is what the Jews have been seeking to undo for the last hundred years. This is what will have to be done over again, sooner or later, whether one likes it or not. The position of power to which the laws inspired by the Revolution have raised them in our day is digging under their feet an abyss just as deep as the height to which they have ascended. When the storm, which they by their display of power are provoking, bursts, they will be hurled down headlong in a catastrophe as unparalleled in their annals as the effrontery with which they are today undermining the life of the nations that have exalted them.…

“It is certain that one of the signs of the end of the world foretold in Holy Scripture is the entrance of Israel into the one true fold. But we are not convinced that there are indications of that conversion visible at present. This people scattered over the face of the earth…is today what it became after the destruction of Jerusalem, without a king, without a priesthood, without a temple, without a native land, and, at the same time, a most bitter enemy of the name and of the Church of Jesus Christ, true God and true Man, crucified by their ancestors. We see no proofs, evident or otherwise, that it is likely to change for the better and welcome as its Savior that Jesus whom it put to death.… It is certain that at present the Jewish nation as a whole shows an incomparably greater tendency towards the hatred and destruction of Christianity than towards a benevolent attitude to it and a desire to see it prosper.’’[31]

It is clear from the foregoing that our efforts to undo the effects of the French Revolution and to permeate the political life of the nations with Christian principles will involve us in conflict with Jewish naturalism. It is equally certain that we shall have to combat Jewish naturalism in our endeavors to organize economic life on the basis of membership of Christ.

In regard to the economic organization of the world, Pope Pius XI, in the Encyclical Letter, On the Social Order, insists that “then only will it be possible to unite all in harmonious striving for the common good, when all sections of society have the intimate conviction that they are members of a single family and children of the same Heavenly Father, and further, that they are one body in Christ and everyone members one of another.’[32] To have lasting peace in society, then, we Catholics must strive to bring back the great truth that employers and employed must treat one another as members of Christ. It is, as we have seen, part of what we promise Christ as King, when we make submission to Our Heavenly Father along with Christ as Priest, at Mass. Now, the aim of the Jewish nation is to substitute for the supernatural Messias in whom we are members of one Body, the rule of the natural Messias. Accordingly, in virtue of Catholic principles, we must oppose the efforts of the Jews to get control of the economic organization of society. How can we succeed in getting employers and employed to treat one another as members of Christ, if we allow social organization to pass into the hands of those who have persistently denied and rejected his divine Mission and for whom the supernatural Kingdom of his Mystical body is simply a fraudulent attempt to turn Israel aside from its destiny? We have, therefore, to resist and defeat Jewish efforts to dominate social organisms and mold them along naturalistic lines, in opposition to Our Lord and his Mystical Body. The guilds of the Middle Ages, which, as we have seen, reflected the solidarity of the members of the Mystical Body of Christ in economic organization, rendered wonderful services to their members in times of sickness and need, thus efficaciously preventing Jewish money-lenders from gaining control of families and property.[33]

We too in our day must safeguard the poor and needy from being tortured by Jewish money-lenders. Our action in this connection must, however, not be merely the negative one of combating illegalities and getting laws suitably amended, but the positive one of setting up organizations, which will render services similar to those rendered by the guilds. Besides this safeguarding of the poor and needy, there is the more far-reaching question of the creation of money and the regulation of the volume of exchange-medium used by Christian peoples. That power must not be allowed to fall into, some would say, to remain in, Jewish hands or into the hands of nominal or erstwhile Christians, Masons and others, who are dependent upon, or in alliance with, Jews. We must combat Jewish attempts to bring under their domination individual Catholics and Catholic countries, even more vigorously than we must struggle against Freemasonry, because the Jews form a more strongly organized and more cohesive naturalistic force than Freemasonry.[34]

the dual citizenship of the jews

Read in the light of what has been written, the following observations will help readers to understand the difference between the situation of a Jew who becomes a citizen of the United States or France or Italy and, say, an Irishman who becomes a citizen of one of these states.

The members of the Jewish nation, while retaining their primary allegiance to their own nation, are also citizens of other nations. Given the Messianic aspirations of their own nation, they are bound to strive for the domination of their nation over the others, as they are firmly convinced that in this way alone justice and peace will reign upon the earth. The positions attained by them in the councils and legislative assemblies of other nations must logically he for them, at least primarily, a means for advancing the domination of their own people. That Christ should reign over nations, that the influence of his supernatural life should be felt in all public life, elevating and purifying it, is utterly abhorrent to their naturalism.

They entertain considerable contempt for the national patriotism of non-Jews, though in public pronouncements they may pander to it for the sake of their own interests. If the Jews, for example, assisted at a peace conference merely as representatives of a Palestinian state, their role thereat would be proportioned to the importance of that state, but when they assist as citizens and representatives of England, France and the United States, then we know that English, French and American citizenship will be utilised for the furtherance of the interests of a nation that believes firmly that English, French and Americans are destined by God to be subject to it.

The primary allegiance of an Irishman, who has become a citizen of the United States, is to the United States. He may retain his sympathies with Irish national aspirations, but—to put it mildly—he is not imbued from birth with the idea that the Irish nation is destined to rule over the Americans and all other nations. Besides, if the Irishman in question is still a Catholic and believes firmly in the supernatural Messias already come, he will be convinced that any subordination of the legitimate interests of the nation of which he is citizen to those of any other nation will be sinful. If, in any public capacity, he found his sympathies with Irish national aspirations (which, as has been said, do not include a program of bringing other nations into subjection) coming into conflict with the mission entrusted to him of safeguarding primarily the interests of the U.S.A., he would in conscience be obliged to resign. Otherwise, he would fail in his duty to the supernatural Messias, Our Lord Jesus Christ. The Jew, to be consistent, would fail in his duty to the Messias to come, if he did not subordinate the interests of every other nation to those of his own. There is, accordingly, a vital difference of attitude, which has its ultimate ground in the doctrines respectively held with regard to the Messias.

The naturalistic adventure upon which Europe embarked at the French Revolution has been disastrous for the nations of Western Europe, for it has simply meant, as we have seen, that they have allowed the Jewish nation to impose its national form upon them and thus bring about their downfall and decay.[35] The Jewish religion of the natural Messias necessarily aims at this imposition of the Jewish national form. The evil was inaugurated by the putting of all religions on the same level and the admission of the Jews to full citizenship. So the first step to be taken to undo the naturalism of the French Revolution is to withdraw citizenship of other states from all Jews and limit them to citizenship of one state, their own.[36]

Have the Jews a right to Palestine as the portion of the earth’s surface in which they may set up a separate state? It is clear from all that has been said about their rejection of the true supernatural Messias that they can no longer lay claim to it by divine right. They were assigned that part of the earth as their inheritance on condition of their being obedient to God. They disobeyed God’s command to hear his Son, by their rejection of Our Divine Lord before Pilate and on Calvary, and they persist in their disobedience. Accordingly, there can be no question of a right based on a divine promise. As the attempt to set up a Jewish state in Palestine is an effort to defy God, it has been suggested that some other country should be set aside for the Jewish nation, by international agreement. In that hypothesis all Jews should be made citizens of that state only. Very strict regulations should be made concerning the Jews sojourning in states other than the Jewish state.

In addition, the Arabs have a natural right to the country they have occupied for the last thirteen hundred years. Canon Arendzen wrote as follows on this aspect of the question, in the Catholic Gazette (London) of August, 1936: “The Arab population, which has occupied the country for the last 1300 years, has definite and inalienable rights which must he respected. The Jews are foreigners in Palestine and their intrusion seems an act of unprovoked injustice. It would obviously be unjust if some great power by force made England a national home for the Danes on the strength of that people once having been masters of this country a thousand years ago. The Jews have practically evacuated Palestine since 138 A.D., and their intrusion into it after having left it for eighteen hundred years seems unjustifiable, on any known principle of equity. The Mandatory Power, which at present is the government de facto, is clearly acting against elementary laws of fairness in promising to a race, alien in religion, speech and blood, a country already occupied by another nation.”

The Jewish claim to Palestine is implicitly a denial that they have disobeyed God and missed their vocation by their rejection of the supernatural Messias. It is the assertion in action that the promised Messias has not yet come and that the day of their national domination over the world will yet dawn. The final result will inevitably be another disastrous blow to their hopes. All their naturalistic attempts to impose their will on God, instead of accepting His, are, needless to say, doomed to failure, and every failure involves the Jewish nation in dire catastrophes.

In his Letter to the members of his own race, the ex-rabbin Drach expresses these truths in touching fashion. Amongst other things he writes: “The holy men of the Old Testament, the only true Israelites, did not ascribe to the Messias they expected, as the present-day Synagogue does, the mission of leading back our exiled nation to Palestine, the Promised Land, and rewarding it with the glory of this world and the abundance of its goods, but of bringing about our spiritual redemption, as Our Lord Jesus Christ has really done. The prayer called the ‘Eighteen benedictions’ which you recite three times a day furnishes an unassailable proof of the truth of this statement.”[37]

the catholic church and anti-semitism

The Catholic Church condemns hatred and want of charity between nations as it condemns them between individuals. By nature we are brothers and by our supernature, the divine life of grace, we are united in a brotherhood which is infinitely nobler still. “Above the brotherhood of humanity and fatherland,” said Pope Pius XI, in a passage already quoted, “there is a brotherhood which is infinitely more sacred and more precious, the brotherhood which makes us one in Christ, our Redeemer, namely, our kinship in the Catholic Church, the Mystical Body of Christ himself.”

The Church condemns in a more particular manner hatred of the Jews. Why is hatred of the Jewish race, as such especially odious? Because they are the nation and race in which the Word became flesh. Our, Lord is a Jew of the House of David. This hatred is commonly designated by the term “anti-Semitism.”[38]

“On March 25, 1925, the Congregation of the Holy Office abolished the association called The Friends of Israel, which in action and language had departed from the mind of the Church and of the Fathers and had adopted a mode of procedure abhorrent to the Sacred Liturgy.” The Friends of Israel fell into naturalism, while ostensibly striving to overcome Jewish naturalism. Nevertheless, in that same decree, the Church insists upon the fact that she “habitually prays for the Jewish people which was the custodian of the divine promises down to Jesus Christ, and this, in spite of, nay rather, on account of, their subsequent blindness. Actuated by this spirit of charity, the Apostolic See has protected this people against unjust treatment and, as it condemns every form of hatred and jealousy between nations, so in a special manner it condemns hatred of the people once chosen by God. This hatred is commonly designated as anti-Semitism;”[39]

The Jews look upon themselves as the “Chosen People,” because they hold that they are the people destined to bring happiness to the world in the Messianic era yet to come. Catholic writers would do well not to pander to this naturalism, by speaking of the Jews simply as the Chosen People, for thus they increase the confusion of thought in modern times. The Jews were chosen to be the custodians of the divine promises down to Jesus Christ, of whom they were to be the fount according to the flesh. They have not ceased to be the race in which the “Word was made flesh,” and, as such, they are the object of special love on the part of Our Lord. But the naturalism by which they reject Our Lord and continue to hold that the happiness of the world is to come through their Messianic aspirations is false and must be everywhere combated.

If we take into account the condemnation of the German racial theories in the Encyclical Letter, Mit Brennender Sorge, and in the Letter of the Sacred Congregation of Seminaries of April, 1938, the present National-Socialist hatred of the Jewish race is still more severely condemned, because it is based on blasphemous and heretical presuppositions. Let us see briefly what these presuppositions are.

The second proposition condemned in the Letter of the Sacred Congregation of Seminaries runs as follows: “The vigor of the race, and blood-purity, must be preserved and cultivated by every means; anything that conduces to this result is by the very fact honorable and permissible.” The Fourth Proposition is: “The essential aim of education is to develop the characters of the race and to inflame men’s minds with a burning love of their own race as of the supreme good.” The Fifth Proposition is: “Religion is subject to the law of race and must be adapted to it.” The Sixth is: “The primary source and supreme rule of the whole juridical order is the racial instinct.”

The Catholic Church teaches that all the baptized, as members of Christ, are meant to live their lives in complete subjection to their head. All their political and economic activities must be in accordance with Christ’s law and wishes, in view of their divinization in and through Christ, true God and true Man. The minimum that the Catholic Church, which has been instituted by Christ to speak in his name, can demand, is that Christ’s members should not be forced by society to go against their head. It is for the Catholic Church, not for any other body, to say what is for or against Christ, that is, what is moral or immoral. Now the National-Socialist deification of the German race teaches that the German race, as the highest embodiment of the divine here below, has the right to say, through its representatives and leaders, what is moral and what is immoral. The leaders have to listen to the voice of the blood, the racial instinct, and enunciate its indications to the people. This instinct never errs, even when its decisions are against positive morality or international morality. The condition of its proper functioning, however, is the purity of the blood. Race-mixtures are disastrous and especially any mixture of Jewish blood with Nordic blood.[40]

While insisting upon the loathsomeness of “anti-Semitism,” however, we must not forget the complementary truth of the loathsomeness of naturalism. On the one hand, the Church condemns race-hatred in general and hatred of the Redeemer’s race in particular. On the other hand, the Church insists, as we have seen, on the duty of combating naturalism in public and private life, approves of love of native land and extols true supernatural patriotism. We have the right and the duty to defend our country and our nation against the unjust aggression of another nation. This duty is still more strongly urged upon us when it is question of our country’s fidelity to Christ the King. We must, therefore, always and everywhere combat naturalism in general, and in particular we must be vigilant in regard to the naturalism of the Jewish nation. The tireless energy with which his own nation pursues the elimination of the influence of the supernatural life of grace is doubly painful to Our Lord’s Sacred Heart.

The combat against naturalism in general and, therefore, against the organized naturalism of the Jewish nation, is urged upon us, for example, by Pope Leo XIII (Tametsi, 1900) and Pope Pius XI (Quas Primas, 1925, and Quadragesimo Anno, 1931). We are warned against Jewish naturalism explicitly in a whole series of Papal Documents quoted by Pope Benedict XIV. “As for Us,” writes that learned Pontiff, ‘‘in this matter, as in all others. We follow the line of conduct adopted by Our Venerable Predecessors, the Roman Pontiffs. Alexander III (1159–1181) forbade Christians, under severe penalties, to enter the service of Jews for any lengthy period or to become domestic servants in their households. ‘They ought not,’ he wrote, ‘to serve Jews for pay in a permanent way.’ The same Pontiff explains the reason for this prohibition as follows: ‘Our ways of life and those of Jews are utterly different, and Jews will easily pervert the souls of simple folk to their superstition and unbelief, if such folk are living in continual and intimate converse with them.’

Innocent III (1198–1216), after having mentioned that Jews were being admitted by Christians into their cities, warned Christians that the mode and the conditions of admission should be such as to prevent the Jews from returning evil for good: ‘When they are thus admitted out of pity into familiar intercourse with Christians, they repay their hosts, as the proverb says, like the rat hidden in the sack, or the snake in the bosom, or the burning brand in one’s lap,’ The same Pontiff says it is fitting for Jews to serve Christians, but not for Christians to serve Jews, and adds: ‘The sons of the free woman should not serve the sons of the bondwoman. On the contrary, the Jews, as servants rejected by that Savior whose death they wickedly contrived, should recognize themselves, in fact and in deed, the servants of those whom the death of Christ has set free, even as it has rendered them bondmen.’ These words may he read in the Decretal, Etsi Judaeos. In like manner, in another Decretal, Cum sit minis, under the same heading, De Judacis et Saracenis (On Jews and Saracens) he forbids public positions to be bestowed on Jews: ‘We forbid the giving of public appointments to Jews because they profit by the opportunities thus afforded them to show themselves bitterly hostile to Christians.’…If any one should ask what is forbidden by the Apostolic See to Jews dwelling in the same towns as Christians…he has only to read the Constitutions of the Roman Pontiffs, Our Predecessors, Nicholas IV (1288–1294): Paul IV (1555–1559); Saint Pius V (1566–1572); Gregory XIII (1572–1585); and Clement VIII (1592–1605), which are readily available, as they are to he found in the Bullarium Romanum.”[41]

As my readers may be unfamiliar with these documents, it may be well to quote, as a specimen of their tenor, the opening passage from the Apostolic Letter, Antiqui Judaeorum, of Pope Gregory XIII, June 1, 1581. “The perversity of the Jews of old,” writes that great Pontiff, “which was the source of their continual resistance to God’s loving kindness, showed itself in even more detestable fashion in their descendants, inasmuch as these latter sinned still more grievously than their ancestors did by rejecting the Son of God and impiously plotting His Death. Having thus given God additional cause for anger and become more wicked even than their progenitors, they were driven from their own country, delivered up to perpetual bondage, and scattered far and wide over the face of the earth. Nevertheless, they have nowhere met with greater kindness than in the dominions of Christian rulers. Especially has this been the case in the territories subject to the Apostolic See. The sovereign Pontiffs, ever anxious for the conversion of the Jews, have received them kindly, have graciously allowed them to dwell amongst their own subjects and have always striven with pious zeal to draw them to the light of truth. In addition, they have helped them to secure the necessaries of life, have forbidden all to injure or insult them and in their benevolence have bestowed many privileges upon them for their protection. The Jews, however, in no way softened by these benefits and with their ancient anti-Christian attitude unchanged, do not cease, in their synagogues and everywhere, to rage against Our Lord Jesus Christ now gloriously reigning in heaven. Moved by an intense hatred of the members of Christ, they continue to plan horrible crimes against the Christian religion with daily increasing audacity.”

The spread of the spirit of the French Revolution has caused the rights of God to be obscured. They must be unequivocally proclaimed, and the Divine Plan for Order through membership of Christ made known. We have to undo the triumphs of Judaeo-Masonic naturalism and guide aright the national reactions that have come or are coming everywhere against the domination of the two naturalistic Internationalisms of Jewry and Freemasonry. All this we must do, while keeping our souls free from hatred, for we could not face Christ the King in judgment, if we hated his own race and nation. Our reaction against Jewish naturalism must be supernatural. One of the reasons why non-Catholic writers sometimes fail to maintain a balanced attitude with regard to the Jewish nation is because they have a vivid realization of the corruption and decay of their national life, which is the inevitable result of Jewish influence. In trying to express this truth and arouse their peoples to defend their traditions, they are unfortunately liable to err. Unless guided by Catholic theology and Thomistic philosophy, national reactions are in danger of turning wrong and plunging still deeper into the mire of naturalism.

As an example of disordered reaction to Jewish naturalism, we may mention Arnold Leese’s pamphlet, Race and Politics, A Counter-blast to the Masonic Teaching of Universal Brotherhood, published by the Imperialist Fascist League. This pamphlet is deeply impregnated with the false racial theories of Rosenberg and German racialism in general. The moral law, binding upon nations as upon individuals, disappears in favor of the instincts of the Aryan Race. “The true Internationalism” we read, “is the instinctive respect of one Aryan nation for another.” Again we find: “The real value of the Aryan or Nordic Race is in its instincts, which result from the experience of its ancestors handed down as an hereditary memory, and may very truly be said to be the highest form of knowledge.”

A leaflet of the same League points out that the imposition of the Jewish national form proceeds by the propagation of “crazy cults, unhealthy mysticism, pseudo-science and sham philosophies.” Surely it ought to be manifest to the members of the League that Rosenberg’s race theory is a typical example of a “crazy cult” and a “sham philosophy leading men still further away from Our Divine Lord.

In face of Jewish naturalism, then, we must proclaim the supremacy of the supernatural life of the Mystical Body, by which we are spiritual descendants of Abraham, over the natural life of Abraham’s descendants according to the flesh, as over every form of national life. “All are not Israelites that are of Israel; neither are all they that are the seed of Abraham, children.”[42] In face of Rosenberg’s naturalistic deification of the German race and his rejection of Jewish blood as poisoned, we must proclaim that the Mystical body of Christ is the one divinely-instituted supernatural society in which all, both Jew and Gentile, German and non-German, find redemption. As Abraham merited by his faith and obedience to be the ancestor of the head of redeemed humanity, who was, therefore, of Jewish blood; so we, by our faith and obedience, are his spiritual descendants, spiritually Semites, members of the Mystical Body of Abraham’s seed.[43] This is what Pope Pius XI emphasised when he used the expression: “We are spiritually Semites,” addressed to the members of a Belgian pilgrimage in September, 1938. Pope Pius XI’s phrase is an echo of the one used by Pope Pius IX to the Jewish convert priests, the Fathers Lémann: “You are the sons of Abraham and I also.”[44]

The phrase used by Pope Pius XI has been very frequently quoted, in fact, so frequently that one is inclined to suspect that it is being used as propaganda with a view to emphasizing one aspect of the question, especially when one hardly ever finds any allusion to the previous portion of the Pope’s discourse. Pope Pius XI also said: “It is impossible for Christians to be anti-Semites, but We acknowledge that everyone has the right to defend himself, in other words, to take the necessary precautions for his protection against everything that threatens his legitimate interests.”

Hence we find in this pronouncement of Pope Pius XI the two currents which, down the centuries, run through the official declarations of the Holy See concerning the Jews.[45] On the one hand, the sovereign Pontiffs strive to protect the Jews from physical violence and to secure respect for their family life and their worship, as the life and worship of human persons. On the other hand, they aim unceasingly at protecting Christians from the contamination of Jewish naturalism and try to prevent Jews from obtaining control over Christians. The existence of the second current, needs to be strongly stressed, because, to some extent, it has been lost sight of in recent times. Catholics need to be made familiar, not only with the repeated Papal condemnations of the Talmud but with the measures taken by the sovereign Pontiffs to preserve society from the inroads of Jewish Naturalism. Otherwise they will be exposed to the risk of speaking of Pope St. Pius V and Pope Benedict XIV, for example, as anti-Semites, and so showing ignorance of the meaning of supernatural life and of the rule of Christ the King over society.

The point has been raised that Pope Pius XI’s appeal in the Encyclical Letter, On the Troubles of Our Time, to “all those who still believe in God and adore him loyally and heartily” to unite against the enemies of religion is addressed to the Jews who believe in God as well as to Catholics and non-Catholic Christians. Starting from this, it is insinuated that the Pope desires an organization of society based on common belief in God. Now, the appeal is certainly addressed to all sincere believers in God to beg them to combat the Communist propagators of atheism and irreligion and thus ward off the great danger that threatens all, but surely it must not he taken as denying all that the same Holy Pontiff had said in his other Encyclicals already quoted. If Jews are sincere in their belief in God, they ought to combat Communism, along with other believers in God, but an appeal to them to do so does not imply an acceptance of collaboration with them for a naturalistic and anti-supernatural organization of society. That would mean the denial of what Pope Pius XI had already written in the Encyclicals, Quas Primus and Quadragesimo Anno, and would make null and void the principles so clearly enunciated in the later Encyclical Letter Mit Brennender Sorge. “Belief in God will not in the long run be preserved pure and genuine, if it is not supported by belief in Christ…. and belief in Christ will not he preserved true and genuine, if it is not supported and protected by belief in the Church.” Can we suppose Pope Pius XI to have appealed for an organization of society in which belief in the divinity of Christ and the Church, which the Jews do not accept, would he relegated to the background? Can we conceive that the Pope who said; “everything must crumble that is not grounded on the one corner stone which is Christ Jesus” was desirous of an organization of society based on indifference to the divinity of Jesus?[46]

reason for special opposition

to the jewish nation

Up to Calvary, the opposition to the Jewish nation, which was to he found in the ancient world, was a compound of the self-centered resistance to the supernatural life, which is to be found in fallen man, and of the hatred aroused by Jewish pride. Jewish national pride, which culminated in the rejection of Our Lord at the Prætorium and on Calvary, did not arise in a generation. It was a gradual growth and it played its part in the hatred which the Jews drew on themselves before the coming of Our Lord. Still, up to Calvary, salvation was from the Jews, in the sense that he who was to restore the real life of the world was to be of their race and he was to ask them to be the heralds of the real life and of the Divine Plan for Order. Since Calvary, their self-centeredness and persistent resistance to order draw upon them even greater hatred and opposition from their fellow members of the naturalistic camp. Their efforts to lead the world to a Messianic era of definitive peace, by the imposition of their national form, are opposed, as we have seen, not only to the supernatural life of the Mystical Body of Christ, but also to the natural development of national life. The inevitable result is opposition to and dislike of the Jews. When the nature of their influence becomes manifest to a considerable portion of the population, violent resentment is almost inevitable.

We may express the truth contained in the preceding paragraph in another way. The man who obstinately resists divine grace will not remain an upright natural man. He will sink down to an infra-human level and he will have a debasing influence on those around him. So the Jewish nation, in its obstinate resistance to the real life of the world, has developed unnatural traits and is dragging the world, down to an infra-human level. And the poor deluded and debased world, in an effort to save itself, turns upon the Jews who have done so much to lead it astray.

There is a fundamental difference in origin between opposition to the Jews and opposition to the Catholic Church. Opposition to the Catholic Church is opposition, led by Satan, to the supernatural life and to the real order of the world: the particular opposition to the Jews has its origin in a reaction against their pride and against their efforts to impose their domination. This pride and these inordinate ambitions are the consequence of their special resistance to the supernatural life and order of the world, at the instigation of Satan. God is drawing good out of evil. Home-sickness after the unity of the Christian world that existed before the 16th century is growing greater, as the true character of the goal towards which Jewish Naturalism is leading becomes more evident.

A few extracts from the article in the Civiltá Cattolica will help to illustrate these points. “When Napoleon I thought of granting full equality of civil rights to the Jews in France at the beginning of this century, the distinguished lawyer, Portalis, drew up a document in which he pointed out that, in the case of the Jews, religious tolerance should not be confused with the granting of civil status. ‘The Jews’ he said, ‘are not merely a religious sect but a people. This people, which formerly had its own territory and its own government, has been dispersed, but not broken up. It moves all over the earth’s surface seeking a refuge but not a patria or native land. It is to be found amongst all the nations but it is never assimilated. It takes up lodging everywhere as a foreigner on foreign soil. That comes from the nature of Jewish institutions.…”

“Hence it stands out as clear as noon-day that the Jews everywhere form a nation within a nation, and that, although they live in France, Germany and England, they never become French, Germans, or English. They remain Jews and nothing but Jews.… It follows as a corollary of this condition of things that in no country has the Jew a native land, a patria that is, the land of his fathers. Accordingly, the patriotism of which he continually boasts and of which he pretends to be the apostle, in order to attain his own end of ruining and devouring the nations that have been foolish enough to grant him the rights of citizenship, is simply a monstrous imposture. This is the reason why the loathsome professions of spy and traitor come natural to him. Bismarck’s saying, namely, that ‘God has created the Jew to serve as a spy to anybody who needs one ‘is well known, as is also that of Count Cavour who used to say of a Jew, his confidant: ‘He is most useful to me in order to give publicity to whatever I want to make known. I have hardly finished speaking to him, when he has betrayed me.’

“Last July, the Kreuzzeitung of Berlin related the following incident from the Mémoires of an army officer: ‘During the war of 1870, I was attached to the Tenth Army, commanded by General Voigts-Rhetz. One hundred thousand thalers had been assigned to that general to pay spies, he returned to Berlin, however, with the sum intact, because he could not succeed in hiring any amongst the French. On the other hand, in the war against Austria in 1866, things were quite different. The Jews came in crowds and sold us cheaply information about all the movements of the Imperial Army. These Jews were subjects of Austria and therefore voluntary spies.’

“History is full of betrayals on the part of Jews.… The Jew, Goldsmit, a few years ago, stole the most closely guarded maps of the Prussian Higher Command and sold them. The Jew, Klootz, betrayed the English General Hicks and his forces, in the Soudan, to the Mahdi’s savage hordes. The Jew, Adler, betrayed the confidence placed in him by Krajewski and delivered him over to Prussia. The Jew, Deutz, betrayed tbe Duchess of Berry for the sum of 500,000 francs. And thus it has always been down the ages, from the Jew Sedecia, who poisoned Charles the Bald, to the Jewess Paíva who a short time ago, in Paris, was maneuvering to steal the plans of the French army in order to sell them.”[47]

divine providence and the jewish nation

When Our Lord, the supreme manifestation of the fatherhood of God, came amongst the Jews, they turned against him and rejected his message of supernatural life and peace. To have accepted him and the real order of the world would have meant that they were prepared to acknowledge that the domination of their nation over others was not the supreme good and the final destiny of the universe. This they would not do. They refused and, as a nation, continue to refuse to admit the reality of the supernatural life of grace and to acknowledge Christ as its unique source.[48] As a nation, they continue down the ages to war against the idea of there being any higher social entity than the Jewish nation. Their national policy, in so far as it is coordinated, is based on the idea that unity is to come to the world, not through the supranational Mystical Body of Christ, but through their nation. Their unyielding opposition to the supernatural life of grace and to the Divine Plan for Order has meant the existence of additional weakness and division amongst the European nations and in the rest of the world. Because the nations of Europe had acknowledged the Mystical Body of Christ, they were charged with a special mission to draw the rest of the world into the unity of that Body.

If the Jewish nation as such had humbled itself and sincerely repented any time for the last 1900 years, it would have immediately meant an enormous increase in the numbers of members of Christ in the world, for they would have put their restless energy into missionary work for him. But alas: “All the day long have I spread my hands to a people that believeth not and contradicteth me” (Rom. 10:21; Isa. 65:2). “The Messias,” writes Father Libermann, C.S.Sp., “appeared amongst the Jews. They did not accept him. On the contrary, they persecuted him. …They were in a hurry to get rid of him. So great in fact was their hatred of him that they would have killed him before the time fixed by God’s eternal decrees, if they had been able. For the past 1,800 years since his death, they seek him and they cannot find him. They look for him in all the great calamities which fall upon them. They rejected the true Messias, the Omnipotent Son of God, and they found Barcochebas in one of their greatest afflictions. It was just and fitting that instead of finding Our Savior they should have found the completion of their ruin in Barcochebas, since they had preferred Barabbas to him.”[49] Yet, in spite of that agelong opposition, God has not allowed that nation to disappear “whose are the fathers, and of whom is Christ, according to the flesh, who is over all things, God blessed for ever. Amen” (Rom., 9:5). They have been preserved by a special mysterious design of divine Providence.

the two camps

The order of the world demands that the Jewish nation should pass from the naturalistic army of the enemies of Christ into the supernatural camp of the members of his Mystical Body, for, here below there are only two camps, the supernatural and the naturalistic. This great truth must not be obscured, no matter how strongly one may feel the necessity of stressing the special mysterious design of divine Providence in preserving the Jewish nation, in spite of their continued resistance to his love.[50] Certain phrases used by M. Jacques Maritain in Les Juifs parmi les Nations, a pamphlet published by Les Editions du Cerf of Paris, are, it seems to me, calculated to obscure the clear-cut issue between naturalism and supranaturalism.[51] The author writes as follows: “To the eye of a Christian who remembers that the promises of God are without repentance, Israel continues its sacred mission, but continus it in the darkness of the world, preferred on that unforgettable occasion to faith in God. Israel, like the Church, is in the world and yet is not of the world: but from the day the Jews stumbled because their leaders chose the world, Israel forms part of the world, remains a prisoner and a victim of that world it loves and of which it is not a part, of which it never shall be or can be a part. This is how we ought to contemplate the mystery of Israel in the light of Christian Revelation.… If the world hates the Jews, it is because it feels that they will be always supernaturally[52] foreign to it… it is the vocation of Israel which the world detests. ‘To be hated by the world is the glory of the Jews as it is also the glory of Christians who live by faith.”[53]

Now, the world of which Our Lord speaks in the Gospel is the entire collection of forces marshalled by Satan against the supernatural life of grace.[54] It is therefore the naturalistic camp, of which Satan is the leader. The Jews, under their rulers, entered that camp and led the others in the attack on the supernatural life in person, Our Lord Jesus Christ. They occupy a special place in that camp, it is true because of God’s loving preservation of them in spite of their obstinacy and pride, but in the conflict which divides the world into two opposing armies, there must not be any shadow of doubt about their being in the vanguard of visible opposition to the supernatural. We must not begin to consider them as a force apart as it were, opposed both to Our Lord and to the world. They form, in the naturalistic camp today, as at any time for the past 1,900 years, the most strongly organized and most cohesive visible force. Our Lord’s Sacred Heart is wrung at the sight of His own people leading the opposition to him. But our place is with him and along with those who express submission to God the Father in the Mass. God’s special Providence in regard to the once chosen people must not make us hesitate about the camp to choose when Bela Kuhn receives marching orders for the attack on the Mass in Barcelona and throughout Spain or, if he is still alive, at some date in the future, in Dublin and throughout Ireland.

J. Maritain speaks of the Jews as a mystical body in another sense from the Church, but his use of the expression tends, as I have said, to render obscure, the real position of Israel in the world. Here are his own words in the same work: “The Church, as you know, is not merely a religious administration. She is, according to her own teaching about herself, a mysterious body in which living bonds unite souls amongst themselves and with God, in view of a divine task to be accomplished. She is the Mystical Body of Christ. Now, in a very different sense, Jewish thought is conscious that Israel is, in its way, a mystical body. A recent work by Erich Kahler, Israel unter den Volkern (Israel amongst the Nations), insists particularly on this point. The bond which unites Israel is not the bond of flesh and blood along with community of customs and history. It is a sacred and supra-historic bond, not of possession but of longing for the realization of a promise.…Israel passionately hopes for, looks forward to and longs for the coming of God in the world, the Kingdom of God here below. The Jews want, with an eternal will, a will that is supernatural and unreasonable, to realize justice, in time, in nature and in the state.’’[55]

But is not the desire to impose one’s will on God instead of conforming one’s will to God’s will, the very antithesis of the attitude of the supernatural Messias, Our Lord Jesus Christ, and is it not therefore naturalistic? One can well see that it is unreasonable, but how is it truly supernatural? The Jews, instead of accepting the supernatural Messias and striving under his leadership for that relative condition of justice that is possible for our fallen race here on earth, want a natural Messias who will restore the garden of Eden here below. They refuse to accept that perfect justice is reserved for our risen life with Christ in heaven. This anti-supernatural attitude of revolt leads to disaster for individuals and nations.

In the Spanish crisis, J. Maritain seemed to lose sight of the fact that the horrible designs of the Jewish rulers of Russia were a consequence of Israel’s refusal to conform its will to the will of God. It was also a sign of the deplorable decay of the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ in the world that a man of J. Maritain’s knowledge and ability should set out to direct the world, with regard to the interests of Our Divine Lord in Spain, in complete opposition to the Spanish hierarchy. This he did in the interview reported in The Commonweal (U.S.A.) of February 3, 1939. He left his readers under the impression that those who accepted the guidance of the official representatives of Our Lord in Spain were not thinking on the supernatural plane.[56] No wonder Right Rev. Mgr. F. F. Hawks wrote as follows in The Catholic Standard and Times of Philadelphia: “There are other questions (in this interview) of a leading character. In answering them, Maritain repeals (without any attempt at proof) all the accusations which have been made familiar to us by the various Red organizations operating in this country. So far from explaining his own position, he has only given excuse for all the accusations that have been made against him. For Maritain there is only one side: and that side is the one opposed to the cause of General Franco. A more one-sided expression of opinion could hardly be printed. It is almost shocking in its spleen, the more so when it is interlarded with constant appeals to charity and to impartiality. The Commonweal has done a service in printing this interview. No Catholic need take the Maritain position seriously.”

jewish conversions to christianity

This is an aspect of the Jewish question about which one regrets to be obliged to speak, but it is necessary to do so because of the confusion produced in some minds on reading such phrases as the following: “The spiritual fathers of Bolshevism are non-Jews. It is true that Marx was a Jew, but he was baptized at the age of six.”[57]

Let us begin with some testimonies with regard to the nature of Marx’s conversion and then examine the general question of Jewish conversions. The first testimony will be taken from the well-known book, The Cause of World Unrest.[58] “There is one very remarkable coincidence with regard to these two men (Lassalle and Marx),” writes the author, “which has never before been noticed. They were not only Jews; but they both, in their youth, dedicated their lives to revenge.

“Ferdinand Lassalle (or Lassal) was born of Jewish parents at Breslau, on April 11th, 1825. In Breslau, it should be explained, the Jews were not emancipated until 1842. In his youth he kept a diary, and that diary (for the years 1840–41) was afterwards published by Herr Paul Lindau.

“In that diary (on February 1st, 1840) Lassalle writes: ‘I think I am one of the best Jews in existence, although I disregard the ceremonial law. I could, like the Jew in Bulwer’s Leila, risk my life to deliver the Jews from their present crushing condition.’ He speaks of his childish dream ‘to make the Jews armed—I at their head—free.’ And on July 30th, 1840, commenting on certain accusations of ritual murder then being made against the Jews, he says: “…the time will soon be at hand when we, in very deed, will help ourselves to Christian blood. Aide-toi et le ciel t’aidera. The dice are ready: it only depends on the player.’

“So far Lassalle. Let us now turn to Marx.

“In his Karl Marx, His Life and Work, John Spargo says that the true patronymic of the family seems to have been Mordechai. Mordechai, a grandfather of Karl Marx, was a rabbi: ‘one of a long line of rabbis, unbroken from the sixteenth century until his son Heinrich, father of Karl Marx, adopted law instead of religion for a career. On his mother’s side also, Karl Marx had a long line of rabbinical ancestors.’ But in 1824, when Karl was six years old, Heinrich and his wife suddenly embraced Christianity, and they with their children were baptized. Mr. Spargo tries to make out that Heinrich forsook Judaism as a matter of conviction, but we can hardly credit such an explanation, and for the following reasons: At the time Heinrich adopted Christianity the Jews in the Rhine Province (the Marxes lived in Trier) were subject to extortion and mild persecution at the hands of the Prussian officials; the Code Napoleon of March 17th, 1808, had been issued provisionally for a period of only ten years fixing the status of Jews in the Rhine Province; and Heinrich Marx was a convinced disciple of that enemy of Christianity, Voltaire. Moreover, Liebknecht, long the intimate associate of Karl Marx, and himself a Jew and a revolutionary, says in his Memoirs that the acceptance of Christianity by the parents was compulsory, that it was due to an official edict by the Prussian government compelling all Jews holding official positions or engaged in the learned professions to forego these or formally renounce Judaism. The same writer says that the boy Karl felt keenly this insult to his race, of which he was so proud, and that “his whole life was a reply and a revenge.”

“Spargo and the other biographers of Karl Marx naturally do not accept this explanation of their hero’s activities, and do their best to discredit Liebknecht. But the story, despite their efforts, is, as we have seen, historically credible.

“Here then we have a motive hitherto unsuspected by those Gentiles who follow the Red Banner—the motive of destroying the Christian nations in revenge for the wrongs of Judaism.”

The second testimony will be from an author who has made a special study of the secret origins of Bolshevism. Here is how Salluste in Les Origines Secrètes du Bolshevisme, pp. 44–45,[59] describes the conversion of Heinrich Marx and his family: “Marx’s father had become exteriorly a convert to Protestantism, while continuing to practice the Jewish religion at home. Young Marx’s infancy was thus steeped in the traditions of his race: God has given the world to the Jews. They will reign over it forever. When the Messiah shall have come Jews alone have the right to own. When the Messiah shall have come, two hundred mules will be required to carry the kegs of the trunks (or boxes) in which the riches taken from the Christians will be heaped, up, etc.… Of this doctrine, the young Israelite was to retain above all the idea of an expropriation on a vast scale, coinciding with the triumph of his race.”

The Jewish writer, Bernard Lazare, in L’Antisémitisme, is in practical agreement with Salluste. He attaches no importance to Marx’s conversion to Protestantism. He writes: “This descendant of a line of rabbins and doctors inherited all the logical vigor of his ancestors. He was a clear and lucid Talmudist—a Talmudist who studied sociology and applied his natural aptitude for exegesis to the criticism of political economy. He was full of that old Hebrew materialism which ever dreams of a paradise on earth and always rejects the hope held out of the chance of a Garden of Eden after death. But he was not merely a logician, he was also a revolutionary, a rebel and a bitter controversialist. Just like Heine also, his gifts of sarcasm and invective came to him from Jewish sources.…In general the Jews, even the revolutionaries, have kept the Jewish spirit, and if they have given up religion and faith, they have nevertheless been formed, thanks to their ancestry and education, by the influence of Jewish nationalism. This is true in a very special way of the Jewish revolutionaries who lived in the first half of the 19th century. Heinrich Heine and Karl Marx are two typical examples.”

It is well to add that Marx wrote an article on the Jewish question in which he attacked the Jews who had become wealthy and wished to settle down in the society of their day instead of working for the overthrow of the whole existing organization of society. On the strength of that article, some writers have even spoken of Marx as an anti-Semite.[60] Salluste insists, on the contrary, that it was then that he showed himself most profoundly imbued with the true Jewish revolutionary spirit.

As regards Jewish conversions in general, Jewish history has alas, familiarised us with pretended conversions such as that of Mordechai’s (Marx’s) family. In the Dictionnaire Apologétique de la Foi Chrétienne,[61] we find the following statements concerning conversions from Judaism:

“From 313 A.D. to 1100 A.D.

‘‘There are conversions to Christianity which are not sincere and the Jews try to wean the faithful from Christ. This is the reason why the Church forbids the Jews to have Christian slaves, to live on familiar terms with Christians or to hold public positions.

“From 1100 A.D. to 1500 A.D.

‘‘Some Jews pretend to be sincerely converted. Forced conversions were (and are) against the will of the Church.… In Spain, during the troubles of 1391, thousands of Jews asked for baptism. Most of them pretended to be Catholics exteriorly, but practiced Judaism in secret. The ordinary people, who had no illusions with regard to their sincerity, called these new Christians ‘Marranos,’ which means ‘damned’ or ‘excommunicated.’ and hated them even more than they did the Jews. The Spanish Inquisition was founded in 1480 against these pretended converts from Judaism and Muhammadanism… Whenever a Jew became a Catholic, there was immediately a concerted attack on him to bring him back. ‘This was the chief accusation levelled against the Jews of Spain, by Ferdinand and Isabella, in their Edict of Expulsion of 1492.…The Popes and the Councils are continually obliged to forbid Catholics to marry Jews, to eat with them, or to join in their celebrations.

“From 1500 A.D. to 1789 A.D.

“Pretended conversions to Catholicism on the part of Jews, become more numerous, especially in Spain and Portugal.…A lifetime of feigned conversion did not cause the Jews any remorse. It seemed quite natural to them to pretend to be sincerely Catholic from generation to generation while being really ready to throw off the mask at the first opportunity.

“From 1789 to the present day.

“The Marranos of Spain and Portugal continue to lead a double life. Catholics exteriorly, they are Jews in the bosom of their families.…There are doubtful conversions amongst those who, at Berlin, frequented the Salon of Henrietta Herz, as also in the League of Virtue[62] which was inaugurated there, and in the Jewish Association for Civilization and Science, founded in 1819 by Zeinz, Gans and Moser.…Graetz shows that Heine and Boenie were Jews, Jews through and through, that it was only in outward appearance that they had separated themselves from Judaism, ‘like soldiers who adopt the dress and flag of the enemy in order the better to strike him down and annihilate him’ [63]… Karl Marx’s father had abjured Judaism with just as little conviction as Heine.”

According to George Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers in The Czech Conspiracy (p. 73), dubious conversions are very numerous today. So we may have some future rivals of Karl Marx amongst the “Christian” refugees to whom hospitality has been so freely accorded. Pitt-Rivers writes as follows: “By the time I reached Vienna, motoring from Poland, in the beginning of September (1938), mass migrations of Viennese Jewish ‘refugees’ to England and other parts of the British Empire were well on the way. Approaches to the British Consulate in Vienna were blocked with thousands of Jews clamoring for British visas. A large quota were besieging the English Chaplaincy, applying for baptismal certificates, in order to qualify for the special benefits and assistance in registering for employment in England, under the schemes of the ‘Committee for Non-Aryan Christians’ and other associated bodies. By the unflagging and persevering efforts of the temporary English chaplain, the permanent resident English chaplain being on leave, hundreds of Viennese Jews were weekly being baptized at the improvised font in the ‘official-chapel,’ at the English chaplain’s residence, which is situated opposite the English Church. The Church, unfortunately, was not then available, owing to its being closed for the annual cleaning and redecorations. Through the courtesy of the temporary English chaplain I received personal assurance that the good work of ‘conversion’ was proceeding with the utmost possible dispatch. I gladly undertook to testify to the work of this hard-pressed representative of the Church of England, who. without other clerical assistance, succeeded in converting, preparing for baptism, and baptizing so many hundreds of Jewish candidates for entry into the Anglican community, of whom not one in a hundred could speak a word of English. Qualifications for Baptism were strictly laid down and complied with. Only those were accepted who were furnished with (a) a British visa, (b) an Ausweis or release from the Judischer Kultut Bund, the Jewish Congregation, and (c) the German police permit to leave the country—and not return. Of course, in addition, converts paid the moderate baptismal fees.

I am informed that it takes four days between application and baptism, during which time the candidates are entitled to four hours instruction in the tenets of the Anglican faith and in the Catechism. This, it must be admitted, is not too long a period for those who cannot speak a word of English. I am informed, also, that it is through the Anglican door of baptismal waters that alien Jews can most rapidly prepare for ‘assimilation and absorption’ in their new English homeland, flowing with milk (canned in Switzerland and imported under arrangements of the Milk Marketing Board), and honey (imported from Russia under arrangements of the Board of Trade).”[64]

According to The Catholic Times (London), of Jan. 20th, 1939, Mgr. Joseph Grosz, Administrator Apostolic of Szombathely, Hungary, gave the following instructions, in his first pastoral letter of the year, regarding the instruction of Jewish converts: “In these days,” he writes, “many Jews are turning to the Church and asking to he baptized. The Church does not hesitate to open her doors to those who seek Christ in good faith, but she fears, in the present circumstances, that there are among the aspirants some who are seeking baptism, urged on, not by the motives of conscience but by fear of extraneous events and by material interests.…The clergy must show great prudence. Therefore, we order that those who wish to he received into the Church must be given instruction during two or three hours a week for three months. This order can be set aside only in case of danger of death. When the civil formalities have been completed, permission to confer baptism must be sought from the bishop: each case will be examined separately, and without this enquiry no permission will be granted to baptize Jews.”

For a sincere conversion to the Catholic Faith, humble submission to God is indispensable. Jewish pride insists upon imposing the will of the Jewish nation on God. So long as that mentality lasts, sincere conversions amongst the members of the Jewish nation will be rare. Catholic writers rarely stress the greater humility that is needed from members of the Jewish nation than from others, for conversion and after conversion, because of the insults offered by them to the Sacred Heart of Jesus down the ages since Calvary. They should do so. Jewish resistance to the love of God has been more stubborn than that of the other nations and wounds the Heart of Our Divine Lord in a way that the obstinacy of no other nation can do.

the jewish problem, by louis golding

Because of the widespread propaganda for the diffusion of this book, it is well to refer to it, at least, briefly. I intend, first of all, to point out two of the many historical inaccuracies in the volume and then to treat of the absolutely vital defect in the standpoint from which the book is written, namely, its naturalism.[65]

Let us begin with Mr. Golding’s denial of the historical accuracy of the four Evangelists. In that he follows the modern Jewish exegesis which is striving to make Pilate and only a small section of the Jewish nation, the Sadducees, responsible for the death of Our Divine Lord. “The historical Gospels,” he writes, “exclude from all participation in the arrest, trial and crucifixion, the religious leaders of the people, the creators of modern Judaism—the Pharisees.” Now it is quite clear from the four Evangelists that there was a “United Front” amongst the different sections of the Jewish people against Jesus. The naturalism of the different groups, resulting in part from their perverted desire to rule all nations in the temporal order and in part from their racial pride in their descent from Abraham, led to the rejection of the supernatural Messias, who spoke of the entrance of the Gentiles into a kingdom higher and nobler than that of the Jewish nation. Wounded national pride effected the union between them against the God-Man.

Mr. Golding asserts that “the last mention of Pharisaic contact with Jesus in St. Mark is in Chapter 12:13.”[66] Surely he knows that the scene at the foot of the cross is described in St. Mark, 15:31–32. There “the chief priests mocking said with the Scribes one to another: He saved others: himself he cannot save. Let Christ, the King of Israel, come down now from the Cross, that we may see and believe.” He cannot be unaware of the fact that the Scribes were chiefly Pharisees. The Gospels bind together Scribes and Pharisees and almost confound them, for the vast majority of the doctors of the law at the time of Christ belonged to the sect of the Pharisees.[67]

On page 61, Mr. Golding commits another historical blunder. “A wave of blood accusations,” he writes, “Swept over Poland in the eighteenth century, which was responsible for the dignified Report of Cardinal Ganganelli (afterwards Pope Clement XIV), in which he completely exonerated Jews of all conceivability of blame for such outrages.” I am not going to deal with the whole question of Ritual murder.[68] I merely want to point out here that the statement made by Mr. Golding with regard to Cardinal Ganganelli’s report is false. Cardinal Ganganelli sets aside a number of accusations of ritual murder as not sufficiently supported by proofs, but he accepts two cases. He writes in his report: “I admit as true the case of Blessed Simon, a child of three years, put to death by the Jews at Trent, in 1475, out of hatred for the Faith of Jesus Christ, though that murder has been denied by Basnage and Wagenseil.… I admit also as true a second murder which took place in 1462, in the village of Rinn, in the diocese of Brixen. Blessed Andrew, a little child, was there cruelly done to death by the Jews out of hatred for the Faith of Jesus Christ.”[69]

The most important point, however, with regard to Mr. Golding’s book is that it assumes as false the great central truths of the world, namely, that Our Lord Jesus Christ was truly God and truly man and that he came to restore supernatural life to the world. These great truths are held by Mr. Golding to be so unworthy of serious consideration that he does not even mention them. Yet the history of the Jewish nation is a complete puzzle, unless we grasp that they are a people who have missed their vocation. They have done so, because they have sought and still seek to impose their will on God instead of submitting to the supernatural Messias whom he has sent. They refuse to accept Our Lord and work under His banner for the supernatural life and real order of the world. That is the root cause of the Jewish Problem, and that problem is essentially and directly a problem for the Jews themselves, especially for their leaders.

I thus deny emphatically Mr. Golding’s statement that “there is no contribution the Jews themselves can make towards a solution of the Jewish problem which is not sooner or later pronounced an exaggeration.” There is one contribution they can make, namely, humble, sincere, unfeigned conversion to the supernatural Messias and acceptance of their position as one nation amongst other nations. The only difference between them and other nations will consist in their being burdened with a deeper debt of reparation to God the Father and his Son, Jesus Christ, whom in their pride they have rejected and continue to reject. Such a conversion will never be pronounced an exaggeration.

The Jewish persistence in looking forward to a Messianic age, while rejecting the supernatural Messias who has already come, is the kernel of the Jewish Problem since Calvary. The change of attitude involved in the acceptance of order is the contribution to the solution of the problem which is incumbent on the Jews, and in particular on their rulers. Those leaders misled their people, when they induced them to reject Our Lord, and they continue to mislead them since, the Gentile nations are deeply concerned in the Jewish nation’s acceptance of the truth about Our Lord Jesus Christ,[70] but, given the Jewish loathing of the very idea of the supernatural, their present task is primarily one of self defense against the inroads of Jewish naturalism. They must, undo the work of the French Revolution. In that process, they can indirectly contribute towards preparing the Jewish mind and heart for submission to the real order of the world.

Program of Christ the King through His Mystical Body, the Catholic Church

Firstly

The Catholic Church, supernatural and supranational, is the one way established by God for the ordered return of human beings to him. All states and nations are bound to acknowledge it as such, and all men of all nations are called upon to enter it as members of Christ.

Secondly

The Catholic Church is the sole divinely-appointed guardian of the whole moral law, natural and revealed.

Thirdly

Christian marriage, the foundation of the Christian family, as the symbol of the union of Christ and his Mystical Body, is one and indissoluble.

Fourthly

Children must be educated as members of Christ’s Mystical Body, so that they may be able to look at everything, nationality included, from that standpoint.

Program of the Jewish nation since the rejection of Christ before Pilate and on Calvary.

Firstly

The Jewish nation, under the natural Messias, will establish union among the nations. That necessarily involves aiming at the elimination of every vestige of the supernatural life that comes from Christ.

Secondly

The Jewish nation, under the natural Messias, will decide what is moral and what is immoral.

Thirdly

Divorce and polygamy will take the place of Christian marriage.

Fourthly

As the doctrine of membership of Christ is a corruption of the true Jewish message to the world, all trace of membership of Christ and of the supernatural life of grace must be eliminated from education. Non-Jews must be trained to accept submission to the Jewish nation, and non-Jewish nationality must not conflict with Jewish worldwide supremacy.

Fifthly

Ownership of property should be widely diffused, in order to facilitate families in procuring a sufficiency of material goods for their members. Unions of owners and workers in guilds will reflect the solidarity of the Mystical Body of Christ.

Sixthly

The monetary system of a country is meant to be at the service of production in view of the virtuous life of members of Christ in happy families.

Fifthly

Complete socialization of property, either in the form of ownership of everything by the state, or by the relatively few financiers who control the state, must be aimed at. Ownership of property, especially in land, makes for independence, so it must be eliminated.

Sixthly

Money is the instrument by which state control or state socialization is brought about. Instead of the correct order of finance for production and production for members of Christ, men must be subservient to production and production to finance. State control can be maintained by means of financial control.

[1]Allocution Singulari Quodam, 9th Dec., 1851, Encyclical letter, Quanto conficiamur moerore, 10th August, 1863. With regard to invincible ignorance, cf. Denzinger, 1167. Loreto Editors note: Pius IX does not say that one can be saved by invincible ignorance. Rather, he says that no one will be tormented on account of such ignorance.

[2]Denzinger. 1667: “The Command of Christ, to the Apostles to preach the Gospel to ‘every creature’ implies a corresponding obligation on the part of all men to hear and obey them, and, therefore, to become members of the Church: ‘preach the Gospel to every creature,’ said Christ… he that believeth not shall be condemned’ (St. Mark, 16:15–16). No man therefore, who, on coming to know the true Church, refuses to join it, can be saved. Neither can he be saved, if, having once entered the Church, he forsake it through heresy or schism… ‘The Church, as St. Paul says, is the living body whereof Christ is the head, he who severs himself from the Church, severs himself from Christ and cannot be saved, for in Christ, alone is salvation’’ (Sheehan, Catholic Apologetics, vol. I, p. 137).

The visible Church, by the institution and will of Christ, is a necessary means for the attainment, of salvation in the sense that everyone must belong to it in re or in voto. That means that those who are in the physical or moral impossibility of actually entering the Church are not excluded from salvation, provided they are fully disposed to enter the Church the moment the obstacles are removed. Cf. Schultes, O.P., De Ecclesia Catholica, pp. 270–274.

[3]Cf. Ia IIae, Q.109, a.3.

[4]Encyclical Letter, Humanum genus.

[5]This divinization is, of course, not in the order of being, but in the order of thought and will, through our participation, by the grace of Christ, in the inner life of the three divine persons.

[6]Certainly, the devil is the head of all wicked men and all wicked men are members of this head. Was not Pilate a member of Satan? Were not the Jews who persecuted Christ and the soldiers who crucified him, members of Satan?’ (Homily of St. Gregory for the First Sunday of Lent).

[7]De L’Harmonie entré L’Église et la Synogogue, by the Catholic ex-Rabbin Drach, vol II, p. 181. Cf. Msgr Landrieux, L’Histoire et les Histoires dans la Bible, pp 76–110.

[8]G. K. Chesterton sums up the deification of the Jewish race and nation by the Jews as follows: “There are Jewish Mystics and Jewish sceptics; but about this one matter of the strange sacredness of his own race, almost every Jewish sceptic is a Jewish Mystic” (The End of the Armistice, p. 86). It is not strange that the Jews should come to deify their race, since they have rejected the Divine Plan for Order. It is the inevitable alternative. It is, however, strange in the sense that it is a terrible proof of the weakness of human nature since the Fall. Of course, the Jewish race will always remain the race from which the Redeemer sprang, and, as such, is especially dear to his Sacred Heart. That is the “sacredness” which they, as a race, despise and reject.

[9]Commentary on St. John’s Gospel, p.374.

[10]Campaigners for Christ Handbook, pp. 29, 30, by David Goldstein.

[11]La Foi d’Israel, by Julien Weill, pp. 173–174. This writer, in the early part of the same work, has already pointed out that it is Judaism rather than heresy which has prevented Christianity from becoming the faith of the majority of believers in God, and that, instead of Christianity “finishing” Judaism, Judaism may succeed in “finishing” Christianity. In other words, he hopes that, instead of the Jewish nation accepting the true supernatural Messias, Our Lord Jesus Christ, the pretended supernatural influence of Our Lord will decay and finally disappear, making way for the naturalistic realm of the new Messias.

[12]Judaism in the War of Ideas, by Harry Joshua Stern, p. 100.

[13]Theologians usually distinguish between what God wills, by or with an antecedent act of will (voluntas antecedents, voluntas secundum quid), and what he wills simply and unconditionally or by a consequent act of will (voluntas consequens, voluntas simpliciter). “And thus it is clear that whatever God simply or unconditionally (simpliciter) wills, takes place, though that which he wills antecedently or conditionally does not take place” (IaP., Q19. a.6, ad 1). The per se order is what God wants in accordance with his holiness, that is, the right and the good, but this God wills, while at the same time permitting man to resist, through the abuse of his free will. God wills absolutely or unconditionally what takes place here and now.

[14]“In the rabbinical apocalyptic literature the conception of an earthly Messiah the prevailing one, and from the end of the first century of the common (i.e. Christian) era, it is also the one officially accepted by Judaism…. his mission is, in all essential respects, the same as in the apocalypses of the older period; he is to free Israel from the power of the heathen world, kill its ruler, destroy his hosts and set up his kingdom of peace” (The Jewish Encyclopaedia, vol. VIII art. Messiah).

“The Messiah whose coming the Jews obstinately expect, in spite of the fact that he obstinately refuses to appear, is to be a great conqueror who will reduce all the nations of the world to the condition of slaves of the Jews. The latter are destined to return to the Holy Land in triumph, laden with the riches taken from the non-Jews. Jerusalem is to have a new temple, which will not be built, by human hands but will be let down from heaven, ready made, and fully furnished, after the fashion of a stage construction” (Drach, De L’Harmonie entré L’Église st la Synogogue, vol. I, p. 98).

[15]“For there is one God, and one mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Tim. 2:5).

[16]L’Entrée des Israelites dans la Societe Franchise et la États Chrétiens, p. 286. On pages 204 and 205 of the same work, the author gives a list of the restrictions imposed on the Jews up to 1780, in order to safeguard the influence of the supernatural Messias in the social life of Christian states. Jews were forbidden: to have Christian slaves or servants of either sex; to open schools for Christians or to teach in the universities; to have posts in the army: to have part in the making or interpreting of laws; to be magistrates: to be owners of real estate or to acquire property: to be chemists or hotel keepers.

[17]Encyclical Letter, Tametsi, On Christ Our Redeemer (1900).

[18]Encyclical Letter, Mit Brennender Sorge, On the Persecution of the Church in Germany. In the Encyclical Divini Redemptoris same holy Pontiff wrote: “Everything must crumble that is nor grounded on the one corner stone which is Christ Jesus.”

[19]Treatise Abada-Zara. Fol.18 versa, fol. 20 recto: treatise Baba-Kamna fol. 29 verso.

[20]Foundations of the Jewish Faith by Joseph Abbo, III Part. chap. 25.

[21]The Jews in their attacks on our religion confuse these two kinds of worship.

[22]From The Interntional Jew vol. III, pp. 20–23, we can see that the rabbins and other Jewish teachers have not failed to form their pupils in hatred and contempt of Christ and his Blessed Mother. Two Jewish editorials are there quoted as follows:

“Half of Christendom worships a Jew: the other half worships a Jewess.”

“If the Gospel story is correct, Judas was a pretty decent sort of fellow. It was only after he had become a convert to Christianity that he became that which has made his memory an accursed thing for nineteen hundred years.”

Further on, the following extract from the minutes of a meeting of the Committee on Families of the New York Board of Child Welfare is quoted:

Mr, Hubbard: ‘That is one of the things I have in mind, that a widow deliberately brings into her home a nameless child and the inevitable consequence of that is that her legitimate children are always thereafter pointed out.’

Miss Sophie Irene Loeb: ‘As far as nameless children are concerned, Christ himself was a nameless child. Let us get away from nameless children.’

Dr. Devroch: “… You are corrupting the morals of those legitimate children by permitting them to remain in such surroundings.’

Miss Loeb: I say to you that this Committee, if it takes such an attitude as that, is one hundred years behind the times.’

Mr. Cunnion: ‘Anything against purity is immoral.’

Miss Loeb: ‘What has that to do with the question of purity? Was the mother of Christ pure?’

Mr. Cunnion: ‘Certainly.’

Miss Loeb: ‘He has no name.’

If it is objected that Mr. Henry Ford made a public retraction of The International Jew, the answer is easy. Mr. Ford’s retraction holds with regard to the opinions expressed and the views advanced in the book, but, of course, his personal retraction does not affect the value of the quotations from Jewish publications or the extracts from official documents of the United States government.

[23]4th Oct., 1890, pp. 8–11.

[24]According to the Civiltá Cattolica (Oct., 1890, p. 15), the Talmud affirms that the three men have the same authority as the tribunal of Moses (Treatise Rosch-Haschahann, fol. 25, 1°).

[25]The translation is that of the Daily Missal, by Dom Gaspar Lefebvre, O.S.B.

The teaching of Thomas with regard to the present day significance of Circumcision may be helpful to some in grasping more clearly why we must oppose the naturalism of even the “religious” Jews. St. Thomas insists that “just as it would be a mortal sin now for anyone in making a profession of Faith, to say that Christ is yet to be born, which the fathers of old said truthfully and devoutly, so too it would be a mortal sin now to observe those ceremonies which the fathers of old accomplished with devotion and fidelity” (Ia IIae, Q.103, a.4). Circumcision was a protestation that the Messias was to be born of Abraham according to the flesh. The unity of the world and the oneness of the Divine Plan must never be lost sight of. If they are not kept well in mind, confusion of thought is the inevitable result.

[26]De L’Harmonie entré L’Église et la Synogogue vol. I, p. 77.

It is to he noted that the ex-rabbin Drach was writing of incidents which occurred in the year of his conversion to the Catholic Faith (1823–1824), twenty years before the foundation of the Jewish world-wide secret society of the B’nai B’rith.

[27]Letter, Post tam diuturnas.

[28]Article in the Civiltá Cattolica, Della questione Giudaica in Europa 15th Nov., 1890.

[29]La Mystérieuse Internationale Juive (pp. 270–272). This work was published by G. Beauchesne, Paris, in 1936.

[30]Les Pourquoi de la Guerre Mondiale, published by Desclée, De Brouwer et Cie. Lille and Paris, in 1922.

[31]The special position of La Civiltá Cattolica amongst Catholic reviews and the encomiums bestowed on it by sovereign Pontiffs deserve to be more widely known. Let us mention a few of them.

Pope Pius IX gave the review its status in the following terms: “By this letter, in virtue of Our Apostolic Authority, We erect and constitute in perpetuity the College of Writers of the Periodical La Civiltá Cattolica.

Pope Benedict XV blessed its work: “We bless the fruitful Apostolate which the venerable review La Civiltá Cattolica carries on courageously and unwaveringly on behalf of the Christian cause.”

Pope Pius XI praised its devotion to the Holy See: “From your assiduous activity and from the whole life of La Civiltá Cattolica there radiates that special devotion to the Holy See, which has deservedly won for you the benevolence and esteem of Our Predecessors and Ours.

[32]Encyclical Letter, Quadragesima Anno.

[33]Cf. The Workingman’s Guilds of the Middle Ages, by Godefroid Kurth (Loreto Publications)

[34]The Jews, as we shall see, exercise a very real and efficacious power of influence in Freemasonry and direct its action, through the B’nai B’rith Lodges, which do not admit non-Jews, but whose members are admitted to ordinary Masonic Lodges.

[35]“The apostasy of the Greeks was punished by the Mohammedans who annihilated their Empire. The instrument chosen by the anger of heaven to punish the degenerate Christianity of our day is the Jewish nation. The power of the Jewish nation goes on increasing with the spread of the evil spirit, which, in the organization of society, has substituted the rights of man for the “rights of God.” Article in the Civiltá Cattolica, Della questione Giudaica in Europa 20th Dec., 1890.

[36]The writer of the article on the Jewish question in the Civiltá Cattolica already referred to, holds that the once Christian states must go back and take the road they missed at the French Revolution. They must “take away equal citizenship from the Jews, for these latter have no right to it.” At the time that article was written, the return of the Jews to Palestine had not yet appeared on the horizon.

[37]De L’Harmonie entré L’Église et la Synogogue vol. 1, p. 9.

[38]The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World, p. 277, where mention is made of the fact that the term is too wide and too vague. Cf. article in the Civiltá Cattolica, 4th October, 1890, p. 7, where a similar remark is made.

[39]The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World, p. 275.

[40]The New Racial Paganism, pp. 3, 4.

This question will be treated at length later on, when we come to examine the National-Socialist movement in its proper perspective as a national reaction against the domination of Judaeo-Masonic naturalistic internationalism. We shall see that it has turned wrong, because it has sought its inspiration in ideas drawn from decaying non-Catholie Christianity and anti-supernatural philosophy.

[41]Encyclical Letter, A quo primum (1751).

[42]Rom. 9:6–7

[43]If the Arabs may be spoken of as the descendants of Ishmael, we see that Mohammedanism, too, goes back to Abraham. In this case, too, it is a question of physical descent, and the Messias, Mahomet, has already come.

[44]“Vos estis filii Abrahae et ego.” This is quoted in the book, La Cause des restes d’Israël introduite au Concile Oecumeuique du Vatican, by the Fathers Lemann.

For the full text of Pope Pius XI’s Discourse, cf. The Kingship of Christ and Organized Naturalism, by the present writer (The Forum Press, Cork).

The Antiphon of the Magnificat of the first vespers of Quinquagesima Sunday expresses the same idea in succinct fashion. It runs as follows: “Noble Abraham, the Father of our faith, offered a holocaust on the altar in the place of his son.”

Cf. the text of Gal., 3:29: “And if you be Christ’s, then you are the seed of Abraham, heirs according to the promise.” M. Draeh quotes this text when, addressing his fellow Israelites, he says: “It is only through Jesus that you can be children of Abraham” (L’Harmonie entre L’Eglise et la Synagogue, vol. I, p. 25).

[45]Cf. article Juifs et Chrétien, in the Dictionnaire Apologetique de la Foi Chrétienne.

[46]Cf. Encyclical Letter. Divini Redemptoris, On Atheistic Communism.

[47]Op. cit., 4th Oct., 1890.

[48]Of. Évangele et Nationalism, by C. Barthas.

[49]Commentary on St. John’s Gospel, p. 319.

[50]With regard to the conversion of the Jews, cf. The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World, pp. 281–287.

[51]An English translation of this pamphlet, with some additions, has been published under the title Anti-Semitism, by the Centenary Press (London).

[52]Italics in text.

[53]Op. cit. pp. 19, 21.

[54]CF. e.g, the able work of André Charae, L’Incredulité des Juifs dans le Nouveau Testament, pp. 2t2–24fi.

[55]Les Juifs parmi les Nations, p. 19.

[56]The Joint Letter of the Spanish bishops was given to the world on the Feast of the Most Precious Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ, July 1, 1937. In it their Lordships wrote: “The National Movement (of General Franco) has released a current of love which has concentrated round the name and historical essence of Spain, with aversion for the foreign elements who occasioned our ruin. And as love of country, when supernaturalized through the love of Jesus Christ, our God and Lord, touches the summits of Christian charity, we have witnessed an outburst of veritable charity which has found its maximum expression in the blood of thousands of Spaniards who have given it to the cry of ‘Long live Spain! Long live Christ the King!’”

Cf. Pope Pius XII’s Broadcast to Spain, quoted on p. 337.

[57]Bolshevism is not Jewish, p. 3. This pamphlet is published by the Woburn Press.

[58]This book was published in 1920 with a preface by Mr. H. A. Gwynne. In all probability Mr. Victor K. Marsden, for many years the Morning Post’s correspondent in Russia, had a considerable part in writing it. I am quoting it, because it refers to books which I have not been able to procure.

[59]This book is out of print and is very difficult to procure.

[60]“Marx hated everything Jewish” (Bolshevism is not Jewish, p. 3).

[61]Article Juifs et Chrétiens, cols. 1676–1681.

[62]The name was given in irony.

[63]This sentence has been suppressed in the French Edition of Graetz’s History of the Jews.

[64]For further evidence of pretended Jewish conversion, see Isabella of Spain, Chap. XV by William Thomas Walsh.

[65]It is truly amazing to find writers ignorant of the elements of Catholic teaching and yet having the audacity to pose as learned exponents thereof. For example, Mr. Golding, on page 63 of this work, says: “It was in 1215 that the Fourth Lateran Council recognized officially the doctrine of Transubstantiation, that is, that in the ceremony of the Holy Communion, the consecrated elements become the actual body and blood of Jesus Christ.’ Mr. Golding might have consulted some standard Catholic work about the meaning of Transubstantiation and of Holy Communion as well as of a definition of faith, before venturing to talk about the simplicity and ignorance of Catholics as he does in the lines immediately following. He only provokes a smile at his own impertinence.

[66]Op. cit., p. 25 in note. Of course, Mr. Golding speaks of Mark, not St. Mark. I have inserted the title of supernatural reverence and distinction before the Evangelist’s name.

[67]A complete refutation of the falsification of history of which such Jewish writers as Professor Klausner and Mr. Golding are guilty concerning the death of Our Lord Jesus Christ, is to be found in the two very able studies presented for degrees at Louvain and Paris respectively by l’abbé André Charue and l’abbé C. Barthas L’lncrédulité des Juifs dans le Nouveau Testament, par l’abbé André Charue (Dissertation for the degree of Master in Theology in the University of Louvain); Évangile et Nationalisme, par Rabbi C. Barthas (Thesis for the Doctorate in Theology at the Catholic Institute of Paris).

Klausner is a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His work is entitled Jesus of Nazareth, His Times, His Life, and His Teaching.

[68]Readers who wish to study it will find it treated in able fashion in the article, Juifs et Chrétiens, of the Dictionnaire Apologetique de la Foi Chrétienne and in the splendid work of H. de Vries de Heekelingen, Juifs et Catholiques, pp. 66–85.

The Dictionnaire Apologétique de la Foi Chrétiene gives a list of Papal documents dealing with the question of Ritual Murder. “Some are favorable to the Jews,” remarks the writer, “others are unfavorable.” Amongst the documents that are unfavorable, the Bull Beatus Andreas (22nd Feb., 1755) of Pope Benedict XIV is very important. On the other side, the Bull of Pope Innocent IV of 5th July, 1247, is well known. I make particular mention of the fact that there are Papal documents that are unfavorable to the Jews because of Cecil Roth’s statement: “The Catholic Church never gave the slightest countenance to the calumny” (The Ritual Murder Libel and the Jew, p. 20). Of course, the Catholic Church does not countenance calumny—that is certain, but there are official documents of the Catholic Church unfavorable to the Jews in this matter.

[69]St. Simon is commemorated in the Roman Martyrology on the 21st March. We there read: “Passion of St. Simon, a child who was most cruelly put to death by the Jews and who afterwards became famous because of the numerous miracles wrought, by his intercession.”

The Dictionnaire Apologétique de la Foi Chrétienne speaks also of Pope Pius VlI’s approval of the cult of Blessed Dominic of Val in the diocese of Saragossa and of that of the holy child of La Guardia in the diocese of Toledo, as well as of the approval of the Sacred Congregation of Rites of the cult of the little boy, Laurence of Marostica, in the diocese of Vicenza (1867) and of that of Rudolph of Berne, in the diocese of Basle (1869).

[70]“How, if the offence of them be the riches of the world, and the diminution of them, the riches of the Gentiles, how much more the fulness of them?” (Rom. 11:12).

Chapter IX

The Second Visible Organized
Naturalistic Force—Freemasonry

naturalism and supernaturalism

We have studied the opposition to the Mystical Body of Christ of the Jewish nation, the non-secret organized naturalistic force. Let us now turn to the secret organized naturalistic force, Freemasonry. The Masonic Society, or group of societies, is, as has been already remarked, a visible organization, but its naturalistic, or anti-supernatural character is secret or camouflaged. Relatively few of its members are aware of the naturalism or anti-supernaturalism of its end, as well as of its ritual and symbolism. Let us make clear, first of all, what we mean by the naturalism of Freemasonry.

I. As we have seen, supernaturalism affirms that the life of grace, participation in the life of the Blessed Trinity, is infinitely higher than the natural life of human reason and that the unique source of that life in the existing order is Our Lord Jesus Christ.

The loss of supernatural life through the fall of the first Adam has been repaired through membership of the Mystical Body of the second Adam. Naturalism, on the contrary, affirms that our highest life is the life of reason and, consequently, denies that there has been any such thing as a fall from, or loss of, supernatural life.

II. Supernaturalism affirms, as is logical, that it is only through cultivation of our membership of Our Lord’s Mystical Body that we can be good men and true, as we ought to be. Naturalism, also logically, affirms that it is a matter of indifference whether one invokes Our Lord Jesus Christ, or Mahomet or Buddha, or nobody at all.

III. Supernaturalism teaches that the Catholic Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, is infinitely higher and nobler than any natural society, while insisting that ordered love of country and native land must be sedulously cultivated. The naturalistic mentality, on the contrary, insists that the highest social organization is the individual state or the whole group of states tending to coalesce into a World-state.

IV. The Catholic Church will aim at permeating all social life, political and economic, with the spirit of the Mystical Body.

The state or group of states aimed at by naturalists will seek to eliminate every vestige of supernatural life from social organization.[1]

We shall now see that all these characteristics of naturalism are to be found in Freemasonry.

teaching of the catholic church concerning the naturalism

of freemasonry

The teaching of the Catholic Church is imparted to us authoritatively by Pope Leo III, in his Encyclical Letter on Freemasonry.

freemasonry stands for the

supremacy of human reason

“From what We have already written, it is indisputably evident that their (the Freemasons’) ultimate aim is to uproot completely the whole religious and political order of the world which has been brought into existence by Christianity and to replace it by another in harmony with their way of thinking. This will mean that the foundation and laws of the new structure of society will be drawn from pure naturalism.…Now the fundamental doctrine of the naturalists, as is clear from their very name, is that human nature and human reason must be in all things mistress and guide.…

“Since, however, it is the special and exclusive function of the Catholic Church to preserve from any trace of corruption and to set forth in their integrity the truths divinely entrusted to her keeping along with her own authority to teach them to the world and the other heavenly aids to salvation, it is against the Church that the rage of the enemies of the supernatural and their most ferocious attacks are chiefly directed. Now, if the mode of action of the Masonic Sect in religious matters be examined, especially wherever it is more at liberty to cast off restraint, it will be brought home to any impartial observer that it is aiming at putting into practice the policy of the naturalists.

denial of the fall

“Besides, since human nature is stained by original sin and is therefore more prone to vice than inclined to virtue, for a virtuous life it is indispensable to restrain the disorderly movements of the soul and bring the passions into subjection to reason. In this struggle, what appeals to nature must very often be despised, and the greatest labor and hardships must be endured, in order that reason may always remain in triumphant control. Now, the naturalists and the Masons, not accepting by faith what we know by divine Revelation, deny that the first Adam fell. They, consequently, hold that free will is in no way weakened or rendered prone to evil (Conc. Trid, Sess. VI, De Justifi., c. 1).

“On the contrary, exaggerating rather our natural virtue and goodness and considering it to be the only fount and rule of justice, the idea does not occur to them that there is need of continual effort and unremitting attention, in order to keep in check the revolt of our passions and to maintain them steadily under control. This is the reason why we see human beings beset with so many temptations to indulge in the pleasures of the senses. This is also the explanation of the publication of journals and pamphlets that are both unrestrained and indecent as well as of the awful licentiousness of stage plays and the scandalous treatment of artistic subjects according to the shameless laws of so-called realism. This, too, is the pretext by which the systematic pandering to effeminacy and luxury and the continual pursuit of every form of pleasure, by which virtue may be lulled to sleep, are excused or justified.…

“What We have said can be confirmed by a fact that is novel not so much in itself as in its open admission. Since, in general, no one obeys cunning and crafty schemers so readily as those whose self-control has been sapped and broken by subjection to the yoke of their passions, there have been found in the Masonic Society men who have proclaimed their determination to strive skilfully and cunningly to saturate the masses with every form of vice, so that thus they would be at the beck and call of their leaders for their future projects, no matter what may be their nature.

propagation of religious indifference

“If those who are received into the society are not obliged to abjure Catholic teaching explicitly, this, instead of being an obstacle to Masonic aims, is on the contrary helpful to them. First of all, in this way they easily deceive the simple-minded and the unwary and induce many others to join their ranks. Secondly, as all who present themselves from any form of religion are readily received, Freemasons thereby inculcate the great error of this age, namely, that religion is a matter of indifference and that one religion is as good as another. Such an attitude of mind is equivalent to the destruction of religion, and especially of the Catholic religion which, since it is the one true religion, is treated with the gravest injustice and offered the worst form of insult when it is placed on the same level as other forms of worship.…

“Although as a rule, they admit the existence of God, they themselves openly avow that they do not all firmly assent to this truth and hold it with unwavering conviction. For they do not attempt to hide the fact that this question of God is the chief source and cause of discord amongst them; nay, it is well known that recently it has been the subject of a serious disagreement in their ranks. As a matter of fact, however, they allow their members the greatest licence on the point, so that they are at liberty to hold that God exists or that God does not exist, and those who obstinately contend that there is no God are as heartily welcome as those who, while asserting that there is a God, have wrong ideas about him, like the pantheists. This is purely and simply the suppression of the truth about God, while holding on to some caricature of the divine nature.

elimination of the supernatural

life from society

“From the points We have summarily touched upon, it is quite clear what the Masonic Society is and what it is aiming at. Its chief dogmas are so completely and manifestly at variance with human reason that nothing more wicked can he conceived. To wish to destroy religion and the Church which God himself has founded and which he watches over to the end of time, to strive to bring back, after a lapse of eighteen centuries, the customs and morals of the pagans is the height of folly and outrageous impiety. Neither is it less horrible nor more tolerable that the benefits mercifully won by Jesus Christ, not only for men in their individual capacity but as linked together in families and states, should be repudiated. Even our enemies do not hesitate to give testimony of the very high esteem in which they hold these benefits. In this mad and wicked design, the implacable hatred and thirst for vengeance with which Satan himself is animated against Our Lord Jesus Christ become almost visible to our bodily eyes.…

“With regard to family life, the teaching of the naturalists may be summed up as follows: Marriage belongs to the class of commercial contracts, which can be rightly revoked at will by those who have contracted them. The rulers of the state have power over the marriage bond. In the education of youth, nothing that concerns religion is to be taught as certain and fixed. Each one must be left free to follow whatever he may prefer, when he has reached man’s estate. All these points are fully accepted by the Freemasons; and not only do they agree to them, but they have long endeavored to get them embodied in laws and institutions. Already in many countries, even in those supposed to be Catholic, it has been enacted that no marriages other than civil marriages will be considered lawful: in other places, the law allows divorce; and in others, every effort is being made to make it lawful as soon as possible. Thus, the time is rapidly approaching when the nature of the matrimonial contract will be completely perverted. It is in danger of becoming an unstable union entered into under the passing influence of passion and liable to be dissolved when that influence has grown weak. With the greatest unanimity, the Masonic Society also endeavors to get control of the education of the young.…

“In political organization, the naturalists lay down that all men have the same rights and are all equal and alike in every respect; that every one is by nature free; that no one has the right to exercise authority over another; that it is an act of violence to demand obedience on the part of men to an authority not emanating from themselves.…They hold also that the state should not acknowledge God; that out of the various forms of religion, there is no reason why one should take precedence over another. According to them, all should be on the same level. Now, that these views are held also by the Masons and that they too want to set up states constituted in this wise is too well known to need proof. For a long time, they have been openly striving with all the strength and resources at their command to bring this about; and they thus prepare the way for the bolder spirits who are ready to hurl society into an even worse condition, in their mad longing to arrive at equality and community of goods, by the destruction of all distinctions of rank and property.…A number of groups of Communists and Socialists are planning and extolling a revolutionary upheaval of this kind, and the Masonic Society is not only not opposed to their designs but greatly favors them, as its principles are identical with theirs. If they do not endeavor to realize their aims at once and everywhere, this is not because they are restrained by their teaching or for lack of firmness of purpose, but partly on account of the strength of that divine religion which cannot he destroyed, and partly because the more balanced members of the community do not wish to be the slaves of secret societies and vigorously resist their insane strivings.…

“What We have said must be understood of the Masonic Society as a body and inasmuch as it includes the associations similar to it and linked up with it, but not as referring to each of the individual members. Amongst the associates there may be many, who, though blameworthy in having joined such associations, are yet neither themselves sharers in the crimes of these societies nor aware of the ultimate object at which they are aiming. In like manner, some of the affiliated societies perhaps, by no means approve of certain extreme conclusions, the baseness of which appalls them, though they would be quite consistent in accepting them, since they follow necessarily from their common principles. Some of them, again, are obliged by circumstances of time and place to limit themselves to projects less ambitious than they themselves would wish or than the others usually attempt. They are not on this account to be reckoned as outside the Masonic federation, because membership of the Masonic federation is to be judged, not so much by acts or achievements, as by the acceptance of a set of guiding principles.”[2]

final aim—naturalistic world-state

or world republic

We have just seen that Pope Leo XIII teaches that Freemasonry is not only not opposed to the designs of the Socialists and Communists but greatly favors them, as its principles are identical with theirs. Now Pope Benedict XV, after having spoken of “Naturalism, that awful pest of our epoch,” went on to say: “The advent of a Universal Republic, which is longed for by all the worst elements of disorder, and confidently expected by them, is an idea which is ripe for execution. From this republic, based on the principles of absolute equality of men and community of possessions, would be banished all national distinctions, nor in it would the authority of the father over his children, or of the public power over the citizens, or of God over human society, be any longer acknowledged. If these ideas are put into practice, there will inevitably follow a reign of unheard-of terror. Already, even now, a large portion of Europe is going through that doleful experience and We see that it is sought to extend that awful state of affairs to other regions.[3]

That is the World-state at which Communists aim. And, as Freemasonry has the same fundamental principles as Communism, that too is the World-Republic for which Masonry is working, though some Masons may be unaware of it. The logical conclusion from the principles of the French Revolution is Communism. Since all men are equal, properly, the greatest source of social inequality, must be suppressed. Some Masons resent that logic and try to stem the tide. Their reaction, needless to say, will not avert the evils inherent in the principles of the society to which they have sworn allegiance.

masonic constitutions

Let us now set forth the naturalism of Anderson’s Constitutions of the Freemasons.[4]

The first of the charges or obligations of the Freemasons, namely, that concerning God and religion, in Anderson’s Constitutions (edition of 1723) reads as follows: “A Mason is obliged by his tenure, to obey the natural law:[5] and if he rightly understands the Art, he will never be a stupid Atheist nor an irreligious Libertine. But though in ancient times Masons were charg’d in every country to be of the religion of that country or nation, whatever it was, yet tis now thought more expedient only to oblige them to that religion in which all men agree, leaving their particular opinions to themselves; that is, to be good men and true, or men of Honor and Honesty, by whatever Denominations or Persuasions they may be distinguished; whereby Masonry becomes the Center of Union, and the means of conciliating true Friendship among persons that must have remained at a perpetual Distance.” Later on in Section VI on Behavior we read: no private Piques or Quarrels must be brought within the door of the Lodge, far less any Quarrels about Religion, or Nations, or State Policy, we being only, as Masons, of the Catholic Religion above mentioned; we are also of all Nations, Tongues, Kindreds, and Languages, and are resolved against All Politicks, as what never yet conduc’d to the Welfare of the Lodge, nor ever will. This Charge has been always strictly enjoin’d and observ’d; but especially ever since the Reformation in Britain, or the Dissent and Secession of these Nations from the Communion of Rome.”

Two points in these “Charges” must be stressed. First of all, belief in the existence of God is not clearly demanded or enjoined. The whole wording is redolent of that ambiguity which is so calculated to deceive the ignorant and unwary. “Atheism is not condemned, but just sufficiently disavowed to meet the exigencies of the time, when an open admission of it would have been fatal to Masonry. It is not said that Atheists cannot be admitted or that no Mason can be an Atheist, but merely that if he rightly understands the Art, he will never be a stupid Atheist, that is to say, he will not hold or profess Atheism in a stupid way, for instance, by statements that shock religious feeling and bring Masonry into bad repute. And even such a stupid Atheist incurs no stronger censure than the simple ascertaining of the fact that he does not rightly understand the Art, a merely theoretical judgment without any practical sanction. Such a disavowal tends rather to encourage modern positivist Atheism.[6] The same writer goes on to say: “Scarcely more serious is the rejection of Atheism by the British, American and German Grand Lodges in their struggle with the Grand Orient of France. The English Grand Lodge, it is true, in its quarterly Communication of 6th March, 1878 (Chr. 18/8. I, 161), adopted four resolutions, in which belief in the Great Architect of the universe is declared to be the most important ancient landmark of the order, and an explicit profession of that belief is required of visiting brethren belonging to the Grand Orient of France, as a condition for entrance into the English Lodges. Similar measures were taken by the Irish, Scottish, and North American Grand Lodges. But this belief in a Great Architect is so vague and symbolical, that almost every kind of Atheism and even of ‘stupid Atheism’ may be covered by it. Moreover, British and American Grand Lodges declare that they are fully satisfied with such a vague, in fact, merely verbal declaration, without further inquiry into the nature of this belief, and that they do not dream of claiming for Freemasonry that it is a ‘church,’ ‘council,’ a ‘synod.’ Consequently, even those are acknowledged as Masons who, with Spencer and other naturalist philosophers of our age, call God the hidden, all-powerful principle working in nature.”

Father Gruber then quotes extracts from various Masonic writers and orators to show how vague an affirmation about God will satisfy the Masonic authorities. For example, an American Grand Orator, Zabriskie of Arizona, on 13th of November 1889, proclaimed that “individual members may believe in many Gods, if their conscience and judgment so dictate. Father Gruber then concludes: “Thus the whole controversy turns out to be merely nominal and formal. Moreover, it is to be noticed that the clause declaring belief in the Great Architect a condition of admission was introduced into the text of the Constitutions of the Grand Lodge of England only in 1815, and that same text says: “A Mason therefore is particularly bound never to act against the dictates of his conscience.” whereby the Grand Lodge of England seems to acknowledge that liberty of conscience is the sovereign principle of Freemasonry prevailing over all others when in conflict with them.…Thus the Grand Orient of France is right from the Masonic point of view as to the substance of the question; but it has deviated from tradition by discarding symbols and symbolical formulae, which, if rightly understood, in no way imply dogmatic assertions, and which cannot be rejected without injuring the work of Masonry, since this has need of ambiguous religious formulae.…From this point of view the symbol of the Grand Architect of the universe and of the Bible are indeed of the utmost importance for Masonry.”

The second point that needs to be stressed in connection with these “Charges” is the fundamental error of Masonry, namely, its naturalism. The order of the world, as has been already stated, demands the acceptance by all men of supernatural life, which is a participation in the inner life of the Blessed Trinity. It is only through that divine life that our natural life, individual and social, can be lived in order. The unique source of that life is Our Lord Jesus Christ, and human beings are intended to receive communication of that life by being incorporated into Him through membership of the supernatural, supranational society of his Mystical Body, the Catholic Church. All nations are meant to enter the Mystical Body of Christ and organize their national life in accordance with the Divine Plan. Now Masonry everywhere, English Masonry as well as French Masonry, refuses to accept the Divine Plan for Order; it puts itself above the Mystical Body of Christ and aims at drawing all states and nations into a naturalistic, supranational unity.

How do we prove that Masonry refuses the Divine Plan? According to the section of Anderson’s Constitutions which we have quoted, the Masonic Society obliges its members to observe the moral law and to be good men and true, but insists that in order to be morally good men, it is a matter of indifference whether God’s plan for the restoration of our supernatural life through Our Lord Jesus Christ is accepted or not. Now, by original sin we lost supernatural life, and we need divine grace that we may live an ordered life, yet, this society proclaims that one can be a good man and a true man, while, remaining utterly indifferent to the unique source of grace, Our Lord Jesus Christ, and to His divinity. That is equivalently a denial of the Fall and is pure naturalism.[7] The importance of the Masonic Society in the world, as the only body capable of bringing about union amongst men divided by their allegiance to relatively unimportant warring sects, is implicitly understood in every line of the Constitutions. It is explicitly affirmed in such places as the Fellow-Crafts or Companion Masons’ song, part of which runs as follows:

I

Hail Masonry! thou Craft divine!

Glory of Earth, from Heav’n revealed;

Which dost with jewels precious shine,

From all but Masons’ eyes concealed.

II

As men from Brutes distinguisht are

A Mason other men excels;

For what’s in Knowledge choice and rare

But in his Breast securely dwells.

In virtue, then, of knowledge revealed from heaven, communicated to men by this Society which professes indifference to the Divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, a Mason is raised as far above a man who believes in the Divinity of Our Lord and accepts his teaching, as a human being is above a brute beast. The folly of attaching importance to membership of the Mystical Body of Christ, in comparison with membership of Freemasonry, could hardly be more strongly emphasised. Thus we see that Freemasonry not only inculcates indifference to the Divine Plan for Order through membership of the Mystical Body of Christ, but even puts itself above the Mystical Body.

Again, the whole force of the arguments used by Masons on behalf of the beneficent, unifying influence of Masonry seems to repose on the assertion that human reason inculcates religious indifference. For example, Lord Ampthill, Pro-Grand Master, in a speech printed in the History of the Bank of England Lodge, declares: “I have said enough to remind you that the purpose of Freemasonry is religious; for what is religion except the service of God.…But do not misunderstand me: I am not saying or thinking that Freemasonry is a religion, or that it can take the place of any dogmatic religion that has a name, a definite existence and a creed. What I do say, and firmly believe is, that the object of Freemasonry is to assist men of all creeds to live religious lives and to practice more truly the religion which they profess.”[8] Hence this society, which professes itself deeply religious and respectful of the service of God, avoids awakening the minds of its members to the great objective truth that the second person of the Blessed Trinity has come down into the world to indicate precisely how God in three divine persons ought to be worshipped and served. Not only does it thus avoid calling the attention of its members to the importance of discovering which is the one true religion established by God become Man, but it urges them to disregard the matter and gloss over it as unimportant. Hence it attempts to drive home in practice the pernicious error that according to the natural law one religion is as good as another.

The plague of religious indifference has so weakened men’s minds with regard to God’s designs that they are almost incapable of seeing the awful disorder of such naturalism. It will, therefore, be well to dwell upon it a little.

To enter a society in which men surrender their wills unreservedly to the heads of the society, by taking an oath of blind obedience, is an immoral act, contrary to man’s God-given rational nature. The revolt is, however, still more heinous, when it is question of entrance into a society making open profession of naturalism. As there are only two camps here below, revolt against Christ the King is, objectively, entrance into the camp of Satan. This naturalism is the fundamental error of Masonry and it is common to all the sections of Masonry, Anglo-Saxon, French, Italian and Spanish. Corruption of the idea of God has inevitably followed on the rejection of the one way instituted for return to God, namely, membership of the Mystical Body of Christ. The French Grand Orient has betrayed the presence of this corruption and degradation with regard to God, more openly than English or Irish Masonry. That is the whole significance of the controversy about the deletion of the expression, The Great Architect of the universe, by the French Grand Orient.[9]

Pope Leo XIII, in the Encyclical Letter, Humanum genus, has emphatically pointed out the decay that is the morally necessary consequence of naturalism. “The naturalists,” he writes, “go much further still. For having in foolhardy fashion turned their backs upon the right road in matters of the utmost importance, they are carried headlong to extremes, either on account of the frailty of human nature, or because God justly chastizes their pride. Thus it comes to pass that even those truths that are grasped by the light of human reason are no longer considered by them as indubitably certain. Such, for example, are the existence of God, the complete immateriality of the human soul and its immortality. The Masonic sect, owing to a like error of direction, has fallen into the same peril. Although, as a rule, they admit the existence of God, they themselves bear witness to the fact that they all do not firmly assent to this truth nor hold it with unwavering Conviction.[10]

To sum up, then, the retention by the Grand Lodge of England of the article relating to the Grand Architect of the universe does not signify that English Masonry is Christian, for English Masonry does not accept the supremacy of the Mystical Body of Christ. On the contrary, English Masonry is anti-supernatural and anti-Christian like the other sections of the Masonic Brotherhood, for it puts Mahomet and Buddha on the same level as Christ, thus denying Christ’s role as the one Mediator.[11] Neither does this article mean that English Masonry professes belief in a transcendent God as we know him, for it is compatible with acceptance of pantheism, that is, with the identification of God with man. French (Grand Orient) Masonry has shown this pantheistic conception of the idea of God more fully and more explicitly than English Freemasonry. An open avowal of Atheism or of the deification of man would have been impolitic in England in 1878 when the French Grand Orient deleted the paragraph referring to the existence of God from its constitutions. The retention of the vague term, “Great Architect of the universe,” enabled English Freemasonry to pose as religious, while continuing its work of sapping the belief of Englishmen in the divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ and in the reality of that supernatural life of grace coming to us from him, by which we are true men as ee ought to be.

“Besides,’ writes M. Léon de Poncins, “it does not follow that there are no relations between Anglo-Saxon Freemasonry and Latin Freemasonry. America has not completely broken with the Grand-Orient and English Freemasonry is in close touch with the American branch. England is also in touch with several Masonic branches in Central Europe which in their turn are in relation with the Grand-Orient, in addition, England maintains direct contact with Latin branches of Freemasonry which in no way differ from the Grand Orient. If we open the English Masonic calendar for 1930, we find that the Grand Lodge has official relations with Portugal, Spain, with the remnant of Italian Freemasonry and with Latin America.

“That cuts the ground from under all the affirmations of English Freemasonry (about complete rupture with the Grand Orient), for no highly-placed Mason is ignorant of the fact that Spanish, Portuguese and Brazilian Masonries, to mention only a few, are actively political and anti-religious after the fashion of the French Grand-Orient. Spanish Freemasonry stirred up an international agitation in favor of the Anarchist, Ferrer. Portuguese Freemasonry played an active part in the (Portuguese) Revolution of 1910, which began by the assassination of King Carlos and his son…[12]

Sir Alfred Robbins, who for a number of years was high up in the administration of British Freemasonry, was sent to North and South America in the Spring of 1924 as the accredited representative of the English Grand Master, the Duke of Connaught, he gives some interesting evidence with regard to the links between the Grand Orient and the Grand Lodge of England, in his book, English Speaking Freemasonry. We read therein: “From the Gulf of Mexico to the Straits of Magellan the various national governing Masonic bodies are of the Latin (Grand Orient) type. Such of the Central and South American Grand Lodges, or Grand Orients… as agree with the English formulae of fundamentals, the United Grand Lodge of England recognizes as being in friendly association. In four of these—-Argentine, Brazil, Uruguay, and Chile English-speaking and English-working Lodges exist,… all in friendly, all in differing relations with the Grand Jurisdiction in whose country they reside, and to whose sovereignty, under Masonic International Law, they are bound to have regard…

In Brazil there is no Lodge warranted by England: but some fifteen English-speaking and English-working Lodges exist by warrant from the Grand Orient of Brazil, their internal affairs being represented at that body by a Grand Council…constituted under an Anglo-Brazilian Masonic Agreement of 1912…thus in harmony with the National Grand (Orient) bodies in four of the greatest South American countries. English-speaking and working Freemasonry has a corporate existence, fully recognised not only by those bodies but by the United Grand Lodge of England.”

M. de Poncins quotes an interview given by Sir Alfred Robbins to The Scotsman, June 6, 1927, in which he stated that he had been amicably received by the Grand Masters of the Grand Orients of Brazil, Argentine and Uruguay. He also quotes a statement by Sir Alfred to the members of the Swiss Lodge. Helvetica, in London, to the effect that he had come back from South America with an admiration for Latin Masonry which he would never have had if his knowledge of it had been limited to correspondence and reading.[13]

Sir Alfred on pages 18–20 of his book gives clear proof of the vagueness of meaning of the “fundamental Grand Architect of the universe” as well as of the fact that Freemasonry is not Christian, He there writes as follows: “The foundations on which English-speaking Freemasonry so long has stood is a reverential belief in the Eternal, with an inner realization of his revealed will and word. It recognizes that both belief and revelation exist in various forms…Theological discussion inside a Lodge or in association with Masonic gatherings is as firmly forbidden as ever. This does not prevent members of different denominations and creeds instituting Lodges which not by rule, but by understanding, admit as members none save those of their own belief. In England many Lodges are entirely composed of Anglicans, Methodists and Congregationalists, as well as of Jews; while overseas, as has been indicated, there are Lodges of Mohammedans, Buddhists, and Parsees, among the greater divisions of the world’s religious thoughts…[14]

opposition of freemasonry

to the catholic church

The opposition of all the branches of Freemasonry to the Catholic Church is thus essential and ineradicable, for it is the opposition of naturalism to the supernatural life which comes from Our Divine Lord. It is, in other words, the opposition of Anti-Christ to Christ. It has been thought necessary to stress this great truth, because of the statements one sometimes hears, even from Catholics, that Continental Freemasonry is quite different from English Freemasonry. The latter, they say, has no connection with the former and is merely a benevolent association, in which non-Catholics find friendship and help, but which Catholics may not enter because of the oath of secrecy imposed on its members. Statements such as these are utterly misleading. They betray complete ignorance of that which constitutes the essential defect in all forms of Freemasonry, namely, its naturalism.

The revolt against the Divine Plan for Order in the 16th century, by which each Protestant state relegated the care of religion to a state department, prepared the way for the uprise of a purely naturalistic society aping the universality of the Mystical Body of Christ. Satan urged the desirability of setting up a society based upon that natural religion in which all men agree. Thus, he urged, since men are rational, you can make them good and true, and at the same time work for the brotherhood of men of all nations, so much endangered by all the quarrels between Christian denominations. Satan pleaded, too, for an oath of secrecy, knowing its appeal to the curious and the adventurous. Thus was brought into existence a naturalistic caricature of the Mystical Body of Christ, in which men reject the supernatural life of grace and, in addition, go against their natural reason by an oath of blind obedience. The so-called Reformation (really a Revolution, not a Reformation) did not attempt to set up a supranational organization in the place of the Catholic Church. It simply resulted in the separation of different sections, calling themselves National Churches, from the one true Church of Christ. The setting up of a supranational organization was reserved for the French Revolution of 1789.

Modern history, since that Masonico-Naturalistic Revolution, has been, to a large extent, an account of the diffusion of its principles throughout Europe and America, resulting in the domination of the naturalistic supranationalism of Freemasonry, behind which has been looming up the still more strongly organized naturalistic supranationalism of the Jewish nation. “Russia” or “Moscow” is merely a prolongation of the principles of 1789 and a materialistic adaptation of them to action on the part of these naturalistic organizations. In recent years, a series of national reactions in the name of the concept of native land against the corruption and deformation carried on by these naturalistic forces, have been taking place.[15] Unless the intrinsic evil of the naturalism of the French Revolution and, as a consequence, its place in the struggle of Satan against the supernatural life of the world, are clearly grasped, modern history since 1789 is unintelligible.

It is a pity that Mr. Hilaire Belloc, who has done such magnificent work with regard to the history of the so-called Reformation, has not clearly grasped this point. His treatment of the significance of the French Revolution and of subsequent revolutions suffers from the fact that he ascribes the opposition between the Catholic Church and Freemasonry, not to an essential and logically inevitable conflict of programs, but to an accidental association of ideas. The passage in which he has elaborated this theory is to be found in an article on the Masonic hatred of Italy, in G. K.’s Weekly, December 26th, 1935, which runs as follows: “The doctrines (of Freemasonry) are harmless enough; but there is this about it which is remarkable and could only be explained by the association of ideas that, wherever the Catholic Church is powerful, Masonry becomes the organization directing the political forces which aim at the destruction of Catholic society.

“There is no logical connection between the quaint Hebraic ritual (invented apparently at the end of the seventeenth century) and hostility to the Catholic Church. Still less is there any apparent rational link between the vague humanitarian ideals which run through Masonry and the body of Catholic doctrine. The main complaint is that Masonry being non-doctrinal saps organized and doctrinal religion, but that does not explain the conflict.

“The connection between one thing and another in practical life depends not only on links that can be rationally explained but also upon mere association of ideas. If a man meets with insult from another man in a red cloak the association of red cloaks with insult would arise, though it would be slight. But if a second man in a red cloak is rude to him and then, after some interval, a third man in a red cloak plays a practical joke upon him, he will come to identify the wearing of red cloaks with hostility to himself. If a body of men whose bond is fidelity to a particular creed are in practice constantly at loggerheads with those who care nothing about the creed but are given to playing the flute, the followers of the creed will inevitably get into a state of mind where flute playing is to them an abomination. The doctrine of adult baptism has nothing whatever to do with the doctrine that fermented liquor is an evil, but by an association of ideas there arose after a few generations a permanent hostility between Baptists on the one hand and hearty drinking on the other.

“That is the answer to those who say that there cannot be any real hostility between Masonry and Catholic society. It is an hostility bred from an association of ideas which has existed so long that it has taken on strength and struck roots and become permanent. It has body and real existence. Go wherever you will in any Catholic nation or polity—Ireland, France, Belgium, Vienna, Portugal, Spain—everywhere you will find Masonry furnishes the framework, the organization and the directive, of attack against the social and religious tradition of the people.

“International Masonry therefore has already a natural antipathy to the presence of a new powerful Catholic state, such as Italy was manifestly becoming. Still, that tendency was vague; what made it exceedingly active was the direct attack made by the new Italian government on the Masonic Lodges and the complete success of that attack.…Therefore it is that all over the world (in America, for instance, where there are more Freemasons than in all the rest of Christendom put together, in Mexico, where the government is openly Masonic, in Bohemia, where the government is also purely Masonic, as may be seen in the persons of Masaryk and Benes, Masonry is working against Italy. It is only one of the many highly comic things about our modern press in England that a matter of this importance is never spoken of.…The public is left not only ignorant of the international role of Masonry; it is ignorant also of a thousand other things which the newspaper monopolists have either never heard of or arrange to keep silent about.”

A connection or an opposition based on association of images (and ideas) is accidental. The thought of something as linked up with or opposed to something else arises in a man’s mind on the occasion of the presentation of an image (and consequent thought) of the former object, because of sense-impressions in the individual’s previous experience. In this case, the thought of the second object arises, because of an association of sense-impressions which might have been quite otherwise, if the individual’s life-experience had been otherwise. There is nothing in the nature of things to associate the objects. A logical or objective connection or opposition, on the contrary, is one that seen by the mind to be involved in the nature of things: it is essential. Of this latter kind is the opposition between the naturalism of the various sections of the Masonic Brotherhood and the supernaturalism of the Mystical Body of Christ, the Catholic Church.[16] Masonry will send up a smoke screen and advance to battle behind nationality, science, progress and the rest of the well-worn shibboleths for which so many non-Catholics and recreant Catholics have crucified Our Savior again since 1789, but because of its naturalism, Masonry is always, in the last resort, aiming at the elimination of the supernatural act of worship of the Mass, and of the divine life permeating society therefrom.

The opposition between the Catholic Church and Free-masonry will become clearer when one realizes the meaning of Masonic “tolerance.” The formation in “tolerance” given in the Lodges aims not merely as that negative mental state which puts religious truth and error on the same level, treating them both with indifference; it aims at the production of a positive hatred of what it calls the “intolerance” of the Catholic Church, namely the Catholic Church’s insistence on the oneness of the Divine Plan for Order. The stressing of the importance of toleration and indifference is intended to produce a mentality in which hatred and contempt for the “intolerance and unyielding attitude of the Catholic Church are blended. Why is this? Because the steadfast hold of the Catholic Church on the one true order of the world is utterly hateful to Satan who has rejected that order for himself. He calls that hold upon order “intolerance” and unceasingly inculcates hatred of it. This is the reason why Masonic orators and writers like Pike, in Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, continually inveigh against superstition and point out the deadly opposition between it and glorious Masonic light. The formation in Masonic “tolerance,” then, is really a formation in hatred of the firmness and strength of the Catholic Church, in standing for the supernatural life and order of the world. This is the ultimate reason why Anglo-Saxon Masonry, ostensibly so conservative, has consistently favored movements towards the Left, opposed to the true order of the world. The Masonic Society as a whole forms a solid phalanx in the naturalistic camp of Satan, in spite of some superficial manifestations of lack of cohesion. In the world, there are only two camps, the camp of Our Divine Lord and the camp of Satan. Accordingly, Masonry will inevitably tend towards more flagrant opposition to Our Lord’s program for the organization of society.[17] Satan will see to it. He will strive to have the process of suggestion, to which Masons are subjected in the Lodges, continued, until the deformation of the intelligence and the perversion of the will have reached the point at which he is aiming. This must be always borne in mind. The subjects who are found not to be apt pupils are not allowed to pass on to the higher degress: they are left under the impression that, as Master-Masons, they have attained to the dignity that is of really practical importance.[18]

Masons are gradually “formed” both by personal penetration of the doctrine underlying Masonic symbols and ceremonies and personal acceptance of the Satanic consequences thereof, and also by systematic “lectures.” Exoteric initiates, who are largely ignorant of esoteric Masonry or the inner significance of the symbolic teaching of the order, form the bulk of those who frequent the Lodges.[19] The really initiated, the esoteric Masons, are those who have penetrated fully into the hidden meaning of Lodge symbolism and who have accepted all the consequences of that penetration. That is the result of personal work on the part of the individual Mason and no degree can confer it.[20]

The following is an outline of the “formation” given by the “lectures.” The sublime mission of Masonry is proclaimed to be the establishment of the religion of Toleration. Respect for Catholicism as for every form of Christianity is at first insisted upon, but it is pointed out that intolerant Catholicism is the enemy of genuine Christianity. As the Jesuits and other religious orders interpret the Catholic religion with intolerance, Masonry must combat them, in pursuit of its sublime mission. Then, later on, dogmatic teaching is assailed as the source of intolerance, for dogma is intolerant by nature. Finally, to save humanity from intolerance, the Church itself must be attacked, because the Church’s dogmatic teaching leads to intrusions into politics. The Catholic Church’s claim that all the actions, political and economic, of members of Christ, must be subject to Christ, is treated as an intrusion into politics.

How does this naturalism penetrate from the lodges into masses of the people? The journalist in his articles, the writer in his books, the dramatic author and film producer in their compositions, the songwriter in his songs, the professor in his lectures, the teacher in his classes, all spread abroad the naturalistic ideas with which they have been impregnated in Masonic reunions. And as the Masons who thus act as propagandists do not avow that they are Masons, their action is not recognised as Masonic action. For example, the moderate paper, seemingly respectful of religion, may have, without its being known, its Mason or Masons, who insert therein what it is safe to say, going as far as is possible for the moment and biding their time till public opinion is formed and ready to accept something stronger. In the lodges, these Masons come in contact with those who are engaged on the anti-Catholic papers.[21]

Besides the direct action of its own members on the public, Masonry aims at creating sub-masonries or associations for the propagation of its ideas. These associations vary according to the types of intelligences for which they are destined, but in spite of differences, the naturalistic and anti-supernatural note is always present. The gradations of this ever-present characteristic range from rabid anti-Catholicism to “broad-minded” indifferentism. The Orange Society and Rotary are two examples of such sub-masonries. In addition to the creation of associations for the dissemination of Masonic ideas, Masonry aims at securing entrance into and arriving at the control of associations which it has not created. Freemasonry thus succeeds in setting in motion a vast number of people and gets them to work for ends unknown to them. “Those who support themselves by the labor of their hands,” writes Pope Leo XIII in his Encyclical Letter on Freemasonry, are especially exposed to the allurements of men whose ways lie in fraud and deceit. Therefore, they ought to be helped with the greatest possible kindness, and to be invited to join associations that are good, lest they be drawn away to others that are evil. For this reason, We greatly desire that…the guilds may be restored.”[22]

The forces that control Masonry proceed slowly and cautiously, getting in the so-called “progressive” ideas. But when the people are completely blinded and powerless, the moderate leaders, who were allowed to figure on the stage during the period of preparation, disappear, and others more fanatically “progressive,” take their places to serve their turn. It must also be borne in mind that ministers of state are, to a very large extent, dependent upon the permanent officials. During the years of preparation. Masonry aims at getting hold of the key-positions on government clerical staffs. Thus even the good men who become ministers very frequently find themselves powerless to arrest the downward trend.

We have seen the ambiguity of the Constitutions of Anderson with regard to God and religion, and the inevitable results, with regard to opposition to the Catholic Church and the supernatural life of the world, in an oath-bound naturalistic society, in which hatred of “superstition” and “intolerance” is inculcated. Let us now pass on to consider the effect of the similarly ambiguous language with regard to political action.

freemasonry and political action

Let us first take the testimony of Father Gruber, S.J., in the article on Freemasonry in the Catholic Encyclopedia, from which we have already quoted. “Another characteristic of Masonic Law,” he writes, “is that ‘treason’ and ‘rebellion’ against civil authority are declared only political crimes, which affect the good standing of a Brother no more than heresy, and furnish no ground for a Masonic trial. The importance which Masonry attaches to this point is manifest from the fact that it is set forth in Article II of the ‘Old Charges’ which defines the duties of a Freemason with respect to the state and the civil powers. Compared with the corresponding injunction of the ‘Gothic’ constitutions of operative Masonry, it is no less ambiguous than Article I concerning God and religion.…The second article of modern Speculative Freemasonry (1723) runs as follows:

“Of the Civil Magistrates, supreme and subordinate.

“A Mason is a peaceable Subject to the Civil Powers, wherever he resides or works, and is never to be concerned in Plots and Conspiracies against the Peace and Welfare of the Nation, nor to behave himself undutifully to inferior Magistrates; for as Masonry hath always been injured by War, Bloodshed and Confusion, so ancient Kings and Princes have been much disposed to encourage the craftsmen, because of their Peaceableness and Loyalty, whereby they practically answered the Cavils of their adversaries and promoted the Honor of (the) Fraternity, who ever flourished in Times of Peace. So that if a Brother should be a Rebel against the state, he is not to be countenanced in his Rebellion, however he may be pitied as an unhappy man; and, if convicted of no other Crime, though the loyal Brotherhood must and ought to disown his Rebellion, and give no Ground of political Jealousy to the government for the time being, they cannot expel him from the Lodge and his Relation to it remains indefeasible.”

“Hence rebellion by modern speculative Masonry is only disapproved when plots are directed against the peace and welfare, of the nation. The Brotherhood ought to disown the rebellion, but only in order to preserve the fraternity from annoyance by the civil authorities. A Brother guilty of rebellion cannot be expelled from the Lodge; on the contrary, his fellow Masons are particularly obliged to have pity on his misfortune when he (in person or before the courts) has to suffer from the consequences of his rebellion, and give him brotherly assistance as far as they can. Freemasonry itself as a body is very peaceable, but it does not disapprove, on the contrary, it commends those brethren who, through love of freedom and the national welfare, successfully plot against monarchs and other despotic rulers, while as an association of public utility it claims privilege and protection through kings, princes, and other high dignitaries, for the success of its peaceful work. ‘Loyalty to freedom,’ says The Freemason’s Chronicle (1875, I, 81), ‘overrides all other considerations.’…The protestations (of loyalty to the government) of English and American Freemasons in general may be deemed sincere, as far as their own countries and actual governments are concerned. Not even the revolutionary Grand Orient of France thinks of overthrowing the actual political order in France, which is in entire conformity with its wishes. The question is, whether Freemasons respect a lawful government in their own and other countries, when it is not inspired by Masonic principles. In this respect both English and American Freemasons, by their principles and conduct, provoke the condemnatory verdict of enlightened and impartial public opinion. We have already above hinted that Article II of the ‘Old Charges’ is calculated to encourage rebellion against governments which are not according to the wishes of Freemasonry. The Freemason’s Chronicle but faithfully expresses the sentiments of Anglo-American Freemasonry, when it writes: ‘If we were to assert that under no circumstances had a Mason been found willing to take arms against a bad government, we should only be declaring that in trying moments, when duty, in the Masonic sense, to state means antagonism to the government, they had failed in the highest and most, sacred duty of a citizen. Rebellion in some cases is a sacred duty, and none but a bigot or a fool will say that our countrymen were in the wrong, when they took arms against King James II. Loyalty to freedom in a case of this kind overrides all other considerations, and when to rebel means to be free or perish, it would be idle to urge that a man must remember obligations which were never intended to rob him of his status of a human being and a citizen’ (The Freemason’s Chronicle, 1875, 1, 81). Such language would suit every anarchistic movement equally. The utterances in question were made in defense of plotting Spanish Masons.

“Only a page further on, the same English Masonic Magazine writes: ‘Assuredly Italian Masonry, which has rendered such invaluable service in the regeneration of that magnificent country, is worthy of the highest praise’…. Kossuth, who ‘had been leader in the rebellion against Austrian Tyranny,’ was enthusiastically received by American Masons, solemnly initiated into Freemasonry at Cincinnati, 21st April, 1852, and presented with a generous gift.…Garibaldi, ‘the greatest Freemason of Italy’ (Intern. Bull., Berne, 1907, 98), and Mazzini were also encouraged by Anglo-American Freemasons in their revolutionary enterprises (The Freemason’s Chronicle, 1882, I, 410; 1893, I, 175; 1899, II. 34). ‘The consistent Mason,’ says The Voice (Chicago), ‘will never be found engaged in conspiracies or plots for the purpose of overturning and subverting a government based upon the Masonic principles of liberty and equal rights’ (The Freemason’ Chronicle, 1892, I, 259). ‘But,’ declares Pike (The Inner Sanctuary, IV, 547), ‘with tongue and pen, with all our open and secret influences, with the purse, and if need be, with the sword, we will advance the cause of human progress and labor to enfranchise ‘human thought, to give freedom to the human conscience (above all from papal usurpations) and equal rights to the people everywhere. Wherever a nation struggles to gain or regain its freedom, wherever the human mind asserts its independence and the people demand their inalienable rights, there shall go our warmest sympathies.’”

The effect of the ambiguous naturalistic formation of Masonry in regard to the state, accompanied as it is by denunciations of “tyranny” and “usurpation,” corresponding to the denunciations of “superstition” and “intolerance” in regard to religion, will be the tendency already mentioned to favor Left movement?[23]

States in which the divine order of the world is acknowledged will be classified as “tyrannies” in proportion to the extent in which they accept Our Lord and the supernatural life. Accordingly, as the advent of naturalism in Protestant countries is only a question of time, the terms “tyranny,” “despotism” and “usurpation,” are not applied to them as freely and as vigorously as they were to the realms of the Bourbons and the Hapsburgs in days gone by. In Catholic countries, as has been already pointed out, violent revolution is always aimed at, in order to get rid of the existing social structure in which the Kingship of Christ is respected.

masonic declarations of loyalty

In accordance with the principle laid down in the Constitutions concerning “Behavior in Presence of Strangers Not Masons,” Masonry changes its attitude according to the times and the circumstances. In that Constitution, which is the fourth of those on behavior, it is enjoined that “ you shall be cautious in your words and Carriage, that the most penetrating Stranger shall not be able to discover or find out what is not proper to be intimated: and sometimes you shall divert a Discourse, and manage it prudently for the Honor of the Worshipful Fraternity.” M. Copin-Albancelli in his able works, Le Pouvoir Occulte contra la France, and La Conjuration Juive contre le Monde Chrétien, points out that, when Masonry was introduced into France, it began by appearing to be as anti-revolutionary as English Masonry was, or at least until recently, said to be.[24] Here are some of the declarations of a Masonic orator as reported by Brother de la Tierce who wrote, in 1747 An Apology for the Order of Freemasons: “Let us try to define a Mason in order to know him better. Represent to yourselves a man fearing God, faithful and loyal to his King, giving to everyone his due, not doing to others what he would not like to have done to himself, and you have the picture of a true Mason. These are his mysteries and these his secrets.…I have said that a Mason is a God-fearing man, for he who abandons his religious duties is not a Mason. Such a being usurps the name of Mason and has never deserved to bear it.…Sacred Laws of Religion, to you honor is due.” According to these declarations, then, Masonry would be an association of Godfearing loyal men and the same conclusion, adds M. Copin Albancelli, could be drawn from many other pronouncements which were made from the first appearance of Freemasonry to the eve of the Revolution of 1789 and again from 1815 to 1870. Besides, the Statutes of the French Masonic Federations formerly forbade all political discussions in the Lodges and imposed respect for every form of religious belief as a fundamental obligation.

“It is in this fashion,” continues the same writer, “that Freemasonry begins in Catholic countries. But wait till it has succeeded in getting itself accepted and you will see it seize power and do as it did in France in 1793 and as it is doing at the present time, namely, assassinate or banish those princes to whom it had sworn fidelity and massacre or rob the ministers of that religion whose sacred laws it had invoked.[25] The solemn declarations change, too, for we read in the program of the Masonic Review, Acacia, in 1902, that ‘Freemasonry is the Counter-Church, the Counter-Catholicism, the Church of Heresy.’ The Bulletin of the Grand Orient of France gave utterance, in 1885, to the following ‘profession of faith:’ We Masons, must aim at the complete destruction of Catholicism.’ In 1902, Brother Delpech, in a speech printed in the official report, said: ‘The triumph of the Galilean has lasted twenty centuries. His vogue, however, is now on the wane in its turn. The mysterious voice which once upon a time on the mountains of Epirus announced the death of Pan, today proclaims the downfall of that deceitful God who promised an era of justice and peace to those who believed in him.…Freemasons, it is with pleasure that we proclaim the fact that we have contributed to the overthrow of the false prophets. The Roman Church, built upon the Galilean myth, began to decay rapidly from the time of the foundation of the Masonic Association. Politically, Freemasons have often changed their coats, but Freemasonry has always clung firmly to the principle of the extermination of all superstitions and fanaticisms.’

“Now, if, as Brother Delpech holds, freemasonry has always been aiming at the destruction of the Catholic Church, what are we to think of the declarations made by Freemasons in the 18th century and in the first half of the 19th century?…The proofs of the ferocious hatred of Masonry for the Catholic Church are so evident in our day that hypocrisy has become impossible. Freemasonry sees this and with the same energy with which during 150 years (with the exception of the period of the Great Revolution), it affirmed its respect for religion, it now proclaims that it is aiming at the overthrow of the Catholic Church. It even goes so far as to declare that it has never varied on this point. Hence we may conclude that, as it asserted the opposite during 150 years, the sect lied during these 150 years.”

M. Copin-Albancelli holds that the Masonic Society is so “cautious in Words and Carriage” at any epoch that “the most penetrating Stranger” can discover only what the society does not wish to conceal, with the result that its pronouncements are in flagrant contradiction with its subsequent actions. He says also that many of the individual members who make the pronouncements may be in good faith, but being unaware of the Jewish power over Masonry, are ignorant of the end towards which they are being maneuvered. In the steady movement to the Left, he stresses the influence of Jewish naturalism.[26] Ch. Nicoullaud, another writer whom we have cited, stresses the influence of Satan in the same steady movement towards the Left. These two theses, namely, that Masonry’s movement to the Left is due to the influence of Satan and that it is due to the action of Jewish naturalism, are not actually exclusive, but complementary.

It is hardly necessary to quote passages from Masonic documents to show that Masonry is working for a naturalistic Federation of the World. They can be found in abundance in La Dictature de la Franc-Maçconnerie en France, by Michel and G. Goyau’s work, L’Ideé de Patrie et L’humanitarianisme, as well, of course, as in L. de Poncins’ splendid works. Here are some taken from the first-mentioned work: “Freemasonry does not concede to anyone the dignity of an adversary except to the Pope” (Convent. Intern. de Bruxelles, 1904).… “My Brothers… allow me to express the hope that Freemasonry, which has done so much for the emancipation of the human race and to which history is indebted for National Revolutions, will also be able to bring about that greater Revolution which is the International Revolution” (Official Bulletin of Grand Lodge of France, October, 1922). “This International Revolution is Freemasonry’s work for tomorrow” (Assembly of Grand Lodge of France, 1932) “The principal tasks of the League of Nations are the organization of peace,…the creation of international notes…the extension of pacifist education, relying notably on the spread of an international language,….the creation of a European spirit, of a patriotism of the League of Nations: in a word, the formation of the United States of Europe, or rather of the Federation of the World “ (Assembly of the Grand Lodge of France. 1922.)

is british masonry also moving to the left?

Throughout her work, Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, Mrs. Webster insists upon the distinction between Grand-Orient Masonry and British Masonry. She thus shows that she does not grasp the meaning of organized naturalism, with its inevitable tendency to the Left, or the fact that a society not subject either to Church or state is in fundamental opposition to the Divine Plan for Order. Though she asserts on page 285 that British Masonry is essentially an honest institution, yet, on page 293, she expresses the fear that “should the control ever pass into the wrong hands and the agents of (Illuminized) Secret Societies succeed in capturing a number of lodges, this great stabilizing force might become a gigantic engine of destruction.” Again, on page 325, at the end of the chapter on Secret Societies in England, she concludes: “How, in the face of these declarations coming from those inside the movement, can anyone maintain that Illuminism is dead and that Secret Societies present no danger to Christian civilization?”

Grand Orient or “Continental” Masonry was once just as patriotic as British Masonry proclaims itself to be. This latter, too, is fundamentally, by its nature as a Secret Society, against the order of the world and forms a section of the naturalistic army. It too is condemned by the Church.[27] British Masonry is not exempt. The following pronouncement of Pope Pius IX is quite clear and definite on the point: “If some think that the Apostolical Constitutions anathematizing secret societies and their adepts and abettors have no force in the countries where such societies are tolerated by the civil authorities, they are certainly grievously mistaken. As you know, Venerable Brethren, We have already reproved and We now again reprove and condemn that false and pernicious doctrine.”[28]

We may add to this statement the Letter addressed by the same Pontiff to the bishops of Brazil some ten years later.[29]

The Brazilian Freemasons had been pretending that the Pontifical Condemnations applied only to Masonic organizations in Europe, not to those of the New World. Masonic societies in Europe, they said, were hotbeds of conspiracy, while those in America were engaged exclusively in philanthropic works and were zealous for the progress of civilization. Pius IX replied that all the Masonic Associations in the Old and the New World were condemned, even those that pretended to be concerned only with works of benevolence. “In order that in such an important matter,” he wrote, “there may not remain any doubt or any room for illusion, We hasten to declare again and to confirm that all the Masonic Societies, both those in Brazil and those that are to be found anywhere else in the world, are proscribed by the Apostolic Constitutions, and all those who have had the misfortune to give their names to any one of them, by the very fact, fall under the excommunication reserved to the Roman Pontiff. The Apostolic Constitutions apply to all these Masonic Associations, even if a great many people, either deceived themselves or seeking to deceive others, affirm that they are concerned exclusively with works of benevolence and the advancement of civilization.”[30]

Already in 1928, M. Pierre Colmet, one of the ablest of contemporary writers on Masonic questions, commenting in the Revue Internationale des Sociétes Secrètes, on the (then) recent promotion of the Prince of Wales to the rank of First Principal of the United Chapter of St. James, as a reward for his Masonic zeal, said: “Alas! in spite of all appearances to the contrary and leaving out of account other indications, We beg to warn our English friends that this means the end of a dynasty and of a world. This is not a prophecy, for that would be ridiculous on our part: it is the lesson of history.” In December, 1937, a remarkable article by the Polish writer on Judaeo-Masonic activities, E. Malynski, appeared in Contre-Révolution, the review so ably edited by M. Léon de Poncins. The following are a few of the salient passages of this excellent study of a difficult question: “British Freemasonry is at the moment covered by the royal mantle. The noble personages who belong to it and who govern it officially are a guarantee that everything is conducted in the most honorable fashion.…Nevertheless, subversive cells seem to be undermining the structure of English Masonry in an underground manner, as they did in the case of the French Masonry of the 18th century. They seem to be acting, in England as elsewhere, with the tact and discretion required to carry on the work of corruption and perversion unperceived. Are we actually assisting at the silent preparations of a new historical tragedy which is as yet hidden in the depths of the lodges and does not appear on the surface? It would be very difficult to answer categorically yes or no. What is certain is that in England a great uneasiness is beginning to be felt: it bears an astonishing resemblance to the symptoms indicative of the presence of a cancer in the human organism before it is diagnosed clearly, something disagreeable and out of the ordinary, but which cannot be said to be actual suffering.…

“Certain incidents in English political life, even when the Conservatives are in power, are so abnormal that it is impossible to give a rational explanation of them. At the memorable and deplorable Paris Conference of 1929, with a Coalition government composed of Conservatives and Liberals without any strictly Left elements. England, the country always renowned for its ‘respectability’ was quie definitely in favor of the Bolsheviks. She seemed, besides, to have a certain partiality for all the countries, parties and movements with pronounced socialistic, or at least Jewish and radical, tendencies, it was pretty evident that England had become the avowed champion of Israel and of ‘democracy’ and that anything opposed to Judaism and ‘democracy’ was by the very fact taboo. Still more recently, it was with astonishment that one beheld the strange sympathy of the English government and of Conservative personages such as the Dean of Canterbury and the Duchess of Atholl for the Red government of Valencia. The thesis which holds that Mr. Lloyd George or Mr. Eden is the person exclusively responsible for such extraordinary political action seems to us untenable….

“Though we can behold the French aristocrats of the 18th century only through the somewhat deforming prism of history, it is difficult to believe that they were animated by what is called in modern language the Masonic spirit. It seems to us still more difficult to imagine the noble lords and honorable gentlemen who govern England filled with a spirit of destruction of the established order. On the contrary, their innate attachment to all that is traditional sometimes even seems exaggerated, if it is permitted to speak of exaggeration in the right direction.…Nevertheless, you will meet many of them who will speak to you of progress, of the necessity of keeping abreast of the times, of the impossibility of resisting the forward movement, of broadmindedness, of that clearsightedness which consists in canalizing the inevitable revolutionary movement in view of the spirit of the times, by becoming oneself a sort of revolutionary or at least a champion of ‘democracy,’ Exactly the same sentiments were being first whispered, then openly proclaimed, in the aristocratic salons of St. Petersburg, for some years before that city became the Leningrad of the Jewish rogues and robbers, just as at Paris and even at Versailles before 1789. Other Englishmen, less superficial in character, have somewhat different views. They admit that they have a profound personal dislike of the Bolsheviks…but they add that politics are politics just as business is business.…

“The members of the extreme right, the ‘Die-Hards’ as they are called, listen incredulously, when you speak to them of a real reaction. Their idea is to follow the so-called ‘progress ‘which inevitably goes to the Left, no matter what happens, but to follow it as slowly as possible, preventing others, that is, the Socialists and the Radicals, from advancing too rapidly. That is the maximum of what can be accomplished, according to the most conservative members of the Conservative Party, which is supposed to be the rampart of the traditions of Old England.…

If we read the numerous Mémoires of that epoch, which have been published, we shall find the same mental attitude, resulting from Masonic initiation, before the French Revolution, and before the revolutions of the middle of the 19th century. And if we have not completely lost the faculty of memory, we shall remember its consequences in practice before the Russian Revolution.…We have made use of the word ‘Initiation,’ in accordance with received Masonic usage, but we should speak rather of slow, methodical saturation.”

May we not see a confirmation of Malynski’s warnings in a pamphlet entitled Britain’s Lost Victory, by D. M. Touche ?[31] We read in this pamphlet a number of statements made a few years ago by men who are prominent in English political life, statements which go far to show that they were gripped by the virus of the organized naturalistic forces. Here are some of these pronouncements: “We have absolutely abandoned every idea of nationalist loyalty. We are deliberately putting a world loyalty before loyalty to our country.”[32] “Every possible effort should be made to stop recruiting for the armed forces,[33] and while these things were being said in England, “the German army was revived by the bankers of London and New York, led by the Bank of England.”[34] “The great moneylenders, working from London and New York, determined to restore the strength and prosperity of Bismarck’s Reich in order that the said Reich should pay tribute to the said moneylenders: hence the continuous virulent abuse of the French, hence the dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, hence the cutting-down and final extinction of reparations. The moneylenders, with the Bank of England at their head, only made fools of themselves. They were blinded by greed.”[35]

According to Hilaire Belloc, then, the moneylenders blundered into the second great war (1939–???). Major Douglas, as we shall see later, holds that the war now being waged and that of 1914–1918 are both part of a vast plan for the socialization of the world. He also holds that the Bank of England was not leading but led from U.S.A.[36]

The war foreseen by Major Douglas has come. Perhaps the best description of its effects on England is to be found in the following extract from the Catholic Herald of February 6, 1942: “Two wars are being waged against England. The first we know all about. It is being fought in Europe, in Africa, in Asia…. But the second is no less important and no one bothers about it. On this front the outlook is much darker. It is the war against the spirit and traditions of England, and the enemy lies within our gates. Well may German propagandists exclaim that on one side we are being Americanized and on the other Sovietized. Open any paper or pamphlet, and you will look in vain for a mention of ‘God and My Right,’ of the ideals of St. George, of the monarchy, of our constitutional heritage, of our Christian foundations and faith, of our literature, of our homes that were castles, of our squires, etc., etc., or, if you find them mentioned, it will generally be with a veiled or open sneer.”

We have already remarked that the Declaration made on behalf of English Masonry by the Duke of Connaught, in 1938, leaves the question of the Great Architect of the universe exactly as it was. The same remark must be made with regard to what the manifesto says about political action. The English Grand Lodge does not take part in political action, the manifesto affirms. Our contention is that its members do so. It is very like what a member of the Masonic Council (of France) stated to a reporter of the newspaper, Lé Temps, in 1899: “We proscribe all political discussions. We keep aloof from all political agitation. We never present a candidate at any election.” Of course, it is quite true that they never present candidates, openly stating that they are Masons, but in 1893, six years before the interview given to Lé Temps, another member of the Council, Brother Amiable, could say: “Our candidates won all along the line, and so out group in the National Assembly has been noticeably increased. On behalf of the General Assembly of the ‘Grand Orient,’ I congratulate the Freemasons who are today the chosen representatives of universal suffrage.”[37]

The manifesto of 1938 has been characterised as downright hypocrisy by a French writer in the Revue Internationale des Sociétés Secretes (October, 1938). “Let English Freemasons,” he writes, “re-read with candid and open minds Anderson’s Constitutions of 1723, and they will see that they contain in germ the principles of revolt against revealed religion and against legitimate governments, which the manifesto seems to repudiate. If from Lisbon to Moscow almost the whole continent of Europe has been turned topsy-turvy, it is because Freemasons have drawn the logical consequences from the revolutionary ideas extolled by the Constitutions.” The facts of European history are against the Duke of Connaught’s manifesto.

In a pamphlet, published by The Britons, entitled Despotism in Disguise, these facts are summed up as follows:” To attempt to trace in detail the intrigues of British Freemasonic ministers on the continent would necessitate the re-writing of history since the middle of the 18th century, but interlinear reading is scarcely necessary, even in the most liberal histories, to discover that Brother Palmerston was a F. M. before he was a British Minister: perhaps he was the most outstanding example of a whole line of politicians prepared in the lodges to step, when the time was ripe, on to the political stage.[38]
Once one has grasped the main facts of the Judaeo-Masonic plan—and this can only be done by reading the authorities on the subject—it is surprising how easy it becomes to find a solution to such baffling problems as the complete and phenomenal accord given by members of divergent political parties to a particularly unpopular act of legislation, or the disastrous continuity of policy shown by succeeding and opposition governments in forcing on a dangerous situation abroad.”

freemasonry and social justice

Social or Legal Justice considered in the subjects of a state, is the virtue by which they are enabled to subordinate to the Common Good of the society all the acts of the virtues and thus always act so as to favor that good and enrich it. Now, Freemasonry is opposed to the cultivation of that virtue in two ways. First of all, as it is only through the supernatural life that comes from Our Lord that human beings can maintain their ordered tendency to God, the Common Good of the whole universe, the naturalism of Freemasonry hinders the development of Social Justice.[39] We may express this, perhaps more clearly, by saying that Freemasonry aims at the formation of a mentality contemptuous of, and hostile to, membership of Christ’s Mystical Body. Now, Pope Pius XI insists that “then only will it be possible to unite all in harmonious striving for the common good, when all sections of society have the intimate conviction that they are members of a single family and children of the same Heavenly Father, and further, that they are ‘one body in Christ, and everyone members one of another’ (Rom. 12:5), so that ‘if one member suffer anything, all members suffer with it’ (1Cor., 12:26).”[40]

Secondly, Freemasonry explicitly excludes Social Justice by the Master Masons’ Oath or oath taken at the reception of the Third Degree. The following is the relevant portion of the text of that oath:—

“I furthermore solemnly vow and declare that I will not defraud a brother Master Mason, or see him defrauded of the most trifling amount, without giving him due and timely notice thereof; that I will also prefer a brother Master Mason in all my dealings, and recommend him to others as much as lies in my power so long as he shall continue to act honorably, honestly and faithfully towards me and others. All these several points I promise to observe without equivocation or mental reservation of any kind, under no less a penalty, on the violation of any of them, than to have my body severed in two, my bowels torn thereout and burnt to ashes in the center, and those ashes scattered before the four cardinal points of heaven, so that no trace or remembrance of me shall be left among men.”

The Master Masons Oath ends as follows:

“So help me God, and keep me steadfast in this grand and solemn obligation, being that of Master Mason” (Manual of Freemasonry).[41]

The Rev. C. Penney Hunt, B.A., in his work, The Menace of Freemasonry to the Christian Faith (Fourth Edition, p. 50), says that “it is customary to leave out that clause in the printed rituals of today.”

In the article on Freemasonry, by Father Gruber, S.J., in the Catholic Encyclopaedia, we read that, according to “Duncan’s ‘American Ritual’ the Royal Arch Mason even swears: ‘I will assist a companion R. A. Mason, when I see him engaged in any difficulty and will espouse his cause so as to extricate him from the same, whether he be right or wrong’.” “It is a fact attested by experienced men of all countries,” the same article continues, “that, wherever Masonry is influential, non-Masons have to suffer in their interests from the systematic preference which Masons give each other in appointments to offices and positions. Even Bismarck (Gedanken und Erinnerungen, 1898, I, 302 sqq.) complained of the effects of such mutual Masonic assistance, which is detrimental alike to civic equality and to public interests. In Masonic books and magazines, unlawful and treacherous acts, performed in rendering this mutual assistance, are recommended and praised as redounding to the glory of Freemasonry. ‘The inexorable laws of war themselves’ says the official orator of the Grand Orient of France, Lefebvre d’Aumale (Solstice, 24th June, 1841), ‘had to bend before Freemasonry, which is perhaps the most striking proof of its power.’”

By its explicit opposition to Social Justice, Freemasonry constitutes a serious obstacle to the union and good order which it is the aim of the corporate organization of society to promote.

[1]“What naturalists or rationalists aim at in philosophy, that the supporters of liberalism, carrying out the principles laid down by naturalism, are attempting in the domain of morality and politics. The fundamental doctrine of rationalism is the supremacy of the human reason, which, refusing due submission to the divine and eternal reason, proclaims its own independence and constitutes itself the supreme principle and source and judge of truth” (Encyclical Letter of Pope Leo XIII on Human Liberty).

[2]Encyclical Letter, Humanum genus.

[3]Motu Proprio, Bonum Sane, July 25, 1920.

[4]Anderson’s New Book of the Constitutions is the oldest and most important official publication of the Grand Lodge of England.

[5]The Constitutions of Freemasonry or Ahiman Rezon, published by the Grand Lodge of Ireland, in 1858, adds on here “as a true Noachida.” In a note it is stated that this means Sons of Noah, the first name of Freemasons. The text of these Constitutions is that of Anderson’s second edition of 1738.

The Catholic writer, Arthur Preuss, in A Study of American Freemasonry, pp, 350, 351, says: “It is to be regretted that Dr. Mackey should devote so large a portion of his Encyclopaedia of Freemasonry to the rehearsal of Masonic myths and fables; myths and fables which have been palmed off as facts by the writers he so justly condemns .…the fable of Noah; the fable of Euclid: the fable of Pythagoras; the fable of King Solomon and the Solomonic Temple.”

Dr. Mackey’s works are among the standard works of American Freemasonry.

[6]Article on “Masonry “ in The Catholic Encyclopaedia, by Rev. II. Gruber, S. J. Father Gruber’s knowledge of the subject was unquestioned.

[7]In the 1736 edition of Anderson’s Constitutions, the naturalistic: or purely rational non-Christian character of Freemasonry is even more strongly emphasised than in the 1723 edition. “In ancient times,” we there read, “the Christian Masons were charged to comply with the Christian usages of each country where they travelled or worked: but Masonry being found in all nations, even of diverse, religions, they are now generally charged to adhere to that religion, in which all men agree, leaving each Brother his own particular opinion.”

The Constitutions of Freemasonry or Ahiman Rezon, published by the Grand Lodge of Ireland in 1853, as already stated, follows the 1738 edition of Anderson’s Constitutions. In this volume an apt illustration of the naturalism of Freemasonry, that is, of its systematic inculcation of indifference to Our Lord, the unique source of supernatural life, is to be found. The prayers to be used in the various Lodges and Loyal Arch Chapters and Encampments of High Knights Templars are almost all in two alternative forms. One of these is purely naturalistic: the other makes mention of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

[8]History of the Bank of England Lodge, pp. 11, 12. by Stephen A. Pope.

[9]The Manifesto published in 1938 by the Duke of Connaught, in his capacity as Grand Master of English Masonry reaffirms the necessity of faith in the Supreme Being for recognition by the Grand Lodge of England, but it leaves the question exactly where it was.

[10]The present writer has shown from Masonic writers of the highest repute, such as Wilmshurst, Pike, and Milton Stewart, that the doctrine, conveyed in veiled terms by the symbolism of Freemasonry, is pantheism, and that the final result to which initiation tends is the pantheistic deification of man, particular stress being laid upon the generative, powers of the human race. The initiations of the ancient pagan mysteries and of modern Masonry are ceremonious revelations, indirect and graduated, of the pantheistic deification of man. These revelations are made to new adepts when they have previously sworn to cleave to this object in mind and heart and to keep the secret, under pain of death. They thus enter objectively into Satan’s camp and subject themselves to him in his struggle against Our Lord Jesus Christ. This pantheism terminating, as it does, in the deification of the generative function of the human race, goes far to explain the steadily increasing cult of nakedness in the modern desupernaturalized world Cf. The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World, Appendix VI. pp. 346–351. Cf. also L’Initiation Maçonnique, by C. Nicoullaud, and American Freemasonry, by A. Preuss, pp. 130, 169, in which the same doctrine is proved conclusively.

[11]In The Freemason of August 14, 1926 we read: “At a Masonic service…in Parish Church of St. Andrew, Ramsbottom…Bro. the Bishop of Hulme, Past Prov. Grand Chaplain, Worcester, said the true spirit of Freemasonry was charity. Freemasonry was not of necessity Christian. The Name of the Lord Jesus Christ would not be found in the prayers, nor in the offerings of praise, but anyone who recognised the Supreme Being of God, if nothing else disqualified him, might become a member of the great order. Though Freemasonry was not Christian, at least it was true to say that it was religious.” In the issue of March 26th, 1927, of the same periodical, we read: “Bishop Weldon, P.G.O., erstwhile Bishop of Calcutta and Metropolitan of India, in his Recollections and Reflections, says that Freemasonry, which is so great a power in India, may be taken to establish the possibility of uniting the votaries of many different religious in the common worship of one Almighty Creator.” Again, The Freemason of 3rd November 1917 gives an account of the installation of a Mohammedan, Brother Anik, as Venerable of the Wantage Lodge of London, treating the event as a new title to glory on the part of English Masonry. The Grand Master, the Duke of Connaught, expressed his regret at not being able to assist at the ceremony.

In the section “Notes on the Book of Constitutions,” 1922 edition of The Masonic Record, Sept., 1927, we find the following comments:

“(3) Charges concerning God and Religion.

“Let a man’s religion or mode of worship be what it may, etc.

“Hence not necessarily Christian.

“Therefore the Sacred Book is that which contains the Sacred Law of the individual concerned.

“When any Sacred Book other than the Bible is used for the purpose of obligating any member of a non-Christian faith, the V.S.L. (Volume of the Sacred Laws) must be in the Lodge and must be opened: for any Brother who has been O.B. (obligated a Brother) on the V.S.L. has the right to insist on its presence within the Lodge. The use of the other sacred writings is for the convenience of the candidate.

“There is nothing to prevent a man believing also in one or more inferior Gods provided that he acknowledges one Supreme God.”

Cf. Reflections on Freemasonry, by an Anglo-Catholic, pp. 52–60.

[12]Refusé par la Presse, p. 102. For documents concerning the Portuguese Revolution see Le Portugal Renait, by M. de Poncins.

[13]Refusé par la Presse, pp. 103, 104.

[14]Students of Irish History would do well to read what Sir Alfred Robbins says about the action of Irish Masonry in connection with the uprise and collapse of the Irish Volunteers in 1779–1783, on pp. 200–202. In the ordinary histories, there is never any mention of Freemasonry in connection with the movement.

Italics in the above quotations are mine.

[15]Cf. The Rulers of Russia. (Third Edition), p. 55. These reactions will be dealt with in Chapter XVI.

[16]Father Gruber, S.J., in the article on Freemasonry in the Catholic Encyclopaedia is very definite about the radical opposition between Freemasonry and the Catholic Church. He writes: “Certainly Freemasonry and ‘Christian’ or ‘Catholic’ religion are not opposed to each other when Masons, some erroneously, others hysterically, understand ‘Christian’ or ‘Catholic’ in the above described Masonic sense, or when Masonry itself is mistakenly conceived as an orthodox Christian institution. But between ‘Masonry’ and ‘Christian’ or ‘Catholic’ religion, conceived as they really are; between ‘unsectarian’ Freemasonry and ‘dogmatic, orthodox’ Christianity, or Catholicism, there is radical opposition.* It is vain to say: Though Masonry is officially ‘unsectarian,’ it does not prevent individual Masons from being sectarian in their non-Masonic relations; for in its official ‘unsectarianism’ Freemasonry necessarily combats all that Christianity contains beyond the ‘universal religion in which all men agree,’ consequently all that is characteristic of the Christian and Catholic religion. These characteristic features Freemasonry combats not only as superfluous and merely subjective, but also as spurious additions disfiguring the objective universal truth, which it professes.” This last remark is to be found bluntly expressed in Pike’s Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, where we read: “Masonry teaches, and has preserved in their purity, the cardinal tenets of the old primitive faith which underlie and are the foundation of all religions. All that ever existed have had a basis of truth, and all have overlaid that truth with errors.” Thus, according to Pike, the Catholic Church has superimposed erroneous teachings on the truths of natural religion, which Masonry has preserved pure. *Italics mine.

[17]This reasoning is based on the inevitable consequences of opposition to God involved in Masonic naturalism. Robison, in his celebrated work, Proofs of a Conspiracy, confirms this a priori argument by an a posteriori one from the evil results he had himself seen. “Accordingly we see,” he writes, “ that in every quarter of Europe where Freemasonry has been established, the Lodges have been seedbeds of public mischief.…Freemasonry has been abused, and at last totally perverted and so will and must any such secret association, so long as men are licentious in their opinions or wicked in their dispositions” (Op. cit., 3rd edition, pp. 464, 460).

[18]Ordinary Masons are ignorant of the superimposed strata of secret, societies of which Masonry is composed. Cf. Le Pouvoir Occulte contre la France, by Copin-Albancelli, pp. 228, etc.

Of course, certain nobles and other highly placed personages are advanced to the higher grades without any increase in their esoteric knowledge. “They serve as birdlime for fools,” according to the well-known expression of Piccolo Tigre, the conspirator of the Italian Alta Vendita.

[19]For an explanation of how it is possible to be a Mason for years and yet be ignorant of the real secrets of Masonry, see Preuss, American Freemasonry, Chapters I, II.

[20]“The Masonic work properly so-called the inner secret, ritualistic work by which Masons are made and educated for the outer work, consisting in action for the welfare of mankind according to Masonic principles” (article by Father Gruber, S.J., in the Catholic Encyclopaedia’).

[21]All this naturalistic action is, of course, strengthened a hundredfold by the influence of the organized leaders of the Jewish nation in Masonry and in the press of the world. Masonic action in dividing and weakening is directed and inspired by the leaders of the Jewish nation. For Jewish influence in Freemasonry see Freemasonry and the anti-Christian Movement, by Rev. F. Cahill, S.J., pp. 74–95. For Jewish influence in press, see Grossmachi Presses by Dr. Eberle, pp. 300–302.

[22]Cf. The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World, third edition, pp. 77–113.

[23]“The moral conduct of mankind is grounded on faith in God kept true and pure” (Encyclical Letter of Pope Pius XI, Mit brenennder Sorge, (already quoted). Purity of belief in God, the Pope says, depends upon belief in Christ, and his Church. Accordingly, where there is revolt against Our Lord and his Church, moral decay is inevitable. Masonry inevitably tends to the Left, since Masons not only become members of the anti-supernatural camp of Satan, but take an oath that is anti-rational.

M. Copin-AIbancelli pertinently remarks in his book, Le Pouvoir Occulte contra la France that the statement of principles by which Freemasonry was presented to the public was a masterpiece. The declaration completely concealed the revolutionary end in view and thus made certain of the toleration of the reigning powers, while drawing to the society a number of honest people and even of Catholics. “The society even made profession of principles which it intended to attack, but at the same time it prepared the way for the deformation and falsification of these same principles, by thie inclusion of certain contradictory principles.…On the one hand, the first article of the statutes proclaimed: ‘Freemasonry stands for the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. It respects the religious beliefs of all its adherents. It forbids all religious discussions. On the other hand, the same article declared that ‘Freemasonry was philosophical and progressive, and had, for object, the search for truth, and for principle, absolute liberty of conscience.’ Now liberty of conscience was not absolute if a man were obliged to proclaim the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. In the same way, the search for truth could not be prevented from questioning the religious beliefs of the members. By means of such a program, Freemasonry could vary according to the wishes of its founders.”

[24]“I swear…in the presence of the Great Architect of the universe and of this august Lodge, to live and die in the Catholic, Apostolic and Roman religion in which I was born, to be faithful to my King, against whom I will never bear arms, never to enter into any conspiracy against the state, likewise never to infringe the laws of Masonry in general and the particular Constitution of this Lodge, etc., etc.” (Obligations of Venerable of French Lodge in the 18th century, as quoted in R.I.S.S., 11th March, 1928, p. 226).

[25]The book from which these extracts are taken, Le Pouvoir Occulte contre la France (pp. 88, 90, etc.), was published in 1910. The open attack on Catholicism had been going on since the beginning of the century.

[26]He does this in the work from which a few extracts have been quoted, but more especially in La Conjuration Juive contre le Monde Chretien. M. Ch. Nicoullaud, in his work L’Episode anti-Maçonnique, pp. 153–159, insists upon the action of Satan on those who parody the divine symbolism of Catholicism in the Lodges. M. Nicoullaud’s principal work is L’Initiation Maçonnique.

[27]The universality of the Papal condemnations of Freemasonry is treated by Father Cahill, S.J., in Freemasonry and the Anti-Christian Movement, pp. 131, 132, 254.

[28]Allocution, Multiplices inter Machinationes, On Freemasonry, 15th September, 1865.

[29]Letter, Exortae in ista ditione, April 29th, 1876.

[30]Cf. La Franc-Maçonnerie, by R. P. Dom Benoit. Vol. II, pp 515–516.

[31]Published by the Individualist Bookshop, Fleet Street, London, in 1941.

[32]Mr. Attlee at Southport, October 2nd, 1934.

[33]Sir Stafford Cripps, Oct. 3, 1936. The pamphlet states (p. 19): “The (Russian) Comintern supported the pacifists because pacifism, by weakening Britain, increased the probability of a world war, to be followed by a world revolution.”

[34]The Weekly Review, May 30, 1940

[35]Hilaire Belloc in The Weekly Review, October 10, 1940.

[36]With both of these views of Major Douglas the present writer is in agreement. In addition, this book is intended to make clear that socialization is part of the process of desupernaturalization that is going on in the world.

[37]La Conjuration Juive, by M. Copin-Albancelli, pp. 201, 202,

[38]In Les Sociétés Secrètes et la Sociéte, vol. II, Deschamps treats at considerable length of the action of Palmerston as British Foreign Secretary and Supreme Pontiff of Freemasonry. Palmerston’s program, given to the world in The Globe of 12th May, 1849, will be treated of later.

In 1851, the French Republic was ill, and Louis Napoleon, a Carbonaro, called in to doctor it, was proclaimed Emperor of the French. According to Domenico Margiotta, sovereign Grand Inspector General of the ancient and accepted Scottish Rite, an International Masonic Council was sitting at that time in London, composed of Mazzini, Kossuth, Felix Pyat, Lemmi, and others, with Lord Palmerston, a prominent Freemason, in waiting. They were in close communication with Cavour, Rattazzi, Crispi, and Garibaldi in Italy. Their main object was the unification of Italy and the destruction of the temporal power of the Pope. In 1860, Garibaldi, Grand Master General of the Rites of Memphis and Misraim, with a thousand Masonic followers, invaded and occupied the Kingdom of Naples. An English gentleman, who was then a Protestant and a Freemason, in the volunteer force, was solicited by an officer of his corps, to join the English Legion in support of Garibaldi. He was informed that the Legion would be equipped and supported by Freemasons. Subsequently a Mason, holding the highest position in one of the Essex Lodges, candidly acknowledged to him that English Freemasonry had been in communication with Mazzini, and had entrusted him with money for the purpose of the campaign. Pius IX, who had watched the storm brewing from afar, when he issued the Encyclical Qui Pluribus in 1846, now, seeing it descending upon Rome, delivered in 1865 a solemn allocution, Multiplices inter, in which he deals exclusively with Freemasonry. He calls it, ‘the enemy of the Christian name’” (The X-Rays in Freemasonry by A. Cowan, pp. 81, 82).

[39]In the state of fallen nature man’s rational will is liable to fail to observe the order of loving his own private good in subordination to the common good of the whole universe, namely God. On account of the corruption of his nature, he will prefer his own private good, if he is not purified and strengthened by the grace of God” (Ia IIae, Q.109, a.3, c)

[40]Encyclical Letter, Quadregesimo Anno.

[41]Quoted in The X-Rays in Freemasonry, by A. Cowan.

Chapter X

Links Between Organized

Anti-Supernatural Forces

the headship of satan

according to st. thomas

The special hallmark of Satan is opposition to God’s rights and to ordered return to God. Our Lord came “to gather together in one the children of God, that were dispersed” ( Jn.  11:52). Satan’s action always tends to separate from God and to divide. There are not two worlds: there is only one. From the moment that a man rejects the divine order of the world and remains in or enters a society that proclaims that it can perfect human nature regardless of the supernatural life, of which Our Lord Jesus Christ alone is the source, then, consciously or unconsciously, he takes his place under the banner of Satan, whose whole being is, by his own deliberate act turned against the supernatural.[1] Man’s rejection of God’s order leads to worship of himself—pantheism and humanitarianism. But man is weak and falls readily under the sway of the Prince of naturalists, the first who rejected God’s infinitely loving offer of a share in his own inner life. “The world.” writes Pope Leo XIII, “is always consistent in its way. Near the Sons of God are present the satellites of that great adversary of the human race who, a rebel from the beginning against the Most High, is named in the Gospel the prince of this world.…Full of the spirit of Satan who, according to the words of the Apostle, knows how to transform himself at need into an angel of light, it (Masonry) gives prominence to its humanitarian object, but it sacrifices everything to its sectarian purpose…. to make war against God and against his Church.”[2]

St. Thomas shows, in the second part of the Summa, that there cannot be two final ends for man.[3] In the third part of the Summa he contrasts the headship of the demon over sinful beings with that of Our Lord Jesus Christ over the members of his Mystical Body. “The head not only acts interiorly on the members of the body, but also guides them exteriorly, directing their acts to an end. Accordingly, a person can be said to be the head of a body of men, either in both of these ways, and thus Christ is head of the Church…or only from the point of view of exterior guidance, and in this manner, any prelate or prince is head of the group subject to him. It is in this latter fashion that the devil is head of all evil men.[4] Our Lord, then, is head by interior and exterior influence; the demon is head by external influence, directing the acts of sinners to his own end. The end chosen by the demon is the turning away from God (to self). This turning away from God is looked upon as an end, inasmuch as it is desired under the pretence of liberty (sub specie Libertatis). Inasmuch, therefore, as men are drawn to this end by sinning, they come under the government and direction of the evil one and he is accordingly styled their head.’’[5]

Satan desires the destruction of the order by which men return to God, and so he lures them on to imitate and follow himself in the autonomous use of intelligence and free-will. Owing to the objective anti-supernaturalism of Freemasonry, Freemasons are specially exposed to Satanic influence. And Satan profits by the opportunity offered him. We have a striking proof of it in the testimony of Brother Oswald Wirth, the well-known writer on Masonic questions. He says: “A force, superior to themselves, causes Masons to act together and co-ordinate their efforts with an intellectual vigor, which they certainly do not possess individually. Such is the fact which has been irrefutably established and which we have simply got to accept. It is for each one to interpret this fact in his own way.”[6]

We have another proof in a remarkable passage from a reply of the Supreme Congregation of the Holy Office to a number of U.S.A. bishops. This excellent statement of the final result of the formation given in secret societies runs as follows: “If one takes into consideration the immense development which these secret societies have attained: the length of time they are persevering in their vigor: their furious aggressiveness; the tenacity with which their members cling to the association and to the false principles it professes; the persevering mutual co-operation of so many different types of men in the promotion of evil; one can hardly deny that the Supreme Architect of these associations (seeing that the cause must he proportioned to the effect) can be none other than he who in the sacred writings is styled the Prince of the world; and that Satan himself, even by his physical co-operation, directs and inspires at least the leaders of these bodies, physically co-operating with them.”[7]

The Leo Taxil affair (1892–1897) has been used to throw discredit on every attempt to point out the reality of Satanic action on the world in and through Secret Societies.[8] Nevertheless, there is an abundance of evidence that will amply repay research and study, and the non-Catholic historian, Mrs. Webster, who has made such a profound study of these societies, does not hesitate to write as follows in her splendid work, The French Revolution (p. 23): “When we study the manner in which they (the subversive elements who engineered the Revolution or, at least, figured in the foreground) carried out their design, when we read of the frightful profanity that was inaugurated during the Terror, the desecration of churches, the blasphemies against Christ and the Holy Virgin, and the worship of Marat, it is almost impossible to disbelieve in demoniacal possession, to doubt that these men, inflamed with hatred against all spiritual influences working for good in the world, became indeed the vehicles for those other spirits, the powers of darkness, whose cause they had made their own. And in their hideous deaths… were they not, perhaps, like the Gadarene swine, victims of the demons that drove them to destruction?”

Satan parodies the action of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Mediator between God and fallen humanity, exercised itt the Church and through the sacraments, by urging the establishment of a counter-Church with symbolic rites, in the effort to secure what he sought in his third temptation of Our Lord: “Again the devil took him up into a very high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them. And he said to him: All these will I give thee, if falling down, thou wilt adore me” (Mt. 4:8–9). Monsieur Ch. Nicoullaud in L’Initiation Maçconnique returns again and again to the idea that Masonic “initiation” is the reception of the “sacraments” of Satan. His thesis is confirmed by the text of the document, Ecclesiam (1821) of Pope Pius VII: “They (the Freemasons) blasphemously profane and defile the Passion of Jesus Christ by their sacrilegious ceremonies. They dishonor the sacraments of the Church (for which they sacrilegiously substitute others invented by themselves) and even turn into ridicule the very mysteries of the Catholic religion.”[9]

the jewish nation and freemasonry

An excellent outline of the relations between the two visible organized anti-supernatural forces is to be found in the chapter of Léon de Poncins’ work, La Franc-Maçonnerie, Puissance Occulte, in which he treats of the Jewish influence in Freemasonry.[10] He sums up as follows: “Today Jews are numerous in Freemasonry and in many places their influence is held to be predominant, especially in Central Europe. We find, then, an alliance and close collaboration between the two forces, with the Jewish influence in the ascendant in places, but it would be an exaggeration to conclude that Masonry is a Jewish creation. As a matter of fact, we find few Jews at the beginnings of Freemasonry. Jewish influence at the origin was rather of an indirect character arising from the Jewish Cabala.[11]…If we desire to go to the root of the matter, we are forced to conclude that the supreme guiding force of Freemasonry is neither English nor German nor even Jewish. The guiding force is not corporeal but spiritual.” M. de Poncins then quotes the following passage from La Trahison Spirituelle de la F M, by J. Marqués-Riviere: “The utopia of man self-sufficient of himself is a form of egoism which is monstrous, super-human, in a word, diabolical. Such a suggestion, under the collective form in which we meet it at the present day can be explained, only by assigning to it a superhuman origin.…It is this spirit, offspring of the Renaissance, which presided over the constitutions of the Lodges drawn up by Anderson, spiritual descendant of the enemies of tradition, it reigned over the corrupt society of the 18th century and getting control of the masses provoked the hideous butchery known as the Revolution of 1789.…Since then it holds sovereign sway over western civilization.”[12] by this quotation from M. J. Marqués-Riviere, M. de Poncins emphasizes the co-ordinating influence of Satan upon the two visible sections of the naturalistic army. This is precisely what must he insisted upon, in view of the opposition to the Divine Plan for Order in the world, but it is well to add a few words about an important agreement come to between accredited representatives of the two visible sections themselves.

In Domenico Margiotta’s Life of Adriano Lemmi, entitled Adriano Lemmi, Chef Suprème des Franc-Maçons, there is an account of the pact signed between Albert Pike, sovereign Grand Commander of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite,[13] on the one hand, and Armand Levy, Life Member of the Sublime Federal Consistory of B’nai Brith of Germany, on the other, for the B’nai B’rith of America, Germany and England. The B’nai B’rith Lodges or Lodges of the Sons of the Covenant are Masonic Lodges exclusively Jewish. By this treaty, signed in 1874. “the Supreme Dogmatic Directory of Universal Freemasonry recognizes the Jewish Lodges, such as they already exist in the principal countries. The central headquarters of the B’nai B’rith will be at Hamburg and the sovereign body will take the title of Sovereign Patriarchal Council. The secret of the existence of the Confederation (of B’nai B’rith Lodges) will be kept rigorously by those members of High Grade Masonry to whom the Supreme Dogmatic Directory will judge it advisable to make it known.

“Neither the Sovereign Patriarchal Council of Hamburg, nor any lodges under its obedience, will figure on the annual reports of the Sovereign Administrative Directory: but the Sovereign Patriarchal Council will send direct to the Sovereign Dogmatic Directory a contribution representing 10% of the personal subscriptions of the members of the Jewish Lodges.

“No Brother Mason of the official rites, who is not a Jew can demand entrance into a Jewish Lodge no matter what may be his (Masonic) rank”[14]

The document goes on to say that no one but a Jew may enter the B’nai B’rith Lodges except visitors of the highest degrees—Chosen Magi of the Third Degree of the Supreme Rite and Inspectors-General of the Palladium. Initiation into the Jewish Lodges will not be by degrees and, needless to say, members of Jewish Lodges may be members of other Lodges. In this way, control is exercised and the impulses originating in the Secret Councils of the Jewish nation are communicated to Masonry. Thus we have one of the chief factors in the explanation of the sympathy and support of Masons all over the world for Jewish projects. An example of this Judaeo-Masonic solidarity was seen in the case of the Spanish ‘‘Red” government.

The first B’nai B’rith Lodge was founded in New York in 1843. The Lodges are now numerous in the world, and there is at least one such Lodge in Ireland. The secrecy of the B’nai B’rith is delicately hinted at in the book by Paul Goodman B’nai Brith, The First Lodge of England, 1910–1930, published by the Lodge, London, 1936. On page 12, Goodman writes: “‘Benevolence, Brotherly Love, and Harmony.’ the Motto of the Order in its internal affairs, was to be the rule of conduct of the brethren—as the members are called—and to foster these ideals between them in matters affecting the Lodge, at meetings and in personal conduct, it was considered a point of honor that every member shall regard all proceedings as confidential, and shall not communicate the same, directly or indirectly, to any person not a member of the order.” When one takes account of the Jewish skill in dissimulation, one will agree that B’nai B’rith secrets will be well guarded, even if we take at their face value these very reserved declarations.[15]

We have seen that, for the sake of safeguarding the ordered development of states, the members of the Jewish nation must be permitted to be citizens of only one state—their own. Citizenship of an earthly country, however, is only a means for the attainment of citizenship of our heavenly country, so we must pray for the conversion of the Jews to the supernatural Messias. We have the twofold duty of protecting our countries against their naturalistic strivings and of praying for their sincere repentance for the sufferings they have inflicted on Our Lord Jesus Christ. We have the same double duty with regard to members of the Masonic Society.

APPENDIX

The first of the prayers which follow is the one for the conversion of the Jews approved for general use: the second is that which is recited by the group of Jewish converts who form La Section Israel of the Archconfraternity of Prayer and Penance of the Basilica of Montmartre, Paris. The third prayer is the one approved for the conversion of Freemasons.

prayer for the conversion of the jews

God of goodness and Father of Mercies, we beseech Thee, by the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and by the intercession of the Patriarchs and Holy Apostles, to look with compassion upon the remnant of Israel, so that they may come to a knowledge of our only Savior Jesus Christ, and share in the precious graces of Redemption. Amen. (100 Days, once a day.)

(The Raccolta, 8th Edition, p. 396).

israel’s prayer of reparation

Glory, praise and love be to Thee, O Christ, Redeemer and King! “O Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews,” behold we turn to Thee Whom we have pierced, and weep.

Pardon my God, pardon us. Remember no longer, but, in the name of the Sacred Heart, receive back “Israel, Thy Child.”

We belong to Thee, O Lord. We wish to be Thine. We acknowledge Thee as Universal King and gladly we consecrate to Thee all that we are and all that we have. Do Thou exercise over us all Thy rights. We renew the promises of our Baptism; we renounce Satan, his spirit and his works. We pledge ourselves to work with all our power for the triumph of the rights of God and of Thy Church, and that We may repair by submissive zeal and fidelity to our Faith our past sins and those of our fathers, we entreat Thee for the grace of loving Thee with increasing firmness in the light of God the Holy Ghost.

Divine Heart of Jesus, we offer Thee our poor actions to obtain that all hearts and particularly those of the Children of Israel may recognize Thy Sacred Kingship and thus assist in establishing the reign of Thy peace throughout the entire world.

O Christ Jesus, look with mercy on the children of the race which Thou didst once prefer. May that Blood which formerly they called down upon their heads now descend upon them in baptism unto life and in redemption.

Jesus, Son of David, have pity upon them all!

Immaculate Heart of Mary, Virgin of Israel, pray for them!

prayer for the conversion of freemasons

O Lord Jesus Christ, Who showest forth Thy omnipotence most manifestly when Thou sparest and hast compassion, Thou Who didst say, “Pray for those who persecute and calumniate you,” we implore the clemency of Thy Sacred Heart on behalf of souls, made in the image of God, but most miserably deceived by the treacherous snares of Freemasons, and going more and more astray in the way of perdition. Let not the Church, Thy Spouse, any longer be oppressed by them; but, appeased by the intercession of the Blessed Virgin, Thy Mother, and the prayers of the just, be mindful of Thy infinite mercy; and disregarding their perversity, cause these very men to return to Thee, that they may bring consolation to the Church by a most abundant penance, make reparation for their misdeeds, and secure for themselves a glorious eternity; who livest and reignest world without end. Amen. (100 Days, once a day).

(The Raccolta, 8th Edition, p. 410)[16]

[1]‘‘Those who art not in the state of grace are nothing (nihil)” (St. Thom., Comment, in II ad Corinth.).

[2]Apostolic letter of Pope Leo XIII, March 19th 1902.

[3]Ia IIae, Q.1 a.5.

[4]IlIa P., Q.S, a.7.

[5]In IIIa, P., Q. 114, a.3, ad 2, St. Thomas had already pointed out that if some sins are perpetrated without any temptation on the part of the devil, yet by sin men are made the sons of the devil, inasmuch as they imitate him who first sinned and follow his banner. Here in IlIa P., Q.8, a.7, ad 2, he repeats the same doctrine: “Accordingly the first sin of the devil, who was a sinner from the beginning, as we read in 1 St. John 3, has been proposed to all as an example to be followed. Some imitate this example, thanks to his promptings and suggestions; others do so of their own volition without any suggestion on his part. And thus, that is, inasmuch as they imitate him, the devil is the head of all evil men, as we read in the Book of Wisdom, 2:24: ‘But by the envy of the devil death came into the world, and they follow (imitate) him that are on his side,”

In article 8 of this same Question, St. Thomas teaches that Anti-Christ is said to be head of all men on account of his supreme wickedness. In him the influence of Satan reaches its culminating point.

[6]Quoted from Oswald Wirth, Le Symbolisme, by Mgr. Jouin, in Revue Inter. des Sociétès Secrètes, 19th April, 1925, p. 277.

[7]Acta Sancta Sedis, Vol. I, p. 293, July 13th, 1865. Cf. Freemasonry and the Anti-Christian Movement, by Rev. E. Cahill, S.J., p. 67.

[8]Cf. L’Episode Anti-Maçonnique, by Monsieur Ch. Nicoullaud p. 147, etc. For an excellent summary of the Leo Taxil affair, in English, cf. pp. 70–71 in Father Cahill’s work quoted in previous note.

[9]Letter, Ecclesiam.

“They (the Higher Degrees) are not Christian, but horrible travesties and blasphemies. Take the degree said to be most Christian and the ‘highest.’ There are different versions of it. But we have in all, including the version known as ‘The Ancient and Accepted Rite,’ a blasphemous caricature of the Lord’s Supper, though in ‘The Ancient and Accepted Rite’ the blasphemous character is toned down… The evidence I quote in these papers is but the tiniest fraction of the whole (at my disposal). I have ransacked the order from top to bottom, and I claim now to know that there is no other interpretation. The first issue of this indictment has been for many months before those leaders of my own Church who hold high positions in the Craft: I have repeatedly challenged them, if I am mistaken, to give me the true explanation—and in vain” (The Menace of Freemasonry to the Christian Faith, by Rev. C. Penney Hunt, B.A.).

[10]The fine summary of the question in Freemasonry and the Anti-Christian Movement, by Rev. E. Cahill, S.J., has been already referred to. He, with other writers, mentions the little known fact that the Masonic coat-of-arms still used by the Grand Lodge of England is of Jewish design. From an article on “Anglo-Jewish Coats of Arms,” by Lucien Wolf (The Jewish Historical Society of England, 1893–1895), we learn that the designer was Jacob Jehuda Leon, surnamed Templo.

[11]According in Bernard Lazare, the Jewish writer of L’Anti-Semitisme, p. 339. ‘‘There were Cabalistic Jews around the cradle of Freemasonry, as certain rites still in existence prove conclusively.’’

“The Jew found in Freemasonry a suitable soil for the cultivation of his propaganda. As early as 1754 Martinez Paschales had gauged its value, and had. as far as possible, annexed it by creating new and superior degrees.…The Jews have swarmed into it from the earliest times, and controlled the higher grades and councils of the ancient and accepted Scottish Rite since the beginning of the nineteenth century (The X-Rays in Freemasonry, by A. Cowan, p. (31).

[12]In 1781, an international congress of Freemasons took place, known as the ‘Convent’ of Wilhemsbad. It was attended by several English brothers, by delegates of the French Illuminati, by Lessing with a company of Jews, by Mirabeau, by Dohm, and by Knigge representing Weishaupf.,…The ‘Convent’ paved the way for the French Revolution” (The X-Rays in Freemasonry by A. Cowan, pp. 67–68).

[13]The document is signed by Pike with his name as Initiated Member Limmud Ensoph. Levy signed with a similar esoteric signature.

[14]Op. cit. pp. 224–5.

[15]Cf. The X Rays in Freemasonry, by A. Cowan, pp. 121, 122.

[16] LP Editors Note: Father Fahey here quotes three officially indulgenced prayers, at least two of which were very much in the spirit of St. Maximilian Kolbe who is famous for opposing the schemes of the Jews and Freemasons and who was contemporary with Fr. Fahey. It states in the text above that these prayers appear in the 8th edition of the Raccolta of the Catholic Church but does not state the year of its publication. This book was published in 1945. In 1950, one year after the famous ‘Boston Heresy case’ an “edited” edition of the Raccolta was published by Benziger Brothers in English and authorized by Cardinal Spellman of New York. That edition is currently available as a reprint from Loreto. The interesting point to be made here is that all three Raccolta prayers listed above by Fr. Fahey have disappeared from the 1950 American “edited” edition. Apparently, Catholic Americans were no longer being asked to pray for the conversion of Jews or Freemasons.

Part III

Ockhamism or Nominalism

and

Political and Economic Decay

Chapter XI

Thomism and Ockhamism or Nominalism

We must now examine briefly the kernel of the Ockhamist system of philosophy, the diffusion of which has been one of the main factors in mankind’s failure to retain its hold upon the real order of the world and one of the most potent causes, in the intellectual sphere, of the political and economic decay of Europe.

To reveal to us the doctrine of the Mystical Body in which all the members of Christ are destined to share in the same life, the life of sanctifying grace, God was obliged to make use of our human ideas or concepts of “body,” “member,” and “life.” It is clear, then, that the philosophical explanation of these ideas will have important repercussions on our grasp of this great truth. The systematic explanation of them proposed by William of Ockham differs enormously from that of St. Thomas and by its diffusion contributed largely to the downward movement of Europe. We must begin by outlining St. Thomas’s theory of the nature of the concept and then compare Ockham’s system with it, illustrating the comparison by the idea of “member of the Mystical Body.”

thomism

St. Thomas teaches that there is close collaboration between sense and intelligence in the acquisition of intellectual knowledge. On the presentation of sense data, the intellect, by the process of abstraction or dematerialization, apprehends the nature or form or universal unity thanks to which it knows the individuals perceived by the senses. The nature is apprehended in the individual and, being dematerialized, it is universal. Thus the nature directly grasped by the human intelligence is universal, not singular or individual. Accordingly, when we say that Peter is a member of the Mystical Body and that Paul is likewise a member of the same Body, we express the fact that Peter and Paul possess really and distributively all that is expressed (analogously) by the concepts “member” and “body,” exclusive of the universality which is directly incompatible with their individual unity.[1]

The content of the universal concept (id quod concipitur, in scholastic terminology) is attributed to Peter and Paul but not the mode of universality (modus mentis). Are these judgments true? Yes, if Peter and Paul really possess, though in an individual fashion, the membership which we attribute to them. This supposes, on the one hand, a constitution of objects and, on the other hand, a constitution of the intelligence, such that the content of the universal concepts, isolated in the mind from their universal mode of conception, is identical with what things are, considered apart from their concrete individual mode of realization. Thus we have the twofold condition of the moderate realism of St. Thomas:—

a)  A psychological condition, namely, that the mind, by the fact that it grasps a sense-perceptible object immaterially, strips this object, precisely of what constitutes its individuality;

b)  An ontological condition of objects. They must be such that their only difference, apart from purely accidental variations, in relation to a given specific concept, is their individual difference. In their inner physical constitution, they must conform to the same objective law—they must be specifically alike.

These two conditions can be realised simultaneously only if the individuality of a sense-perceptible object is linked up with its materiality in such wise that the dematerialization of the object involves its dis-individualization. Now to dematerialize an object is the same thing as to strip it of its quantified mode of being. Therefore, quantified matter is the necessary principle of the individuation of sense-perceptible objects. There is thus solidarity between the Thomistic thesis of matter (materia signala quantitate) as the principle of individuation and the universal nature as the direct object of cognition.

Accordingly, when we say in faith that Peter is a member of the Mystical Body and that Paul is likewise a member of the Mystical Body, we are attributing to Peter and Paul an absolutely identical group of intelligible notes expressive of an objective nature or form. This nature or form is apprehended by a process of abstraction carried out immediately by the immaterial faculty called the intellectus agens on data attained by the senses. The nature found in them really exists, that is, it is an objective reality demanding to be respected in the organization of the world, though it has no existence outside the mind except in the individual man (and others) and as identical with them.[2]

ockhamism or nominalism

In man Ockham distinguishes three kinds of knowledge: intuitive sense-knowledge, intuitive intellectual knowledge and abstract intellectual knowledge. Ockham’s account of sense-knowledge is much the same as that of his scholastic predecessors, an immediate, quantitative and therefore relative assimilation of material forms by our organic sense-faculties. Intuitive intellectual knowledge is proper knowledge of the singular. Its object is not metaphysical individuality but internal or external individual facts, in a word, concrete experience. No matter what may be said to the contrary, it is merely a transposition of sense-experience to the intellect. Our first, immediate, and direct intellectual knowledge is, therefore, of the concrete and individual. Abstract intellectual knowledge presupposes this intuitive intellectual knowledge of the individual, and it results from an elaboration of individual perceptions, grouped according to their resemblances under some common point of view, which serves to designate all and each of them. Thus general concepts, whether formed from intuitions of individual objects or from concepts already universal, are nothing else than an immense natural system of signification of individual objects grouping them together in different ways and distributing them in classes duly labelled. Hence any universal term, instead of designating a certain species or nature common to many individuals, will have at most the value of a collective label summing up individual experiences in a handy way, according to a hierarchy of resemblances. The judgments embodying such concepts are simply abridged and co-ordinated expressions of a number of individual experiences.

Accordingly, the formation of a universal concept in Ockham’s system is not a natural and primitive process of abstraction carried out immediately on sense data. It is primarily and exclusively a process of reflex abstraction carried out on singular concepts. Ockham, with less reserve than Scotus, makes our intellectual knowledge begin by the direct apprehension of material singulars. He then reasons as follows: If the individual essences are first known, the constitution of the universal ideas in our minds is only a secondary, reflex operation, carried out upon our primitive representations of individuals. It will be a sort of classification or arrangement, nothing more. Even though guided by the resemblance of the sense-perceptible appearances, it will never give us de jure anything else than subjective points of view, general symbols, grouping together in a uniform series the individuals with which we have been in contact. There is nothing to guarantee us that these symbols, constructed and carved out by us in this way, express so many essential natures of and in the objects. It is clear that the procedure we have described, and about which a lot more could be written, leads straight to a theory of knowledge which does not admit that the universal nature is in any way in things and which limits the scope of objectively valid knowledge to individuals. The nature which the intellect grasps becomes merely a collection of individuals.

consequences of ockhamism or nominalism with regard to faith in

the mystical body of christ

We can now indicate briefly some of the consequences of Ockham’s theory of knowledge. Ockham’s teaching introduces into the philosophical explanation of the teachings of faith, ideas which combat the holding of the faith in its fulness and purity. As a Catholic, Ockham must have accepted in some way our membership of Christ’s Mystical Body, thus admitting that we form with Our Lord, true God and true Man, a vast organism.[3] As an organic whole this body has a definite constitution or nature which must be respected in the organization of society; and since it is charged with the interests of our highest life, it is above all states and nations. Ockham’s philosophy, however, tended to produce a mentality opposed to this doctrine. For him, we cannot have objective knowledge of a nature shared in by all men, as the Thomists understand it. Truly objective knowledge is limited to individuals. No wonder the idea of the Mystical Body of Christ lost consistency for minds grown accustomed to Ockham’s teaching. The concept of divine grace, the life-blood flowing from the head to the members of the body, inevitably grew vague also.

It is not, then, a matter for astonishment that, since there are no natures and, consequently, no natural relations of things, Ockham should profess the most absolute voluntarism. There is no such thing as good or evil in the nature of things. Even hatred of good is not evil in itself. If God commanded it, it would not be evil any longer.

As social order for Ockham’s mind tended to become rather a question of personalities, his doctrinal difficulties with the Pope and the party struggles in the bosom of his religious society inclined him to modify his ideas of social order to suit circumstances. Thus he was led on to favor the “democracy” of Marsilius of Padua, with its emphasis on the will of the majority delegating power to the Emperor or ruler.[4] The writer of the article in the Dictionnaire de Theologie adds that the adversaries of the Pope and of the divine Constitution of the Church have always been able to find abundant arguments in Ockham’s Dialogue.[5]

nominalism and separatism

Another consequence of Ockham’s teaching is deserving of very special mention. It is through our intellectual grasp of the nature of an object that we are able to see that our views of it are complementary aspects of one whole. Sense-knowledge tends to section and separate: one individual is distinct from another. Ockham’s theory of an intellectual intuition of the singular or individual object really degrades the intellect to the level of sense.

Nominalism tends to transform our different mental representations into isolated entities without a substantial nature. With the passing of time this will give rise to the liberalism, separatism, and individualism of Locke, whose political and economic theories have weighed so heavily on the modern world. Locke’s philosophy is a prolongation of Ockhamism in the direction of Empiricism.[6] The Empirical form of Nominalism winds up in pantheism as does the Idealist form. The Nominalist universe is a discontinuous universe of juxtaposed objects, of which the groupings or assemblages revealed by experience remain a mystery for human thought. There are no natures of things. There is no vinculum substantiale, to use Leibnitz’s expression, no metaphysical bond of unity. The beings that are in the world have nothing to link them together or explain them. Inevitably, then, “Nominalism, which lives again in Positivism or Sensism, comes to doubt of the real and essential distinction of God and the world, because this distinction is not capable of being verified by experience. From that it is an easy transition to the thought that there is perhaps only one substance. Consequently, the real distinction of human individuals, which appears so clear at the outset from the fact that the individuals are separated in space, becomes doubtful. It follows as a consequence that the distinguishing characteristics of each of these human individuals are perhaps only phenomena, perhaps mere subjective representations. Thus the external world becomes purely and simply ‘a phenomenal possibility of sensations,’ to use the expression of that modern philosopher, John Stuart Mill, whose Logic is a Summa of Nominalism. Nominalism in the long run does away with all real distinctions, even those that it allowed at the beginning as being empirically evident, even the real distinction between two human beings existing at different points of space. The ultimate conclusion is a form of pantheism in which God is, after a certain fashion, absorbed in the world. God is not, as Renan used to say, he is evolving in the world, in the ascending march of evolution. All real distinctions disappear in the universal flux of Heraclitus.”[7] According to the Report of the General Chapter of the Dominican Order held in 1346, Pope Clement VI ordered the Friars Preachers to adhere strictly to the doctrine of St. Thomas. The same Pontiff wrote also that same year to the University of Paris the Letter, Singularis dilectionis, in which he drew a series of lessons from the condemnation of Nicholas of Autrecourt, a master of the university.

The Pope was himself a past student of the university and he expressed deep regret that “several masters and students of the Faculty of Arts despised Aristotle and the other ancient teachers whom they should follow, and were turning to various other sophistical and foreign doctrines, said to be taught in other universities, opinions which cannot produce good fruit.” By foreign doctrines taught elsewhere, the Pope meant doctrines taught at Oxford. “The Pope was not listened to,” comments J. Maritain, and “from the second half of the 14th century onwards, Ockhamism, in a more or less mitigated form, reigned supreme in the University of Paris and in most of the Schools.”[8]

God had made to the world the gift of St. Thomas and the ungrateful and wrangling world had not welcomed him. Luther’s revolt brought home to many how far they had gone astray. Luther, who knew scholasticism chiefly through Gabriel Biel, the last great representative of Ockhamism, placed Ockham far above St. Thomas Aquinas whom he despised.[9] As Father Denifle, O.P., expresses it: “Luther always remained an Ockhamist,”[10] so his mind was prepared for the rending of the Mystical Body of Christ and for the separation he inaugurated between the Christian and the citizen, between faith and works, and between grace and nature, the latter being, according to him, essentially corrupt.[11]

[1]Of course, the words “member of the Mystical Body” manifest to us the divine intelligible reality they signify, only by analogy, through the gift of faith and by a process of negation, elimination, comparison and proportionality, but they do give us real knowledge of our ineffable relation to Christ, our head. The gift of faith strengthens the intelligence to grasp the supernatural order. We suppose all this, as its development is not necessary for the point at issue.

[2]For a full treatment of Thomism and Ockhamism, in regard to the value of universal ideas, cf. the remarkable work of Père Maréchal, S.J., Le Point de Depart de la Métaphysique, Cahier I.

[3]The first chapter of the Dogmatic Constitution of the Church drawn up for discussion at the Vatican Council is entitled “The Church is the Mystical Body of Christ.”

“The agnosticism of Ockham, an eccentric religious but a sincere believer, did not make him sceptical about transcendent realities. He found the lacunae of rational knowledge guaranteed to him in advance by revealed faith, to which he freely adhered” (Père Marechal, S.J., on p. 194 of Le Point de Depart de la Metaphysique, Cahier I).

After having given an account of the 51 articles taken from Ockham’s works, and about which a condemnatory report was drawn up in 1326 at Avignon, whither Ockham had been summoned by the Pope in 1324, the writer of the article on Ockham in the Dictionnaire de Théologie says that there was no Papal condemnation of these articles or of the whole body of Ockhamism. He adds that we would nowadays expect a condemnation of these doctrines as a matter of course. The formula of retractation imposed by Clement VI on Ockham in 1349 alludes only to his politico-eccelcsiaslical doctrines. It is doubtful whether Ockham was ever reconciled to the Church and relieved of the excommunication pronounced against him in 1328. He may have been carried off by the black death before the formula of retractation reached him.

[4]“Marsilius of Padua appears as the first of those noisy liberators who invoke the rights of the people only with a view to establish more firmly the unrestricted absolutism of rulers” (Recherches sur L’Esprit Politique de la Réformé, by G. de Lagarde, p. 56). The author is alluding to the doctrine of the Defensor minor of Marsilius. On the same page, he attributes the movement in the 14th and 15th centuries, away from the objective order grasped by St. Thomas, to the cumulative influence of Roman Law and Nominalism. The influence of the “Royal Law” alluded to by Godefroid Kurth is evident.

The Defensor Pacis of Marsilius of Padua was condemned by Pope John XXII in 1327. In the Index librorum prohibitorum published in 1564 by Pope Paul IV, the Defensor Pacis is classed as heretical and as belonging to the first category of condemned works. Two of Ockham’s works, the Opus nonaginta dierum and Dialogi et scripta omnia contra Joannem XXII, are included in the second category.

[5]G. de Lagarde has promised a book on Guillaume d’Occam et la Démocratic Religieuse.

[6]Cf. Le point de Depart de la Metaphysique, Cabiers I and II by Pére Maréchal, S.J. Cf. also Precis d’Histoire de la Philosophic Moderne, by the same author.

[7]Revue Thomiste, 1938, article by Père Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., on Pantheism and the Real Distinction.

[8]Antimoderne, p. 137.

[9]Cf. Luther, by H. Grisar, S.J., vol. I, p. 131. In 1520, Luther wrote against the theologians of Louvain and Cologne that “ Ockham was without any doubt the first and ablest of the Scholastic Doctors” (quoted by H, Denifle, O.P., Luther et le Luthéranisme, Vol. III, p. 202). If we are to believe Melancthon in his Preface to the second volume of Luther’s Works, Wittenberg, 1546, “Luther was able to quote from memory Biel and d’Ailly almost word for word. He was deeply versed in Ockham’s writings. The latter he considered superior to Thomas and Scotus” (quoted by Paul Vignaux in Luther, Commentateur des Sentences, p. 45).

[10]Luther et le Luthéranisme, vol. III, p. 196.

[11]We may add the testimony of Père Geny, S.J., in his, Brevis Conspectus Historiae Philosophiae p. 198, to the effect that “the modern writers, who look upon Ockham as a precursor of the religious revolution of the 16th century, as well as of the philosophical revolution of the 17th, are right in their judgment.”

Chapter XII

Nominalism and the Advent of

Social Materialism

the two currents issuing

from ockhamism

We have seen that St. Thomas teaches that there is close collaboration between sense and intelligence in the acquisition of our intellectual knowledge. On the presentation of sense data, the intellect apprehends the nature of sense perceptible objects and, through the analogy of being, by reasoning, it can ascend to God, who completely transcends the world. This harmonious functioning of the two sets of faculties of the one being, man, gave place in the Ockhamist system to a simple extrinsic co-ordination of sense and intellect. Ockham juxtaposes in us two faculties, which, according to him, seem to have the same formal object, the individual. Of course, he affirms that the sense faculties are material and that the intellect is immaterial, but since they both have the same object, one of the two becomes superfluous. In the course of time, modern philosophy, which is entirely Nominalist in its attitude to the objective value of the universal natures grasped by our intelligence in the data of sense, and to the reasoning based thereon, proceeds to sacrifice one of the two facultics. According to the faculty sacrificed we have the two currents of Nominalism into which Modern philosophy is divided.[1]

the first current—

the nominalism of descartes

We have, then, on the one hand, the Nominalism of Descartes, Malebranche, Leibnitz and Spinoza, combined with an Ontologism inspired by Platonism. On account of this Ontologism, Malebranche teaches that we have an intuitive knowledge of God and of the order of being: in the case of Descartes and Leibnitz our ideas of God, etc., are innate. This current issuing from Nominalism inevitably leads to the pantheism of Spinoza by which man is identified with God. So we see that, in the Cartesian school, it is the sense faculty that is sacrificed. The ‘‘sensation” or “sense-idea” differs from the other ideas by the fact that it is occasioned by the slate of the material sensorium, as well as by the “confusion” of its content, in contrast with “the clear and distinct ideas.” It does not differ by its intrinsic nature: it has become a special kind of “confused” intelligence. Since the origin of the content of our ideas cannot be explained by the material passivity of our senses, and since the harmonious functioning of the two sets of faculties of the one nature has thus given place to a corporeal automaton with merely local motion on the one hand and a soul on the other, the innate ideas of Descartes and Leibnitz or the Ontologism of Malebranche become indispensable.[2]

the second current—

the nominalism of locke

The second current issuing from Nominalism is the one with which we are more particularly concerned in the account of the uprise of social materialism. This does not mean that Cartesianism has not contributed to the advent of this materialism, for it has exercised a considerable influence on the movement of ideas, but that the preponderating role has been taken by the Nominalism of Locke, Hume and Comte. This current gradually got rid of the intelligence, finally reducing it to the rank and function of an internal sense. Owing to the fact that, since the Fall, sense life tends to dominate in man, it was the sensist current which prevailed, in great part owing to the influence of Locke on English and French thought after his day. Of course Locke is a hesitant semi-empiricist or semi-sensist. He retains in his idea of substance, for example, a vague something of the Thomistic intellectual apprehension of the nature of being. Therefore, he is not a radical phenomenalist or sensist like Hume, but nevertheless the separatism and individualism of liberalism are in great part due to his writings.[3]

“No thinker,’’ writes M. Vialatoux, “has given a more seductive and a more readily acceptable turn to his ideas than Locke.…The Reformation and the Renaissance, the empiricism of Bacon, the rationalism of Descartes and Hobbes, the scientific positivism of physicists and doctors such as Boyle and Sydenham, the mercantile and liberal spirit of the capitalist ‘bourgeoisie,’ the unvarying politeness, the practical common-sense, the well balanced moderation of his class and his country… all these various gifts and influences fitted him for the task of giving his contemporaries in a simple and easy form the ideas and theories which their minds were prepared to assimilate. And he has certainly wielded enormous influence. I am not alluding merely to that which he exercised on his fellow-countrymen, from Hume and Adam Smith to Bentham, Stuart Mill, and Spencer, though it was enormous and it would be false to say that it does not interest us. But we must remember that of all the English writers admired and followed with such extraordinary enthusiasm by the French philosophers of the 18th century, he was the most popular and the most influential. He it was who won over the ungrateful posterity of Descartes. He was the teacher, in logic, politics and psychology, as well as in social, religious, economic and pedagogic philosophy, of Condillac, Montesquieu, Voltaire, d’Alembert, Diderot, Helvetius, d’Holbach, in a word, of all the writers of the Encyclopedia. Even Rousseau came under his sway. He was the professor of the sect of the economists. Turgot was his pupil, and it has not been sufficiently remarked that Quesnay was also. When we point out the influence which Locke had upon our 18th century, are we not, at the same time, affirming that that influence is exercised indirectly upon our epoch and upon ourselves? When we study Locke, we find clearly formulated the postulates which constitute the foundation of modern social life and are the hidden, though mostly unsuspected, animating principles oi our institutions and of our modes of thought and action.”[4]

Locke’s “ideas” do not give him a grasp of the nature, which is the principle of unity of a number of individuals of a species. They cannot do so, for, firstly, in his definition of “idea,” he confounds sense-representation and intellectual concept,[5] and secondly, he is a Nominalist in regard to the idea of “species.”[6] It is true that he stops half way in his empiricism, for he wishes to safeguard a small number of traditional intellectual theses, but in his system there is continual sectioning and separation. For example, the moral truths that follow from the nature and destiny of man are separated from the world of experience which is governed by its own “laws of nature,” and society has no duty to God and religion.

A theory of knowledge, which breaks the harmonious union of intellect and sense in grasping the objective reality of the nature of man and the order of the world, and which gives the primacy to sense over reason, inevitably sections life into non-communicating departments and posits individualism as the foundation of all its social teaching. It inevitably leads to the denial of a universally valid order in the world and to the limitation of objective knowledge to that of individuals.

The function of political society thus ceases to be deduced from the social nature of fallen man redeemed through membership of Christ. As a created entity, the state or political organization is meant, as we have seen, to aid man in acknowledging and accepting the order laid down by God for return to himself, by fulfilling its duty to God. For Locke, on the contrary, the state, instead of being the well ordered organization of a natural society, is merely an artificial creation of autonomous persons. It is a free and artificial association of persons into which they enter from a previous non-social natural state, in view of safeguarding their civil interests, especially their property and their ownership of money and lands.
The state, for Locke, is in fact only a society of mutual assurance set up by a group of free proprietors to safeguard themselves against loss.[7] It has no duty to God. Let us now illustrate these points by some quotations from Locke’s works.

In Letters Concerning Toleration, we read: “I esteem it above all things necessary to distinguish exactly the business of the civil government from that of religion, and to settle the just bounds that lie between the one and the other.…The commonwealth seems to me to be a society of men constituted only for procuring, preserving and advancing their own civil interests. Civil interests I call life, liberty, health and indolence of body, and the possession of outward things such as money, lands, houses, furniture, and the like. It is the duty of the civil magistrate, by the impartial execution of equal laws, to secure unto all the people in general, and to every one of his subjects in particular, the just possession of these things belonging to this life.…Therefore is the magistrate armed with the force and strength of all his subjects, in order to punish those that violate any other man’s rights. Now that the whole jurisdiction of the magistrate reaches only to the civil concernments and that all civil power, right and dominion is bounded and confined to the only care of promoting these things: and that it neither can nor ought in any manner to be extended to the salvation of souls, these following considerations seem to me abundantly to demonstrate.…

“Let us consider what a church is. A church then I take to be a voluntary society of men, joining themselves together of their own accord, in order to the public worshipping of God, in such a manner as they judge acceptable to him, and effectual to the salvation of their souls.… It is not my business to enquire here into the origin of the power and dignity of the clergy. This only do I say, that whencesoever their authority be sprung, since it is ecclesiastical, it ought to be confined within the bounds of the church, nor can it in any manner he extended to civil affairs; because the church itself is a thing absolutely separate and distinct from the commonwealth. The boundaries on both sides are fixed and immovable, He jumbles heaven and earth together, the things most remote and opposite, who mixes these societies which are in their origin and business, and in everything, perfectly distinct and infinitely different from each other.…

“For the political society is instituted for no other end, but only to secure every man’s possession of the things of this life. The care of each man’s soul, and of the things of heaven, which neither does belong to the commonwealth, nor can be subjected to it, is left entirely to every man’s self. Thus the safeguard of man’s life and of the things that belong unto this life, is the business of the commonwealth; and the preserving of these things unto their own is the duty of the magistrate.”[8]

Thus we see sectioning and individualism in the relations of religious bodies and the state. The state, though a created entity, has no duty to God and religion, in fact, there seems to be no Divine Plan for Order. Instead of being born into a world with an established order, supernatural and natural, which they are bound to respect, individual human persons come into existence in a pre-social condition, out of which they emerge by freely contracting to set up the order that suits them. Locke borrows his method and his principles from Hobbes. Like Hobbes, he derives the origin of society from a state of nature, in which man was not in society. For him as for Hobbes, society arises from a reciprocal agreement of free individual wills previously isolated and separated, in a word, from a “social contract.” So from a state of dispersion and anarchy, these human atoms pass into a combination, but the law of the social organization which results from this contract remains individualist and separatist. Men simply seek in society a means of pursuing in security and peace their particular ends and of better defending their separate destinies against the danger of mutual encroachments on their respective properties.[9]

Hobbes, stressing exclusively man’s individuality, held that when abandoning the condition of war which coincides with the free state of nature, the individuals contracting hand over all their rights, including their right of property, to the state, which has absolute power and is not responsible to anyone. Locke, on the contrary, stressing exclusively the independence of man’s personality, holds that the autonomous persons, when making the social contract, keep their liberty, and above all, the unrestricted right of property. Before men freely agreed that all the wealth of the world would have its representation and its pledge in coined metal or money, the interest of each one was to limit his property to what he could make use of. With the advent of money, it became the interest of each to produce beyond his needs, because he could exchange the excess for money and utilize the money to purchase the labor of others, either to avoid working himself or to increase his wealth without limitation.[10] The advent of money thus led inevitably to a great inequality in possessions.

locke on money

Locke has treated the question of money in his essays on the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest and Raising the Value of Money and Further Considerations Concerning Raising the Value of Money. These were published in London from 1692 to 1695 and were destined to enlighten the English government, the former concerning the advisability of reducing interest to 4% the latter concerning the remedy to be applied to the depreciation of the English silver currency at the time. In regard to the second question, according to A. E. Feavearyear[11] Locke’s Essay, Further Considerations, etc., was published in reply to a report by William Lowndes, Secretary of the Treasury, entitled An Essay for the Amendment of Silver Coins (1695). Lowndes wanted the reform to consist in the stabilization of the currency at the existing value, Locke wanted a return to the old standard. Locke’s views were accepted and his Further Considerations have become “almost a gospel for ‘sound money’ men,” to use Feavearyear’s expression. Sir Robert Peel, both in 1819 and in the Bank Act of 1844, “stood’ firmly by the doctrine, which he obtained from Locke, that the unit was a definite quantity of bullion which must not be altered. All the best-known writers of the nineteenth century praised the settlement of 1819, by which, after the currency inflation of the Napoleonic period, the old standard was restored. Largely as a result of Locke’s influence, £3 17s. 10 1/2d an ounce came to be regarded as a magic price for gold from which we ought never to stray and to which, if we do, we must always return.”[12]

Now, in both the above-mentioned measures, Locke saw a violation of the natural laws which preside over the development of public wealth. The value or purchasing power of money is due to the quantity or weight of the metal composing it. This qualitative or commodity-money, which is only a somewhat less complicated form of barter, is the only form which Locke in these essays seems to consider possible. On that point we shall have more to say later, but let us first examine the effect of his theories on human society. Owing to the separatism and individualism consequent upon his Nominalism, Locke seems to think that once a man has given his consent to the institution of money and has fixed upon these metals, silver and gold, he has only to accept the results passively. These are, for example, what Locke terms the natural use or interest on money and the prices determined by the relation between the quantity of these commodities in the market and other commodities.

“Economic phenomena,” writes Monsieur Vialatoux, “are no longer human phenomena: they take place in a world apart and live their own life, so to say, without having to take account of moral ends or without being subject to efficacious voluntary action on the part of man or human society. They are sectioned off and are quite independent of our intervention, or rather, the only link which unites them to us is that by which they control our lives and by which we are chained to them. It is this theory of price, of which the essential postulate is the separation of economics from morality, which for Locke gives the key to the solution of the problem of interest, as later on it will give the key to the solution of the problem of wages.…It is always the quantity of money, symbol and pledge of wealth, which sets up the economic law. In its relation of exchange with the object it buys and with trade in this kind of article, it determines the price; in its relation with the trade of the country as a whole or the sale of goods in general it fixes the rate of interest. These things, then, are outside the scope and the competence of the laws drawn up by men: they belong to another order and to another world. They are, I repeat, sectioned off from us; they are independent of us. No human will, no human action, whether of individuals or groups, is in any way responsible for the effects of these anonymous causes. If sad results for the human race follow from them, it is only because of our ignorance and our blindness that we accuse one another of being responsible for them. As a matter of fact, they are phenomena of the same kind as all the other natural phenomena.…

“If our humanity is passive in the presence of economic phenomena, it is because money is the only active force in that sphere, the one and only motor of the whole mechanism. Money, however, has been instituted by man and if it rules us after the fashion of an unyielding despot, if we are, so to say, its play things and its puppets, it is because it has the right to do so, for we have consented to and set up its rule. It we are obliged to bow to its behests, it is because its domination has been set up at the beginning by the free decision of our individual sovereign wills.[13] We are thus back at Locke’s individualist and separatist theory of society.

We shall have more to say about Locke’s commodity theory of money later, in connection with the gold standard and economic decay in general. Here it is sufficient to remark with Feavearyear that neither Lowndes nor Locke understood the real cause of the depreciation of English money at the time they were writing. Feavearyear writes: “Nobody understood why the value of money had fallen. Lowndes thought that, because the war had necessitated so many payments abroad, silver bullion had been exported in large quantities to meet the adverse balance, and had become scarce in England, with the result that the price had risen. Locke thought the depreciation of money was entirely due to clipping. He did not attempt to explain why it had occurred suddenly, while clipping had been going on for half a century.…The inflation of credit was the immediate cause of the depreciation.[14]

In this connection Arthur Kitson pertinently remarks: “It should he remembered that credit and paper currency affect prices and therefore the purchasing power of gold (and, of course, silver) coins the same as the addition of a similar volume of gold (or silver) currency, which is a further demonstration of the truth of the Quantity Theory,” as opposed to the barter or commodity-money theory.[15]

economic laws become

exclusively physical laws

Locke’s attitude towards money, with its separation or sectioning, is only one instance—out of many—of the influence of mathematical physics on the thought and practice of the 18th and succeeding centuries. In other words, Locke’s theory of money is only one instance of the growth of that social materialism, which is better known by the less objectionable name of liberalism or naturalism. The essential principle of liberalism or naturalism, the principle which runs through orthodox English and French political economy, represented by Adam Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, Stuart Mill, Bastiat, J. B. Say and the Physiocrats, is that economic affairs are governed by physical laws of nature, to which no political law should attempt to do violence.[16] Men must allow themselves to be governed by nature and not attempt to violate her laws. It was in the name of this principle, held to be approved by science (with capital), that organized naturalism, at the French Revolution, worked for the destruction of the guilds of the Middle Ages, and that naturalistic liberalism resisted the trade-union and reform movements.[17] The laws voted in the first half of the 19th century for the protection of women and children were accepted by the dominant liberalistic school of thought both in England and France, only unwillingly and as exceptional measures. The need for protective measures for married women and children was justified by the argument that they were minors under tutelage and so incapable of contracting freely. It was only by a deviation from orthodox liberalistic principles, remarks M. Vialatoux, that unmarried women of legal age were given the advantage of the same protection. When the right of association was legally recognised for workingmen, it was regarded in France as the recognition of an area of individual liberty, which had so far been unacknowledged. Every movement of resistance to social amelioration and professional organization was made in the name of “Science.”

“Sometimes the rigid determinism of economic laws was directly appealed to; more frequently, the appeal was indirect. The ‘rights of liberty’ and the principles of 1789 were invoked, these clearly involving an optimistic belief in the natural order, of the world and in the spontaneous harmony resulting from the free play of economic forces.”[18] Even the “pessimists” of the Liberalistic School, Malthus and Ricardo, who were aware that the spontaneous order of nature did not give rise exclusively to harmony and justice, nevertheless considered the free play of individual liberty the lesser evil.

Liberalism or naturalism, therefore, claimed to be based on the modern science of physics. What is the precise nature of this science and how does it differ from the Physics of Aristotle and the scholastics? In the modern sense of the word, physics is a comparatively recent science. In point of fact it has nothing in common with the old-time physics except the name. This new type of physical science, while continuing to treat of bodies as such and of the order of the sense-perceptible world, thus keeping the same material object as the ancient physics, considers this object, no longer from the point of view of the intelligibility of being, but from the point of view of mathematical quantity. In the physical world, it does not seek to discover under phenomena the intelligible connections sought by the philosophy of the ancients, which explain phenomena only by transcending them. It is rather a science of the sense-perceptible world, which applies to the detail of phenomena as they are co-ordinated in space and time, the formal connections of mathematical relations. Thanks to the science of abstract quantity, it approaches that deductive character to which it aspires and without which it would not be a perfect science. Modern physics is a marvellous means for the investigation of the world of sense, not from the point of view of being, but from the point of view of quantity. It abandons the idea of looking directly for real causes in themselves and aims above all at expressing in a coherent system of equations measures taken on things.[19] This new physics, instead of being the science of the nature or internal principle of the mutability and qualitative spontaneity of things is rather the mechanics of sense-experience, the science of the spatial and quantitative relations of phenomena. These mathematical functions, which inform us how one quanitity varies when another varies, are the only law with which modern physics is concerned.[20] On the other hand, Aristotelian and scholastic Second Philosophy, being concerned with the inner natures of things, tries to elucidate their laws. This it does by setting forth the lines of development of beings in accordance with what they are essentially.

The law or laws of man’s being in the Aristotelian sense are the line or lines of conduct demanded from his activity by his spiritual form. The laws of a human being are thus laws of a person subject to the conditions of space and time, in consequence of his being incarnate or individualized in matter. Moral science or Ethics, supposing the data of Psychology, treats of these laws. The laws elucidated by modern physics are simply formulae expressing the constant and general relations or connections in virtue of which one phenomenon (called in this case, cause) cannot appear, disappear or vary, without another phenomenon (called in this case, effect) appearing, disappearing or varying. These laws, astronomical, physico-chemical, law of gravitation, etc., indicate how things behave, abstracting from circumstances. They are concerned with facts, not with the natures of things indeed, nature for modern science simply designates the whole body of external phenomena as regulated by laws in the sense just defined. This physico-mathematical knowledge of nature disregards in the reality everything else except quantity and thus neglects what the intellect is primarily interested in, the knowledge of what is, precisely what Aristotelian philosophy seeks to discover.

The term law has three principal meanings. It is used, firstly, to signify the obligatory rules prescribed to the members of an organized society by the authority, which is charged with the common good of that society. The body of these laws is called ‘positive law.’ Secondly, law designates the line of development demanded by the nature of a being, the rule it must follow to reach its end, the perfection of its nature. In the case of man, it is the line of conduct demanded by his spiritual form from his activity, intellectual, moral and esthetic. The body of these non-written laws is called natural law. Thirdly, it is used to designate a formula expressing constant and general relations between observable phenomena. Hence we have political laws, moral laws, and physical laws, with one idea analogously common to the three acceptations, namely that of order. Aristotelian philosophy is concerned with law in the second meaning, while modern physics aims at the elaboration of laws according to the third meaning of the term.

The story of the progress of mathematical physics has largely become the account of the reduction of internal nature, that is, nature in the sense understood by Aristotle and the scholastic philosophers, the nature of man included, to external nature, that is, nature as understood in modern science, namely, the aggregate of the connections between spaced and timed phenomena. The inner dynamic principle, the norm of a being’s development, has been reduced to phenomenal existence. Finality has given way to mechanical movement. Accordingly, the first two meanings of the term law have been reduced to the third, and not only positive laws and institutions but the interior laws of man’s spiritual nature have come to be considered merely as phenomena regulated by determinism, spatial and temporal. This doctrine, according to which moral nature is reduced to physical nature and which holds that political and moral laws flaws in the first and second sense mentioned above) are merely laws of social physics (laws in the third sense) is termed mechanism or materialism. Politics in this system is merely the art of conforming the conduct of societies and the laws of states to the physical laws so discovered and formulated.[21] Human personality is thus disregarded. Political laws, according to Aristotelian and Thomistic philosophy, must be in harmony wilh the natural law of which they are either developments or applications to concrete circumstances.

Perhaps the most striking example of the influence of Nominalist philosophy, nurtured by mathematical physics, on life, is to be found in the separation of politics and economics from the moral order of the Divine Plan and, in particular, in the substitution of the “economic man” for the member of Christ.[22] Economic physics, like astronomy and other branches of physics, came to be treated as a section of mathematical physics. The “economic man” or homo œconomicus, was the social atom, everywhere identical with himself, always looking for the maximum of financial profit at the cost of the minimum of effort and therefore subject to exclusively physical laws. The difference between economic laws and the laws of gravitation or of the propagation of light was forgotten. In the case of the propagation of light, for example, we are dealing with physical events, in regard to which we try to discover the order of the world as it came from the hand of God, utilizing for the purpose all the methods of modern science, in the case of political and economic arrangements, we are dealing with the utilization by human beings of the knowledge thus acquired for their social structure. We must, therefore, be guided in everything by our knowledge otherwise obtained of the nature of man, fallen from his high supernatural estate and restored thereto by membership of Christ. To yield to the influence of Cartesian mechanics and Locke’s individualism and separatism, and treat the human elements of society as so many elements subject to fixed unvarying movements exclusive of true spiritual liberty, is precisely the temptation to which liberalism or naturalism yielded.

“The truth is that liberalism does not consist merely in withdrawing economics from subordination to politics, but in the further step of withdrawing politics (and economics) from subjection to the moral law. Perhaps we may describe it in more general terms by saying that it consists in transforming some particular section or aspect of human activity, economic or political, into a closed area, a separate domain, having its own autonomous end, completely independent of the final spiritual end of man.”[23] In such a system “the end of politics becomes the material prosperity, the power and success of the state, and everything that may procure such an end—even an act of treachery or an act of injustice—is politically good. The end of economics becomes the acquisition and limitless increase of riches, material riches as such, and everything that may procure such an end—even an act of injustice, even oppressive and inhuman conditions of life—is politically good.…If morality intervenes with its peculiar exigencies, it will be to engage in conflict with political and economical reality, with political and economic science.”[24]

The French Encyclopedia, which had such an enormous influence on the preparation of the French Revolution of 1789, had its origin in the union of the two currents issuing from Nominalism, the current of Cartesian rationalism and that of English empiricism. Both these currents were influenced by mathematical physics. As mathematical science leaves finality, goodness and the objective order of the world out of account, this influence worked inevitably in the direction of social materialism. The final result may be seen either in the liberalistic state of the last century, in which human beings were heartlessly treated as replaceable ciphers in the process of production for the sake of finance or else in the present Judaeo-Marxian state of Russia, of which the whole organization is based on the assumption that man is not a member of Christ Litt merely an “economic atom.” As social science was simply a branch of physics or mechanics, political laws in both these types of states were and are merely the applications of the determinism of social physics to human regimentation. In the name of progress, man was and is treated as a mere individual devoid of personality and freedom.

Perhaps the most perfect example of the treatment of human beings according to the formulae of mathematical physics is to be seen in Soviet Russia, where humanity is being subjected to a molding process in view of the evolution of the perfect “economic atom.” The Communist novelist, Panferov, in his novel, Brusski, has very well described the mental attitude of those who put collectivism into effect: “We must beat the idea of property out of man,” they said, “just as dust is beaten out of a mattress. Since the peasant is trying to bargain with us let us knock the wish out of his head.” The Communist hero of this novel has come to accept that the nature of man can be molded and reconditioned. “We are fertilizing the soil,” he says, “in order to breed a new nation…You just refuse to be a sacrifice, and we’ll twist you like a ram’s horn.”

We have travelled a certain distance since Sir William Petty (1623–1687), physician to the English army in Ireland and secretary to Henry Cromwell, in his Political Anatomy of Ireland and Political Arithmetic, proposed a method of calculating the exchange value of human beings in terms of money, and the economist Bastiat (1801–1850), in his Harmonies Économiques, compared “social mechanics to the mechanics of the heavenly bodies,” but we have simply drawn the conclusions of their social materialism. If politics and economics are separated from life in Christ and the manipulation of money withdrawn from subjection to the laws incumbent on members of Christ, then man will ultimately be held to exist merely to produce material wealth in the manner considered most favorable for the schemes of the financiers, and in the name of “progress” human personality will be trodden under foot.

One last remark must be made. It must not be forgotten that the economists of the French Encyclopedia had come under other influences. In secret societies they were filled with hatred of our Lord Jesus Christ and of the supernatural life. Following l’abbé Barruel, Robison, in Proofs of a Conspiracy Against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, says: “This gang of public corruptors held their meetings for many years in the Hotel d’ Holbach at Paris, and Voltaire was their honorary President. The most eminent members were d’Alembert, Diderot, Condorcet, La Harpe, Turgot, Lamoignon. They took the name of economists and affected to be continually occupied with plans for improving commerce, manufactures, agriculture, finance, etc.…But their darling project was to destroy Christianity and all religion and to bring about a total change of government.”[25]

[1]For the development of the ideas here briefly outlined, see Le Point de Depart de la Metaphysique, Cahiers I et II, by Père Marechal, S.J., as well as Precis d’ Histoire de la philosophie Moderne, by the same author. In the latter work, on page 75, to mention one point, we read: “The discredit into which the universals fell from the decline of the Middle Ages onwards is due especially to the fact that, in Nominalist fashion, they were held to he merely formal generalisations, not explanatory principles,” Père Maréchal refers in particular to Descartes (Principia I, Nos, 58, 59, VIII, p. 23).

[2]In preparation for what we have to say later about the Prussian reaction against the domination of Judaeo-Masonry, it is well to note here what J. Maritain points out in Reflections sur l’Intelligence (p. 30). Two currents of Idealism have, proceeded from the Cartesian explanation of knowledge. A positive current is to he seen in the dependence of our ideas, like the angelic ideas, on the first cause and creative truth, in the philosophies of Malebranche, Spinoza and Leibnitz. A negative current is to be found in the Cartesian view that our ideas, like the angelic ideas, do not depend on things and are not measured by them. Kant comes along and ascribes to these ideas that do not depend on things the properties of God’s creative knowledge. The philosopher of Krinigsberg does not assert that our ideas depend immediately on God like the angelic ideas, but that they are, like the divine ideas, the measure of things. Thus they are self-regulating and the human mind enjoys perfect autonomy. Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel represent the progress of this current of thought, according to which, the autonomous human mind, having as its noblest manifestation the Prussian mind, is the source of the order of being.

[3]The influence of Ockham on Locke is treated at some length in the work of Krakowski, Les Sources Médievales de la Philosophie de Locke, especially pp. 115–139. Though Krakowski’s knowledge of Scholastic philosophy is imperfect, his historical information is useful.

Locke was horn in 1632 and died in 1704. It is interesting to note that, according to Krakowski (p. 41), quoting Retter’s Histoire de la philosophi chretienne, the Summa totius Logicae of William of Ockham was still in use as a manual at Oxford at the end of the 17th century. According to the same writer, the Ethics of Buridan was reprinted at Oxford in 1637, his Politics in 1640. Père Maréchal, S.J., quoted a German work by Tellkamp to the same effect in Precis d’Histoire de la Philosophie Moderne, p. 212.

[4]Philosophie Economique, by J. Vialatoux, pp. 144–149.

[5]“I have used it (the word ‘idea’) to express whatever is meant by phantasm, notion, species, or whatever it is which the mind can be employed about in thinking” (Essay on the Human Understanding, Book I, Chapter I).

[6]“And indeed it was only the doctrine of substantial forms, and the confidence of mistaken pretenders to a knowledge they had not, which first coined and then introduced animalities and humanities, and the like; which yet went little further than their own schools, and could never get to be current amongst understanding men” (Essay on the Human Understanding, Book III, Chapter VIII, Cf. Chapters III and VI in the same Book).

[7]Philosophie Economique, by J. Vialatoux, pp. 125–126.

[8]These extracts are quoted from the London edition of 1765, printed for A. Millar, etc.

[9]“It is not without reason that he (a man) seeks out and is willing to join in society with others who are already united, or have a mind to unite for the mutual preservation of their lives, liberties and estates, which I will call by the general name, property. The great and chief end, therefore, of men uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property: to which in the state of nature there are many things wanting” (Second Treatise on Civil Government, Chapter IX).

[10]“As much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property. Now of those good things which nature had provided in common, everyone had a right (as has been said) to as much as he could use and had a property in all he could effect with his labor; all that his industry could extend to, to alter from the state nature had put it in, was his.… It was a foolish thing, as well as dishonest, to hoard up more than he could make use of.…Right and conveniency went together. For as a man had a right to all he could employ his labor upon, so he had no temptation to labor for more than he could make use of.…This I dare boldly affirm that the same rule of property—viz., that every man should have as much as he could make use of, would still hold in the world…had not the invention of money, and the tacit agreement of men to put a value on it, introduced, by consent, larger possessions and a right to them…but since gold and silver, being little use to the life of man, in proportion to food, raiment, and carriage, has its value only from the consent of man…it is plain that the consent of man has agreed to a disproportionate and unequal possession of the earth…they having, by consent, found out and agreed in a way how a man may, rightfully and without injury, possess more than he could make use of by receiving gold and silver which may continue long in a man’s possession without decaying” (Second Treatise on Civil Government, Chapter V).

[11]The Pound Sterling, a History of English Money, pp. 124–137

[12]Feavearyear, op. cit., p. 137.

[13]Philosophie Economique, by J. Vialatoux, pp. 137–139.

[14]The Pound Sterling p. 121. The author adds in a note on p. 125: “The authors of the Bullion Report of 1810 appear to have been the first to diagnose correctly the position of the currency in the period 1694–8 when they stated that, at that period, the effects of the depreciation of the coin by wear and clipping were coupled with the effect of an excessive issue of paper. MacLeod, Theory and Practice of Banking (C IX. pars, 49 and 51) attempted to destroy this theory, but most of the reasoning on the point was fallacious, and the account given in the Bullion Report is an admirable summary of the events as they occurred.”

[15]The Bankers Conspiracy p. 63. “The Quantitative Theory assorts that the value of the money unit is determined by the number of units in circulation multiplied by their velocity of circulation.” When Locke is speaking of the quantity of money, he means the value of the content of the coin or coins, what Arthur Kitson calls the quality.

[16]Philosophie Economique, by J. Vialatoux, pp. 3 and following.

[17]The English Poor Laws, which attached the poor to their parishes, were modified in the interest of industry, not in the interest of the poor, in accordance with the tenets of liberalism. We shall see later that the socialist reaction against liberalism has also been largely controlled and directed by naturalistic or anti-supernatural organized forces.

[18]Philosophie Economique, by J. Vialatoux, p. 15. He adds: “This optimistic belief was present in the minds of those who drew up the principles of 1789, due in part to the influence of physiocratic ideas in the Constituent Assembly.” This attitude; was reinforced by Masonic anti-supernatural propaganda. Workingmen were bound to observe the injunctions of the Law of Chapelier (1791), by which they were forbidden any association, corporation, or syndicate, because such federation would trouble the free play of supply and demand in the labor market. Economic freedom thus became the famous right to die of hunger. Cf. The Workingman’s Guilds of the Middle Age, p. 42.

[19]J. Mauritain, Les Degrés du Savoir, p. 90. Cf. the important observations on pages 269–286 of the same work, also on pages 121–125.

[20]Cf. J. Vialatoux, La’ Cité de Hobbes, p. 48, and J. Maritain, Reflexions sur L’Intelligence, p. 183.

“The material object of philosophy and science may be the same—for example, the sense-perceptible world—the formal object, namely, that which determines the specific nature of these intellectual disciplines, is essentially different in the two cases. In the realm of corporeal being, the scientist will study the laws of phenomena by linking one observable event with another observable event. If he tries to discover the structure of matter, it will be by representing to himself how and according to what laws the ultimate elements in the structure of the edifice—molecules, ions, atoms—behave in space and tiine. The philosopher will try to find out what the matter is whose behavior the scientist depicts, thatis, the nature of corporeal substance considered in the light of ens intelligibile (the question whether it is capable of being divided up, in view of a spatial or spatio-temporal reconstruction of ions, atoms, etc., into protons and electrons… remains intact)” (Les Dégres du Savoir, pp. 93, 94).

[21]Philosophie Economique, by J. Vialatoux, pp. 12–26.

[22]The economists’ conception of affairs was based, however, on certain fallacies, the chief of which was that man was regarded as an economic automaton and not, as a human being. For example, it was believed that labor could move away freely from trades in which work was scarce and wages wore low, to trades in which higher wages were offered. They forgot, however, that human beings have roots, which may be invisible, but which nevertheless exist.…Furthermore, the sort of world visualised by the academic economists of the last century postulated a state of continuous competition, with the weaker or less efficient going to the wall or being absorbed by the stronger and more efficient. They did not attempt to explain from what source were fresh victims for this economic cannibalism to be obtained.” (The Future of Auditing, by A Group of Accountants, pp. 5, 6).

[23]Philosophie Economique, by J. Vialatoux, p. 67.

[24]Religion and Culture, by J. Maritain (English Edition, Sheed and Ward, pp 25, 26). J. Maritain blames the Cartesian spirit for this state of separation and conflict.

[25]Op. cit., pp. 535, 536. Cf. Barruel, Memoires pour a L’Histoire Jacobinisme, vol. I, pp. 343–355.

Part IV

Political Decay

and the

Divine Plan for Order

Chapter XIII

The Protestant Revolt Against Order

the preparation of wrong

national decisions

When a human being comes to a practical decision, both his intelligence and will are brought into play. The intellect enunciates the last practical judgment about a course of action, which the will follows, but it enunciates that judgment under the influence of the will. For a right decision, therefore, two things are necessary: firstly, the intelligence must have a firm grasp of the real order of the world and of the final end of man, namely, union with the Blessed Trinity through membership of Christ; secondly, the will must be strengthened by the moral virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance.[1]

This is the teaching of St. Thomas who says that “for a right decision or a good choice, two things are necessary: firstly, a right intention of the end, and this is brought about by moral virtue secondly, a correct judgment about what leads to the end, and this can only be by reason rightly advising, judging and ordering. This is the function of prudence and its auxiliary virtues.”[2] To this must be added what the Angelic Doctor had just previously said: “It is the function of prudence to give wise counsels about what concerns the whole life of man and the final end of human life.”[3] In the order of action, St. Thomas insists that the will follows the last practical judgment, but he insists that it is the will which makes a particular judgment to be the last.[4] In other words, the will sways the intelligence to look at the motives which appeal to it (the will) and show up in a clear light what attracts it. The last practical judgment can therefore be uniformly sound and good, only if the will be rectified by the moral virtues. The will has the preponderant role in our moral life. But the other condition is of vital importance also. Fully prudent action supposes a clear vision of the end of man and of the order of the world: the danger of disordered action is increased as the intellect’s grasp of order and of the rights of God grows hazy. The intellect must hold up before the will the full order of the world. Just as for a right decision the correct functioning of both intellect and will is required, so a wrong decision in a particular set of circumstances may be the result of the defective functioning of either faculty.

If we now apply analogously the principles of St. Thomas to the practical decisions of peoples and rulers of peoples at the time of the so-called Reformation, we shall see that the wrong turning taken was in part due to the lack of a firm grasp of order in the intelligence and in part to the weakening of the will by the decay of the virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance.[5]

decay in the intellectual grasp of order

Four points must be singled out for particular mention in this connection. Each in its own way contributed to the weakening of the hold of men’s minds upon order. Two of them, the sojourn of the Popes at Avignon and the Great Schism of the West, were spectacular events looming large upon the European stage. The two others, the revival of Roman Law and the spread of Nominalism, of which we have already spoken, though their influence was largely in the realm of the mind and therefore not so visible, nevertheless contributed to the steady weakening of the European mind in regard to the Divine Plan. We should mention also the general unbalancing effect of the Copernican astronomical discoveries on agelong habits of thought, and the consequences of the Black Death. “The Black Death turned Christendom into a house of mourning, and had dreadful results of every kind: the worst being that priests became so few, and bad priests so easily became priests, that the whole great Christian philosophy and morality were brought into contempt.…The Black Death decimated the priesthood, leaving hardly enough priests to go round and admitting a good many who had much better not have gone round.[6]

the exile at avignon (1308–1377)

The head of the Church, the Vicar of Christ, is Bishop of Rome. In the city, around which the Patrimony of St. Peter had grown up, the Pope was not subject to the influence of any temporal ruler. In Avignon, where the Popes sojourned from 1308–1377, that is, from Clement V to Gregory XI, the Pope was dominated more or less by the King of France. This dimmed the sense of the supernatural, supranational unity of the Church, especially in the minds of those nations and their rulers who had differences with the French Kings. In addition, during this period the resentment increased against the holding of bishoprics and other benefices in distant lands by officials of the Papal Court. This was particularly the case in England and played its part in detaching minds and hearts from the Holy See.

the great schism (1378–1417)

God raised up St. Catherine of Sienna to put an end to the sojourn at Avignon, and bring back the Pope to the Eternal City, the center of unity, but the good was undone and the evils intensified by the Great Schism wherein human passions struggled against the realization of that unity of government which all acknowledged should exist. The concessions, too, which the rival claimants were obliged to make to their supporters among the different nations, contributed in some degree to the decay of faith.

influence of roman law and ockhamism

The spectacle of these quarrels and divisions was presented to minds which in many cases were imbued with ideas opposed to the Kingship of Christ. The revival of Roman Law had enabled the Legists to dangle before the rulers of the growing nations the unquestioned authority of the Roman Emperor in matters of religion as well as in temporal matters. Associated with this deleterious influence was the effect of Ockham’s philosophy. It was difficult for an Ockhamist to retain hold of the integral truth about the immutable nature of the Church’s government and constitution. His whole philosophical formation tended to convince him that there were no objective natures of things and that all our valid knowledge was of individuals and of their demands. No wonder, then, that Ockhamists, like d’Ailly and Gerson and many of the doctors present at the Councils of Basle and Constance, defended novel theories concerning Church organization and reform. Their philosophy inclined them to consider those questions and others, like the relations of Church and state, as questions of warring personalities to be solved according to the circumstances of the moment. St. Joan of Arc was sent to remind the world of the fact that political authority was a participation in the temporal Kingship of Christ, of which the anointing at the coronation was a visible sign.[7] She was treated as Our Lord himself had been.

weakening of the will through

the decay of the virtues

Decay in charity resulted inevitably from the corroding influence of Ockhamism on the doctrine of our union with our fellow human beings as members of Christ’s Mystical Body. Along with it went decay in the realization of that membership in practice, owing to routine. This is what Mr. Belloc terms “a crystallization of religion.”[8] “As an example of this crystallization,” he writes,” take the complete network of clerical finance. The old simplicity therein disappeared. Dues were exacted on mere precedent, though the causes of such precedent had ceased to be.… Or take again such abuses as pluralities. In the earlier ages—for instance in England, after the conquest—for a man to hold even two Sees at once was a thing occasionally done but not tolerated. It was a scandal and an outrage. In the later Middle Ages it became accepted; still denounced and still scandalous, but accepted. With this crystallization, this hardening of official action, went a parallel (and much graver) evil among the laity: to wit, a reliance upon the externals of religion at the expense of spiritual life.”[9]

In the scandal of pluralities, we can see at one and the same time the decay of charity, justice and temperance. In the avarice of the clergy, as shown in other ways, and in that of the influential laity, and in the contempt for celibacy among the clergy, we behold the decay of the same virtues of charity, justice and temperance. In the failure to face the reform of these abuses and others, in spite of the protests calling attention to the downhill courses of countries and communities, the lack of charity and of fortitude was patent. In spite of the exhortations of St. Vincent Ferrer, the hatred of Satan for the supernatural life seems to have been lost sight of. This is a sure sign of the decay of faith in any epoch. When once the storm had burst and that hatred was free to show itself, it found expression in insults to all things Catholic, especially to the Blessed Eucharist and to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the central point of Catholic life and worship.

“The condition of the wealthy laity,’’ writes Mr. Belloc, “was much worse (than that of the clergy), and more particularly, as I have said, in the point of avarice. There was nothing men would not do for the violent and rapid acquisition of wealth. They had not of course the doctrinal disease of our time; they did not regard their vices as virtues, nor call the rapid grasping of a fortune heroic, as we do. The knowledge of right and wrong in this matter was still sound but the practice was in ruins,… Every Prince was avid. Right to the hand of appetites so eager and so unscrupulous lay the wealth of the Church.…The last factor, the hatred of the Faith, though it was numerically the smallest by far, was much the most intense, and was in the nature of a leaven which could rapidly infect all society, once it was given play.”[10]

luther and ockhamism

We have seen that the Nominalist philosophy contributed directly to Locke’s individualism and separatism. Indirectly, through its influence on the formation of Luther and of Protestantism in general, it strongly reinforced these characteristics.

We have already briefly alluded to Luther’s Nominalist or Ockhamist formation. He boasted that he had completely assimilated the Ockhamist tenets and that he belonged to the Ockhamist school or faction.[11] Let us take one point, namely, the separation of grace and nature, in which Luther prolongs a fundamental Ockhamist principle into open heresy. The fundamental principle of Ockham and his school is that it is not sanctifying grace, which by its nature renders us agreeable to God, but rather God’s free acceptance of us as pleasing. Strictly speaking, it is not because he is in the state of grace that a man is pleasing to God; it is exclusively because he is accepted as such by God. It follows that sanctifying grace is an unimportant mark designed by God to distinguish from others those whom He accepts as being agreeable to himself.

Grace itself does not secure for us either his favor or his friendship. Consequently, it is not divine grace which makes us worthy of eternal life. We are worthy of eternal life, exclusively because God accepts us.[12] If we are to believe the Ockhamist, man can be in the friendship of God by a purely extrinsic denomination, that is to say, because the will of God accepts him. Of the supernatural life which sanctifying grace bestows on us, the Ockhamists say nothing. It is easy to see that they unwillingly admitted the existence of this dead weight in which they saw neither necessity nor utility. They repeated continually that everything depended on God’s acceptance of us, not on sanctifying grace and the infused virtues. Of course, they did not deny the existence of these gifts, but they were always proclaiming that entities were not to be multiplied without necessity.[13]

Luther in his interior struggles recalled the principle of the free acceptance of God as the Ockhamists explained it, that is, as a simple possibility. God, they said, could accept each of us, even without sanctifying grace. Luther goes much further. He does not say: God could do it, but God does it. We are declared friends of God by an “extrinsic denomination’’ or an “extrinsic arrangement.” ‘This extrinsic denomination comes from the justice of Christ, that is, from a justice which is not ours. In the Ockhamist hypothesis of God’s acceptance of us, however, the sinner was intrinsically justified, his fault was blotted out. According to Luther, God considers the sinner as just on account of the justice of Christ, but the sinner remains a sinner. The sin is not effaced, but God regards the sinner as just, because Christ’s justice is imputed to him. The cause of this erroneous doctrine on the part of Luther was his own interior state. He could not resist sin through his own fault, but he held up Christ’s justice between himself and God and in this way hid his corruption and misery from God’s gaze. Men remained, however, intrinsically corrupt.[14]

Thus Luther involved himself in numberless contradictions with which we are not here directly concerned.[15] So too he set up that separation of grace and nature which was to have such disastrous repercussions on the political and economic organization of Protestant society, especially when reinforced by another inevitable consequence of Luther’s system of private judgment, namely, the growth of a purely individualistic relation with Christ.

consequences of lutheranism

Catholic teaching insists, not on the separation of the supernatural and the natural but on their distinction and connection. For the Catholic Church, there is no inevitable contradiction between invisible grace and visible organization, between interior liberty and external power, between the supernatural world and the material universe. The Kingdom of God amongst us consists, essentially and principally in the supernatural society of the Catholic Church, secondarily and as a consequence of the influence of the Catholic Church, in an organization of the social life of states, political and economic, in accordance with the Divine Plan for Order. God in three divine persons is Subsistent Love of order. The social organization of men, who are called to share in the inner life of God through membership of Christ, must reflect that supernatural love of order. We may represent the Divine Plan for Order succinctly as follows:

god

(in three divine persons)

our lord jesus christ

(invisible head of his mystical body, the catholic church)

states aiming at the temporal prosperity of their subjects so as not only not to hinder but to favor their attaining their final end—union with the blessed trinity. thus the organization of the state will aid every citizen to act always as a member of christ. this is what god in three divine persons wants.

The following diagrammatic expression of the Catholic ideal of the life of the individual Christian may be useful to bring out the contrast between it and Protestantism. The position of the rectangles and the arrows pointing downwards indicate that supernatural life is meant to permeate and animate all the activities of social life. The arrows pointing upwards indicate that social life is meant to aid in the development of the personality of members of Christ and so contribute to the formation of the Mystical Body in heaven; hence the social life of the citizen is fully subordinated to the supernatural life of the Christian. His environment aids him to act as a member of Christ instead of being a hindrance thereto. Thus, too, God’s rights are fully respected.

god

(in three divine persons)

our lord jesus christ

head of his mystical body

supernatural life of

member of christ

social life, political and

economic of member of christ

Lutheranism, on the other hand, separates the world into two halves so independent that they have only accidental relations with each other. This is the inevitable result of the separation of grace and nature (this latter being intrinsically corrupt), of faith and works. According to Luther, each individual, while his natural equipment remains intrinsically corrupt, by an act of blind confidence, holds up the justice of Christ as a fire-screen between God’s anger and his own corruption. In this way there is brought into existence the invisible Church of those who believe, while the one true visible Church, through which alone (in re or in voto)[16] one becomes a member of the Mystical Body, is done away with. This is the invisible Church of human relations with God and of divine action. All the rest, all that concerns the life and action of the external man, including the ecclesiastical organizations entered into to stir up faith in Christ, in a word, all the affairs of this world, are relegated to the state. This results in a clear-cut separation between the Christian and the citizen.

“You are a prince or judge!” said Luther, “…you have people under you and you wish to know what to do. It is not Christ you are to question concerning the matter but the law of your country.…Between the Christian and the ruler, a profound separation must be made.…Assuredly, a prince can be a Christian, but it is not as a Christian that he ought to govern. As a ruler, he is not called a Christian but a prince. The man is a Christian, but his function does not concern his religion.…Though they are found in the same man, the two states or functions are perfectly marked off one from the other, and really opposed.[17] So all man’s external activity, springing from a nature deprived of supernatural life and subject to the dictates of a ruler who must look upon himself not as a Christian but as a ruler, is completely naturalistic. By this individualism and separatism the way is made smooth for modern naturalism and Liberalism.[18]

If we bear in mind that, according to Luther, Our Lord Jesus Christ is no longer the source of sanctifying grace, the intrinsic principle of life of the Mystical Body, we may express the disordered Lutheran ideal of life as follows:

?

Christian Life                  Social Life

Thus the life of the citizen is separated and sectioned off from the life of the Christian. Accordingly, each Protestant state, after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, expressed this separatist ideal by organizing its national form of religion as a state department. The true Church of Christ is invisible.[19]

To bring home to ourselves how far the Lutheran separation of the Christian and the citizen has corroded the true Catholic ideal of membership of Christ in the minds of Catholics, we have only to listen to those Catholics who affirm that there is no persecution of the Catholic Church in Germany under the National-Socialist regime. They say that when they were in Germany they saw Mass being celebrated freely and the Churches crowded. It is clear that for them the Catholic religion stops at the Church door and that there is a rigid separation between Catholic life and social life. If this were not so, they would have seen all the horror involved in the fact that from the moment a German Catholic left Church after Mass, he found himself up against a social organization based on membership of the German race as the primary value, not on membership of Christ.

Another instance of the influence of the Lutheran attitude on Catholic minds is to be found in the limitation of the Christian ideal to the avoidance of sin. Many Catholics do not understand that the ideal of life is not merely negative, that it is not confined to safeguarding oneself from committing sin. The whole life of a member of Christ is meant to be subject to Christ, as the hand or the foot is subject to the head in the physical body, in view of the development of union with the Blessed Trinity here below in the obscurity of faith, while awaiting the vision face-to-face in heaven. And the whole organization of a state is intended by God to favor the cultivation of human personality through that development.

The inevitable result of Protestantism was an enormous increase in the power of temporal rulers of states. As the spiritual Kingship of Christ, participated in by the Pope and the bishops of the Catholic Church, was no longer acknowledged, authority over spiritual affairs, including the right to interpret and apply the moral law, passed to the temporal rulers. Accordingly, on the one hand, the way was laid open for the abuses of state absolutism, for the state’s neglect of God’s rights led to the disregard of man’s rights. On the other hand, the principle of private judgment prepared the way for the opposite error of “holy rebellion” and of the “right” of the people to revolt against authority on any pretext whatsoever. Disregard for God’s rights meant inevitably that man’s duties were not stressed as they should be.

It is true that the Protestant states, as organized bodies, still acknowledged that they had a duty to God, and at the beginning, at least, maintained the great truth of the divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, though rejecting the order established by him for return to God. Decay, however, was inevitable, when once the infallible guardian of the moral law was thrust aside. The way was thus paved for the return of the tyrannical regime of Imperial Rome, dominated by the manipulation of money. Individualism and isolation in relation to Our Lord led to individualism in social life. The separation of the Christian and the citizen prepared the way for the growth of naturalism. With the French Revolution the organized naturalistic forces will begin the new anti-supernatural reorganization of society. As time goes on and the attack on God’s rights develops, man will be treated less and less as a person and more and more as a mere individual. This result of “Progress” and “Liberty” is the sure sign of Satan’s domination over society.[20]

[1]Prudence, of course, is in the intelligence, for essentially it is an intellectual virtue, but it cannot be present without justice, fortitude and temperance, for it is a moral virtue by its matter. It is a habit inclining to knowledge and its object is the act of the will regulated according to the moral law. Accordingly, we speak of prudence as a moral virtue. Cf. Ia IIae, Q.58, a.4, 5; IIa IIae, Q.49, a.l, 2. “Prudence inclines the intellect to judge rightly, by a last practical judgment, about particular actions in relation to the final end of man” (Gredt, Elementa Philosophiae, vol. II, p. 358, ed. 5a).

[2]Ia IIae, Q.58, a.4. Cf. Ia IIae, Q.57, a.5.

[3]Ia IIae, Q.57, a.4, ad 3um.

[4]Cf. Thes. XXI of the XXIV theses of St. Thomas.

[5]“Experience teaches that peoples have a certain ‘personality’ to which practically the same rules and the same reasoning can be applied as to a particular person.” (Benigni, Historiae Ecclesiasticae Propaedeutica, p. 73).

Very often the influence of one person in aiding a nation to reject disorder and remain faithful to Our Lord is strikingly prominent, just as there are outstanding examples of the opposite. In the case of Queen Isabella of Spain (1451–1504), we see a magnificent instance of what a clear intelligence and a firm will can do to help a country to take courage and go against the current. In the case of Cardinal Wolsey we behold what blindness and self-centeredness can do to accelerate the pace downhill towards final disaster. Readers can study the contrast in the splendid volumes, Isabella of Spain, by William T. Walsh, and Wolsey, by Hilaire Belloc.

[6]Chaucer, by G. K. Chesterton, pp. 40, 56.

[7]“The Kingdom does not belong to the Dauphin but to God. Nevertheless, it is the will of God that the Dauphin should be crowned and thus be empowered to hold the Kingdom in commendam” (Procès de Ste. Jeanne d’Arc, vol. II, p. 456. Quoted by Père H. Clérissac, O. P., in La Messangère da la Politique Divine).

[8]How the Reformation Happened, p. 44.

[9]Ibid., p. 46.

[10]Ibid., pp. 61, 62.

[11]Weimar, VI, 195, 4 and 600, 11; “Sum enim Occanicae factionis.” Quoted by Father Denifle, O. P., in Luther et le Luthéranisme, Denifle-Paquier, vol. II, p. 201.

[12]“God accepts a soul in the state of grace into eternal life purely gratuitously.” “Animam charitatem habentem Deus pure gratis acceptat ad vitam aeternam” (Peter d’Ailli, I Sent., qu.9, a.2, fol. 139).

[13]“Frustra fit per plura quod fieri potest per pauciora” (Ockham, I Sent., dist. 31).

[14]ln 1531, Luther wrote: “I am accustomed… to imagine that there is no quality called faith or charity in my heart, but in the place of these I put Christ himself, and I say: This is my justice. Christ is my quality and my formal justice as it is called” (quoted by Father Denifle, O. P., op. cit. p. 220, Corpus Reformatorum, II. 503).

When Luther says elsewhere: “Against Ockham we must hold that God cannot aceept man without justifying grace” (Weimar. T 227, n. 563). he uses the expression “justifying grace” in a different sense from Ockham. In his system the justice of Christ is the “justifying grace.”

[15]Ockham exalts faith and lowers reason. He even attacks the value of the principle of contradiction. Luther, as usual, goes further. Ockham had also prepared the way for Luther and had influenced his mind by his affirmation that Scripture alone is infallible. Cf. Denifle-Paquier, Luther et le Luthéranisme, vol. Ill, pp. 226 and foll., also Les Origines de la Théologie Moderne, by l’abbé Humbert, pp. 36 and foll.

[16]Loreto Ed. Note: Of course, as Fr. Fahey is explaining here, the Lutheran idea of an ‘invisible Church’ is untenable and anti-catholic. The sacraments are all visible in their application, and no one can be a member of the visible Church without receiving the one visible sacrament that is the only means to become a member of that Church; namely Baptism.

[17]Luther’s Works (Weimar Edition), XXXII, pp. 391, 439, 440. Again he writes in his Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians: “Conscience has nothing to do with the Law, works or earthly justice” (Gal., c. II, v. 14, quoted by l’abbé Paquier in Luther et l’Allemagne, p. 166).

[18]L’Union des Eglises, by l’abbé Ch. Journet, has some excellent remarks on the separatist spirit of Lutheranism, pp. 166–170 and 261–262.

[19]The note of interrogation (question mark) at the head of the diagram is meant to emphasize the fact that those who are not in the order laid down by God for return to him are in a state of disorder.

[20]For a brief account of the political and economic consequences of Protestantism, cf. The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World, pp. 13–24. In addition to the works referred to there, see Recherches sur L’Esprit politique de la Réforme, by G. de Lagarde

Chapter XIV

The French Revolution of 1789

the significance of the revolution

We have seen that one result of the Lutheran revolt was the division between the Christian and the citizen. According to the Catholic ideal the whole life of a member of Christ is meant to be subject to Christ and animated with the meritorious supernatural life of grace, just as all the movements of the hand or of any other member are subject to the head in the physical body. According to the Lutheran ideal, all the activity of a Christian in the world is withdrawn from the rule of Christ and given over to naturalism. “They who are just,” says Luther, “observe the law, not because they are thereby justified before God, but for the sake of civil order, and because they know that such obedience is well pleasing to God, and a good example and pattern for the improvement of others.[1] To earthly activity was thus ascribed a merely earthly, naturalistic value. Calvin agreed with this, maintaining the sectioning or division of life, but he added powerful incentives to the observance of natural asceticism and to the pursuit of wealth, he taught that industrial energy and success in business were a proof of one’s election to salvation, a clear indication that the purely interior act of faith-confidence in Christ had been rightly performed, and that on the other hand, lack of eagerness for gain and ill-success were a proof of eternal damnation. Accordingly, political action and business dealings, instead of being vivified with the supernatural love of one’s fellow members of Christ, actual or potential, were left to the guidance of private judgment, that is, inevitably, to the promptings of self-interest. Thus, individualism in religion prepared the way for individualism and separatism in political and economic activity. Naturalism grew apace.

Meanwhile, the uprise of a multitude of sects, which was the inevitable consequence of individualism and private judgment, favored naturalism after another fashion. Satan, as we have seen, urged the desirability of setting up a society based upon that natural religion in which all men agree, as a remedy for the divisions arising from the quarrels between Christian denominations. Thus, the tempter whispered, since human beings are rational, you can make them good and true and at the same time re-establish the brotherhood of men of all nations so much endangered by all these quarrels. Satan pleaded, too, for an oath of secrecy because of special knowledge to be safeguarded, knowing the force of such an appeal and its efficacy in keeping men in subjection. In this wise, Freemasonry, a naturalistic caricature of the Mystical Body of Christ, was brought into existence. The so-called Reformation had not attempted to set up a supranational organization in the place of the Catholic Church. The French Revolution of 1789 witnessed the first appearance in public of the new ideal of a purely naturalistic society striving for the universality of the Catholic Church.[2] The state or nation, falsely holding that it is not obliged to make profession of any religion, proclaims that religion is a private matter and, after the model of the Masonic Society, declares itself superior both to the Mystical Body of Christ and to all the various man-made forms of religion professed by its individual subjects.

Modern history since 1789 is, to a large extent, the account of the domination of state after state by the naturalistic supranationalism of Freemasonry, behind which has been steadily emerging the still more strongly organized naturalistic supranationalism of the Jewish nation. That is why the post-revolutionary epoch has witnessed, in country after country, persistent attacks on the program of Christ the King in regard to the Church, the state, the family, education, the religious orders, secret societies, liberty of the press and private property. After every successful Masonic Revolution since the first in 1789 down to and including the Spanish Revolution of 1931, the world soon began to hear of the country’s entering upon the path of “progress” by the introduction of “enlightened” reforms, such as, the separation of Church and state, the legalization of divorce, the suppression and banishment of religious orders and congregations, the glorification of Freemasonry, the secularization of the schools, the nationalization of property and the unrestrained licence of the press.[3] These were, of course, simply the results of Satan’s utilization of his visible instruments in order to eliminate the influence of Christ the King. Satan himself knows well that the carrying out of his program can only lead to savagery and chaos, through the ruthless enslavement of the many by the few. Most of his subordinates, however, do not grasp this. Blinded by the suggestions of the tempter and by their own pride, men overthrow the bulwarks of society reared on faith in Christ and on our membership of him, with disastrous results, especially for the poor and the lowly.

naturalism and revolution

Naturalism, as we have seen in Chapter 1, consists in the negation of the possibility of the elevation of our nature to the supernatural life and order or, more radically still, in the negation of the very existence of that life and order. If naturalism denies the existence of the supernatural life, it has its foundation in pantheism. The reason of the last statement is clear. If there is no truth and no life beyond the reach of our nature, then our nature is identical with the divine nature. Rationalism is the application of naturalism to the human reason. It involves the negation either of the existence of the supernatural life that comes from Our Lord Jesus Christ or at least of the possibility of getting to know about that life, even by revelation. Thus the human mind is the unique source of truth and order, to the exclusion of God and Our Lord Jesus Christ.[4]

The word revolution may be taken in two senses. The primary signification is that of a radical transformation of society undertaken for the purpose of destroying the ancient order that was based on the recognition of the rights of God through the Mystical Body of Christ and of the reality of the supernatural life of grace as our highest and noblest life. The second signification is derived from the former. According to it, the word is applied to the doctrines or principles in the name of which the social transformation is accomplished and to the new institutions set up in the place of those overthrown. The aim of revolution, therefore, is based on the negation of God’s rights and of our supernatural life and is the enthronement of man’s reason as supreme. In other words, it is the inauguration of the reign of naturalism or rationalism.

the declaration of the rights of man

We have seen in Chapter I that the true rights of man are founded on man’s duties to God, and that God become Man, Our Lord Jesus Christ, the one Mediator, has set forth the divine program for the full acknowledgment of those duties to God. For centuries France had acknowledged those duties, and whatever abuses existed in society had arisen from the forgetfulness of them, that is, from the neglect and contempt of the rights of God, as enunciated by Our Lord Jesus Christ and his Church. The ignorance, forgetfulness and contempt of the rights of Almighty God, the true Supreme Being, and of Our Lord Jesus Christ, were therefore the principal causes of public misfortunes.

In the Preamble of the Declaration drawn up by the French National Assembly, Our Lord Jesus Christ is left out of account and the new-fangled rights of man, not based on his duties to God through the one Mediator, are drawn up in the presence of the vague pantheistic Supreme Being of Freemasonry. “The representatives of the French people gathered together in a National Assembly,” runs the infamous document, “considering that the ignorance, forgetfulness or contempt of the rights of man are the sole cause of public misfortunes and the corruption of governments, have decided to set forth in a solemn declaration, the natural, inalienable and sacred rights of man.…Consequently, the National Assembly recognizes and declares, in the presence and under the auspices of the Supreme Being, the following rights of the man and the citizen, etc.” Thus we find in this “Magna Charta” of the Revolution, on the one hand, social apostacy and the rejection of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and on the other hand, the substitution of man for God or the worship of humanity.[5] The judgment of the Church as to the suitability of these articles for Constitution-building was not long delayed. Pius VI, in a Letter to the Archbishop of Avignon in 1791, concerning the deliberations of the Assembly of that district, condemned the Declaration of 1789 as opposed to religion and to the good of society. “It is enough,” he wrote, “to recall those seventeen articles, wherein the rights of man were taken exactly in the same sense in which they had been set forth and proclaimed in the decrees of the National Assembly of France, I mean, those rights so opposed to religion and the good of society, and they were so taken that they might form the groundwork or foundation of a New Constitution” (Bullarium Romanum, April, 1791).

“Never to have known Jesus Christ in any way is the greatest of misfortunes,” wrote Pope Leo XIII, “but it involves no perversity or ingratitude. But after having known, to reject or forget him is such a horrible and mad crime as to be scarcely credible. For he is the origin and source of all good, and just as mankind could not be freed from slavery but by the sacrifice of Christ, so neither can it be preserved but by his power.…Men wander very far from the goal, in aimless error, once they have entered upon devious paths. Likewise, if the pure and unsullied light of truth be rejected, men’s minds must needs be buried in darkness and deceived by depraved fancies that meet them at every step.…Christ alone is the Way, the Truth, and the Life (Jn.14:6), and if we despise him we lose these three indispensable requisites for salvation.…The case of governments is much the same as that of the individual; they also must run into fatal issues, if they depart from the Way.…Let Jesus be excluded, and human reason is left without its greatest protection and illumination: the very notion is easily lost of the end for which God created human society.…Their minds busy with a hundred confused projects, rulers and subjects alike travel a devious road, bereft as they are of safe guidance and fixed principle.”[6]

The French people had grasped the truth of the Divine Plan for Order and had stood for the rights of God. By leaving Our Lord Jesus Christ out of account and passing over in silence the rights of the head of the Mystical Body, they committed apostacy and ushered in a long period of disorder under the sway of the promoters of naturalism. When men reject Our Lord Jesus Christ, they tend inevitably to put themselves in the place of God. This is what the French Masons had done and this is what they succeeded in doing officially in the name of France in 1789.[7] It is precisely in this putting of human reason in the place of God that rationalism consists, and this is what we find in the Declaration of 1789.

No wonder, then, that Leo XIII was compelled to condemn the spirit animating revolutionary legislation and its provisions. This he did in no uncertain terms in the Encyclical Letter, Immortale Dei, On the Christian Constitution of States (Nov. 1, 1885). “Sad it is to call to mind,” wrote the great Pontiff, “how the harmful and lamentable rage for innovation which rose to a climax in the 16th century, threw first of all into confusion the Christian religion, and, next, by natural sequence, invaded the precincts of philosophy, whence it spread amongst all classes of society. From this source, as from a fountain-head, burst forth all those later tenets of unbridled licence which, in the midst of the terrible upheavals of the last century, were widely conceived and boldly proclaimed as the principles and foundations of that neiv jurisprudence which was not merely previously unknown, but was at variance in many points with not only the Christian, but even the natural law. Amongst these principles the main one lays down that as all men are alike by race and nature, so in like manner all are equal in the control of their life; that each one is so far his own master as to be in no sense under the rule of any other individual; that each is free to think on every subject just as he may choose, and to do whatever he may like to do; that no man has any right to rule over other men.…The authority of God is passed over in silence, just as if there were no God… or as if men whether in their individual capacity or bound together in social relations, owed nothing to God.…Moreover, the state believes that it is not obliged to make public profession of any religion; or to inquire which of the very many religions is the only true one; or to prefer one religion to all the rest; or to show any form of religion special favor; but, on the contrary, is bound to grant equal rights to every creed, aiming exclusively at preventing them from disturbing public order and tranquility.”

On the other hand, we are not left in doubt about what the enemies of Christ and of the supernatural life think of the Revolution. “Long live Liberty, Equality, Fraternity! That is the favorable time for us.” These words, uttered by one of the possessed children of Illfurt (Alsace), show Satan’s high opinion of the principles of 1789.[8]

We need not be surprised, then, at the strong appeal addressed by Pére Henry Ramière, S.J., to the Associates of the Apostleship of Prayer, in 1892: “We must unite in an immense effort to obtain that, as we have seen the Revolution open by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the proclamation of the dethronement of Jesus Christ from his rightful place in society, we may see this same Revolution come to an end by the recognition of the rights of God and of the duties of the human race to its Savior and its King.”[9]

the jewish nation and

the french revolution

Again, the greatest organized visible naturalistic or anti-supernatural force, the Jewish nation, extols the “principles of 1789.” On the 3rd August, 1790, Revolutionary France took the initiative in the question of the admission of the members of the Jewish nation to full citizenship.[10] Their emancipation took place in England only in 1849 and 1858, in Denmark in 1849, in Austria-Hungary in 1867, in Germany in 1869 and 1871, in Italy in 1860 and 1870, in Switzerland in 1869 and 1874, in Bulgaria and Serbia in 1878 and 1879. M. l’abbé Joseph Lémann, the Jewish convert, has depicted in the following terms the advantages the Jews hoped for from the emancipation: “The Jews had always been a hostile power. They were also a financial power to be reckoned with. They became a civil power by the rights of citizenship conferred on them by the Constituent Assembly. They have now only to become a political power, with mastery over the finances, the legislation, the army, and the diplomatic service of the friendly unsuspecting nations. That day will come.”[11]

Seventy years ago, the Jews proclaimed openly how they have profited by the principles of 1789. On the 29th June, 1869, they held a synod at Leipzig, at which were present, under the presidency of Dr. Lazarus of Berlin, representatives of Germany, Russia, Turkey, Austria, England, the Low Countries, France, etc. The following resolution was proposed by Dr. Philipson of Bonn and seconded by the Chief Rabbi of Belgium. M. Astruc: “The Synod proclaims that the diffusion and application to real life of modern principles are the surest guarantees of the present and the future well-being of the Jewish nation and its members. They are the conditions vitally indispensable for the progressive expansion and the highest development of Judaism.” We find the same note of rejoicing in the sermon preached by the Rabbi Isaac Bloch at Nancy, in 1889. “The spirit of the Revolution and the spirit of the Jewish religion are one and the same,” he said, “and in last analysis the one proceeds from the other. The Revolution has had the providential effect of bringing Judaism back to the way to be traversed in order to carry out its mission.…Israel is like a giant Sower advancing down the ever-widening vista of the centuries, bearing a reflection of Sinai on his nimbus-crowned forehead. The Sower of the Bible is still far from the end of his allotted task, but at every step he takes, there is around him more light, more peace, ever growing concord and harmony.”[12]

consequences of the french revolution

We may now express the naturalistic significance of the Revolution as follows:

?

progress of humanity

naturalism

social life, political and economic

The individual Christian, actual or potential, becomes a mere citizen, and the state organizes the whole of life on purely naturalistic lines. The kind of organization set up and the molding process applied to the ordinary man as a consequence will vary according to the disorder of the fundamental conception in question. But the result will invariably be, as has been already remarked, that the citizen will be treated as a mere individual, not as a person. Man can consistently maintain the supremacy of reason over sense in social organization, only on condition of maintaining the subjection of his reason to God through Our Lord Jesus Christ.

The ultimate result of the “Progress of Humanity,” aimed at by the organized naturalistic forces of the Jewish nation and Freemasonry, may be depicted diagrammatically as follows:

?

jewish nation organized under the natural messias to come

all other states or nations, from which every vestige of organization, based on the divinity of our lord jesus christ, and all belief in the supernatural life, to be attained by membership of his mystical body, the catholic church, shall have disappeared.

The pressure of disordered naturalism has made life very hard for Catholics, in the states that have accepted the principles of the French Revolution. At Mass they profess with Our Lord their readiness to bring the whole social life of their country into subjection to God the Father, whose will it is that they should strive to realize his Son’s program in the organization of society and thus aid their fellow-men to live as members of Christ. But the moment they come out of Church after Mass, they find the whole social fabric organized against Christ the King. The result has been division and decay. The so-called Reformation sections life, separating social life, political and economic, from Christ, and exposing it to naturalistic motives and influences. The whole of life is no longer subject to Christ as the right order of the world, in which all are called to be members of Christ, demands. The French Revolution sees the organized naturalistic forces, which form the visible portion of the army of Satan, coming into control of the state and aiming at bringing the whole of life into subjection to themselves. The organization of society presents a complete reversal of the right order formerly accepted. Instead of being organized in harmonious subordination to the supernatural organism of the Mystical Body of Christ as it should be, naturalism reigns supreme, and poor fallen man has to try to live as a member of Christ, in spite of all kinds of difficulties and even of dire persecution.

“Poor France,” exclaimed Pope Leo XIII in 1892, “God alone can measure the abyss of evil into which she will sink if the legislation, instead of improving, will stubbornly continue in a course which must end in tearing out from the minds and hearts of Frenchmen the religion which has made them so great.[13] The legislation, inspired by naturalism, was persisted in. The final blow may be said to have been given by the measure taken under the Jewish Prime Minister, Blum, a few years before the present war, for the undermining of the discipline of the French army. Communist cells diffused the Soviet spirit, which, in 1917, had reduced the Russian army to a disordered rabble.[14]

Yet even now, with the country sunk in the abyss of misery foretold by Pope Leo XIII half a century ago, M. Carcopino, Secretary of State for National Education in the Vichy government, declares: “I am certain that all good Frenchmen are of my opinion and reprove as energetically as I do anything which could either make for a return of the evil influence of an out-of-date anticlericalism or for a renewal of the discussions and divisions regarding the neutrality of the state in religious matters. That neutrality is the bulwark and the safeguard, of inviolable freedom of conscience and of worship. The word ‘God in the program of moral instruction in the primary schools, is to be replaced by the expressions: ‘spiritual values, the native land, Christian Civilization .’”[15] It takes a lot to get men to return fully to God.

the opposition between the catholic church and the french revolution

From what has been said about the naturalistic signification of the Revolution and of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, it is clear that the opposition between the Catholic Church and the French Revolution is not merely accidental but essential. It is not merely an accidental opposition arising out of a chance association of images and ideas, but one based on the very nature of things. It is the opposition between naturalism and the supernatural life of grace. According to Mr. Hilaire Belloc, the conflict between the Catholic Church and the French Revolution was accidental. “By an accident of history,” he writes, “the Revolution following on the breakdown of religion in educated France had come into active conflict with the Church. The conflict, I say, was accidental; but, by an association of ideas, it seemed to the mind of the time to be in the very nature of things.’’ [16] He holds the same theory, as we have seen, about the opposition between Freemasonry and the Catholic Church: in fact, this is merely an application of that theory to a particular instance. This is a regrettable error and leads to a false view of history. Mr. Belloc compares Napoleon’s attempted reorganization of Europe with that of Charlemagne. Charlemagne stood for an order in Europe respectful of the Mystical Body of Christ and proclaimed himself the Defender of the rights of God and of the Holy See. Napoleon was the apostle of naturalism and treated the Vicar of Christ with contumely, making him a prisoner. It is ridiculous to speak of a restoration of order in Europe by a Freemason.[17]

In the Encyclical Letter, On the Christian Constitution of States, after having outlined the principles of the new jurisprudence of the Revolution, Pope Leo XIII insists upon the essential opposition of these principles to the natural law, of which the Catholic Church is the sole guardian.[18] “Natural reason itself,” he writes, “proves convincingly that such concepts of the government of a state are wholly at variance with the truth.…Doctrines such as these (sovereignty of the people without any reference to God: no difference between forms of religion: liberty of thinking and publishing whatever one likes without any hindrance; subjection of the Church to the civil power in the exercise of duty), which cannot be approved by human reason and must seriously affect the whole civil order, Our Predecessors, the Roman Pontiffs (well aware of what their apostolic office required of them), have never allowed to pass uncondemned.” He goes on to speak of the Encyclical Letter, Mirari vos (August 15, 1832), of Pope Gregory XVI, and the Syllabus of Pope Pius IX, adding: “From these pronouncements of the Popes it is evident that the origin of public power is to be sought for in God himself, and not in the multitude, and that it is repugnant to reason to allow free scope for sedition. Again, it is clear from them that it is not lawful for the state, any more than for the individual, either to disregard all religious duties or to hold in equal favor different kinds of religion, and that the unrestrained freedom of thinking and of openly making known one’s thoughts is not inherent in the rights of citizens, and is by no means to be reckoned worthy of favor and support.”[19]

In the Letter to the Italian people of Dec. 8, 1892, Pope Leo XIII put the opposition between the Church and the Revolution on the same level as the opposition between Christ and Belial.

“Societies not subject to the influence of religion,” he wrote, “and, as such, easily exposed to be more or less directed by Freemasons, must in general be looked on with suspicion and avoided. Those also must be avoided which not only lend their aid to Freemasonry but constitute a nursery thereof and a factory for the training of apprentices. All should avoid any liaison and familiarity with persons suspected of being Freemasons or of belonging to affiliated societies.…Familiar intercourse should be cut off, not only with the openly wicked, but with those who hide their real character under the mask of universal toleration, of respect for all religions, and of the mania of reconciling the maxims of the Gospel with those of the Revolution, Christ with Belial, the Church of God with the state without God.”

responsibility of freemasonry

for revolutions

Long before the French Revolution, Pope Clement XII[20] and Pope Benedict XIV[21] condemned Freemasonry. Pope Benedict XIV in particular implored the rulers of Catholic countries to defend their subjects and their thrones against the sect. Instead of hearkening to this warning, they listened to their Masonic advisers and attacked the Society of Jesus. They had reason to regret it. Pope Leo XII definitely placed the responsibility for the French Revolution on the shoulders of the Freemasons and the members of secret societies. “Thus it has come about,” he writes, “that now, when quite a long time has elapsed, since the torch of revolt was lit for the first time in Europe by the Secret Societies and borne far and wide by their agents, in spite of the brilliant victories won by the most powerful princes of Europe .…the efforts of these guilty sects have not ceased.[22]

Pope Pius IX, in the Consistory of September 25, 1865, after having lamented the fact that the Catholic rulers of Europe had not listened to the appeal of Pope Benedict XIV, went on to point out that the Secret Societies were responsible for the seditions, revolutions and wars which had brought such misery on the world. “Would that the sovereigns had listened to the words of Our Predecessor,” he exclaimed, “would that they had not been so remiss in a matter so important! If they had listened to him, neither our fathers nor ourselves would have had to deplore so many seditious movements and revolutions, so many destructive wars which have laid waste the whole of Europe, so many evils which have weighed heavily upon the Church and continue to afflict her.”

Nearly forty years later, on March 19, 1902, Pope Leo XIII, at the beginning of the twenty-fifth year of his Pontificate and of the ninety-second year of his life—he was born on 2nd March, 1810—gave to the world an Apostolic Letter, reviewing the events of his reign. In this Letter, he denounces Freemasonry in the strongest terms, and it is to be noted that neither he nor any other Pope has ever made any distinction between the different sections of that naturalistic society. ‘‘In this pernicious and disloyal work (of hurling calumnious accusations against the Church),” he writes, “a certain sect of darkness is especially engaged, a sect which human society these many years carries within itself and which, like a deadly poison, destroys its happiness, its fecundity, and its life. Abiding personification of the Revolution, it constitutes a sort of retrogressive society whose object is to exercise an occult suzerainty over the established order and whose purpose is to make war against God and against his Church. There is no need of naming it, for all will recognize in these traits the society of Freemasons, of which We have already spoken expressly, in Our Encyclical, Humanum genus, of 20th April, 1884. While denouncing its destructive tendency, its erroneous teachings, and its wicked purpose of embracing in its far reaching grasp almost all nations, and uniting itself to other sects which its secret influence puts in motion, attracting first and afterwards retaining its members by the advantages it procures for them, binding governments to its will, sometimes by promises and sometimes by threats, it has succeeded in entering all classes of society, and forms an invisible and irresponsible state existing within the legitimate state. Full of the spirit of Satan, who, according to the words of the Apostle, knows how to transform himself at need into an angel of light, it gives prominence to its humanitarian object, but it sacrifices everything to its sectarian purpose. It protests that it has no political aim, while in reality it exercises the most profound action on the legislative and administrative life of the nations. While loudly professing its respect for authority and even for religion, it has for its ultimate purpose, as its own statutes declare, the destruction of all authority as well as of the priesthood, both of which it holds as the enemies of liberty.

“It becomes more evident day by day that it is to the inspiration and the assistance of this sect that we must attribute in great measure the continual troubles with which the Church is harassed, as well as the recrudescence of the attacks to which it has recently been subjected. For the simultaneousness of the assaults in the persecutions which have so suddenly burst upon us in these later times, like a storm from a clear sky, that is to say, without any cause proportionate to the effect; the uniformity of means employed to inaugurate this persecution, namely, the press, public assemblies, theatrical productions; the employment in every country of the same arms, to wit, calumny and public uprisings, all this betrays clearly complete identity of purpose and a program drawn up by one and the same central direction. All this is only a simple episode of a prearranged plan carried out on a constantly widening field to multiply the ruins of which We speak. Thus they are endeavoring by every means in their power first to restrict and then to exclude completely religious instruction from the schools, so as to make the rising generation unbelievers or indifferent to all religion.…

“As regards the religious orders and religious congregations, the practice of the evangelical counsels has made them the glory of society and the glory of religion. These very things have rendered them more culpable in the eyes of the enemies of the Church and are the reasons why they have been fiercely denounced and held up to contempt and hatred.…These men and women who…. had spontaneously renounced all the joys of family life to consecrate to the good of their fellow-men, in these peaceful associations, their youth, their talents, their strength, and their lives, have been treated as malefactors, as if they had formed criminal associations, and have been deprived of the ordinary rights of human beings and citizens at the very time when men are speaking loudest of liberty.”

two currents issuing from

the french revolution

We may speak of two currents of thought and action as proceeding from the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the current of Rousseauist-Masonic liberalism and the current of Socialism, collectivism and Communism. The current of liberalism, of course, existed previous to the French Revolution—it is the very essence of Locke’s philosophy as we have seen—but it was strongly reinforced by the Masonic deification of man at the Revolution. According to the doctrine enshrined in Masonic symbolism, each man, as an emanation of the unique substance, is a being absolutely independent. All men are thus equally God, subject to no one and completely free from any obligations to one another. And the man that is born free is man as an individual, man as an animal, with his material needs and his clamorous passions. As unrestrained action is an absolute exigency of human nature as divine, it is only with a view to securing more readily the greatest possible sum of material satisfactions that human beings enter into society. If we retain a firm hold of the doctrine of the immanent divinity or autonomy of man as an individual embodied in the Declaration, we shall readily understand that the first article of the Declaration, namely, “Men are born free and equal in rights and continue so,” strongly contributed to reinforce the opposite currents of liberalism and Socialism or Communism. Neither theory grasps the distinction between man as a person and man as an individual, which was exposed in Chapter I.[23]

According to the Thomistic doctrine, man is an individual member of society and endowed with the gift of reason and consequently with the power of free-will,[24] in view of the development of his personality through membership of Christ. From the moment that a human individual is destined by his nature to live in society,[25] he has the right as a person to demand from society that minimum of the common good which will enable him to live as befits a human person, but he has also the corresponding duties to society and may not behave as an autonomous whole, for whom alone society exists. Therefore, as persons, all men are equal and have equal rights to that minimum, but though equal as persons, because of their being members of the human species and members of Christ actual or potential, human beings are unequal as individuals, because of the inequality of their individual conditions. Thus their concrete individual rights are unequal. Every organization of society must respect both the specific equality of human persons and the individual inequality of human individuals.

This is precisely what neither liberalism nor Socialism could accomplish, liberalism stressed the first part of Article I of the Declaration of 1789, namely, “men are born free.” Each man with his material needs and passions is an autonomous whole, absolutely free with an unrestricted liberty. The individual is thus his own end for himself, and the whole aim of society is to maintain this autonomy, in presence of the inequality of conditions, however, by which the pretended unconditional liberty was continually hampered, liberalism sacrificed the weak to the strong and obliged the former to respect the contracts made with the latter out of dire necessity, though with all the external marks of liberty. Hence liberalism in practice sacrificed the fundamental equality of human persons. In the early days of liberalism, it was held, with Adam Smith and Quesnay, that respect for the “laws of nature” would lead to a splendidly harmonious functioning of society. In later times, especially since the French Revolution, in presence of the glaring injustices of the results of “liberty,” all it could affirm, with Malthus and Ricardo, was that, though things were bad, any attempted interference with the “laws of nature” would lead to greater evils.

The oppression of the weak by the strong led to the coalition of the weak in their endeavor to defend the fundamental rights of human nature, in which all are equal. Unfortunately, the leadership of the reaction was seized by Socialists and Communists impregnated with the same revolutionary doctrine of the “autonomy of the individual.” They inaugurated a system as antisocial as the other, by stressing the second part of Article I of the Declaration, namely, “men are born equal.” In the name of the essential equality of human nature they aimed at suppressing the inevitable accidental inequality of human conditions. The only way to succeed in this was to suppress the actual organization of society in which the law maintains the inequality of conditions, especially through the possession of private property, and reconstruct a society in which all the citizens shall be equal not only de jure but de facto. In this ideal society, the state shall own everything and shall oblige all, without distinction of classes, to work for the common good, distributing to each his proper share of the common store.

The liberals are right in admitting, in opposition to the Socialists and Communists, the natural inequality of human conditions, but their false doctrine of the autonomy of the individual, that is, of the unconditional liberty of a created fallen being, leads in practice to denying the rights of human beings to the vast majority.

In their turn, in the name of the same false doctrine, the Socialists and Communists want to suppress the inequality of conditions. All are equally men, they say, meaning thereby autonomous individuals, and to arrive at equality, society must be reorganized on the basis of the suppression of inequalities. As private property is the chief source of inequalities, a beginning must be made by its suppression. Given the false foundation of both doctrines, which is the Rousseauist-Masonic deification of the individual, there is no solution to the problem. If society is conceived to be, as the Declaration of 1789 and the Social Contract of Rousseau suppose, a simple material juxtaposition of autonomous individuals, then, either in the name of liberty, the strong will oppress the weak, or in the name of equality, the manipulators of the coalition will oppress everybody. In both cases, men will be treated as mere individuals, not as persons.

Since the whole object of society, according to the principles of 1789, is to enable individuals to disport themselves freely like gods without any restraint, it is clear that every state must be drawn up in accordance with the terms of Rousseau’s Social Contract. Such a state will be composed exclusively of individuals like so many arithmetically equal units completely independent of one another, under a government emanating from the sum of the individual wills. Accordingly, every society distinct from the state must be dissolved and the work of destruction must not cease till the state rules over particles of human dust. The corporations or guilds went first. The Chapelier Decrees of June, 1791, saw to that. Then the attack on the family by naturalistic divorce laws, laws regulating inheritance of property, school laws, completed the work of decay begun by Protestant individualism. As Socialism and Communism accepted the same disintegrating principle of the individual as God, they continued the attack on the family, even when they tried, by syndicates and unions, to safeguard the workingman from the consequences of individualism. These temporary expedients are destined to be dissolved in their turn when the Communist state is set up. Thus much the same form of omnipotent, all-devouring state, in which men will be treated as mere individuals, will be the logical outcome of the two currents issuing from the principles of 1789.

This state, having done away with every inferior organization, will absorb all power, all right, all authority, and will become the unique administrator, procurator, proprietor, tutor and teacher. From it, too, every vestige of the supernatural life that comes from Our Lord Jesus Christ, the true Messias, as well as every organization permeated with the reality of that life, will be, as far as possible, eliminated.[26] For, behind the naturalistic Masonic Society, which prepared the French Revolution, the better organized and more cohesive naturalistic organization of the Jewish nation has been steadily preparing for the advent of the new Messianic era. This is very evident in the history of the Socialist and Communist current issuing from the principles of 1789 and especially in the Russian Revolution of 1917. To this we must now devote a chapter.

[1]Quoted by Rev. Eustace Dudley in National Resurrection, p. 39.

[2]For the proofs of the fact that Freemasonry prepared and carried out the French Revolution, see The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World, pp. 25–68, and the authors there quoted, especially l’abbé Barruel and M. Auguste Cochin. The monumental work of Père Deschamps, S.J., Les Sociétes Secrètes et la Sociéte, which is not there mentioned, but which was continually utilised, should also be read.

Since that book was written, I have been able to consult in addition the work of the non-Catholic, Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe. Robison was Secretary to the Royal Society of Edinburgh and was a Mason of some standing. He says:

“I had been initiated in a very splendid Lodge at Liege, of which the Prince Bishop, his Trefonciers, and the chief noblesse of the state were members. I visited the French Lodges at Valenciennes, at Brussels, at Aix-la-Chapelle, at Berlin and Königsberg… At St. Petersburg I connected myself with the English Lodge, and occasionally visited the German and Russian Lodges held there.” Then on pages 10 and 11 he adds: “I found that the covert of a Mason Lodge had been employed in every country for venting and propagating sentiments in religion and politics, that could not have circulated in public without exposing the author to great danger. I found that this impunity had gradually encouraged men of licentious principles to become more bold and to teach doctrines subversive of all our notions of morality….and of all satisfaction and contentment with our present life, so long as we live in a state of civil subordination.… I have observed these doctrines gradually diffusing and mixing with all the different forms of Freemasonry, till, at last, an Association has been formed for the express purpose of rooting out all the religious establishments and overturning all the existing Governments of Europe,… And I have seen that the most active leaders in the French Revolution were members of this Association, and conducted their first movements according to its principles, and by means of its instructions and assistance, formally requested and obtained: and, lastly, I have seen that this Association still exists, still works in secret… that the Association has Lodges in Britain corresponding with the Mother Lodge at Munich ever since 1784” (op. cit., p. 2, 3rd ed., 1798).

[3]For a splendid exposition and refutation of these various naturalistic errors, cf. Les Erreurs Modernes (2 vols.), by Dom Paul Benoit. This work could be used as an excellent introduction to the history of the Middle Ages and of the post-revolutionary epoch (1789 to the present day).

[4]Cf. the 3rd Proposition condemned in the Syllabus of Pius IX in The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World, pp. 120, 131.

[5]For a fuller treatment of what is merely outlined here, see The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World, pp. 51–68, and Les Erreurs Modernes, by Dom P. Benoit, vol. I, pp. 473–513.

[6]Encyclical Letter. Tametsi, On Christ Our Redeemer, Nov. 1, 1900.

[7]It is well to recall here the text of Pope Pius XI already quoted: “No belief in God will in the long run be preserved pure and genuine, if it is not supported by belief in Christ” (Encyclical Letter, Mit Brennender Sorge).

[8]Le Diable, Ses Paroles, Son Action, dans lex Possédés d’ Illfurt, pp. 66. The work is compiled from documents embodying the statements of eye-witnesses.

[9]Le Règne Social du Coeur de Jésus, p. 604.

[10]“The deputies who got the project of Jewish Emancipation voted by the Assembly were all Freemasons” (L’Entrée des Juifs dans la Société Françcaise, p. 356, by l’abbé Lemann, the distinguished Jewish convert).

“The servants of the Jews, the Freemasons, got this decree voted, but only at the fourteenth session, after thirteen fruitless attempts.

… Thus was this foreign nation introduced into the bosom of the French nation” (Les Pourquoi de la Guerre Mondiale, Vol. III, pg. 304, by Mgr. Delassus).

[11]Quoted by Mgr. Delassus. op. cit., p. 305.

[12]Sermons, pp. 136–137 (Paris 1898) Quoted by G. Goyan L’Idée de Patrie et l’Humanitarisme.

[13]Encyclical Letter, Au Milieu des Sollicitudes, Feb. 16, 1892.

[14]In The Diary of a Staff Officer of the British Expeditionary Force, published by Methuen in 1941, we read under an entry for May 22nd, 1940: “.…soldiers’ committees regularised in the French Army in 1936 by Monsieur Léon Blum’s regime have undermined discipline. French G.H.Q. is definitely handicapped by the spirit of internationalism that exists to such a great extent among the rank and file.” Thus General Georges, who had promised a counter-attack to check the German panzer onslaught, excused himself to the British for not issuing orders to that effect by explaining that, under the circumstances, he “could not give orders so far in advance of the inclinations of the divisions.”

[15]Nouvelles de France, 23 avril, 1941. Italics mine.

[16]Napoleon, p. 20.

[17]The documentary evidence for Napoleon’s Masonic affiliations is very strong. See Deschamps, Les Sociétis Secrètes et la Société vol. II, pp. 190–220, 4th ed. We read on pages 211, 215, of that work that, “in the first part of his reign, that is, up to 1809, Napoleon received vigorous assistance from the Masonic Lodges in all countries. His military genius was often aided by the treason of the Commanders opposed to him… In the second part of his career, “from 1809 to 1815, he was abandoned by the Secret Societies” In the R.I.S.S. of February 15, 1037, there is an account of the special celebrations of the Italian Grand Orient, on the occasion “of the birth of the King of Rome, son of Brother Napoleon.”

[18]We have already quoted some extracts from the Encyclical showing these principles. There is a striking similarity between them and the principles of naturalism as outlined in the Encylical, Humanum Genus, On Freemasonry.

[19]Encyclical Letter, Immortale Dei.

[20]Constitution, In Eminenti, April 28. 1738.

[21]Constitution, Providas, May 18, 1751.

[22]Apostolic Letter, Quo Graviora, March 13, 1825.

[23]On this whole question of liberalism and Socialism, cf. Culture Latine et Ordre Social, by Pére Gillet, O.P., pp. 42–60.

[24]“The root of liberty is in the will as in its subject, but in the reason as in its cause” (Ia IIae, Q.17, a.l, ad 2). Liberum arbitrium est vis eligendi media servoto ordine finis—Free will is the power of freely selecting the means leading to an end seen by the reason to be obligatory.

When liberals and collectivists call themselves free-thinkers, they are more concerned with liberty than with thought. They hold that a liberty which is compelled to accept the restrictions of thought is not true liberty. On the other hand, they accept readily that thinking should be subject to the caprices of liberty, as if we were free to think whatever we like, whereas, since thought is measured by being, we are only free to think what is (in order). The result of the subjection of thought to the caprices of liberty is that instead of observing the order of life, man yields to passion and degrades himself. (Cf. Culture Latine et Ordre Social, by Pére Gillet, O.P., p. 45).

[25]Human society does not take its rise from an arbitrary contract entered into by human wills, but neither does it arise from a simple fact of nature like the “society” of the bees or that of the ants. It arises from an agreement of wills in conformity with the fundamental inclinations of human nature. Thus it is essentially different from animal “societies.” The whole error of Rousseau (as of Hobbes and Locke) lies in this, that for him the initiative which is at the origin of a society is purely arbitrary and is not demanded by man’s nature. One falls into another error opposed to the former, but just as pernicious, if social organization is held to be, even at its beginnings, a purely physical affair. Between these two erroneous positions, the pure artificialism, of Rousseau and the purely physical or materialist theory—and above them—stands the true doctrine formulated by St. Thomas. We affirm indeed that man, independent of his free decision to do so, is destined by nature to live with other men. But animal instincts will never bring into existence a human society. This must be the work of intelligence choosing modes of life in accordance with some conception of the end of man. We must not overlook the fact that the choice or selection is guided by a rational regulation of the appetitive faculties. Cf. J. Maritain, Clairvoyance de Rome, pp. 152–153.

[26]Cf. Billot, S.J., De Ecclesia, Vol. II, pp. 33–43.

Chapter XV

The Bolshevik Revolution Of 1917[1]

It is an extraordinary fact that the Germans and the English, though at war at the time, collaborated in the work of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The Germans dispatched Lenin and his followers from Switzerland to Russia, and the English liberated Trotsky from Halifax (Nova Scotia), after he and his band of East-side Jewish desperadoes had been arrested on the high seas by the British Fleet, on their way from New York to Russia. The interest of Germany in the collapse of Russia is quite clear, but why did the English assist in accomplishing the ruin of an allied power which had faithfully served the common cause? Was it owing to the influence of “that formidable sect” of which Mr. Winston Churchill spoke in the House of Commons, on November 5th, 1919? On that occasion, he began his account of the Russian Revolution by quoting a passage from the German General Ludendorff’s book on the war. The passage quoted by Mr. Churchill runs as follows: “By sending Lenin to Russia, our (German) government did, moreover, assume a great responsibility, but from the military point of view his journey was justified. Russia had to be laid low. But our government should have seen to it that we were not also involved in her fall.” Mr. Churchill then continued: ‘‘Lenin was sent into Russia by the Germans in the same way that you might send a phial containing a culture of typhoid or of cholera to be poured into the water supply of a great city, and it worked with amazing accuracy. No sooner did Lenin arrive than he began beckoning a finger here and there to obscure persons in sheltered retreats in New York, in Glasgow, in Berne, and in other countries, and he gathered together the leading spirits of a formidable sect, the most formidable sect in the world of which he was the high priest and chief. With these spirits around him he set to work with demoniacal ability to tear to pieces every institution on which the Russian state depended. Russia was laid low. Russia had to be laid low.”[2] As “the leading spirits” gathered around Lenin were, in overwhelming majority, Jews, we may surmise that England and Germany collaborated in the Bolshevik Revolution, owing to Jewish influence. Let us examine briefly in turn the respective roles of England, Germany and the Jewish nation, in the downfall of Czarist Russia and in the installation of the Communist regime. We shall see the Jewish nation acting behind the other two and utilizing them for its own ends.

To understand fully what is stated here, we must bear in mind the invisible, co-ordinating, anti-supernatural action of Satan and the visible, anti-supernatural action of the Jewish nation, along with the influence of both on Freemasonry. Satan wants the elimination of the supernatural influence of Our Lord Jesus Christ from constitutions and social organization, so that men will no longer be trained to think of one another as members of Christ. The Jewish nation, by its determination to reject Our Lord and to prepare for a natural Messias, is necessarily, as a body, animated with the same spirit. The results are disastrous both for themselves and for society. Pope Leo XIII expresses this bitter truth in more than one place in the Encyclical Letter, On Christ our Redeemer. One passage has already been quoted. Let us now quote another: “According to the eternal counsel of God, the salvation of all and each wholly depends on Christ Jesus; those who forsake him, in their blind fury, seek by that very act their own personal destruction, and at the same time as far as they can, make society in general fall back into the very abyss of evils and disasters from which the Redeemer out of his love had delivered mankind.”[3] Statements are sometimes made which seem to imply that the Jewish nation’s opposition to Our Lord is almost a matter of indifference, since they accept God. Yet the opposition of the Jewish nation to Our Lord is the cause of the growing decay in their concept of God (witness the pantheism of their philosophers!), the increasing materialism of the masses of the Jewish people and the conception and utilization of Bolshevism as a means to their ends.

the role of england in

the bolshevik revolution

To trace the action of England in the downfall of Russia, we must go back a certain distance. The secret history of it is given in the work of Père Deschamps already quoted, Les Sociétés Secrètes el la Sociétés (vol. II, pp. 312–418). The plan which was faithfully followed by successive generations of English diplomats is outlined in the famous article published in The Globe of 12th May, 1849, under the direction of the Masonic Chief, Lord Palmerston.[4] Lord Palmerston, whom Père Deschamps calls “Le Grand Orient des Orients” was Foreign Secretary in the English Cabinet. The following are the principal passages of the article in question retranslated from the French: “The scaffolding erected by the Congress of Vienna (1815) was so arbitrary and so artificial that all liberal statesmen saw that it would collapse at the first shock.…The plan formed by Lord Palmerston is that of a new arrangement of Europe—the establishment of a vigorous German Kingdom, which may serve to separate France and Russia, the setting up of a Polish-Magyar state destined to complete the fortification against the Northern Giant, and a new kingdom of Upper Italy under the House of Savoy. Palmerston has often been blamed for neglecting the Austrian alliance, but here his accusers ought to do him justice. The alliance between England and Austria has never been due to the acceptance of common principles. It existed purely and simply because Austria was the representative and, as it were, the incarnation of the German nation. From the date of the Peace of Westphalia to that of Aix-la-Chapelle (1648–1748), Austria was the center of German unity. But when the sword of Frederick had extended the limits of his realm, which was formerly the Electorate of Brandenburg, when true Germans had recognised in this warrior the real representative of their force and of their nationality, Prussia became on the continent the natural ally of England. The selfishness and timidity of George III alone prevented the alliance of Prussia and England from being our buckler in the American War. What Austria was at the beginning of the last century, what Prussia became later on, Germany can also be, whether it has its capital at Berlin or at Frankfort.”

Deschamps then goes on to show how the Masonic plan of Palmerston was realised by the destruction of the states of the Church, in the course of the formation of the Kingdom of Italy, and by the union of Germany under Prussia.[5] In those chapters he mentions some very interesting things, such as, the manner in which Napoleon III agreed to the steps taken for the downfall of Austria and to the unification of Germany under the hegemony of Prussia, and the relations of Bismarck with the leaders of the Internationale, Marx and Lassalle. He alludes also to the support given by Freemasonry and the Jewish nation to the process of supplanting Vienna by Berlin at the head of the German-speaking peoples. Once we keep in mind the anti-supernatural character of Masonic and Jewish action, we shall have no difficulty in seeing that the Treaty of Versailles at the end of the Great War (1914–1918), by which Austria was dismembered and Germany was maintained practically intact under Prussia, was in harmony with Palmerston’s Masonic plan and really paved the way for its final completion. This came with the annexation of Austria by Prussia in 1938.

As most Englishmen have only very hazy ideas about the way in which their government has influenced European affairs in the past, it may be useful to mention some few points in connection with Italy and Germany, before passing on to Russia. Palmerston was, as Deschamps insists, the soul of the Masonic conspiracy of Cavour, Mazzini and Garibaldi, which terminated in the capture of Rome and the long captivity of the Pope. Sir James Hudson, the English ambassador at Turin, was one of Palmerston’s most useful collaborators in the scheme. His residence was the place of refuge of the worst agents of the conspiracy. Deschamps quotes the humorous remarks of one of the Secretaries of the Embassy as follows: “I have just been dining with Sir James. We were twelve in all. Except Sir James and myself all the diners were jailbirds and cut-throats. They were enough to give me the shivers.”[6] G. K. Chesterton’s comments on England’s past relations with Prussia are even more humorous. He writes: “I have passed the great part of life in criticizing and condemning the existing rulers and institutions of my country: I think it is infinitely the most patriotic thing that a man can do. I have no illusions either about our past or our present. I think our whole history in Ireland has been a vulgar and ignorant hatred of the crucifix, expressed by a crucifixion. I think the South African War was a dirty work which we did under the whips of money-lenders. I think Mitchelstown was a disgrace; I think Denshawi was a devilry. Yet there is one part of life and history in which I would assert the absolute spotlessness of England. In one department we wear a robe of white and a halo of innocence. Long and weary as may be the records of our wickedness, in one direction we have done nothing but good. Whoever we may have wronged we have never wronged Germany. Again and again we have dragged her from under the just vengeance of her enemies, from the holy anger of Maria Teresa, from the impatient and contemptuous common sense of Napoleon. We have kept a ring fence around the Germans while they sacked Denmark and dismembered France. And if we had served our God as we have served their Kings, there would not be today one remnant of them in our path either to slander or to slay us.”[7]

Prussia has been continually favored by the anti-supernatural forces, because she has been steadfast in her opposition to the supremacy of the divine life of the Mystical Body of Christ over national life. Bismarck’s Kulturkampf was his effort to repay Freemasonry for its help in the formation of the German Empire.[8]

The first step taken for the realization of the program of Palmerston (or of the Masonic Council that made use of him) was to break up the alliance between Russia, Prussia and Austria. Prussia was easily detached by the promise of ultimate hegemony over united Germany. Austria was frightened by the menace of a coalition between England, France and Turkey to set up a Polish-Hungarian Kingdom, and withdrew from the alliance. Then England, France and Piedmont declared war on Russia under the flimsiest of pretexts. This was the Crimean War. When Russia was thus separated from Austria and weakened beyond the power of assisting her, if she would, France was urged to deal a deadly blow at Austrian rule in Italy and thus prepare the way for the attack on the states of the Church. Prussia then crushed Austria at the battle of Sadowa. France was let down in her turn in 1870 and Bismarck returned thanks by the Kulturkampf. “Wherever the program (of Palmerston) prevailed,” remarks Mgr. Dillon, “the worst form of persecution of the Catholic Church began to rage.”[9] We must now pass on to the war of 1914–1918, which dealt the final blow to the once united but now separated Empires of Austria and Russia.

In the able work of A. Netchvolodow, Lieutenant-General of the Imperial Russian Army, L’Empereur Nicholas II et les Juifs (1924), we read: “In the paper, La Franc-Maçonnerie Démasquée, edited by l’abbé Tourmentin, in the issues of December 10 and 25, 1919, there appeared a list of contemporary Russian Freemasons contributed by one of the correspondents of the paper…

Though this list was published towards the end of 1919, no attempt to refute it or to question its exactness has appeared. Yet most of the people mentioned in the list are living in Paris, and out of the twenty-seven names cited, twenty-one are those of ‘outstanding’ statesmen and politicians, while all are connected more or less closely with the extraordinary events taking place in Russia since February, 1917.

“The following is the list of the twenty-one Freemasons:

“(1) Sazinow (Sergius). Minister for Foreign Affairs of the Imperial government down to the declaration of war in 1914. Later, representative of Admiral Koltchak at Paris.

“(2) Maklakow (Basil). Counsel for the defense in the case of the Jew, Beylis, accused of the ritual murder of young Andrew Youstchinsky, at Kiev. Appointed Ambassador at Paris by the Kerensky government, he still occupies the Russian Embassy and considers himself the representative of Russia. L’abbé Tourmentin adds in a note that Maklakow was a member of the Clichy Lodge, Les Rénovateurs, which had as Venerable, Brother…Sincholle, an important member of the Council of the Order of the French Grand-Orient. This Sincholle was sent on a mission to Russia of which the details will be given.

“(3) Basili (Nicholas). Former functionary attached to the Staff of the General in command of the Russian Army. He, along with General Loukomsky, drew up the manifesto of abdication submitted to the Emperor.

“(4) Count Ignatiew (Alexis). Military representative at Paris of the Imperial Russian government. He remained on after the February (1917) Revolution.

“(5) Prince Lwow (George). Head of the provisional government after the February (1917) Revolution.

“(6) Wyroubrow (Basil). Vice-president of the General Union of Ziemstwos. He played an important part under Prince Lwow, more important still under Kerensky.

“(7) Savinkow (Boris). Famous organiser of political assassinations. Occupied the post of Minister of War under Kerensky.

“(8) Bachmetiew (Boris). Occupied the post of Ambassador at Washington after the February (1917) Revolution. (He is not to be confounded with G. P. Backhmetew, Imperial Ambassador at Washington before the Revolution.)

“(9) Bourtzew (Wladimir).

“(10) Soukine (John). Under-secretary for Foreign Affairs during the Koltchak government.

“(11) Kerensky (Alexander). Former barrister. Revolutionary Socialist. Member of the Duma. Minister of Justice after the February (1917) Revolution. Vice-president of the Petrograd Council of Soldiers and Workers Deputies, then Minister of War, head of the provisional government and General-in-Chief.

“(12) Milioukow (Paul), Leader of the Popular Liberty Party. Minister for Foreign Affairs after the February (1917) Revolution.

“(13) Stakhovitch (Michael). Member of the Popular Liberty Party. Former Chamberlain of the Czar. Accepted the post of Ambassador to Spain under the Kerensky government, but was not recognized at Madrid.

“(14) Jarochinsky (Charles). Financier who made an enormous fortune during the War.

“(15) Argounow. Important member of the former Siberian government.

“(16) Oulianow, alias Lenin. President of the Council of the People’s Commissars in Soviet Russia.

“(17) Bronstein, alias Trotsky. Jew. Head of the Red Army in Soviet Russia.

“(18) Radomyslsky, alias Zinoview. Jew. Head of the Commune of Petrograd. President of the Executive Committee of the Third International.

“(19) Lounatcharsky. Commissar of Public Education in Soviet Russia.

“(20) Joffé. Jew. Former Bolshevik Ambassador at Berlin, in 1922, he represented Soviet Russia at the Genoa Conference.

“(21) Helpfand, alias Parvus. Jew. Important Bolshevik. As agent of the German government, he introduced Lenin to the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1914.

“If we add to all this the information published by L’ Etendard Russe and the paper, Zemstchina, in 1912, both of which declared that A. J. Goutchkow is a Freemason… we thus see linked together by mysterious ties: the former Minister for Foreign Affairs of the Emperor Nicholas II, Sazonow, and A. J. Goutchkow, who considered himself the personal enemy of the Emperor, Prince Lwow, Milioukow, Maklakow, Count A. Ignatiew, Savinkow, Skoropadsky, Kerensky, Pellura, Lenin, Trotsky, Joffé, Parvus and Lounatcharsky.”[10]

If we now pass to the memoirs of the Princess Paley, wife of the Grand Duke Paul, General of the Imperial Guard, we find that in La Revue de Paris, of 1st June, 1922 (page 468). She accuses Sir George Buchanan, the English Ambassador at St. Petersburg, of having fomented the Revolution. She writes: “The English Embassy, by order of Lloyd George, had become a center of (revolutionary) propaganda. The liberals, Prince Lwow, Milioukoff, Rodzianko, Maklakoff, Goutchkoff, etc., were constantly to be found there. It was at the English Embassy that it was decided to abandon constitutional methods and start a revolution.…It was related at St. Petersburg at the beginning of the revolution that Lloyd George, on hearing of the downfall of the Czar and Czarism, had rubbed his hands and said: ‘One of England’s war-aims is attained.’ Great Britain was a strange ally, an ally against whom we should have always been on our guard, for the hostility of England runs like a red line through Russian history for three centuries.…And at present, is it not to the Great Britain of Lloyd George and Robert Horne that we owe the prolongation of Russia’s agony? England purposely maintains in power the anti-Russian International government known as the Soviet government, in order not to allow the real Russia, national Russia, to rise again.”

In his book, My Mission to Russia (Cassel, 1923), Sir George Buchanan replies to these accusations and others. He says: ‘‘As I have no intention of sheltering myself behind any imaginary instructions from home, I may at once state that I accept full responsibility for our attitude towards the revolution. It was on my advice that his Majesty’s government consistently acted. Needless to say, I never engaged in any revolutionary propaganda, and Mr. Lloyd George had our national interests too much at heart ever to have authorised me to promote a revolution in Russia in the middle of a world war. It is perfectly true that I did receive at the Embassy the liberal leaders named by Princess Paley, for it was my duty as Ambassador to keep in touch with the leaders of all parties. I was, moreover, in sympathy with their aims, and, as already stated, I consulted Rodzianko on the subject of those aims before my final audience with the Emperor. They did not want to provoke a revolution as long as the war lasted.…I have nothing to reproach myself with for having cultivated the friendship of these men. They disappointed me by failing, when the crisis came, to keep control of the situation: but they were, I must admit, confronted with colossal difficulties.…It was Hugh Walpole, the head of our propaganda bureau who begged me to show by the warmth of my language at some public meetings where I had to speak that I was wholeheartedly on the side of the revolution. I accordingly did so.…But though he now possessed all the powers necessary for dealing with the situation, Kerensky completely failed to turn them to proper account. He made no attempt to find and arrest Lenin: he countermanded the order for the arrest of Trotsky and another leading Bolshevik, on account of their being members of the executive committee of the Soviet, and he contented himself with issuing proclamations ordering the workmen to deliver up their arms instead of allowing the military authorities to disarm them by force. In fact, I doubt very much if any of the organisms of the Bolshevik rising or any of the men who took part in it were ever really punished.…As head of the government he (Kerensky) must bear the chief responsibility for Russia’s surrender to the Bolsheviks.”[11]

It is not necessary to dwell at any length on these statements. It is clear that both the Russian Liberal (Masonic) leaders and Sir George Buchanan found themselves in the grip of forces they could not control. That has frequently been the case with successful promoters of revolution, who were members of the Masonic association or of other secret societies.

The Russian writer, Petrovsky, in his detailed history of Russia from 1917 to 1930, entitled Russia Under the Jews, confirms this reasoning.[12] He is very severe on Kerensky. He says: “In spite of the proposal of the Procurator to have Lenin, Trotsky and company arrested, Kerensky gave orders to leave the frontiers open.…When the Governor of Petrograd, Colonel Polovtzeff, arrested Trotsky (Bronstein), Nakhamkess and Semachko, Kerensky himself liberated them and took them in his own car to the Smolny Institute reserved for the Soldiers’ and Workers’ Council after the Revolution, and after a while set them completely at liberty. ‘The conduct of Kerensky is so strange… that his actions cannot be explained except by the fact, that an understanding existed between him and the Bolshevik leaders.…If it were not for Kerensky and his double game.[13]…the provisional government would perhaps have succeeded in attracting to its support all the sound elements of the army and the people. But the double game of Kerensky and his evil influence in every direction…. had for result that all honest Russians lost confidence in the provisional government over which he presided. Hence, when the Bolshevik rising took place in October, 1917 the provisional government was abandoned by both soldiers and people. Then Kerensky and company…not forgetting to carry away with them the money and valuables they had plundered…fled abroad.’’

The English writer, Robert Wilton, in his book, Russia’s Agony, is equally emphatic in his judgment of Kerensky. He writes: “Kerensky did everything to upset the arrangements that were being made with a view to checking Bolshevist designs. He helped the Bolshevist game.”[14]

Another point, namely, England’s, failure to prevent the assassination of the Czar and of the helpless Imperial family, must be alluded to briefly. It will be sufficient to transcribe a little of what appears in the book written by Meriel Buchanan (Mrs. Knowling), daughter of Sir George Buchanan, entitled The Dissolution of an Empire (1932). She writes: “In his book, my father has replied to some of the accusations made against him, but, bound as he was by the Official Secrets Act he could not disclose all the true facts, and therefore was never able to clear his name from the slur cast upon it by the indictment of having failed… to help the Imperial family of Russia in their hour of need.…Those who knew him and were with him through those dark and ominous days… know how easy it would have been for him to justify himself, and how it was only loyalty to what he considered was his duty, which kept him silent. Later on, when he had retired from the diplomatic service, he had, I know, the intention of including in his book the truth about the attempt that was made to get the Imperial family out of Russia, but he was told at the Foreign Office, where he had gone to examine some of the documents, that if he did so, he would not only be charged with an infringement of the Official Secrets Act, but would have his pension stopped, and as he was a poor man and had also suffered the loss of the greater part of his personal estate and possessions owing to the Revolution, he decided to hold his hand. The account he gives of the promise of the British government to receive the Emperor in England, and the way in which, afraid of a few extremist members of the House, they were persuaded to take no further action, is therefore a deliberate attempt to suppress the true facts, and so save those who were responsible, from criticism and contempt. Some day I hope somebody will publish the true story of those proceedings, backed by documentary proof in the official archives, but meanwhile I want to try and describe what happened, without the assistance of those official records, from my own personal recollections and from impressions left on my mind by my father’s actual words and actions.

“Late on the afternoon of the 21st March… one of the Grand Dukes…. came to see me on a matter of urgent importance.…‘Does your father know how desperate the Emperor’s situation really is?’ (he asked)… ‘Unless your father arranges for the Emperor’s escape within the next few days his Majesty will be murdered! It is only a question of time, weeks, months, perhaps, but that will most certainly be the outcome.’… And then, just as hope seemed in sight, a telegram arrived from England! It was the 10th April.…He (my father) had sunk down in the chair in front of his desk.…‘I have had news from England’ he said,… ‘They refuse to let the Emperor come over.’…‘They say, my father continued, ‘that it is wiser to discourage the idea of the Imperial family coming to England.…They have told the provisional government to cancel all arrangements.…They are afraid, that is the truth of it; they are afraid!’ That day I remember Mr. Lloyd George’s name was not mentioned, and it was only much later that my father told me that the whole plan of the Emperor’s journey to England had been wrecked because Mr. Lloyd George had warned the King (of England) that the feeling in the country was violently against the Russian Imperial family, that the Labor members had sworn to create trouble if they were received, and that it would be very unwise to risk offending them at that critical juncture of the war. He had at the same time managed to convince the King that the danger to the Imperial family was grossly exaggerated….

“Since those days Mr. Lloyd George has had ample time for reflection, and it is impossible not to feel sorry for a man whose mind must be burdened with the memory of the ghastly mistakes he has made in his attitude towards Russia.… It is very difficult to arrive at the real truth, and it is difficult even to obtain documentary evidence of that truth, for Mr. Lloyd George, at that moment Prime Minister, had a habit of sending telegrams direct to the various Embassies, and not through the usual source of the Foreign Office, so that in the official archives there is nothing to show that he was directly instrumental in preventing the Emperor from being given sanctuary in England.…It is a little difficult, even now, to follow and understand the apparent fluctuations of his policy.…his cordial reception of Mr. Bullitt, the American journalist who went to Russia on a special mission, and returned inoculated with Communist fervor, his refusal to take any drastic steps to counteract the intensive Bolshevik propaganda being carried out in England, and his welcome of the Russian Trade Delegation under Krassin, make one wonder a little dubiously who his counsellors were and what the secret influence was that caused a volatile change of mind always at the crucial moment when the Bolsheviks seemed on the point of surrender. ‘Mr. Lloyd George really did us a great service,’ Lenin told a journalist after the conference in Genoa in 1924.”[15]

In face of the above, we may ask ourselves if Sir George Buchanan was allowed to write freely in what he set down about the liberation of Trotsky from Halifax by the English government.

One last point to which reference must be made concerns Rasputin. Lloyd George writes: “When the Revolution started, Lenin was a refugee in Switzerland. Trotsky was earning a precarious living as a writer on the staff of an unprofitable Communist journal in New York. The conspirators who overthrew Czardom were the Czarina and Rasputin, with the help of the inept ministers they promoted and favored.”[16] The conclusion from these statements would seem to be that Trotsky and Lenin and those behind them were not conspiring to overthrow the Czar, whereas the unfortunate Czarina and Rasputin were conspiring to do so. Lloyd George seems to use the word “conspirators” ambiguously, to say the least of it. We may admit, however, that there were people trying to use Rasputin, and here Freemasonry and the better organized force of the Jewish nation come on the scene. In his book, The Fall of the Russian Empire (p. 110), the Rev. E. A. Walsh, S.J., says: “At a Masonic Congress, held in Brussels at this time (1911), Rasputin was discussed as a possible instrument for spreading the tenets of the order in Russia; it was thought that under his destructive influence the dynasty would be destroyed in two years.”[17]

On his side, Sir George Buchanan in the work already mentioned, My Mission to Russia, writes: “Rasputin was at the same time accused of being in German pay—a charge that was not strictly speaking correct. He was not in immediate communication with Berlin, and he did not receive money from the Germans; but he was largely financed by certain Jewish bankers, who were to all intents and purposes German agents. As he was in the habit of repeating to those Jewish friends of his all that he heard at Tsarskoïe (the Tsar’s palace), and as the Empress consulted him on both military and political questions, much useful information reached the Germans through this indirect channel. Without being their regular agent, he was, moreover, rendering them yeoman service by discrediting the Imperial regime and thus paving the way for revolution.”

the role of germany in

the bolshevik revolution

Germany’s role in the Bolshevik Revolution has been admirably summarized in A. N. Field’s instructive work. The Truth About the Slump, pp. 58–74. Only a few points need be touched upon, because the main facts are not in dispute. The first point is that it was a wealthy Jew named Parvus or Helpfand, given as a Freemason in the list already quoted, who acted as the intermediary between the German government and Lenin. It was he who arranged with the German government the passage of Lenin through Germany in a sealed train.[18]

A collaborator of his was Ganetski-Fürstenberg. According to the Russian Lady, Ariadna Tyrkova Williams, widow of the late Harold Williams, in her valuable book, From Liberty to Brest-Litovsk, “Ganetski-Fürstenberg was an adventurer on a large scale, a collaborator with Parvus the provocateur, a Socialist with a very tarnished reputation.…Helpfand-Parvus had made Copenhagen his headquarters and thence this adroit adventurer managed his miscellaneous enterprises, such as the contraband sale of expensive drugs for the Russian Army, the supply of cheap German coal for the needs of Danish co-operative societies, revolutionary propaganda in Russia, and perhaps not in Russia only.…Through Ganetski-Fürstenberg the Bolsheviks used to obtain large sums of money. This was discovered after the first attempt at a coup d’etat made by the Bolsheviks.…Large sums of money were transferred to Petrograd by a Russian Jew, Helpfand, commonly known among international Socialists by his literary pseudonym of Parvus. This obscure international speculator, who acquired an enormous fortune, styled himself the inspirer of Bolshevism. The German Social-Democrat Haase revealed the strange connections of Parvus with the Imperial government.…The Russian Intelligence Department possessed data proving the connection between the Bolsheviks and the German General Staff. But Kerensky’s government fell apart, without having published its information, and without arriving at any definite conclusion upon the subject.”[19]

Supplementary information on these points is available from the report issued by Mr. Edgar Sisson called The German-Bolshevik Conspiracy (Washington, D.C., Oct., 1918). Mr. Sisson compiled this report while acting in his capacity as “Special Representative in Russia of the Committee on Public. Information.’’ As the delegate of President Wilson, he acquired important documents concerning the German-Bolshevik Conspiracy. The Committee on Public Information published the Sisson Documents as War Information, Series No. 20, October, 1918, after having submitted the documents to the Investigators of the National Board for Historical Service in the United States. Both the Committee on Public Information and the United States Congress accepted the judgment of the National Board for Historical Service on these documents. This much we learn from the remarkable booklet, An Answer to Father Coughlin’s Critics, by the Radio Priest’s Friends. Father Coughlin’s Friends quote at considerable length from the Sisson Documents, as does A. N. Field in The Truth about the Slump.

Document No. 1 is to the effect that, in accordance with orders received from the Bolshevik leaders, there had been removed from the archives of the Ministry of Justice an order of the German Imperial Bank “allowing money to Comrades Lenin and Trotsky and others for the propaganda of peace in Russia,” and that at the same time “all the books” of the bank in Stockholm had been “audited” to conceal the payment of funds to Lenin and Trotsky and their associates on the order of the German Imperial Bank (Order 7433). Another document stated that “Zinovieff and Lunacharsky got in touch with the Imperial Bank of Germany through the bankers D. Rubenstein, Max Warburg, and Parvus. Zinovieff addressed himself to Rubenstein and Lunacharsky through Altvater to Warburg, through whom he found support in Parvus.” Sisson added to this in a note: “Parvus and Warburg both figure in the Lenin and Trotsky documents.…Warburg is believed to have been lately in Petrograd.”

The second point to be noted is that mentioned by Mr. Boris Brasol, the Russian writer, in his book, The World at the Cross Roads. “The full history,” writes Mr. Brasol, “of the interlocking participation of the Imperial German government and international finance in the destruction of the Russian Empire is not yet written.…It was not a mere coincidence that at the notorious meeting held in Stockholm in 1916, between the former Russian Minister of the Interior, Protopopoff, and the German Agents, the German Foreign Office was represented by Mr. Max Warburg, whose two brothers (Paul and Felix) were members of the international banking firm, Kuhn, Loeb and Company, of which the late Mr. Jacob Schiff was a senior member.”[20] This brings us to the part played by the Jewish nation behind the warring states, England and Germany.

the role of the jewish nation

in the bolshevik revolution

Unless one realizes that the driving force behind the Bolshevik Revolution was that of the Jewish nation, it is impossible to explain adequately how the hitherto rather sleepy Russia suddenly woke up in 1917, and began an intensive campaign for international domination, spending money lavishly. Whence came the dynamic energy in the Russian character all of a sudden? How are we to explain the sudden appearance of a virulent anti-God movement in a people that with all its faults was intensely religious? Both these questions find an adequate answer in the controlling influence of the nation that has persistently rejected the one true Mediator between God and man and is ever seeking to impose its will on God, instead of accepting His will. Otherwise these things seem inexplicable. Once we realize, however, that 1917 witnessed what the German revolutionary, Wilhelm Marr, had foreseen before 1879. we can understand what took place and is taking place.
“In that vast Empire,” he wrote, “Judaism will find the fulcrum of Archimedes which will enable it to pull the whole of Western Europe off its hinges once for all. The wily Jewish spirit of intrigue will bring about a revolution in Russia such as the world has never yet seen.”[21]

Pope Pius XI did not think it possible to explain the hatred of religion in Russia without taking account of the action of secret societies. On June 3rd, 1933, in an Encyclical Letter dealing with the persecution in Spain, he said that “this persecution has been set on foot, not so much from ignorance of Catholic teaching and of its benefits, as from the hatred and enmity, which the destroyers of all order, civil and religious, banded together in secret societies as in Mexico and Russia, cherish and stir up ‘against the Lord and against his Christ’.” Pope Pius XI holds too that Bolshevism was foreign to Russia, in spite of the contrary opinion expressed by writers such as the Rev. Edmund Walsh, S.J., in The Fall of the Russian Empire.[22] Father Walsh wrote: “A thesis common in Monarchist and emigre circles labors to prove that the Bolshevik revolution was an unnatural, un-Russian phenomenon artificially created by two foreign influences, German militarism and Jewish hatred, and then imposed by treachery on a demoralised and exhausted people. But on the strength of the record, and in view of the testimony of representative Russians supported by documentary evidence now becoming increasingly available, I am obliged to reject that theory.…I maintain that Bolshevism is a natural phase in the evolution of a strictly historical process originating in the soil, the culture, and the politics of Russia itself.’’ In the Encyclical Letter. Divini Redemptoris, Pope Pius XI wrote in 1937: “For them (the peoples of the Soviet Union) We cherish the warmest paternal affection. We are well aware that not a few of them groan beneath the yoke imposed on them by men who in very large part are strangers to the real interests of the country. We recognize that many others were deceived by fallacious hopes. We blame only the system with its authors and abettors who considered Russian the best prepared field for experimenting with a plan elaborated years ago, and who from there continue to spread it from one end of the world to the other.”[23] Let us now take some of the historical evidence which goes to prove that those “strangers to the real interests of Russia,” who are experimenting with this Marxian plan elaborated years ago. are members of the Jewish nation.

a. the jewish nation guides

the communist movement

We have seen how Communism follows from the “freedom and equality” of the principles of 1789. Françcois Noel Babeuf, one of the adepts of the secret societies that prepared and carried out the French Revolution, in an address to the French people, drew the logical conclusions from these principles with a savage vigor which leaves nothing to be desired.[24] With the reaction against the Revolution, the class-war died down, though the collectivist theories of Babeuf persisted in the Socialist movements. The class-war, the militant atheism, and all the other characteristics of the revolutionary epoch were revived with renewed vigor when the Jews assumed the leadership of Communism with Karl Marx and Ferdinand Lassalle. In The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World (pp. 82–87), a brief account of the rise and development of Communism and Socialism under the control of the Jew’s is given.[25] That outline will suffice to show that the Jewish writer, Alfred Nossig, in his book, Integrales Judentum (Integral Judaism), does not exaggerate when he says that “the modern socialist movement is chiefly the work of Jews.” The plan of the revolution is always substantially the same. The reins of government of some great nation must be captured and then that nation must be made use of to impose the revolutionary ideal and the domination of the Jewish nation on the world. If Marx had succeeded through his agents in the Paris Commune of 1871, France would have had the fate reserved for Russia in 1917.

The preparation of the Russian Revolution on the part of the Jewish nation began long before 1917. In the New York Times of March 24, 1917, there is an account of a celebration held in New York over the initial stage of the revolution which had taken place on March 14. At that celebration, a Mr. George Kennan said that “during the Japanese-Russian war he was in Tokyo and that he was permitted to make visits among the 12,000 Russian prisoners in Japanese hands.… He told how they asked him to give them something to read and he had conceived the idea of putting revolutionary propaganda into the Russian army. The Japanese authorities favored it and gave him permission. After which he sent to America for all the Russian revolutionary literature to be had.…The movement was financed by a New York banker you all know and love, he said, referring to Mr. Schiff, and soon we received a ton and a half of Russian revolutionary propaganda. At the end of the war 50,000 Russian officers and men went back to their country ardent revolutionists. The Friends of Russian Freedom had sowed 50,000 seeds of liberty in 100 Russian regiments. I do not know how many of the officers and men were in the Petrograd fortress last week, but we do know what part the army took in the revolution.” A message was then read from Mr. Jacob Schiff regretting his inability to be present to celebrate “the actual reward of what we had hoped and striven for these long years.” Jacob Schiff had arranged a loan to help Japan to fight Russia in 1904–1905. According to the Jewish Communal Register (New York), “ He (Jacob Schiff) financed the enemies of autocratic Russia from the money market of the United States.”[26]

b. the jewish bund and

the bolshevik revolution

For a good many years before the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, the Jewish nation had been actively engaged in preparing a Communist Revolution in Russia. The Jewish writer, Dr. A. S. Rappoport wrote in his book, Pioneers of the Russian Revolution (pp. 228, 250–252): “To a greater degree than the Poles, the Letts or the Finns, or, indeed, any other ethnic group in the vast empire of the Romanovs, they (the Jews) have been the artisans of the Revolution of 1917.…There was no political organization in the vast Empire that was not influenced by Jews or directed by them. The Social Democratic, the Socialist Revolutionary Parties, the Polish Socialist Party, all counted Jews among their leaders.…The heroism of the members of the ‘Bund’ or General Union of Jewish Workingmen, founded in 1897, served as a model to the fighters for freedom, the pioneers of the Russian Revolution. The Bund was a political and economic association of the Jewish proletariat, at first averse to all national distinctions, but gradually impregnated with Jewish national sentiment. It made active propaganda in Yiddish, published numerous pamphlets and such organs as The Jewish Workingman, The Voice of the Workingman.…The Jewish intelligentzia assimilated itself with the Russian intelligentzia during the seventies, just as the Jewish proletariat was destined to make common cause with the Russian proletariat later on.… I have already pointed out that there are two proletariats, the manual and the intellectual.…Many members of the Bund belonged to the intellectual proletariat.…The members of the Bundists arrested, imprisoned and deported amounted to 1,000 during the years 1897–1900, and 2,180, between 1901 and 1903. Altogether, from March, 1903, to November, 1904, 384 politicals passed through the prison of Alexandrovskane. The following is the percentage of these prisoners according to nationality: 53.9% Jews, 26.4% Russians,…as for the women, 64.3% were Jewesses. Plehve maintained that 80% of the revolutionaries in Russia were Jews.”[27]

Rappoport’s book was published in 1918. Certainly there is not anything in the book to make one conclude that “among the fiercest opponents of Bolshevism was the General League of Jewish Workers, called the Bund,” as we read in the pamphlet, Bolshevism is not Jewish, published by the Woburn Press (London). On the contrary, according to Rappoport, the Bund practically prepared the Revolution of 1917. On page 5, Rappoport says that he sees the period of terror coming in Russia, but that it is only natural that it should come, however much to be deplored. Perhaps the “Reign of Terror” has been so savage and of such long duration that the Jewish Board of Deputies behind the Woburn Press does not like the Jewish direction of Bolshevism to be known.

Another source of information about the Bund which does not seem to have been utilised so far in the history of the Bolshevik Revolution will now be called upon. This is the book, The Polish Jew, by Beatrice Baskerville.[28] Written in 1906, long before the events which we have witnessed since 1917, it yet foreshadows them so accurately that it is difficult to believe it was written so far ahead. The book, as the author tells us in the Preface, was the result of eight years residence in Russian Poland. “During this time,’’ she says, “I have witnessed the growth of that revival which has now spread throughout most of the settlements and all the large Ghettoes, and which has engendered hostility to the Gentile and revolution against the powers that be.” It is regrettable that only a few passages can be quoted, but they will be sufficient to show that there must have been a powerful organization and strong financial resources behind the Bund.

“Here under the northern skies,” writes Miss Baskerville, “…the children of Israel play a role which cannot but interest the English-speaking race that has seen enough of the Jewish emigrant to fear that his presence, hitherto but a troublesome question, may shortly assume all the proportions of a problem.…He (the Anglo-Saxon) reads with horror of Jewish massacres and of Jewish persecution.…Has he had an opportunity of observing the methods of the Polish Jews who, living freely among a nation in the proportion of one in seven, have attained an influence in the proportion of seven to one? Has he seen the other side of the medal and counted the cases in which the Semite takes advantage of the Slav, and the Jew rules the Russian?…. Can he imagine the capital of Poland, the most civilized city in Russia… where every third man is a Jew, where the trade and commerce are in the hands of Jews and where Jewish organizations have openly declared their intention of converting the Imperial Army to the tenets of Socialism and of gaining the greatest amount of political influence when the crisis of crises, the fall of absolutism, shall throw the Empire into chaos? And yet these things are facts, and, what is of more importance to the Anglo-Saxon peoples, these facts may, though in a modified form, spring up amongst them.…

“The Bund came to Poland from Lithuania in the year 1900. The soil was well prepared to receive it, for signs of a political revival, engendered by the desire to assert Jewish nationalism, had already made their appearance. Its program includes the overthrow of Tsardom and the establishment of a democratic government, the convocation of a national assembly based upon universal, direct and secret voting: amnesty for all political prisoners the abolition of capital punishment, the nationalization of the land, etc., etc. So far this program is identical with that of another revolutionary party, the Social Democratic League. But there is a clause dealing with the Jewish question.…Incidentally, too, the Bund tends to draw the Jewish proletariat away from the superstitions of Judaea; a man who believes in the precepts of modern Socialism can scarcely retain all his respect for Talmudic and Rabbinistic lore. But at the same time the Bund does not laugh at Yiddish, far from it.…The Bund insists: ‘When autocracy falls we shall have a vast amount of political influence. The Jew will no longer be the pariah of society: he will be able to assert his own individuality. Keep to your Yiddish.…’ The immediate goal of the Bundist is the overthrow of Tsardom. He employs two general means towards that end—strikes and the conversion of the Tsar’s military and naval forces to the tenets of Socialism.…

“Generally speaking, the activity of the Bund is confined to the young generation of the Jewish proletariat.…. The parents…. do not understand the revival which has manifested itself so conspicuously during the past five years. The children retort that their fathers were young in different times, and that the wave of revolution that is sweeping over Russia is the only hope for the civil emancipation of the Jews.…The weak point about all the revolutionary undertakings in Russia is the attitude of the military, who not only refuse to fight for the people, but, in spite of all efforts to organize mutinies, show a considerable amount of respect for their officers.…The Bundists are hopeful of curing this trait… by organizing as many small mutinies as possible.[29] Whether they will succeed in doing so remains to be seen, and as they themselves allow a term of five to seven years before expecting any great results, the world will probably wait a good deal longer before the average Russian soldier grows careful about anything when drunk or fails to repent of his misdeeds when sober.…Should their officers decide to cast in their lot with the people against autocracy, there is little doubt that the soldiers would obey them. But this is not what the Bund aims at: the Bund wants to stir up strife between officer and private, and has organized a system of propaganda amongst the Tsar’s military and naval forces with this end in view.

“Propaganda is carried on, (1) by Jewish factors who obtain entrance into all the garrisons and fortresses, (2) by Jews serving in the army or navy.…Factors have as much access to the sailors as to the soldiers. From time to time the factor can distribute leaflets calling upon them not to shoot their brethren but their officers. There is a great amount of risk in such propaganda for the Russian soldier or sailor is very anti-Semitic, and often denounces the agitator or arrests him.…The Jewish soldier has a far better chance of success.…The soldier will listen to a comrade better than to a factor. Often he will agree that as the man is a Jew he cannot be giving him good advice: but though a Jew he is a comrade, and therefore deserving of some sort of consideration.…But the Bund is not content with persuading the soldier to fight for the proletariat: it has taught the proletariat to fight against the soldier so long as he refuses to listen to its call and rise against autocracy.

“The leaders of the movement soon realised that the physical cowardice which characterizes the Polish Jew was a great drawback.…So they promptly organized what they called ‘fighting groups,’ consisting of armed men.…This systematic arming was first introduced by the Bund, and upon the Bund the responsibility of placing firearms in the hands of the proletariat rests.… Its adherents are supplied with revolvers of the Browning system and taught how to use them. Those who can afford to pay are supposed to do so, but the poorer ones receive them for nothing.…Nearly all the revolvers in the possession of the Bund… were brought into the country without the knowledge of the customs authorities.…

“Among the resolutions of a Congress of Bundists are the following: Groups of non-Jewish workmen must be formed to agitate among the non-Jewish proletariat in order to gain the greatest amount of political influence by the time autocracy is abolished…General Strikes… are of paramount importance…Terror must be applied when necessary. It is also necessary that public men who are dangerous to the cause be removed. In time of public disturbances government buildings must be stormed by the populace…”[30]

Miss Baskerville treats more briefly of the other revolutionary parties. Of the Social Democratic League or Party, to which the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks belonged, she says: “The Social Democratic League of (Russian) Poland was founded by Rosa Luxembourg, a Jewess, and Karski, in 1893. Its program is the same as that of the Bund except for the clause treating of Jewish nationalism. A large proportion of the members of the party are Jews.…Of 75 names (of individuals arrested in a police raid) 66 were indisputably Jewish and the rest either doubtful or non-Jewish. The Social Democrats, being anti-national, appeal to many of the Jewish intelligentzia who have left the traditions of the Hebrew culture far behind them.…These men and women have generally been educated in the Russian Gymnasia, where the tendency of the teaching is non-national. The Social Democrats seem to live in a world mapped out by Marx and Engels.”[31]

The author then goes on to point out that “the rank and file of these parties quarrel among themselves and with the followers of the National Democratic Party.” If we take account of the nationalism of the Jews of the Bund, and of the internationalism of the Jews of the Social Democratic Party, we have at least a partial explanation of some of the liquidations which took place later on when the Bolsheviks triumphed.

c. the difference between

the bolsheviks and the mensheviks

What was the difference between Bolshevik and Menshevik members of the Social Democratic Party? A carefully written article in the London Free Press of October, 1938, examined the question thoroughly. It seems that at a Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party held in London in one of the early years of the century, a discussion arose over the wording of Paragraph I of the Party Rules. Lenin proposed that this should read: “Anyone is a member of the Party who participates in the organization of the Party.” Martoff introduced a counter-proposal which ran: “Anyone working under the supervision of the Party is a member of the Party.” In the voting which followed, Lenin’s proposal received a few more votes than that of Martoff. From that day forward, his supporters called themselves Majoritarians (Bolsheviks) while those of Martoff styled themselves Minoritarians (Mensheviks). The writer in the Free Press then continues: “Thus the difference between a Menshevik and a Bolshevik is a mere matter of hair-splitting over the qualifications of Party membership, and the two parties, in all the essentials of revolutionary propaganda, were inspired by the same aims.” We are therefore again in a position to cast grave doubts on an assertion in the pamphlet, Bolshevism is not Jewish, namely, that the Bund was amongst the fiercest opponents of Bolshevism. The Bund, of course, joined the Mensheviks, for Martoff’s proposal suited them perfectly, whereas Lenin’s proposal suited the Jews of the National Democratic Party better.[32] After the Kerensky revolution, the nationalism of the Bund opposed the internationalism of the Bolsheviks, but in the summer of 1917, large numbers of intellectuals and of the proletariat left the Bund and joined the Bolsheviks.[33] Directions for the change over may have been given by the Central Jewish organization in Switzerland, about which something was learned in 1905, on the occasion of the revolutionary troubles at Odessa.

d. the central jewish organization

and the revolution at odessa

in november, 1905

The correspondent of The Times at Odessa lifts the veil for a moment and reveals the existence of this center of direction. In the issue of November 22, 1905, under the heading of The Reign of Terror at Odessa, we read: “It must be understood that all through September, meetings of a national or…of a revolutionary character were being held in the local universities.…The various organizations, Radical and Ultra-Radical, were preparing for a crucial moment. Amongst the other Socialistic fraternities, the Central Jewish Organization located in Switzerland, sent emissaries from its branches in Warsaw and Boland to Odessa.…On Sunday, Oct. 29th ,…many excited boys and girls, other than students at the universities, began to make barricades across certain of the main streets. Excited Jewish factory girls… donned red blouses and ribbons, and openly flaunted them in the faces of the Cossack and Dragoon patrols.…Even yet the situation would not have been dangerous, if the emissaries from Warsaw had not brought an arsenal with them. Many of these… youthful demonstrators were flourishing revolvers. Shots were fired.…Half a dozen gendarmes were deliberately assassinated at their stations at the street corners.…It was at this very moment that the Tsar’s Great Manifesto (granting the Constitution) arrived….

“On Tuesday, October 31st…the knots of excited people at the street corners grew into processions that surged up and down the main thoroughfares. It was immediately noticeable that for the main part the demonstrators were students and Jews.

A large percentage were girls. For some time, the processions were orderly enough. A red flag or two occasionally appeared but in the general enthusiasm were readily discounted. The main gatherings drifted to the headquarters of the Governor-General. Kama Kaulbars…. called for three cheers for the Constitution.

“After leaving the presence of the Military Governor, the processionists, who were for the most part excited Jews, unblushingly exhibited Republican emblems. Red flags were unfurled at the head of the procession. Where found, the Russian National Emblem was dishonored by having all color, except the strip of red, torn from it. The crowd, now absolutely beside itself, surged down to the City Hall. They tore the national motto down from the portico, mutilated the Emperor’s portrait in the session room, and hysterically declared the reigning dynasty to be abolished and a South Russian Republic established. In the street the more tardy Russian patriotic processions carrying their own particular ‘ikons’ and the portraits of the Tsar and Tsaritsa were met by the now acknowledged revolutionists. The latter tore the emblems from the patriots’ hands, grossly insulted them, and derided the carriers.…

“As has been pointed out above, the Central Jewish Organization, acting in conjunction with other revolutionary committees, had provided the implements by which it was hoped that anarchy might be established. Already the Jewish population had been wrought up to a state of frenzy owing to the Manifesto and the events which had followed upon its issue.…Bombs were dropped from balconies, revolvers fired from behind counters and shutters.…On Tuesday night the massacres began in real earnest.…The Jews, organized in gangs, had the upper hand at night, the Christians took their pound of flesh by day,… And so the slaughter of Christian and Jewish women and children continued until Baron Kaulbars’s time limit had expired.…The Military Governor marched his battalions into the streets and order was almost instantaneously restored.

“Odessa is a town of about 430,000 inhabitants, of which just over a third are Jews. For the three days…. some 415,000 of the populace remained behind barred doors. About 15,000 engaged in the lutte acharnée (fierce struggle) with the result that the Jewish cemetery received over 400 bodies and the Christian about 600. There are something over 4,000 admissions to the public hospitals, more or less equally divided.…There are at least 40,000 rendered homeless…of whom the vast majority are Jews.”

The Times, of November 30, continues the narrative under the heading, The Situation at Odessa. “It is now definitely known,” writes the special correspondent, “and indeed admitted by the Jewish organizations, that so far back as Easter last the Jews began secretly to arm. There were three organizations the Bund, the Zionists, and the students and the Jewish workmen, the latter organized by two well known Russian professors from the local university. The organization supplied over 1,000 persons with revolvers and ammunition.…The armed Jews fired wildly into the streets from balconies and housetops, then, having stung the canaille into white-hot fury, threw away their arms and hid themselves, while the frenzied Russian mob rolled on into the suburbs and flung itself upon the unarmed Jewish workmen and shopkeepers.”

The columns of The Times at that period are full of accounts of protests against the treatment of the Jews in Russia. In the speeches delivered at these meetings, there is no mention of the Central Jewish Organization engaged in training and equipping the Bund, etc., for the future Socialist Revolution, for example, the issue of December 5, 1905, contains an account of the great day of mourning throughout the United States for the victims of the massacres in Russia. In New York, there was the greatest demonstration in the history of the Jews in America. “Chanting funeral hymns, while fifty bands played dirges, 125,000 Jews marched through the streets of the Lower East Side and then along Broadway to Union Square, where a mass meeting was held.” Thus is a legend created and dust thrown in the eyes of the public.

e. in the hour of triumph

On the 1st of July, 1922, the Czech deputy, Mazanac, made, long speech in the Czech Parliament, in which amongst other things he said:

“Honorable Members of Parliament! When you read over at your leisure what I am about to say to you, I beg of you not to waste any time on the question of what people will emerge triumphant from the Communist chaos. That is one of the points that is most evident in present day political life, but wonderful to relate, it is never mentioned amongst us. To speak of the Catholic religion and of the Catholic Church and Catholic clergy as the most obscurantist elements in the realm of obscurantism is considered amongst us as a sign of good education, and language of this kind will get a man any post, especially in our diplomacy, but to mention Jews at all is to brand oneself as a reactionary. Well, whether I am branded as a reactionary, or not, it seems to me that to speak of the Genoa Conference without mentioning Jews, to carry on negotiations with Soviet Russia, while making abstraction of the plans of the chosen people… is to give a clear proof of the way the press has trained and formed our minds all these years.

“Allow me to quote for you, Gentlemen, in this connection, something emanating; from the powers that direct world politics. though they pretend they do not. Of these powers we shall learn nothing either in the official reports or in the lengthy debates on the Genoa Conference. I am going to read for you a circular destined for the representatives of the Committees of (some) Jewish International Association. It was found in the pocket of an individual named Zunder, on the night of 9th December, 1920, after a skirmish with the bolshevik troops on the Esthonian frontier. Zunder was the officer in command of the 11th Regiment of Sharpshooters. The circular is drawn up in Hebrew. Here is what it says:

“‘Sons of Israel! The hour of victory is at hand. We are on the eve of becoming masters of the world. What seemed to be merely a dream is on the point of being realised. Formerly weak and feeble we can now proudly lift up our heads, thanks to the disorder and confusion of the world. By clever propaganda we have held up to criticism and ridicule the authority and practice of a religion which is foreign to us. We have plundered the sanctuaries of that foreign cult, and we have shaken the hold of their traditional culture upon nations, finding amongst them more helpers than we needed in our task. We have succeeded in bringing the Russian nation under Jewish sway and we have compelled it, at last, to fall on its knees before us. Russia, mortally wounded, is now at our mercy.

“‘The fear of the danger in which we stand will not allow us either to exercise compassion or to feel mercy. At last, it has been given to us to behold the tears of the Russian people, by taking away from them their wealth and their gold, we have turned the Russians into wretched slaves, but we must be prudent and circumspect. We have to eliminate all the best elements of Russian society, in order that the enslaved Russians may have no leaders. Thus we shall forestall every possibility of resisting our might. Wars and civil strife will destroy all the treasures of culture created by the Christian peoples.

“‘Be prudent, Sons of Israel, do not confide in treacherous and mysterious forces. Bronstein, Rosenfeld, Steinberg, Apfelbaum, and many other faithful sons of Israel are in the ranks of the Commissars and play the leading roles, but do not lose your heads over the victory. Be prudent, for you can rely only on yourselves to safeguard you and defend you. Sons of Israel, close up your ranks and combat for your eternal ideal!’”

Mr. Mazanac’s speech appeared in No. 375 of the Russian paper, Novoé Vréman, edited at Belgrade, on July 28th, 1922, under the title, In the Czech Parliament. Lieutenant-General Netchvolodow adds, in his book, L’Empereur Nicholas II et les Juifs (p. 243) that nobody has shaken the authority of the document quoted by Mr. Mazanac.[34]

It is to be noted particularly that in the document quoted by Mr. Mazanac, Bronstein, (alias Trotsky) is mentioned as “a faithful son of Israel.” This does not mean, of course, that Trotsky was an orthodox Jew adhering rigidly to the practices of the Jewish religion, but that he was devoted to his own nation. We find a confirmation of this in The Story of “St. 25,’’ by Sir Paul Dukes, for years British Secret Service agent in Russia. The author relates that after the S. R. Strikes, Trotsky made a speech at the Putilov works, in which he said that the Petrograd Soviet was planning to requisition two large Churches as offices and clubs for the workmen. “At this point,” writes Sir Paul, “a workman rose and interrupted: ‘Comrade Trotsky, instead of taking our churches which are badly heated and unsuited to your requirements, why do you not requisition your synagogue in Offizerskaya Street, which would suit you better?’ This interruption was followed by deadly silence. Trotsky made no reply. The interruptor said afterwards: ‘I was sure I should be seized and arrested.…’”[35] It is evident that statements about Trotsky’s indifference to Jewish interests such as are contained in the pamphlet, Bolshevism is not Jewish, must not be taken at their face value.

f. the alliance of jewish finance

with communism

It is unnecessary to treat of this alliance in detail. This has already been done in masterly fashion in La Mysterieuse Internationale Juive, by M. Léon de Poncins, and in Mr. A. N. Field’s books, The Truth About the Slump and All These Things. “The supreme Jewish ideal,” sums up M. de Poncins in his able work (page 209), “consists in the transformation of the world into a Limited Liability Company. The capital of this company will be the Earth and it will have for object the exploitation of the whole human race. Israel, aided perhaps at the beginning by a few figureheads, will supply the Council of Dictators to administer the affairs of the Company. Two methods are being employed to reach this end. The first is Americanization, which has the inconvenience of being relatively slow. The second, which is rapid, brutal and dictatorial, is Communism.…Progress does not consist in replacing bourgeois Capitalism by proletarian Communism. Progress consists in substituting for the as yet limited Capitalism of Europe and America, under which there is still a certain degree of political liberty, World-Capitalism with despotic political power.”

An excellent commentary on the above summary is to be found in the account given by Count de St. Aulaire, former Ambassador of France at Madrid and London, of a “lecture” by a Jewish banker of New York on the mission of Israel amongst the nations. The “lecture” was “delivered” at an international dinner at Budapest in 1919, only a few days after the collapse of the Judaeo-Bolshevist domination over Catholic Hungary. “A number of Jewish revolutionaries,” writes the Count, “who had been expelled from Hungary, were there.…They wore American uniforms.… I have retained in my memory the conversation of one of these augurs whose neighbor at table was.…He had become director of a great New York bank, one of those which were financing the Bolshevist Revolution.… A fellow guest had asked him how it was possible for high finance to protect Bolshevism.…Our friend, who was then at the head of a mission for feeding those who were without bread, swigged off a big glass of Tokay, paused for a moment, taking a long pull at his enormous cigar which had cost five golden francs. and then said: ‘Those who are astonished at our alliance with the Soviets forget that the nation of Israel is the most nationalist of all peoples.

…Like the papacy, it is œcumenical and spiritual. But its eyes are turned towards the future rather than the past and its kingdom is of this world.…To the calm and monotonous song of prosperity we prefer the passionate voices, raised in turn, of a rise and fall in market values. There is nothing like a revolution to excite them, unless it is a war which is also a revolution.…The health of our Golden Calf calls for the sickness of certain nations, those which are incapable of developing themselves by their own efforts.…The whole economic life of Turkey (the sick man) was entrusted to is. We looked after him so well, that he died of the treatment, at least as far as Turkey in Europe was concerned.…Russia is now the sick man of post-war times, much more nutritive to us than the Ottoman Empire and much less able to defend itself. Russia is our new feast. It will soon be a corpse and our only trouble will be to carve it up.… In the management of the new world we give proof of our organization for revolution and for conservation. Our organization for revolution is evidenced by destructive Bolshevism and for construction by the creation of the League of Nations which is also our work,…Israel is the microcosm and the germ of the City of the Future.’ ”[36]

This “lecture” came back to my mind on learning that the authenticity of the document quoted briefly on page 27 of The Rulers of Russia and at length on pages 88–91 of The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World, had been questioned in the United States. The document in question implicated the banking house of Kuhn, Loeb and Co., as well as certain directors of it, in the work of financing the Bolshevik Revolution. It had been widely published in France with its index number in the files of the French General Staff—“7—618—6 No. 912—S R.2 II Transmis par l’Etat—major de l’armée, 2e Bureau.” In La Documentation Catholique of March 6, 1920, it was preceded by the following remarks: “The authenticity of this document is guaranteed to us. With regard to the exactness of the information which it contains, the American Official Services must assume responsibility.”

Recently, the question has been splendidly dealt with in An Answer to Father Coughlin’s Critics, by Father Coughlin’s Friends, which is highly recommended to all who are interested in the question. A few additional remarks may, however, be of interest. The document in question was communicated to the Editor of La Documentation Catholique, by a diplomat then representing a foreign government in Paris. ‘This diplomat was afterwards assassinated. Another point is that in the book. The Reign of the Elders, page 59, the following is given as the Naval Secret Service Report on Paul Warburg, a member of Kuhn, Loeb and Company, in December, 1918:

“Warburg, Paul, New York City, German: was naturalised an American citizen 1911, was decorated 1912 by the Kaiser; was vice-Chairman of United States Federal Reserve Board; is a wealthy and influential banker: handled large sums furnished by Germany for Lenin and Trotsky: subject has a brother who is leader of the espionage system (of Germany).[37] Now, this report simply states that Paul Warburg handled large sums for the German government. It does not speak of his personal participation in the work. But we have seen that the Jewish multimillionaire, Parvus, introduced Lenin to the German government and that Max Warburg, the banker of Hamburg, brother of Paul and Felix Warburg, of Kuhn, Loeb and Company, was also acting for the German government in the business. We have seen too that the Jewish Bund, thanks to the Central Jewish Organization in Switzerland, was wealthy enough to supply an arsenal of weapons for the Jewish youth of Odessa in 1905. Accordingly, we have some reason to agree with the Count de St. Aulaire when he states that “any Jewish banker would have said exactly the same (as his Budapest friend) in a moment of sincerity.”[38]

Perhaps the most conclusive evidence of the alliance between Jewish Finance and Jewish revolutionary elements in the Russian Revolution is furnished by the secret report of Count Lamsdorf, former Russian Foreign Minister, to the Emperor Nicholas II, dated January 3, 1906. This report deals with the international aspect of the first revolutionary outbreak in Russia in 1905 (at Moscow, Odessa and elsewhere). The following passages are particularly interesting in view of what we have already seen about the Bund, etc.: “The events which took place in Russia during 1905 and which assumed especially acute forms at the beginning of October last, when, after a series of strikes, they brought about an armed revolt in Moscow, and many other towns and localities of the Empire, plainly indicate that the Russian revolutionary movement… has also a quite definite international character.…The most decisive indications which warrant this conclusion are given by the circumstances that the Russian revolutionaries are in possession of great quantities of arms which are imported from abroad, and of very considerable financial means, because there can be no doubt that the leaders of the revolution have already spent on our anti-government movement large amounts of money. One is bound to come to the conclusion that there are foreign capitalists’ organizations which are interested in supporting our revolutionary movement.…If we add to the above that, as has been proved beyond any doubt, a very considerable part among these heterogeneous nationalities is played by Jews, who, as ringleaders in other organizations, as well as through their own (the Jewish Bund in the Western Provinces), have always come forward as the most bellicose element of the revolution, we may feel entitled to assume that the above-mentioned foreign support of the Russian revolutionary movement comes from Jewish capitalist circles., . . The revolutionary movement is not only support, but also to a certain degree directed from abroad. On the one hand, the strike broke out with special violence and spread all over Russia not before and not after October, that is, just at the time when our government was trying to realize a considerable foreign loan without the participation of the Rothschilds, and just in time to prevent the carrying out of this financial operation: the panic provoked among the buyers and holders of Russian loans could not fail to give additional advantages to the Jewish bankers and capitalists who openly and knowingly speculated upon the fall of Russian values.…Moreover, certain very significant facts, which were also mentioned in the press, quite confirm the obvious connection of the Russian revolutionary movement with foreign Jewish organizations. Thus, for instance, the above-mentioned importation of arms…. can be duly appreciated if we take into consideration that already in June, 1905, a special Anglo-Jewish committee of capitalists was openly established in England for the purpose of collecting money to arm fighting groups of Russian Jews, and that the well-known anti-Russian publicist, Lucien Wolf, was the leading member of this committee.”[39]

We may now conclude our inquiry into the origin of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, which, as we have said, is a logical conclusion from the principles of the French Revolution. The Jewish nation, using Germany and England, two countries at war at the time, and a certain number of misguided Russians, let it loose upon the world. Our investigation has brought us up against certain leaders of the Jewish nation, principally amongst New York bankers. Count de St. Aulaire has summed up the situation in some telling phrases: “Just as Great Britain has shared the mastery of the seas with her emancipated daughter, so the republic of the United States has shared with Great Britain the metropolis of Israel, in this last partition the word mastery must be understood in a different sense. It is passive rather than active. It is submitted to rather than exercised. The mastery of the seas is almost equally divided, but the mastery of Israel is unequally endured. It is more complete in Wall Street than in the City of London…The preponderant part played by the great Jewish bankers in the Russian Revolution need not be demonstrated. They let it loose upon the world in conjunction with Germany whence they came and where they had their associates”[40]

APPENDIX

lenin’s nationality

In The Rulers of Russia (3rd Edition, pp. 28, 30), I mentioned various opinions about Lenin’s nationality without examining them critically. The chief reason was that I had not been able to trace the origin of the “legend” that Lenin was married to a Jewess and that his children spoke Yiddish. Since then, I have discovered what seems to be the origin of the story in Henry Ford’s The International Jew, vol. 1. p. 214. There we read, along with an amount of useful information about Bolshevism and the Russian Revolution, the following phrases: “Perhaps he (Lenin) is a Gentile, but why do his children speak Yiddish…The explanation of all this may be that he married a Jewess. The fact is that he did. But another explanation may be that he himself is a Jew.” No authority for these statements is cited in The International Jew. Now it is certain that Lenin’s wife was a Russian. Lenin may have learned Yiddish, as he was continually with Yiddish-speaking Jews, but with his wife he would have spoken Russian. There has never been any mention of children of the marriage.

Writers seem to agree that Lenin’s facial appearance was not Russian. “Astrakan, on the north-western shore of the Caspian,” writes Father E. A. Walsh, S.J., “was the birthplace of Lenin’s father, Ilia Ulianov, who came from a respectable middle-class stock which had somehow been crossed with Mongolian blood: miscegenation was clearly visible in the future dictator’s countenance. It was at Simbirsk on the Volga that Vladimir was born, April 10, 1870, while his father was acting as Inspector of Rural Schools, a position which entitled him to be addressed as ‘Your Excellency.’ In the same city lived the family of Alexander Kerensky.[41]

In his turn, Inspector Fitch of the Special Branch, New Scotland Yard, whose task it was to watch Lenin and Trotsky in Great Britain, testifies to the same non-Russian appearance. “It was my first sight of him,” writes the ex-detective, “a smooth-headed, oval-shaped, narrow-eyed, typical Jew, with a devilish sureness in every line of his powerful magnetic face. Beside him was a different type of Jew, the kind one might see in any Soho shop, strong-nosed, sallow-faced, long-moustached, with a little tuft of beard wagging from his chin and a great shock of wild hair—Leiba Bronstein, afterwards Lev Trotsky.”[42]

Father Walsh ascribes the non-Russian cast of Lenin’s features to a mixture of Mongolian blood. Inspector Fitch puts him down as a Jew. M. de Poncins, who examines all these questions carefully, says that “Lenin’s origin is not clear and well-defined. On his father’s side, there is a mixture of Russian and Tartar so common in Russia.…On his mother’s side, there is some suspicion of Jewish blood. His mother was Maria Alexandrovna Blank, daughter of a medical doctor, Alexander Dimitrievitch Blank. According to Pierre Chasle (Life of Lenin, Paris, 1929, p. 3), Alexander Blank came fromVolhynia and was a military doctor. His wife, Lenin’s grandmother, is spoken of as German in the publication, The Oulianow Family at Simbirsk (Lenin Institute, Moscow and Leningrad, 1925, p. 20). Alexander Blank was supposed in Judaeo-Sovietic circles to have been a baptized Jew. The name Blank is very common in Germany and is usually a German name, but is found also amongst Jews. In Russia, the name is usually found amongst Jews.”[43] This author’s account seems to be an excellent summary of the present state of the question

[1]The first Revolution, known as the Kerensky Revolution, took place in the Spring of 1917. The Czar abdicated on March 15th. In April, Lenin and the other revolutionaries were placed on a sealed train in Switzerland and taken through Germany to Stockholm and thence to Russia. The Bolshevik Revolution took place in October, 1917. The Patriot of London, in July. 1924, published the names and nationality of 165 of the passengers in the famous sealed train. Of these 121 were Jews and only 23 were Russians.

[2]Quoted in The Cause of World Unrest, published in 1920, with an Introduction by H. A. Gwynne, editor of the Morning Post.

[3]Encyclical Letter, Tametsi.

[4]The Masonic role of Palmerston is dealt with at considerable length in Deschamps, op. cit., and in Mgr. Dillon’s book, The War of Anti-Christ with the Church and Christian Civilization.

[5]Deschamps says that Palmerston made use of seemingly unobtrusive newspapers to communicate his designs to his friends in the Secret Societies. He quotes a passage from a speech by Lord Norman by reproaching him with it. The incident of the alteration by Palmerston of dispatches already signed by the Queen is well known. In furtherance of the Masonic plan, he also approved of Louis Napoleon’s coup d’etat in France without consulting the Queen or his colleagues in the Cabinet.

For the Masonic plan for the desupernaturalization of Europe, in other words, for uprooting what remained of the Kingship of Christ and for the rejection of God’s rights, see Deschamps, op. cit., and Mgr. Dillon’s book mentioned in the previous note.

[6]Deschamps, Les Sociétés Secrètes el la Sociétés, vol. II, p. 340. Cf. the notes on pages 96–97 of Mgr. Dillon’s book. The War of Anti-Christ with the Church and Christian Civilization, about the list of the Italian members of the Foreign Legion in the British service in the Crimean War, drawn up by Major-General Burnaby. They were “fearful scoundrels,” according to the Major-General, but Palmerston passed on the list to Cavour and Garibaldi for the Garibaldian “Army of Occupation” in the two Sicilies and the Papal States.

[7]The Crimes of England, pp. 104–105. This work was first published in 1915.

[8]Cf. Deschamps, op. cit., vol. II, p. 411.

[9]The War of Anti-Christ with the Church and Christian Civilization, pp. 107 and foll.

[10]Op. cit., pp. 41 and foll.

[11]Op. cit., vol. II, pp. 96, 97, 99. 158, 216. On page 121 of the same volume, Sir George points out that Milioukoff had asked for the detention of Trotsky and other political refugees for a time at Halifax (Nova Scotia). Accordingly, the provisional government shares responsibility with the English government for their being set free.

[12]This book appeared in French under the title La Russie sous les Juifs, Aux Editions Baudiniere, in 1931. The quotations are from page 35.

[13]Italics in original.

[14]Op. cit., p. 290. With regard to Robert Wilton’s unrivalled knowledge of Russia and things Russian, cf. The Rulers of Russia, pg 7.

[15]Op. cit., pp. 192–198, 297. Mr. Lloyd George states in his War Memoirs, vol. Ill, that “the Czar was unable to avail himself of it (the invitation), even had he been anxious to do so, and of that we had no evidence.” He finally quotes Sir George Buchanan as stating in My Mission to Russia: “Our offer remained open and was never withdrawn.” From Miss Buchanan’s evidence it is clear that Sir George Buchanan was not a free agent in writing that sentence. With regard to Jewish responsibility for the murder of the Czar and the Imperial family, cf. The Rulers of Russia, p. 13.

[16]War Memoirs, vol. I, p. 953.

[17]A certain amount of information about Freemasonry in Russia is to be found in Deschamps, Les Sociétés Secrètes et la Société, vol. II, pp. 687–704, and in Wichtl, Weltfreima urerei Weltrevolution, Weltrepublik, pp. 168–174. There is a curious conversation of a Russian “Liberal” non-Mason with an American Mason on page 173 of the latter volume. The American Mason remarked, when he learned that the Russian was returning to Russia for the Coronation of the Czar Nicholas II: “These things will not last much longer,” but refused to say more since the Russian was not a Freemason. After 1906–1907, according to Wichtl, the number of Lodges in Russia increased enormously. He says that the overthrow of the Czar was the work of Russian Freemasons with the help of English Freemasons.

Mr. A. N. Field, in The Truth About the Slump, p. 63, comments on the fact that Cagliostro, with Jewish and Masonic associations, was used to discredit the French royal family prior to the French Revolution, while Rasputin performed a similar service in Russia before the Russian Revolution.

[18]Cf. The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World, pp. 92, 93, for some more information about Parvus.

[19]Op. cit., pp. 105, 106, 110, 289. She adds, on p. 289, that all the documents fell into the hands of the Bolsheviks after their victory.

[20]Op. cit., pp. 70, 71.

Sir George Buchanan says in his book (vol. II, p. 33) that “on his return journey (from France and England) he (Protopopoff) had had an interview with a German financier named Warburg at Stockholm that had seriously compromised him.” Mr. Warburg may have been more “German” than his brothers Paul and Felix were “American,” but they were all three members of another nation, the Jewish nation.

[21]For the full text of this author as well as for a similar text of Dostoievsky, the Russian writer, c.f The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World, pp. 180, 181. The extract from Dostoievsky there quoted was written between 1876 and 1880. It contains the famous phrase: “The Jews will compass the ruin of Russia.”

[22]Published in 1929. The quotation is from p. 12.

[23]In complete agreement with Pope Pius XI, the Russian writer, N. S. Timasheff, most emphatically asserts that Bolshevism is not a Russian product, “Communist doctrines,” he writes. “were imported into Russia as part of the great process of Westernization… Communism certainly was not a straight continuation of Russian history” Religion in Soviet Russia, pp. 10. 18. (London, Sheed and Ward, 1943).

[24]A portion of Babeuf’s address is to be found in The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World, p. 55. The full text is contained in l’abbé Barruel’s work, vol. IV, pp. 445 and foll.

[25]For the secret history of Marx’s Communism, cf. Les Origines Secrètes du Bolshevisme by Salluste, pp. 1–100.

[26]1917 Edition.

[27]Op. cit., pp. 228, 250–252.

[28]Published by Chapman and Hall. Ltd., in 1906.

[29]The recent mutiny in the Preobrajienski regiment was organized by the Jews, who served as bandsmen. The regimental bands in the Russian Army are largely composed of Jews (note in The Polish Jew, p. 168).

[30]Op. cit., pp. 4, 5, 168, 169, 170, 201, 202.

In his excellent book, Le Plan Communiste d’ Insurrection armèe (The Communist Plan for Armed Insurrection), pp. 42. M. Léon de Poncins confirms what we have seen described long before in The Polish Jew, M. de Poncins quotes documents taken from Communist sources containing detailed instructions for the preparation of revolution, and then adds: “An excellent illustration of these tactics is to be found in the work of the Bolsheviks in the Russian army in the different phases of the revolution. From 1902 on, the Bolsheviks kept up their secret revolutionary agitation in the Russian army. At the time of the 1905 revolution this agitation had reached a point of development such that in a number of garrisons the Bolsheviks were able to act upon the great body of the troops. After the defeat of the 1905 revolution, when the Bolsheviks were again forced to have recourse to secret action, in order to prepare the masses for new revolutionary combats, the propaganda in the army took on a still more secret character. This lasted down to the revolution of February, 1917. Immediately after the overthrow of the Czarist government, the Bolsheviks began to carry on a vast movement of corruption amongst the troops. Secret methods gave place to legalised decomposition by means of Communist cells, soldiers’ committees, assemblies of soldiers’ delegates newspapers for soldiers, etc.”

[31]Op. cit., p. 208.

[32]It is well to bear in mind what Robert Wilton wrote in Les Derniers Jours des Romunof (pp. 136–138): “It is in the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party that the governmental power resides. It was composed as follows in 1918—9 Jews and 3 Russians. The other Russian, Socialist Parties are similar in composition. Their Central Committees are made up as follows: S.D. Mensheviks, 11 members, all Jews… S.R. (Right Wing), 15 members, of whom 13 are Jews and 2 are Russians.…These parties, in appearance opposed to the Bolsheviks, play the Bolsheviks’ game on the sly, more or less by preventing the Russians from pulling themselves together. Out of 61 individuals at the head of these parties, there are 6 Russians and 55 Jews. No matter what may be the name adopted, a revolutionary government will be Jewish.” Cf. The Rulers of Russia, p. 9.

To this must be added the prophetic words of a government official in Warsaw to Miss Baskerville, which are to be found on p. 334 of her book, The Polish Jew, published in 1906: “The government,” said this official, “will not, give the Jews civil rights if they can help it, because, they are afraid. The Jews are everywhere and doing everything. The Cadet Club in St. Petersburg is full of them.…The Russian members are indifferent or occupied elsewhere. When the Jews do get their disabilities removed… they will rule the Empire officially. De facto, they are the masters at the present moment. The young men of the civil service who ought to be energetic and save the situation, are letting things slip through their fingers. All they think about is amusement and getting their salaries raised.…When the Jew effects an entrance into their midst, he will sweep them off the board like so many pieces of paper.”

[33]“From the history of the working-class movement it is known that the Bundists left the Social-Democratic Party in 1903; when the majority of the Party of the working-class refused to accept their demand to be recognized as the ‘sole’ representatives of the Jewish proletariat. This exit from the Party was a manifestation of separation.…But, in fact, the Jewish workers have entered and continue to enter the Party everywhere in spite of the Bund… When the Bund in 1906 again returned to the Party, the Party put forward the condition of no separatism, i.e., unity in all localities of all the Marxist workers of whatever nationality. But this condition was not fulfilled by the Bundists” (Lenin on the Jewish Question, p. 19. International Publishers, New York).

[34]The document read by Mr. Mazanac in the Czech Parliament is similar in content to the handbill distributed amongst the Jews of Budapest during the Judaeo-Masonic-Communist revolution of 1919. A translation of the text as it is found in Dr. Hans Eisele’s book, Bilder aus dem Kommunistischen Ungarn, published in 1920, by the publishing firm “Tyrolia,” of Innsbruck, is given in The Rulers of Russia, 3 edition, p. 52.

[35]Op. cit., pp. 370–371. The S. R. Strike was in March, 1919. Dukes sent his report on the matter in question in April, 1919. The book embodying this extract from his report was published recently.

[36]These extracts are taken from Geneva versus Peace, the translation of Count de St. Aulaire’s book, published by Sheed and Ward, pp. 76–84.

A little-known historical instance of the collusion between Jewish finance and Jewish-guided revolutionaries may prove interesting. It dates from the first openly Communist revolution, that of Paris in 1871. An account of it is to be found in Edouard Dennachy’s book, Les Rothschild, pp. viii, ix. He relates that one of the principal barricades erected by the Communards in Paris was just near the corner of the Rue de Rivoli, on which was situated the splendid mansion of Baron Alphonse de Rothschild. It was formerly the residence of Talleyrand-Périgord. The Rothschilds were certainly well known to be wealthy bourgeois, in fact, one would expect their house to be the first to be burned, when the Marxian, “proletariat” began to move. Yet those who were systematically setting fire to houses passed, with their petrol-cans in their hands, in front of this fine mansion and the numerous others which the Rothschilds had elsewhere in the Avenue Marigny, Rue Lafitte, etc., etc., and never even stopped.

[37]The author of the pamphlet, The Reign of the Elders, has informed me by letter that he got this information direct from the Navy Department. On the same page the author adds thar the brother mentioned was Felix.

[38]Cf. extract from letter of Count de St. Aulaire in The Rulers of Russia., p. 6.

[39]The World at the Cross Roads, by Boris Brasol, pp. 75, 76. Mr. Brasol adds in a note that the full text of this report was published in American Hebrew and Jewish Messenger, July 13, 1918. He also states that, according to the Jewish Chronicle (London), the contribution of international Jewry to the Russian revolutionary cause in 1905 reached the sum of £874,341. He refers to the work of A. Selianiuov, The Secret Power of Masonry, p. 261 (St. Petersburg, 1911).

“Money,” said Chamfort to Marmontel, “and the hope of plunder are all-powerful with the people. We have just made the experiment in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, and you would not believe how little it cost the Duke of Orleans to get them to sack the factory of that decent man, Réveillon, who amidst these same people provided a livelihood for a hundred families. Mirabeau cheerfully asserts that with a thousand louis one can get up a first-class rebellion” (Memoires de Marmontel, IV, 82). The Affaire Réveillon was the first outbreak of violence in the Paris of 1789. It was the rehearsal for the attack on the Bastille. If we are to take Mirabeau at his word, he would have done well with the millions at the disposal of Lenin in 1917.

[40]Geneva versus Peace, p. 74.

[41]The Fall of the Russian Empire, p. 216. Lenin’s real name was Vladimir-Illitch Oulianoff.

[42]Traitors Within (Burst and Blackett, 1933). On the occasion in question, Inspector Fitch was disguised as a waiter and was serving drinks to Lenin and his companions.

[43]La Mystérieuse Internationale Juive, p. 99.

Chapter XVI

Reactions Against the Naturalism of the French Revolution

ordered reaction implies acceptance

of christ’s kingship in its integrity

We have seen that modern history since 1789 has been to a large extent the account of the domination of state after state by the naturalistic supranationalism of Freemasonry, behind which has been gradually and steadily emerging the still more strongly organized naturalistic supranationalism of the Jewish nation. Now, since human society, just like individual men, cannot avoid essential deviations from order unless by submission to God through Our Lord Jesus Christ, this anti-supernatural revolt has brought about inevitable disorder and decay, even in the natural life of nations. The imposition of an anti-supernatural form has necessarily resulted in national decline. This has shown itself especially in the Catholic countries, because the naturalistic forces have devoted particular energy to the overthrow of the elements of supernatural organization still to be found in these countries. This attack has had disastrous consequences for their national life. But the Protestant countries have not been spared. In them, however, by the fact of the accepted separation of the Christian and the citizen the desupernaturalizing process was already well on its way. It has been continued by the widespread legalization of divorce, the elimination of true Christian education, and especially by the increasing domination of money. The results are to be seen, in the treatment of human beings as mere individuals not as persons, in the decay of family-life, in the socialization of property, and in the subjection of nations to those who control money.

For the past twenty years, thinking men in every country have begun to see the need for national reactions against the consequences of naturalism, in order to safeguard their national life and maintain their independence. A complete reaction on the part of any country would mean a return to full acknowledgment of all that we have seen to be implied in the Kingship of Christ in its integrity. That would mean not only the rejection of the domination of the naturalistic or anti-supernatural forces of the Jewish nation and Freemasonry, but also the acknowledgement of the Divine Plan for Order, by acceptance of the Catholic Church’s mission and teaching, on the relation of Church and state, on the Catholic Church as the divinely-appointed guardian of the moral law, on the sacrament of Matrimony and family life, on the Catholic education of youth as members of Christ, on private property and the function of money.

Let us now take in turn the reactions of Poland, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Germany, and Italy and, as far as the available data permit, compare them with the Divine Plan for Order.

poland’s reaction

Poland’s reaction is placed first for the reason mentioned in the Preface. Of all the nations of Europe that once expressed their submission to the Blessed Trinity in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, along with Christ, Our Lord, of the Mystical Body, Poland and Ireland are the only countries where the native population has not been induced by Satan to turn against the Mass. These two nations have committed faults and have made mistakes, but in regard to the central point of order in the world, they have never wavered. Satan seems to have abandoned all hope of prevailing on the Poles to revolt against Christ the King, so he simply aims at crushing them to the earth and blotting out their country. The Vicar of Christ trusts that Lucifer’s expectations will be disappointed. “Poland,” writes Pope Pius XII, “imperishably crowned in the pages of history by the long record of her loyalty to the Church and her services to Christian civilization, should claim from all eyes a brotherly, a human tear. She puts her trust in that Virgin Mother of God who is the Help of Christians, and waits for the day when peace and justice will be restored, the day when she will be allowed at last to emerge, unharmed, from the waves that have engulfed her.”[1]

The resurrection of Poland at the end of the Great War (1914–1918) did not proceed without serious opposition from the anti-supernatural forces. The Cause of World Unrest, published in 1920 with an introduction by the editor of The Morning Post, Mr. H. A. Gwynne, is emphatic on the point, “it was notorious during the proceedings of the Peace Conference,” writes the author of this work. “that whenever any decision favorable to Poland was reached, Jewish gentry from London hurriedly crossed the Channel for the purpose of trying to revoke it.…Why?

A strong Poland is not a Jewish interest. For one thing, how many Englishmen are aware of the enormous Jewish population which lives within the ethnographical boundaries of Poland? In 1910 the total number of Jews in the world was, roughly, 12,506,238, and in 1900 almost five million Jews lived in Polish territory. It is interesting, too, to note that since the Russian Revolution of 1905 there was a distinct movement in Poland to get rid of the monopoly exercised by the Jews in all commercial and financial activities in Poland, by the creation of Polish Cooperative Societies. It is perfectly clear that a strong national Polish government would further develop that policy, and this might lead in time to measures which would by no means prove welcome to the enormous Jewish population concentrated within its territories.…Thus, Poland as created by the pundits of Paris, started badly.…The Bolsheviks were exceedingly anxious to secure their grip on a state which, with its Christian faith and Western traditions, barred their march towards the West. In the letter which Trotsky sent to the French Socialists as long ago as October, 1919, he made it clear in his bragging way that Poland’s turn was to come next. That Bolshevist offensive was launched in March, 1920, and failed.…To say, then, that Marshal Pilsudski attacked Russia, which all the Pacifists and Bolsheviks in England are trumpeting forth every day, is untrue.…From the very beginning a violent anti-Polish campaign was started in England, and the English dockers and railwaymen were called upon to prevent the sending of munitions to Warsaw.…

“Dr. Dillon, in his book on the Paris Peace Conference, says: ‘Of all the collectivities whose interests were furthered at the conference the Jews had perhaps the most resourceful and certainly the most influential exponents. There were Jews from Palestine, from Poland, Russia, the Ukraine, Romania, Greece, Britain, Holland, and Belgium: but the largest and most brilliant contingent was sent by the United States.’ With reference to that great achievement of the Jews at Paris, the Minority Treaties, he (Dr. Dillon) says: ‘It may seem amazing to some readers, but it is none the less a fact that a considerable number of delegates believed that the real influence behind the Anglo-Saxon peoples was Semitic. They confronted the President’s proposal on the subject of religious inequality, and, in particular, the odd motive alleged for it, with the measures for the protection of minorities which he subsequently imposed on the lesser states, and which had for their keynote to satisfy the Jewish elements in Eastern Europe. And they concluded that the sequence of expedients framed and enforced in this direction were inspired by the Jews assembled in Paris for the purpose of realizing their carefully thought out program, which they succeeded in having substantially executed.’ It should be remembered that the original claims of the Jews went much further than those which were eventually sanctioned by the conference.”[2]

The Peace Conference certainly showed itself generous towards the Jews, in particular towards the Jews in Poland, as Mgr. Delassus points out in Les Pourquoi da La Guerre Mondiale (Vol. II, p. 363). “The conference,” he writes, “set up in their favor a regime which made them a state within the state, under the control of the great powers. This gave rise to the reluctance of the Poles to sign the treaty which the conference proposed to them for signature.…Article 12 declared that these stipulations constituted international obligations and would be placed under the protection of the League of Nations.”

Since the Great War (1914–1918), how did things go in Poland with regard to the Kingship of Christ? In one respect, badly. Article 114 of the Polish Constitutional Law of March 17th, 1921, re-enacted by the Constitutional Law of April 23rd, 1935, states:

“The Roman Catholic Faith, being the religion of the great majority of the nation, occupies a leading position in the state among other religions, which, however, enjoy equal rights.’’[3] The leading position assigned to the one true religion set up by God become man is simply due to the fact that it happens to be the religion of the majority of the people, not because it is the true religion. Equal rights are accorded to all religions. Thus, to use the words of Pope Pius XI in the Encyclical Letter, Quas Primas (1925), on the Kingship of Christ: “The religion of Christ is put on the same level as false religions and placed ignominiously in the same category with them.” The rejection of the Blessed Trinity’s condescending love, involved in that attitude, is implicitly contained in the resolution passed by the Polish government on June 10th 1941, which runs: “The Polish government shares the principles expounded by the Prime Minister (General Sikorski) in the United States, on the government policy concerning the Jews, and in particular associates itself with his declaration on this question, made in the National Council on June 4th 1941, reading as follows: In accordance with the sincerely democratic policy of the government; the principle—equal duties, equal rights—will be binding in the future Poland in regard to all citizens of the Republic without regard to nationality, race or creed. That is the standpoint of the Polish government, which regards all cultivation of an anti-Semitic policy as harmful.”[4] The Polish government’s resolution confuses respect for the rights of God through Christ the King with anti-Semitism.

In the Catholic Herald (London) of October 31st, 1941, under the heading Is Poland Catholic? we read: “The question might seriously be put when we read the special ‘order of the day’ issued by General Sikorski to Polish troops about to leave for service in Soviet Russia. The Commander-in-Chief (General Sikorski) speaks nobly about their trust, about ‘comradely cooperation, invincible solidarity and profound devotion.’ but unless the latter vague phrase is meant to cover the matter, nowhere does he speak of God and Catholicity. Now Poland is a Catholic nation and is proud of the fact. Poland is suffering in large measure because of a spirit founded in Catholic truth and tradition. The Polish people and the Polish troops are nearly all Catholic by birth and in outlook. Are we then asking too much that in a message of this kind and on this special occasion they should be reminded by their commander of the religious inspiration of their nation and their lives?” Now, nobody can doubt the sympathy of the Catholic Herald for Poland and her cause, so these remarks are not made in a hostile spirit. But the writer seems to be unaware of the logical implications of the Polish Constitution and of the Polish government’s resolution quoted above. It would not be “democratic” to mention Christ the King and his Blessed Mother. Above all, it would be “undemocratic” to proclaim to the world that the Catholic religion is the one true religion laid down by God for the world’s acceptance.

In some other respects, Poland has reacted against naturalism. Towards the end of December, 1938, according to the Irish Catholic of January 5, 1939, a Presidential Decree was issued, dissolving all Masonic Associations and closing down all Masonic Lodges in Poland. According to the article, the most widespread were the Jewish (B’nai Brith), German and Odd Fellows’ Lodges. In closing down the Lodges, the writer adds, the police authorities published at the same time the names of their members.[5] Again, by the law promulgated in Poland under the date of March 25th, 1938, persons and bodies of Christians, Jewish or Mahommedan religions were authorized to produce and trade in objects of devotion and religious worship of their own religion only. Contraventions of this law were punishable by imprisonment for three months and a fine of 3,000 zlotys. Objects produced in contravention of the law were liable to confiscation.

spain’s reaction

Spain’s reaction against the principles of the French Revolution has been the most poignant and the most thorough, for, after Russia, it was in Spain that the “rights of man” came nearest to the complete overthrow of the rights of God. The history of Spain and Portugal since the beginning of the 19th century may be well summed up in these words of Pére Deschamps: “The revolutions which have succeeded one another in these countries (Spain and Portugal) have been caused for the most part by the rivalry between different sections of Freemasonry. These work together harmoniously in the struggle against Christian social order but tear one another to pieces when they have attained power. The same holds true for Mexico.…[6]

The Spanish Revolution of 1931 was a Masonic Revolution. A Masonic bulletin published by M. Léon de Poncins proclaims it to the world: “The new Republic” we read therein, “is the perfect embodiment of our doctrines and our principles. It would be impossible to bring about a political revolution more completely Masonic than the Spanish Revolution.”[7] The Masonic revolution was intended to be only the forerunner of the Communist revolution, but General Franco rose to do battle for the rights of God and saved Spain for order. M. Léon de Poncins, in Appendix IV of his work, gives a detailed account of the numerous illegalities committed by the Masonico-Communist leaders, thanks to which they were enabled to seize power and proclaim themselves the “elected” government of Spain. The culminating point was the assassination of Calvo Sotelo by government agents acting on the orders of the Minister of the Interior, who was simply carrying out instructions emanating from the General Secretary of Freemasonry.[8] Then came the rising of the Army commanded by General Franco leading to the defeat of the Judaeo-Masonic-Communist aims. At the time of writing (August, 1941) the reorganization of Spain in accordance with the Divine Plan for Order is being continued. The Spanish state acknowledges the Catholic Church as the one true Church instituted by Our Lord Jesus Christ. Needless to say, however, the elimination of all the seeds of disorder sown in the past 150 years will take time. As General Franco proclaimed in his Victory Speech of May 19th, 1939: “We, Spaniards, must be under no illusion. The Jewish spirit, which was responsible for the alliance of large-scale capital with Marxism and was the driving force behind so many anti-Spanish revolutionary agreements, will not be got rid of in a day.” Freemasonry was banned in 1940.[9]

In view of the deep impression made even upon Catholics by Communist propaganda about “Fascist” Spain, it will be well to quote at least a few sentences from Pope Pius XII’s Broadcast to Spain of April 16th, 1939. “The persistent, propaganda and the un-remitting efforts of the enemies of Jesus Christ,” said His Holiness, “lead one to believe that they sought to make Spain a supreme example of the powers of destruction at their disposal and which are disseminated over the whole earth.…The wise people of Spain, with that generosity and frankness that are the two characteristics of a soul’s nobility, rose decisively in defense of the ideals of Faith and of Christian life…. and aided by God .…they were able to resist the onslaught of those who, deceived by what they believed to be a humanitarian ideal for the relief of the lowly, were in reality fighting for atheism.”

portugal’s reaction

Portugal’s reaction against Judaeo-Masonic disorder has been, on the whole, peaceful, but it is well to have it known that if General Carmona and Dr. Salazar have been able to continue their work of orderly reorganization, Freemasonry has not been idle. In 1931, and again in 1935, the Grand Orient attempted to get rid of them but failed.

Everybody knows that the revolution of 1910, which put an end to the Monarchy, was the work of Freemasonry. As usual, there was an active sub-Masonry in the Portuguese Carbonari.[10]

The “hero” of the Revolution of 1910 was the Carbonaro, Brother Machado Santos. The Republic was proclaimed on October 5th, 1910. Three days afterwards the provisional government revived the laws against the Jesuits and the other religious orders and then the Masonic politician, Alfonso Costa, promulgated the law separating Church and state, affirming at the same time that in two generations Catholicism would have disappeared from Portugal. The Masonic dictatorship which was inaugurated in 1910 ushered in the saddest period in the history of Portugal. From 1910 to 1926 there were sixteen revolutions and forty changes of government. In the course of a revolution in 1921, Machado Santos, the “hero” of 1910, was taken by other more modern “heroes” and summarily executed. On the 28th May, 1926, the army rose and put an end to the disorders by suppressing the professional revolutionaries, but the army leaders were without competence in financial matters.

God had prepared a man to save the country in the person of Dr. Salazar, who became Minister of Finance in April, 1928. He had been Minister for a few days in 1926, but another had then been put in his place and he had gone back to Coimbra University, where he was professor of Finance. When, in 1928, the finances of the country were in a desperate condition; the League of Nations granted a loan but demanded absolute control of Portugal’s finances. The government proudly refused and sent for Salazar. He accepted and became Minister of Finance. Since 1932, he has been Prime Minister as well as Minister of Finance and he has been engaged in restoring order to the national mind and will as well as re-establishing economic and financial stability. A convinced Catholic, his whole reform of the state is based on his personal conviction of the fact, so much insisted upon in this work, that every human being is not only an individual but a person, and that the state is for the development of the human person, member of Christ, through the family. Thus he works for the cultivation of solidarity amongst citizens for the common good, without reducing them io the level of mere individuals. In his economic reforms, Dr. Salazar has accordingly aimed at reversing the great disorder of modern times, whereby man is subordinated to production of material goods and the production of material goods is subordinated to finance.[11]

In regard to the points of the Divine Plan for Order concerning the relation of the state to the Catholic Church, the family, and the education of members of Christ, the Portuguese Constitution favors the return to order, while considering it prudent to take account of the results of decay and to await the development of the right mentality towards the Divine Plan, through education. Thus “the state shall maintain the regime of separation in relation to the Catholic Church and any other religion or cult practiced within Portuguese territory,”[12] but will keep up diplomatic relations with the Holy See with reciprocity of representation. Civil marriage and civil divorce are allowed, but the state will not permit Catholics married by the Church to apply for civil divorce. The state will thus not aid the revolt of Catholic members of Christ against Christ. Article XXIV of the Concordat of 1940 says: “In harmony with the essential qualities of Catholic marriage, it is understood by the very fact that they have entered into a canonical marriage the parties shall renounce the civil faculty of applying for a divorce which cannot therefore be applied by civil courts to Catholic marriages.”

Article XXI on education enacts: “The teaching given by the state in public schools shall be guided by the principles of Christian doctrine and morals traditional to the country. Therefore, the Catholic religion and Catholic morals will be taught in public elementary, complementary and intermediate schools, to pupils whose parents, or guardians have not lodged a request to the contrary. In asylums, orphanages, official establishments and institutions for the education or correction or reform of children, under the state, the Catholic religion will be taught and the observance of its practices ensured, at the expense of the state. For the teaching of the Catholic religion, the text-books used must be passed by the ecclesiastical authorities and the teachers will be appointed by the state in agreement with the said authorities. In no case shall religious instruction be given by persons not approved by the ecclesiastical authorities as competent.”

It is by the recognition of the fact that man is not only an individual subordinate to the state but also a person whose well-being and development is the end of the state that the Portuguese Corporative state rises superior to the Italian. “There are undoubtedly,” said Dr. Salazar, “political systems with which Portuguese nationalism has similarity and points of contact.…We should like it, however, to be fully understood that we have not put on one side the errors and vices of a false liberalism and of a false democracy to embrace others which may be even greater, but rather to reorganize and strengthen the country with the principles of authority, order and national tradition, in harmony with those eternal truths which are, happily, the patrimony of humanity and the appanage of Christian civilization.”[13]

The Portuguese state is authoritarian but not totalitarian. On the 26th May, 1934, Dr. Salazar warned the first Congress of the National Union against the danger of confusing the two. “We must remove from us,” he said, “the impulse tending to the formation of what might be called the totalitarian state. The state which would subordinate everything without exception to the idea of the nation or the race, as represented by it morally, legally, politically and economically, would put itself forward as an omnipotent being, a beginning and an end in itself, to which all individual and collective manifestations were subject, and would involve an absolutism worse than that which preceded the liberal regimes, because that at least did not withdraw itself from human destiny. Such a state would be essentially pagan, naturally incompatible with the temper of our Christian civilization.…The Constitution, approved by popular plebiscite, rejects, as irreconcilable with its aims, all that directly or indirectly proceeds from the totalitarian system. It begins by establishing morality and law as limits to its sovereignty. It charges the state to respect the natural guarantees of individuals, families, corporations, and local autonomies. It safeguards the liberty and the inviolability of religious beliefs and practices. It assigns to parents and their representatives the instruction and the education of their children. It guarantees property, capital and labor in social harmony.”

The Corporative Organization has for end the higher destiny of the nation and of the persons who constitute it. “In the organization of the economic corporations,” said Dr. Salazar, “the interests which they pursue must be kept in view, or, better, the interests of production must be subordinated not only to the national economy as a whole, but also to the spiritual finality and higher destiny of the nation and of the persons who constitute it.”[14] In other words, because all Portuguese subjects have the right to a free and dignified life (as persons), the right of Portugal to the same free and dignified life must be respected by all. The welfare of the collectivity transcends and is at the same time indispensable for, the welfare of the individual.

“Political pluralism admits the reality of the corporation or functional association,” writes S. George West, “and accords it a recognised place in the organized life of society, but does not regard the state as representative of the whole organized life of society.…political pluralism, therefore, emphasizes freedom rather than order. The Italian Corporative state also recognizes the reality of functional association, but seeks to make its corporations subordinate contributors to the life of the nation-state, which is essentially sovereign. Fascism shows the Hegelian preference for order.…The Portuguese Corporate state accepts the reality of functional association common to political pluralism and to Fascism, but repudiates the Liberty without Authority of the former and the Authority without Liberty of the latter, substituting for them the formula Authority and Liberties, which is the fourth of the Ten Commandments (of the New Portuguese state).”[15]

Twice the forces of Freemasonry have tried to overthrow the work of reform. To Salazar’s famous speech of 30th July, 1930, the Grand-Master of the Portuguese Grand Orient replied by a secret message to the Masonic Lodges to prepare for the final struggle against “the absolute domineering and despotic state, which is a revival of the imperialist and theocratic states of the Middle Ages.…Where is the source of that hidden force which urges on the Portuguese to the realization of such an attack on public liberty and on the democratic characteristics of our nation? We well know that this source is the Vatican! It is manifest that it is from there that proceeds the pressure which brings to nought all the attempts to bring about a peaceful transformation of the dictatorship into a democratic and parliamentary republic, neutral in religion.…The conception of the Corporative state outlined in the discourse of Dr. Oliveira Salazar on July 30th, 1930, contains the most obscurantist program of all the dictatorships. By a vigorous effort of the Masonic spirit, we must win back the liberty which has been ravished from us of working for the greatness of our country and principally for the good of humanity. In Portugal as elsewhere the latter is subject to plots and secret maneuveres tending to bring about a return of medieval ignorance.”[16]

Masonic action quickly followed in 1931 in the form of revolts at Madeira, in Guinea, and the Azores. Again, after the promulgation of two laws, one of 13th May, 1935, concerning state functionaries, the other of 21st May, 1935, against secret societies, the police nipped another Masonic revolutionary movement in the bud.

According to the terms of the law promulgated on the 21st May, “all state functionaries and public servants, civil, political or military, must henceforth testify in writing on their word of honor that they are not members of the Masonic Society or of any secret society and that they do not intend to enter such a society.” The report drawn up by Dr. A. de Andrade, Professor of Law at the University of Lisbon, when presenting this law for the approval of the Corporate Assembly, characterized Freemasonry as “a state within the state, which aimed at replacing Christian civilization by Masonic (naturalistic) civilization.”

ireland’s reaction

widespread ignorance of

the meaning of naturalism

The struggle against England on the national level has so absorbed the attention of Irishmen that relatively few of them ever envisage that struggle in its full relation to the vaster and more intensely real conflict being waged between Our Lord Jesus Christ and Satan. They know that when England embraced the form of disorder prevalent in the 16th century, Ireland remained steadfast in its hold on order, but they do not know accurately what has been the effect of the French Revolution on Ireland, considered from the point of view of the real struggle in the world. We have seen that the progress of the French Revolution has meant the successive renunciation by states of all acknowledgment of the Mystical Body of Christ and the supernatural order, under the influence of the naturalistic supranationalism of Freemasonry and the Jewish nation. As a consequence, all religions are placed on the same footing, that is, the Catholic Church is placed “on the same level as heretical sects and even as Jewish perfidy,” to use the expression of Pope Pius VII.[17] The state thus declares itself indifferent in the struggle between Our Lord Jesus Christ and the new Messias. and we know that “he who is not with me is against me” (Mt.12:30).

The widespread ignorance in Ireland of the meaning of naturalism and of the significance of the principles of 1789 is shown by the repeated exhortations to Irishmen to accept without discrimination the principles of Wolfe Tone and James Connolly. One of the great tragedies of these men’s lives was that they were caught up in movements of which they were far from realizing the inner significance and the ultimate orientation. This tragedy is even more poignant in the case of James Connolly than in that of Wolfe Tone, for James Connolly’s devout reception of the sacraments and recital of the Rosary before death showed that he believed firmly in the divinity of Our Divine Lord and honored his blessed Mother. Let us first see Wolfe Tone’s ignorance of the real order of the world and of the inner significance of the movement he wished to propagate in Ireland.

wolfe tone and the vicar of christ

The following quotation from Tone’s diary shows that not only was he opposed to the temporal sovereignty of the Pope over the Papal States, which was the providential safeguard of the independence of Christ’s Vicar, but that his whole attitude to the Vicar of Christ was one of hatred and contempt:

“March 1, 1798. An event has taken place, of a magnitude scarce, if at all, inferior in importance to that of the French Revolution. The Pope is dethroned and in exile. The circumstances relating to this great event are such as to satisfy my mind that there is a special Providence guiding the affairs of Europe at this moment, and turning everything to the great end of the emancipation of mankind from the yoke of religious and political superstition, under which they have so long groaned. Some months ago…Buonaparte accorded a peace, and a generous one, to the Pope: it was signed at Tolentino.…Many people thought at the time, and I was of the number, that it was unwise to let slip so favorable an opportunity to destroy for ever the Papal tyranny.…One would have thought that so narrow an escape might have prevented the Pope from rashly embarking into a second contest with the Republic, holding, as he did, his very existence dependent on the breath of Buonaparte, who might with a single word have annihilated him. But Providence, for its own wise and great purposes, the happiness of man, and the complete establishment of civil and religious liberty, seems to have utterly taken away all sense and understanding from the Pope and his Councils.…Now the measure of the folly and wickedness of the Papal government was filled, even to running over. The (French) Ambassador instantly quitted Rome, with his family, announcing these events to the Directory, who gave orders to General Berthier, to advance with the invincible army of Italy on the ancient capital of the world. A few days put him in quiet possession of Rome, from which all those concerned in the late abominable transaction had fled, the Pope alone remaining. On his arrival, the Roman people assembled in the Capitol, formally deposed the Pope, and declared themselves free and independent, choosing a provisory government, under the ancient Roman names of Consuls, Praetors, and Aediles. Two or three days after, the Pope left Rome, attended by two French aides-de-camp, and where he is gone to, I do not yet know.…How art thou fallen from Heaven, O Lucifer, Son of the Morning!’ The Revelations have many fine things on this subject, touching the ‘Beast and Babylon’ etc., ‘Of the Pope’s ten horns, God bless us, I’ve knocked off four already. He is now a prelate in partibus, his means are gone, his cardinals, his court, his wealth, all disappeared, and nothing remains but his keys. It is a sad downfall for the Servant of the Servants of God, but I scorn to insult the old gentleman in his misfortunes: Requiescat in pace!” [18]

wolfe tone and the jewish longing

for the natural messias

Scarcely less revealing, in regard to Wolfe Tone’s ignorance of the order of the world, are his comments on the Jewish longings for the natural Messias: “April 21 to 24, 1798. The last Paris papers mention that Buonaparte is decidedly set off to take the command of the expedition which is preparing in the Mediterranean.…The object declared is Egypt and Syria. With regard to this last country, in which Palestine is included, I see today an article in the Telegraph which has struck me very much. It is a proposal to invite the Jews from all quarters of the world, to return to their parent country and restore their ancient temple.…It is now not only possible but highly probable, that the Jews may be once more collected, and the temple restored. The French will naturally take care to stipulate for advantages in return, and there is a giant’s stride made at once into Asia.…I see every day more and more, that after ten years of war, and the defeat of all the despots of Europe united, the French Revolution is but yet begun; the Hercules is yet in swaddling bands. What a people! Combining this intended measure with the downfall of the Pope already accomplished, I have no doubt but a person…might build very extraordinary systems,… If the Jews are restored, as their wealth is immense in Europe and in Asia incalculable, the Republic will of course exact certain ‘shekels of gold’ before they consent to the elevation of the Tabernacle.…”[19] Here Tone shows himself indifferent between the true Messias and the natural Messias whom Catholics call Antichrist.

wolfe tone, naturalism

and anti-supernaturalism

The evident naturalism of the Revolution was unperceived by Wolfe Tone. In fact, the worship of the nation seems to have gone to his head: “March 30, 1796. Went today to the Church of St. Roch, to the fête de la Jeunesse; all the youth of the district, who have attained the age of sixteen, were to present themselves before the municipality and receive their arms, and those who were arrived at twenty-one were to be enrolled in the list of citizens, in order to ascertain their right of voting in the assemblies. The Church was decorated with the national colors, and a statue of Liberty, with an altar blazing before her. At the foot of the statue the municipality were seated, and the sides of the Church were filled with a crowd of spectators, the parents and friends of the young men, leaving a space vacant in the center for the procession. It consisted of the État-Major of the sections composing the district, of the National Guards under arms, of the officers of the sections, and, finally, of the young men who were to be presented.…When these were armed, their parents and mistresses embraced them, and they returned to their station. It is impossible to conceive anything more interesting than the spectacle was at that moment; the pride and pleasure in the countenance of the parents; the fierté of the young soldiers, and, above all, the expression in the features of so many young females…I was in an enthusiasm. I do not wonder at the miracles which the French Army has wrought in the contest for their liberties.”[20]

The anti-supernaturalism of the French Revolution was, moreover, pleasing to Tone: “He (Clarke) came to the influence of the Catholic clergy over the minds of the (Irish) people, and the apprehension that they might warp them against France. I assured him, as the fact is, that it was much more likely that France would turn the people against the clergy; that within these last few years, that is to say, since the French Revolution, an astonishing change, with regard to the influence of the priests, had taken place in Ireland. I mentioned to him the conduct of that body, pending the Catholic business, and how much and how justly they had lost character on that account.”[21] In fact, one of the benefits which Tone anticipated from “liberty” for Irish Catholics was the decay of the faith. In his Argument on behalf of the Catholics of Ireland, we read: “Persecution bound the Irish Papist to his Priest, and the Priest to the Pope; the bond of union is drawn tighter by oppression; relaxation will undo it. The emancipated and liberal Irishman, like the emancipated and liberal Frenchman, may go to Mass, may tell his beads, or sprinkle his mistress with holy water: but neither the one nor the other will attend to the rusty and extinguished thunderbolts of the Vatican, or the idle anathemas, which, indeed, his Holiness is now-a-days too prudent and cautious to issue.”[22]

wolfe tone’s ignorance of

the real meaning of masonry

Tone did not see that the anti-supernaturalism of the Illuminati was the driving force behind the Revolution and that therefore its crimes and excesses were but the logical conclusion of the formation received in the Lodges.[23] In his Address to the People of Ireland, he wrote: “Notwithstanding the Catholic clergy are so fully and so beneficially to themselves occupied in preaching submission to those who are put over us, and uttering violent, philippics against the principles and the conduct of the French Revolution, their aim is obvious; yet it is to be lamented that these invectives have received great force, and all the coloring to which their success is owing arises from a momentary deviation from one of the principles of the French Republic, a solemn renunciation of conquest. But the reign of liberty, justice, and truth, is restored to France, and tyrants tremble on their thrones.”[24]

Again, in An Address to the Peasantry of Ireland, by a Traveller (1796), Tone wrote: “Countrymen: Great pains have been taken in order to mislead and misinform you on the subject of the French Revolution, by various descriptions of people, whose interest it is, and, of course, whose policy it ever has been, to keep you in ignorance. They have endeavored to impress you with horror at the idea of the execution of the king, of the banishment and plunder of the nobility, and especially of the clergy.… It would be in vain to deny that, in the course of the Revolution, many horrible acts of cruelty and injustice have been committed; the government was, unfortunately, for some time, in the hands of men utterly devoid of humanity and feeling, who sacrificed, without distinction, the innocent and the guilty to their own avarice, ambition or revenge.… It has been the policy of your oppressors to dwell upon the crimes which, unhappily, for a short period, disgraced the Revolution, which exist no longer, and of which no trace remains.” The “no trace remains” is certainly a remarkable statement in 1796.

Earlier in this book, something has been said of the process of intellectual sapping or undermining to which the all-important concepts of “body,” “member,” and “life” were subjected by Ockhamism, from the 14th to the 16th century, with the result that the vital truths concerning the Mystical Body of Christ and the Divine Plan for Order became blurred for many minds and their hold on them was weakened. The same process has been going on in our country in regard to the concept of nationality, with the result that, between Owen Roe O’Neill’s concept of nationality and that of Wolfe Tone, there is a gulf. For Owen Roe O’Neill, the development of national life is meant not only not to hinder but to help every member of the nation to live his personal life as a member of Christ. The Mystical Body of Christ, not the state or nation, is the supreme entity charged with the supreme interests. For Wolfe Tone, membership of Christ does not exist, the supreme dignity is that of the citizen of the nation. There is nothing higher than that. Thus he shows the disorder of his mind and his unfitness to serve as a model in the Irish national struggle. Now the nations of this world do not stand still, so our country, like all countries, will either return to integral acknowledgment of Christ the King or it will drift further to the left, that is, into the camp of Satan. The spiritual descendants of Owen Roe O’Neill and Wolfe Tone fought each other for the soul of Owen Roe’s adopted country, Spain, quite recently. Spain was saved for Christ the King. Will Ireland remain faithful to him? Yes, on condition of realizing more fully than Wolfe Tone and James Connolly whither the principles of 1789 lead, and rejecting them integrally. Let us now see how James Connolly failed to do so.

james connolly’s ignorance of the meaning and the aim of communism

We have already seen that the strongly organized naturalistic Jewish nation gradually got control of the Socialist or collectivist current issuing from the principles of the French Revolution and that the Jews brought these to their logical conclusion by the installation of a Communist state in Russia. In The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World (pp. 228–236), an outline is given of the theoretical basis and the inevitable consequences of Marxian materialism. For Marx men are purely material like the irrational animals, and, as such, being mere individuals not persons, they cannot aspire to have family life, a native land, or union with God through membership of Christ. “For Marxists, there cannot be any organization such as we Catholics understand by the family. Men are purely material like the animals. They have sexual intercourse, as natural instinct inclines them thereto, but the children born of these unions belong to the collectivity, to the Marxian World-state. There cannot, of course, be any question of a native land (patria) in the Catholic sense. Material man works and modifies by his labor the particular portion of matter assigned to him by the State-God, but all our language about continuing the spiritual traditions of our ancestors is simply meaningless bourgeois cant. Man is purely material and, in due time, given the correct Marxian education, he will be exclusively concerned with matter and its modifications, as he should be. Finally, there is no such thing as God or the Blessed Trinity or the supernatural life of grace. The second person of the Blessed Trinity could not become Man, for as has just been said, there is no God and no Blessed Trinity. Our Lord Jesus Christ is just a mere clod of matter like the rest of us.”[25]

Now, James Connolly came up against this blatant anti-materialism under Jewish leadership, in the United States, and yet he was unable to see that the whole movement was simply a preparation for the reign of the natural Messias. The following passages from Mr. David Goldstein’s book, Autobiography of a Campaigner for Christ (pp. 185–187), will suffice to make this clear: “He (Connolly) tackled the biggest man intellectually in the socialist movement of the Western Hemisphere, Professor Daniel De Leon.…A few excerpts from the official organ of the Socialist Labor Party, The Weekly People, April 9, 1904, will show that Connolly dealt with socialism in the same manner as the man who separated water into its component parts, oxygen and hydrogen, consuming the oxygen and imagining that he was drinking water. Connolly separated the oxygen of socialism—its economics—from the hydrogen of socialism—its Marxian philosophy—and imagined he had real socialism. To quote from Connolly himself: ‘My comrade’s views (against monogamic marriage), especially since the publication in The Weekly People of Rebel’s Woman, are held by a very large number of members, but I hold, nevertheless, that they are wrong, and, furthermore, that such works and such publications are an excrescence upon the movement. The abolition of the capitalist system will, undoubtedly, solve the economic side of the Woman Question, but it will solve that alone. The question of marriage, of divorce, of paternity, of the equality of woman with man are physical and sexual questions…. and in a Socialist Republic would still be as hotly contested as they are today.…The attitude of the party towards religion is another one on which I believe there is a tendency at present to stray from the correct path. Theoretically every Socialist Labor Party man agrees that socialism is a political and economic question, and has nothing to do with religion. But how many adhere to that position? Very few indeed. I hold that mine is the correct Socialist Labor Party doctrine.’ Now, will someone please tread on the tail of my coat?”

“Connolly put the tail of his coat just where De Leon could and did tread on it and all over it. De Leon finally lifted it up and booted Connolly out of the Socialist Labor Party.… Connolly’s two and a half column article in The Weekly People was followed by De Leon’s five column reply. Connolly countered, but it went into thin air—not into The Weekly People. He was taught a lesson others have learned, that free speech is a good propaganda slogan to use against the ‘capitalist press,’ but that does not mean freedom to tell the Socialist Labor Party, in a Socialist Labor Party paper, what Socialist Labor Party doctrine is, when it is not Socialist Labor Party doctrine.

“In the Reminiscences of The Socialist Labor Movement and Its Great Leader, Daniel De Leon, the story of the clash was recorded, with a socialist twist, for future generations.”[26]

james connolly’s ignorance

of catholic teaching

That James Connolly’s knowledge of Catholic teaching was very imperfect can be readily seen, even from what he says above in defense of Christian marriage. He makes the silly assertion that marriage is a physical question not an economic question. He should have known that marriage is above all a moral question and then an economic and physical question, and that Our Lord has laid down the order to be observed in regard to it. If he had only given one-half the energy to the study of Pope Leo XIII’s Encyclical Letter, On the Condition of the Working Classes, and its exposition of the Divine Plan for Order, that he had given to Marx’s Neo-Messianic plans for disorder, he would have done a marvellous amount of good because of his strength of character. He would have learned, for example, that we must always take into consideration the moral aspect of economic and physical questions. Thus he would have seen in Pope Leo XIII’s Encyclical, Rerum Novarum, what Pope Pius XI insisted upon forty years later, namely, that the Church “never can relinquish her God-given task of interposing her authority, not indeed in technical matters, for which she has neither the equipment nor the mission, but in all those that have a bearing on moral conduct. For the deposit of truth entrusted to Us by God, and Our weighty office of propagating, interpreting, and urging, in season and out of season, the entire moral law, demand that both social and economic questions be brought within Our supreme jurisdiction, in so far as they refer to moral issues. For though economic science and moral discipline are guided each by its own principles in its own sphere, it is false that the two orders are so distinct and alien that the former in no way depends on the latter. The so-called laws of economics, derived from the nature of earthly goods and from the qualities of the human body and soul, determine what means are thereby necessary; while reason itself clearly deduces from the nature of things and from the individual and social character of man, what is the end and object of the whole economic order assigned by God the creator. It is the moral law alone which commands us to seek in all our conduct our supreme and final end, and to strive directly in our specific actions for those ends which nature, or rather, the author of nature has established for them, duly subordinating the particular to the general.…As a consequence we shall be led by progressive stages to the final end of all, God himself, our highest and lasting good.”[27]

Because of his imperfect knowledge, James Connolly has done an amount of harm, as he has diffused a one-sided view of the Catholic Church, which he derived from Marx. Both failed to see that Our Lord and His Mystical Body, the Catholic Church, stand for the Divine Plan for Order in the world and never cease to proclaim that order even when it is rejected and they are crucified. The crucifixion by the world in both cases is the result of the proclamation of the divine order. Along with Our Lord in Holy Mass, his members proclaim their determination to work valiantly to organize the world in the way Christ wants and not to allow social life to be molded in opposition to the Divine Plan. Of course, the Church preaches humility and patience in face of triumphant evil, but she also preaches magnanimity and fortitude in action for the order of the world for which Our Lord died. The Mass is not a mere public act of resignation to the disorder organized by those who reject the Divine Plan, whether “Creative Capitalists”—continually attacked by Communists—or “Loan-Capitalists”—less frequently, or never, mentioned by Communists. No; God wants all who assist at Mass to understand that they are affirming publicly their readiness to strive for order with his Son, that order in which all will be treated with the reverence due to members of his Son. That will mean striving for an organization of the world opposed to those who in self-centered fashion, maintain disorder and increase the sufferings of the poor and the lowly.

In 1910, Pius X exposed this teaching as follows: “As in the conflict of interests and most of all in the struggle against unjust forces, a man’s virtue, nay his sanctity, does not always suffice to assure him his daily bread, and as the social machinery ought to be so organized as, by its natural action, to paralyze the efforts of the wicked, and to render accessible to every man of good will his legitimate share of temporal happiness, We earnestly desire that you should take an active share in organizing society for that purpose. And for that end, while your priests shall apply themselves with ardor to labor for the sanctification of souls, for the defense of the Church, and in works of charity properly so called, you shall select from amongst them some men of activity and of well-balanced minds, doctors of philosophy and theology, perfectly conversant with the history of civilization, ancient and modern, and you shall apply them to the less exalted, but more practical, study of social science, and when the opportunity offers place them at the head of your works of Catholic Action. However, let not those priests allow themselves to be led astray in the maze of contemporary opinions, by the mirage of a false democracy.…Let them be persuaded that…the Church, which has never betrayed the happiness of the people by compromising alliances, has no need to disown her past, that it is enough for her, with the co-operation of the real workmen of social re-organization, to take up again the organizations shattered by the Revolution, and in the same Christian spirit which inspired them, to adapt them to the new environment created by the material evolution of contemporary society: for the true friends of the people are neither revolutionaries, nor innovators, but men of tradition.”[28]

Hence James Connolly drew a one-sided conclusion from Catholic exhortations to bear one’s sufferings in union with Christ. It is true that the Catholic Church does preach resignation in suffering, because suffering is inevitable in our fallen world, but the Catholic Church’s whole message is far from being limited to that, as we have seen. God wants us to bear the sufferings that are inevitable in a fallen world, as Pope Leo XIII insists in the Encyclical Letter, Rerum Novarum, but he does not will sin and disorder with consequent infliction of suffering, and he wants organization on the part of good men so that such crimes may be prevented. God’s aim is always order. He wants an ordered organization of the world so that a sufficiency of material goods for the life of a human person may be within reach of each and all. He wants order in meeting the inevitable sufferings of life, but he did not introduce suffering into the world, and he does not will, for example, a financial system which wilfully inflicts suffering by organizing the destruction of food and thus conniving at the starvation of thousands in the midst of potential plenty. God wants society to be organized in such a way as to prevent selfish men from inflicting such sufferings, but he does not want the reaction thereto to be in the direction of Communism. The whole trend of Communism is to reduce human beings to the animal or sub-human level, leaving them without religion, family or property. Against the exploitation of the weak by ruthless individualism, the Catholic Church preaches the solidarity of members of Christ’s Mystical Body, while, against the anti-human Communist denial of human personality, she preaches the lofty dignity of the human person, member of Christ.

If James Connolly in his blindness could not see whither he was being led, that is no reason why we should follow those who want to fool us by using his name.[29] According to The Hibernian Journal (November, 1937), Mr. William O’Brien, later a Labor Representative for Tipperary, delivered a speech at the Mansion House, Dublin, in 1918. The object of the meeting at which the speech was delivered was “to congratulate the Russian people on the triumph they had won for democratic principles.” In the course of the speech, Mr. O’Brien said: “The freedom that Russia has won is the same kind of freedom that has been fought for by every revolutionary in Ireland from Wolfe Tone to James Connolly.” Another speaker said: “The Russian interpretation of the principle (of freedom) is the only interpretation that will be acceptable to the people of Ireland.” It may be conceded that the triumph of the Neo-Messianism of Karl Marx is a logical conclusion of the naturalistic principles of the French Revolution accepted by Wolfe Tone, and we may regret the blindness of Wolfe Tone and James Connolly. But we should be fools to follow them against Our Lord. Surely Mr. O’Brien cannot think us so naive as to believe what was said about the Russian interpretation of the principle of freedom? When man is purely material and animal, as he is for Marx and Lenin, what meaning can be ascribed to the words “freedom” and “liberty”?

the irish constitution of 1937

In the beautiful Prologue to the Constitution, is to be found the following splendid profession of faith: “We, the people of Ireland…humbly acknowledging all our obligations to Our Divine Lord, Jesus Christ, who sustained our fathers through centuries of trial,…do hereby adopt, enact, and give to ourselves this Constitution.” By that profession of faith, we proclaimed to the world that we acknowledged not merely some, but all, our obligations to Our Divine Lord, Jesus Christ, true God and true man, judge of all mankind. Yet, in regard to the central point of the order of the world, namely, the relation of our nation to the one true Church which Our Lord came down on earth to found, the Constitution fails lamentably to acknowledge the rights of God and its obligations to Our Divine Lord. The reference is to Article 44 on religion.

In Section I of that Article, the state acknowledges that the homage of public worship is due to Almighty God. From this the logical conclusion is that this homage of worship should be given to him according to the rule and in the manner he himself has laid down, namely, through the Catholic Church instituted by Christ. Yet there is nothing like this in the Constitution. The state does not acknowledge that the one true religion according to which Almighty God desires to be worshipped is that of the Church established by Our Divine Lord, Jesus Christ, namely, the Catholic Church. Instead, the state recognizes the position of the Catholic Church as the Church of the great majority of the citizens, just as it recognizes the Protestant Episcopal Church in Ireland, the Methodist Church in Ireland, the Religious Society of Friends in Ireland, as well as the Jewish Congregations and the other religious denominations existing in Ireland at the date of its coming into operation, as the Churches of minorities. The expression used with regard to the Catholic Church, namely, that the state recognizes the special position of the Catholic Church as the guardian of the Faith professed by the great majority of Irish citizens, may leave a superficial reader under the impression that the Irish state follows up the declaration of the opening sub-section to its logical conclusion. Alas! it does nothing of the kind. The state simply acknowledges what is evident to anybody who can count, namely, that the majority of Irishmen in Ireland profess the Catholic Faith.

In addition, by the use of the word “recognizes” for all the different forms of religion, the Irish state seems to attribute rights to erroneous systems as such and, by putting all religions on the same level, professes that religious indifference condemned in such forcible terms by Pope Leo XIII: “To hold, therefore,” writes Pope Leo, “that there is no difference in matters of religion between forms that are unlike each other, and even contrary to each other, most clearly leads in the end to the rejection of all religion in both theory and practice. And this is the same thing as atheism, however it may differ from it in name. Men who really believe in the existence of God must, in order to be consistent with themselves and to avoid absurd conclusions, understand that differing modes of divine worship involving dissimilarity and conflict even on most important points, cannot all be equally probable, equally good, and equally acceptable to God.”[30] The influence of the French Revolution is most clearly visible in the fact that the Irish state proclaims itself indifferent to the true Messias who has come and to the natural Messias looked forward to by the Jewish Congregations. The different Protestant sects, in theory at least, acknowledge the divinity of Our Lord and thus are turned towards the one true order of the world. The Jewish nation looks forward to the disappearance of that order.

Another ambiguity in the same article must be pointed out, for it is to be found in practically every post-revolutionary constitution. “Freedom of conscience” and “the free profession and practice of religion” are, “subject to public order and morality” guaranteed to every citizen. But who is to decide what is moral and what is immoral? Pope Leo XIII expressly teaches in the Encyclical Letter, lmmortale Dei, that “the Catholic Church is the true and sole teacher of virtue and guardian of morals.” Her divine mission to safeguard the moral law is, however, not acknowledged by the state, as we have seen. She is put on the same level as various other man-made bodies that claim to have the right to give authoritative decisions with regard to morality. Accordingly, if a conflict arises about a question involving moral issues, it will belong to the state to decide it. Thus the state will arrogate to itself the function of the Catholic Church. This means that, in the last resort, the supranational, naturalistic organizations of Freemasonry and the Jewish nation, which have been gradually acquiring control since the French Revolution, will impose their view of morality. So naturalism will oust the supernatural and men will cease to treat one another as members of Christ.

It is one thing to declare that erroneous systems as such have rights and another to recognize the rights of persons who hold erroneous opinions. The state may and ought to recognize the rights of persons because they are persons. As persons they have the right not to be forced to accept even the truth, but this right presupposes the duty of accepting the truth freely. The state must respect the good faith of the individual conscience and not constrain it, but, while doing this, it must not lose sight of its paramount social duty of acknowledging the objective order instituted by God and recognizing unequivocally the Kingship of Christ.

In the texts from the Encyclical Letters of Pope Leo XIII quoted in the Preface we have seen that the great Pontiff insists primarily on the rights of God. The essential (or per se) order of the world, the order which God wants, demands the acknowledgment of these rights. “Since the Catholic religion is the only true religion” he writes in the Encyclical Letter on Freemasonry, “to put it on the same level as other religions is to treat it with the gravest injustice and offer it the worst form of insult,” “The Church,” he again writes in the Encyclical Letter on The Christian Constitution of States, “deems it unlawful to place the various forms of divine worship on the same footing as the true religion.” He then mentions what is secondary and accidental (per accidens). “The Church does not,” he says, “condemn those rulers who, for the sake of securing some great good or of hindering some great evil, patiently allow custom or usage to be a sort of sanction for each kind of religion having its place in the state.” Finally, he proclaims the deep respect of the Catholic Church for the liberty of the human person: “the Church is wont to take earnest heed that no one shall be forced to embrace the Catholic faith against his will.”

On account of his hatred of the supernatural life of grace, Satan has steadily striven to get every country that once acknowledged the essential or per se order of the world to reject that order and to revolt against it. He considers that he has made a notable advance towards his goal when he has succeeded in having other religions placed on the same level as the true Church of Christ. He is well aware of the anti-supernatural influence of that official attitude on the average member of society.

The rights of God and the Divine Plan for Order in the world must not be allowed to become obscure in men’s minds. They have been specially emphasised in this book, in order to prepare the full reaction against the so-called Reformation and the French Revolution. “First and foremost,” writes Pope Leo XIII towards the end of the Encyclical Letter on The Christian Constitution of States, “it is the duty of all Catholics worthy of the name and wishful to be known as most loving children of the Church…to endeavor to bring back all civil society to the pattern and form of Christianity which we have described.” He stressed the same duty in other words in the Encyclical Letter on Human Liberty. “Justice therefore forbids,” he writes, “and reason itself forbids, the state to be godless; or to adopt a line of action which would end in godlessness—namely, to treat the various religions (as they call them) alike, and to bestow upon them promiscuously equal rights and privileges. Since, then, the profession of one religion is necessary in the state, that religion must he professed which alone is true, and which can be recognized without difficulty, especially in Catholic states, because the marks of truth are, as it were, engraven upon it.”

Cardinal Pie ascribed the decay of French governmental and public life primarily to the neglect of the rights of God. “Why is it,” he writes. “that our fine body of priests, our splendid army of convinced and practicing Catholics cannot succeed in remedying the sufferings of the country in a greater degree and in a more efficacious manner? Foreigners who know, who admire, and who envy all the magnificent qualities of French Catholicism often put themselves this question. What is the explanation of the fact that so much charity, so much activity, so much self-sacrifice, are so ineffectual and produce so little fruit in regard to the amelioration of public affairs? The reason is that in regard to public affairs and social order, the faithful and, in too many cases, the priests of our generation have thought that even in a Christian country, a sort of neutral attitude towards the Catholic faith could be adopted, as if Our Lord Jesus Christ had never come or had disappeared from the world. …If we have not succeeded in triumphing over the revolutionary spirit which makes us a spectacle for other peoples, the evil which is sapping our strength and leading us to the tomb is that while we have the faith in private we have accepted our share of national infidelity.…Our Lord Jesus Christ does not reign amongst us and our Constitution is far from being what the Constitution of a Christian and Catholic country should be. Our public law lays down that the Catholic religion is the religion of the majority of Frenchmen, but it adds that the other forms of worship have a right to equal protection. Is not that equivalent to proclaiming that the Constitution gives equal protection to truth and error?…When error has once become incarnate in legal formulae and in administrative practice, it penetrates so deeply into people’s minds that it is impossible to eradicate it.[31]

Let us for the sake of clearness put, in parallel columns, the outlines of a Constitution fully respectful of the rights of God and in keeping with the fidelity of our ancestors to Our Divine Lord, and the actual Constitution.

Draft of Constitution Fully Respectful of God’s Rights (Art. 44).

Article 44 of the Constitution as it Now Stands

I. The state acknowledges Almighty God’s right to public worship in the manner which he has clearly shown to be his will.

II. Accordingly, the state shall hold in honor the Holy Name of God and shall reckon it amongst its chief duties to favor and protect religion and shall not enact any measure prejudicial to it.

III. The state acknowledges that the true religion is that established by our divine Lord Jesus Christ himself when he instituted the Holy, Catholic, Apostolic and Roman Church; and that that Church has, therefore, the divine mission to propagate the true religion and to be the guardian ami interpreter of the moral law.

IV. The state recognizes the Catholic Church as a perfect society, having in itself full competence and sovereign authority in regard to man’s spiritual good.

I. (1) The state acknowledges that the homage of public worship is due to Almighty God. It shall hold his Name in reverence and shall respect and honor religion.

(2) The state recognizes the special position of the Holy, Catholic, Apostolic and Roman Church as the guardian of the faith professed by the great majority of its citizens.

(3) The state also recognizes the Church of Ireland, the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, the Methodist Church in Ireland, the Religious Society of Friends in Ireland, as well as the Jewish Congregations and the other religious denominations existing in Ireland at the date of the coming into operation of this Constitution.

Draft of Constitution Fully Respectful of God’s Rights (Art. 44).

Article 44 of the Constitution as it Now Stands

V. (1) Whatever may be classed as belonging to the civil and political order is rightly subject to the supreme authority of the other perfect society, the state, whose, function it is to procure the temporal good, moral and material, of society.

(2) The state pledges itself, therefore, in virtue of the sovereign authority it holds from God in the temporal sphere, to enforce respect, by just laws, for the inalienable rights of the person and the family, and to promote, with all its strength, conditions of social and moral well-being.

(3) Wherever the jurisdiction of the Catholic Church and that of the state demand to be harmoniously co-ordinated, the state will make a special arrangement with the Church. It may also make special arrangements with other religious bodies concerning particular matters, civil, political and religious, in order to safeguard the personal rights of their members.

VI. The state guarantees to all its citizens freedom of religious conviction and liberty to practice their religion, in public and in private, due regard however being had to social order and true morality.

II. (1) Freedom of conscience and the free profession and practice of religion are, subject to public order and morality, guaranteed to every citizen.

Draft of Constitution Fully Respectful of God’s Rights (Art. 44).

Article 44 of the Constitution as it Now Stands

VII. The state pledges itself not to impose any disabilities that would be contrary to natural rights and social justice, on the ground of religious conviction.

VIII. Legislation providing state aid for schools shall not discriminate between schools under the management of the Catholic Church and of the other religious bodies.

IX. The Catholic Church and the other religious bodies in the state shall have the right to manage their own affairs, own, acquire and administer property, movable and immovable, and maintain institutions for religious and charitable purposes.

X. Neither the property of the Catholic Church nor of any other religious body shall he diverted save for necessary works of public utility and on payment of just compensation.

(2) The state guarantees not to endow any religion.

(3) The state shall not impose any disabilities or make any discrimination on the ground of religious profession, belief or status.

(4) Legislation providing state aid for schools shall not discriminate between schools under the management of different religious denominations, nor be such as to affect prejudicially the right of any child to attend a school receiving public money without attending religious instruction at that school.

(5) Every religious denomination shall have the right to manage its own affairs, own, acquire, and administer property, movable and immovable, and maintain institutions for religious and charitable purposes.

(6) The property of any religious denomination or any educational institution shall not be diverted save for necessary works of public utility and on payment of compensation.

A logical conclusion from the section on religion in the Irish Constitution may he seen in the Register of Population, 1943, Form A. This was sent round to be filled up, in connection with the rationing of supplies, in November, 1943. On this form, after the column marked Surname there is a column for Other Names. As Irish citizens who do not accept membership of Christ are placed by the Constitution on the same level as those who do, officially we may no longer speak of Christian names in Ireland. Those who reject membership of the Mystical Body of Christ by Baptism would object, so we eliminate what our ancestors so nobly died for. If we wish to react against all the attacks being made on family life, we ought not only to restore Christian names but substitute family name for surname.

As has been already remarked, nations do not stand still any more than individuals, so Ireland will either return to integral acknowledgment of Christ the King or will drift further towards the camp of his enemies. The pressure towards the Left will be maintained by the organized forces of the Jewish nation and of Freemasonry.[32] The Masonic Society functions freely both in the Twenty-Six Counties and in the Six Counties of the North-East. Communist propaganda is striving to unite all Irish workers for the ideals of Marx and Lenin. The failure to stand for the rights of God in regard to the essential point, namely, the question of religion, may be followed later on by a union with the North-East in a manner calculated to favor Judaeo-Masonic naturalism. Our Divine Lord may be incensed at the forgetfulness of him and the ingratitude shown to him, in this article of our Constitution, and may leave us without the light and strength we need.

the irish monetary system

In Part V of this work, which treats of Economic Decay and the Divine Plan for Order, we shall see that the functioning of the English financial system has resulted in a complete perversion of social order. Right order demands the subordination of the manipulation of money or exchange-medium to the production, distribution and exchange of material goods, in view of the development of family life and human personality through membership of Christ. Under the English Gold Standard System, human beings are subordinated to the production of material goods and the production and distribution of material goods are subordinated to finance. J. Maritain has excellently expressed the above idea, though somewhat less explicitly, while considering the three elements, man, production of material goods, and money. In Religion and Culture, he writes as follows: “Instead of being considered as a mere feeder enabling a living organism, which the productive undertaking is, to procure the necessary material, equipment and replenishing, money has come to be considered the living organism, and the undertaking with its human activities as the feeder and instrument of money; so that the profits cease to be the normal fruit of the undertaking fed with money, and become the normal fruit of the money fed by the undertaking. That is what I call the fecundity of money. Values have been reversed, and the immediate consequence is to give the rights of dividend precedence over those of salary, and to establish the whole economy under the supreme regulation of the laws of the fluidity of the sign money, predominating over the thing, commodities useful to mankind.”[33]

There has been no real reaction in Ireland against this fundamental disorder. Professor O’Rahilly points this out in Money (p. 394): “We must not be misled by current phraseology,” he writes, “into thinking that we have at present a separate currency which happens to be kept at parity with British Currency. What we have is not parity but identity subject to separate book-entry.” This identity was disastrous for our farmers, when the Bank of England entered upon its post-war deflation in view of the restoration of the Gold-Standard in 1925. The fundamental disorder inspiring the system is militating against the rehabilitation of rural life and the promotion of social justice. Irish workingmen, having nothing but their labor to offer for sale must now go across to England during the present war (1939–?), in order to be able to secure some of the exchange-medium freely issued there. By presenting this English exchange-medium, their families can obtain Irish exchange-medium. Meanwhile the recommendations of the Report of the Drainage Commission (Dublin, 1941) are not being attended to as they ought. These recommendations would mean the issue of exchange-medium for work here, highly profitable work in the long run.[34] Reafforestation, too, would mean highly profitable work. The morally inevitable consequences of the migration—and return—fit in well with the plans of the anti-supernatural forces in the world for the attack on the supernatural life in our country. Anyone can verify this by reading Irish Freedom, the Communist organ published in England for the diffusion of Communistic ideas amongst Irish workingmen over there. An extract, taken from the June (1942) issue of Irish Freedom, is to be found in its proper setting in The Workingmen’s Guilds of the Middle Ages, by the present writer. Irish Freedom not only approves of attacks on the acknowledgment of the one true religion by any state—“religious distinctions are protected only by tyrants”—but advocates the confiscation of Church property and the abolition of the right of acquiring property by inheritance. The abolition of the right of inheritance is one of the points insisted upon in The Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels. It aims a deadly blow at family life and sane farming.

germany’s reaction

prussia and judaeo-masonry

In order to understand the different currents in the German reaction against Judaeo-Masonic influences, we must bear well in mind that the Jewish nation and Freemasonry are working in the camp of Satan for the reign of naturalism, that is, for the disruption of the Divine Plan for Order and the elimination of supernatural life and love from the world. They will hotly deny this or scoff at it, but the objective order of the world remains. In addition, the leaders of the Jewish nation aim at the inauguration of the reign of the natural Messias and the rejection of Our Divine Lord, in view of their own domination, and they use their undeniable influence on Freemasonry for that purpose. Accordingly, we must be prepared to see these naturalistic forces favor Protestant powers like England and Prussia in so far as they may be useful instruments in propagating naturalism and at the same time seek to use them for the ulterior schemes of Judaeo-Masonry. We must be prepared, too, for reactions, when these Protestant countries perceive that what they consider their national interests have been sacrificed to Jewish interests on various occasions and that their national life is in danger of corruption and decay.

We need not be astonished, then, to find, on the one hand, in books like Les Sociétes Secrètes et la Société, by Pére Deschamps, S.J., and Les Pourquoi de la Guerre Mondiale, by Mgr. Delassus, lengthy accounts of the different ways in which Jewry and Freemasonry favored the hegemony of Prussia over the Germanic countries and the substitution of Berlin for Vienna as the cultural center of the German-speaking peoples. It may be well to mention one of the lesser known incidents in this story. We saw that the creation of a Prussian Empire was amongst the aims of Palmerston outlined in The Globe of 12th May, 1849. Already at the Diet of Frankfort in 1848, Mgr. Kettler, afterwards Bishop of Mayence, was astonished to hear one of the deputies propose, at a preliminary reunion, the extension of the frontiers of Prussia to the Maine, thus making himself the champion of an enormous violation of law and justice. “I never thought,” he wrote in one of his books, “that, twenty years later, as Bishop of Mayence, I should see the realization of this plan.… I am now certain that this deputy was not expressing a merely personal opinion, but that he was revealing the plan of a secret society.”[35] Prussia showed its gratitude by protecting Freemasonry. In a book published by General Gelazinski with the authorization of the German Grand Lodge, shortly after the appearance of Pope Leo XIII’s Encyclical Letter, Humanum genus, on Freemasonry, we read: “Of all the European powers that have been in contact with Freemasonry, only two have been consistent in their line of conduct: Prussia which has always protected it, and the Papacy which has always combated it.”[36]

It was from Prussia that the movement for the emancipation of the Jews started. The Jew, Wilhelm Dohm, Secretary of the Prussian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, wrote a book entitled Political Reform and the Jews, which appeared in 1781. According to the Jewish convert, l’abbé Joseph Lémann, this book had an enormous influence on Mirabeau and the other French revolutionaries. Dohm, who was later Plenipotentiary for Prussia in negotiations with Napoleon, was a very intimate friend of Mirabeau, when the latter frequented the salon of Henriette Herz in Berlin (1783–1788). In 1788 Mirabeau himself published a pamphlet in London containing Dohm’s ideas. L’abbé Lémann says that Dohm simply applied to the Jews the theories exposed in Rousseau’s Contrat Social. Rousseau substituted “men” and “citizens” for “members of Christ.” Dohm then claimed that the Jews who refused to become members of Christ should be treated as men and citizens.[37] And the Jews showed their gratitude by the way in which they favored the increase of Prussia’s power. One testimony will suffice. In Le Nouveau Mercure (Paris, May, 1922), a Jewish writer, M. René Gross, contributed an article entitled The Jewish Question by a Jew. In the course of this article, he said: “On November 11, 1918, Germany gave up the struggle and laid down her arms. France had lost 1,600,000 of her youth killed on the field of battle.… It is doubtful whether this sacrifice has been of any use. After forty-two months of peace, France, bled white, devastated and ruined, is today in a more dangerous situation, in face of Germany, than in 1914.…If France does not look out, the conquered of yesterday, victorious today, will be the conquerors of tomorrow. The two Internationals, which are simply the two facets of the Jewish international power, finance and revolution, are working feverishly for that end. It is no longer necessary to prove this thesis.…The criminals have come forward into the limelight too openly and in too many countries at the same time. The conflagration in Russia lights up the crime with flames that are really too high and too luminous for there to be any longer any possibility of concealment.”

On the other hand, we find in books like that of Dr. Friedrich Wichtl, Weltfreimaurerei, Weltrevolution, Weltrepublik, the accusation levelled at Jewry and Freemasonry of having continually worked against the interests of Germany. For example, Wichtl shows that Freemasonry throughout the world turned against Germany during the Great War (1914–1918). In particular, he proves that it was through Masonic pressure that Italy entered the war against Austria and Germany. He shows also that the Communist Republic in Munich and the whole Communist movement in Germany and Russia after the Great War was the work of Judaeo-Masonry with Brothers Toller, Levien, Axelrod, Wadler, Ewinger, Lenin and Trotsky, etc., etc.[38] On page 286, he gives as his conclusion that “neither we, Germans, nor the visible governments of our enemies are responsible for the terrible slaughter of the Great War, but that dark, secret power which we have called World-Masonry, behind which is hidden the invisible ruler of the destinies of all states and peoples, World-Jewry.”

In their books, Père Deschamps, S.J., and Mgr. Delassus stress the fact that the organized naturalistic forces favored Prussia, in view of utilizing that power’s anti-Catholic attitude, for the elimination of the spirit of the Mystical Body of Christ from Germany. Wichtl insists upon the fact that in the end, Prussia began to see that she was being sacrificed in her turn for “higher interests.” One is strongly reminded of a remark made to the distinguished historian, Cardinal Pitra, at Vienna, in 1889. A highly-placed personage, whose name he does not give, said to him: “The Catholic nations must be crushed by the Protestant nations. When this result has been attained, a breath will he sufficient to bring about the disappearance of Protestantism. Thus we shall arrive at state atheism.[39] So the points of view defended by these two groups of writers are complementary rather than contradictory.[40]

germany’s reaction is antagonistic

to the catholic church

The German reaction against the corrupting naturalistic influence of Jewry and Freemasonry, instead of inaugurating the return of the whole German nation to the Divine Plan for Order, from which North Germany turned aside in the 16th century, has intensified the disorder. The reaction is a purely naturalistic one, by which the German race is put in the place of the Mystical Body of Christ, German blood is substituted for sanctifying grace, the life-blood of the Mystical Body, and the instinctive aspirations of the German racebound, national soul, as interpreted by the leaders of the race, replace the moral law. Over against the supernatural, supranational Mystical Body of Christ, the Jews put their race and their nation, thus declaring that order is to come to the world through all nations being molded by the Jewish nation. In consequence of this fundamental disorder in Jewish thought, pantheism has largely taken the place of belief in the transcendent God of their ancestors, and the Talmud has ousted the law of God. In this way the Jews have come to put their race and nation in the place of God, have deified them in fact. Instead of drawing the obvious lesson from the Jewish rejection of Christ and striving to bring back Germany to accept his Divine Plan, the National-Socialist movement has denounced the whole Christian revelation as a superimposed deformation of the German national soul and set up the German race and its national aspirations in the place both of the Mystical Body of Christ and, a fortiori, of the Jewish race and nation.

Accordingly, National-Socialism substitutes the German race and its exigencies of social organization for the supernatural, supranational Mystical Body of Christ and its exigencies of social organization, expressed by the indirect power of the Church, Christian marriage as the union of members of Christ, and Christian education as the formation of members of Christ. So one can readily conclude that the National-Socialist reaction against the corroding influence of Jewish naturalism on German national life leads, not only to measures of repression against the Jews but to a dire persecution of the Catholic Church.[41] The deified German race has attacked directly the rival natural deity, the Jewish race, and has proceeded systematically to get rid of it as corrupting the very fount of deity, German blood. It undermines and seeks to eliminate directly and indirectly the supernatural, supranational Catholic Church. Catholics are still allowed to profess at Mass that they will endeavor to live their lives as members of Christ and that they will strive to organize society so as to be aided in so living. But, from the moment Catholics in Germany and Austria leave the Church after Mass, they find society organized on the principle that the highest form of life is German national life and that German blood is higher and nobler than sanctifying grace, the life-blood of the Mystical Body. National-Socialism demands an education which forms the young to regard membership of the German race, not membership of Christ’s Mystical Body, as the highest good. The moral law of which the sole divinely-appointed guardian is the Catholic Church is replaced by the exigencies of German blood as declared by the chosen leaders of the people. Hence the whole social organization of German life and the ideals animating it are completely anti-Catholic.

We can now understand what National-Socialism means by “Positive Christianity,” Revelation, Faith, Sin and Redemption. Positive Christianity is Christianity as the German national soul, the noblest of all souls, understands it under the influence of its special instinctive impulses. Catholicism and Protestantism both stand for a negative Christianity which is always condemning and forbidding courses of action, thus barring the way to the positive expansion of the German soul. It is only when a man has broken with Catholicism that he becomes free for a really organic culture, a true faith in German blood. Revelation signifies the inspiration coming from the blood of the German race and from the history of the German people. Faith is nothing else than sublime unshakable confidence in the future of the German people and in the truth of the Leader’s mission. The Leader has been thrown up by the German racial soul for the national hour of need. The one really mortal sin is to mingle good German blood with the inferior blood of other races and to deform the mind by doctrines opposed to the National-Socialist Weltanschauung (World-outlook or View of the World).[42] Redemption consists in the liberation of the German soul from extraneous influences of blood and all anti-racial deforming doctrines.

We can thus see the radical opposition between the National-Socialist Weltanschauung, with its deithfication of the German race, and the Divine Plan for Order through the Catholic Church, the Mystical Body of Christ. Hence persecution of the Catholic Church by a National-Socialist government is inevitable. In Mein Kampf, Herr Hitler is quite explicit in this regard. “A Weltanschauung is intolerant,” he writes, “and cannot permit another to exist side by side with it. It imperiously demands its own recognition as unique and exclusive and a complete transformation in accordance with its views throughout all the branches of public life. It can never allow the previous state of affairs to continue in existence by its side.…It may be objected here that…such fanaticism and intolerance are typical symptoms of a Jewish mentality. That may be a thousandfold true; and it is a fact deeply to be regretted…but the fact does not change conditions as they exist today. The men who wish to liberate our German nation from the conditions in which it now exists cannot cudgel their brains with thinking how excellent it would be if this or that event had never arisen. They must strive to find ways and means of abolishing what actually exists. A philosophy of life which is inspired by an infernal spirit of intolerance can only be set aside by a doctrine that is advanced in an equally ardent spirit and fought for with as determined a will.…Political parties are prone to enter into compromises; but a Weltanschauung never does this.… A general Weltanschauung will never share its place with something else, therefore it can never agree to collaborate in any order of things it condemns. On the contrary it feels obliged to employ every means in fighting against the old order and the whole order of ideas belonging to that order and to prepare the way for its destruction. Any new philosophy of life will bring its ideas to victory only if the most courageous and active elements of its epoch and its people are enrolled under its standards and grouped firmly together in a powerful fighting organization. To achieve this purpose, it is absolutely necessary to select from the general system of doctrine a certain number of ideas which will appeal to such individuals and which, once they are expressed in a precise and clear-cut form, will serve as articles of faith for a new association of men.…The program of a Weltanschauung represents a declaration of war against an existing order of things, against present conditions, in short, against the established Weltanschauung. It is not necessary, however, that every individual fighter for such a new doctrine need have a full grasp of the ultimate ideas and plans of those who are the leaders of the movement.”[43]

Opposition to the molding process carried out by the National-Socialist Weltanschauung, opposition which is incumbent on every Catholic bishop and priest, is treated by the National-Socialist government as interference in politics and as an expression of hostility to the German Reich. According to the National-Socialist government, to form children to consider membership of Christ as their highest dignity, infinitely higher than membership of any race, is “politics” and an act of direct enmity to the German state as at present constituted.

Persecution of the Catholic Church is therefore inevitable, as has been said. But, according to the National-Socialist government, there is no persecution of Catholics for religion. All that happens is that priests who interfere in politics and show themselves enemies of the German state are dealt with as they deserve. Accordingly, we find flagrant contradictions between the affirmations of the of the German government, Herr A. Hitler, on the one hand, and those of the Pope and the German bishops, on the other.

For example, in an Official National-Socialist Bulletin, News from Germany (April, 1939), in a statement made by Herr Hitler in the Reichstag on January 30th, 1939, we read: “No one in Germany has so far been persecuted for his religious views, nor will any one be persecuted on that account.…We shall protect the German clergy in their capacity as God’s ministers; but we shall destroy members of the clergy who are the enemies of the German Reich.” Yet, on the other hand, Pope Pius XI, speaking to the College of Cardinals on Christmas Eve, 1937, said: “We must call things by their right names. In Germany, there is undeniably a religious persecution. For a long time, they have been trying to make us believe that there is no persecution. We know well, however, that there is a grievous persecution. Nay more, there has rarely been a persecution so grievous, so fearful, so painful, and so devastating in its far-reaching effects. It is a persecution in which neither the exercise of force, nor the pressure of threats, nor the subterfuges of cunning and deceit have been spared.…We are not meddling in politics.…It is undeniably Our duty to insist that the ordinary citizen is obliged to maintain his civic life in conformity with the law of God, the law of Christ. Is that working for religion or is it meddling in politics? It certainly is not meddling in politics.…This it is that profoundly grieves the sovereign Pontiff, namely, the repeated accusation of the abuse of religion for political ends and the launching of such a calumny against so many of his Venerable Brethren in the Episcopate, against members of the Sacred College of Cardinals, against so many priests, against so many good laymen, solicitous for nothing else than to obey God’s law.…”[44]

Again, in their Joint Pastoral Letter of 19th  August, 1938, the German bishops wrote as follows: “We German Catholic bishops have already in earlier Pastorals dealt with the struggle which has been forced upon us. And again today, from repeated experiences, we have to place it on record that these attacks have not been moderated or become more bearable, but have grown fiercer and are being pressed home with greater enmity than ever, while it is also true that our enemies’ aims have now become more evident. They are trying to restrict us on every side, to bleed our Catholic life to death. Yea, more, they aim at the complete overthrow of the Catholic Church on German soil, and even at the entire elimination of Christianity of whatever sort, and the introduction in its place of a form of belief which is utterly alien to the true faith in God and belief in a future life.…Men of standing and authority have themselves announced with the greatest publicity that their ideological aim is none other than the destruction of German Catholicism. Nor can it be urged against this that, after all, no hindrance is placed in the way of holding Catholic Church services. On the whole this is still the case. In actual fact, however, constant efforts are being made in that direction, notably by the endeavor to engender in youth and in those in various camps a distaste for going to Church, by putting difficulties in the way of their doing so, also in representing ‘denominationalism’ as destructive of the unity of the nation, and striving to drive everything ecclesiastical out of the public gaze. There has thus been allotted to us a life like that in the catacombs, which is to be the beginning of the end.…(Here the bishops mention some of the ways in which the persecution is carried on.)…

“According to the principles of the racial and ‘blood’ theories, the person and life of Christ are in contradiction with the German ideal of humanity, as are also the principles of his teaching and, in particular, the doctrines of Original Sin, Redemption, reward and punishment after death, which are said to be drawn from the superstitious legends of barbarous peoples who imposed their beliefs on the Germans by force. Imbued with these principles, young people, in different parts of the country, took it upon themselves to clear the public places of the Crucifix, the symbol of Christianity. They even went so far as to destroy very ancient Calvaries, taking no account of the artistic value of several among them.…They seek to banish the Christian God, and to set up a ‘German God’ in his place. Is this ‘God’ a different God from the God of other nations? If he is, then there are as many ‘Gods’ as there are races and peoples, which is as much as to say that none of them is ‘God’ at all, since the true God is necessarily unique.… It has been proclaimed in an official statement that the German will not accept a ‘Creator-God.’ If that is so, the German is turning this passing world into something eternal, and in so far as the one and only true God is rejected he can understand by the word ‘God’ at most some manifestation of the racial soul. Such a ‘God’ as this has no meaning.…Just as was done to the Holiest one of all who said, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.’ they can take Christian truth prisoner, scourge her, hand her over to the civil power, crown her with the thorns of calumny, condemn her to death and crucify her on a German Calvary. But for her, short indeed will be the silence of the grave, and she will rise again and gaze in triumph at the tomb men dug for her and sealed over her, and at the silent graves of her enemies, closed for ever.…”[45]

The radical opposition of German racial theories to Catholic teaching is made clear in the instruction to combat them, issued by the Sacred Congregation for Seminaries and Universities to Rectors of Seminaries and Catholic Universities. The document, which was issued on April 13th, 1938, runs as follows: “Last year, on Christmas Eve, our August Pontiff and gloriously reigning Pope, in his allocution to the Cardinals and Prelates of the Roman Curia, referred in grave and sorrowful terms to the grievous persecution of the Catholic Church in Germany. It was a cause of the greatest pain to the heart of the Holy Father that, in order to excuse such flagrant injustice, barefaced calumnies were invented, and most pernicious doctrines, falsely alleged to be scientific, were spread far and wide, with the intention of creating dire confusion in minds and uprooting the true religion. In view of this state of things, the Sacred Congregation of Studies urges Catholic universities and faculties to direct all their resources and efforts to the defense of truth against the inroads of these errors. Accordingly, those who are teaching in these centers of higher studies must mobilize all the means at their command, in biology, history, philosophy, apologetics, legal and moral science, and thus forge the weapons with which to refute decisively and expertly the following absolutely untenable and erroneous doctrines:

“1) The human races by their natural and immutable characters are so different, one from another, that the lowest of them is further removed from the highest than it is from the highest species of animal.

“2) The vigor of the race and blood-purity must be preserved and cultivated by every means. Anything that conduces to this end is by that very fact honorable and permissible.

“3) The intellectual and moral qualities of man come mainly from his blood, the source of racial characteristics.

“4) The essential aim of education is to develop the characters of the race and to inflame men’s minds with a burning love of their own race as of the supreme good.

“5) Religion is subject to the law of race and must be adapted to it.

“6) The primary source and supreme rule of the whole juridical order is the racial instinct.

“7) Only the cosmos or universe exists, a living being: all things, man included, are only diverse forms, increasing through the ages, of the universal living being.

“8) Individual men exist by the state and for the state: whatever rights they possess come to them exclusively through a concession from the state.…”[46]

sources of the german race theory

What are the sources of the present day deification of the German race? They are many and varied. We may begin by distinguishing between the remote and the proximate sources. The remote source is the Lutheran revolt in the 16th century. The proximate sources are the philosophy of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel and the race theories of the Frenchman, Gobineau, and the Englishman, H. St. Chamberlain. Let us say a few words about each of these in turn.

the lutheran revolt

The Lutheran revolt is the revolt of the individual against that subjection to the Divine Plan for Order by which true personality is developed. God alone, as we saw in Chapter I possesses personality in the full sense of the word, for he alone is fully independent, in his being and in his action, not merely of matter, but also of everything that is not himself. Accordingly, human personality is developed, in proportion as we tend to union with God along the lines he has laid down. This means that, in our condition of fallen but redeemed beings, our personality is developed in proportion as we live in loving union with the Blessed Trinity present in us through membership of Christ’s Mystical Body, the Catholic Church, thus observing the objective order of life incumbent upon us because of the actual Divine Plan. Growth of personality, therefore, implies a developed grasp of that ordered tendency and an intense love of the order so grasped. This love will manifest itself by a capacity for self-sacrifice, that is, by an increasing power of suppressing the inclination to make of self the center of life. In this way we respect the ordered tendency of all beings to God, the common good of the universe.

To develop one’s individuality, on the other hand, is to lead a self-centered existence allowing one’s will to be swayed against order under the impulse of passion. Luther’s history is the story of a revolt against order under the sway of passion. “As Luther gets older, his energy becomes less and less a soul’s energy, and more and more, the energy of a temperament. Driven by great desires and vehement longings…possessed by the passions, loosing the tempest around him, breaking every obstacle and all external discipline.…Luther is the very type of modern individualism (the prototype of modern times, Fichte calls him). But in reality his personality is rent asunder and ruined.…All that comes from the same cause: the absolute predominance of feeling and appetite…With Luther… the will has the primacy, truly and absolutely.…That attitude of soul naturally goes with a profound anti-intellectualism, which was besides helped by the Ockhamist and Nominalist training in philosphy, which Luther had received.… So in Luther the swollen consciousness of the self is essentially a consciousness of will, of realization of freedom as German philosophy said later on. We should have to stress too his egocentrism, and show how the self is center for him, not certainly, as in Kant, from a claim of the human intelligence to be the measure of intelligible things, but from the claim of the individual will, cut off from the universal body of the Church, to stand solitary before God and Christ, in order to ensure its justification.…Behind Luther’s appeals to the redeeming Lamb, behind his outbursts of confidence and his faith in the forgiveness of sins, there is a human creature which…will follow the will to power…and work its will in the world.”[47]

The Lutheran revolt, therefore, in the last resort consisted in the setting-up of the passionate will of a human creature against the Divine Plan. It inaugurated the conflict of the Gospel and Law, of Faith and Works, and gave rise to the immanentist and subjectivist tendency by which the objective order of the world is considered to be an obstacle hampering the development of the inner self. With it, the Germanic peoples began to set up their will to mold the world against ordered subjection to the Mystical Body of Christ. The philosophy of Kant, Fichte and Hegel definitely put man in the place of God.

the philosophy of kant, fichte, and hegel

To understand the full effect of those philosophers, we must go back for a moment to the two currents which we saw issuing from Nominalism. The Nominalism of Descartes sacrificed man’s sense-faculties to his intelligence and led to the pantheism of Spinoza, by which man is identified with God. The Nominalism of Locke, Berkeley and Hume sacrificed man’s intelligence which was finally reduced to the rank and function of an internal sense. Kant’s philosophy was a reaction against the consequences of the sensism or empiricism of Hume. Sensism leaves before the mind only discontinuous phenomena like grains of dust with no intelligible explanation of the groupings to be met with in nature. Kant saw that the empiricism of Locke and Hume not only could not explain the unity of individual beings but was in flagrant contradiction with the fact of the necessary and universal judgments of science, that is, of the existence of a necessary and universal order in the world. The temptation for Kant to ascribe to the mind the phenomena themselves, as subject to order and law, thus making of them a product of human thought, was very great. As he had no knowledge of the Thomistic doctrine of abstraction, by which the intellect grasps the objective order of the world in the data furnished to it by the sense-faculties, he succumbed to the temptation. The universe of ordered phenomena is absorbed in the subject and appears as immanent to the mind, and the human mind constructs the order of the world. The mind of man takes on the function of the divine mind, for the divine intelligence is the measure of things.[48]

Fichte completed the work of putting man in the place of God by teaching that the human mind produced not only the form but the matter of thought. He saw that, if the matter came from outside, the application to it of the categories would be arbitrary and that there was no guarantee of its “malleability” or “pliability” under the action of the human mind. Might it not one day refuse to be molded and so leave nothing but chaos and confusion? The mind (or Ego) for Fichte must be the absolutely first being, producing the phenomenal world by an unconscious and involuntary creation, hence the created mind is identified with God. This is what Fichte stresses so strongly in his Addresses to the German Nation. For example, in the Third Address, he says: “The pupil of this education is not merely a member of human society here on this earth.…he is also…a link in the eternal chain of spiritual life in a higher social order.…Under proper guidance he will…. find at the end that nothing really exists but life, the spiritual life which lives in thought, and that everything else does not really exist, but only appears to exist.…He will perceive that… according to a law founded, in God himself, the spiritual life which alone really exists is one, the divine itself, which exists and manifests itself only in living thought. He will thus learn to know and keep holy his own and every other spiritual life as an eternal link in the chain of the manifestation of the divine life,”[49]

How does the Ego or mind produce the non-ego? Unconsciously and involuntarily. Fichte distinguishes in the knowing subject the empirical, finite, and individual ego conscious of itself and the infinite and universal Ego, which is the rational life of human society manifested in practice, especially in German science and philosophy. This practical rational life of human society ever tends to know better and to bring about the moral order of the world. German thought is called upon to mold the world and to introduce order into it. The German mind is the culminating point of the self-consciousness of the ever-evolving deity immanent in humanity.[50] We can thus grasp the full force of the conclusion of Fichte’s Fourteenth Address. “If there is any truth in what I have said in these addresses,” we read, “it is to you, the parent stock of modern Europe, that, amongst all modern peoples, the germ of human perfection is in a special sense entrusted and on you that the lead in its development has been conferred. If you fail in this your special call, with you fails all hope of the whole human race.”

This pantheism or identification of God with man is modified in expression in Fichte’s successors, Schelling and Hegel, but the transcendence of God is just as strenuously denied by them.[51] God is immanent in the world especially in the German race. In the evolution of the Humanity-God, one state or people always leads, according to Hegel. Greece and Rome led the ancient world. In Europe today, there is a chosen people to carry on the development of the world and introduce order into it—the German race.

german racial instinct replaces the german mind as the force molding the world—gobineau and h. st. chamberlain

It would take too long to enumerate all the influences which have led to the present form of the divinization of the German race. We have seen the current coming from Fichte and Hegel. Even the partial reactions against these philosophers never questioned the basic principle, namely, that German thought was destined to mold the world. For example, German absorption in metaphysical speculation was the object of much criticism, when it was perceived that other countries which had been more concerned with colonization, raw materials and manufacture, had accumulated enormous wealth and power. As a consequence, Feuerbach’s materialism went to the extreme of putting matter and body as the essence of the Ego, but it retained the position of the Ego, and also the German guidance of the molding process. Haeckel applied the Darwinian theory of selection to human life, and war took its place as part of the Germanic contribution to world progress. Accordingly, the new current coming from Gobineau and H. St. Chamberlain readily fitted into the existing mentality. According to them, purity of blood and race is the great principle of progress for humanity, not only of physical but of mental and moral progress. Therefore, that the German mind and soul may mold the world, the indispensable condition is the purity of the German blood and race. As, according to this theory, the mind of man, that is, his intellectual and moral qualities, come mainly from his blood, Gobineau and H. St. Chamberlain can claim that they are only laying bare the ultimate foundations of the philosophies of Fichte and Hegel. In reality, their pantheism is more decidedly materialistic.

The National-Socialist state is the means by which German racial instincts, sprung from German blood and German soil, generate order in the world. “The fundamental principle,” we read in Mein Kampf, “is that the state is not an end in itself, but the means to an end.…The excellence of a state…. must be judged by the degree to which its institutions serve the racial stock which belongs to it.… As a state, the German Reich shall include all Germans. Its task is not only to gather in and foster the most valuable sections of our people but to lead them slowly and surely to a dominant position in the world.… It will be the task of the People’s State to make the race the center of the life of the community. It must make sure that the purity of the racial strain will be preserved.… It must see to it that only those who are healthy shall beget children.…But, on the other hand, it must be considered as reprehensible conduct to refrain from giving healthy children to the nation.… It (the state) must proclaim as unfit for procreation all those who are affected with some visible hereditary disease or are the carriers of it; and practical means must be adopted to have such people rendered sterile.…The Weltanschauung which bases the state on the racial idea must finally succeed in bringing about a noble era, in which men will no longer pay exclusive attention to breeding and rearing pedigree dogs and horses and cats, but will endeavor to improve the breed of the human race itself.…

“If we consider it the first duty of the state to serve and promote the general welfare of the people, by preserving and encouraging the development of the best racial elements, the logical consequence is that this task cannot be limited to measures concerning the birth of the infant members of the race and nation but that the state will also have to adopt educational means for making each citizen a worthy factor in the further propagation of the racial stock.…The People’s State will have to direct the education of girls just as that of boys and according to the same fundamental principles. Here again special importance must be given to physical training, and only after that must the importance of spiritual and mental training be taken into account.…

“The main lines of action must not only be in accord with the fundamental idea of our Weltanschauung but must actually be an expansion of it in the practical world of foreign affairs.…The fundamental and guiding principles which we must always bear in mind when studying this question is that foreign policy is only a means to an end and that the sole end to be pursued is the welfare of our own people. Every problem in foreign politics must be considered from this point of view, and from this point of view alone. Shall such and such a solution prove advantageous to our people now or in the future or will it injure their interests? That is the question. This is the sole preoccupation that must occupy our minds in dealing with a question. Party politics, religious considerations, humanitarian ideals—all such and all other preoccupations must absolutely give way to this.”[52]

It is clear that a long road has been travelled since Kant carried out the Copernican revolution by which the human mind became the mold of the moral law, but the descent was inevitable, in spite of the glowing terms in which Kant extolled the absoluteness of that law. The human mind, withdrawn from ordered subjection to God, falls inevitably under the sway of passion.[53]

No wonder Pope Pius XI felt obliged to write, in the Encyclical Letter, Mit brennender Sorge: “He who takes the race, or the people, or the state, or the form of government, the bearers of the power of the state or other fundamental elements of human society—which in the temporal order of things have an essential and honorable place—out of the system of their earthly valuation, and makes them the ultimate norm of all, even of religious values, and deifies them with an idolatrous worship, perverts and falsifies the order of things created by God. Such a one is far from true belief in God and a conception of life corresponding to true belief.…It is part of the trend of the day to sever more and more not only morality, but also the foundation of law and jurisprudence, from true belief in God and from his revealed commandments.…

“By this standard we must judge the principle: ‘What helps the people is right.’ A right meaning may be given to this sentence if it is understood as expressing that what is morally illicit can never serve the true interests of the people. But even ancient paganism recognised that the sentence, to be perfectly accurate, should be inverted and read: ‘Never is anything useful, if it is not at the same time morally good. And not because it is useful is it morally good, but because it is morally good, it is also useful.’ Cut loose from this rule of morality that principle would mean, in international life, a perpetual state of war between different nations. In political life within the state, since it confuses considerations of utility with those of right, it mistakes the basic fact that man as a person possesses God-given rights, which must be preserved from all attacks aimed at denying, suppressing or disregarding them.…

“We have not tired, Venerable Brethren, of portraying to the responsible guides of the destinies of your country the consequences that necessarily follow, if such trends are left unhindered and much more if they are viewed with favor. We have done everything to defend the sanctity of a word solemnly pledged, to protect the inviolability of obligations freely undertaken, against theories and practices which, if officially approved, must destroy all confidence and render valueless any word that might also be pledged in the future.…Everyone in whose mind there is a trace of feeling and justice, will then have to admit that, in these grievous and eventful years after the signing of the Concordat, in every word and in every action of Ours, We have stood faithful to the terms of the agreement. But with amazement and deep aversion he will be obliged to admit that to change the meaning of the agreement, to evade the agreement, to empty the agreement of all its significance, and finally more or less openly to violate the agreement, has been made the unwritten law of conduct by the other party.”[54]

Given the German racial philosophy, how will the German mind organize the world? There will be a hierarchy of “races,” it may be presumed. The Germans will, of course, be at the top, assigning to all the others their particular position and their special role. Under the Germans will be the other Nordic Aryans. Then under these again the various races will find place in proportion to their resemblance to the Nordic Aryan dominant type. Democracy, as we have known it, has tried to solve the problem of world-organization by allying nationalism in politics, that is, the existence of separate national states, with internationalism (tending to Jewish supranationalism) in economics and especially in finance. Communism, which is the left wing of international finance, aims at eliminating national frontiers, thus doing away with separate national states. National Socialism aims at instituting order by German racial hegemony, which will necessarily involve not only political but economic and financial subordination to the evolving deity immanent in the German race. Leaving the question of finance to be dealt with in Part V, let us now see what becomes of personal liberty in a National-Socialist organization of the world.

the german racial theory

and personal liberty

We must first set forth briefly the aim of the state and the meaning of personal liberty. Man, as a spiritual being, is necessarily endowed with free will, that is to say, the human will in its inner domain is not only not subject to external constraint, but is delivered from any necessitating determination. By its intrinsic nature, the human will is determined to love: the unlimited or infinite good and, by that very fact, no good which is not the unlimited or infinite good can determine it necessarily. This freedom of choice or initial liberty is not itself an end to itself. It is meant to bear fruit in the psychological and moral order. By our efforts we are meant to become completely masters of ourselves and become capable of willing, in complete independence of any created thing, the order incumbent upon us as creatures. This terminal liberty, which we must conquer, is the liberty of autonomy or complete personal liberty.[55] As we have seen in Chapter I, in our fallen condition, we can attain to this liberty only through membership of Christ, and we are meant to be aided in the struggle for it by an organization of society respectful of the rights of God according to the order laid down by Christ. Thanks to sanctifying grace, which is a created participation in the divine nature, we share in the life of God and can remain firmly united to the Blessed Trinity present in us already here below in preparation for the definitive union in the Beatific Vision.

Civil society is essentially ordained, not merely to allow free play to the liberty of choice of each individual as to a little god, as Rousseau and the French Revolution declared, but to the attainment of the common temporal good of the people. This common temporal good being itself intrinsically subordinate to the conquest of the liberty of autonomy by the human persons composing the society, is only an intermediary end.[56] Man, as an individual, is for the state and must sacrifice himself for the common good, but the common good itself of the state is for man, as a person. The state is for the personal development of its subjects through membership of Christ. It is not the state’s business to lead the human person to his spiritual perfection and to the fulness of his liberty of autonomy, for that belongs to the Church, the Mystical Body of Christ. The state is, however, destined essentially by its nature to strive for the realization of such intellectual, moral and material conditions amongst its subjects that each person will be positively helped in the arduous work of conquering his liberty of autonomy through union with God as a member of Christ.

According to the philosophy of life issuing from the confluence of the pantheism of Fichte and Hegel with the race theories of Gobineau and H. St. Chamberlain, all human beings are emanations or manifestations of the immanent divine life, which is itself molded by the blood of the race. As such, they are completely subject to the collectivity. They exist as members of the race for the good of the race, and their duty is to sacrifice themselves completely for the good of the race along the lines laid down by the racial leaders.[57]

“The race-bound national soul,” writes Rosenberg in The Myth of the Twentieth Century, “is the measure of all our thoughts, voluntary aspirations and actions, the final criterion of our values.[58] Hence there can be no such thing as personal liberty as explained above. All men are merely individuals belonging body and soul to the race and to the state, which is simply a means for the maintenance of racial purity. Liberty, as the realization of the will to power and the acquisition of domination, is to be attained in and by the race and its organ, the state, and in complete subjection to it. Accordingly, human beings are merely individuals, not persons, and only by sacrificing themselves completely for the domination of the race do they enjoy true liberty. This is true, a fortiori, of the members of the German race, for “only the German really has a people and is entitled to count on one. He alone is capable of real and rational love for his nation:”[59] The glory of the German race is, therefore, the complete final end of every German. Hence the aim of the state must be to bring about such intellectual, material and, in reality, immoral conditions that every German will acquiesce in this perversion of order and work for it by every means. We may express our judgment on this in one phrase: it is extremely sad to see such an enormous capacity for discipline placed at the service of a disordered ideal.

prussian freemasonry and the

national-socialist movement

Masonic formation, as we have seen, is objectively the graduated acceptance of pantheism or the identification of God with man, for Masonry is pantheistic in its symbolism and in its inner or esoteric signification. German Freemasonry, both Grand Orient and Prussian, contributed to the production of a mentality favorable to the present deification of the German race. Inasmuch as Prussian Freemasonry was to some extent a reaction against Jewish domination, by its exclusion of Jews from membership, it may be said to have contributed thereto in an especial way.[60] By its exclusion of Jews, who were freely admitted to membership of the Grand Orient or Humanitarian Lodges, stress seemed to be specially laid on the deification of the Prussian or German race and not of “humanity” in general. In the statement drawn up by the Assembly of the Prussian Grandmasters on 16th February, 1924, this point of view is clearly stressed. The statement declares that the three Prussian Grand Lodges stand for ‘‘a German and Christian view of life.…because they are persuaded that there is no universal humanitarian ideal and that, just as every personality has its root in race, only boundless love of and fidelity to one’s race can develop personality.”

In 1933, the Prussian Grand Lodges transformed themselves into Orders of Chivalry with a purely German symbolism. The National Grand Lodge, “At the Three Globes,” founded by Frederick the Great in 1740, became the National Christian Order of Frederick the Great, with an ideal of pure Germanic Racial Nationality. It has been stated that even that transformation did not save them from being suppressed like the Grand Orient Lodges. One thing at least is certain, namely, that the “German Christian” attempt to introduce the neo-paganism of the so-called “German Faith” amongst German Protestants, which has been favored by the National-Socialist government, follows exactly the lines indicated in the declarations of the three Prussian Grand Lodges.[61] In addition, the persistent hatred of the supernatural life of grace displayed by the National-Socialist government seems indicative of the presence behind the scenes of some satanically inspired group such as Masonry. It is true that it is unequivocally stated in Mein Kampf that a Weltanschauung, unlike a political party, cannot compromise. Still, every purely human movement tends to become less narrow in outlook and less bitter in action, when its leaders discover that dangers lie ahead. Yet the Pastoral Letter of the German Catholic Bishops read on July 6th, 1941, makes it clear that the fury of the persecution is not abating.

italy’s reaction

It is not necessary to speak in detail of the triumph of Judaeo-Masonic naturalism in Italy and of the need for a reaction.
The history of the Italian Revolution and the names of Mazzini and Garibaldi are familiar to everyone.[62] The enemies of the supernatural life seemed to have reached the zenith of their power when, in 1907, the Masonic Jew, Ernesto Nathan, was elected Mayor of Rome. “A Jewish Mayor in the Eternal City,” wrote the Jew, Peter Ryss, “is symbolic of the new age.”[63]

The best way to set forth the guiding lines of the Italian reaction against the naturalism of the French Revolution is to point out the contrast between it and the Portuguese reaction. In Portugal, as we have seen, the state, while not officially acknowledging the Catholic Church, yet accepts the fundamental distinction between the personality and the individuality of the human being, and is guided in great part by sound philosophy and the traditions of Portugal. Hence, though it allows of divorce from civil marriage, it does not allow of it in the case of Catholic marriages, and prepares for the day when the Portuguese nation, regenerated after long years of naturalistic decay, will joyfully acknowledge the full Divine Plan for Order.

In Italy, on the other hand, the state has returned to full acknowledgment of the Catholic Church and the supernatural order. In the Encyclical Letter, Casti Connubii, On Christian Marriage, Pope Pius XI singles out for special praise Article 34 of the Italian Concordat with the Holy See, in which “the Italian state desirous of restoring to the institution of Matrimony, which is the foundation of the family, that dignity conformable to the traditions of its people, assigns as civil effects of the Sacrament of Matrimony all that is attributed to it by Canon Law.” He then adds: “This peaceful settlement and friendly co-operation is such as befitted the glorious history of the Italian people and its ancient and sacred traditions.…This might well be a striking example to all, of how, even in this our own day (in which, sad to say, the absolute separation of the civil power from the Church, and indeed from all religion, is so often taught), the one supreme authority can be united and associated with the other without detriment to the rights and supreme power of either, thus protecting Christian parents from pernicious evils and menacing ruin.”

Nevertheless, while accepting the supernatural order, the Italian state has shown unmistakable signs of a wrong philosophy, in regard to the natural order of life, especially concerning the distinction between personality and individuality. Signor Mussolini has written: “Fascism conceives of the state as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived in their relation to the state.”[64] Again, in the Encyclical Letter, Non abbiamo bisogno, Concerning the Apostolate of the Laity, speaking of the attacks on Catholic Associations of Youth by the Italian government, Pope Pius XI wrote: “We find ourselves confronted by a mass of authentic affirmations and no less authentic facts which reveal beyond the slightest possibility of doubt the resolve…to monopolize completely the young from their tenderest years up to manhood and womanhood, for the exclusive advantage of a party and of a regime based on an ideology which clearly resolves itself into a true, a real pagan worship of the state—that Statolatry, which is not less in contrast with the natural rights of the family than it is in contradiction with the supernatural rights of the Church.” Hence the formula adopted by Signor Mussolini: “Nothing against the state; nothing outside the state; everything in the state and for the state,” must be interpreted as denying that the state is for the development of the personality of members of Christ. Accordingly, human beings are merely individuals, emanating as it were from the national organism and having for complete final end of their existence the good of the state.

This stressing of human individuality to the exclusion of human personality seems to me to be the ultimate reason for the differences between the Portuguese corporate organization and the Italian. Dr. Lucey, in an article on The Principles of Fascism, in the Irish Ecclesiastical Record of April, 1939, sums them up in excellent fashion. “In the first place,” he writes, “the Portuguese Corporations are intended to be autonomous bodies, whereas the Italian Corporations are governmental organs, in the second place, Portuguese corporatism is integral, whereas Italian corporatism is exclusively economic. Integral corporatism, the corporatism of the Encyclicals, is defined in the authoritative Le Siècle du Corporatisme by M. Manoïlesco as ‘that which considers as corporations, endowed with an autonomous organization and their own rights, not only the economic corporations, but also the social and cultural corporations of the nation, such as the army, the judiciary, the corporations of national education, of public health, of the sciences and of the arts.’ Fascist corporatism, on the other hand, embraces only the forces of production, namely, business, trade, agriculture and certain of the professions.” Instead of being free associations of human persons destined to aid families to cultivate the personality of their members, Italian corporations seem to be emanations of the state. In the Encyclical, Quadragesimo Anno, Pope Pius XI praises the good work done by them, but makes certain reservations with regard to their excessively bureaucratic character. “Little reflection is required,” he writes. “to perceive the advantages of the institution thus summarily described: peaceful collaboration of the classes, repression of Socialist organizations and efforts, the moderating influence of a special ministry…, (Nevertheless) it is feared that the new syndical and corporative institution possesses an excessively bureaucratic and political character, and that, notwithstanding the general advantages referred to above, it risks serving particular political aims rather than contributing to the initiation of a better social order.”

What are the currents that have contributed to bring about this deviation from Catholic tradition and sound philosophy in the Italian system as compared with the Portuguese? Three must be singled out for special mention.

The first is the revival of the Imperial traditions of the ancient Roman state. The deification of Imperial Rome and the practical consequences of that doctrine in the relations of the state and its subjects are well-known. The state-divinity became incarnate in the Emperor and the Emperor’s will was law. The greatest jurisconsult of antiquity, Ulpian, set forth the doctrine in most precise terms. “The prince’s good pleasure has the force of law,” he writes, “since in virtue of the Royal Law’ which is the source of his authority, the people have conferred on him and incorporated in him the whole body of their rights and their powers.”[65] The practical consequences of such a theory are evident. The Emperor could do what he liked.[66] He was above all laws and was bound by none.[67] Everything belonged to him: possessions, bodies, souls. He was the arbiter of all existences, the fount of all rights, the raison d’être, of all human effort. The subjects of such a state were mere individuals. Personal rights, as is clear from a well-known incident in the Gospel, were nonexistent. The fear of the loss of Caesar’s friendship, of the friendship of the omnipotent despot governing the world, caused Pilate to disregard the rights of the Just One. Here we have one source of the exaggeration of the role of the state in modern Rome.

The second source, which it is unnecessary to dwell upon, is the tendency towards state-omnipotence and state socialization developed by years of Masonic deformation. When all those little divinities called men, who are all equally God, constitute a society by an arbitrary contract, all power is concentrated in the sovereign People. This current leads to the Divinity-State.

The third source is the influence of the Hegelian philosopher, Giovanni Gentile. That Hegelian philosophy leads to the divinization of the state we have already seen when studying Germany’s reaction. The Hegelian character of Gentile’s thought may he readily deduced from the following statement: “The state,” he writes, “is within us. It lives and is destined to live in our intelligences, our wills and our hearts. There it is destined to grow and develop, and become ever more conscious of its duties and its ends.”[68] That Gentile exercised an undoubted influence on the development of Fascist thought during some years is quite certain, according to Monsieur Paul Cuche in his lecture at the Semaine Sociale de Reims in 1933.

The Fascist theory of the role of the state led to a breach of the Concordat and to a sharp protest from Pope Pius XI, in November, 1938. Signor Mussolini, as Minister of the Interior, drew up a decree for the defense of the Italian race. The first article of this decree stated that “Matrimony between an Italian citizen of Aryan race and a person belonging to another race is forbidden. Matrimony celebrated in a way contrary to this decree is invalid.” This Article violates Article 34 of the Concordat signed in the Lateran Palace on February 11, 1929, which we have already quoted. A marriage between an Italian Catholic and a Jewish convert to Catholicism celebrated in due form by the Church would thus be deemed invalid by the state. Now, the Italian state could quite legitimately withdraw the rights reserved to citizens from Jews and from the offspring of a marriage such as that just mentioned, thus undoing in part the work of the French Revolution, but it should respect their rights as persons. One of those rights is that of contracting a valid marriage by observing the laws of the Catholic Church concerning marriage.

The new Italian state did splendid work in suppressing Freemasonry, which is not only an insult to Our Divine Lord but a disgrace to civilization. It is to be hoped that Italy will go on to bring its philosophy of life fully into harmony with the rule of Christ the King, by getting rid of the infiltrations of ancient and modern paganism, which result from man’s usurping the place of God.

[1]Encyclical Letter, Summi Pontificatus, October 20th, 1939. The translation is that of the English C.T.S. pamphlet.

The first of Pope Pius XII’s Five Peace-Points must here be recalled: “A fundamental postulate of any just and honorable peace is an assurance for all nations, great or small, powerful or weak, of their right to life and independence. The will of one nation to live must never mean the sentence of death passed upon another. When this equality of rights has been destroyed, attacked, or threatened, order demands that reparation shall be made, and the measure and extent of that reparation is determined, not by the sword nor by the arbitrary decision of self-interest, but by the rules of justice and reciprocal equity (Allocution to the College of Cardinals, December 24th, 1939).

The Vatican broadcasts in 1940 on the sufferings of Poland filled hearer’s souls with sorrow and pity for that country.

[2]Op. cit., pp. 180–184. On pages 28 and foll. of the same work, we read: “Sometime in June, 1920, the Maccabeans honored Mr. Lucien Wolf at the Holborn Restaurant by inviting him to a banquet. The event is described in the Jewish Guardian of June 11th. Here is the first, sentence: “Honor to whom honor is due, and all honor to Mr. Lucien Wolf, the man who fought for Jewish rights at Versailles last year.”… Later on in the same account we come across another significant passage. Here it is: The second (message) was a letter from Mr. Israel Zangwill: ‘The Minority Treaties were the touchstone of the League of Nations, that essentially Jewish aspiration. And the man behind the Minority Treaties was Lucien Wolf.’… In returning thanks for the many kind things said of him at the banquet. Mr. Lucien Wolf’’s reply is thus described:… ‘The Anglo-Jewish members of the Delegation might claim that the first detailed plan of the Minority Treaties was their own. They discussed it with members of the Commission on New States, but the governing principle had first been accepted from them by the Allied and Associated Powers and by the League of Nations. Though in the excitement of hearing the Main Treaties all else might be well lost for the moment, he would remind them that the principle laid down in the preamble to the Labor Convention, which secured the rights of the working classes and guaranteed them the protection of the League of Nations, recognized that the rights of minority populations were on exactly the same plane.’… Taken to pieces, this means that in order to secure privileges for the minorities (i.e., the Jews), it was found best to camouflage this step under the guise of ‘securing the rights of the working classes’ and guaranteeing them ‘the protection of the League of Nations—‘that essentially Jewish aspiration.’ ”

[3]Polish Fortnightly Review, issued by the Polish Ministry of Information, Sept. 1st, 1941, p. 8.

[4]The Polish Fortnightly Review, Sept. 1st, 1941, p. 8.

[5]In Les Sociétés Secrètes et la Société vol. II, pp. 691–704 (4th Edition), Pére Deschamps, S.J., shows the efforts made by Freemasonry to get control of patriotic movements in Poland and turn them in the direction of a socialistic and (so-called) democratic republic. He mentions, among other interesting points, that, at the second commemoration of the Polish revolution held at Brussels in 1846, one of the orators was Karl Marx. We are aware of the amount of sympathy Marx had for the traditions of the Polish nation.

[6]Les Sociétés Secrètes et la Société vol. II. p. 668. On pages 668–680 the author quotes a number of Masonic documents, concerning the secret history of Spanish and Portuguese revolutions.

The remark made about Mexico receives ample confirmation in Mexico, the Land of Blood-drenched Altars, by Francis C. Kelly, and in No God Next Door, by Rev. M. Kenny, S.J. Father Kenny gives an excellent summary of the documents concerning the responsibility of the United States and of American Freemasonry for the persecution of the Catholic Church in Mexico.

[7]Histoire Secrète de la Révolution Espagnole, by M. Léon de Poncins, p. 24. This work and that of M. Jean Marques-Biviere, Comment la Franc Maçonnerie fait un Revolution contain details and documents.

[8]Histoire Secrète de la Révolution Espagnole p. 227. On pp. 168–383 of the same work there is given a French translation of the official documents of the Portuguese government concerning the part taken by the Soviet government of Moscow in preparing and directing the Spanish Civil War. Two Jews, experts in revolution, were sent from Russia to Barcelona: Bela Kun and Losovski (Solomon Abramovitch Dridzo). All the parts of the program drawn up by the Kommintern were carried out in the section of the country subject to Madrid. And so on.

[9]An article in The Standard (Dublin) of April 16, 1943, confirms the hopes held out above. The article was translated for The Standard from El Mensajero del Corazón de Jesús, published by the Jesuit Fathers at Bilbao. The opening sentence of the article runs as follows: “We can say unhesitatingly that Spain as such, the Spanish state as such, has never put into practice an official religious policy more public, more sincere, and more unanimous than that being pursued at the present time by Franco’s Spain, in which God has granted us to live.” Some of the hatred of Satan for this Catholic reaction is expressed in the film, Inside Fascist Spain.

[10]Shortly after the proclamation of the Republic, Brother…Furnemont, Orator of the Belgian Grand Orient, triumphantly declared: “You remember, Brothers the deep feeling of pride we all felt when we heard, some time ago, the news of the Portuguese Revolution.

...It was a thunderbolt for the uninitiated, but we, Brothers, we knew. We were aware of the admirable organization of our Portuguese Masonic Brethren.…We held the secret of this glorious event.” Somewhat later in 1911, Brother Machado Santos published his report, The Portuguese Revolution, in which he affirmed that “The success of the Portuguese Revolution is the exclusive work of Freemasonry.” On these points and others cf. Léon de Poncins’ splendid work, Le Portugal Renait and Weltfreimaurerei, Weltrevolution, Weltrepublic, by Dr. F. Wichtl, pp. 107–113 (11th Edition).

[11]For an excellent outline of Dr. Salazar’s financial reforms, cf. The Truth About Portugal, by B. Berthon Waters (The Irish People Publications, No. 7).

[12]Political Constitution of the Portuguese Republic (Editions SPN Lisbon, p. 17). Article I of the Concordat of 1940 runs as follows: “The Portuguese government recognizes the personality at law of the Catholic Church. Friendly relations with the Holy See shall be maintained in the traditional manner by the appointment of an Apostolic Nuncio to the Portuguese Republic and of a Portuguese Ambassador to the Holy See.”

[13]Discourse on The New Portuguese State in the Political Evolution of Europe.

[14]Discourse on The New Portuguese State in the Political Evolution of Europe.

[15]The New Corporative State of Portugal, by S. George West, Lecturer in Portuguese in the University of London, pp. 22–29 (Editions SPN, Lisbon). No. 4 of the Ten Commandments is: “The new state repudiates the idea of ‘Authority without Liberty’ equally with that of ‘Liberty without Authority.’ It takes its stand rather on authority and specific liberties, as compatible and indeed mutually necessary factors.” No, 5 is: “In the New state the individual has his place in society as a member of natural groups, viz., the family, the guild or corporation and the municipality, and, as such, he enjoys all necessary rights. The New state is concerned not with the abstract rights of man, but with the concrete liberties of men.”

The concrete liberties of men are based on their duties to God.

[16]Cf. pp. 73–75 of Le Portugal Renait, by M. Léon de Poncins. This Masonic message was circulated during the year 1930.

[17]Letter, Post tam diuturnas (1814).

[18]This quotation and the others which follow are taken from Life of Theobald Wolfe Tone, Founder of the United Irish Society, written by himself (edited by his son, William Theobald Wolfe Tone. Edition of 1826. Washington: Printed by Gales and Seaton), Vol. II, pp. 464–466.

It is interesting to read the account of the incident which was the pretext for the invasion of Rome by the French in L’Église Romaine en face de la Révolution, by Crétineau-Joly, Vol. I, p. 184. Concerning the deposition of the Pope by the Roman people, Crétineau-Joly writes: “In the name of the free and sovereign people of Rome, a deputation of Jews, foreigners and mercenaries of the Revolution, representing the ghosts of Cato, Pompey and Brutus, evoked by the future Prince of Wagram (Berthier), had the impertinence to declare to Pius VI that he had lost his temporal rights” (op. cit., p. 157).

[19]Op. cit., Vol. II, p. 478.

[20]Op. cit., Vol. II, p. 76.

[21]Op. cit., Vol. II, p. 51.

[22]Op. cit., Vol. I, p. 358.

[23]Cf. Barruel, Robison, Deschamps, Cochin, already referred to.

[24]Op. cit., Vol. II, p. 311.

[25]The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World, p. 229.

[26]A man named De Lion is mentioned by the Jewish writer. Bernard Lazare, in L’Antisémitsme (p. 344), as a Jewish propagator of Socialism. According to the Dictionary of American Biography, De Leon always pretended to be a Venezuelan Catholic.

[27]Encyclical Letter, Quadragesima Anno.

[28]Letter of 25th August, 1910, on the Sillon (Translation of Irish (C.T.S.). We can see from Pope Pius X’s Letter how grievously James Connolly erred when he spoke of the Catholic Church as “ever counselling humility, but sitting in the seats of the mighty: ever patching up the diseased and broken wrecks of an unjust social system, but blessing the system which made the wreck and spread the disease.” (Labor, Nationality and Religion, p. 75). Cf. The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World, pp. 14–24 and 215–228.

[29]Connolly never grasped the distinction between Creative Capitalism and Loan-Capitalism and never saw that Communism was only the left wing of international finance. Perhaps the most striking illustration of James Connolly’s blindness is to be found in the passage which he quotes from the journal, The Flag of Ireland, of October 3rd, 1808, in Labor in Irish History (Maunsell and Co., 1917, p. 203). He there says that the founders of Fenianism, “O’Mahony and Stephens, had entered into the secret societies of France.… To Stephens is due the direction Fenianism took in line of sympathy with the movements of the Revolution on the Continent. He saw that the Irish question was no longer a question of religion.…The circumstance that the General chosen by Stephens to be the Commander-in-Chief of the Irish Republican Army was no less a character than General Cluseret, afterwards Commander-in-Chief of the Federals during the Commune of Paris, says more for the principles of the men who were the brains of the Fenian movement than any testimony of subordinates,” How could Connolly be so blind as to approve of making his country a catspaw for Judaeo-Masonic schemers on the continent? In addition to The Hibernian Journal (November. 1937) I have been able to read the account of the Mansion House meeting in The Freeman’s Journal of February 5, 1918, thanks to the kindness of the Editor of The Hibernian Journal in securing me a photographed copy of the issue in question. According to the Freeman’s Journal, the meeting was organized by the Socialist Party of Ireland amd was presided over by Mr. O’Brien.

[30]Encyclical Letter, Immortale Dei, On the Christian Constitution of States. Previously, in the same Letter, Pope Leo had stressed the fact that the acknowledgment of the one true religion by the state is “the bounden duty of rulers to the people over whom they rule.” In the Encyclical Letter on Human Liberty, Pope Leo XIII points out that “right is a moral power which it is absurd to suppose that nature has accorded indifferently to truth and falsehood…for it is contrary to reason that error and truth should have equal rights.” Cf. The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World. (2nd Edition), p. 251

It is well to note, in addition, that acknowledgment of the Catholic Church as the one true Church does not necessarily involve state-endowment of the Church. The two things are quite distinct.

[31]The Kingship of Christ According to Cardinal Pie of Poitiers, pp. 198, 199, 78, 52. Cf. the quotation from the same at the end of Chapter XVII. Cf. also page 168 in the same book, where the Cardinal insists upon the point I have been stressing. There he says: “If the Catholic Church were consulted, she would take account of all the difficulties which have arisen in the course of time and would find formulae which would be a solemn act of faith on the part of the nation and of the sovereign, without this authentic profession of the true Faith hindering in the least the toleration become necessary for other forms of worship.… If the law proclaims that it allows the exercise of all religions, because in the eyes of the law all are equally good or because the public authority is incompetent to come to a decision on the, matter, the law is impious and atheistical. The law thus makes profession, not of civil toleration, but of criminal neutrality, and justifies the most absolute religious indifference in the subjects of states. On the contrary, if, while recognising that one religion alone is true and good, the law tolerates and permits the peaceful practice of the others, the law may be wise and necessary according to circumstances.’’

[32]We have in Dublin a B’nai B’rith Lodge, as has been already remarked.

[33]Translation, Sheed and Ward, p. 62.

[34]“We have pursued the amazing policy that before an Irish pound note can be issued in Ireland someone has to acquire an English pound or lend a pound to the English government. And so we cannot issue money to set the Irish unemployed to work, creating real wealth on which they may live. We have allowed our productive workers to crowd into the emigrant ships and to endure the conditions in other countries which they have had to endure, and have put a banker’s fetish before the lives of tens of thousands of Irish men and women” (The New Central Bank, No. I of The Irish People Publications).

[35]Germany After the War of 1866, by Mgr. Kettler (quoted from the French translation by Belet, in Deschamps, Vol. II, p. 402).

[36]Quoted by Mgr. Delassus in Les Pourquoi de la Guerre Mondiale, Vol. II, p. 52.

[37]Cf. L’Entrée des Juifs dans la Société Française, by l’abbé Joseph Lémann, pp. 368–381.

[38]Op. cit. pp. 211–231, 278–281.

[39]Quoted by Mgr. Delassus, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 48.

[40]Wichtl asserts (op. cit., p. 186) that, though Frederick the Great was a Freemason, he was never admitted to the real secrets of the Lodges. As the founder of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, to which, however, additions were made at the end of the 18th century, Frederick was well aware of the inner meaning of Masonic naturalism. In fact, the Mason, Bluntschli, claims for him the honor of being the initiator of the revolutionary era, which, he says, should date from the year of Frederick’s accession, namely 1740, rather than from 1789. The modern state “independent of all theocracy,” that is, owing no submission to the divine law, began with Frederick, he maintains. Cf. Deschamps. op. cit., Vol. II, p. 19.

[41]In The Rulers of Russia (pp. 74–77), two quotations are given from distinguished German Catholic writers to show the enormous extent of Jewish influence in Germany. Dr. Kurt Ziesché, Professor in the University of Breslau, insists upon the prevalence of Jewish naturalism in the political and economic life of the country, in his book, Das Königtum Christi in Europa, published in 1926. Dr. Eberle, the Editor of Schönere Zukunft, sets out in 1927 the actual power and might of Jewish influence in banking, in publishing and commercial life, etc., etc. Cf. The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World, p. 310.

[42]Mr. James Murphy, the translator of the Unexpurgated Edition of Mein Kampf, writes in the introduction to that work: “Weltanschauung literally means ‘outlook on the world.’ But as generally used in German this outlook on the world means a whole system of ideas associated together in an organic unity—ideas of human life, human values, cultural and religious ideas, politics, economics, etc., in fact a totalitarian view of human existence. Thus Christianity could be called a Weltanschauung… National Socialism claims definitely to be a Weltanschauung. Weltanschauung is a complete philosophy of human life. Complete philosophy or comprehensive all-embracing view of human life expresses what Mr. Murphy means by “a totalitarian view of human existence.”

[43]Op. cit., pp. 378–380. (Unexpurgated Edition, Hurst & Blackett, Ltd. 1930).

[44]Translated from the Italian text in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis, 31 January, 1938, p. 21.

[45]This translation is in great part taken from The Persecution of the Catholic Church in the Third Reich, published by Burns and Oates, but the translation made by the present writer for The Rulers of Russia, pp. 67, 68, has also been used.

[46]For the introductory part of the document, the translation in The Persecution of the Catholic Church in the Third Reich (Burns and Oates) has been used. The propositions themselves have been translated directly from the original.

[47]Three Reformers, by J. Maritain, pp. 27–37, passim (Sheed and Ward).

[48]Cf. Les Sources de l’Idéalisme, by Régis Jolivet, pp. 104–110, and Maritain, Réflexions sur l’Intelligence, p. 30.

[49]The Translation of the Addresses by Jones and Turnbull (1922) has been chiefly used.

[50]“Humanity itself is the living God.…I loathe every form of religion which considers God as a personal being. Such an idea is unworthy of the human race “ (Quoted from Fichte’s Criticism of any Form of Revelation, by Pére Garrigou-Lagrange, O. P., De Revelatione, I, p. 242).

[51]‘‘According to Hegel, the common source of the Ego and nature does not transcend reality. It is immanent to it.…The Absolute is the succession, the perpetual generation of things.…For Hegel, the Absolute is the evolutionary process itself, it does not engender movement and life. It is itself the movement.… In the same way, it is not above the intellectual capacity of man. If one understood by God, the Being transcending human reason, Hegel would be the most atheistic of philosophers, since no one affirmed as categorically as he did the immanence and complete intelligibility of the Absolute. Spinoza himself, the philosopher of immanence, seems not to go so far” (Histoire de la Philosophìe Européenne, by Alfred Weber, p. 362).

[52]Mein Kampf (Unexpurgated Edition), Hurst and Blackett, pp. 328, 331, 334, 338, 341, 347, 497.

[53]Nietzsche had already manifested the decay. “The mind,” he declares, “counts for us only as a symptom of relative imperfection and weakening of the organism.…Our true life is to be looked for not in experiences that have been ‘sifted through-with reason,’ but in the dark, unconscious and instinctive elements of our nature…I submit that egoism belongs to the essence of a noble soul.…Life itself is the will to power.” Quoted by J. H. Muirhead in Oxford Pamphlets.

[54]The Encyclical Letter, Mit brenneder Sorge, On the Persecution of the Church in Germany, was published on March 14, 1937.

[55]Cf. Maritain, Du régime temporel et de la liberté (pp. 6–40), for the development of the ideas outlined here.

[56]Maritain, op. cit., p.58.

[57]“As if a man could be made for anything else than for his fellow beings” (Mein Kampf, Translation, Hurst and Blackett, p. 331).

[58]By a decree of the National-Socialist government of Germany dated January 31st, 1934, Rosenberg was given control of the intellectual and philosophical formation of the National-Socialist party.

[59]Fichte, Eighth Address to the German Nation.

[60]For the attitude of the three Old Prussian Lodges to Jews, cf. Wichtl, Weltfreimaurerei. etc., p. 55.

[61]Cf. The Mystical Body of Christ, in the Modern World, pp. 311, 312.

[62]Cf. Deschamps, S.J., Les Sociétiés Secrètes et la Société, pp., 253–394. Mazzini and Garibaldi were, of course, both Masons.

[63]La Tribune Juive, 14th May, 1921. Quoted by Wichtl, op. cit., p. 58.

[64]The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism. Quoted by Rev. C. Lucey, D.D., in I. E. Record, March, 1939, p. 249.

[65]Ulpian, L. I. Dig., tit. IV, par. 1. Quoted by Godefroid Kurth, Les Origines de la Civilisation Moderne, vol. I, pp. 12, 13.

[66]Quod libet, licet (Spartian in Anton. Caracalla, p. 132, A. Casaubon).

[67]Princeps legibus solutus est, L. I. Dig., tit. III, par. 31, Ulpian.

[68]Quoted by Monsieur P. Cuche in his lecture at the Semaine Sociale de Reims, 1933.

Part V

Economic Decay

and the

Divine Plan for Order

Chapter XVII

Some Aspects of Economic Decay

We have seen in Chapter III that economics is the science which studies the component cells of the state, namely, families, in the constituent relations of their members and in their conditions of existence. Economics, then, will study: firstly, the constituent relations of the members of Christ who form the family; secondly, the science of the production, distribution and exchange of natural wealth, in view of securing that sufficiency of material goods, which is normally indispensable for the virtuous life of members of families; thirdly, the auxiliary art of the manipulation of money or artificial wealth, which is meant to facilitate families in procuring by exchange the above-mentioned sufficiency. According to right order, then, money or exchange-medium is for the production of material goods and the production of material goods is for the virtuous life of members of Christ, of which the foundation is laid in the Christian family. A full account of economic decay since the 13th century, therefore, would have to include: firstly, the story of the disruption of family-life through divorce and an outline of the havoc caused by the uprise of modern individualism under the influence of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination and of the revolutionary principle. “all men are equal.” This should embrace also the history of the ruin of the guilds, the auxiliaries of family-life, and of the gradual subordination of man to production, leading to the Socialist and Communist reaction; secondly, the story of the increasing domination of production and producers by those who control finance and manipulate money; thirdly, an outline of the activities of the organized naturalistic forces which are ever seeking to eliminate the idea of membership of Christ from social and economic life. The last-named forces would have to be considered from the point of view of their connection with all those processes of decay. In this chapter, however, we can only touch briefly upon some aspects of this complicated question.

the english revolution of

1688 and the bank of england

The English Revolution was quickly followed by the foundation of the Bank of England. That was an event of outstanding importance in economic history. With the foundation of the Bank of England, the sovereign authority in England, the country that was destined to exercise a preponderating influence on commerce and finance in the modern world, definitely handed over the creation of money or exchange-medium to a private company. “The special character of this new institute, the Bank of England (the charter of which dates from July 27, 1694), lay in this,” writes Mr. Belloc, “that when it made out a paper promise to pay, all the resources of England were to be put at its disposal to enable it to keep that promise—in other words, its credit was not private but public.…This was in effect to give the Bank of England the right of creating money. It could not coin the metals, gold and silver; the government reserved its right to do that; but it could print on a bit of paper, ‘I, the Bank of England, promise to pay the bearer five pounds,’ and the bearer knew that there would be no default so long as a government responsible for the Bank Charter existed and could force people to pay taxes.…The Bank of England paper being thus guaranteed there need be no hurry to cash it: it could pass from hand to hand in the same way as current metallic coin. But the Bank of England was not a department of government, as it should have been. It was an independent corporation, privileged and guaranteed by government, but pursuing a policy of its own: and from that day onward in greater and greater degree the Bank of England has had the last say in any government policy involving expense, and particularly in the matter of foreign wars and coercion of dependencies. The effects of this revolution in national finance were enormous. In the first place, it powerfully strengthened the already strong support given by the big money-dealers in the City to William’s government. A Jacobite restoration was under no obligation to honor the bond of the usurping government, and thus, every one who held Bank of England paper had an interest in maintaining William upon his imitation throne.”[1]

That point has been frequently mentioned. What has not been so frequently noticed is that with the English Revolution of 1688 there began the transference of the Jewish financial center from Amsterdam to London. The Jewish nation, in pursuit of its naturalistic Messianic, ideal, has always aimed at control of trade and commerce and also of bullion. That means, as we say today, control of raw materials, of imports and exports, of price-fixing and of gold. When the arrogance of the Jews and their double-dealing with regard to religion had led to the establishment of the Inquisition and their expulsion from Spain and Portugal, they transferred their center of financial action to Amsterdam and the Netherlands.[2]The Dutch drove the Portuguese out of some of their positions in the East Indies, such as Ceylon and Java, during the 16th century, and Amsterdam and Antwerp became great centers of trade. With the Revolution, the change-over to London began. We read in Hyamson: “The Jewish merchants who accompanied William III transferred the bullion trade from Amsterdam to London”[3]

the jews and william of orange’s expedition to england

Amongst Jewish writers who refer to the matter, Lucien Wolf, James Picciotto and Albert M. Hyamson may be quoted. In his Essays in Jewish History, Lucien Wolf writes: “Isaac or Antonio Suasso of Amsterdam, who was created by Charles II of Spain, Baron d’Avernas…presented William of Orange with two million crowns for the purpose of the expedition which won him the English throne, stipulating only that it should be repaid in the event of the enterprise being successful.”[4] Again, James Picciotto in his Sketches of Anglo-Jewish History states: “It is asserted that without the Jews of Amsterdam, the King could never have reached the throne of England, for his intended expedition was at a standstill for want of funds, until they advanced some very large sums. If such was the case, the loans in question must have been effected to the government of the Republic, and not to the Stadtholder personally, for we are informed by Lord Macaulay, that soon after the Chief Magistrate of Holland had ascended the throne of England, the English Parliament voted a grant of £600,000 to repay the Dutch Republic for the costs of the expedition.”[5]

On the other hand, Albert M. Hyamson in his History of the Jews in England, just before the statement previously quoted from him about the transference of the bullion trade from Amsterdam to London, remarks: “It has been said that Dutch Jews were largely instrumental in furnishing the means that rendered his descent on England possible, and the Dutch-Jewish financier, Francisco Lopez Suasso, Baron d’ Avernas-le-Gras, who afterwards settled in England, has been singled out for mention as one who advanced large sums to William. The authority for this statement has, however, never been given, and no reference to it can be found either in the state records or in those of the Suasso family.”[6] Further on, Hyamson adds: “Under William and Mary, Suasso became famous in political and financial circles, and in the following reign Sir Solomon Medina (the Jew Medina) was, to the outside world, the leading Jew of his day. Following William III to England, Medina became the great army contractor in the wars that succeeded his arrival. For his services he was knighted, being the first professing Jew to receive that honor, but his chief title to notoriety consisted in the charges preferred against him, and more or less proved, of having bribed, on an extensive scale, the great Duke of Marlborough. A contemporary of Medina, Manasseh Lopez, was also one of the most prominent financiers of his day. In that department of activity, however, the leading member of the community was undoubtedly Sampson Gideon, known in the Synagogue as Sampson de Rebual Abudiente (1699–1762). The son of a West Indian merchant, who was engaged in business in The City, Gideon, by a remarkable display of sagacity, judgment, and courage, succeeded in raising himself from very modest beginnings to the position of trusted adviser to the government, a landowner, and the founder of a noble house.…In an earlier crisis, that of the South Sea Bubble, Gideon was also among the few who were not carried away by the whirlwind of speculative excitement, and consequently stood clear of the crash that succeeded. The Jews, as a whole, stood aside from the wild speculations of the time, and were among the few whose fortunes passed through the ordeal unimpaired.”[7] We know that it was the treason of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, that decided the issue in favor of William of Orange and against James II, the legitimate ruler of England, after William’s landing. At the baseness of Churchill’s act of treachery, even William expressed a measure of disgust.[8] Had Churchill already been in touch with those who were providing William with funds? It is not impossible in view of his later relations with Medina.

With regard to Picciotto’s remark that the sums advanced were given not to William, but to the Dutch Republic, it is hardly conclusive, even when supported by Macaulay’s testimony. A promise of an army contractorship, for example, by William of Orange, in the event of success, would certainly elicit an advance. Hyamson informs us of Medina’s contractorship for the continental army. He also mentions that Isaac Pereyra acted as Commissary-General of the Army in Ireland and speaks of the payment he received.[9]

The non-Jewish writer, Werner Sombart, has some interesting remarks about the number of Jews who accompanied William of Orange. “Towards the end of the 17th century,” he writes, “we find the Royal Exchange (since 1698 Change Alley) already full of Jews. Their number was so great that a special section of the building was known as Jews’ Walk. ‘The Alley is thronged with Jews,’ writes a contemporary.[10]… Whence came this sudden influx of Jews? We know all about it now. It was due to the numerous Jews who came over from Amsterdam in William III’s suite. They brought with them, as we have already said, the complete technique of Stock-Exchange business.

“That the statements made by John Francis with regard to these events are in complete accord with the facts is proved by the numerous testimonies that have been brought forward in recent years for the first time, particularly by Jewish writers. The Stock-Exchange appeared suddenly like Minerva, in other words, it came on the scene fully equipped. The chief negotiators of the first English loans were Jews. They were the advisers of William of Orange and one of them, the rich Jew, Medina, was Marlborough’s banker. He paid Marlborough a yearly pension of £6,000 and in return obtained the first fruits of war news. The victories of the English army were as profit-yielding for him as they were glorious for England. All the tricks and artifices capable of bringing about a rise or a fall, the false news from the war zone, the couriers supposed to have arrived, the secret-coteries on the Stock-Exchange, the whole carefully concealed work of plot and intrigue with wheels within wheels, were well-known to the first ‘Fathers of Change’ and duly exploited by them. Besides Sir Solomon Medina, the Jew Medina, as he was called, whom one may consider to be the founder of speculative buying and selling (of shares) in England, we know of a whole group of big Jewish money-dealers in Queen Anne’s reign, who carried on large style speculation. Manasseh Lopez, we know, made a large fortune thanks to a panic caused by a false report of the Queen’s death. He bought up all the government stocks which rapidly fell in price. A similar story is told at a later date of Sampson Gideon who was known amongst the Gentiles as the great Jew Broker.

“To get an idea of the financial strength of London Jews at the beginning of the 18th century, we must bear in mind that there were then one hundred Jewish families with an annual income of £1,000 to £2,000 and a thousand with an annual income of £300, while some Jews, such as Mendes da Costa, Moses Hart, Aaron Francks, Baron d’Aguillar, Moses Lopez Fereira, Moses or Anthony da Costa, who was a director of the Bank of England towards the end of the 17th century, and others, were amongst London’s richest merchants. But even more important than this creation of large style exchange speculation by big money-lenders seems to me the fact that professional stock-exchange business and thus professional speculation, as it is called, were introduced by Jews on the London Stock-Exchange.”[11]

the bank of england, locke,

and freemasonry

a. the bank of england

It is extremely difficult to get information about the group of men that founded the Bank of England. This is regrettable, for their action exercised an enormous influence on the history of England and of the world. The foundation of the Bank seems to have been an integral part of the scheme to make of London instead of Amsterdam the world’s financial center.[12] In Belloc’s Shorter History of England, we read: “We now approach what is much the most important landmark in all these years and, after the Reformation and the destruction of the monarchy, the most important event in modern English history. At the end of the year 1692 a group of rich men, who made the politician Montague their agent, proposed to follow the method of state finance which the Dutch had founded long before, and to mortgage to their advantage the powers of government.”[13] Thus the Bank of England and the National Debt came into existence in 1694. The Protestant writer, William Cobbett, is very severe in his remarks on the foundation of the Bank of England. “An Act of Parliament was passed in the year 1694,” he writes, “being the 5th year of William and Mary.…Thus arose loans, funds, banks, bankers, bank-notes, and a national debt: things that England had never heard or dreamed of before this war ‘for preserving the Protestant religion as by law established’… The sum as first borrowed was a mere trifle. It deceived by its seeming insignificance.…The thing soon began to swell at a great rate, and before the end of the ‘glorious’ no-popery war, the interest alone of the debt, the annual interest, amounted to £ 1,310,492 a year, which, observe, was a greater sum than the whole of the taxes had yearly amounted to in the reign of the Catholic James II! So that here were taxes laid on forever, mind that: merely on account of this ‘glorious revolution,’ which was expressly made for the purpose of getting rid of a Catholic King; here were additional taxes laid on forever to a greater amount than the whole of the taxes raised by that Catholic King! Thus does the justice of God work!…The scheme, the crafty, the cunning, the deep scheme, has from its ominous birth been breeding and fattening on the vitals of the country, till at last it has produced what the world never saw before—starvation in the midst of abundance! ”[14]

In the quite “orthodox” History of the Bank of England, by the Greek professor, Andréadès, there is some information about William Paterson, but very little about the other members of that group of rich men spoken of by Hilaire Belloc.[15] Paterson, according to Andréadès, was horn in Dumfrieshire in 1658 and went to Amsterdam about 1685, Amsterdam being then the headquarters of the English Whigs. He apparently took part in the revolutionary movement of 1688, and must have been deeply involved in the liberal agitation which preceded the campaign in England. After the revolution he settled in London, where he became rich and influential. In 1691, in association with Michael Godfrey and other London merchants, he proposed the foundation of the Bank of Lngland, at the same time pointing out the need for a restoration of the coinage. Paterson was the chief promoter, but in spite of his repeated efforts, nothing came of it for three years. When the Bank was founded, Paterson became a director, with a salary of £2,000, but the Bank did not completely fulfil his expectations and a year later he resigned, after a disagreement with his colleagues. As a matter of fact, the exact cause of Paterson’s retirement is not known.[16]

b. locke

We have seen something of the influence of Locke’s philosophy on the monetary policy of the Bank of England. A few details about Locke’s career may be interesting. According to the article on him in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Locke retired to Holland in 1683.…For a time he was in danger of arrest at the instance of the English government. After months of concealment at Amsterdam, under the assumed name of Dr. Von der Linden, he escaped; but he was deprived of his studentship at Christ Church by order of the King; (James II), and Oxford was thus closed against him. In 1688, Locke was at Rotterdam, where he was a confidant of political exiles including Burnet and the Earl of Peterborough, and he became known to William, Prince of Orange. William landed in England in November, 1688: Locke followed in February, 1689, in the ship which carried the Princess Mary.

According to William Cobbett, Burnet “received the thanks of Parliament for his History of the Reformation, that is to say, a mass of the most base falsehoods and misrepresentations that ever were put upon paper.…This man had, at the accession of James II, gone to Holland, where he became secretary to William (afterwards the ‘Deliverer’), and where he corresponded with and aided the ‘Glorious Revolutionizers’ in England, and in 1689, the year after the ‘deliverance,’ the ‘Deliverer’ made him Bishop of Salisbury as a reward for his ‘glorious revolution’ services. This was the fittest man in the world to invent that which was destined to be a scourge to England (the Bank of England and the funding-system).…It had the two-fold object of raising money to carry on the ‘no-popery’ war and of binding to the ‘no-popery’ government all those persons who wished to lend money at high interest.…The scheme, which was quite worthy of the mind of the Protestant Bishop Burnet, answered its purposes: it enabled the ‘Deliverer’ to carry on the ‘no-popery’ war, it bound fast to the ‘Deliverer’ and his bringers-in all the base and selfish and greedy and unfeeling part of those who had money. The scheme succeeded in effecting its immediate objects, but, what a scourge did it provide for future generations! ”[17] Burnet, a Scotchman, would thus be behind the scheme linked with the name of another Scotchman, Paterson, but both seem to have been in close touch with “Dutch” financiers. Locke was useful as a writer.

There is another item of information about Locke, which is not mentioned in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. In The Constitutions of Freemasonry or Ahiman Rezon,[18] we find a letter from “the learned Mr. John Locke, to the Right Hon. Thomas, Earl of Pembroke, with an old manuscript on the subject of Freemasonry.” The letter is dated the 6th May, 1696, and in it we read: “My Lord, I have at length, by the help of Mr. Collins, procured a copy of that MS. in the Bodleian library which you were curious to see; and in obedience to your Lordship’s commands, I herewith send it to you. Most of the notes annexed to it are what I made yesterday for the reading of my Lady Masham, who is become so fond of Masonry, as to say, that she now more than ever wishes herself a man, that she might be capable of admission into the fraternity.…I know not what effect the sight of this old paper may have upon your Lordship, but for my own part, I cannot deny that it has so much raised my curiosity as to induce me to enter myself into the fraternity, which I am determined to do (if I may be admitted) the next time I go to London, and that will be shortly.”[19]

In connection with Locke’s expressed intention to become a Freemason, it is interesting to note that in the same volume from which Locke’s letter is taken there is to be found the statement that William III was initiated in 1690.[20]

c. the bank of england lodge

Many readers may be unaware that there is a Masonic lodge known as the Bank of England Lodge No. 263. From the history of this Lodge, published by order of the Bank of England Lodge and printed by Hadden, Best & Co., Ltd., in 1932, we learn that “of the nine founders of the Lodge named in the Constitution three were engaged in the Bank of England, viz., Bros. William Mullins, William Garrett and Thomas Bliss. Bro. William Mullins was the first Treasurer, and Bro. William Garrett the first Secretary, the latter being succeeded in the following year by Bro. Thomas Bliss. Further, Bro. Benjamin Kiddell, who was the first joining member of the Lodge on 23rd October, 1788, was an official of the Bank of England. This, of course, makes it perfectly clear that the formation of the Lodge was primarily due to the activities of Freemasons in the Bank of England—hence the title given to the Lodge. The founders, however, acted in the true Masonic spirit by allowing the Lodge to be available for all suitable men who were desirous of joining the Fraternity, and not confining its members to any particular institution.…As bearing upon this question of the title of the Lodge, reference may be made to the stone discovered during recent excavations for the foundations of the new Bank of England building, of which stone a photographic copy is given. The two Masons whose names are engraved upon it, Bros. Thos. Dunn and John Townsend, who were contractors for the Bank of England building, were, in 1732, members of a Lodge, No. 5 in those days, which met at the Ship at the back of the Royal Exchange, and the Lord Montacute was Grand Master in that year. It may well be, therefore, that there was some connection between this Lodge, No. 5, and the Bank of England.”

defective principles adopted by

the bank of england with regard

to the issue of money

Money, as we have seen, has been invented to serve as a stable measure of exchange in view of facilitating families in procuring the material goods necessary for the virtuous life of the persons composing them. Material goods are produced by the application of the available labor to the resources of the country. Money is the indispensable means to enable this to be easily done in a complex society and thus permit the productivity of a country to be readily actualized.[21] But the principle governing the injection of money into the country’s industrial system must be the determination to actualize the country’s potential resources in view of the common good. The endeavor must be to reach the point at which all the available labor and resources are being utilised in a manner respectful of the Catholic Church’s program of the widest possible diffusion of property. There has to he a planned gradual development, but the increasing capacity of a nation to make and supply goods ought never to be hampered by the lack of the means to carry on the indispensable exchanges. As money is, broadly speaking, a claim on the goods capable of being produced by the persons owning property in a community, its rate of issue must be regulated by the rate of actualization of these goods. The regulation of the issue of money on other principles will lead inevitably to a defective and lopsided development of a country’s resources.

In the history of the Bank of England, we find the issue of money regulated by two very defective principles. The first of these is more or less clearly embodied in the Tonnage Act or Bill of 1694, by which the Bank of England came into being almost by the back door.[22] The preamble reads: “A Bill for granting to their Majesties several Rates and Duties upon Tonnages of Ships, Vessels and upon Beer, Ale and other Liquors: for securing certain Recompenses and Advantages, in the said Bill mentioned, to Such persons as shall voluntarily advance the sum of Fifteen hundred thousand pounds towards carrying on the War against France.” The chief of the “Recompenses and Advantages,” which were granted to the subscribers to the loan, who were to constitute a corporation to be known as “The Governor and the Company of the Bank of England” was that the corporation was to have the right to issue notes up to the volume of its total capital. “The Bank’s capital was £1,200,000,” writes B. D. Knowles, “the whole of which sum was to be advanced to the government at a rate of 8% plus £4,000 per annum for expenses, or £100,000 per annum in all. The privileges of a bank were granted for twelve years to the Corporation, which was allowed to deal in bills of exchange or bullion, but not in merchandise, and…. to manufacture and issue notes up to a volume equal to that of its capital. To use William Paterson’s own words: ‘The Bank hath benefit of interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing.’”[23] When the Bank’s Charter was renewed in 1709, the right was granted to double its capital and so its note issue.

Thus the issue of new money depended, not upon the rate of actualization of the country’s resources, but upon the amounts borrowed from time to time by the government, and these borrowings were largely for foreign wars. ‘This was the beginning of that phenomenon which has given rise to so much criticism since the Great War (1914–1918). Money is forthcoming in abundance for war but not for the peaceful development of the country. “The first advance” writes Mr. Belloc, “had been just over a million. In four years the National Debt was twenty million, and in twenty years it was already over fifty million. It became a permanent institution. In this fashion governments were enabled, for their immediate purposes, to saddle posterity with the duty of financing their wars, whilst what was worse, wealthy men found an opportunity for levying a permanent tax upon the community. If you had £10,000 to invest all you had to do was to buy government stock, and you were certain of getting your interest forever out of the taxpayer.”[24]

Another defective principle with regard to the issue of money was adopted by the Bank of England about 1783. In the Rise of the London Money Market, by W. R. Bisschop, on pages 168 and 169, we read: “Whilst in 1780 the value of the notes in circulation was about £6,500,000, this amount had risen to £9,500,000 in 1783. About this time the Bank adopted the unfortunate theory that the note circulation should be contracted simultaneously with an efflux of gold from the Bank, in order to bring about a reflux of the specie withdrawn.…The author of this idea was Mr. Bosanquet.” In a note the same author adds: “According to Mr. Bosanquet, the single fact sufficed that gold was withdrawn from the Bank irrespective of the question whether it was required for internal circulation or for abroad.”

Leaving for a later chapter the question of the use of gold in foreign trade, it is quite clear that making the volume of money dependent on the volume of gold not only divorced the supply of money available in the country from any relation to the actualization of the country’s productivity, but by causing the amount of money to fluctuate was bound to prove disastrous for the stability of the price level. It is not necessary to elaborate the first point, as it is quite clear.[25] The second is excellently treated by Mr. Geoffrey Crowther in An Outline of Money. “The two functions of the gold standard,” he writes, “are quite distinct. The first, aiming at control of the volume of note issue, is obviously concerned with the internal value of the currency; we may, therefore, call it the Domestic Gold Standard. The second, aiming at the stability of the external value of the currency, we can call the International Gold Standard. The cardinal point in the Domestic Gold Standard is clearly the proportion of volume enforced by the law between the gold reserve and the currency. The essence of the International Gold Standard is the convertibility of the currency into gold—that is, the fixed proportion of value between a unit of gold and a unit of the currency.…Not only is a minimum gold reserve a wasteful way of regulating the volume of the currency, it is also a most capricious one. For it does not stabilize the volume of the currency, it merely stabilizes the relations between the volume of gold and the volume of the currency, and if the volume of gold is itself fluctuating, the Domestic Gold Standard does not stabilize the volume of the currency but forces it to fluctuate. An expanding, progressive world needs an expanding supply of currency, and if the annual percentage increment to the gold stock does not equal the annual percentage increase in the demand for currency there will tend to be either an excess or a deficiency of currency, and hence a tendency to rising or falling prices. This can be clearly seen from the monetary history of the nineteenth century.”[26] Since “pursuit of price stability is not compatible with maintenance of the gold standard.”[27] The principle adopted by the Bank of England about 1783 was in reality the abandonment, by those manipulating the primary currency of the world, of the essential property of an exchange-medium.

Another evil arising out of the adoption of the Domestic Gold Standard is that gold can be cornered and thus the power to “see-saw” prices in different countries will fall into the hands of a few men. It is bad enough to have to endure instability of prices owing to the action of what we may call natural causes on the supply of gold: it is the very reversal of order to have the well-being of the community, the common good, at the mercy of a few schemers while the national government looks on helplessly. “Always remember” writes Miss G. M. Coogan in 1935, “that the price of an ounce of gold in terms of the currency of any nation, is purely arbitrary: it is fixed either by law, as in so-called fixed-conversion countries (U.S., Holland, France), or by open market bidding by the gold brokers (England, the Colonies, Argentine, etc.).…Gold brokers, it is reported, meet daily in London at the office of the Rothschilds. The Rothschilds are very conveniently the agents for the Royal Mint. The following firms appear to constitute the assembly of gold brokers: Samuel Montague & Company, 114 Old Broad Street, London, E.C.2; Mocatta and Goldsmid, 7 Throgmorton Ave., London, E.C.2; Pixley and Abell, Palmerston House, Old Broad St., London, E.C.2; Sharps and Wilkins, 19 Great Winchester Street, London, E.C.2. After England suspended gold payments in 1931 the gold brokers began to change the purely arbitrary price of an ounce of gold in London and in the British Colonies.”[28]

“Gold has been cornered, scrambled for, and hoarded,” said the Rt. Hon. Winston Churchill in 1932. “It has risen enormously in price, and the value of everything we have or earn has been diminished accordingly. This monstrous process has only to be continued long enough to shatter the civilization, as it has already broken the prosperity, of the world as we have known it.”[29]

The functioning of the Gold Standard will be dealt with at some length in the next chapter.

berkeley’s rediscovery of some sane principles concerning money

Christopher Hollis in his remarkable book, The Two Nations,[30] has an excellent chapter on the outlines of monetary reform proposed by George Berkeley, Protestant Bishop of Cloyne in Ireland, in his work, The Querist (1735–1739). Berkeley belonged to the English colonist minority in Ireland whom the triumph of William of Orange and the Penal Laws had placed in complete domination over the overwhelming majority, the ancient Catholic inhabitants of the country. In other words, he belonged to what was called in Ireland in later times the Ascendancy. This Protestant bishop, in spite of his acceptance of Nominalism in philosophy, rediscovered in great part the nature of money, that is, some of the essential principles of its ordered functioning in society. A few extracts from Christopher Hollis’s summary will obviate the necessity of quoting too many of the disconnected queries from Berkeley’s work.

“One may throw the general lesson of the queries into a coherent narrative as follows: The fundamental service which a monetary system can render to a society is to provide a sufficiency of ‘counters’ to enable such goods as the producers wish to sell and buyers to buy to change hands. The business of the government is to see that the general price-level remains stable. One article, through the demand for it increasing, may go up in price and another come down. But the price of articles in general must neither increase nor decrease. Any such general increase or decrease ‘such arbitrary changing the denomination of coin, is a public cheat’ (Query 28).[31] On the other hand, an increase of goods and services to be exchanged demands an increase of tokens if the price-level is to be kept stable. “Whether counters be not referred to other things, which, so long as they keep pace and proportion with the counters, it must be owned the counters are useful?” he asked in Query 310. Thus we can see that Berkeley had rediscovered the two chief functions for which money had been invented, according to St. Thomas, he saw, too, what will be exposed at length in the next chapter, that arbitrary increases and decreases in the amount of money, whether through the manipulation of notes or check (credit) money, is against justice, and he even asked in Query 290: “Whether it be not a mighty privilege for a private person to be able to create a hundred pounds with a dash of his pen?”

He was quite clear also that the material of which national money or exchange-medium was composed was a matter of indifference, for, in Query 35, he asked: “Whether power to command the industry of others be not real wealth? And whether money be not in truth tickets or tokens for recording and conveying such power? And whether it be of consequence what material the tickets are made of?” Neither was Berkeley unaware that the real backing behind all money is the national credit, that is, the national capacity to produce goods and render services. “Whether all circulation be not alike the circulation of credit, whatsoever medium (metal or paper) is employed, and whether gold be any more than credit for so much power?” he asks in Query 426. In Query 44 he had already asked: “Whether the opinion of men, and their industry consequent thereupon, be not the true wealth of Holland, and not the silver supposed to be deposited in the bank of Amsterdam?”

Berkeley, then, saw quite clearly that gold or silver was not required for the internal exchange-medium of a country in order to develop its potential resources. “With characteristic common sense,” writes Christopher Hollis, “he tackled the problem of poverty. The first business of a country’s economic system is to give its citizens the necessities of life. Does our system do this? It does not. Why not? Because there are not enough goods? No, but because the poor have not enough money.…So long as there was on the one hand the labor, the raw material, and the skill to produce new goods, on the other hand the desire to consume them when produced, for so long would the provision of money, sufficient to make that demand effective, do good to everybody and harm to nobody.”[32]

Berkeley put the following questions in Queries 59 and 62: “Whether to provide plentifully for the poor be not feeding the root, the substance whereof will shoot upwards into the branches and cause the top to flourish? Whether a country inhabited by a people well fed, clothed, and lodged would not become every day more populous? And whether a numerous stock of people in such circumstances would not constitute a flourishing nation? and how far the products of our own country may suffice for compassing this end?” And later on he asked: “Whether upon the circulation of a national bank more land would not be tilled, more hands employed and consequently more commodities exported? Whether trade be not on a right foot when foreign commodities are imported in exchange only for domestic superfluities? Whether the quantities of beef, butter, wool and leather exported from this island, can be reckoned the superfluities of a country, where there are so many natives naked and famished? Whether we are not in fact the only people who may be said to starve in the midst of plenty? Whether there can he a worse evil than that people should quit their country for a livelihood?”[33]

Nevertheless, in spite of this clear perception on Berkeley’s part of the relation of money to production and of production to human beings, we must not omit to point out the fundamental disorder of his mind, with regard to the full order of the. world. Berkeley’s interest in the Irish poor, whom, in some of his Queries, he compares to Tartars,[34] was all directed towards getting them to abandon the one true Faith.

We see this quite clearly in Queries 255 and 289: “Whether a scheme for the welfare of this nation should not take in the whole inhabitants? And whether it be not a vain attempt to project the flourishing of our Protestant gentry, exclusive of the bulk of the natives?” This Query 255 was followed in the first edition of The Querist by Query 289 of Part I in the Appendix, which runs as follows: “Whether, therefore, it doth not greatly concern the state, that our Irish natives should be converted, and the whole nation united in the same religion, the same allegiance, and the same interest? and how this may most probably be effected?”[35] For Berkeley the way to get rid of the impoverishment of the country was not to relax the infamous Penal Code but to make Protestants of those, whom in his Exhortation to Roman Catholic Clergy, he calls “the true Aborigines, the natural Irish.”[36] He goes on to suggest the use of the Irish language and of something like what later received the name of “Birds-nests” as the best means for the purpose: “Whether catechists in the Irish tongue may not easily be procured and subsisted? And whether this would not be the most practicable means for converting the natives? Whether, in defect of able missionaries, persons conversant in low life, and speaking the Irish tongue, if well instructed in the first principles of religion, and in the popish controversy…may not be fit to mix with and bring over our poor illiterate natives to the Established Church?…And whether, in these views, it may not be right to breed up some of the better sort in the charity-schools, and qualify them for missionaries, catechists and readers?[37]

Berkeley did grasp the relation of money or token wealth to the production of real wealth and of the latter to human life, but his mind was in disorder with regard to the way Christ had laid down for membership of his Mystical Body. The poor “aborigines or natural Irish” had a far clearer view of the full order of the world in that respect. This fundamental disorder prevented Berkeley from seeing that his common sense views with regard to the function of money or exchange-medium would be brought to naught by the current of liberalism or separatism, initiated by Nominalism and enormously increased by the Lutheran separation of the Christian and the citizen. Because of both these influences, as we have seen, the manipulation of money had ceased to be subject to membership of Christ and to the natural moral law. Berkeley, however, was blind to the fact that Protestant individualism, into which he wished to draw Irish Catholics, was paving the way for the domination of money. Not only Protestantism but the Nominalism prevalent in the 18th century also tended to render nugatory Berkeley’s partial grasp of the nature of money.

Berkeley resolutely throws overboard the hesitant semi-Empiricism or semi-Nominalism of Locke, who, though he confused intellect and imagination and the idea or intellectual grasp of the nature of a being with an image or sense-representation of it, yet continued to speak of an abstract idea of substance. For Berkeley, as a strict Nominalist of the Ockhamist tradition, every representation or image, consequently every idea, is concrete and particular.[38] Now, it is only through our intellectual grasp of the nature of an object that we are able to see that our views of it are complementary aspects of one whole. Sense-knowledge tends to section and separate. One individual is distinct from another. So, given the separation and sectioning of the prevalent philosophy, it was in vain for Berkeley to try to get his view of money accepted and embodied in a coherent view of life as a whole. By the very force of things, his attempt was destined to be a failure. In spite of his efforts, money would go its own way as an independent entity governed by its own laws, with disastrous results for human life. The modern world was to learn the truth of Our Lord’s words: “No man can serve two masters.…You cannot serve God and mammon” (Mt 6:24).

french economic life sacrificed in order to eliminate membership of christ

a. frederick the great and

the french revolution

The history of France since the French Revolution affords a striking illustration of what we have seen to be the mot d’ordre of the naturalistic or anti-supernatural forces—favor for a time a Protestant power in order to ruin a Catholic power. In the Masonic work, already quoted, The Constitutions of Freemasonry or Ahiman Rezon, published by the Grand Lodge of Ireland in 1858, certain important dates are given which must be here recalled. We learn that Frederick the Great of Prussia was initiated in 1738 and that, in 1761, he ordered his deputy to convene a Grand Consistory of Princes of the Royal Secret at Paris, to give a patent to Brother Stephen Morin to introduce that system to the world. Lastly, in 1762, Frederick, King of Prussia, was proclaimed sovereign Grand Inspector General, 33rd degree, for both hemispheres. These dates are mentioned, because Frederick the Great used all his influence in Freemasonry to urge on the preparation of the Revolution and to weaken France. In addition, he did all in his power to divide France and Austria and to undo the good effect of the marriage of Marie Antoinette to the future king, Louis XVI, in 1770. How few realize that behind the efforts to make Marie Antoinette unpopular and to provoke such exclamations as “A bas L’Autrichienne!” was the sinister figure of that cynical scoundrel, the King of Prussia!

Fewer still understand that the hounding of the unfortunate daughter of Maria Theresa to her death was only an episode in the long drawn-out scheme by which Protestant Berlin took the place of Catholic Vienna as the cultural capital of the German-speaking peoples. “‘The hatred of the Queen for everything that bears the name of Prussian,’ wrote the German envoy, Baron von Alvensleben, ‘is indisputable.’…This was one of the great crimes of the unhappy Queen—that she was anti-Prussian. Those amongst the French who still revile her memory would do well to remember that she was the first and greatest obstacle to those dreams of European domination that, originating with Frederick the Great, culminated in the aggression of 1870 and 1914. Marie Antoinette paid heavily for her aversion to Prussia. There can be no doubt whatever that certain of the libels and seditious pamphlets published against her, before and during the Revolution, were circulated by Von der Goltz, the Prussian Ambassador, at the instigation of the King of Prussia.…There was thus a double strain of German influence at work behind the French Revolution—political and philosophical. The first, inspired by Frederick the Great and carried out by Von der Goltz: the second, inspired by Weishaupt and conducted by Anacharsis Clootz, the Prussian sent to France for the purpose.”[39]

b. bismarck and gambetta

The work of destruction so ably inaugurated by Frederick the Great was carried on by Gambetta and the Freemasons who succeeded him in power from 1877 onwards, that is, from a few years after the disastrous defeat of France in 1870. A well-documented book by Mgr. Landrieux, Bishop of Dijon, entitled La Legon du Passe, gives a moving account of the betrayal and the ruin of a great country.[40] Les Pourquoi de la Guerre Mondiale, by Mgr. Delassus, Protonotary Apostolic, goes over the same ground at greater length. In 1870, in the course of a conversation, Bismarck remarked to the Mayor of Rheims: “The Latin nations, France and the others, have their greatest source of strength in Catholicism. Once we have overthrown Catholicism in France, we shall be masters of France.” His instructions to Count Von Arnim, German Ambassador in Paris in 1871 and 1872, continue this line of thought. “I am about to begin a campaign against the Catholic Church, which will be long and perhaps terrible.… I shall be accused of persecution and I shall perhaps be obliged to have recourse to it. It is necessary, however, in order to complete the overthrow of France and (to) establish our religious and diplomatic superiority as we have already established our military supremacy. Well, I repeat it, in this task, the French Republicans will aid us: they are playing our game. What I am attacking in order to further my political plans, they will attack because of their anti-religious fanaticism. We can count on their help (Letter of Nov. 16, 1871).…The most certain means to hamper the influence of France to our advantage is to weaken Catholicism.… If we can succeed in this, France is definitely finished” (Letter of 1872).[41]

Gambetta. a half-Jew, Italian and Freemason, already member of the Provisional government which counted ten Freemasons out of eleven members, raised to power by Judaeo-Masonry in 1877, was Bismarck’s agent and accomplice. In agreement with Bismarck, “Gambetta organized the most terrible of all civil wars, the religious war which paralyzed all the efforts of the French nation to rise again.”[42] While Gambetta was stirring up French patriotism by his fiery speeches, he was dining every week at the residence of the Jewess Païva, with Bismarck’s emissary, Henckel, with whom he was discussing the terms of an entente cordiale with Germany on the basis of an alliance against the Catholic Church. Gambella’s slogan: “France’s enemy is Clericalism,” became the rallying cry of all the subsequent Masonic governments which misgoverned France in the interests of Germany. It was practically suggested by Bismarck.[43]

c. the attack on the christian

family by divorce

We know that the sacramental unity of husband and wife symbolizes the supernatural union of Christ and his Church. Given that fact, it was inevitable that the naturalistic French Revolution should assail Christian marriage and introduce divorce. Divorce was legalised in France in 1792. Already, in 1793, there were as many divorces as marriages, and in the year VI there were more.[44] Napoleon maintained divorce. The Restoration abolished it. The Third Republic set about its reintroduction. A Jew, Naquet, proposed it in 1876. It was rejected. It was proposed again in 1881 and again rejected, but in 1884, it was adopted. In the Dictionnaire Larousse, Alfred Naquet is given as the man who got the divorce law voted.

In 1885, the year following the promulgation of the law, there were 4,123 divorces. In 1912 there were 14,579 as against 311,959 marriages or one divorce for every twenty-one marriages. “The orators who spoke in favor of the divorce law in the Senate and in the Chamber of Deputies,” writes Mgr. Delassus, “maintained that the promulgation of the law would see a diminution in the number of adulteries. Yet the number of condemnations for this crime went on increasing. They held also that divorce would exercise a beneficent influence on the number of births. The number of births steadily diminished. They proclaimed that the relief given to those in despair would lead to a diminution in the number of those committing suicide because of family troubles. In 1883, there were 1,108 such cases: in 1889, there were 1,404. And Monsieur Georges Michel wrote, in a special study of the question in 1901, that there were three or four times as many suicides amongst divorced men and women as amongst married people.”[45]

d. financial cost of eliminating membership of christ from

french schools

The General Assembly of the Grand Orient had, already in 1870, voted in favor of laicizing all primary schools, that is, of eliminating every allusion to God, the Blessed Trinity, membership of Christ, and the supernatural life, from the minds of French children. The proposal was again accepted unanimously by the same Assembly in 1877. In 1879, Jules Ferry, a Freemason, prevailed on the Chamber of Deputies to vote in favor of his Bill, which, according to the Masonic Bulletin, was essentially Masonic. Article VII of this Bill forbade any member of a non-authorized congregation to teach. The Bill was rejected by the Senate, but it was accepted a few years later. In 1882, a law was passed excluding religious instruction from school programs, and in 1886, a law prohibiting religious from teaching in the state schools. Manuals of Civics, then, took the place of the Catechism. Every trace of Christian thought was eliminated from the class-books, and the old authors were subjected to an anti-God censorship and revision. The name of God was condemned to disappear even from La Fontaine’s Fables.[46] Ferry brought in three Protestants to carry out the of France, namely, Buisson, Steeg, and Pecaut. Buission remained director of primary education for eighteen years under twenty-seven ministries, from 1878 to 1896.[47]

It would be interesting to trace all the steps by which the souls of French children were perverted and the ground prepared for the Socialists, the Communists and the Anarchists. At the time of writing his book, Mgr. Landrieux stated that 97,000 French primary teachers were affiliated to the Communist International and other revolutionary groups, while the remaining 20,000 non-revolutionary teachers got little encouragement from the ruling powers.[48] This story of perversion would take too long, however. We must limit ourselves to showing at what a heavy financial cost to France the behests of the naturalistic organizations were carried out. When the primary school was made obligatory for all and all the expenses were taken over by the public authorities, French Catholics built and endowed their own schools. From 1882 to 1904, they paid the public taxes for schools, to which they did not send their children, and at the same time maintained their own schools taught by religious. At the time the Masonic Society was crying out against the Catholic schools and demanding that the state should have a monopoly of education or at least that no religious should be allowed to teach in a public or private school. The religious were driven out of the schools in 1904. While the faithful Catholic families were engaged upon this formidable task of trying to save their children, let us see the crushing financial burden laid upon the French people as a whole in order to make war on Our Lord.

If we take the average annual figure spent on education by the state during the ten years that preceded 1882, we find that it was about 90.1 million francs (90,412,138, to be accurate). Accordingly, the total expenditure on education for the thirty years from 1882 to 1912 should have been about 2,715 million francs. As a matter of fact, the sum expended was 7,000 million francs. The difference between the two figures. 2,715 million and 7,000 million, namely, 4,285 million francs, represents what it cost the French state financially to eliminate all teaching touching the Kingship of Christ and membership of Christ from French schools. And in this figure, the additional expenses incurred by the departments and the Communes are not comprised. Mgr. Landrieux says that the figure would have to he doubled, if they were included. He cites the case of the Municipal Council of Paris which had to borrow 77 million in order to replace the schools closed as a result of the law of 1901. [49]And it was the same story from one end of the country to the other.

We have mentioned only the financial expense necessitated by the fact that “they (the Freemasons) had introduced the republican and democratic government in view of using it as a first-class instrument for the realization of their program of universal laicization and national apostasy.”[50] The moral results of the execution of this program were deplorable. Le Temps, a Parisian non-Catholic paper, in its issue of 30th December, 1911, bewailed them. “The wastage of human resources is on the increase,” we read, “the number of those who are worthless at school and in the army, who are useless for work, the number of vagabonds and scamps of all kinds is on the increase.…The number of illiterates is on the increase.” In 1882, the proportion of illiterates was 14% or 10% according to Paul Rert; in 1907, it had gone up to 25 or 30%. In 1912, the number of illiterates entering the army was 24,000; in 1919 the number had gone up to 30,967.

In addition, the children would not go to a state-school, when there was a Catholic school to go to. In one department, Maine-et-Loire, 46 state-schools had only five pupils each, 29 state-schools only three, and 24 schools had not any pupil. In another, l’Ardeche, 65 state-schools had in all 255 pupils, while 65 Catholic schools had 3,062. One of the teachers of a state-school in this department had only one pupil, his own daughter. He sent her to the Catholic school and continued to draw his salary for doing nothing, as so many of his fellow-teachers, who had no pupils, were doing. No wonder decent French people, who did not understand the meaning of Masonic naturalism, marvelled at the waste of money. They marvelled more when they learned what became of the confiscated property of the religious driven out of the schools and exiled. The shameful story is narrated at length by Mgr. Landrieux.[51]

e. legalized robbery

under false pretenses

The annual assemblies of French Masonry urged on the government to suppress the religious orders and congregations and confiscate their property. The Assembly of 1896 proposed the confiscation of the property of the religious societies in order to devote it to old age pensions for workingmen. In 1898, the Lodges valued the property at 10,000 million, and in addition to workingmen’s pensions proposed to double the primary teachers’ salaries.[52] The property of the religious was confiscated, but the workingmen never got their pensions nor the teachers their increase of salary. Why? Because the liquidators and the lawyers filled their pockets, in other words, the expenses of liquidation were so heavy and the whole wretched business carried out with such little respect for the common good that nothing remained except a few crumbs—and ruins.

“Out of 108 liquidations carried out in 1907, 45 left only debts, nine just balanced the cost of carrying them out, while one, that of the Sisters of St. Bernard in L’Aisne, showed a profit of 50 centimes.… A Trappistine Convent in the Pyrenees had cost a million. It was sold for 21,000 francs, out of which a donation of 120,000 francs had to be paid back. The net result was, therefore, a loss to the state of 99,000 francs.…But in every case, whether the sale resulted in a gain or a loss for the state, the liquidator did not neglect himself. He always made sure to get his share. The properties of the Carmelites at Tours and the Ursulines at Nice just covered the expenses of their sale, so that the state made no profit (but at least the taxpayers had not to pay for the ruin of a good work and the exile of some of the best Frenchwomen). The liquidator set aside for himself 6,500 francs and 6,255 francs, respectively.”[53]

The sordid affair caused such a scandal that at last, in spite of all the efforts of the Lodges, it was brought to light. “We should never have known anything about the business,” writes Mgr. Landrieux, “if the band of vultures charged with plundering and robbing the religious orders and congregations had displayed even a tiny bit of shame, at least outwardly, for the sake of appearances. But they perpetrated so many crimes, they went to such lengths and behaved in so shameless a fashion, that neither the Lodges, nor the Public Prosecutor, nor the Parliament, nor the President of the Republic, nobody in fact, could prevent the scandal from becoming public. In 1912, the government had to yield to the pressure of public opinion and of the press and hand over its liquidators to a Commission of Inquiry. And then the reality was found to be worse than it had been said to be.”

It is unnecessary to go into the details of the sums the liquidators kept for themselves or gave to their lawyer friends. Some of the tit-bits given by Mgr. Landrieux are taken from the figures given in the Chamber of Deputies and from the pen of no less a personage than M. Combes, the Minister who, with M. Wakleck-Rousseau, another Freemason, is chiefly responsible for the whole business. The liquidators allowed themselves for travelling expenses four times the price of first-class railway tickets. One lawyer in the dossier of the Barnabite Congregation copied out a law-book which had no connection with the matter, four times over, just for the sake of lengthening his work and getting money for doing nothing. Combes himself admitted that the liquidators had made of his great work, the suppression of the religious orders, a regular highway robbery. “Modern society,” he added, “certainly had the right (sic) to dissolve the congregations, but not to deliver them over to the rapacity of vampires.”[54]

Of course, as Mgr. Landrieux points out, honest Catholic buyers could not be found to take part in the auction of religious houses and stolen property, with the result that they were bought by Jews for little or nothing. It was a magnificent speculation for them, he adds, to get the Freemasons to drive out the religious and then take over some of the religious houses as a bargain.[55]

The final crime was committed when aged religious who had been promised a pension from their plundered convents were allowed to die in want. Mgr. Landrieux quotes letters from a Freemason like M. Briand on the subject and even a protestation from M. Combes. It is time to ring down the curtain on these disgusting episodes in the systematic degradation of a great Catholic country. “What is really astounding,” writes M. Robert Vallery-Radot, “is that never once during those years of national disgrace was the Grand Orient taken by storm and pillaged.”[56]

f. the warning of the great war unheeded

The organized forces of naturalism continued their nefarious work after the Great War (1914–1918).[57] They finally left France without aeroplanes or tanks for its defense, when the second European War began in September, 1939, that is, a few weeks after the official celebration of the 150th anniversary of the Masonic revolution of 1789.[58]

In the book by M. Prache, La Petition countre la Franc-Maçonnerie, to which allusion has just been made, the author writes as follows concerning “The Grand Orient Commission for External Relations”: “French Freemasons are running the risk of being fooled and of compromising the interests of our country by their sectarian hate and their cosmopolitan dreams, which are designedly and cleverly encouraged by foreigners. This is to our mind the great danger which is hidden behind that mysterious institution called ‘The Grand Orient Commission for External Relations.’ French Freemasons are repeating the blunders of their predecessors under The Second Empire: they seem to have forgotten the terrible lesson of 1870.” The war which began in 1939 was a rude awakening for the dreamers.

In default of the Judaeo-Masonic connections of the French Ministers at the outbreak of the war, let us put down those of the Daladier Ministry, according to Le Pilori of July, 1938. They were as follows:

“Edouard Daladier, President of the Council. Lecturer in Masonic Lodges.[59] Member of the League of the Rights of Man.

“Camille Chautemps, Vice-President. 32nd Degree Sublime Prince of the Royal Secret. Very influential member of International Masonry.

“Georges Bonnet, Minister of Foreign Affairs. Dignitary of the Lodge ‘La Republique’. Almost certainly affiliated to English Masonry.

“Paul Raynaud, Minister for Justice. Jewish Agent. President of the Committee for the Defense of Central European Jews.

“Albert Sarraut, Home Secretary. Dignitary of the Grand Orient. Brother of Maurice Sarraut, one of France’s chief Masons.

“Cesar Campinchi. Navy. Lecturer in Masonic Lodges. Member of the Central Committee of the Jewish League against Racialism and Anti-Semitism (L. T. C. A.).

“Guy La Chambre. Air-Minister. Has always been a faithful follower of Masonic policy.

“Paul Marchandeau. Minister of Finance. Venerable of the Lodge ‘La Sincerite’ of Rheims. Member of the League of the Rights of Man.

“L. O. Frossard. Public Works. Half-Jew by his mother née Levy. Member of the Lodge ‘L’Internationale.’ Member of the League of the Rights of Man and of the L.I.C.A,

“Henri Queuille. Minister of Agriculture. Lecturer in Masonic Lodges.

“Jean Zay. Minister of National Education. Jew. Member of the Lodge ‘Étienne Dolet’.

“Paul Ramadier. Minister of Labor. Member of the Lodge ‘L’Internationale.’ Member of the League of the Rights of Man and of the L.I.C.A.

“Fernand Gentin. Minister of Commerce. Affiliated to several Masonic groups. Member of the League of the Rights of Man.

“Georges Mandel. Colonial Minister. Jew, whose real name is Jeroboam Rothschild. Dignitary of the Jewish Lodges B’nai B’rith:

“Jules Julien. Minister of Posts and Telegraphs. No information concerning him.

“Marc Rucard. Minister of Public Health. 33rd Degree. Member of the Council of ‘Le Droit Humain.’ Member of the Central Committee of the League of the Rights of Man and of the L.I.C.A.

“Champetier de Ribes. Pensions. Follows Masonic policy, but we have no information concerning him.

“De Chappedelaine. Mercantile Marine. Affiliated to the Masonic group known as ‘L’Action laïque’.

“Raymond Patenotre. National Economics. Lecturer in Masonic Lodges. Contributed funds to the Popular Front.”

We can add to this a somewhat earlier ministry, the Chautemps Ministry, as given in the Revue Internationale des Sociétès Secrètes of February 1, 1938. This Ministry comprised twelve Freemasons and four lecturers in lodges. The Freemasons were:

Camille Chautemps, 32nd Degree Lodge ‘Les Démophiles’ of Tours.

George Bonnet, Lodge ‘L’Internationale.’.

L. O. Frossard, Lodge ‘L’Internationale.’

Marchandeau, Lodge ‘Sincérité’ of Rheims.

Jean Jay, Lodge ‘Étienne Dolet’ of Orleans.

Sarraut, Honorary Member of the Lodge .’. Fraternité tonkinoise.

William Bertrand. Lodge .’. L’Union rétablie of Marennes. Former member of the Council of the Grand Orient.

Kamadier. Lodge ‘L’Internationale.’

Mare Kucart, Lodge ‘L’Internationale’ of Orleans.

Max Hymans. Lodge ‘Isis-Montyon, Conscience et Volonté’.

Monnerville, Lodge ‘La Prévoyance’.

Raoul Aubaud, 32nd Degree, Former member of the Council of the Grand Orient.

The Lecturers were: Edouard Daladier, Yvon Delbos, Pierre Cot, de Tessan.

There are some slight differences with regard to a few of the Ministers figuring on both lists. At the time of writing (November, 1941), it is impossible, on account of the war, to investigate these details.

APPENDIX

cardinal pie of poitiers and napoleon iii

In a memorable interview, in 1856, the Bishop of Poitiers, later Cardinal, said to the Emperor of the French, Napoleon III, who had boasted of having done more for religion in France than the Bourbons had done after their Restoration in 1815: “I am quite ready to do justice to your Majesty’s religious dispositions and I certainly acknowledge the services that you have rendered to Rome and to the Church.…Perhaps the Restoration did not do more than you have done. I am obliged, however, to add that neither the Restoration nor you have done for God what you should have done. Neither of you raised up his throne: neither of you disavowed the principles of the Revolution, of which, nevertheless, you combat the practical consequences. The social gospel which furnishes inspiration to the state is the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which is purely and simply the formal negation of the rights of God.

“God has the right to command nations as well as individuals. It is for this that Our Lord came on earth. He is meant to reign by inspiring the laws, sanctifying the national habits and customs, enlightening the teaching, directing the councils, regulating the actions of governments as well as of their subjects. Wherever Our Lord Jesus Christ does not rule in this manner, there is disorder and decay.

“Now, it is my duty to tell you that he does not reign in our country and that our Constitution is far from being what the Constitution of a Christian and Catholic country should be. Our public law lays down that the Catholic religion is the religion of the majority of Frenchmen, but it adds that the other forms of worship have a right to equal protection. Is not that equivalent to proclaiming that the Constitution gives equal protection to truth and error? Well! does Your Majesty know what reply Our Lord Jesus Christ will give to governments which are guilty of such a contradiction?
Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of heaven and earth, will reply: ‘To you, governments which succeed one another, I also grant equal protection. I accorded this protection to the Emperor, your uncle; I accorded the same protection to the Bourbons, the same protection to Louis-Philippe, the same protection to the Republic and to you also the same protection will be accorded.’”

The Emperor interrupted the Bishop: “But surely you do not believe that such a state of things is suitable for the present day and that the time has come to establish this religious rule that you ask of me. Do you not know, Mgr., that all the forces of evil would be let loose?”

“Sire, when great politicians like your Majesty inform me that the time has not yet come, I have only to bow my head, for I am not a great politician. But I am a bishop, and as a bishop I reply: ‘If the time has not yet come for Our Lord to reign, well! the time has not yet come for governments to last.’”[60]

Later on, after the defeat of 1870 and the disappearance of Napoleon III, the preparations being made for the godless school, by the Masonic government of the Third Republic, seemed to Cardinal Pie to sound the funeral knell of France. “If you are going to set up schools,” he said, at which everybody must assist and in which everybody must be present except God, that outrage on human liberty and on religion will be the finishing stroke, the death-sentence. Sacrilegious and murderous hands will have written on the tombstone of our country: Finis Galliae.”[61]

If the great Cardinal were alive today he would be saddened on reading the contents of the issue of March 23, 1943, of the French daily paper, France, published under the patronage of the Association des Français de Grande-Bretagne. This issue contains the announcement of the new Constitution for Northern Africa and French Equatorial Africa drawn up by General Giraud. According to this Constitution, the regulation, drawn up by Marshal Petain for members of the Jewish nation, with regard to French citizenship, is done away with everywhere except in Algeria. “It is the return to the position adopted by the French people in the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789.” Account is taken of Mohammedan opposition in Algeria. The decree of the Marshal forbidding functionaries or agents of the French government to be members of secret societies is also abrogated. Freemasonry is again free to continue its anti-supernatural work. In the light of what we have seen this makes sad reading

[1]A Shorter History of England, pp. 455, 456.

[2]The Inquisition, as we know, did not succeed in putting an end to double-dealing with regard to religion. We read in The History of the Jews in England, by the Jewish writer, Albert M. Hyamson: “At the same time (1643) the Portuguese ambassador in London, Antonio de Souza, was himself a Marrano or Crypto-Jew, and it was in the chapel of his embassy that the small colony of Spanish and Portuguese merchants used to assemble weekly, nominally to hear Mass, in reality, however, to join in divine service in accordance with Jewish rites.”

[3]Op. cit., p. 188. For an interesting outline of the relations of the Jews with Spain, Portugal, Holland and England, see a pamphlet, The Jews and the British Empire, by L. Fry (the M.C.P., 93 Chancery Lane, London, W.C.2).

[4]Jewish Historical Society of England, 1934, p. 215.

[5]Trubner and Co., 1875, p. 53.

[6]London, Methuen, 2nd Edition, 1928, p. 187.

[7]The History of the Jews in England, pp. 216, 217.

[8]Cf. Belloc’s Shorter History of England (p. 441) as well as his James the Second (p. 223), and The Enigma of James II, by M. V. Hay (p. 141). Cf. also King James the Last, by Jane Lane (p. 222). The poet, John Dryden. says that those who drove out James II and brought in William of Orange were “a company of men perhaps as destitute of honor and as God-forsaken as any of which history has record” (Quoted in Great Catholics, Sheed and Ward. p. 266.)

[9]Op. cit, p. 189.

[10]The Anatomy of Exchange Alley or a System of Stock Jobbing (1719) printed by J. Francis.

[11]Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben, pp. 104–106. The first edition of this important work appeared in 1911. Five editions had appeared before 1924. Hyamson says that Anthony da Costa, the first Jewish director of the Bank of England, was an agent for the Georgia Company.

[12]Cf. Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben, by Werner Sombart. p. 104.

[13]Op. cit., p. 455.

[14]History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland (pars. 402–411).

Henry VIII prepared the downfall of the English popular Monarchy when he attacked the Divine Plan for Order. The families that rose to wealth and power, thanks to the confiscation of the possessions of the Catholic Church, the Cecils, the Russells, the Cromwells, and the rest, gradually hemmed in the Monarchy, then revolted against it and finally turned out the legitimate ruler of England, James II, the creator of the English fleet. They always feared a Catholic reaction which might endanger some of the possessions taken from the poor and from the education of the people. With the advent of William of Orange, the triumph of the Aristocracy over the Monarchy was complete. But the foundation of the Bank of England meant that power and wealth gradually passed into the hands of the financiers and the speculators. The rule of the latter is called Democracy. An excellent outline of the struggle against the Monarchy is to be found in The Tragedy of the Stuarts, by J. D. Gleeson (Cecil Palmer).

[15]In The Fascist of Oct., 1935, Arnold S. Leese speaks of William of Orange having been financed not only by Suasso but also by Franz von Schoonenberg, who was one of the Jew Belmontes, and adds that thus it is easier to understand “how, so soon afterwards, the Bank of England was projected by a Jew, Henriques.” Unfortunately, he does not give any references. Belmonte is, of course, the Italian form of Schönberg.

“In the seventeenth century,” writes Christopher Hollis in The Two Nations (p. 63), “England was an importer of capital from Holland. At the turn of the century London established itself as ‘all that Amsterdam was’ and England became instead an exporter of capital. Or, to put the truth with more exact accuracy, an international gang which had up till then operated from Amsterdam, found it more convenient to operate from London instead.”

[16]According to Andréadès, Paterson died in London in 1719, after having taken part in the famous Darian or Panama expedition, in which he lost £10,000. Parliament voted him £18,241 in 1715.

In The Old Lady Unveiled, by J. R. Jarvie (London, Wisharr and Co., 1933), p. 9, we read: “The bibliography of the Bank is meagre and leads nowhere in particular. There is a quite, excellent orthodox history published in 1908, but it reveals nothing of the vital secrets of the institution which would have a direct bearing on the financial debacle of the ‘thirties.’… As Professor H. S. Foxwell says, in his preface to the book by Professor Andréadès just referred to: ‘ It (the Bank) never seems to have published any reports or even to have preserved its own minutes and accounts. “We have mainly to rely for any official knowledge of its operations on the occasional returns extracted by Parliamentary Committees, and on the weekly returns under the Act of 1844, which competent judges have declared to be the most valuable result secured by that Act.…And the returns under the Act of 1844 are very inadequate. Neither source gives the mass of valuable information contained in the annual reports of the Banks of France and Germany, and indeed of most of the foreign banks. Hence there are many questions of Bank policy which can only be studied upon such basis as is afforded by hearsay, and the articles and occasional utterances of individuals.’ Dr. Andréadès’ history is one of two works written since 1900 which are to be found at the British Museum. The second volume, The Bank of England from Within. 1691–1900, by Mr. W. Marston Acres, which was published two years ago, caused no perturbation among the directors. So innocuous is it in fact, that Mr. Montagu Norman wrote an introduction to the book.”

[17]History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland (pars. 406–410). For further information about Burnet as a historian, cf. The Enigma of James II, by Malcolm V. Hay. Dryden speaks of him as “invulnerable in his impudence” (Quoted in Essay on John Dryden in Great Catholics, Sheed and Ward).

[18]Cf. notes (5) and (7) of Chapter 9.

[19]Whether Locke actually became a Freemason the present writer does not know. If he did so, he would be one of the many prominent writers who were strongly influenced in the direction of naturalism by their membership of secret societies, for example, Descartes (probably), Spinoza, Leibniz, Goethe, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Burns, and Dugald Stewart. With regard to the affiliation of Descartes and Leibniz to the Rosicrucian Society, cf. J. Maritain, La Songe de Descartes (pp. 10 and foll.). Concerning Robert Burns’s and Dugald Stewart’s membership of Masonry, cf. Robert Burns and his Masonic Circle, by Dudley Wright. Sir Walter Scott’s Masonic affiliation is certified to us by no less a person than Sir Alfred Robbins in English-speaking Freemasonry (p. 226). The proofs of the connection of the Jewish philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, with the Rosicrucian Society are to be found in the R. I. S. S. (Revue Internationale des Sociétes Secrètes) of February 9th, 1930. The occult signification of Goethe’s work is treated in the R. I. S. S., Partie Occultiste, vol. I (1928), pp. 129 and foll. the article opens with the remark that several German Masonic Lodges claim the honor of having had him on their roll of membership. Cf. articles by M. P. Masclaux in De Mercure de France, 1925 and 1928.

[20]The Constitutions of Freemasonry, p. 184.

[21]In any highly developed society, that is, in any society with multiple exchanges, money in some form is the conditio sine qua non of the reduction from potency to act of all the resources of the community, to use the phraseology of scholastic philosophy.

“The physical cost of afforestation is inescapable,” writes Prof. O’Rahilly, “whether we as a community can afford to do this or that is primarily not a problem of money-tickets at all; it depends ultimately on the available labor and resources. Forests cannot be grown in the Sahara; planting cannot be carried out if there are no available man-power, plant and tools. But, as we are living neither in a simple barter economy nor in a regime of dictatorship-cum-serfs, money is an indispensable means, not on the physical level like soil and tools…but on the human organisational level” (Money, p, 308. Cf. also pp. 310, 322).

[22]The expression “almost by the back door” is that employed in the Encyclopedia Britannica (14th Ed.), Vol. III, Art. Bank of England, p. 53. The expression is fully justified, for “neither the title of the Bill, ‘Tonnage Bill,’ nor its preamble was indicative of the fundamental and far-reaching considerations which were entailed.” Cf. Britain’s Problem, by B. D. Knowles, p. 47.

[23]Cf. Britain’s Problem, by B. D. Knowles, p. 49.

[24]A Shorter History of England, p. 457.

“As the years went by, checks came to oust bank notes as a medium of exchange, and there was no longer any need for the Bank of England to go to the trouble, or even the small expense, of manufacturing notes on every occasion of government borrowing” (Britain’s Problem, p. 53, by B. D. Knowles).

[25]“This amount (the amount of gold held by the banks) bears no relation to the volume of world production, it and especially of world harvests, which vary seasonally. The value of world agricultural production greatly exceeds that of all other production. So a big world harvest, or still more a series of such, means more food but not more money, and consequently a fall in farm prices. But most people in the world are still working on the land. If farm prices fall, the purchasing power of 70% of the world’s population falls, and industrialists lose their main market. So industrial prices fall, and with them, confidence. Slump conditions then prevail, with their accompaniment of unemployment and unsaleable surpluses of goods” (Look to the Land, by Lord Northhourne, p. 30).

[26]Op. cit., pp. 318–322.

[27]Op. cit., p. 356. Cf. pages 345 and 358 of the same work. On page 345 the author writes: “The Golden Rule is not a device for maintaining the sobriety of the price-level, but for ensuring that each national price-level shall be as drunk as every other.” The Golden Rule, according to the same author (p. 342), is: “expand credit when gold is coming in: contract credit when gold is going out.”

[28]Money Creators, pp. 84–86. In Britain’s Jewish Problem, by M. G. Murchin (p. 136) we read: “At about ten minutes to eleven each morning, representatives of three Gentile firms (Sharps and Wilkins, Pixley and Abell, and Johnson Matthey) meet the representatives of three well-known Jewish concerns (Mocatta and Goldsmid, Samuel Montague and Co., and N. M. Rothschild and Sons) at the Rothschild office in St. Swithin’s Lane, and in a remarkably short space of time the day’s price for gold is fixed.…One of the firms mentioned, Johnson Matthey, is not a bullion dealing firm, but an assaying firm.”

To reconcile what Miss Coogan says here with what we shall have to say in the next chapter about the determining influence of the American price-level, the following remarks of Mr. Geoffrey Crowther are useful: “As things are, the value of gold is now ultimately dependent only on the fact that the United States Treasury is willing to go on paying thirty-five dollars an ounce for it. Gold, in fact, is a pensioner of the dollar, and if ever its thirty-five dollar pension is withdrawn, its value might sink to what it would fetch in dentistry. The United States, as the world’s greatest holder of gold, and the British Empire, as the world’s greatest producer of gold, both have an interest in maintaining its value.”

[29]Quoted in the Introduction to Tyranny of Gold, by Hiskett.

[30]London, George Routledge and Sons, Ltd. (1935).

[31]The Two Nations, pg. 56.

[32]The Two Nations, p. 62.

[33]The Querist, Queries 467, 172, 173, 446, 447. After having enumerated in Query 142 the amounts of beef, pork, and butter exported from Cork in one year, he goes on to ask in Query 143: “Whether a foreigner could imagine that one-half of the people were starving, in a country which sent out such plenty of provisions?”

[34]Query 513 runs as follows: “Whether the Tartar progeny is not numerous in this land?” Cf. Query 512 also for an expression of the same “benevolent” attitude, with a sneer at Spain thrown in.

[35]Fraser’s collection of Berkeley’s works, published by the Clarendon Press (1901), has been used for The Querist. The Queries withdrawn by the author in the second edition have been placed by Fraser in an Appendix and are numbered as in the Three Parts, published in 1735, 1736, 1737.

[36]On page 10 of Francesco Olgiati’s work on Berkeley, L’Idealisme di Giorgio Berkeley, we read: “As Bishop of Cloyne in Ireland, in spite of his Anglicanism, he ardently strives to relieve the miserable economic conditions of the Irish Catholics.” This would need to be modified in view of Berkeley’s real aims as shown by his writings, his Primary Visitation Charge to the Protestant Clergy of Cloyne in particular.

[37]Queries 261 and 264. Berkeley was of opinion that it would be better to let Catholics enter Trinity College, without asking them to apostatize on entrance, better, that is, from his point of view, as a proselytizer. Cf. Query 191 introduced in the second edition of The Querist.

[38]Cf. Introduction to the Principles of Human Knowledge in Fraser’s Edition. Cf. also Le Point de Depart de la Metaphysiqne, by le B. P. Maréchal, S. J., pp. 144–45,

[39]The French Revolution, by Nesta H. Webster, p. 27 (1922). It is well known that it was in a Masonic Assembly at Frankfort-on-Main in 1784 that the deaths of Louis XVI of France and Gustavus III of Sweden were decreed. Father Abel, S.J., declared, in a sermon preached at Vienna in 1898, that it was his grandfather who had proposed this assassination. The proposal was accepted, and the two Brothers, Bade and Knigg were sent to Paris and Stockholm to stir up the lodges of the two countries to carry out the general plan of the Revolution. Father Abel said also that it was his father’s dying wish that he should thus make reparation for this horrible crime. Cf. Les Pourquoi de la Guerre Mondiale, by Mgr. Delassus, Vol. I, pp. 213, 214.

[40]This work, written before the Great War (1914–1918), was published some years after that war.

[41]This second letter was read in the Chamber of Deputies and inserted in the Journal Officiel of April 7, 1911. Bismarck was a Mason, needless to say. Cf. Deschamps, Les Sociétès Secrètes et la Société, Vol. II, pp. 377–1179,

[42]Quoted from Résponse à Déroulède, by Madame Adam, in La Leçon du Passé. For full documentation the two works referred to should be consulted.

[43]“From the time of the Waddington Ministry in 1879, in which there were already six Freemasons out of nine Ministers, Freemasons were always in a majority in the government. The Freycinet Ministry in 1890 had six out of ten; the Loubet Ministry in 1892 counted seven out of ten; the Ribot Ministry, also in 1892, seven out of ten. Even the famous Méline Ministry, opposed by the Lodges because it was too mild, counted seven out of eleven. The Rouvier Ministry in 1905 had eleven out of fourteen. The number of Freemasons in Parliament was out of proportion to their numbers in the country. When one reckons that there are not more than 25,000 Freemasons in France, and that there is only one Senator for every 30,000 electors and one deputy for every 20,000, there ought to be at most one Freemason in the Senate instead of 150 and two in the Chamber of Deputies instead of 212” (La Leçon du Passé.’, p. 21).

[44]In the autumn of 1793, the introduction of a new Calendar was decreed by the Convention. The new era from which every trace of the supernatural life of Christ was to be banished was supposed to begin on 22nd September, 1792. This Calendar was used for official purposes up to 1806. Cf. Marion, Histoire de L’Eglise, Vol. IV, p. 307.

[45]Les Pourquoi de la Guerre Mondiale. Vol. I, p. 155.

[46]Instead of Petit poisson deviendra grand pourvu que Dieu lui prête vie, which is what La Fontaine had written, young children had to read Petit poisson deviendra grand pourvu qu’on lui laisse la vie. In the Grammar of Larive et Fleury, the name of God kept its place, amongst the examples, down to 1905; in the edition of that year, God was replaced by Wine. And so on.

The Masonic program was not carried out because of a demand for it on the part of the people. The laicization laws were voted by 329 deputies representing 2,738,204 electors out of 10,179,345 on the registers. “Was the country consulted about the laicization laws? No: and rightly so. The country, poorly instructed, would perhaps have replied that it did not want Godless teaching” (Clemenceau, in La Justice of 2nd December, 1886).

[47]In Pourquoi de la Guerre Mondial, Vol. I, p. 361, it is stated that Buisson was expelled from Switzerland because of anti-Christian lectures and that he was a Freemason. Steeg’s father, as we read on page 362 of the same work, was a Prussian who, without being able to prove that he had taken out his naturalization papers, was elected deputy for Bordeaux. As soon as the younger Steeg became minister, he began to bring in his relations.

[48]Mgr. Landrieux refers to L’Instituteur française of 15th June, 1922.

[49]The Law of 1901 is usually known as Waldeck-Rousseau’s Association Law. By the terms of this monument of hypocrisy and iniquity it was declared on the one hand, in Article 2, that “persons may freely form associations, without any preliminary authorization,” but on the other hand, according to Article 13, “no religious congregation can he formed without a special authorization accorded by law.” Henceforward, all French citizens had the right to form associations in thousands, if they so wished, all except religious, who ceased to be persons, and this in spite of Article 10 of the famous Declaration of the Rights of Man: “Nobody may be molested for his opinions, even his religious opinions.” Horrible crimes were committed in France in the name of this law. The Journal De Débats of January, 1910, related that the people of Pleslin, in Brittany, on the outbreak of an epidemic of typhus, demanded back the three Sisters who had been driven out. At a word from the Mayor, the three came back and spent themselves night and day for the sick. They were denounced by a local Mason to the government and condemned at Rennes for infringement of the law.

[50]Journal Officiel de la Maçonnerie française, 1885, p. 262. Quoted by Mgr. Landrieux, op. cit., p. 18.

[51]Op. cit., pp. 76–133.

[52]In order to arrive at the utterly ridiculous figure of 10,000 million, the property of several congregations was counted twice. Buildings that were simply leased by religious from municipal councils and urban councils, and which belonged to the cities and towns, were reckoned as belonging to the religious, and so on. Cf. Mgr. Landrieux, op. cit., pp. 94–95.

[53]Mgr. Landrieux, op. cit., pp. 122–123.

[54]Interview given by M. Combes to Le Journal, October, 1909. Quoted by Mgr. Landrieux, op. cit., p. 120.

[55]“These shady transactions enabled the Twelve Tribes to plunge a few more roots in French soil” (Mgr. Landrieux. op. cit., p. 127).

[56]La Dictature de la Maçonnerie, p. 272. A petition against the nefarious action of Freemasonry, signed by 80,000 citizens, was presented to the Chamber of Deputies in 1902. Cf. La Petition countre la Franc-Maçonnerie, by M. Prache.

[57]Mgr. Landrieux quotes the demand of the Grand Orient in 1923 for the application of the laws of 1901 and 1904 against religious. Op. cit., p. 70.

[58]The French were outnumbered six to one in the air in 1910. General Chambe, on the occasion of La Semaine de L’Aviation at Vichy, as related in the Nouvelles de France 27th May, 1912, said that the French and English had only 1,700 aeroplanes against Germany’s 5,200.

Of course, what is said here would need to be completed by an account of the traffic of the iron ore of Lorraine from behind the Maginot Line to Germany, for months after the outbreak of the war in 1939. Cf. article by Frank C. Hannighen in Harper’s Magazine, March, 1940. The iron ore returned in the form of tanks and aeroplanes later on.

[59]A lecturer is a man who can be relied upon to speak in a way calculated to favor Masonry’s plans. To these lectures, though given in lodges, non-Masons are admitted.

[60]The Kingship of Christ according to Cardinal Pie of Poitiers, pp. 76–79

[61]Ibid., p. 190.

Chapter XVIII

The Functioning of The Gold Standard and Economic Decay

some financial principles of

st. thomas aquinas

Money, according to St. Thomas, was invented by the art of man for the convenience of exchange by serving as a common measure of things saleable. “Natural wealth,” he writes (Ia IIae, Q. 2, a.1, c.), “is that by which natural wants are supplied, for example, food, drink, clothing, vehicles, dwellings, and such like. Artificial wealth is that which is not a direct help to nature, as for instance, money. This was invented by the art of man, for the convenience of exchange by serving as a common measure of things saleable.” As a common measure it ought to be stable. “As a measure used for estimating the value of things,” writes St. Thomas (Comment, in Ethic., Lib. V, Lect. IX). “money must keep the same value, since the value of all things must be expressed in terms of money. Thus exchanges can readily take place and, as a consequence, communications between men are facilitated.” Money is, therefore, essentially an exchange-medium. Stability in value is a property or necessary attribute of an exchange-medium. Money is meant to facilitate families in procuring by exchange the sufficiency of material goods required for the virtuous life of the human personalities composing them. The virtuous life of human persons is simply their ordered development as members of Christ.

The functioning of the gold standard with its alternate booms and slumps has led, not only to unemployment and starvation in every country in spite of potential sufficiency, but to something of a deadlock in international trade coupled with the destruction of food and the lessening of production. The fundamental reason for this lies in the perversion of order involved in the system. St. Thomas insists that money is intended to facilitate production, distribution and exchange, in view of strengthening the family life of members of Christ, actual and potential. Instead of that, men are sacrificed for production, while production and consumption, in their turn, are sacrificed for interest on debt. Instead of being an instrument of politics and economics, money has become an end. This fundamental disorder, the domination of society by money and by those who manipulate money, must be rectified. The fundamental rectification is the return to the full doctrine of membership of Christ’s Mystical Body with all that it implies, as Pope Pius XI points out in Quadragesimo Anno: “Then only will it be possible to unite all in harmonious striving for the common good, when all sections of society have the intimate conviction that they are members of a single family and children of the same Heavenly Father, and further that they are ‘one body in Christ, and everyone members one of another’ (Rom. 12:5), so that ‘if one member suffer anything, all the members suffer with it’ (1Cor. 12:26).” Without that, peace cannot be lasting.

the bankers’ discovery

We have already seen that bronze, iron, and silver speedily came to be used as money or exchange-medium.[1] For many centuries, silver was the commodity chiefly employed, and it worked well, when exchanges were few or relatively few. Gold came to be used as money or exchange-medium much later. Then arose the business of storing the gold and silver tokens employed in the process of exchange. Individuals went into business as the keepers of strong-rooms for storing precious metals till the owners needed them, the owners meanwhile receiving receipts for their deposits. Since everybody was assured of the safety of the precious metals deposited in the strong-rooms, people began to hand the receipts from one to another without going to the trouble of getting out the gold or other precious metal and passing it on. It was much more convenient to transfer the receipt or the piece of paper. These pieces of paper were the storekeeper’s or goldsmith’s or banker’s promises to pay precious metals upon demand. From the point of view of the history of the gradual advance of bankers to their present dominant position in modern states, this may be termed the first step. From the point of view of the ordinary man, and especially of the poor, who suffer most from the absence of social justice, it was the first mistake. “The public error, however,” writes Miss G. M. Coogan, lay not in trusting the private banker with their real money, but in carelessly allowing the private banker to issue his slips of paper in substitution and later in multiplicate for real money. This placed his private seal on a parity with the seal of the government on its lawful money. This was the initial step of the process by which eventually the money seal of the private banker actually took precedence over the money seal of the government itself.”[2]

The second public error lay in allowing the goldsmiths or bankers to exploit an observation that they had made. They saw that about 90% of their total stock of gold remained in their vaults entirely undisturbed, and that only about 10% of the precious metal was required for the normal transaction of business. The bankers then began to circulate far more promises to pay gold than they had gold to meet, and to collect interest on the fictitious money. The bankers “discovered that they could lend far more money than they possessed, that is to say, that they could issue far more promises to pay in gold than they could meet with all the gold in their coffers. This was because it was found in practice that the promised payments were never simultaneously demanded; in fact, except in crises, never more than one-tenth of these at any one time. This lamentable discovery was the origin of the world’s monetary system today.”[3]

What the bankers had discovered was simply the working of the law of averages. Modern organization of money and banking depends almost entirely on the law of large numbers. If tokens were issued, say, to about a dozen people, you could never predict what would happen. The whole dozen might walk in and claim gold. But when you are dealing with millions of people the lodgements and withdrawals will tend to cancel out. Similarly, a company could not insure only twelve people, for it could not predict their mortality; but it can make a good statistical prophecy about twelve thousand. In the days of the gold standard, “redeemability of notes could normally be kept up, because though a number of people presented notes and obtained gold, a practically equal number presented gold and obtained notes. Thus it was not necessary to keep a gold backing for every note issued. It was sufficient to keep a marginal amount, that is, sufficient to cover fluctuations about the average.…If then, redeemable tokens are issued on a sufficiently large statistical scale, the excess of withdrawals over lodgements in any period—and the excess of lodgements over withdrawals in some other period—will be reduced to a small fraction of the total concerned. Moreover, these fluctuations will become regular and predictable.…Thus it becomes quite safe… to issue redeemable tokens to which no gold corresponds.”[4]

In other words, the goldsmiths or bankers found that they could not only lend nine-tenths of the gold originally entrusted to them, but also that they could put into circulation, through “credit-worthy” borrowers, their own notes or receipts up to ten times the amount of these nine-tenths and yet be certain in practice of being able to pay out gold on demand for the proportion of notes presented at the cashier’s desk. By the covering of 10% the bankers were always able to maintain the illusion that the whole of their notes and receipts were convertible into gold or were “backed” by gold. “The successful maintenance of this illusion,” writes Jeffrey Mark, “which depends essentially on the proportion of people in the community who, in practice, are likely to and do present their notes for gold redemption at the same time, is the ‘convertible paper’ and the ‘sound’ money of the modern banking system.

“Let us now consider some of the extraordinary consequences of this proceeding. There are, let us suppose, 10 original depositors, who each left with the goldsmith gold equal to one major unit of the currency. There are now in circulation 10 goldsmith’s receipts, collectively equal to and actively functioning as 10 units of currency. But by loaning out the 9 unreclaimed units of gold to 90 borrowers as described… 90 of the goldsmith’s personal notes are now in circulation and also function as 90 units of the currency. By virtue of the illusory gold-backing to his notes (the illusion never being destroyed as no more than 9 notes are simultaneously presented for the 10 units of gold in his vaults) the goldsmith has created 90 units of currency, which were not in existence before, which he claims as his property, which therefore must be repaid him, and on which he will charge interest, say at 5% until such time as they are repaid him.…The fact emerges that there are now 100 units of currency in circulation: 10 the property of the depositors, and 90 the property of the goldsmith, with a fixed yearly charge owing to the latter on every unit.

“It should be remembered that at the beginning of this proceeding the goldsmith owned nothing whatever (except of course the store-room). At the end of the transaction the original depositors still own the same number of currency units as they did at the beginning…whereas the goldsmith now owns, and therefore controls 90 units of currency: his total receipts for both service charge and interest (over and above the ownership of the created currency) being 5 units of currency, i.e., half the value of the original gold deposits,—the whole of this extraordinary creation and appropriation of interest-bearing currency being based on other people’s money deposited with him for ‘safe custody.’

“If we add to this fact that these ‘fictitious loans’ (to borrow a convenient phrase from Prof. Soddy) were only granted against evidence of tangible security deposited with the goldsmith in an amount always in excess of the loan, and that this security was confiscated by the goldsmith if these ‘loans’ were not ‘repaid’ when called, we have an accurate picture in miniature of the modern financial system, under whose dictates we all necessarily live and suffer. Modern finance, even in the complicated medley of bugaboo which is carried on under the sounding titles of High Finance and International Finance, is simply a vast elaboration and mystification based absolutely on these simple but monstrous principles.”[5]

The toleration by the state of this practice of lending promises-to-pay to ten times the amount of money which the bankers had in their possession was the second and the more important step in the bankers’ advance to control in modern states. From the point of view of the ordinary man, and especially of the poor, it was the second and more fatal error. In point of fact, governments failed to realize that the so-called promises-to-pay, i.e. checks, had become money, in fact, a far more important category of money than that issued by the state.

Having seen the fundamental principles underlying the orthodox functioning of the gold standard, let us now examine the system at work, first in national finance, and, secondly, in international trade. Before doing so, however, it is well to remind ourselves once more that money, according to St. Thomas, has been invented by the art of man for the convenience of exchange by serving as a common measure of things saleable. Like all common measures, such as the yard-stick and the pound-weight, it is meant to be stable. We shall see even more clearly as we go on that those into whose hands the creation of money was allowed to fall did not aim at facilitating the distribution of socially produced wealth, but at making money a source of revenue to the issuer and a means of arriving at the greatest possible control for themselves, by the creation of debt and the manipulation of the price level.

national finance and the gold standard

Let us first examine the approximate figures of the various elements composing the medium of exchange in Great Britain, the country of origin of the gold standard system of finance. The figures are taken from page 55 of the excellent work already quoted, namely, The Modern Idolatry, by Jeffrey Mark. They are not meant by the author of this book, published in 1934, to set forth the exact amount in use, but to give a fairly accurate idea of the proportion which each kind of exchange-medium bears to the others and to the whole amount. The actual figures may vary very considerably, but the ratios between the categories remain substantially the same.

In Great Britain, out of £2,500 million of exchange-medium, approximately 10 million are in copper or bronze, 40 million are in silver, 450 million in Bank of England notes, and 2,000 million are what are called Bank deposits. Bank deposits are really loans made by the banks and finally controlled by the Central Bank, in this case, the Bank of England. “Of the 450 million in banknotes some 250 million represent the British £1 and 10/- Treasury notes issued during the World War, which in 1928, under the terms of the Banknotes and Currency Act, came under the control and are now the virtual property of the Bank of England.…State-issued money now consists entirely of the bronze (or copper) and silver coins, that is, about £50 million. The Banks now own and claim as their property some £2,450 million out of £2,500 million. It is therefore clear that the British banks have created, except for about 2%, and now own all the money in circulation in England, as a debt against the community.…The situation in the U.S.A., and indeed in all civilized countries today, is substantially the same.”[6]

In 1934, therefore, about 98% of the money of Great Britain was controlled by the Banks. We need not make any distinction from this point of view between notes and bank deposits, for whether on the presentation of security £1,000 is credited to a man’s account in a bank ledger and he writes checks against it, or he obtains that bank’s own notes for £1,000 and spends them, a “deposit” has been created or an “advance” made—and money or exchange-medium has been brought into being. Notes give a clearer impression of new exchange-medium being put into circulation: that is all. “What is created in the first instance is a bank deposit or what is called a ‘deposit.’ For instance, if Mr. X obtains an ‘advance’ of £50 against Security on Dec. 30 and does not spend it, the bank balance sheet of Dec. 31 will include the following items among many similar items:

Liabilities.              Assets.

Deposit of Mr. X – £50.          Advance to Mr. X– £50.

–A bank ‘deposit’ has been created.”[7]

“There is no economic difference,” writes Prof. O’Rahilly, “between these two methods (notes and checks) of creating new purchasing power. There would be no difference at all if, instead of giving the customer a book of blanks to be filled up as required, the bank were to issue a block of coupons of denominations such as 10/-, £1, etc. As things are, there is merely a slight juridical distinction between a bank note and a check: a note is an absolute obligation to pay; a check is a contingent obligation, it may be dishonored if the customer has overdrawn beyond his agreement.…Hence there is no real social or economic difference between (1) a bank-of-issue which creates new purchasing-power by the emission of notes, and (2) a bank-of-deposit which creates new purchasing-power by the issue of credit transferable by check. The confusion of thought is chiefly due to the persistence of the word ‘deposit’ which no longer means depositum but a debt.”[8]

These points must be insisted upon because of the mistaken idea that people have that “the function of the banker is, firstly, to take care of ‘their’ money, and, secondly, to make profits by lending ‘their’ money to other people at a higher rate of interest than they themselves allow on deposits or on checking accounts. In the true sense of the word, the public do not own any money at all, and the phrase ‘bank-deposit’ is a legal euphemism. Seeing that all money comes into existence as a debt created in favor of the banking systems of the world, the plain truth is that bankers must always lend their own (created) money, however much it may be criss-crossed between private ‘debtors’ and ‘creditors’ subsequently, no one really has any money to lend to the banks on ‘deposit’ because all money ‘owned’ by depositors derives from a loan made by the banks to somebody else.…Yet the line taken by bankers, when publicly explaining any new move in policy, is that they have done so to protect their depositors’ money. [9] The situation is simply this. Seeing that all credit is created by bank loans, for every ‘deposit’ in a bank, there is an equivalent loan somewhere else in the banking system, so that the total of ‘deposits’ is equal to the totality of the bank loans.…[10] The amount of money in existence is increased if the aggregate of loans granted is greater than the aggregate of loans repaid or called in (credit expansion). It is decreased if the aggregate of loans granted is less than the aggregate of loans called in or repaid (credit contraction).…Now the extent to which a bank can make loans is determined by its ‘cash’ holdings, which, in England, varies with the amount of its balance at the bank of England, as the Rt. Hon. Reginald McKenna, the able Chairman of the Midland Bank, laid down at a meeting of the Midland Bank shareholders (in 1927): ‘Variations in the quantity of money are due to variations in the total of bank cash.…The total of bank cash is determined solely by the action of the Bank of England.’ The authority of the Bank of England in fixing the amount of money in England is therefore absolute. The genesis of all inflations or deflations of the currency comes from a private corporation whose policy is not controlled by Parliament.”[11]

Before passing on to speak of the evils of inflation and deflation, it will be well to explain the meaning of the phrase used above, namely, that variations in the quantities of money are due to variations in the total of bank cash. Briefly it means that, as bankers are accustomed to lend promises-to-pay up to ten times the amount of legal tender money which they either possess or can count upon securing in case of a ‘run’ upon them, bankers’ loans vary with the amount of their available legal-tender money. A banker’s balance sheet shows how much legal-lender money he can count upon under the heading ‘Cash and Deposits at the Central Bank.’ Cash is the amount of legal-tender money he has actually in his possession. Deposits at the Central Bank are the credit balance of the private bank at the Central Bank. Deposits at the Central Bank are reckoned as cash because they can be immediately converted into legal-tender money. The Central Bank will see to that.

There is one very important difference between cash and deposits at the Central Bank. Cash is legal-tender money. Deposits at the Central Bank are a credit balance at the Central Bank for which legal-tender money can be obtained. The Central Bank, by what are called ‘open-market operations’ can increase or decrease the private bank’s available supply of legal-tender money, on which it has lent ten times the amount. When the Central Bank buys securities in the open-market, it pays for them by checks drawn on itself. “The sellers of these securities lodge these checks to their credit in their own banks… thus increasing their own deposits. The banks pass these checks into the central bank, thus increasing their balance at the central bank.…Hence the central bank by its ‘open-market operation’ has increased the cash-ratio of the banking system. And it is easy to see that if the central bank sells securities (instead of buying them) it decreases the cash-ratio of the banks as a whole.”[12] Hence the Central Bank can control the lending powers of the private banks and increase or decrease the amount of exchange-medium in the country. The Central Bank is controlled by the movements of gold, when the gold standard is functioning. An export of gold forces the Central Bank to reduce the credit balances of the private banks.

The Rt. Hon. Reginald McKenna was even more explicit at the meeting of the Midland Bank in January, 1924, than in 1927. At that meeting he said: “I am afraid the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that the banks can, and do, create money. The amount of money in existence varies only with the action of the banks in increasing and decreasing deposits and bank purchases. Every loan, overdraft, or bank purchase creates a deposit, and every repayment of a loan, overdraft, or bank sale destroys a deposit. And they who control the credit of a nation, direct the policy of governments and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people.” In his 1927 speech, the same distinguished banker and former Chancellor of the Exchequer said that the total of available bank cash on which the quantity of loans or deposits of private banks depended, was determined by the Bank of England.[13] Thus we can conclude that, according to this one-time Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Governor of the Bank of England directs the policy of the English government and practically holds in his hands the destiny of the English people. We shall have more to say about this point later on.

the meaning of inflation and deflation

We have seen that by far the greater part, in fact all except (less than) 2% of the exchange-medium in use in Great Britain, comes into existence as a loan from the banks, in the form of promises-to-pay. We may say, then, that the exchange-medium of that country is practically created by the banks and that the rate of its creation is regulated by the private corporation called the Bank of England. ‘Instead of lending notes, the banks, in effect, now lend check-books and the right to draw checks up to limited sums beyond what the borrower possesses. For nearly a century, until the revelations of the War made it impossible to conceal the truth from the general public, the bankers stoutly denied that they were creating money at all, and claimed that they were merely lending the deposits their clients were not using. The President of the Bank of Montreal not a year ago continued to repeat this, but, nearer the center of things, all this was known and admitted by the orthodox apologists for this monstrous system even before the War, usually by some such lying phrase as ‘Every loan makes a deposit.’ A loan, if it is a genuine loan,[14] does not make a deposit, because what the borrower gets, the lender gives up, and there is no increase in the quantity of money, but only an alteration in the identity of the individual owners of it. But if the lender gives up nothing at all, what the borrower receives is a new issue of money and the quantity is proportionately increased. So elaborately has the real nature of this ridiculous proceeding been surrounded with confusion by some of the cleverest and most skillul advocates the world has ever known, that it still is something of a mystery to ordinary people, who hold their heads and confess they are ‘unable to understand finance.’ It is not intended that they should.”[15]

Let us now examine the alternate periods of boom and depression known as the Trade Cycle or Credit Cycle. During the opening stage, money is increased by the fact that more bank loans are made than are repaid. This causes a rise in prices and a corresponding diminution in purchasing-power in the money already in the hands of people. This happens, because the amount of exchange-medium is increased before goods are ready to be exchanged, in consequence of its being left to private individuals, frequently mere speculators, to decide how much money shall go into circulation. Their aim, of course, is not to keep the price level stable, while enabling the potential productivity of the country to be developed, but to make profit for themselves. During the first stage, employment increases, producers and traders take loans. ‘There is an increasing demand for goods. Prices continue to rise till purchasers, whose salaries and incomes have not risen in proportion, begin to buy abroad. This they can do by shipping gold instead of goods, for the price of gold is fixed and so has not risen.[16] But the moment gold begins to leave the country, the bankers fear for their solvency, so they do not renew their loans when they are repaid. Money is thus withdrawn from circulation and the second stage of falling prices begins.

The loans, contracted when prices were rising, have now to be paid back when prices are falling—borrowers have to sell far more goods in order to obtain the same quantity of money to pay the banks—so a number of traders go bankrupt. Their securities are sold up by the banks or held until later, when another boom will enable them to be disposed of advantageously. The speculators sell when prices are still high, that is, if they are “in the know,” and then wail before buying again till prices have fallen to the lowest level, when a period of depression sets in and continues till the Central Bank, the Bank of England, gives the signal for a new series of loans by buying securities. That action gives the seller’s bank a credit balance at the Bank of England. Thus that bank, having more “cash” at the Central Bank, can create more ledger-money.[17] A new Credit Cycle begins and follows the same disastrous course as the former. The rise of prices in the first stage swindles all creditors for the benefit of debtors. The fall of prices in the second swindles all debtors for the benefit of creditors.

Ordinary people have a difficulty in following all this, because they always think of the bankers as lending money or exchange-medium that has an existence independent of the bankers’ fiat. “What is not generally realised about the ‘Credit Cycle’ is that the bankers are making profits both ways, by compelling buyers to pay them tribute during the booms and by compelling sellers to pay them tribute during the slumps—and all this by means of loans of promises-to-pay what none of them possessed—money.”[18] Ordinary people seem to have accepted, as they are meant to do, the explanation that all these cycles are the working of a law of nature. They will do well to read the interesting speeches put into the mouths of bankers and others by Miss G. M. Coogan in Money Creators (p. 28) and R. McNair Wilson in Promise to Pay.

According to Miss Coogan, the strong-room keeper, speaking at a meeting summoned to inquire into the causes of depression, “in a very sad voice told the committee that he regretted more than anyone in the community that the laws of economics were so rigid and did place such burdens on mankind, particularly upon the weaker members of the community, it made him very sad to see under-nourished and poorly-clad children…. but man did not make the laws of economics and he, as a guardian of the community’s money, could do nothing else but recognize those bitter laws. There was simply no solution for the problem except economy.…But the community would have to face its problem courageously and they would simply have to economize more until all the debts foolishly contracted had been wiped out, that is, until the people either paid what they owed or surrendered their property. That was the only sound solution. They certainly had no desire to violate the laws of economics.”[19]

According to R. McNair Wilson, the banker waxes more lyrical about the laws of nature: “This movement of prices up and down,” he declared, “is inherent in human nature. It belongs, too, to the nature of things as well as to the nature of men. Look at the seasons. Out of Winter darkness emerges the sunlight of Spring.

… But all too soon the days begin to draw in.…Never forget that a banker’s first duty is towards his clients, the honest and frugal folk who have entrusted to him the savings of their lifetime.…Would you have him make use of your savings to attempt to change the laws of nature, to try to sow in the time of reaping? It is confidence which begins a boom, my friends, and it is lack of confidence which brings it to an end. There is no financial conjuring trick, believe me, which can change by an iota that law of nature, that economic law, that inexorable economic law.”[20]

some historical examples

of planned deflations

The first example will be taken from the monetary history of the U.S.A. as outlined by Miss Coogan in her splendid book, Money Creators. She writes as follows: “Just one week after President Cleveland was inaugurated, the ‘Panic Circular’ was issued, March 12, 1893. It appealed to the bondholding classes to ‘advocate an extra session of Congress for the repeal, unconditionally, of the Sherman Silver Law.’ It was issued directly from the American Bankers’ Association and addressed to all ‘National Banks’ throughout the U.S.A.” Miss Coogan then continues:

“The following is a direct quotation from a Resolution introduced to the 63rd Congress, First Session, April 29, 1913, by Hon. Charles A. Lindbergh, Sen.,:—

“‘In eighteen hundred and ninety-three a circular was sent out by the American Bankers’ Association, an organization in which most bankers hold membership. It is known as the ‘Panic Circular of eighteen hundred and ninety-three,’ bears date March eleventh, eighteen hundred and ninety-three, and was mailed to the National Banks. It read as follows:

“Dear Sir,—The interests of national banks require immediate financial legislation by Congress. Silver, silver certificates, and Treasury notes must be retired, and National Bank notes upon a gold basis (the phrase ‘gold basis’ always means a debt basis) made the only money. This will require the authorization of 500,000,000 dollars to 1,000,000,000 dollars of new bonds (debts) as the basis of circulation. You will of course retire one-third of your circulation, (your paper money), and call in one-half of your loans. Be careful to make a monetary stringency among your patrons, especially among influential business men. Advocate an extra session of Congress to repeal the purchasing clause of the Sherman Law, and act with other banks of your city in securing a large petition to Congress for its unconditional repeal per accompanying form. Use personal influence with your Congressmen and particularly let your wishes be known to your Senators. The future life of national banks, as fixed and safe investments, depends upon immediate action, as there is an increasing sentiment in favor of government legal-tender notes and silver coinage.’[21]

“It was an undisputed fact that silver, silver certificates, and United States government legal tender currency had proven very desirable as money since 1878. In the summer of 1893 the American Congress convened in extra session for the very purpose of violating the confidence and the will of the United States. Everyone knows that the result was another severe depression.

“The following is an excerpt from a confidential bankers’ circular issued two years prior to the Panic Circular of 1893:

“We authorize our loan agents in the states to loan our funds on real estate to fall due on Sept. 1st, 1894, and at no time thereafter. On Sept. 1st, 1894, we will not renew our loans under any consideration. On Sept. 1st we will demand our money. We will foreclose and become mortgagees in possession. We can take two-thirds of the farms west of the Mississippi, and thousands of them east of the great Mississippi as well, at our own price.…We may as well own three-fourths of the farms of the West and the money of the country. Then the farmers will become tenants as in England…

“After the battle over the dishonest demonetization of silver in the United States had subsided, the international connivers succeeded in passing the so-called Gold Standard Bill. This bill was approved on March 14, 1900.…

“Under the terms of this bill, unconstitutional in fact, Congress supposedly gave to the United States Treasury itself and to private individuals, the right to make gold dollar contracts calling for the payment of dollars at future dates, each dollar of which was convertible into 25.8 grains of gold .9 fine. The falsifiers stated that a dollar consisting of 25.8 grains of gold .9 fine was henceforth the standard of value. Thus recently was born our good old traditional gold standard.

“Under the banking laws, any private individual could bring gold into the United States, or take gold out of the United States, and hence, at his pleasure, change the volume of gold within this country. Each gold dollar could also be used as a so-called base upon which to build a pyramid of many bank-manufactured dollars. By manipulating the volume of bank-manufactured dollars, the actual purchasing power of every dollar in the United States could be altered at the pleasure of a few individuals.”[22]

The second example of the functioning of the “economic law” of alternate boom and depression will be taken from the recent monetary history of Great Britain. In regard to this example we are particularly favored, for eight years before the “coup” took place, Mr. Arthur Kitson foretold that it was being prepared. In his book, A Fraudulent Standard, published by King & Son, in 1917, we read:

“Just now a few of the great financiers are contemplating the most gigantic ‘deal’ that has probably ever been conceived, and one which if perpetrated by any other class of the community, even on a very much smaller scale, would be denounced as barefaced robbery.…This deal is nothing less than doubling the national, and incidentally all other, debts, by doubling the present value of our monetary units. The object of this is to double the value of their War Loan investments, regardless of the terribly disastrous industrial and social results which must ensue. This robbery will be accomplished, if it is not checked in time by public sentiment, in a perfectly legal manner by a complacent Chancellor under the guise of a measure for the public welfare, for the sole purpose of removing ‘inflation’ and reducing prices which have risen mainly through the creation of the very currency and credit constituting the War Loans. The measure will aim at restoring what money-dealers term our ‘good, sound, honest gold currency,’ by destroying the Treasury notes and reducing bank credit to the pre-war proportions. The effect will naturally be to double the purchasing power of the pound at the expense of every wage earner, producer, merchant, manufacturer, tradesman, and taxpayer in the country.…Nominally, of course, the amount of the War Debt will undergo no change. The figures will remain the same.…By altering the value of the pound, which is easily accomplished, the trick is done and the debt, although nominally £6,000,000,000, becomes in reality £12,000,000,000, in terms of the present purchasing power of money, corresponding to that of the money actually loaned! Similarly, although the nominal rate of interest is 5%, by this method of tampering with the value of the pound, these investors will actually receive 10% on their original investment.…This will mean that every taxpayer will have to give at least twice the amount of his goods and labor to meet his taxes, than that which he has had to furnish under present conditions.”[23]

In The Bankers’ Conspiracy, written by the same author and published by Elliot Stock in 1933, in the section devoted to the criticism of the Report of the Cunliffe Committee on Currency and foreign Exchanges of 1918, we read: “In advising the restoration of the gold standard they (the Cunliffe Committee) are advising the government to increase the National Debt and so add to the burdens of taxation which the British public will have to bear. At present our National Debt approximates £8,000,000,000! But what are these pounds and with what were they subscribed? The Committee must know that the War Loans were subscribed in ‘cheap’ pounds, approximating in value to only one-half of the pre-War pounds. Hence our war-debt, expressed in pre-War pounds, would be less than £4,000,000,000! By restoring the gold standard, the public debt would therefore be doubled and become £8,000,000,000 at pre-war value! Hence every taxpayer would be compelled to pay at least twice the amount of taxes in his own products and services by reason of the Committee’s recommendations. Very nice for the big money-lenders and war loan subscribers, but rather hard on the wealth producers and taxpayers!…

“When the American Greenback Party once proposed to pay off the American National Debt in paper money, a cry of horror went up from all the money-dealers and bankers at the shockingly immoral crime contemplated of paying the public debt in a depreciated currency-—notwithstanding the fact that a large proportion of the American National Debt had arisen from loans made with the self-same cheap paper money. But these same gentlemen later managed to sneak a bill through Congress which compelled the American people to repay their War debt in an appreciated currency worth three times that in which most of the debt was contracted! The money-lenders’ code of morals—which the Committee apparently endorse—is, that whilst it is very wicked for debtors to defraud their creditors, creditors are quite justified in robbing their debtors. This seems to be the moral basis of the Gold Standard.”

In the body of the same work, pages 25–27, Mr. Kitson touches briefly upon the results of the re-establishment of the gold standard, foretold by him in 1917. “This document (The Cunliffe Currency Committee’s Report),” he writes, “advised the adoption of certain monetary policies which were accepted by the Coalition government of Mr. Lloyd George in 1920, under the chancellorship of Mr. (now Sir) Austen Chamberlain, and is directly responsible for the most disastrous period in the industrial history of this country. Notwithstanding the ruinous results of the deflationary policy recommended in this report during the years immediately following its adoption, Mr. Winston Churchill intensified these evils by establishing the gold standard in 1925, which precipitated the great strike of 1926.…The gold standard, re-established in 1925, after inflicting untold losses upon our industrial classes and taxpayers, had to be abandoned six years later to save the country from ruin. The same policies as those recommended by the Committee, have also been tried in other countries since the War and with similarly ruinous results; hence the present World Crisis! By the universal adoption of the gold standard after its recommendation by the Cunliffe Committee, which was one of the main policies advocated by the League of Nations, an irresponsible super-government was created, composed of a group of International Bankers. It required only a few years to prove the utter incapacity of these men to manage the world’s financial affairs, and if the people of all civilized countries are not yet convinced of the terrible dangers attending the supremacy of the banking interests, there will be a repetition of the economic disasters of the past few years—but of a much more intensive character.”

In his pamphlet, Finance in the Melting Pot (Stanley Nott, Ltd.), Mr. Vincent C. Vickers, former director of the Bank of England, outlines the same story in very telling fashion. “We have to remember,” he writes, “that the value—that is to say, the purchasing power—of money, and consequently, the price of goods, can be and has been varied intentionally and deliberately, not by the will or action of the state, but by those individuals who themselves manage and control the money—though they constantly aver that they act for, and on behalf of, the community. We returned to the Gold Standard in 1925 for the benefit of the City of London, and so ruined our basic industries. It does not follow that what is best for the City of London is best for the country. In consequence of past policy, a farmer who borrowed from his Bank, say, in 1920, the money-equivalent of 100 sacks of wheat, might be obliged to sell 200 sacks of wheat a few years afterwards in order to repay that same loan, simply because a pound became twice as valuable.”

The evidence of Mr. Montagu Norman before the Macmillan Committee in 1930 is very evasive and even contradictory in its evasiveness, yet there are some illuminating admissions with regard to the planning of deflations. Here are some extracts as given in Mr. John Hargrave’s book, Professor Skinner alias Montagu Norman, pp. 150–161, with some of Mr. Hargrave’s comments: “Lord Macmillan (the Chairman) put a very awkward question: ‘It is, of course, the case that the volume of credit in the country is, to a very large extent, in your hands, is it not?’

Mr. Norman—‘Yes, I think it is!… .’

Chairman—‘And again, speaking in the broadest terms, is it your view that the consequences of that internal restriction of credit, unfortunate as they may appear to be, are outweighed by the advantages of the maintenance of the international position?’

Mr. Norman—‘Yes, there is very large benefit.’

“That is to say: ‘There is very large benefit to British industry in having to suffer the consequences of internal restrictions of credit, ‘unfortunate as they may appear to be.’ And that is not nonsense? It is sheer nonsense, following logically from the basic philosophy of poverty-is-good-for-you. It is dangerous nonsense, because it leads inevitably to war.…”

Mr. R. McKenna—‘You have restricted the quantity of credit by selling securities on balance in the first two months of this year.… Is that so?’

Mr. Norman—‘I am not sure.’

Mr. McKenna—‘You do not remember if you restricted credit?’ Mr. Norman—‘I am not aware that credit was restricted.’

Mr. McKenna—‘I have the figures.…Between February of last year and February of this year you sold many million of securities?’[24]

Mr. Norman—‘Oh, yes.’

Mr. McKenna—‘And you reduced credit?’

Mr. Norman—‘Yes.’

“Yet a moment before he said: ‘I am not aware that credit was restricted.’….

Mr. Keynes—‘If the amount of assets held by the Bank of England were reduced by £5,000,000, by how much would that reduce bank credit throughout the country?’

Mr. Norman—‘I think your neighbor would tell you that best.’… The neighbor was Mr. McKenna.

Mr. McKenna—‘About £50,000,000—ten times the amount?’

Mr. Norman—‘I do not know that that is necessarily so.’

Mr, Keynes—‘You do not know?’

Mr. Norman—‘Ten to one is an arbitrary reckoning based on the bankers’ normal percentage of cash.’

Mr. Keynes—‘Would the curtailment of credit by £50,000,000 have no effect of any importance on industry?’

Mr. Norman—‘I do not think it would…unless of course it had to be continued over an extended period.’

“Well, as it happened, it has been continued over an ‘extended period.’”

As many of my readers may have little knowledge of the planned character of inflations and deflations, another instance from recent history may not be superfluous. On page 60 of Money Creators, Miss Coogan writes: “A secret bankers’ meeting was held on May 18, 1920, in Washington, D.C. In the name and style of The Orderly Deflation Committee of the American Bankers’ Association, a secret resolution was passed declaring for the contraction of money and credits. The published proceedings of this secret bank meeting show that it was held in the name and style of the Federal Reserve Board, the Federal Advisory Council and the Class ‘A’ Directors of the Federal Reserve Banks. The action prescribed was taken on a resolution assuming to be presented by the American Bankers’ Association. The names of all the men present at that meeting, and the statements made by them, can be obtained by anyone who will take the trouble to write to the Superintendent of Documents, Washington, D. C., and request Document No. 310 of the 67th Congress, 4th Session. Those who attended were warned to hold the proceedings in sacred secrecy.…Hon. Finly H. Gray described the meeting: ‘The manipulating financiers and bankers, the masterminds of frenzied finance…were not there,…but were, directing…their catspaws from afar.…Mr. John Skelton Williams, Comptroller of the Currency, when this contraction of money was proposed, explained his efforts to stop the resolution.…Don’t you know, he said, that it is going to ruin lots of farmers, and they cold-bloodedly replied to him: they ought to be ruined—they are getting so prosperous that they will not work.’”[25]

These examples are sufficient to make one realize the absurdity of the reason for monetary depressions advanced by Professor Jevons, whose book, Money and the Mechanism of Exchange, is still a standard work on the subject. Professor Jevons “was convinced, with the rest of the professional economic apologists, that no possible explanation for these depressions could be found within the monetary system itself, but was so hard put to it to account for them otherwise that he was driven to seek an explanation in the periodic recurrence of sunspots.”[26]

This is a sample of the teaching which has permitted the perpetration of terrible crimes against society to go unhindered and unsuspected.

When prices rise during the boom period, “public speakers,” writes Mr. D. W. Maxwell, “bleat mournfully of the ‘rise in the cost of living’ and of ‘taking the price-level into consideration’ as if a rise of prices were like an earthquake or a typhoon—extremely unpleasant but nobody’s fault. A rise of prices is not an ‘act of God’; the brain and hand of man are the guiding forces.”[27]

international trade

and the gold standard

From what has just been said about the organization of national finance under the gold standard, it can be easily seen that the system will not work satisfactorily in the realm of international trade. It inevitably leads to a state of affairs where every country wants to export goods in order to have a favorable balance of trade and where no country wishes to import. As, however, the exports of one nation are the imports of another, this leads to a deadlock. Sir Reginald Rowe sets forth the reason for this absurd situation briefly and clearly: “If we consider the International Gold Standard system, we shall see that it did not ensure an exchange of goods and services between nations to their mutual advantage but, on the contrary, ensured that nations should export their real wealth, that is, goods and services, and obtain in return an admission of unpayable debt; the debt was supposed to be payable in gold and was called a ‘favorable’ balance, but if gold was, in fact, paid, the loss caused internal disaster to the country which paid it. Herein lies the reason, on the international side, why nations are so anxious to export and not import, although there is another internal reason connected with employment and the distribution of internal purchasing power through wages; the latter is also a monetary problem.…This country (England) for nearly eighty years had an annual so-called active ‘favorable’ balance of approximately £100,000,000. This meant that after it had paid all its bills to the world for all the imports and services it required, it still had £100,000,000’s worth of foreign currencies owing to it.

“Let us suppose, for the sake of simplicity, that the Argentine owed England annually the whole of this amount. England was then in a position to say to the Argentine: ‘We have bought and paid for all the meat and wheat we required from you during the last accounting period, and after doing so we still have £100,000,000’s worth of pesos for which we have no use. We can, if we like, offer them for sale on the foreign exchange. If we do, some English exchange broker will give us pounds for them, but clearly as there is no immediate demand by Englishmen for them, no Englishman will give us their normal exchange value. He will expect to get more of them for his pounds than the par value. In other words, if we offer these pesos for sale it will knock down your exchange rate. When it falls to the point where the loss in exchange would be greater than the loss represented by having to pay freight and insurance on the transport of physical gold, we shall cease selling pesos and go to the Central Bank of the Argentine and buy bars of gold; we shall ship them physically to England and sell them to the Bank of England and so get our pounds that way. When, however, the Central Bank of the Argentine loses gold to us, it will be obliged to take out of circulation paper pesos to a corresponding value. This will mean that the commercial banks will find themselves with less cash and, in order to maintain the same relationship of their loans to their cash, will be obliged to call in loans. This will mean that Argentine producers, manufacturers and merchants, will be obliged to throw their stocks on an unwilling market in order to raise the money to repay their bank loans. The throwing of these stocks on to the market will have the effect of knocking down prices. It will then be necessary for you to try to reduce wages as with lower prices you will not be able to afford to pay the same rate of wages as before. This will lead to strikes and, in any case, will destroy the internal purchasing power of the Argentine market.’

“The Argentine would reply, ‘But this is terrible,’ to which England was in a position to answer, ‘Yes, devastating, and there is only one way out of the difficulty and that is that you borrow the £100,000,000’s worth of pesos at interest so as to take them out of harm’s way. There will only then be due from you the annual interest. Next year, however, there will probably be another £100,000,000 which you will similarly have to borrow’, plus the interest on this year’s £100,000,000.’ In 141 years at 5% compound interest each £100,000,000 would double itself. It will thus be seen that, under the system, the Argentine was given the choice of getting hopelessly into debt to England or of losing gold with devastating internal effects.”[28]

The kernel of the difficulty of international trade under the gold standard system is that when a country’s imports exceed its exports, the banks are liable to be asked for gold to cover the deficit. The reason is that the exchange will go against the country whose exports are down. At a certain point it will come to be more advantageous for those who have to pay debts in the other country to buy gold, the price of which is fixed, and ship it to the other country to buy the exchange-medium of that country. The export of gold will prevent the further fall of the exchange. For example, at one time $4.86 bought one pound in the foreign exchange market, for each was worth the same amount of gold. If English exports to the U.S.A. came to exceed greatly English imports from the same country, there would be a great demand for pounds sterling and the cost of the pound in terms of dollars would gradually rise. When it reached $4.90, the difference between $4.86 and $4.90 would cover the cost of freight, insurance and loss of interest on gold. When gold could thus be bought and shipped, no one would pay more than $4.90 for a pound and the exchange would remain stable. Gold would be shipped in the opposite direction if the pound fell to about $4.849.[29]

But the “drain of gold” as it is called, will have a disastrous effect on the exporting country. “Since International Bankers, like Home Bankers, are lending promises-to-pay ten times the quantity of money which they actually possess, it is obvious that strict limits are set to the export of gold.… In fact the International Bankers protect themselves by refusing to lend and trying to call up as many as possible of their existing loans—just as, in similar circumstances, the Home Bankers do.”[30] The results are that prices fall and the country tries to sell goods at a loss, while taking steps to recapture export trade by cutting down wages and dismissing workmen. Low wages mean the possibility of big exports. This means a lowering of the standard of living, especially of the wage-earners. “The people whom International Finance is playing off against each other are not merely the merchants and industrialists of the world. The wage-earners in every country are being pitted against the wage-earners in every other country. The attack on wages is everlasting and it is conducted by means of the wage-earners themselves who have nothing to hope for unless they can produce cheaply, that is to say, unless they will accept lower wages than all their competitors.…The men, naturally, blame their masters; the masters blame their men. Both are helpless in the hands of the International Bankers since it is they who control the quantity of money in their markets.… If wages are not cut, half the businesses will be bankrupt. And when wages have been cut the whole hideous cycle will begin once more. Is it any wonder that, in such circumstances, Communism and Socialism, both of them will-o’-the-wisps, flourish? Is it any wonder that class is set against class? Master against men? Nation against nation? Nobody suspects the true enemy.[31]

The whole tendency of the system, then, is to lower the standard of living in any country to that of any other country with a lower standard of living, since a country with a lower standard of living or low wages will be able to export. It is true that the gold standard keeps the value of the money of any country stable in terms of foreign currencies, but this is only another way of saying that it tends to prevent wages in any country from remaining high when wages anywhere else fall. The net result is a dreadful struggle for the necessaries of life in the midst of potential sufficiency, the struggle being made far more tragic by gambling in the different currencies and speculation on the stock-exchanges of the world.[32]

A striking example of gambling in currencies is given by Mr. Arthur Kitson in The Banker’s Conspiracy. He writes: “Some years ago The Bankers’ Magazine gave a startling example of the depreciation in the prices of 325 of our representative investments caused by the withdrawal of £11,000,000 in gold from the Bank of England by a group of American financiers. The transfer of this amount caused a fall of prices equivalent to £115,000,000! The absorption of the same gold caused a corresponding advance in the prices of certain American securities. By first selling English securities and buying American, they had merely to transfer so much gold and afterwards reverse the transactions by buying and selling respectively, and the game was won! As a well-known financial writer stated at the time: ‘These speculators were playing upon two tables at the same time—one in London and the other in New York—with the certainty of winning on both.’”[33]

Let us now examine a little more profoundly the reason for the urge to export goods, which every country experiences, in spite of the fact that many under-nourished and ill-clad people in almost every country lack the very goods that are being exported or the goods into which they could be converted. “Plenty of wool and no markets,” announced a Dublin daily paper some time ago. “Plenty of poor and no blankets,” was the very apposite comment of the humorous journal, Dublin Opinion.

One reason of the urge to export is to be found in the fact that 98% of all the money in existence comes into being with a demand for interest at 5% attached to it. We have already seen that in 1934 bank-created money in Great Britain was over 98% while state-created money was less than 2%. Now, no more money can come out of the system than is put into it. If a certain proportion of businesses manage to pay back both principal and interest of their loans, the possibility or actuality of bankruptcy is automatically intensified for the whole of the remainder.”[34] The payment of interest on money brought into existence as a debt involves the payment of more than is issued. This cannot be done without further borrowing, so the process means steady progression into debt for the society as a whole. It necessarily means also that, in every business cycle, a certain amount of the goods produced in that cycle remains unpurchased. This unpurchased surplus is increased by the fact that certain individuals in the society save up and reinvest their savings. Thus, as industry develops thanks to more and more loans, there is an ever-increasing surplus remaining unpurchased within the area of the society, and there is an ever-increasing demand for foreign markets. Debts, however, increase much faster than production, and production increases far more rapidly than distribution—so the urge to send goods abroad is accompanied by a proportionately increasing inability on the part of the inhabitants of the home-country to profit by the developing production. “The inevitable result of a financial system based on usury,” writes Mr. Jeffrey Mark, “is the progressive accumulation of debt and a complementary decrease in the ratio between consumption and production. Between 1922 and 1929, for instance, debt-claims in the United States increased 76%, against an increase in manufactured output of only 33%, and the distribution of consumer goods, only 4%.”[35] The standard of living was raised but not at a rate commensurate with the increase in production.

Accordingly, the inevitable condition of foreign trade under the gold standard system is that every industrially developed nation must strive to export more than it imports. “If some nations have ‘favorable’ balances (of payments), other nations must have unfavorable ones. International trade has therefore degenerated into financial war, instead of being an exchange of goods and services to the mutual advantage of both parties” (A Twentieth Century Economic System, p. 21). Historically, Holland in the 17th century, Great Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries and Great Britain and America in the 20th century saw the development of those “money-lending cycles which automatically created the necessity, as opposed to the desire for industrial expansion, the exploited industrially undeveloped countries being also necessarily their victims. Once the money-lenders have initiated the first cycle, the process must go on.…

“The historical development of the British Empire has been essentially a successful attempt to create an increasing ‘favorable’ balance of trade abroad so as to force her possessions, particularly India, to disgorge their gold in payment. This gold was, of course, used by the banking system….to expand the currency by the creation of debt, thereby engendering bigger surpluses which were used to force still larger quantities of gold out of the East.…When it was discovered that this direct acquisition of gold by foreign ‘trade’ was not proceeding fast enough for the money machine, the era of foreign ‘investment’ began. This process…. is essentially either, (a) the re-investment in the debtor country of debts due to the creditor country owing to the ‘favorable’ balance of trade of the latter; or (b) the export of goods on new credits.…The true purpose of an economic system—which should be the complete distribution of home production, plus the complementary and equal exchange of goods with foreign countries—thus becomes entirely incidental to the financial process, which undoubtedly is the creation of internal debt, through necessary currency expansion, and the creation of external debt, through foreign ‘trade’ and foreign ‘investment.’”[36] The whole aim of the financial system should be to facilitate the production and distribution of the goods needed for the development of the human personality of members of families, but instead of this, production and, in a proportionately far less degree, distribution, are tolerated only in so far as they will facilitate payment of interest on a previously created debt. Interest on loans is the ultimate end of the financial system, not the development of hutnan personality.

the urge to war and destruction

It is unnecessary to dwell at length on the way the system we have described impels towards war. As practically every nation is suffering from “over-production” and is trying to get rid of a “surplus,” which its own impoverished thousands cannot purchase, the success of one nation in exporting means the intensification of the difficulties of another. Hitherto what was termed “industrial progress,” along the lines indicated, could be maintained by the exploitation of “backward” nations. But now the once “backward” nations have themselves a “surplus” to export.
A terrible struggle for control of the remaining partially developed countries and a state of tension, which the armament manufacturers view with growing gratification because of their particular “surplus stocks,” are inevitable. The immense profits made by armament manufacturers in the United States during the Great War (1914–1918) are a strong temptation for them to desire war, not peace. For example, during the four years of peace preceding that war, the United States Steel Corporation made on an average 105,000,000 dollars annually. During the four war years the annual profits of the same corporation were 239,000,000 dollars. In those circumstances, it is difficult to conceive of anyone financially interested in United States Steel acting vigorously in the interests of peace.[37]

It is possible, however, for there is another side to the picture, which is revealed to us by Mr. Vincent C. Vickers in Economic Tribulation. Even a mighty armament firm like Vickers-Armstrong may be overwhelmed by the burden of debt. “With every market short of purchasing power,” writes Mr. Vickers, “the financial system set the whole world gambling on its future capacity to produce more and sell more and at the same time pay off its debts; and it is mainly the abnormal efforts of almost every nation to pay off or even to pay interest on, its impossible debts, which have resulted in the present international confusion where each nation seeks to exchange its own produce for the money of other nations, but not for the produce. For money debts cannot be repaid by produce unless and until that produce has been exchanged for money; production is of no value to finance except in so far as it may be converted into money; and the money industry, under the existing system, almost wholly depends for its prosperity upon the indebtedness of others. What finance has failed to perceive is that there is a limit to the profitable increase of this indebtedness. Similarly, Vickers, Limited, and, as the Bank of England knows only too well, Armstrong Whitworth and Co., and their respective shareholders, were half ruined by the war of 1914–1918 and its natural repercussions. Those who regard Vickers Armstrong as war-profiteers either possess superficial intellects or have no knowledge of the proven facts; and I, who write, have suffered, and I know.”[38]

War means wholesale, indiscriminate destruction, but peace, too, under the present monetary system means wholesale, systematic destruction. Why is this? Because thus the prices of the remaining stocks will be raised, it is hoped, and the producers will he enabled to meet some of the interest-claims on their debts. We have seen that production and distribution of real wealth are tolerated in so far as they facilitate the payment of interest on debts. Production and distribution which threaten to interfere with such payment cannot be allowed. Tariffs and quotas and the formation of Boards for Planned Economy and Orderly Marketing are employed, as well as systematic destruction, to diminish and check production. Distribution, already terribly ineffectual, of course, suffers proportionately.[39] The tariffs, quotas and Boards are very effective in reducing production and hampering distribution, but destruction is more spectacular, so it attracts more attention. “In July, 1933, at Liverpool, thousands of cases of oranges were dumped into the sea, as it would have been ‘a loss to land them.’ Up to April 30, 1932, 5,600,722 bags of coffee had been purchased for destruction by the National Coffee Council of Brazil. Some eight months later, the National Coffee Council announced plans… for the stabilization of coffee prices, including the destruction of 12,000,000 bags in the next twelve months and the placing of an additional tax of five shillings a bag on coffee exports from the country. The decision to destroy the 12,000,000 bags was reported as unanimous by the New York Times of December 7, 1932.…In the middle of July, 1933, Mr. Wallace, the Secretary for Agriculture in the United States, announced the success of the scheme to take land out of cultivation) by the statement that 10,000,000 acres under cotton had been left to waste, the potential crop being thereby reduced by 3,500,000 bales. The bonuses to farmers for this strange attempt to relieve the lot of a half-starved world involved a sum of approximately 100,000,000 dollars.

“At the same time, a long drought, heat and the ravages of grasshoppers united in causing severe damage to the American wheat crop, so that, according to the London Daily Mail for 28th June, 1933, nature is helping President Roosevelt to restrict production, thereby ‘paving the way to world recovery.’ The news of this triple disaster from drought, blight, and grasshoppers was received with acclamation by farmers, salesmen, press, and public in the Chicago Wheat Pit, and it is clear that the universal obsession with regard to money and debt has driven the world mad, when there is “more joy over one crop that fails than over ninety-nine bounteous harvests.’”[40]

Similar information about the same points was given in an article in the Catholic Herald, which stated that “a regular feature of our capitalist-ridden economy was the destruction of the fruits of the earth as a legitimate method of maintaining price-levels at a profitable height. Thus, for this reason, in August, 1933, between England and Spain, 1,500,000 oranges were thrown into the sea deliberately. Even more disgraceful has been the pouring into the river Clyde of gallons of rich milk obtained from Irish cows imported and landed at Glasgow. And, of course, the burning of coffee in Brazil is quite well-known, although perhaps it is not generally realised on what a gigantic scale this has been done. Between 1931 and 1936 about 40,000,000 bags have been destroyed…enough to supply the whole world for nearly a year and a half.”

This destruction is forced upon producers in the endeavor to raise the price of the remainder of their stocks, so that they may make an attempt to pay back a portion of their loans with interest. But the operation of destruction is itself costly. The government must either procure the sum by taxation or borrow it from the banks and then pay it back—with interest—from taxation. In either case the burden upon the producers and consumers is increased. “So that, either way,” writes Mr. Mark, “in order to exercise a compulsory privilege to destroy goods which it has itself produced, which it desperately needs, but which it cannot buy because of an existing intolerable debt burden, the community must add to that debt.”[41]

Since there seemed to be no immediate possibility of getting the financiers in control to reconsider the very foundations of the system which was driving the government of the richest country in the world to pay people not to produce, while many were suffering from dire want, one man at least drew the logical conclusion. The U.S.A. Financial Chronicle for August 18th, 1934, published the following letter to the Editor:

“Sir, —A friend of mine in New England has a neighbor who has received a check for 1,000 dollars this year for not raising hogs. So my friend now wants to go into the business himself, he not being very prosperous just now. He says, in fact, that the idea of not raising hogs appeals to him very strongly. Of course, he will need a hired man, and that is where I come in.…

“.…The friend who got the 1,000 dollars got it for not raising 500 hogs. Now we figure we might easily not raise 1,500 or 2,000 hogs, so you see the possible profits are only limited by the number of hogs we do not raise. The other fellow had been raising hogs for forty years and never made more than 400 dollars in any one year. Kind of pathetic, isn’t it, to think how he wasted his life raising hogs when he could have made so much more by not raising them?

“I will thank you for any advice you may offer.

Yours very truly,

Harold Trurman.”[42]

The writer of the above letter had evidently grasped the absurdity of a financial system by which it is more advantageous to pay men a dole for doing nothing than to pay them wages to produce real wealth.

Though it is an obvious fact that it is the defective functioning of the financial system which hampers the production and mutual exchange of all the goods and services available, yet a number of financial experts, as well as many politicians and industrialists speak of over-production, while never mentioning under consumption, through lack of purchasing power.[43] The paradoxes of over-production such as, hunger in Great Britain while many thousands of tons of wheat lie unsold in the Dominions and Dominion farmers lack many things, machinery, etc., which could be supplied by the unemployed of Great Britain, ships lying idle meantime for lack of freights, are attributed by them to defective arrangements on the part of farmers and manufacturers, and other purely industrial causes. They certainly cannot attribute those paradoxes to lack of transport facilities, or to insufficient development of the arts of advertising and salesmanship. These are more than ample for the work of distribution.[44] Yet ignoring the question of monetary reform, they accept the proposals of the moneyed interests—restriction of production and rationalization of industry.

A brief quotation from G. K. Chesterton will fittingly bring this chapter to a close. Those gallant men,” he writes, “who stormed the gates of the sunset to set up the golden banners of Spain, were fortunately unaware that they were fixing on a peak in Darien the enigmatic ensign that we call the Gold Standard.”[45]

[1]The term ‘‘exchange-medium’’ is perhaps better, as it recalls the essential function of money. It also brings home better the reason of the demand for stability in the purchasing power of money. Stability is a property or necessary attribute of an exchange-medium. Cf. Chapter III, p. 60.

[2]Money Creators, p. 16. For an excellent summary of the historical development of banking, see Chapter I of Prof. O’Rahilly’s book, Money.

[3]The Root of All Evil, by Sir Reginald Rowe, p. 13.

[4]Money, by Prof. O’Rahilly, pp. 8, 9.

[5]The Modem Idolatry, by Jeffrey Mark, pp. 66, 67.

[6]The Modern Idolatry, Being an Analysis of Usury, by Jeffrey Mark, pp. 55, 56. The proportion of money in Great Britain that is not bank-created is really less than 2% according to Mr. Reginald McKenna, quoted by Mr. Mark on p. 56.

“The amount of bank-created money increased from nothing at all in 1694, the date of the establishment of the Bank of England, to about £2,300,000,000 in 1920. Although the bulk of the expansion took place in the war years, that increase is at the average rate of well over £800,000 per month for 226 years!… For over two hundred years, as production has expanded, so have various people usurped to an ever greater extent the right of issuing money (claims for goods and services). As a consequence, the nation has never been able to reap the full benefit of its work.…The creation of money has always outstripped the production of commodities.…The system does not always mean prosperity for all the money-creators.…On the other hand, the appalling system of allowing people to issue money whenever it suits them to do so, regardless of whether it is in the interests of the nation as a whole, brings poverty without fail to the bulk of the population” (The Principle Cause of Unemployment, by D. W. Maxwell, pp. 41, 42. Published by Williams & Norgate, Ltd., London).

Instead of the, expression “own,” used in the above quotation from Mr. Jeffrey Mark, “controls” or “administers” would be more accurate. The banks control the issue of claims against the community for goods and services. On the word “own,” cf. Money, by Professor O’Rahilly, pp. 70–148, 358.

[7]The Principal Cause of Unemployment, by D. W. Maxwell, p. 117.

[8]Money, pp. 69, 70. Cf. quotation from the same work in Chapter XXI, p. 528.

“The Bank Charter Act of Sir Robert Peel of 1844 nominally fixed the monetary system in this country up to the War.… It legislated to limit and ultimately to extinguish the issue of bank-notes in England except by the Bank of England, limiting the latter’s issue to fourteen million above the gold reserve (the so-called fiduciary issue). This effectively checked the expansion of the note currency, and the upshot was that the check, at first secretly, took the place of the note as a means of creating new money, and soon became the overwhelmingly preponderating form of the credit medium of exchange.…The borrower without money was allowed to draw checks just as if he had money and to create an overdraft at the bank. The bank’s balance-sheet was falsified so that it still balanced. For, on the one side, could be credited to the individual the limiting sum to which he was authorised to overdraw, and, on the other side, the same sum as owing as a debt of the individual to the bank” (The Role of Money, by Prof. Soddy, pp. 60, 61).

[9]This is the line taken by the Irish correspondent of the English paper, The Sunday Times, 9th Oct., 1938, accompanying the defense with sneering references to the Encyclical Letter, Quadragesima Anno.

[10]The author points out in a note that “these generalizations are true, only if the totality of bank loans is considered to include (as it should do) the discounting of bills and the purchase of investments by the banks. But as both of these processes generate the same, mutual relationship between banks and the public, the implication in the statement is true.”

In an excellent article in the Standard (Dublin), Mr. J. L. Benvenish observes: “It is sometimes said that every advance creates a deposit, but this is not quite true. An advance to an individual customer by one particular bank may cause the extinction of another person’s overdraft at that person’s bank and so keep the total of all the advances the same, but total advances must in the normal way produce an increase in total deposits.”

[11]The Modern Idolatry, Being an Analysis of Usury, by Jeffrey Mark, pp. 88–91. Ireland is within the financial orbit of the Bank of England. Prof. O’Rahilly writes in Money (p. 230): “He (Mr. Colbert) goes on to say: ‘Actually the Bank of England has as much control over the volume of banking credit in this country (Ireland) as it has over the weather.’ I do not agree with this. Irish banks follow the lead of the Bank of England as regards the bank-rate, and this influences our volume of credit. It is also strongly affected by the policy of deflation or expansion pursued by the Bank of England, for this greatly changes the conditions of actual and would-be borrowers in Eire and the willingness of our banks to give credit-facilities.”

[12]Money, by Professor O’Rahilly, p. 93.

[13]Professor O’Rahilly, in Money, pp. 102–112, quotes a great number of extracts from ‘orthodox’ bankers and economists, that is, from writers in favor of the existing system of banking, to show that the banks do create exchange-medium. Of these, two may be cited as typical of the others. The first is from the Report of the Macmillan Committee on Finance and Industry, issued in 1931: “It is not unnatural to think of the deposits of a bank as being created by the public through the deposit of cash, representing either savings or amounts which are not for the time being required to meet expenditure. But the bulk of the deposits arise out of the action of the banks themselves; for by granting loans, allowing money to be drawn on overdraft, or purchasing securities, a bank creates a credit in its books, which is the equivalent of a deposit.”

The second is from the article on Banking and Credit in the Encyclopedia Britannica, by R. J. Hawtrey, Secretary to the British Treasury. He writes as follows: “When a bank lends by granting an advance or discounting a bill…. two debts are created: the trader who borrows and becomes indebted to the bank at a future date, and the bank which becomes immediately indebted to the trader. The bank’s debt is a means of payment; it is credit-money. It is a clear addition to the amount of means of payment in the community. The bank does not lend money.”

[14]A loan of genuine, already existing money.

[15]The Role of Money, by Prof. Soddy, p. 62 (1934).

[16]“The quantity of money in existence was kept in the perpetual state of ebb and flow, known as the Trade Cycle, by making it convertible with gold. The, details of this ‘beautifully working automatic regulation’ form the stock-in-trade of all pre-war conventional money-writers and need not detain us. The quantity of money was regulated by means of the gold standard. The latter meant that the value of the money unit in a large number of countries was kept equal to that of a certain weight of gold by making the money, in theory, always exchangeable with gold. In practice, it meant the growth of a number of new devilries having for their object the frustration of every attempt to exchange it for gold, so soon as that exchange began to occur’’ (The Role of Money, Prof. Soddy. P. 65). There was only enough gold for a mere fraction of the claims for gold brought into existence by the check-book system, so loss of gold meant a danger of insolvency.

[17]Cf. The Principal Cause of Unemployment, by D. W. Maxwell, p. 54.

[18]Promise to Pay, by R. McNair Wilson, p. 32 (George Boutledge & Sons, Ltd.).

[19]Op. cit., p. 28.

[20]Op. cit., p. 33.

[21]The phrases in brackets in the letter are comments inserted by Mr. Lindbergh. Mr. Jeffrey Mark quotes the letter in full in his book, The Modern Idolatry, pp. 240–241, and adds that Mr. Arthur Kitson, who was still alive at the time Mr. Mark’s book was written (1934), had personally assured him that the letter was still in his (Kitson’s) possession.

In his evidence before the Macmillan Committee on Finance and Industry, at London, May 15, 1930, Mr. Kitson said that “within a few weeks of the issue of this letter, we (in the U.S.A.) had the most terrible panic that had been known up to that date, and several millions of people were thrown out of employment. Thousands of merchants and manufacturers were made bankrupt, and we had a period of industrial depression far worse than we are having here (in England) now.”

[22]Money Creators, pp. 230–233

[23]Op. cit., pp. 2–5

[24]“But the Bank (of England) also holds at command the power directly to increase or decrease the amount of purchasing media in the country by open market operations. If the Bank purchases securities in the market the transaction is settled by crediting the drawing account of the broker or other party through whom they are purchased.

This eventually leads to an increase in the balances of the joint-stock banks at the Bank of England.…The deposits of the joint-stock banks at the Bank are the equivalent of cash and the banks thus find themselves with more than their usual proportion of cash to deposits and are in a position to grant further loans to their customers or otherwise to create additional credit. Since the banks as a whole maintain a cash proportion to deposits of from 10% to 11% they are in fact able to increase their deposits by some ten times the cash created by the Bank of England. By the opposite process, a sale of securities by the Bank of England, or the calling in of a loan, will reduce the cash of the joint-stock banks and entail a reduction of their deposits. The Bank of England is thus in a position…to exercise almost complete control over the amount of bankers’ cash in the country and thus…over the total volume of deposits within such limits as are set by the existence of the international gold standard” (Official Report of the Macmillan Committee on Finance and Industry, June, 1931, par. 71).

Cf. The Principal Cause of Unemployment, by D. W. Maxwell, p. 54, and also Promise to Pay, by R. McNair Wilson, p. 146.

[25]Cf. also The Truth About the Slump, by A. N. Field, pp. 103–104.

[26]The Modern Idolatry, by Jeffrey Mark, p. 16. On pages 340–342 of Money and the Mechanism of Exchange, Professor Jevons writes: “From all the above considerations it follows that the only method of regulating the amount of the currency is to leave it perfect freedom to regulate itself.…The amount of money itself can be no more regulated than the amounts of corn, iron, cotton, or other common commodities produced and consumed by a people.…The manner of issuing this paper currency should be strictly regulated in one sense; the paper circulation should be made to increase and diminish with the amount of gold deposited in exchange for it. At the same time, no thought need be taken about the amount so issued. The purpose of the strict regulation is not to govern the amount, but to leave that amount to vary according to the natural laws of supply and demand. In my opinion, it is the issue of paper representative notes accepted in the place of coin, which constitutes an arbitrary interference with the natural laws governing the variations of a purely metallic currency.…”

[27]The Principal Cause of Unemployment, p. 33.

[28]The Root of All Evil, by Sir Reginald Rowe, pp. 177–179. And the loans made by England, to enable the Argentine and the other countries to keep on, have resulted in gains for the financiers, but in losses for ordinary people: “In the last eighty years this country (England) has lent something like £8,000,000,000 to its colonies and other countries. Of that enormous sum a very large proportion has been totally lost, or virtually lost in the form of ‘foreign credits.’ It has been estimated that the total present value of these investments is less than £3,000,000,000; in other words, more than half the money has been lost. ‘The loss has been divided between countless British investors…The financier does not float a loan ‘for keeps.’ His job is to pass it on to the public. He gets out of the risky stuff as soon as he profitably can, and floats another.” Op. cit., p. 30.

[29]Cf. An Outline of Money, by Geoffrey Crowther, p. 317.

[30]Promise to Pay, by R. McNair Wilson, p. 98.

[31]Op. cit., pp. 101–103.

[32]In several places in his book, The Principal Cause of Unemployment, notably on pp. 34 and 79, Mr. D. W. Maxwell treats of the disastrous effects of speculation, due to the possibility of the private creation of money through loans or deposits. On p. 79, he writes: “When it is no longer possible to put privately created money into circulation, most of the gambling which takes place in industrial and other shares, and even in the necessities of life (wheat, wool, cotton, etc.) will cease. Speculators will not then be able to raise prices for the whole population by increasing the quantity of money and reducing the quantity of goods in the market.”

[33]Op. cit., p 80.

[34]The Modern Idolatry, by Jeffrey Mark, p. 94. With reference to what is treated of in these few paragraphs, pages 94–164 of Mr. Mark’s book are particularly recommended.

[35]The Modern Idolatry, p. 110. On page 52, he quotes the remark of Mr. Bassett Jones, that production increases as the third power of time, and debt as the fourth power of time.

[36]The Modern Idolatry, by Jeffrey Mark, pp. 136–138.

[37]The figures set down in books, indicating the profits made by firms during the Great War (1914–1918), vary.

[38]Op. cit., pp. 68, 69.

[39]“In Great Britain under the rules and regulations imposed via the various Marketing Boards, producers were heavily fined for producing too much. Right up to the declaration of a state of war against Germany in September, 1939, British potato-growers, for example, were being fined if they grew potatoes that were ‘too big’.…’Some farmers (in U.S.A.) are burning wheat in their fields in order to avoid the expense of harvesting, and over thousands of square miles no attempt will be made to plant a crop for next year, the land being allowed to be idle.…They blame the low price on the policy of the Federal Farm Board, which bought more than 200,000,000 bushels and is still holding them’ (Manchester Guardian, August 7, 1931). That was one of the ways in which the Great Slump hit the U.S.A. farmers. In both hemispheres, during these years, wheat was burned, fish thrown back into the sea, cotton ploughed back, coffee ‘drowned’ or burned, fruit allowed to rot on the trees, cattle slaughtered and burnt, textile machinery broken up, potato crops ploughed in again, milk poured down the drains.…There was (if you please) ‘overproduction’ while millions of human beings were in a state of semi-starvation” (Professor Skinner alias Montagu Norman, by John Hargrave, pp. 217, 181).

[40]The Modern Idolatry, by Jeffrey Mark, pp. 30–32.

[41]In The Modern Idolatry, p.32. With regard to the prevalence of want and insufficiency in the midst of potential plenty in U.S.A. and England, cf. op. cit., pp. 19–40

[42]Professor Skinner alias Montague Norman, by John Hargrave, pp, 216, 217.

[43]“Unfortunately, a finance-controlled press throughout the world persists in misrepresenting the facts, now as always, while the official manifestoes issued by the banking profession, either ignore the ‘possibility’ of a financial cause for the ‘depression,’ or else flatly deny it” (The Modern Idolatry, by Mr. Jeffrey Mark, p. 38.)

“Perhaps some reader may here object: ‘How can this conspiracy of silence (in the press) be true, if the whole case against the present system is as clear as you make out?…It is hard to believe that so many people could be so easily taken in! The initial question suggests that it is impossible to fool not only ‘all the people all the time,’ but a majority for a considerable time. But is not this temporary fooling glaringly evident in the world today?… It is obviously true that people’s opinions are largely fashioned by the press; and the press, like most of us, is under present conditions, largely ruled by the money-power.…The money-power signifies those who are in chief control of our present monetary system, the financial leaders who direct its major operations… who control the machine by directing the movements of credit; and this gives them an immense power the rest of us” (The Root of All Evil, by Sir Reginald Rowe, pp. 101, 106).

[44]The over-development of advertising is due to the driving force of debt and the insufficiency of purchasing-power in each economic cycle.

[45]Chaucer, p. 244.

Chapter XIX

The Economic Principles of St.Thomas Aquinas and the Functioning of
the Gold Standard

We have seen the principles of St. Thomas concerning politics and economics. Let us apply them to the functioning of the Gold Standard Monetary System, beginning with his economic principles.

A. Usury or the Consideration of the Gold Standard from the point of view of Efficient Causality.[1]

In the examination of this question, we must keep well before our minds the text of Pope Leo XIII in the Encyclical Letter, Rerum Novarum (1891), where he insists upon the existence of usury in our day, though under a different guise from that of ancient times. After having insisted that the abolition of the guilds and the free rein given to unbridled competition had opened the way to the subjection of the laboring poor to a small number of wealthy men, he adds: “The evil has been increased by rapacious usury, which, though more than once condemned by the Church, is, nevertheless, under a different guise, but with like injustice, still practiced by covetous and grasping men.”[2] He then goes on to point out that the evil in question, namely, the growth of a vast propertyless proletariat in subjection to a few rich men, has been still further augmented by the uprise of powerful monopolies controlling enterprises and raw materials. Usury, therefore, according to Pope Leo XIII, not only exists in our times, but it has played an enormous part in depriving the masses of property and concentrating it in the hands of a few.[3]

Many writers hold with Father Lamarche, O.P., that “modern lending is so constituted that always and everywhere it is accompanied by extrinsic titles justifying interest.”[4] Accordingly, they maintain that usury, except in the sense of exorbitant interest, does not exist, because extrinsic titles justifying a certain rate of interest are always present. For these writers, however, money, as a fungible thing, has an existence independent of the lender and the borrower.[5] Other writers point out that four of the extrinsic titles[6] properly apply only where the lender of money gives up already existing money created independently of him, which by his industry he has succeeded in acquiring. Professor Soddy states this in his usual clear style: “The evils of genuine usury in the Middle Ages,” he writes, “through the shortage of the precious metals and the insufficiency of the medium of exchange, cried aloud to heaven for redress. But the genuine usurer did at least give up what he lent and that for which he received interest, whereas the banker does not.…It is bad enough to be in the grip of the money-lender who does lend his money, but it is a million times worse to be in the grip of the pretended money-lender who does not lend his own money but creates it to lend and destroys the means of repayment just as fast as the debtors succeed in repaying it.”[7] Sir Reginald Rowe implicitly makes the same assertion, namely, that exchange-medium is created and cancelled in the manner best calculated to make profit for the creators. “It is the large variations in the rate of interest,” he writes, “brought about in the past by the international scramble for gold, which seem to me largely responsible for present-day evils, including a world continually at war. Internally they are the machinery of alternate inflations and deflations, an alternation which hits everybody except the dealers in money who profit on balance, either way. Thereby the trader, whether merchant or manufacturer, is hurt on balance, and all wage-earners, a vast majority of the community, suffer excessively.”[8] Of course, Professor Soddy and Sir Reginald Rowe and all the writers on modern money admit that the banks are allowed to make a service-charge for the creation of exchange-medium and that in this way there is a valid title to a certain percentage for bank-loans.[9] As the function is a public service it can be conceded that the banks have a right to a reasonable remuneration, but we have already seen that the term interest cannot properly be applied to bank-charges for the issue of bank-money.[10]

Accordingly, a moderate service-charge is justified. But are the banks content with this? Sir Reginald Rowe expresses the attitude of mind of the growing body of students of the banking system on this point, when he writes: “New economists are not prepared to admit that banking could not be worked much more cheaply, but even if banking administration cost no less, they think it fatally wrong that the creation and destruction of money should be left to private concerns owned by shareholders. The banks publish balance-sheets, but no profit-and-loss accounts. Their operations are largely kept secret, and their balance sheets leave much unrevealed. They can always, through their power in the manufacture of credit, arrange to pay a 15% dividend (which seems to be about the figure which their directorates judge will not alarm the public), or any large dividend within reasonable limits.”[11] It is interesting to note that state-created money, for example, silver and copper coins, circulates without interest being paid on it, while bank-created money enables a dividend of 15% to be paid on its circulation. Though a moderate rate of interest on the creation of money can be justified as a service-charge, yet all Catholic writers agree that an excessive rate of interest is usurious. This, however, can hardly be what Pope Leo XIII meant when he said that usury had come back under another guise, for it is an old form of usury.

It seems to the present writer that the manner in which usury has come back in modern times under another form is by the arbitrary changes made in the volume of exchange-medium by those who are in chief control of the monetary system. My argument must be understood to be exclusively against “the financial leaders who direct its major operations,” to use Sir Reginald Rowe’s words.[12] The deflation after the Great War (1914–1918), which told so hardly on Irish farmers, was certainly not the working-out of an inexorable law of nature like a drought in Australia. Money is manipulated by human intelligences and wills, so there must have been intelligences and wills responsible for the “scarcity of money” spoken of by Pope Pius XI in the Encyclical Letter, On The Troubles of Our Time.[13]

In his book, Interest and Usury, published in 1943 by the American Council on Public Affairs (Washington, D.C.), the Rev. Lernard W. Dempsey, S.J., seems to agree that deflation as described is usurious. On page 208 he writes: “Deflation did not present itself to them (the Scholastics) as an acute problem.…If the loans and created funds upon which they were based were all in the hands of one man, the Scholastics would not approve of that one man calling all the loans simultaneously, inducing distress selling and an avalanche of pseudo-costs with resultant lower values, and then buying in the assets. That, too, would he gain from a loan; and to make one’s own price by calling a loan would be no less reprehensible than charging a higher price for a good which the seller financed by a loan involving no emergent loss. Though the Schoolmen were not confronted with the problem, we may well believe that they would have condemned such a practice as heartily as they would condemn the depreciation of money by sending pseudo-income to market.”

“It is the big financiers, the dealers in big money,” writes Sir Reginald Rowe, “who control the machine by directing the movements of credit: and this gives them immense power over the rest of us.…Those in chief control of money are comparatively few, but the army they command is large, since it contains all those whose livelihood is associated with the movements of money. I think that many of the leaders, if not all, understand the problem perfectly well, but keep it as far as possible from their own consideration as well as from that of others.…Of the rank and file (of the monetary army), probably not one in a hundred understands the problem at all. Books are written about it, which they do not read, and it is hardly ever mentioned in the press.…I think many of them are beginning to doubt if it (the present system) is satisfactory.…The press is hugely capitalized, must pay interest on its capital, and has to finance itself on the large scale which is so dear to the heart of the money power. In the present state of public ignorance, no important newspaper dare affront and challenge the money-power for fear of the consequences. Our credit-makers, the banks, serving in their turn ‘big money,’ could easily by a twist of the credit-screw check any such revolt.”[14]

Arbitrary changes in the volume of money or exchange-medium cause prices to rise or fall. Thus the power to change the volume of the exchange-medium is the power to change the terms of every contract involving future money payments. The amount of currency or exchange-medium is increased if the aggregate of loans granted is greater than the aggregate of loans paid back or called in, as happens in periods of credit expansion. The amount of currency is decreased if the aggregate of loans granted is less than the aggregate of loans called in or paid back, as happens in periods of credit contraction. One party to the loan-contract, the Central Bank in control of the issue of credit-money, thus retains the power to alter the value of the currency as a measure of things saleable. This is the same as if a man sells a horse to another, and at the same time retains the power to change the animal into a mule or a donkey in a fortnight or whenever it suits him. The yard measure or the pound avoirdupois is not alterable in this way at the will of a buyer or a seller. One of the contracting parties, the Central Bank, plays the accordion with the exchange-medium and can thus double the 5%. There can be no question of extrinsic titles in this case. It is purely and simply usury under another guise.

This is the point made by Mr. Arthur Kitson in the passage in A Fraudulent Standard, published in 1917, where he speaks of the plans of the great banking and financial companies that had invested large sums in War Loans, to double the weight of the War Debt, by a mere stroke of the pen. They were planning to do this, he said, by returning to the Gold Standard and thus altering the value of the pounds in which the debt had been contracted. “Similarly,” he adds, “although the nominal rate of interest is 5%, by this method of tampering with the value of the pound, these investors will actually receive 10% on their original investment.” The return to the Gold Standard took place in 1925 and the taxpayers had to sell two sheep instead of one, in order to pay the interest, though the nominal figures of the debt and of the interest were not changed. This certainly seems to be usurious, and it accompanies all the “booms” and “slumps” or inflations and deflations that are part of the normal functioning of the Gold Standard. The consequences of declining prices are business failures, unemployment, and wholesale foreclosures with inevitable increasing financial control. “Inflation,” as Mr. Jeffrey Mark expresses it, “is the web of the financial spider, and deflation the mastication of the human fly.”[15]

It may be well to add other testimonies to that of Arthur Kitson about the effect of the return to the Gold Standard in 1925: “The increase of the National Debt, due to the War (1914–1918), some £8,000 million,” writes Professor Soddy, “was for the most part contracted in this debased money—the value of £1 in goods being less than half the pre-War value—and if the money had been correctly issued the debt would not have amounted to half this sum.…This wrong the Cunliffe Committee proposed to correct by a second and worse one (the return to the Gold Standard) involving the universal swindling of debtors for the benefit of war-gorged creditors, since debts and the interest on them are not really paid in pounds but in goods and services the pounds will buy. But all this is now common knowledge and sordid beyond concealment.”[16]

Mr. Reginald McKenna is just as emphatic as Professor Soddy or Arthur Kitson with regard to the injustice of the return to the Gold Standard. In one of his addresses as Chairman of the Midland Bank, he told the English people very clearly what it meant: “Let us look at the policy of monetary deflation,” he said, “.…let us suppose that it were practicable by this process to bring prices permanently down to the pre-War level. What sort of a charge would our National Debt mean to us? It stands today at £7,770,000,000, mostly borrowed when money was worth very much less than before the war. With prices back to their former level the burden of the debt would be more than doubled, in other words, the creditor would receive a huge premium at the expense of the debtor.…Such a result would be repugnant to every principle of equity and economic propriety.”[17]

Again, in Economic Tribulation (p. 56), by Vincent C. Vickers, a former governor of the Bank of England, we find the injustice of the deflationary policy pursued after the Great War (1914–1918) assailed in the following terms: “Have we not issued war loans, and inflated the currency and then deflated it for the benefit of the money-lenders?” Readers will recall the disastrous effects of the postwar deflation on Irish farmers. Many of them, encouraged by the high prices prevailing during the period 1914–1919, invested in larger farms with the help of overdrafts from the banks. When the deflation took place they found they had to pay the same nominal amount of interest, while the prices of what they had to sell had been practically halved. Thus the interest, though remaining nominally at the same figure, had, to all intents and purposes, been doubled. They had to sell twice as much corn as before in order to pay it. This is precisely the example chosen by Mr. V. C. Vickers in the extract from Finance in the Melting Pot quoted in the last chapter. A farmer, he said, who, in 1920, borrowed from his bank the money equivalent of 100 sacks of wheat, was obliged to sell 200 sacks of wheat a few years afterwards in order to repay that same loan, because we returned to the Gold Standard for the benefit of the City of London.

Mr. A. N. Field depicts a similar situation in New Zealand and illustrates it by some simple figures: “Both these processes—increase (inflation) and decrease (deflation) of the currency—are great public evils. Of the two, deflation is by far the worse. In an ordinary inflationary period, the active people who are producing things benefit and the inactive and unproductive people, such as the drawers of interest, are injured. In a period of deflation, it is the other way round, and the active producers suffer, while the people who live on interest receive more than their share.

“For instance, let us suppose that Farmer Robinson had bought a farm five years ago, and had figured it out that of his gross income one-third would pay his mortgage interest bill, one-third would keep him and his family, and the other third he would have free to put back into the farm. Very well, we will next suppose—it does not need much supposing—that Farmer Robinson’s income from his farm has fallen 50% by reason of the decline in the prices of his produce (due to deflation). For every £100 that formerly came in only £50 will now come in. But his mortgage interest bill will still remain at the old figure and out of every £50 he receives he will have to set aside £33 6s. 8d. for his mortgage interest. This will leave him with £16 13s. 4d. to carry on with in place of the £66 13s. 4d. free income for keeping himself and improving his farm that he had reckoned on five years before. In other words, an interest charge that formerly took one-third of the farm produce to satisfy it now requires two-thirds of the shrunken income. Taken by and large that is what the farmers of New Zealand are up against today.”[18]

In the foreword to the book, Economic Tribulation, already mentioned, Mr. Vickers, who had been a governor of the Bank of England from 1910 to 1919, writes: “Ever since that day in 1926, when, not in arrogance but with humility, I felt it my duty to explain to the Governor of the Bank of England, Mr. Montagu Norman, that ‘henceforth I was going to fight him and the Gold Standard and the Bank of England policy until I died’—and well I remember the words of his reply!—I have been an ardent money reformer. Some few years afterwards I resigned my long directorship of Vickers Limited; since then I have spent much time and money in advocating the necessity for a reform of the monetary system.…In fifteen years nothing whatever has occurred to make me alter my views. I still believe that the existing system is actively harmful to the state, creates poverty and unemployment, and is the root cause of war.”

Thus we see what an important role has been played by an old-time evil in a new guise, in bringing the mass of men into subjection to the few who manipulate money. In fact, employers and employed are all now more or less at the mercy of those who control finance.[19] Indeed, the whole collectivist class-war movement, whether Socialist or Communist, has been used by finance simply as a means to consolidate its rule over employers and employed alike. Personal liberty demands the return of the solidarity of the Mystical Body between employers and employed with the reform of the monetary system, which is tending to the enslavement of both. Socialist and Communist projects of monetary reform are almost always limited to the institution of a state bank in exclusive control of credit. That ultimately means slavery under the despotism of the financiers maneuvering the Socialist and Communist movements and manipulating credit.[20]

B.  Money as a Stable Measure of Things Saleable, or the Consideration of the Gold Standard from the point of view of Formal Causality

We have seen that, according to St. Thomas, money is meant to he a stable measure of things saleable. Money should be steadier in value than other things. Accordingly, stability of the price level should be the object of the state’s unceasing vigilance. Now, in view of what, we have seen, it is unnecessary to stress the fact that the functioning of the Gold Standard system has not made for stability of the price level. At the ordinary meeting of the shareholders of the Midland Bank, held on January 29th, 1932, Mr. Reginald McKenna said that he was “unable to attach any meaning to the phrase ‘sound money,’ except that a ‘sound’ unit of currency would always be of the same value measured in the aggregate of the things on which our money is spent.…Viewed in this light, could any standard have failed more signally than the Gold Standard in recent years?” He added that “if the Gold Standard cannot work, without depressing and ruining trade, the proper course would he to seek another and a better one…but that the financial authorities of the world, with their deep-rooted traditions and long-established practice, will not be easily moved to consider the question on its merits.” According to Sir Reginald Rowe, Mr. McKenna seems to be of opinion that “if the banks aim primarily at maintaining a price level.…nothing more need be done.”[21]

Relative stability of prices along with the link with gold was maintained in Great Britain after 1931, but in spite of Mr. McKenna’s opinion, things were far from satisfactory. There were miles of unemployed[22] whose numbers were not greatly reduced in the succeeding years. Credits were being given to Germany which were being used for re-armament, and there was “over-production” with people underfed and insufficiently clad. “Considering that we are in an age of monetary policy.…when there is not given a moment’s consideration to the most elementary principles of justice to the owners of money, who give up for it valuable goods and services and have a right to receive again value equivalent to that which they have given up,[23] something more seems to be needed. A more scientific system of regulating the issue of money or exchange-medium, by which it will be withdrawn from the control of those who have thus abused their privileges in the past, is evidently required. That we shall treat of later, but here a few remarks must be made about the continuance of the use of gold as a measure of things saleable.

C. Two Theories of Money—The Quantitative Theory and the Qualitative or Commodity Theory, or the Consideration of the Gold Standard from the point of view of Formal Causality

In Money and Civilization (p. 8), by Alexander del Mar, there is an important observation concerning the use of gold as a measure of goods and services. “From the evidences of fact which history presents,” writes del Mar, “and the conclusions which reason affords, it appears that the value of coins, so long as they remain coins, is in inverse ratio to the whole sum of money in use when reduced to like denominations: while the value of the metals of which the coins may be made depends upon the stock on hand, supply and demand for the arts, mining discoveries, conquests, slavery, taxation, general progress in the mechanical arts, the growth of commerce, the use of paper notes, the extension of the credit system, and upon fashions, caprice and numerous other circumstances. As there are practically no means of preventing the owners of coins from reducing them to metal, and as under existing laws this metal may be re-coined at pleasure, it follows that the value of the coins has been regulated by two different sets of considerations, wholly opposed to one another, one relating to number, and the other to material. Hence the radical difference of opinion on the subject.”

In other words, confusion has been created by the fact that two different categories, substance and quantity, have been applied in reasonings about the use of gold as a medium of exchange. In the early days of the use of gold as money, when it was merely a simplified form of barter, the substance or commodity theory was in vogue, but the use of paper-money, whether in the form of banknotes or checks leads to manifest absurdities in that theory. Arthur Kitson shows this conclusively in The Bankers’ Conspiracy, pp. 59–61. “The theory, which apparently held sway amongst financiers practically the world over when Sir Robert Peel introduced his famous Bank Act, was known as the qualitative or commodity money theory. It was held that the value or purchasing power of money was due to the metal composing it or into which it was legally convertible. Gold was then supposed to have a ‘fixed value’ the world over.… It will be seen that this qualitative or commodity money theory originated with and pertains exclusively to barter, the exchange of one commodity for another of equal value.…In his celebrated speech delivered on May 6, 1844, in the House of Commons, on the renewal of the Bank of England Charter, Sir Robert Peel defined the English monetary pound as follows: “That which is implied in the word ‘pound’ is a certain definite quantity of gold with a mark upon it to determine its weight and fineness, and that the engagement to pay a pound means nothing and can mean nothing else than the promise to pay the holder, when he demands, that definite quantity of gold. This definite quantity is the mass of standard gold 11/12ths fine contained in our golden sovereign, viz., 113 grains. That is at present the only legal definition of the pound extant, and constitutes what is called the British standard unit measure of value.[24]…In endeavoring to prove to the House the scientific correctness of his definition of the pound, Sir Robert Peel…. confounded two quite distinct and independent transactions, viz., barter, and purchase by means of credit. Let us put Sir Robert’s definition to the test. If the monetary pound means nothing else than so much gold with the mark upon it—in other words, the golden sovereign-—then the legalization of monetary payments in anything else but golden sovereigns, must necessarily be considered a legalised robbery. And yet in this very same Bank Act, Sir Robert authorized the issue of £14,000,000 of bank notes by the Bank of England without any gold backing whatever. If Sir Robert Peel really believed in the gold standard principle as he defined it, in foisting £14,000,000 of paper money upon the British public, he was guilty of enacting one of the most impudent and fraudulent legislative measures ever inflicted upon a long-suffering public!

“Again, if the pound ‘means nothing and can mean nothing else’ than the legal quantity of gold associated with the golden sovereign, viz., 113 grains, it follows that…. £8,000,000,000—the amount of our War Debt—must mean this number of golden sovereigns or 8,000,000,000 times 113 grains of gold, which is roughly equivalent to 80,000 tons of gold. Now the estimated quantity of gold available through the whole world, is not more than one-third of the sum representing our War Debt.…My point is this. By applying Sir Robert Peel’s definition of the pound to any large sums representing, say the War Debt, our national wealth or any large aggregation of capital, the monetary sums in which they are expressed become absurd and meaningless.…Of course, the only rational meaning that can be given to such monetary expressions as £8,000,000,000 is 8,000,000,000 times the purchasing power of the pound at the time the debt or estimate was made.…

“With the organization of credit, and the establishment of credit banking, an entirely new monetary system was evolved, based upon an entirely different principle.…The modern and generally accepted theory of monetary science is known as the quantitative theory, which asserts that the value of the money unit is determined by the number of units in circulation multiplied by their velocity of circulation. This theory is in direct opposition to the barter or commodity-money theory. For it claims that quantity and not quality controls the value of money. Hence it is absolutely immaterial so far as value is concerned, whether a nation employs paper money or gold and silver coins so long as the number of units in circulation is the same in both cases. Under the qualitative or commodity-money theory, gold functions by weight, whilst under the quantitative theory, gold coins function solely by number. And this quantity theory is supported in practice in whatever direction it may be applied.… It stands to reason that since money is merely a claim to wealth—goods or services—its purchasing power must be determined by the number of claims offered in relation to the wealth available. And it cannot possibly make any difference whether these claims are engraven on parchment notes, on silver or on gold, so long as all are equally valid claims in the eyes of the law.[25]

As a stable measure destined to facilitate the exchange of goods in view of family life, which is St. Thomas’s concept, money belongs to the category of quantity.[26] Exchange-values are quantitative and are expressed quantitatively. A clear proof of the quantity-theory of money was available in practice, when the gold standard was functioning. A given weight of gold, in different countries like England and the United States whose currencies were based on gold, had a different degree of purchasing power: yet if the substance “gold” were the measure of value, the purchasing power should be the same. An ounce of gold in England was equal to an ounce of gold in the United States, but the quantities or amounts of paper currency and credit money in circulation in the two countries affected the purchasing power of gold currency the same as the addition of gold coins.[27] “The aggregate of all the money (counters) in a nation in relation to all goods and services on sale for money determines average prices. The price level is a mathematical expression of the ratio at which money can be exchanged for goods.”[28] It is thus possible to calculate what a particular unit of money in circulation in a country, a pound or a dollar, will purchase of the ordinary things needed by human beings. The aim must be to keep that purchasing-power stable at the desired level, by adding to the aggregate when there is a proportional increase in the goods or services offered for sale and subtracting therefrom, when there has been a decrease. “Since new money can be immediately exchanged for goods or services, arbitrary increases in the volume increase the effective demand for goods and, therefore, alter average prices upward. Additions to the volume of money without a previous proportional increase in the supply of goods and services on sale for money decrease the amount of goods and services obtainable for money. Less money decreases the effective demand for goods.

Thus it can be seen that the power to cause a change in the volume of money is the power to tax and to change the terms of every contract involving future money payments. Arbitrary changes in money see-saw average prices and thus cause the everlasting and unnecessary struggle between debtors and creditors and owners and laborers.”[29]

One more quotation concerning this important point will be given because of its clearness. It is from the pen of Mr. Robert Owen, whose authority in the matter no one can question. He writes as follows: “People have a general illusion that money is stable and that property is unstable because it rises and falls in price; whereas it is money which falls or rises in purchasing power because of (its) scarcity or abundance.…When the commodities in the wholesale markets in 1933 required 40% less money to be bought than in 1929, it was because the money supply was contracted. Since money measures everything, the scarcity of money causes the value of everything to fall. When the money supply is more abundant, or doubles, and the volume of commodities is unchanged, the exchange-value in money of all commodities and properties doubles. While this truth is recognized by all informed students, nevertheless the illusion persists with a great body of people that it is not the money that changes in value but the property.…It takes time to overcome such a worldwide error.…

“Prior to the twentieth century it was the traditional theory of money held by orthodox professors of political economy, that gold was money provided by nature and that nothing else was money. This opinion was expressed very clearly by the great financier, J. P. Morgan, in December, 1912, in answering a question of Samuel Untermeyer during the Pujo Investigation. Mr. Morgan said: ‘Gold is money and nothing else is.’…Modern students of monetary science now know with certainty that the value of money depends upon the supply of money in relation to the demand for money. Gustave Cassell, Professor of political economy at the University of Stockholm,…sets forth these correct principles.…Our own experience in the United States has completely demonstrated the truth of the quantitative theory.[30]

We shall see later the reforms that will be advisable, in accordance with St. Thomas’s principles, in order to ensure stability of national price levels. Gold seems to be a source of confusion by introducing the consideration of a category other than quantity. Besides, its use is dangerous, as it can be monopolized and thus allow of arbitrary interference with exchange-values and with the social order.

D. The Purpose of Money, or the Consideration of the Gold Standard from the point of View of Final Causality

The purpose of money, according to St. Thomas, is to facilitate exchanges in view of the development of the personality of members of Christ. We have seen that the functioning of the Gold Standard has led not only to something of a deadlock in international trade, but to the destruction of food and the lessening of production.[31] ‘The fundamental reason for this has been stated more than once. It lies in the perversion of order involved in the system. Instead of the right order, according to which the manipulation of money is intended to facilitate production, distribution and exchange, in view of strengthening family life, men are now sacrificed for production, while production and consumption, in their turn, are sacrificed for interest on debt. Instead of being an instrument of economics and politics, money is the end. This fundamental disorder, viz., the domination of money, shows itself in human life in a multitude of evil effects. Let us consider some of them, at least in outline.

a. farming

The production of primary goods is sacrificed to the production of luxury articles and goods of secondary importance. We have seen that the creation of money with a demand for interest leads to goods being unsold in every trade-cycle and that the volume unsold increases with the expansion of debt. Now the rhythm of production of secondary and manufactured goods can be accelerated enormously in the endeavor to accomplish the impossible task of getting out of debt. But agriculture is dependent on the seasons; its rhythm cannot be accelerated in the same proportion, and the attempt to do something similar by the exploitation of virgin soils is disastrous in its effects on those soils.

This last point can be disposed of first. For an adequate treatment of it the reader is referred to two outstanding books, The Laboring Earth, by C. Alma Baker, C.L.K., and The Rape of the Earth, by G. V. Jacks and R. O. Whyte. In the introduction to the former by the Rt. Hon. Lord Addison, we read: “There is no doubt as to the justice of the author’s first main contention—that, in the desire to make money out of it quickly, mankind has wasted the precious earth wholesale, turned fertile lands into deserts and presented us with wide landscapes of rubbish in place of cultivated fields. We have systematically taken organic matter from the soil and not replaced it.” The following passages from pages 25 and 28 of the second book are a striking confirmation of Mr. Baker’s thesis: “In Europe…the countryside has been desecrated and scarred with ugliness in many places, but the one inviolable condition on which man holds the lease of land from nature—that soil fertility be preserved-—has in the main been respected.…In the New World…with few exceptions, profit and wealth have been most easily won by exploiting and exhausing the virgin soils. In particular grassland soils required merely a superficial cultivation to convert them immediately into almost ideal arable soils, rich in plant food, perfect in tilth, and apparently incapable of further improvement. Or they afforded rich and extensive pastures without having to be touched at all.…The insatiable demands of the Old World and the progress of agricultural science and machinery offered immense profits and further opportunities for exploitation to the man who cashed his soil fertility for labor-saving and yield-increasing devices.…Nineteenth century economy, especially within the British Empire, was based on the mutual exchange of agricultural and industrial produce. That the New World was being robbed of its soil and was being paid in coin that brought no recompense to the land never entered the heads of either partner to a bargain which seemed natural, sensible, and highly satisfactory to all concerned.”

It did seem quite natural to all concerned, for it was all part of the system of procuring cheap food, in order to keep the wages of English workers low and enable English industry to pay interest on the loans contracted from the banks. The domination of finance caused the development of industry in England, at the expense of agriculture with its slower rhythmic movement. Then came the importation of cheap food from the virgin soils of America, which resulted in the ruinous exploitation of the latter and brought English agriculture into stagnation and decay.

“English farming,” writes Commander Herbert Shove, D.S.O., “held its own, in a rapidly growing market, for a generation after the repeal of the Corn Laws, but fell again in the eighties, when the exploitation of virgin land brought it up against a system of living on capital in its own domain, whose “products were brought into competition with the home-grown ones through the usurious aid of coal, both in transporting them and cheapening the goods exported to pay for them. The building of the American transcontinental trunk railways marked the final conquest of the English plough by the steam engine.”[32]

The same writer points out another revolution which had been going on before that in English farming, under the rule of finance. It was the process of increasing rents by the conversion of tillage land to sheep-walks and cattle ranches. “It was the interest of the mercantile, money-minded landlord to reduce the number of peasants relative to the total population in greater proportion than the total produce of the land is thus reduced. The ordinary method of doing this was the conversion of tillage to grassland on enclosure. The richer cultivated kinds, in the main the ‘heavier’ wheat and bean lands, were thus thrown out of tillage; such lands being capable of producing, say 1/3 of the money value of food (not, of course, the nutrient value) in return for 1/6 of the labor, when in grass as compared with arable. The immediate effect of this was to double the margin of rent.”[33] The same process was going on in Ireland under the same influences from 1830 to 1880, with an added source of bitterness in the fact that the landlords were aliens in religion and nationality, and the tenants the dispossessed owners of the soil.[34] Grazing paid better, so human beings gave place to cattle. With the relentless grinding of the money machine, there came a time when it did not “pay’’ to keep up the big houses. It was inevitable.

In his splendid book, Look to the Land, Lord Northbourne repeatedly refers to the results of the disorder stressed by me in this book, by which men are sacrificed to the production of goods and the production of goods to money. Of all the writers I have read he best brings out the fact that, in the realm of production, farming is sacrificed to industry with sad consequences for both human beings and farming. “Industry,” he writes, “is a superstructure on farming. This is an obvious truism, for we could live without the one, but not without the other, but we behave as if farming were an appendage—a neccssary one of course—to industry.…Industry was made for man; yet men are now looked on as being creatures useful to industry—either as machine-minders, salesmen, or as buyers of the products of industry.…In the portentous jargon of today, farming is ‘the agricultural industry.’…Farming is an industry, but it is only incidentally an industry. The more its industrial aspect predominates over its more fundamental aspects the farther it gets from real farming, and the less effectively it serves the real needs of man. The industrial aspect predominates today, and the common needs of man and the land are inadequately served. The industrial aspect is the cost accountancy aspect, which takes account of saleability rather than true quality.…The rate of erosion is not steady; it is increasing very rapidly almost all over the world. Probably more soil has been lost since 1914 than in the whole previous history of the world.…Erosion is nearly all man’s work. Some of it can be attributed to mere foolishness. But most of it is due to greed combined with the existence of the possibility of getting rich quick by exhausting the land and underselling competitors. But the actual tillers of the soil who have got rich are few.…What has been the stimulus to the rapid extension of exhaustive farming all over the world? The stimulus has been a great development of the said possibilities of getting rich quickly, a development partly dependent on the evolution of new and powerful machines, and partly on a roughly simultaneous worldwide extension of a peculiar economic system, which has led to a vast accumulation of financial debt.…International debt and soil erosion are twin brother and sister, inseparables.…

“Rationalization implies in the end mainly an increase of speed. Its object is that the same number of men should produce more in a given time. In applying it we forget that life is a rhythmical process.…The harmonious rhythms of life are thrown into discord by the, inexorable urge to speed and ever more speed which is the inevitable accompaniment of a way of life dominated by the mathematical fiction which we know as money.…There is another complication. It is the fact that our economic and financial system has an inherent instability. For hundreds of years, farm prices have fluctuated wildly. Short booms have been followed by long slumps. The mechanism of this instability is the mutual interaction of prices and the circulation of bank credit. That is to say, of the rate and volume of borrowing.…The cash reserve of the banks, which limits the volume of borrowing, has hitherto been related to the amount of gold held by the banks. This amount bears no relation to the volume of world production, and especially of world harvests, which vary seasonally.…Under present conditions the only thing that pays is quick profitmaking while the going is good. By ignorant or unscrupulous exploitation and exhaustion of fertility vast profits have been made (by financiers rather than by farmers) in the name of cheap food. The pace is forced for the sound farmer wherever he lives.…As is usual nowadays, it will be left to future generations to pay for our mistakes, but they may not have the wherewithal. Money alone is notoriously useless in a desert.…Man’s strife against man is merely an incidental part of a world-embracing disharmony.…We have got to reconsider all our ideas about the place of the land in our lives, and therefore of all our activities which affect the land in any way, of which farming is the chief. It is not a case of enabling the farmers to serve the public better. It is a case of the public, and especially the urban public, serving the land better. Only so can the land serve them.”

Perhaps what has been written in this section may help people to understand in some degree why farmers, the producers of primary necessities, are everywhere complaining, and why reafforestation in Ireland is not popular financially. The slower rhythm of agriculture and of forestry, so favorable to normal human life, is not beloved of those whose chief preoccupation is interest on debt. It is to be hoped that having discovered why, people will strive to do all they can to remedy this state of affairs, instead of treating the complaints of the farming community as a matter for jesting.

b. ruin of small owners

and manufacturers

“Scepticism as to the practicability of a nexus of small holdings is widespread, and Lord Northbourne in Look to the Land makes the true point that they are in fact incompatible with the distribution of foreign foods as part of a system based on profit, interest, cut prices, cheap quality, and the wholly disproportionate value given to money. They (the writers of this book) know as well as the big vested interests that to cultivate our own soil with the minute devotion that the small farm demands and usually receives, to conserve its fertility and prevent its reversion (to barrenness) mean a new orientation of society far more deep-seated than the state Socialism that now reigns side by side with the older money-power. It means nothing less than the return to smaller units of social-economic life and to the splitting-up of the swollen top-heavy communties squeezed into huge towns.…The advantages of small-scale generalized farming upon our own soil are so overwhelming that the enigma is—why has twentieth-century science, economics, big business and mass-opinion been so unsparing towards it? Why is the little home-farm regarded as a failure? Because the history of the past hundred years has leaned all its weight upon it in order to destroy the possibility of its success. Wholesale neglect of the land, its desertion by its husbandmen and invasion of suburbia, the blind attempt to convert farming into the joint-stock company in which business takes the lead of cultivation, the equally fatal experiment of replacing men by machines, rhythm by speed, soil knowledge by accountancy, content by acquisition, self-support by parasitism, what chance has authentic farming had against such a combination of forces that hoist (money or token) wealth above life?[35]

Mr. Jeffrey Mark points out that the rationalization of industry and the Pigs Marketing Scheme, etc., etc., are simply a battle in mass formation against the banks.[36] As larger units of production mean easier book-keeping—not to mention other pecuniary advantages—the increasing domination of finance over production leads to wholesale amalgamations and rationalization. All schemes of this kind, however, do not prevent the financial subjection and the proletarization of the many. On the contrary, chain-shops destroy the independent shopkeeper. As chain-shops result from the growing power of the banks, the diffusion of ownership seems to be impossible without a complete reversal of the aim of finance. Bear in mind also the effect of those schemes of Planned Economy and Orderly Marketing on the small producers.[37] Then read the following extracts from the Encyclical, Quadragesimo Anno: “The uplifting of the proletariat is the aim which Our Predecessor urged as the necessary object of our efforts. The condition of the workingman has indeed been improved and rendered more equitable in many respects (since the days of Pope Leo XIII.…Put after modern machinery and modern industry had…taken possession of many newly colonized countries no less than of the ancient civilizations of the Far East, the number of the dispossessed laboring masses…increased beyond all measure. Moreover, there is the immense army of hired rural laborers, whose condition is depressed in the extreme.…The immense number of propertyless wage-earners on the one hand, and the superabundant riches of the fortunate few on the other, is an unanswerable argument that the earthly goods, so abundantly produced in this age of industrialism, are far from rightly distributed and equitably shared among the various classes of men.…This program cannot, however, be realised unless the propertyless wage-earner be placed in such circumstances that by skill and thrift he can acquire a certain moderate ownership, as has been already declared by Us, following the footsteps of Our Predecessor.”[38]

c. bread

We shall begin by quoting a few extracts from Bread in Peace and War, a splendid pamphlet published in October, 1940, by the Food Education Society of England. In this excellent work, some of the facts of the case are outlined as follows: “The switch-over to roller-milled flour (from stone-milled) in the eighties made a big difference to the nutritive value of the poor man’s diet.…When the whole wheat is ground on stones, giving stone-ground wholemeal, the whole of the wheat grain, including the germ, is present in the resulting flour, with the exception of perhaps, about 2% of the largest and roughest husk.…It is generally agreed that in normal times the diet of the poorer classes is deficient in calcium and vitamin B, and that in time of stress this deficiency may become serious.…The Medical Research Council recommends that flour for the bread of the people should contain the germ of the wheat grain, as much as possible of the aleurone layer and the finer portions of the bran. Instead of the flour consisting of about 70% of the wheat grain, as it does at present, the percentage extracted should be at least 80% to 85%. By this means the content of certain vitamins, of all minerals, and of fat, would be increased and the nutritive value of the protein would be improved.…The Medical Research Council further recommends that the bleaching or improving of flour by the use of oxidizing agents such as nitrogen peroxide, or by any other process which damages the nutritive value of the flour should he prohibited. The total mineral content would be about doubled.…The whole daily requirement of iron would be realised in the bread portion of the diet alone. Anaemia from iron deficiency is a common cause of lowered vitality among poorer women, particularly in pregnancy, and among infants.”[39]

A few passages from another excellent pamphlet, Our Daily Bread, by Professor Joseph Reilly of University College, Cork, may be quoted in confirmation of what we have just read. “The trend of development in the treatment of cereals for human use is not in line with progress in the science of nutrition, but rather in the opposite direction. This applies especially to wheat as used by man in the form of the white loaf. The aim for a long time was to provide a product pleasant in appearance, irrespective of the loss of the finer nutritive constituents. The actual nature of the loaf has seriously changed within the last three or four decades. The bread used by the great majority of our people today is far less nutritious from many aspects than the cereal products of former times. Some interested parties say that this does not matter. With the great selection of other foodstuffs now available, these defects can readily be amended. Yet it must be realised that bread is the principal food of the working people.…

“No wheaten flour may now be milled…which is under 95% extraction. “This will produce a brownish colored bread. It will be much more nutritious than the pre-war white bread of 70% extract flour.…The distinction between wholemeal flour and brown flour should be noted. The former contains all the constituents of the grain. The latter is a mixture of white flour with varying proportions of the bran and other layers of the wheat grain. It does not contain all the separated fractions from the flour and is especially low in wheat germ.…The replacement of wholemeal by the white flour of the modern roller mills is, according to that great authority on dietetics—Sir Robert McCarrison—‘the greatest single factor in malnutrition.’… It is important that this knowledge should be disseminated, if only to dissipate the prejudice which seems to have been created in the public mind against the use of wholemeal flour by many decades of familiarity with white bread. ‘This is especially so at the present time, but I would like to emphasise this fact that the public should not confuse the present high extraction flour (even 95% extraction) with wholemeal flour. What I mean by wholemeal flour is whole grain, stone-milled flour containing the germ of the wheat as well as all the other constituents of the wheat berry.…Even the roller-milled flour is often bleached still whiter by irritants or oxidized by so-called chemical improvers. Chemicals such as nitrosylchloride, chlorine, nitric acid, benzoyl peroxide or certain persulphates are also used.…Nitrogen trichloride has largely displaced other chemicals in the bleaching of flour. About 90% of the flour mills in North America and 85% of the flour mills in England employ this reagent.…

… An extremely white product results. It is claimed that this treatment, even though it increases cost, alters the gluten, and gives the baker a more stable and stiffer dough so that on treatment with yeast a ‘better’ loaf results which will absorb more water—hence more loaves per sack of flour.”[40]

In spite of these undeniable facts, the struggle to secure good bread for the people, especially for the poor, will be exceedingly difficult. The big mills with their large output “pay” better than the older type which turned out better flour. The pamphlet Bread in Peace and War, continues: “Today (in regard to this struggle) we have to contend with an even more powerful opposition (than in 1917) because the flour-milling industry is in the hands of so few firms. This is a great danger. In 1930, when Mr. Hurst wrote his brochure on The Bread of Britain, the Co-operative Wholesale Society milled 22% of the flour, Ranks 20%, Spillers 20%, and independent firms 32%.

Hurst said it would not be long before 80% was controlled. Now 90% is controlled by the three powerful interests such as these are never going to release their hold so long as they can persuade the public that white flour is the right stuff.…What are the circumstances which explain the resistance to the provision of a wholemeal bread? May they not be found in the fact that the entire industry of flour-milling in this country is now for practical purposes concentrated in one gigantic combination which approximates to the position of a single trust, inasmuch as two private and interrelated firms, with the Co-operative Wholesale Society as their sole rival, control the whole production of flour? Any departure from existing practice must mean a serious disturbance of invested capital amounting at this time probably to something like twenty million sterling, and the loss to the companies concerned of the highly profitable by-products of milling white flour.…Mr. John Burns, President, Local Government Board, announced that a Bill was in preparation to secure the purity of flour and to render illegal the use of phosphates and bleaching, July 23, 1912. The same Minister stated that a Bill dealing with the whole question of the purity of food, including flour, was in preparation, March 26, 1913. (Neither measure, however, saw the light).…

“It has been well-known for years that civilized diet is deficient in both vitamins and mineral salts. For centuries, two of the most important foods of the world have been wheat and rice. Before 1850 these grains wrere pounded by hand or coarsely stone-ground, and little of the bran was lost, while the valuable vitamin B was retained. The introduction of steel rolls for milling enabled the miller to produce finer flour while the bran and so on were sieved off. These sievings contain the germ of the wheat (or rice) and incidentally the vitamin B and the mineral salts. The flour from the modern treatment is whiter, and the public, mistakenly thinking that whiteness means purity and goodness, demands the whitest possible flour. To obtain this the modern miller bleaches his flour with chemicals. The result of these operations is to produce a devitalized white powder which we make into bread, but it is no longer the ‘staff of life.’ The sievings, which contain the most valuable part of the wheat, are made into food-stuffs for poultry or other live stock.…Very powerful commercial interests, including a whole group of advertised cereal goods, drugs, preparations, etc., have been built up upon the circumstances that the milling trade has been ready and able to supply the raw material of these traders in the form of the so-called ‘offal’ of flour, which offal was, previous to 1880 (introduction of roller-milling) included in the daily food of the people and is now extracted from it.…The attention of the Minister of Food is called to a legal anomaly, now much discussed, and likely to excite public feeling when it is more generally appreciated, viz., the dairyman or milk supplier who extracts cream from his milk (beyond a certain percentage) is visited with the most severe penalties: the miller who extracts the equivalent of cream from his flour goes scot free.”[41]

“In a democracy,” writes Mr. Kenny Williamson, “free speech is permitted. You can say what you think—within limits—the limits imposed by the Money Power. I have done a little broadcasting; but could I say what I thought, what I believed? Of course not!

“In 1938, I wrote in a script that experiments at Cambridge, upon rats fed exclusively on white bread, had resulted in the rats dying of various diseases (all due to malnutrition) within three months. I was not allowed to say this, however. Nor was I permitted to extol the virtues of wheatmeal bread. I was not allowed to explode the old lie that British wheat was unfit for making into wholemeal flour. The Money Power had mills at the ports and its machinery was designed for skinning the nutritious golden skin of the harder foreign wheat-berry, in order to produce snow-white flour, and also to supply the feeding-stuffs trade with ‘offals’ as the skins or rinds are called. If everyone, hearing my talk, made sudden demand for wheatmeal bread, million of pounds worth of machinery would have to be scrapped. Sixteen million people might be permanently undernourished, but sixteen million pounds must not be lost!…Nothing likely to injure the Money Power was permitted.…Be a good boy and prophesy unto them smooth things, or else you won’t be able to give any more talks over the air of the B.B.C. Sixteen million permanently undernourished? We are afraid it has nothing to do with us. Privately, of course, we agree with you, but orders are orders.

“It was the same in newspaper articles: nothing must be printed which might cause a falling-off of advertising revenue. In one group of newspapers the Jolly Millers spent over forty thousand pounds in advertising, so nothing depreciating white bread must appear in the paper. Won’t you write another article about the otter instead? Say just what you like. They live in water, don’t they, in rivers and swamps?…The Money Power cares nothing for human life, nothing for the soil that is the mother of human life. How long will men continue to respect the old system which is based on the Money Power? For the system not only ruins the soil and despoils human life, but periodically it becomes locked in a deadly struggle with its rivals.[42]

We find the same story of the domination of the money interests in the U.S.A. “If you will refer to the Rockefeller and other experiments,” writes William Howard Hay, M.D., “you will note that those little animals that were fed on the white flour preparations died sooner than did those fed on nothing at all.…It was known that the animals fed on the white flour preparations died of acidosis.…And it is not hard to see that the acid-forming tendency of the white flour, added to the total deficiency of alkalies carried by this form of so-called food, would be sufficient to poison the animal as its own waste would not do to the same extent, and death resulted from acidosis.…If the government would only interest itself in the prohibition of the processing of foods, there would be much accomplished toward a lessening of the deficiency evil in our land. The government is fully cognizant of the facts of nutrition, as many feeding experiments were conducted in the Section of Foods, Department of Agriculture; even the feeding-experiments before referred to as occurring in the Rockefeller Institute were duplicated in this section, with comparable results. So Uncle Sam is a party to the demineralization of our national foods by not forbidding it. Part of very big business, the millers and the bankers, is interested in the denaturing of foods, and Uncle does not like to offend big business, for he has found that it does not pay. He watches the composition of the feed for calves and chickens, and is very severe on any one who sells corncob meal for these innocents, but he does not interest himself in the feeding of the future citizens in the slightest. This is not as it should be of course, but what can we do about it? Big business needs the money so we will have to continue to eat of the emasculated food products which they are allowed to sell us, and which Uncle Sam helps them to advertise under very misleading statements.…There seems to be but one thing that we can do about it, and that is personally to refuse everything that is in any way processed or refined, and when enough are doing this there will be forced a change in the whole system of preparing and marketing foods.”[43]

“Vitamin B—now known as aneurin or thiamin—is necessary for the structural and functional efficiency of the nervous system: consequently, its adequate supply is essential to all neuro-muscular activities, including those of the heart, the stomach and the bowels. The structural and functional efficiency of the adrenal gland depends largely upon it.…Its insufficient consumption or utilization may give rise to anorexia, poor growth, lack of vigor, fretfulness or nervousness, cardiac and bowel irregularities and neuritis.…The chief cause of its insufficiency in the diets of our people is the almost universal use of white flour, from which it is lacking, in preference to wholemeal flour, in which it is abundantly present, and the excessive consumption of vitaminless sugar.”[44]

The testimony of Lord Northbourne in this connection is too apposite to be omitted. In Look to the Land he writes: “The health of man and the health of his land are not two distinct matters which can properly be considered separately and apart.…So if farming were unsound it would be strange if man’s physical life remained perfectly adjusted.…It is true that man cannot live by bread alone, but it is also true that he cannot live without bread: and if his bread is defective he cannot be expected to live well.…The typical food of most of us today is white bread. It is interesting to consider a loaf of white bread in the light of what has been said about food in general. The chances are that the wheat has been grown abroad, most probably under a system of continuous wheat growing, very likely on land the fertility of which is in some degree exhausted. After a period of storage, during which it may be chemically treated against insects, it is put through a modern roller mill.… So that, even if wheat is healthily grown, most of the life-giving and protective constituents are removed.…White bread is mere filling. It is probably no exaggeration to say that it generally does not nourish at all.…Sir Robert McCarrison used rats for his experiments (with regard to food). Some were fed on the diet of the Hunza people and of certain other tribes whose health was remarkable. These rats prospered exceedingly. Disease was almost unknown.…Another set of rats were fed on the diet of the poorer classes in England (white bread, margarine, sweet tea, boiled vegetables, tinned meats, and jams). They grew badly. They got neurasthenia and bit their attendants. After only sixteen days they began to eat each other. They also got many diseases, and in addition lassitude, loss of hair, boils, bad teeth, and crooked spines. They became terribly like us.”

d. regimentation of medical doctors

A very interesting pamphlet entitled Barrier to Health, by Dr. Douglas Boyd,[45] draws attention to the increasing pressure on doctors to accept contract practice and points out that the powers controlling money are moving in that direction. He writes: “The growing number of doctors accepting contract practice is clearly a matter for alarm. It is obvious that many prefer to accept restrictions rather than suffer privations.…it is very clear that the wide-spread curtailment of private consultation is the result of general economic distress. Is it not strange that steadily deepening economic pressure should be accompanied by numerous opportunities for contract service? Knowing that credit is under highly centralized control, one may then justifiably suspect that those directing financial policy are more concerned with the regimentation of the medical profession and patients than with the general welfare?…To the impartial observer, cognizant of the facts, it is clear that the whole medical profession is being ruthlessly taken in the grip of some form of Socialism, Fascism, Russian Communism, or whatever name one cares to give to regimentation and the enforcement of objectives contrary to the wishes of the majority.…The facts are quite clear. Almost every practitioner now must purchase a practice. This ‘compulsion’ follows the introduction of the panel system. Apart from any considerations of the success or otherwise of this system, the fact remains that it created a vast extension of bank credit. At the same time, it became an obligation on almost every doctor to take out life insurances, in most instances being persuaded into the endowment class, which skilled investigation will show to produce most profit to the insurance companies. It would be a credulous person who believed that the small group in control of bank credit and the major insurance groups had no hand in the formation of such an enterprise.…Who, then, directs the policy of the Bank of England? No matter where we turn we find centralization under the domination of the financier. In every direction we see the result of an inhuman policy. We, in the medical profession, have had the doubtful honor paid to us of being amongst the first of the professions to be placed under a system of regimentation, for the ease of control and the direct gain of those who direct the policy of financial institutions.”[46]

e. advertisements of patent medicines

We have seen, then, that the perversion of order due to the domination of finance has proved deleterious for agriculture, leading to the exhaustion of the soil and the neglect of the production of primary goods, ruinous also for man’s food, that is, not only for the production and distribution of food but for the food itself, and injurious to the medical care of the human person. Let us now go a step further and see something about the sad effects of this domination not only on man’s body but on man’s soul.

It is true that in connection with advertisements for secret remedies we are chiefly confronted with the results of human selfishness using the modern facility of advertising. But the driving force of debt for heavy advertising and general expenses, increases the urge to make false and exaggerated claims and improper appeals. The mad competition for inadequate purchasing power impels to indecent advertisements which have a de-supernaturalizing and degrading effect upon society. Then again, fear of losing revenue and so being unable to pay bank overdrafts forces newspapers to refrain from publishing the truth about secret remedies and thus warning the public.

We have seen that the potential capacity of the world to supply its inhabitants with all they need is not availed of or, if it is availed of to some extent, the products are not distributed but destroyed. On the other hand, enormous sums are spent on advertising the products that are not destroyed, that is, in making them known to people suffering from lack of purchasing power to buy what they need. Enormous sums are also spent in advertising medicaments and remedies rendered necessary by the devitalization of food as well as by its insufficiency. “More and more,” we read in the pamphlet published by the Food Education Society, “the English-speaking democracies are relying on devitalized foodstuffs and corrective drugs to maintain their health. This custom spreads from the cities to the country districts. This increasing consumption of a tinned, concentrated, and synthetic diet is not only seriously embarrassing the agricultural revival… but is disseminating devastating diseases.”[47]

“Both town and country people,” writes Lord Northbourne in Look to the Land, “need the right food. At present not one in a hundred of either can get it for love or money. It is not there. The commercial handler (who holds the cards) wants that which is standardized and easily stored or preserved, in quantity and at a low price. He ‘educates’ the public and the farmer must conform to the resultant demand, or go out of business. Cheap food has been the plausible excuse for all this.…The lowering of financial cost is our ideal.…So long as people go on being fooled by advertisement (blatant or concealed) of processed foods, so long will they and the farmers be at the mercy of vast distributing concerns, whose every interest seems to be opposed to the people’s real nutritional necessities.…Milk must be pasteurized in order that it may be more safely bulked for handling by vast distributing concerns.…Purity is the advertiser’s watchword. But in practice it has come to be almost synonymous with sterilization. Sterilization means killing.…Pasteurizing admittedly alters one of the phosphatic constituents of milk. That constituent is closely concerned in the calcium metabolism of the body, which includes the formation of bones and teeth.…One section at least of the business community knows that we are unfit, and that is the section which relies on advertising for its livelihood. Consider, therefore, the proportion of advertising space allotted to patent medicines and cures of all kinds, processed foods recommended on grounds of health, flavorings, stimulants, and narcotics, not excluding stimulants and narcotics for the mind. To this list may be added cosmetics, the main purpose of which is to produce a spurious imitation of the bloom of health.…A state of low vitality in our plants and animals is no less discernible.…Liability to disease shows itself increasingly among classes of livestock bred and fed for high production, especially poultry and dairy cows.”

The Report from the Select Committee on Patent Medicines ordered to be printed by the House of Commons on 4th August, 1914, and reprinted in 1936, contains a mine of information about secret remedies, We read therein: “We are getting a lot of quack remedies which were formerly confined to the United States.…While the trade in certain classes of secret remedies is carried on…with trifling capital, in other cases the amount of capital invested in manufacturing is very large. The annual turnover of the proprietors of Beecham’s Pills, selling over a million pills a day, Sundays included, is about £360,000 a year. The proprietors of Seigel’s Syrup, who have sold 100 million bottles in 40 years, pay upwards of £40,000 a year in wages alone.[48] In most cases the principal expenditure in connection with secret remedies is in advertising. The proprietors of Wincarnis for example, spend thus £50,000 a year, employing between 30 and 40 persons in their advertising bureau.…

“As so large a sum as £2,000,000 or more is spent annually in advertisements of these remedies in one form or another of advertising, the trade is naturally of great importance to newspaper proprietors. In the case of most newspapers these advertisements constitute one of the most considerable sources of income, while a number of small provincial newspapers could probably hardly exist at all without secret remedy advertisements.… As regards the advertisements of swindlers like Macaura, the ‘eye quacks’ the ‘deaf quacks’ the cancer-curers, the consumption-curers, the electric belt makers, the curers of rupture without operation, or ‘fakirs’ generally, most newspaper proprietors do not regard it as incumbent upon them to test the good faith of secret remedy advertisers, any more than of advertisers of other goods.…We must point out further, in this connection, that the large sums received for the advertisement of secret remedies lead newspapers, either from discretion or under compulsion, to exclude from their columns criticism or discussion of secret remedies. When the British Medical Association, for example, issued their volume entitled Secret Remedies containing analyses, costs, etc., of a large number of proprietary medicines, not only was the volume not noticed editorially by most papers, but even an advertisement of it was declined by many journals, some of them of the highest class. A trial in Edinburgh in the course of which the judge described the business of the proprietors of ________ as ‘based on unblushing falsehood for the purpose of defrauding the public,’ was, we were informed, with few exceptions not reported in the press, and the remedy still has a considerable sale.

fraudulent remedies

This is a large class, having an extensive sale, often at high prices, consisting of abortifacients, of alleged cures for cancer, consumption, diabetes, paralysis, locomotor ataxy, Bright’s disease, lupus, fits, epilepsy, rupture (without operation or appliance), deafness, diseases of the eye, syphilis, etc., together with electric belts, apparatus for supplying oxygen to the system, ‘ionized’ waters and the like.…They are and are known by their makers, to be cruel frauds: and the sale and advertisement of them should be prohibited under drastic penalties.…

remedies making grossly

exaggerated claims

“As an example of the profits made by the sale of this class of remedies, George Taylor Fulford, the proprietor of Dr. Williams’ Pink Pills for Pale People, left a fortune of £1,111,000.…

medicated wines

“There can be no doubt that many persons acquire the ‘drink habit’ by taking these wines and preparations..., etc) either knowing that they are alcoholic or in ignorance that they are highly intoxicating liquors. The further charge is made that their drug content may lead to the ‘drug habit.’….

“The trade in abortifacients presents one of the most deplorable aspects of the secret remedy trade. Innumerable remedies for ‘female irregularities’ are advertised. A few of these are poisonous and have caused death, whilst most of them are wholly inactive for the purpose for which they are sold.…Many deaths from the use of this substance…for this purpose were reported to us. It can, of course, only produce abortion by producing lead poisoning, from which insanity, blindness, paralysis and death have resulted.… The question of the total prohibition of its sale should be considered by the competent authorities.…

“Some papers of the so-called ‘religious press’ we are told, show a wider hospitality to secret remedy advertisements, and many of an objectionable character have been found in its columns. It is also lamentably true that the cheap so-called ‘home’ weeklies, intended for the reading of girls and young women, contain advertisements of a grossly improper nature. Many improper advertisements from weeklies, sporting prints, ‘religious’ and ‘home’ papers, were exhibited to us—including nineteen advertisements of drugs, obviously intended to be used as abortifacients, in one provincial Sunday paper.…

“It will probably now be learned without surprise that witnesses of unquestionable authority have assured us that grave evils, urgently requiring remedy, arise from the present sale and advertisement of secret remedies. We may quote the following as examples. As regards diseases arising from sexual intercourse, Dr. Reginald Edward Cross, M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P.: ‘A very grave and wide-spread evil, urgently demanding legislative action.’ As regards aural diseases, Mr. P. MacLeod Yearsley, F.R.C.S.: ‘A widespread and grave evil, which I most decidedly believe requires legislative treatment.’ As regards diseases of the skin, Dr. Arthur Whitfield, M.D., F.R.C.P., Physician to the Skin Department, and Professor of Dermatology in King’s College Hospital: ‘The harm done is appalling.…There is urgent demand for legislation.’…And on the general question, Mr. G. Sidney Paternoster, assistant editor of Truth. ‘There is absolutely no question about it, the public is defrauded of millions in the course of a year, and purely by false statements.’”[49]

The Earl of Portsmouth sums up the situation as follows: “In a healthier age with a less irrational system, it would have been impossible for such appalling mental and physical drugs as we now suffer from to have taken first place in our lives. Scarcity both in food and work has meant subnormal health and that in itself created a colossal vested interest in patent medicines. The dullness of our rationalised and regimented lives has created a demand for mass-produced amusements, ‘the dogs,’ and the football pools, and other such entertainment. Big profits lie in moneylending to create new issues promoting luxury business. So, too, with the vast growth of the tobacco industry, and the unreal sensationalism of the press. Those who say that they could not in 1939 afford sufficient food to put into their stomachs…were driven with every excuse to expend money in sheer boredom on cigarettes, newspapers, cinemas, football pools, and hire purchase of radios, which a healthier world… would have found less necessary to its existence. Most of this degeneration can be laid finally at the door of finance, just as to the same door we can lay the twenty to thirty million unemployed who haunted the streets of Europe and America. All this happens in a world where finance has all the power, and wields it without authority or any social design” (Alternative to Death, p. 36).

f. family life

We have seen that the news of a drought and of the consequent loss of a wheat crop in the United States was received with acclamation in the Chicago Wheat Pit. Such an attitude is in complete opposition to the sentiments expressed in the prayers Holy Church orders us to recite in the Litany of the Saints. The Litany of the Saints is said or sung on Rogation Days, precisely in order to invoke God’s blessing and protection on crops. The Collect of the Mass for Rain was evidently not drawn up by speculators in wheat, for in it we read: “O God, in Whom we live, move and have our being, grant us rain in due season, that when our temporal needs are sufficiently supplied, we may seek with more confidence after things eternal. Through Our Lord Jesus Christ.” In Our Lord’s account of the signs that shall precede the end of the world, he mentions famines. If the peoples of the world allow the financiers to continue to insult God by their attitude to his gifts, they will have themselves to blame for the famines.

There is, however, something still worse. One United States Senator, in 1933, in the presence of the increasing number of proposals to restrict the output of so much of what is required for the normal existence of human beings, declared that the finishing touch to the picture would be given by a Bill to restrict the procreation of children throughout the Union. In all probability, he was unaware that in England letters had already been sent to The Times suggesting this very thing. The following phrases are taken from one of them: “‘The poorer section of the population have outrun the demand for manual labor… they must learn to regulate the expansion of their families as the middle and upper classes have long been doing.”[50] This is a very different ideal of married life from that set before us in the beautiful prayers prescribed by the Church to be said over the newly-wedded pair at Nuptial Mass. Therein the priest begs God that the wife may be a mother fruitful in offspring and that they may both see their children’s children unto the third and fourth generation.

The existence of “surpluses” of production over consumption does not bring home to people who are suffering from the finance mentality that the remedy is to be sought by going against the tide and seeking to increase consumption. No, the remedy they suggest is to bring about a diminution in the number of producers. The fertility of money must be maintained, even if it leads to the sterility of the human race. The Central Bankers will doubtless be ready to oblige by lending money to the state to erect birth-prevention clinics alongside the banks in every important street. As the English taxpayers are still paying interest on the money borrowed by the English government to finance the war that ended with the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, the gradually diminishing population will in all probability still be looking for money to pay the interest on this other loan, when the Archangel Gabriel will summon the last of them, along with the financiers, to listen to the full truth about the order of the world.[51]

“There is very little to encourage people to take the long view—and yet, from the point of view of the state, it is generally the long view that matters. Actually, there is every inducement for taking the short view. Money is the end almost universally sought, whatever the means of acquisition. Company law has been so framed that it is possible for men to make what they can while the going is good and escape responsibility altogether for their actions by the simple means of selling out at the right time and leaving others to deal with the consequences.

“A particularly glaring example of the emphasis of the short view is to be found in the career of the building companies of the nineteen-twenties and thirties. Admittedly, there was a need for houses, but not for houses to be thrown up with little or no regard for quality in great unsightly masses around our big cities and provincial towns. As soon as an estate had been developed and the profit reaped, the company was wound up, and when it was found later that the houses were unfit for habitation, the people to whom they had been sold on mortgage were left high and dry without recourse to anyone. That is one example from one industry. Many others may be quoted but they all have the same characteristics, that a man or group of individuals may bleed a business white and escape entirely the future consequences of their policy by winding-up or selling out before the long term results of their actions have made themselves felt.

“Society has also a very definite interest in seeing that its physical resources are not squandered. In agriculture, it has long been recognised that, whatever temporary advantages may be gained by over-cropping, in the long run no more can be got out of the land than is put back into it. Industry is really very much the same,”[52]

We Catholics may not content ourselves with extolling the sublime dignity of the sacrament of Matrimony and preaching the moral law. We must do that, but in addition we must do all we can to enable young people to get married at a normal age and to fulfil the sacred obligations of the married state. We must take to heart the words of the late Holy Father in the Encyclical on Christian Marriage: “Since it is no rare thing to find that the perfect observance of God’s commands and conjugal integrity encounter difficulties by reason of the fact that husband and wife are in straitened circumstances, their necessities must be relieved as far as possible. And so, in the first place, every effort must be made to bring about that in the state such economic and social methods shall be adopted as will enable every head of a family to earn as much as is necessary according to his station in life, for himself, his wife, and the rearing of his children, for “the laborer is worthy of his hire” (Lk 5:7).” Under the existing monetary system, people were dying of under-nourishment, while food was being destroyed, because it could not be sold at a profit, and many of the survivors were exposed to cruel temptations against the moral law. Is it not right to subject that system to examination, seeing that money is destined by its very nature to facilitate members of families in procuring that sufficiency of material goods they normally require for a virtuous life?

We may fittingly conclude this chapter by a quotation from Pope Pius XII’s Allocution of Christmas, 1942:

“Moved always by religious motives, the Church has condemned the various forms of Marxist Socialism, and she condemns them today, because it is her permanent right and duty to safeguard men from currents of thought and influences that jeopardize their eternal salvation, but the Church cannot ignore or overlook the fact that the worker, in his efforts to better his lot, is opposed by a system which is not only not in accordance with nature but is at variance with God’s plan and with the purpose he had in creating the goods of the earth.… If the issue was once the liberation of a land hallowed by the life of the Incarnate Word of God, the call today is, if We may so express Ourselves, to traverse the sea of errors of our day, and to march on to free the holy land of the spirit which is destined to sustain in its foundations the unchangeable norms and laws on which would arise a social construction of sound internal harmony. With this lofty purpose before Us, We turn from the Crib of the Prince of Peace, confident that his grace is diffused in all hearts, to you, beloved children who recognize and adore him, Christ your Savior, We turn to all those who are united with Us at least by the bond of faith in God.

[1]This may be termed the consideration of modern money from the point of view of Efficient Causality, as it deals with the creation of money or exchange-medium.

[2]The Pope’s own words are: “Malum auxit usura rapar quae non semel Ecclessiae judicio damnata, tamen ab hominibus avidis et quaestuosis per aliam speciam exercetur radem.”

[3]Pope Pius XI in the Encylical Letter Quadregesimo Anno, does not use the word usury, but he speak of the terrible power of those who control credit and adds in the next paragraph that those who survive in the economic struggle are “those only who are the strongest, which often means those who fight most relentlessly, who pay the least heed to the dictates of conscience.”

It is worthy of note that Canon 2351 of the Code of Canon Law treats of certain penalties to be inflicted on those guilty of such crimes as homicide, usury, sale of human beings into slavery, etc.

[4]La justice, et la prét á intérêt (p. 17), by Père Lamarche, O.P. (Sociétè d’Études Religieuses, 38, Quai Mativa, Liège). The same line of argument is followed by Father Lewis Watt, S.J., on page 15 of a pamphlet published by the Catholic Social Guild (Oxford), entitled The Ethics of Interest.

[5]“A fungible thing is one which perishes in the act of serving its natural purpose, one the natural use of which is to be used up. The natural and normal use of a loaf of bread, for instance, is to be eaten. The loaf is a fungible thing” (Father Lewis Watt, S.J. op. cit., p. 2).

[6]Lucrum cessans (gain given up), damnum emergens (resulting loss), periculum sortis (risk) and poena conventualis (liability to a forfeit).

[7]The Role of Money, p. 77.

[8]The Root of All Evil, by Sir Reginald Rowe, p. 94. (Italics mine).

[9]Lex Civilis or the title of civil law is usually spoken of as an extrinsic title justifying the lender in demanding interest on a loan. Dr. Cleary (The Church and Usury, p. 193) points out that it is “the one exception to the general rule that extrinsic titles are reducible to titles of compensation.” Theologians are divided as to the explanation of the validity of this title. All their discussions, as has been already remarked, suppose the independent existence of money or exchange-medium.

[10]The term interest, in the case of the modern banker’s creation and cancellation of exchange-medium, designates the service-charge made for this function. It is an old word with a new meaning. Cf. Money, by Professor O’Rahilly, pp. 102, 272.

[11]The Root of All Evil, p. 108.

[12]The Root of All Evil, p. 102. The inferior officials are to be held responsible only in so far as they are aware of the working of the system as a whole and can react.

[13]Encyclical Letter, Caritate Christi Compulsi (May 3, 1932). The Latin text is pecuniae caritas which may be translated “scarcity (or dearness) of money.”

[14]The Root of All Evil, pp. 102, 103.

[15]The Modern Idolatry, p. 287.

[16]The Role of Money, by Professor Soddy, pp. 78, 80.

In his fine work Alternative to Death (p. 36), the Earl of Portsmouth distinguishes between the system and the men who work it. “Democracy today.” he writes, “is virtually a fiction. The real rulers are the small, often unknown, groups of men who control nearly all the means of affecting political issues.…Probably no country in the world has such able or such upright controllers of its banking system as we have. One of the very reasons why the devil has never been sufficiently visible to provoke revolt is the fact that some of the most honest of men have devoted their lives in all sincerity to the elaboration of this nevertheless dishonest system. Because they have rarely been over-greedy, they have worked the system sufficiently well to mask our decline to the servile state by imperceptible stages.…But while they continue to work such a system, based upon power without responsibility and profit without production, misery and degeneration have walked at the head of the procession of modern progress.”

[17]Quoted by A. N. Field in The Truth About the Slump, p. 109. Mr. Field adds in the same place: “To see that Mr. McKenna was not mistaken, one has only to refer to the file of the London Statist for July last, in an article published during that month, the Statist pointed out what the price decline had meant up to then in the deadweight of the debt Britain owed America. That debt was funded in 1923 at £915,205,000. Since then £35,755,000 had been paid off, leaving £909,452,000 outstanding. The Statist price index number in 1923 was 133, in July last it was 98. Thus the outstanding American debt, adjusted to the, value of money in 1923, would be £1,234,256,000, or £289,051,000 more than the original amount. The burden today is considerably heavier than it was in July last, and the controllers of gold can juggle the burden of the world’s debts about to any extent they please,” As Mr. Field’s book was published in 1931, by July last, he means, in all probability, July 1930.

[18]The Truth about the Slump, pp. 12, 13.

[19]Cf. the extracts from the Report of Pujo Commission which was made public in U.S.A. in 1913, as quoted in The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World, p. 306. According to this report, five banking houses controlled no less than 112 banks and financial and industrial companies. According to Mr. Jeffrey Mark in The Modern Idolatry (1934), p. 123, the directors of eight New York banks then held 2,000 industrial directorships between them.

[20]“Labor members, with important exceptions, although they clamor for the nationalization of the banks, seem mostly so blind to what the banks are up to that they are as likely as not, even if such nationalization were effected, to become unwittingly the slaves of the system” (The Root of All Evil, by Sir Reginald Howe, p. 109).

[21]The Root of All Evil, by Sir Reginald Howe (p. 108).

[22]“If all the men, women, boys and girls, a total of 2,825,772, who were registered as unemployed on September 28, 1931, had stood or sat in one line, shoulder to shoulder, that line at two persons per horizontal yard, would have extended for 802 miles. They would then be standing or sitting about as closely as people sit in a third-class railway-carriage, where the breadth allowed per person is generally a fraction under 18 inches. To get an idea of the length of that line, we may note that from London a direct line 800 miles long at sea level would reach farther than Madrid, Florence or Vienna, and far beyond Berlin” (The Principal Cause of Unemployment, by D. W. Maxwell, p. 13).

[23]The Role of Money, by Professor Soddy (p. 85).

[24]Only a short extract from Sir Robert Peel’s speech is quoted in The Bankers’ Conspiracy. The portion quoted is taken from Arthur Kitson’s other book, A Fraudulent Standard (p. 52). As Sir Robert Peel follows Locke, it is more accurate philosophically to speak of the theory contained in the Bank Act of 1844 as the qualitative theory rather than the substance or commodity theory. Locke, as a nominalist and semi-sensist, is, at best, hazy about the category of substance. He writes: “The complex ideas we have of substance are, as it has been shown, certain collections of simple ideas that have been observed or supposed constantly to exist together.…Ideas of substance as collections of their qualities are all inadequate.…Those who, neglecting that useless supposition of unknown real essences whereby they are distinguished, endeavor to copy the substances that exist in the world, by putting together the ideas of those sensible qualities which are found co-existing in them, etc.…When I am told that something besides the figure, size, and posture of the solid parts of the body is its essence, something called substantial form, of that I confess I have no idea at all…(Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding, Book 2, chapters 23 and 24).

[25]St. Thomas expresses these ideas in pithy fashion: “All other things have some utility in themselves, but not money, which is only the measure of the utility of other things. Hence the use of money does not measure utility through money itself, but through the things which are measured by money” (III Sent., d. 37, q. 1, a. 6. Translation as in Money, by Prof. O’Rahilly, p. 128).

[26]According to the principles of St. Thomas, there is another relation of measure, but obviously it does not apply to money or exchange-medium. “This relation of measure, which is not according to quantity (The quantitative relation of measure is one of equality and inequality), but according to being and truth, is the relation of formal extrinsic causality. This is twofold, inasmuch as the measure is either an object or a model: faculties, habitus, and acts are measured by their object, a work of art or a product of industry by the idea in the artist’s or craftsman’s mind” (Gredt, O.S.B., Elementa Philosophiae, Ed. 5a, n. 162).

[27]Cf. The Bankers’ Conpiracy, by Arthur Kitson (p. 66).

[28]Lawful Money Lectures, by Miss G. M. Coogan, Lecture Four.

[29]Lawful Money Lectures, by Miss G. M. Coogan, Lecture Four.

[30]National Economy and the Banking System of the United States (pp. 21–23) by Robert L. Owen, former Chairman of Senate Committee on Banking and Currency.

[31]Wherever Sir Otto Niemeyer, a member of the Board of the Bank for International Settlements, has been throughout the world, promoting the foundation of Central Banks, in the interests of “financial reconstruction,” he has left behind him suggestions for greater economy and general “tightening of belts.” The reason for this is that the payment of interest on loans must be facilitated, no matter how the unemployed may languish in the midst of potential sufficiency. Irish readers will remember that Professor T. E. Gugenheim Gregory, Sir Otto’s companion in Australia and New Zealand in 1930, was a member of the Irish Banking Commission. He was one of the signatories of the Majority Report of which the recommendations are reminiscent of Sir Otto Niemeyer’s “trail of economy.”

[32]The Fairy Ring of Connemara (pg. 51).

[33]The Fairy Ring of Connemara (pg. 50). In Appendix I if the same work, the author quotes from The Rise and Progress of Poverty in England, by W. G. Wilkins, J. P. a statement of accounts of a parish in 1716 before enclosure, and in 1786, after enclosure. “Thus,’’ comments Mr. Wilkins. “the landlord obtained £663 more rent, which was highly satisfactory. Four farmers at least doubled if not trebled their incomes, and if seventy-eight households were driven off into penury out of this one parish, it was nobody’s business and nobody cared.”

[34]For example, in 1810, three families of the O’Dwyers of Kilnamanagh, whose ancestors had been the chieftains of the countryside since the 7th century, were evicted from their farms near Dundrum (Co. Tipperary), in the clearances carried out by the then Lord Hawarden, a descendant of a Cromwellian officer. Cf. The O’Dwyers of Kilnamanagh, by Sir Michael O’Dwyer pp. 31, 317).

[35]England and the Farmer (pp. 5, 7, 8).

“The seasonal ‘simple interest’ return from land must, as the speeding up process continues, lag ever further behind the cyclic ‘compound interest’ return from trade or manufacture.…The materials of industries become progressively less and less crop products dependent on the rigid seasonal time factor, as the industries themselves produce less and less essential things. They are, therefore, more and more susceptible of the speeding up which goes with the exploitation and waste of exhaustible natural resources, minerals and so forth, instead of the constantly but seasonally renewed fertility of properly worked land. Thus these industries so soon as a demand for their products can be created, tend to pay better than the older staple products. But they will very soon glut their market unless there is…an ever-progressive change of fashion—‘new season’s models’ are the feature of every motor show, etc.,—and the cheap production of articles designed to wear out quickly so as to keep up a constant demand for renewal.…The whole policy is one of waste in order to ‘keep things going’ by an ever-increasing quantity production at the expense of quality” (Flee to the Fields, The Faith and Works of the Catholic Land Movement, p.p. 37, 45, 46).

[36]The Modern Idolatry (pp. 40 and 120–122).

[37]For example, from 1935 to 1938, in Ireland, there was a reduction of 89,029 in the number of pigs bought for curing and exporting alive. In the same period, there was a reduction of 128,874 in the total number of pigs in the country. The Pigs Marketing Board and the Bacon Marketing Board were operating during these years. There must be order in production and marketing, but it must not be an order dictated by the present reversal of order. The result of the subordination of human beings to production and of production to finance, is the gradual decay of production and, worse still, the decay of human personality. Cf. The Servile State and The Restoration of Property, both by H. Belloc.

[38]In his evidence before the MacMillan Committee, Mr. Montagu Norman said: “Broadly speaking, I believe that the salvation of industry in the country lies first of all in the process of rationalisation, and that it is to be achieved by the unity or unification or marriage of finance and industry.…I hope sooner or later…to establish another company which will unite the laity as a whole…to assist industry towards the goal of rationalization.” Rationalization means, in practice, as Mr. Hargrave pithily expresses it, the compulsory squeezing out and closing down of small factories and mills, so that the larger, heavily debt-burdened concerns may be “helped” by the Bank of England via the new industrial financing company. Cf. Professor Skinner alias Montagu Norman (pp. 154, 155).

[39]Bread in Peace and War (pp. 48, 33, 35, 30, 31).

[40]Op. cit., pp. 30, 29, 10, 33. The last remark goes to prove that bakers as well as millers will be financially interested in maintaining the demand for white flour.

“In the march of civilization as we go farther we fare worse. Knowledge of what is wrong is ignored or exploited, in either case for commercial gain. For instance, the steel-roller mill was introduced here in 1872. By it the colored parts of the wheat, the embryo or germ and bran, were totally removed. The flour was dead white. In 1912, the discoveries of Hopkins and of the Pole, Dr. Funk, were announced from which grew the realization that the colored part contained the nerve food…. The mistake of 1872, then, was discovered forty years later; yet, so far from rectifying it, the milling industry is on the eve of greatly amplifying the despoiling apparatus. Thus is knowledge ignored” (Dr. L. J. Picton in England and the Farmer, pp. 128,129).

“‘Well-baked, properly milled, wholemeal bread need only be consumed in about three-quarters the quantity of white bread in order to satisfy hunger and regain health” (Viscount Lymington in England and the Farmer, p. 19).

[41]Bread in Peace and War, pp. 23, 71, 42, 47.

[42]Quoted in the Monthly Bulletin of the Economic Reform Club, July, 1941.

[43]Health via Food, pp. 247, 283, 284.

[44]Bread in Peace and War, pp. 47, 48. “White bread as we eat it now is a scandal and a curse to civilization.…White bread, like white sugar, is a shoddy cheap food that results in £5,000,000 a year being spent in advertisements for patent medicines” (Viscount Lymington in England, and the Farmer, p. 19).

[45]The Abbey Press, Bangor, Co. Down, Ireland.

[46]Op. cit., pp. 11, 12, 13, 14, 39. “Medical science is largely occupied in adapting our bodies to an unnatural way of living, just as agricultural science is largely occupied in adapting our land to an unnatural way of farming. The results are by no means encouraging either way.” (C. Henry Warren in England and the Farmer, p. 66).

[47]Bread in Peace and War, p. 23.

[48]Elsewhere the report says: “For many years, this preparation bore the statement that ‘an old woman. Mother Seigel, etc.’ Your committee arrived at the conclusion that every detail of this statement was an invention. There never was a Mother Seigel, or this wonderful herb.”

[49]Report on Patent Medicines, pp. 10, 11. 13, 14, 15, 20, 23, 24 (published by H. M. Stationery Office).

[50]Quoted by Mr. Jeffrey Mark in The Modern Idolatry, p. 35.

[51]Of course, the City had money invested on the other side too. “On this occasion he (Napoleon) had no option but to raise a loan for the defense of France, The City of London accommodated him with £5,000,000. With this sum he equipped the army which Wellington defeated at Waterloo” (Monarchy or Money-Power, by R. McNair Wilson, p. 107),

[52]The Future of Auditing, by A Group of Accountants (Gee & Company, Potters Bar).

With regard to the statement made by this group of writers that there has been little to encourage people to take the long view, it will be well to quote a few lines from the Report of the British Forestry Committee (1943). “Afforestation emphatically demands the long view, which has not been encouraged. Up to the beginning of the last war,” we read, “the United Kingdom (including Ireland) had no Forest Policy.…The Forestry Commission was established in 1919 as the forest authority. Owing to the lack of stability of finance the Forestry Commission’s operations were subjected to a number of checks… The progress with private woodlands has been disappointing.…The post-war position will demand speedy and large scale action. The requisites for success are available. British conditions are suitable for the rapid growth of good timber. There is sufficient land available in the existing woodlands and uncultivated rough grazing.” Are not Irish conditions suitable also?

Chapter XX

The Political Principles of St. Thomas Aquinas and the Functioning of the Gold Standard

money manipulators and governments

We have seen that for St. Thomas money is meant to be the servant of politics and economics. The art of manipulating money must not be allowed to fall uncontrolled into the hands of private individuals, as they will be tempted to work for instability of price-levels in view of their own gain. A fortiori, the rulers of the state must see to it that the manipulators of money do not get control of the government. Now these two evils—instability of national price-levels and control of governments by financiers—seem to have been allowed to grow apace under the gold standard monetary system. There is no need to dwell further on the former evil, as it has been sufficiently stressed. The latter needs a little elaboration.

Let us first take the testimonies of the rulers of states themselves. When the Federal Reserve Bank, created in 1913 by Mr. Paul Warburg, a German Jew belonging to the banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb and Company, had been a few years in existence, in 1916 to be precise, President Woodrow Wilson thus summed up the situation in U.S.A.: “A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men.…We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the civilized world—no longer a government by conviction and the free vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of small groups of dominant men.”

If we pass to England, we shall find abundant evidence in proof of what Professor Soddy wrote about the Bank of England some years ago: “From being what is known as a bankers’ bank, it has become now almost the government’s government.[1] Mr. Gladstone said: “From the time I took office as Chancellor of the Exchequer (1852), I began to learn that the state held, in the face of the bank and the City, an essentially false position as to finance.…The hinge of the whole situation was this: the government itself was not to be a substantive power in matters of finance, but was to leave the money power supreme and unquestioned. In the conditions of that situation, I was reluctant to acquiesce, and I began to fight against it by financial self-assertion from the first… I was tenaciously opposed by the Governor and Deputy-Governor of the Bank, who had seats in Parliament, and I had the City for an antagonist on almost every occasion.”[2] Mr. John Hargrave significantly adds: “It would astound the Grand Old Man to see the strides that the money power has made in building up and entrenching its position since his day.”

On page 215 of the same work, Mr. Hargrave quotes Mr. Montagu Norman as saying that the difference between the Treasury and the Bank is “the difference between Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee.” To confirm his affirmation that the government—i.e., the Treasury—has to go, cap-in-hand, to the Bank of England in order to get necessary government advances, Mr. Hargrave cites what Sir Thomas L. Heath, Permanent Secretary to the Treasury (1913–1919), writes about it in his book, The Treasury (p. 78): An Act of 59 Geo. III, c. 76, requires that whenever it is deemed necessary for the public service to make application to the Bank of England for any advance authorized by Parliament, such application must be made in writing by the First Lord of the Treasury or the Chancellor of the Exchequer for the time being to the Governor and Deputy-Governor of the Bank.…The practical effect is that the Chancellor has to write to the Governor and Deputy-Governor four times a year (towards the end of March, June, September, and December) to ask them to move the Court of Directors to consent… Mr. Hargrave also quotes Mr. Vincent Vickers, Bank of England director 1910–1919, as follows: “It was not Mr. Winston Churchill, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, who initiated or was to blame for our return to the gold standard in 1925; it was not Mr. Baldwin who decided the terms of the Bank Notes and Currency Act 1928: nor later was it Lord Snowden who personally pigeon-holed that request for a Royal Commission on monetary policy and who substituted so soon afterwards the MacMillan Committee which seemed to some so redolent of Threadneedle Street. Since 1919 the monetary policy of the government has been the policy of the Bank of England, and the policy of Mr. Montagu Norman.” If we link with this the declaration already quoted from Mr. Reginald McKenna, distinguished banker and former Chancellor of the Exchequer, to the effect that “they who control the credit of a nation direct the policy of governments,” we have reliable testimony as to the real ruler of England. In conclusion we may add to this that the Bank of England was empowered by the Income Tax Act of 1918, Section 68, to assess and tax itself with nobody in control.[3]

In point of fact, with the growing influence of American financial interests, power over the British government seems to have passed to the other side of the Atlantic. Mr. Thomas Johnston, M.P., who in 1931 was Lord Privy Seal in the Labor government, wrote: “The City, the financiers and the moneylenders in New York and Paris, refused to put up credits in support of a balanced budget. They demanded a cut in unemployment benefit. They wanted humanity crucified on a cross of gold. We declined absolutely and resigned.…Twenty men and one woman—a British Cabinet—waited one black Sunday afternoon in a Downing Street garden for a final decision from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.”[4]

Besides Mr. Thomas Johnston’s spectacular testimony about the dependence of the British Cabinet on the Federal Reserve Board, there are others to the same effect. Some of them are quoted by A. N. Field in The Truth about the Slump. For example, Sir Josiah Stamp, in an interview in the New York Evening Post, reprinted by the National City Bank in its monthly circular for February, 1926, spoke of the United States Federal Reserve Board as follows: “Never in the history of the world has so much power been vested in a small body of men as in the Federal Reserve Board. These men have the welfare of the world in their hands, and they could upset the rest of us either deliberately or by some unconscious action. Mind you, I am not criticising them, but it is precarious to have such concentrated power vested in such a body.”[5] Again, in his book America Conquers Britain, Mr. Ludwell Denny says; “Many nations may laugh at our State Department, but all must tremble before our Federal Reserve Board. High money rates in the United States early in 1929, for instance, forced an increase in the official discount rates almost at once in England, in ten European countries, in two Latin-American countries, and two in the Far East. And in almost every case that action restricted business and brought suffering to millions of foreign workers. That blow hit Britain hardest of all. It checked her trade revival.… As one British critic said: “It proves our Bank (the Bank of England) is harnessed to Wall Street.” Berlin bankers, as reported in the New York Times, February 8, 1929, ‘declare that it signifies defeat of England’s purpose of restoring London to primacy as the world money center. This wish is considered to have been largely responsible for the altogether too long retention of the 4.5% bank rate.’ Nevertheless the Bank of England, in the face of the most bitter criticism, was forced to raise the money rate to the highest level since the autumn of 1921 to prevent its gold reserve from disappearing—chiefly because there was a speculation orgy in Wall Street. As a result, the British Board of Trade index soon showed a decline in commodity prices, which the British correctly attributed to the rise in European money rates owing to the necessity which devolves upon central banks to withstand the pull of high call money rates in America’ (Manchester Guardian Commercial, May 30, 1929). The London Herald, organ of the Labor Party, had correctly forecast that ‘more unemployment, a slump in trade and dearer living will follow inevitably the increase in the Bank of England discount rate from 4.5% to 5.5%’… ‘The well-being of all of us, not only in England, but in all civilized countries, is affected by the good or bad management of the Federal Reserve system.’ says the Hon. R. H. Brand, Director of Lloyd’s Bank, London.…London is thus harnessed to Wall Street, instead of having Wall Street and the rest of the world dragging at her heels as in pre-war days.”[6]

Again, here is what Mr. Reginald McKenna had to say on this subject at the annual meeting of the shareholders of the Midland Bank on January 28, 1928: “Today, as before the war, the price of gold in America is fixed, and we are apt to assume that the value of gold continues to govern the value of the dollar. But such an assumption is no longer correct. While an ounce of gold can always be exchanged for a definite number of dollars, the value of the ounce will depend on what those dollars will buy, and this, in turn, will depend upon the American price-level, if the price level in America fluctuated according to the movements of gold, the purchasing power of the dollar would still depend, as it did formerly, upon the value of gold. But we know that this is not so. As I have just shown, the American price level is not affected by gold movements, but is controlled by the policy of the Reserve Banks in expanding or contracting credit. It follows, therefore, that it is not the value of gold in America which determines the value of the dollar, but the value of the dollar which determines the value of gold. The mechanism by which the dollar governs the external value of gold is obvious. If the price level outside America should rise in consequence of an increase in the supply of gold, America would absorb the surplus gold; if, on the other hand, the external level should fall in consequence of a shortage of gold, America would supply the deficiency. The movement would continue until the price levels inside and outside America were brought once more into equilibrium. Although gold is still the nominal basis of most countries the real determinant of movements in the general world level of prices is thus the purchasing power of the dollar. The conclusion, therefore, is forced upon us that in a very real sense the world is on a dollar standard.…I conclude that as long as conditions remain at all similar to those we know today America will be able to maintain control over the world level of prices.”

Innumerable other opinions, Mr. Field continues, might be quoted in proof of the fact that the world’s money and prices are chained to the policies pursued by the financiers who control America. But it will be sufficient to conclude with the balanced judgment of Professor Gustav Cassel of Sweden in his book, Post-War Monetary Stabilisation. “The monetary policy of the United States determines the value of the currency of every other gold standard country. The Federal Reserve authorities therefore control not only the general level of prices in the United States, but also the price level of all other gold standard countries in the world.…When the central bank system possesses a gold cover of over 70% to 80% for notes and deposits, while a ratio of 35% to 40% is required by law, it does not in the least matter whether this gold cover is increased or reduced by a few percent. Since the leaders of the United States bank policy are not obliged to pay any consideration whatever to minor fluctuations in the gold cover. This means that the Federal Reserve system is in a position, of course, within certain limits, to regulate the supply of the means of payment in the country without any regard to the movements of gold. Thus the Federal Reserve exercises an independent influence upon the level of prices. Other gold standard countries are compelled to follow suit and to adjust their price-levels in conformity with that of the United States. Otherwise they expose themselves to a depletion of their none too abundant stocks of gold or else to an influx of gold which they could not afford to leave unutilised. The increase or decrease in the stock of gold in the United States, which would be connected with such movements of gold, would have no material bearing on the monetary situation of that country, which, in spite of the fluctuations of its monetary stocks of gold, would be quite able to keep its general level of prices constant. Consequently the price-level of the United States has a determining influence on the world price-level, which is actually regulated by the leaders of United States bank policy.”[7]

the federal reserve system

“In consequence, then, of the huge accummulation of gold in the United States,” writes A. N. Field, “the policy pursued by the United States Federal Reserve Board now determines the general price level of commodities.” Thus the Federal Reserve Board by its control of gold practically controls the trade of the world. We have seen President Woodrow Wilson’s opinion about the United States’ government in 1916, when the Federal Reserve Board had been a few years in existence. “A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit.…We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the civilized world.…The growth of the nation and all our activities are in the hands of a few men.” Now we must ask what is the relation between the Federal Reserve Board and the few men, who, according to President Wilson, control the nation by controlling its system of credit?

First of all, in the same work from which we have been quoting, namely, The Truth About the Slump, Mr. A. N. Field makes clear that there was an all-powerful Money Trust in the United States. He does this by quotations from the Report of the Pujo Commission, set up by Congress soon after Woodrow Wilson had become President in 1912. It is unnecessary to cite here all the extracts which are to be found on pp. 78–80 of Mr. Field’s work and on pp. 306–308 of The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World, but a few lines must be quoted again. The Pujo Commission reported that there was a Money Trust in existence in March, 1913, and it named the following concerns as constituting the inner and directing force:

J. P. Morgan and Company

The National City Bank of New York

Lee, Higginson and Company of Boston and New York

Kidder, Peabody and Company

Kuhn, Loeb and Company

“The first group, which for convenience we will call the inner group, consists of Messrs. J. P. Morgan and Company, the recognized leaders, and Mr. George F. Baker and Mr. James Stillman, in individual capacities and in joint administration of the First National Bank, etc.…The second group, closely allied to this inner and primary group, is composed of the powerful international banking house of Lee, Higginson and Company, and Kidder, Peabody and Company, with three affiliated banks in Boston.

“The third group consists of the international house of Kuhn, Loeb and Company. This firm is only qualifiedly allied to the inner group, yet through its relations with the National City Bank, etc.…it has many interests in common.…Together they have with few exceptions pre-empted the banking business of the important railways of the country.…The powerful grip of these gentlemen is on the throttle, the controls, the wheels of credit, and on their signal those wheels will turn or stop.…The gentlemen constituting this inner circle, however, violated no law in what they have done, so far as we can discover, but that is rather because…the law has not yet properly safeguarded the community against this form of control.”

The Commission reported that by a system of interlocking directorates, stock holding companies and other forms of domination, the above five banking houses controlled no less than 122 banks and financial and industrial companies with resources in capital and reserve totaling the prodigious sum of £4,449,000,000. A full list of the concerns thus controlled was published. The following is a summary:

In the thirty-two transportation companies controlled by the Money Trust were included the leading American railway systems, and among the twelve public utility corporations was the Great Western Union Telegraph Company controlled by Kuhn, Loeb and Company. Among the producing and trading companies controlled by the Money Trust were: Amalgamated Copper, American Smelting and Refining Company, The International Nickel Company, General Electric Company and United States Steel Corporation.

Class of Undertaking

34 banks and trust companies

10 insurance companies

32 transportation companies

(railroads, express and

steamship companies)

24 producing and trading companies

12 public utility companies

(power, light, telegraph, etc.)

112 companies.

Resources in dollars

2,679,000,000

2,293,000,000

11,784,000,000

3,339,000,000

2,150,000,000

22,245,000,000

There was in existence, then, in 1913, an all-powerful Money Trust dominating and controling economic life in the United States. Yet President Wilson, who had denounced the Money Trust, handed over control of the United States to those financiers by the Carter Glass Bill establishing the Federal Reserve Board.

The Bill was passed on Dec. 20, 1913. “Thirteen years later, the publication of The Intimate Papers of Colonel House (1926) showed that the Bill had been framed by the very men officially denounced a few months previously as controling the Money Trust! These men were the people to whom Colonel House, as adviser-in-chief to President Woodrow Wilson, ran for advice as to how to frame a measure to curb the Money Trust.…All the time the good Colonel was firmly of the opinion that the Money Ring should be brought to book. Under date of July 26, 1911, he wrote as follows to Senator Culberson: ‘I think Woodrow Wilson’s remark that the Money Trust is the most pernicious of all trusts is eminently correct. A few individuals and their satellites control the leading corporations.’ Yet when the Colonel, who, according to the editor of The Intimate Papers, Dr. Charles Seymour of Yale, was the unseen guardian angel of the Bill and was indefatigable in providing the President with the knowledge that he sought, was framing the Bill, he laid chief stress on his frequent conferences with bankers.”[8]

After a long talk with Major L. Higginson of Lee, Higginson and Company of Boston and New York, one of the concerns in the inner ring of the Money Trust, Colonel House wrote: “Every banker like Warburg who knows the subject thoroughly has been called upon in the making of the Bill. Major Higginson seemed thoroughly satisfied with the endeavors the administration had made to construct a good and beneficent measure.” No wonder Mr. Jacob Schiff, after the passage of the Bill, was able to write to Colonel House on December 23, 1913: “The bill is a good one in many respects, anyhow good enough to start with and to let experience teach us in what direction it needs perfection, which in due time we shall then get.”

“The foregoing extracts show clearly enough that President Woodrow Wilson and his naive friend and adviser, Colonel House, were mere putty in the hands of these astute financiers. Thinking they were freeing America from an octopus they merely fastened its tentacles more firmly than ever on the people of the United States.”[9]

In view of what has been written in Part One of this book about the function of money according to St. Thomas, another remark must be made about the Federal Reserve Board. One significant alteration was quietly made in the Bill during its passage through the House of Representatives. “As passed, the Act says the discount rate shall be made with a view to accommodating commerce and business. As introduced, there was a further instruction that the rate should be made so as to promote stability of the price-level. This clause had vanished before the Bill reached the Senate and efforts since made to amend it in that direction have been totally unsuccessfull.”[10] One of the essential functions of money has thus been excluded from the aims of the monetary authority of the U.S.A. The monetary authority of the U.S.A. can disregard stability of the national price level. On page 356 of his book, An Outline of Money, published in 1940, Mr. Geoffrey Crowther remarks: “In Great Britain there was a considerable body of opinion, led by economists but backed by industrialists, which demanded a policy of price stabilization. In the United States the same demand inspired Congress, and more than one Bill was introduced to put upon the Federal Reserve Banks the statutory duty of maintaining stable prices. Though none of these Bills reached the statute book, there was no doubt of the strength of the opinion that to seek for stability of prices, rather than of the exchanges, was the primary duty of the monetary authorities. But it has already been made clear that the pursuit of price stability is not compatible with maintenance of the gold standard.”[11]

In chapter five of The Truth About the Slump, Mr. A. N. Field shows that the creator of the Federal Reserve Board was the Jewish banker, Paul Warburg, who was born in Germany on August 10, 1868, and came to America in 1902, becoming a partner in Kuhn, Loeb and Co. and acquiring American citizenship, a few years before the Great War of 1914–1918. Paul Warburg married Miss Loeb, daughter of Mr. Solomon Loeb of the firm of Kuhn, Loeb and Company, in 1894, thus becoming a brother-in-law of the late Jacob H. Schiff, who had also married a Miss Loeb and who had succeeded as head of the firm. In a work in two volumes, The Federal Reserve System: its Origin and Growth, published in 1930, Paul Warburg himself proves that he was the real originator of the Federal Reserve Board. The Federal Reserve Law was duly passed by Congress. It differed very slightly from what was desired by Mr. Warburg, and that gentleman is reported to have said that this difference could be “corrected by administrative processes.” The success of Paul Warburg’s campaign for banking reform on the lines of what his brother, Max Warburg of Hamburg, and other Jewish bankers, had set up in Germany, was greatly facilitated by the great New York financial panic of 1907. It was the failure of the Knickerbocker Real Estate Trust Company which precipitated that panic. Among the members of the Knickerbocker Trust was Solomon Loeb of Kuhn, Loeb and Company. Now it was widely asserted in the United States Congress and elsewhere that the panic was deliberately created by financiers for their own purposes. At any rate it was used to favor Paul Warburg’s scheme.

After having mentioned that Mr. Jacob Schiff of Kuhn, Loeb and Company, along with E. H. Harriman, played an active part in forming the huge amalgamations of railway and other capital known as trusts, Mr. Field goes on to quote from the New Encyclopaedia of Social Reform as follows: “Our railways foster monopoly directly and indirectly. By consolidation and combination, they are building up numerous monopolies in the railroad field, and by the concessions to favored trusts and combines like the Standard Oil, the Beef Trust, the Sugar Trust, etc., they help to build up vast monopolies in manufactures and commerce. The Standard Oil monopoly was directly created by a railway rebate. The Beef Trust is another excellent illustration of a giant monopoly that owes its creation to the fostering care of railroad discrimination.…The formation of vast industrial trusts began in 1872.…Today there are 450 to 500 trusts, with an aggregate capitalization, including the railroad and other franchise trusts, of something like 20,000 million dollars. And still more trusts are forming.…They are reaching out after the land.…They are establishing international relationships aiming to monopolise the globe in their lines of business. And they are joining hands with each other.…On the whole the situation seems to be this: The railways and other big franchise monopolies are coordinating with the great commercial combines into a gigantic machine controlled by a few financiers and created to manufacture or capture profit for them. Events are moving towards a consolidation of interests that will give a handful of capitalists practically imperial power through the vastness of their industrial dominions.…And the railways are generally regarded as forming the basis of the structure, or a large part of it.…Thus the gigantic railroad, industrial, and public utility corporations of the United States are all managed from what is known as ‘the Wall Street end.’…The boards of directors are usually chosen by the banking interests, and of course all matters of policy are either approved of or devised by these same banking interests.”

A. N. Field concludes chapter five with a quotation from the book entitled Other People’s Money, written by Mr. Louis D. Brandeis, the first Jew to be appointed a judge of the United States Supreme Court. In this book, which was published in 1914, Mr. Brandeis says: “The dominant element in our financial oligarchy is the investment banker. Associated banks, trust companies, and life insurance companies are his tools. Controlled railroads, public service and industrial corporations are his subjects. Though properly but middlemen, these bankers bestride as masters America’s business world, so that practically no large enterprise can be undertaken without their participation and approval.”

A great number of people thought that the United States had at last got an honest, powerful money system, when Paul Warburg’s Bill was passed.[12] They hoped that they would be protected from panics and depressions in the future. Mr. Charles A. Lindbergh, member for Minnesota, was under no such illusion. He said in the course of the debate: “I propose to show that it (the Bill) will perpetuate the system which actual experience proves to have been the cause of centralizing wealth, so that a few have robbed the people generally. It is perpetuating a system the very purpose of which is to enable the money loaners, rent collectors, dividend beneficiaries, and speculators generally to take advantage of the actual producers so as to control production and fix prices.” We shall see that Mr. Lindbergh was a true prophet when we study Wall Street Under Oath, the account given by Mr. Pecora of his period of seventeen months (January, 1933 to July, 1934) as counsel for the United States Senate Committee on Banking and Currency in its investigation of stock-exchange, banking, and security markets practices.[13]

Before this Committee, Mr. Pecora informs us, came in imposing succession the demigods of Wall Street: J. P. Morgan, Thomas W. Lamont and other partners of J. P. Morgan and Company; Otto H. Kahn and his partners of Kuhn, Loeb and Company; Charles K. Mitchell and his colleagues of the National City Bank; George Whitney, Morgan partner, and his brother, Richard E. Whitney, President of the New York Stock Exchange; former vice-president Charles G. Dawes; Owen D. Young: Edsel B. Ford (son of Henry Ford), etc., etc.

Before we state the results of the investigation let us see how Kuhn, Loeb and Company compare with the more familiarly known J. P. Morgan and Company, in the estimation of Mr. Pecora. “They (Kuhn, Loeb and Company) could not, in general,” he writes, “begin to match the Morgans in size, ramifications, or power. As against the half billion dollars of Morgan deposits, Kuhn, Loeb and Company, at the end of 1929, had approximately $89,000,000. Their capital, in 1929, did not rise above $25,000,000, as against the Morgans’ $118,000,000. And their various partners held sixty-five directorships in forty-eight corporations, as against almost double that number held by members of the House of Morgan, In the field of investment banking, however—the origination and flotation of new issues of bonds and stocks—the discrepancy between the scale of operations of the two firms was much less marked. Even more than J. P. Morgan and Company, the eleven partners of Kuhn, Loeb and Company were essentially what Mr. Morgan had called ‘merchants of securities.’ Between 1927 and 1931, this firm originated over $1,600,000,000 of bonds, a stupendous total for a single house in half a decade.

“The power of Kuhn, Loeb and Company, moreover, was much more effective than these blanket figures reveal, because of the fact that the firm’s activities were largely concentrated in a single area. They specialized in railroad financing, and here especially they were a very formidable factor. Once upon a time, they had, in combination with Harriman, been powerful enough and bold enough to challenge J. P. Morgan, the elder, in a battle for railroad supremacy, with the famous Northern Security panic of 1907 as the result; and even after three decades of growing Morgan power, they held their own in this particular province. Indeed, from 1927 to 1931, Kuhn, Loeb & Company actually originated no less than fifty-four issues of railroad bonds, totaling $1,137,000,000—far more than J. P. Morgan and Company during the same period, and a substantial part of the entire twelve billions added to the debt of all the railroads of the United States since the World War. Not only in the quantity of railroad securities handled, but in the broader field of influence and control in the railroad world, as well, they were rivals, on practically even terms, of the Morgans.”

Mr. Pecora then speaks of the holding company called the Alleghany Corporation formed by the Morgans, to offset which in the railroad world, Kuhn, Loeb and Company formed the Pennroad Corporation. But when J. P. Morgan and Company were privately offering stock in one or other of the corporations they thus formed, to “preferred lists” of individuals, that is, making gifts of substantial dimensions, for they well knew the stocks were bound to rise, they did not forget Kuhn, Loeb and Company. Kuhn, Loeb and Company were amongst the favored few, so were Bernard M. Baruch, Myron C. Taylor of United States Steel, Owen D. Young of General Electric Company, ex-President Coolidge, General Pershing, William Woodin, Secretary to the Treasury, etc., etc.[14]

Mr. Pecora says that the investigation, which came to an end in June, 1934, “Brought to light a shocking corruption in our banking system, a widespread repudiation of old fashioned standards of honesty and fair dealing in the creation and sale of securities, and a merciless exploitation of the vicious possibilities of intricate corporate chicanery. The public had been deeply aroused by the spectacle of cynical disregard of fiduciary duty on the part of many of its most respected leaders… of great banks, which combined the functions of a bank with those of a stock jobber.…Many aspects of the New Deal, of course, bore no direct relation to the subject matter of the Senate Committee’s inquiry. But four statutes in particular grew out of the effort to cope with the abuses it had revealed. These marked the beginning of a new era in the history of American finance.[15]

That these statutes have had some good effects is fairly certain, but they and the others do not seem to have brought about an essential reform of the functioning of American finance. First of all, it has been freely stated that the Senate Banking and Currency Committee inquiry came to an end when it had successfully attacked opponents of the New Deal and when it should have logically gone on to examine the manoeuveres of New Deal friends. Again, concerning the Gold Bill of 1934, we read in Money Creators: “All efforts on the part of members of both the House and the Senate to delay the Bill long enough to learn its contents were thwarted. The Bill was not even printed and circulated in Congress as required by all Congressional precedent.…The strange thing about the Gold Bill of 1934 is that no one will claim authorship. After signing it, President Roosevelt publicly admitted that he had never read the Bill and yet he was unwilling to tell sincere Congressmen who the authors were.…The Chief Executive was very careful, when signing this Bill, to make it clear to those standing around, including the newspaper reporters, that he had nothing to do with writing it, and had not read it before signing; that he was taking it on official faith from the Secretary of the Treasury. The Secretary of theTreasury, in turn, also stated that he had not read it but that it was what the experts wanted. Well may we wonder why the Chief Executive and the Secretary of the Treasury have not been willing to tell who wrote this Bill.

…If it were announced to the patient and trusting American people that the Gold Bill of 1934 was written by a money-changer and that the preparation of it took place at this man’s office in Wall Street, it is reasonable to suppose that the patient American people would begin to get an insight into the money creators’ trickery.…It is strange that the Treasury Department was never interested in learning the names of those who brought gold back to the United States, particularly in the few weeks following the passage of the Gold Bill in 1934. These people received 35 dollars per ounce, while the American who had 100 dollars in gold, and the poor people who had a few gold coins, were threatened by the President if they did not bring back their gold and get 20 dollars 67 cents per ounce, it certainly pays to be an internationalist![16]

By the Bill of 1913 the Federal Reserve Board had the exclusive power of note issue to the reserve banks as well as the power to fix the discount rate and the accompanying power to increase or decrease the circulating medium of the country at will. The Bank Act of 1935 does not seem to have put any check on these powers. In July, 1938, Miss Coogan wrote: “The United States suffered a tremendous collapse, and only in the last month have there been signs of improvement. This collapse was brought about through a deliberate contraction of the money system to set the stage for the passage of more legislation intended to destroy all personal rights and enslave the working and middle classes of the country. In March, 1937, the Federal Reserve Board increased the required reserves of the member banks on the books of the Central Banks. Again in May of 1937 another increase took place. In the summer of 1937, 1.5 billions of funds collected from the pay envelopes of the workers under the guise of Social Security was used to take out of existence billions of existing bank credit. Those forces set in motion, together with a deliberate drive on the security exchanges, brought about a terrific collapse, particularly in September and October of 1937, and March of 1938.” The plan outlined in The U.S.A. Bankers Magazine (26th August, 1934) is being pursued: “Bonds and mortgages must be foreclosed as rapidly as possible. When through a process of the law the common people lose their homes they will become more docile and more easily governed through the influence of the strong arm of government applied by a central power of wealth under the control of leading financiers. This truth is well known among our principal men now engaged in forming an imperialism of capital to govern the world. By dividing voters by the political party system, we can get them to expend their energies in fighting over questions of no importance. Thus by discreet action we can secure for ourselves what has been so well planned.”[17]

The process of centralization of the control of exchange-medium in the United States begun in 1913 seems to have been continued by the Gold Bill of 1934 and the Bank Act of 1935. The Board of Governors appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate only, according to the last-named Act, continues the process by which Section 8 of Article I of the Constitution of the United States has been rendered nugatory. That Section of the Constitution provides that “Congress shall have power to coin money, regulate the value thereof and of foreign coin.” Now Congress consists of two houses. The House of Representatives constitutes the direct representation of the citizens. The other part of Congress is the Senate, which does not directly represent the citizens. The House of Representatives has nothing to say in the exercise of the sovereign power of issuing exchange-medium.

naturalistic forces working

for centralization

The accounts given of the forces at work in the United States, in such books as All These Things, by A. N. Field, and Fools Gold, by Fred R. Marvin, as well as in the issues of the Revue Internationale des Societes Secrets of 1st February, 1938, and 15th January, 1939, are ominous for the future. The Revue Internationale des Societes Secretes of 15th January, 1939, insists emphatically that “there is in the United States a Brains Trust of Jews and Scottish Rite Masons.…It must be borne in mind that for numerous reasons the American Supreme Councils of the Scottish Rite wield a preponderant influence over the Scottish Rite Masonry of the entire world.[18] First of all, because the higher degrees were inaugurated and then remodelled by the American Jewish Masons, S. Morin and Dalcho, with the help of some other Jews. Secondly, the European Supreme Councils have taken their origin from those of the United States. Thirdly, there is a close alliance between the Supreme Councils of the Scottish Rite and the Jewish Masonry of the B’nai B’rith. Finally, the Supreme Councils of the Scottish Rite direct the majority of the lodges of the United States. Thus, thanks to the great number of Masons in the States, about 3,300,000, they exercise an enormous influence on the government.”

Mr. F. R. Marvin, “the Senator from Alaska,” insists upon the socializing tendency of the New Deal, in his able and enlightening book, Fools Gold. “The philosophy upon which the New Deal is founded,” he writes, “is destructive. It has appeared during the ages under many names and has been propagated by many different groups and organizations. It is best known today as socialism and communism. This philosophy is un-Christian because it is based wholly upon a materialistic conception, would subordinate and, in the end, eliminate the spiritual side of life; all of which leads to the deification of man. This book is offered to present briefly—and only briefly—the nature of that philosophy; how it gathered force on the Continent many years ago; how, when, and by whom it was introduced into the United States; how it has been knowingly and intentionally advanced through the use of various organizations and movements resulting in a number of its leading exponents being installed in key positions in the Federal government; how it has shaped much of the restrictive, regulatory and confiscatory legislation now on the statute books; and how, if carried to its final conclusion, it will result in the complete socialization of this country and the abolition of the institution of private property, the foundation upon which rests all of our institutions, including the home and religion.…This book is not presented as a direct attack upon either the New Deal or the present administration at Washington. It is emphatically non-partisan.…The truth is, that for a number of years both the Republican and Democratic parties have imposed several socialistic nostrums upon the American people through the channels of legislation. Both parties—and the one is no more responsible than the other—have established boards, bureaus and commissions to put these socialistic proposals into effect. These boards, bureaus and commissions always started modestly and with comparatively small appropriations. Each succeeding year, however, they enlarged their personnel, expanded their functions and secured larger appropriations. As a nation we have been drifting. Slowly but surely, organized agencies have maneuvered us into the swift and destructive current of socialistic thought.…

“Those who pick up the trail of the socialistic forces supporting the late Senator La Follette in 1924, and follow that trail down to the nomination of Franklin D. Roosevelt by the Democratic Convention in 1932, will find the connection between these forces and the delegates pledged in the primaries to insist upon the nomination of Mr. Roosevelt. Space permits hitting only a few high spots.…Let us turn to those who, because of the nature of their activities, have been labelled brain trusters. The unquestioned head of this group was—and probably still is—Professor Felix Frankfurter of Harvard. The Unofficial Observer, writing in the Washington Post of March 11, 1934, had this to say: ‘Prof. Felix Frankfurter’s intimacy with President Roosevelt dates back to the Wilson Administration.…President Roosevelt would have welcomed him in almost any position up to, and probably including, the Treasury portfolio or the governorship of the Federal Reserve Board.…The most he (Frankfurter) would do was to accede to Roosevelt’s request that he supply the Administration with a hand-picked group of liberal lawyers’… General Hugh S. Johnson… in the Saturday Evening Post of October 26, 1935, says: “Shortly after election there began to occur one of the cleverest infiltrations in the history of our government.…The Professor (Frankfurter) himself has refused every official connection. His comings and goings are almost surreptitious. Yet he is the most influential single individual in the United States. His ‘boys’ have been insinuated into obscure but key positions in every vital department.”[19]

In his painstaking and well-documented work, All These Things, Mr. A. N. Field shows that the same socializing tendencies are to be found in the P.E.P. (Political and Economic Planning) and the New Deal policies in Great Britain and the United States respectively. The public is being stampeded and brutally coerced by the New Deal, whereas the English must be dealt with slowly and asked to forego freedom in the name of patriotism.[20] With regard to the personages engaged in the work of socialistic planning in the United States, Mr. A. N. Field quotes from a radio address by Mr. Louis T. McFadden, delivered on May 2, 1934. Mr. McFadden was a banker and an ex-President of the Pennsylvania Bankers Association. He was in Congress from 1915 to 1934 and for over seventeen years was a member of the House Banking and Currency Committee and for twelve years its chairman. He was defeated for Congress in the autumn following the radio address from which we are about to quote, and, according to one testimony cited by A. N. Field, “by a flood of Jewish money in his district.” In the radio address above mentioned Mr. McFadden said: “The original ‘Brain Trust’ was composed of Professor Raymond Moley, Professor Rexford Tugwell, and Justice Brandeis’s contribution—A. A. Berle, Jr., and Bernard M. Baruch’s contribution—General Hugh S. Johnson. To these must be added Professor George K. Warren and Professor James Harvey Rogers, the gold specialist twins, and another Mr. Justice Louis D. Brandeis confrére—Professor Felix Frankfurter, as well as James M. Landis, Jerome Frank, and another Bernard M. Baruch contribution—Donald Richberg, as well as Frederick C. Howe, Harry L. Hopkins, Clarence Darrow, Mordecai Ezekiel, Harold Ickes. One must not omit the Secretary of Agriculture, Henry A. Wallace, nor Henry Morgenthau, Sr., who is a sort of super-adviser of his illustrious son,”

From various sources, Mr. Field gives sketches of many of these advisers, showing their Socialist and Communist tendencies and connections. Space does not allow of more than a few words about the chief personnages. Justice Louis (Lubitz) D. Brandeis, Bernard M. Baruch and Professor Felix Frankfurter.

Mr. Justice Brandeis, the first Jew to be appointed to the United States Supreme Court Bench, is a prominent Zionist leader. The Chicago Daily Tribune of July 22, 1922, said: “A Jew, Justice Lubitz Brandeis, ruled the White House by secret telephone.”
The Jewish-owned New York Times of 28th January, 1934, is quoted as saying: “The underlying philosophy of the New Deal is the philosophy of Justice Brandeis.”

The Jewish financier, Bernard M. Baruch. the “adviser to Presidents Wilson, Harding, Coolidge and Hoover,” who has now been made Minister by Roosevelt, specialized in organizing various concerns producing or dealing in tobacco, copper, tungsten, rubber and steel. He was appointed by President Wilson a member of the War Industries Board. In the course of an examination into the functioning of this Board by a Congressional Committee, the following passage occurs:

“Mr. Jefferis: In other words you determined what anybody could have ?

“Mr. Baruch: Exactly: there is no question about that. I assumed that responsibility, sir, and the final determination rested with me.

“Mr. Jefferis: What?

“Mr. Baruch: That final determination, as the President said, rested with me; the determination of whether the Army or Navy would have it rested with me; the determination of whether the railroad administration could have it, or the Allies, or whether General Allenby should have locomotives, or whether they should be used in Russia, or used in France…

“Mr. Jefferis: And all those different lines, really, ultimately, centered in you, so far as power was concerned?

“Mr. Baruch: Yes, sir, it did. I probably had more power than perhaps any other man did in the war; doubtless that is true.”

Mr. Field then adds: “If the foregoing statements correctly represent the position, it would appear that during the portion of the War (1914–1918) in which the Allies were largely dependent upon supplies from the United States, the Allied Commanders-in-Chief in the field, and the Allied governments behind them, had to conform in their plans of campaign to what it suited Mr. Bernard M. Baruch, Jewish war dictator of the United States, to permit them to have in the way of war supplies. According to statements made in various quarters, Mr. Baruch today (1936) has enormous control over the companies and corporations comprising the munitions industry of the United States.”

Professor Felix Frankfurter, who is alleged to have supplied the legal brains for the Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration, is an Austrian Jew, born in Vienna in 1882. He was admitted to the American Bar in 1905, and is head of the law department of Harvard University. In 1917, Professor Frankfurter endeavored to enlist the sympathy of ex-President Theodore Roosevelt on behalf of a man who had thrown a bomb into a procession in California, killing ten persons and injuring fifty. In a letter of December 19, 1917, the ex-President replied: “Thank you for your frank letter. I am answering it at length because you have taken and are taking…an attitude which seems to me to be fundamentally that of Trotsky and the other Bolshevik leaders in Russia, an attitude which may be fraught with mischief to this country.… I have just received your report on the Bisbee deportation.…Your report is as thoroughly misleading a document as could be written on the subject. No official, writing on behalf of the President, is to be excused for failure to know and clearly set forth that the I.W.W. is a criminal organization.…Here again you are engaged in excusing men precisely like the Bolsheviks in Russia, who are murderers and encouragers of murder, who are traitors to their allies, to democracy and to civilization, as well as to the United States, and whose acts are nevertheless apologised for on grounds, my dear Mr. Frankfurter, substantially like those which you allege.”

In his letter of 7th January, 1940, to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Pope Pius XII said: “When that day dawns,—and We would like to hope that it is not too far distant—on which the roar of battle will lapse into silence and there will arise the possibility of establishing a true and sound peace dictated by the principles of justice and equity, only he will be able to discern the path that should be followed who unites with high political power a clear understanding of the voice of humanity, along with a sincere reverence for the divine precepts of life as found in the Gospel of Christ. Only men of such moral stature will be able to create the peace that will compensate for the incalculable sacrifices of this war and clear the way for a comity of nations, fair to all, efficacious and sustained by mutual confidence. We are fully aware of how stubborn the obstacles are that stand in the way of attaining this goal, and how they become more difficult to surmount.”[21]

If we take full account of the vigorous naturalism of Freemasonry and the still more vigorous naturalism of the leaders of the Jewish nation down the ages, it is to be feared that Mr. Roosevelt will have considerable difficulty in maintaining that sincere reverence for membership of Christ inculcated in the Gospel, which the Holy Father says is indispensable for the creation of a just peace.

Another point must be briefly touched upon in this connection. Some Catholics stress the fact that there are in the United States, for example, many nominal Christians who are wealthier than any individual Jew. That is true, but it does not prove anything against the point here stressed, namely, the superior driving force of the Jews, as an organized body, in the struggle Satan is waging for naturalism. The Jewish international financiers are members of a nation that refuses to accept the supernatural Messias and looks forward to its own naturalistic domination. The Morgan combination is doubtless powerful. Mr. Pecora informs us that “all the Morgan partners were likewise participants in the firms of Morgan, Grenfell and Company, of London, and Morgan et Cie, of Paris. Each of these European affiliates had distinguished resident members such as Mr. E. C. Grenfell, Member of Parliament, and Director of the Bank of England, and Mr. Vivian H. Smith, head of the Great Royal Exchange Assurance Corporation; men high in the financial circles of London and Paris, members of numerous directorates, and well equipped to take care of any interests Morgan and Company might maintain in European territory.”[22] Yet that unity of financial interests, great as it is, in spite of divergencies of nationality, has not the same cohesion as that, for example, between the Warburgs in the United States and Max Warburg and Company of Hamburg, of which firm a partner, Dr. Carl Melchior, was the only non-Parliamentary member of the main German Peace Delegation at Versailles in 1919.[23]

Mr. Louis T. McFadden gives us some idea of these racial links, in his speech in the United States Congress on January 24, 1934: “Mr. Chairman,” he said, “understanding that Henry Morgenthau is related by marriage to Herbert Lehmann, Jewish Governor of the State of New York, and is related by marriage or otherwise to the Seligmans, of the international Jewish firm of J. and W. Seligman, who were publicly shown before a Senate Committee of investigation to have offered a bribe to a foreign government: and to the Lewissohns, a firm of Jewish international bankers; and to the Warburgs, whose operations through Kuhn, Loeb and Co., the International Acceptance Bank, and the Bank of Manhattan Co., and other foreign and domestic institutions under their control, have drained billions of dollars out of the United States Treasury and the bank deposits belonging to United States citizens; and to the Strauses, proprietors of R. H. Macy & Co., of New York…and that Mr. Morgenthau is likewise related or otherwise connected with the Jewish banking community of New York and London, Amsterdam, and other foreign financial centers…it seems to me that Henry Morgenthau’s presence in the United States Treasury…is a striking confirmation of the statement made by me on May 29, 1933.”[24]

All these wealthy Jews are in agreement in their anti-supernatural outlook. The wealthy nominal Christians, on the other hand, not only do not put themselves at the point of view of membership of Christ, but do not see anything un-Christian or unnatural in the reversal of order prevalent in the business world. This reversal of order consists in an organization such that members of Christ (actual or potential) are held to exist for the production of material goods and the production of material goods is considered subordinate to the manipulation of money. We need not wonder, then, that the Jews, in spite of divisions and rivalries amongst themselves, have practically eliminated the idea of membership of Christ from business. In that they have been powerfully aided by the naturalistic influence of Freemasonry on so many of the nominal Christians. It would be interesting, for example, to find out exactly, if it were possible, all that lay behind the fairly recent action of the Washington State Department in regard to Hungary. The New York World, Oct. 21, 1928, published an interview with a ‘spokesman’ of financial interests to the effect that the Hungarian monarchy would not he restored as announced by Premier Bethlen because “Count Bethlen knows the bulk of the money put up by the financiers was passed conditionally upon the continuation of the (Horthy) regency, and that any violation of the agreement would not only halt any future investments or loans, but cause the recall of the bulk of that already in the country, estimated at upwards of 200 million dollars.” The World story continues: “That there will not be any change in the Hungarian government is also the view of Ralph Beaver Strassburger, financier, number 60 Broadway, who is a member of the American group of Hungarian investors. He is in close touch with Budapest and goes there every year.”[25]

the german-jewish inspiration

of the federal reserve system

We have seen that Mr. Paul Warburg, the creator of the Federal Reserve Bank, came to the United States from Germany in 1902. From the memoirs of Prince Max of Baden, we learn that his brother, Max Warburg, occupied a most influential position in German banking circles. The control of German banking over the lives of the German people is outlined for us in chapter six of The Truth About the Slump. Let us examine it briefly so that we may have some idea of the system Paul Warburg aimed at imposing on the United States and through the United States on the world. Mr. Field first gives us the opinion of Sir Oswald Stoll, who says: “The financial ring which girdles the earth is gathered from all nations. Powerful elements in it are essentially American, but the dominating influence is Teutonic.”[26] Mr. Field then continues: “Of the German banking system in particular Sir Oswald said: ‘Six great German banks control scores of thousands of million of capital throughout the world, through direct and indirect associations and silent partnerships. See Document No. 593 of the United States Senate issued at Washington by the National Monetary Commission.’ This American government document is a bulky volume of 1,012 pages.…It shows how the financial ring holds German industry in the hollow of its hand.”[27]

Mr. Field quotes Dr. L. J. Dillon on the close alliance in German trade between the banks and the cartels. “A cartel is a ‘trust’ or ‘syndicate’ of trades or industries. These trusts make binding agreements as to output, markets, profits, and prices. Each cartel has a monopoly of a given district.…Under the cartels the German retail dealer becomes a mere agent. He may buy and sell only from his local cartel. He may buy and sell only such goods as the cartel allows: and the buying and selling price and the quantity he may sell are fixed by the cartel. The cartels in their turn are controlled by the banks, which virtually own them. Most British people have heard of the great German dye trust.…The cartels of Germany were largely built up by Jewish bankers of that country, and later German-Jewish bankers in the United States played a prominent part in building up the great trusts there by means of which they brought American industry under their own control.… If the American people are to gain a clear understanding of the system of financial control which is about to be imposed upon international commerce through credit operations, and which has been gradually developing in the United States since the passage of the Federal Reserve Act, the best way is to observe the system as it exists in Germany.[28] Its home is in that country where it has been molded into a perfect machine by a small group of men practically all Jews.

“It is not a question of the adequacy of the wage which the system allows for service as opposed to what service would bring in a free and open labor market, but it is question of the possibilities of exploiting everybody.…Should even the most powerful fail to become a cog in the system, he is economically broken, and he is a lucky man if he can gain a livelihood for himself and his family thereafter. As will be shown, this system of punishment has been introduced into the United States.…The key to the situation…lies in the German law which permits banks to hold shares in other banks and in industrial corporations. Until the passage of the Federal Reserve Act such privileges were not accorded banks in the United States for fear that there might develop a system of overlordship which has reached such perfection in Germany. Eventual control of industry and the banking facilities of the country would necessarily drift into the hands of a few. But the Jewish system of Germany has led and directed such a movement for concentration and apparently with a conscious objective. The result is that the interlocking directorates of the greatest German banks, about six in number, dominate the country. The list would include: The Reichsbank of issue for the government bankers central bank, the directors of which are responsible for the depreciation of the German mark and the suffering which it entailed: the Disconto Gesellschaft; Max Warburg & Co. of Hamburg, to which was allocated the shipping of Germany, and which controlled the North German Lloyd and Ham-burg-American lines: the Deutsche Bank, mainly concerned in the development of the metal industries: and the Bank für Handel und Industrie ( Darmstadter Bank). It is quite possible to contend that others should be included.… In any event with the Reichsbank as a key bank the list is substantially correct. The outstanding fact is that by a system of interowning stocks, interlocking directorates, assignment of shares of interest, and by a mutual arrangement of interests, the banking system is one whole.…

“The control lies, perhaps, in the hands of a hundred men who cluster in the directorates of the largest corporations, and of whom 95% are Jews. As is usual in associations of this character, there are a few who lead. While the figure of Max Warburg, of Hamburg, may not loom large three thousand miles away as the dominating figure of this aggregation, since the death of Walter Rathenau, the Warburg influence has been the directing force, has furnished the financial finesse which has enabled his group greatly to increase its power, and this has been mainly accomplished through the faithful co-operation of his two brothers, Paul and Felix, in New York. At the present time these bankers absolutely control and exploit for their own gain four-fifths of the internal commerce of Germany, whether industrial, agrarian, or what not. The residual one-fifth represents small transactions between individuals in small communities in which the profit is nominal.

“The inquiring individual will wonder how it is possible to include within the above designation the word ‘agrarian.’
How are farm products controlled? The history of this phase of their undertaking is an interesting one, and its accomplishment furnished a most difficult task. But it was eventually achieved. The control of the markets, and the methods of transportation, the organization of land banks for the purpose of giving credit, these banks being linked in with the general system, all comprised the machinery which enslaved the farmer. The workingman was captured and held through the imposition of social insurance laws, compulsory health insurance, for instance, as was fully described by Bismarck, who said that these laws were passed to throw ‘a gold chain around the necks of workers.’”[29]

Thus we have seen the same bankers interested in the installation of bolshevism in Russia and in the erection of a financial system in the United States after the German model. The National-Socialist rulers of Germany have taken over the system elaborated by the Jewish bankers. They have, however, introduced one important modification, inasmuch as the issuing of the national exchange-medium has been made completely independent of gold. It is adapted to the actualization of the potential resources of the country. But the exchange-medium is loaned into existence and the government controls all lending and borrowing. This last point means slavery. The rejection of the supremacy of the Mystical Body of Christ by the deification and exaltation of the German race and blood reinforces this evil, for it means in practice the abrogation of the objective moral law, as we have seen.

All these systems thus tend in the same direction, namely, to the treatment of human beings not as persons but as mere individuals. It is the Servile State, the return of slavery in a worse form than before the coming of Our Lord. “Our Lord Jesus Christ,” writes Pope Leo XIII, “is the origin and source of all good, and just as mankind could not he freed from slavery bin by the sacrifice of Christ, so neither can it he preserved but by his power.…What the life of man is from which Jesus has been expelled…. what is its morality and its end, may be learned from the example of nations which have not the light of Christianity.…Those who forsake him…. seek by that very act their personal destruction, and at the same time as far as they can, make society in general fall back into the very abyss of evils amid disasters from which the Redeemer out of his love had delivered mankind.”[30]

the federal reserve board and the struggle for world financial supremacy

Some account of the part played by the Federal Reserve Board and the American Money Trust in the international struggle for control of raw materials, commerce and industry, is to be found in Mr. A. N. Field’s book. The Truth About the Slump, and in Mr. Luduell Denny’s work, America Conquers Britain.[31] Mr. Field says that Mr. Ludwell Denny’s book is “worth the closest study of all who desire to see civilization freed from its present domination.” This praise for a remarkable book the present writer is happy to endorse. It is a pity, however, as Mr. Field remarks, that “although Kuhn, Loeb and Company are mentioned in the text, no entry appears in the index and the same is true of the important International Acceptance Bank,” founded by Warburg in 1921. However, the omission is not a serious handicap for the reader who knows that “the frequent reference to the ‘Harriman interests’ is merely to the Warburg interests under another and less suggestive name, and the Pujo Commission report shows that the activities of National City Bank, of which Mr. Denny’s book is full, have been closely associated with the Warburg group.”[32]

“Internationally,” writes Mr. Ludwell Denny, “there is a three-cornered struggle among the British, the American, and the European trusts, and consequent efforts of each to penetrate industries and markets of the others. I. G. (Interesses Gemeinschaft Farbenindustrie), the German Dye Trust, has tried repeatedly to form a world cartel. It has achieved limited agreements. But in the general field I.G. has failed to draw Britain into its European cartel.…Several times when Lord Melchett has been on the point of making agreements for Imperial Chemical Industries with the I. G. German-French cartel, the London government for defense reasons has intervened to prevent such an alliance from becoming more than a partial gentlemen’s agreement. The tendency is towards two great world trusts. German I.G. versus British I.C.I., with American capital trying to increase its influence over both foreign rivals. This has brought about a division in American capital, with the Morgan-Chase-General Motors group supporting British I.C.I. and the Rockefeller group supporting German I.G. British I.C.I. has acquired substantial minority holdings in General Motors, Allied Chemical and Dye and du Pont Chase Securities Corporation of New York in co-operation with British I.C.I. formed in April, 1928, each holding equal stock, the Finance Company of Great Britain and America. That joint company announced that its business would be that of bankers, concessionaires, merchants, promoters, prospectors, miners, ship owners, operating in chemical and other industries in Europe, the British Empire, and the United States. On its Committee, in addition to officers of British I.C.I. and Chase National Bank, are officials of General Motors, American International Corporation, American Car and Foundry, American Locomotive, International Paper, American Railway Express, Metropolitan Life Insurance, and Bethlehem Steel. Some of the British Board members are Lord Reading, Lord Melchett, Lord Colwyn, and Sir Harry McGowan.…

“Countering that partial alliance between British I.C.I. and one group of American capital, is a partial alliance of the Rockefeller-Ford interests with German I.G. This latter alliance is represented by the newly-formed American I.G. Chemical Corporation.…I.G. agreements with American producers or affecting American producers, in addition to those mentioned above, are summarised by the Commerce Department in 1928: The German Dye Trust’s interests in the American Chemical industry include a dyestuffs production pact with an American Company effected in 1924… joint production with American rayon producers controlled by the British Courtaulds, etc., etc.”[33]

Among the directors of the American I.G. Corporation are: “Mr. Edsel Ford, president of the Ford Motor Company; Mr. Walter Teagle, president of the Standard Oil Company; Mr. Charles Mitchell, chairman of the International Acceptance Bank. These Americans represent an aggregation of capital even greater than that of German I.G., and, when combined with the latter, create a potential financial concentration of unprecedented proportions.…

“As a result of these manifold developments in the international chemical industry—growing out of the conflict between the British I.C.I. and the German I.G., the Anglo-American Oil rivalry, and the world struggle between Ford and General Motors (du Pont)—there are thus beginning to form two great opposing international capital groups, American-British and American-German.”[34]

In connection with the above, Mr. A. N. Field remarks that “in the light of the Pujo Report’s revelations as to the association of the American companies in both groups in the Money Ring under the Federal Reserve System, it is difficult to believe in the idea of fierce competition between them. For example, in 1928, when the National City Bank organized United Aircraft and Transport, Standard Oil, Ford, and their alleged deadly enemy, General Motors, were all represented on the same board.”[35] It seems far more likely that the directing powers in the American Money Ring are aiming at their own supremacy over Europe and the world. We may see indications of this in some of Mr. Denny’s revelations. Let us glance first at the growing American control of Great Britain.

At the end of the chapter entitled America Invades the Dominions, Mr. Denny maintains that Great Britain is “unable to stand alone, either as a nation or as an empire, against the growing European economic alliance pressing upon her from one side and the larger American economic unit challenging her from the other side. Britain is approaching the time when she must decide on a working agreement with the European cartel or with the United States.”[36] Britain’s financial alliance with—some would say financial dependence on—the United States, which was well under way before the present war, will inevitably advance still further during the war. “By March, 1929,” writes Mr. Field, “American General Electric had bought 60% of the stock of British General Electric. Early in 1929, the leading electrical manufacturing concerns in Britain: British Thompson Houston, Metropolitan Vickers, Edison Swan, and Ferguson Pailin were fused into the Associated Electrical Industries in which the principal shareholder was American General Electric.…In 1929 the Utilities Power and Light Corporation, an American concern, bought up the entire common stock of the Greater London Counties Trust, controlling the seven chief power companies of Britain, supplying power on a monopoly basis to 95 cities in England and Scotland. It also controls the Edmondson Electrical Corporation owning twelve electric supply companies in Britain. A British government inquiry was made into this American ownership of the motive power of British industry. The Minister of Transport, Colonel Ashley, told the House of Commons, on Feb. 18, 1929, that efficient operation was of more consequence than ‘whether the capital happens to be British or American.’[37]

“The late Lord Birkenhead obliged the American owners by becoming the ornamental British chairman of the (last-mentioned) concern.…Under the heading ‘Grabbing Raw Materials,’ Mr. Denny tells of the amalgamation in 1928 of the British Mond Nickel Co. and the International Nickel Co. of New Jersey, with control in America according to the New York Times (and Manchester Guardian Commercial). The Mond Company is, as is well-known, a Jewish concern.…[38] Although Britain has smelting control of 70% or so of the world’s tin output, yet in June, 1929, the British-American Tin Corporation was organized and was said to represent more than 80% of the British controlled tin production.”[39]

The following British press communique appeared on February 19, 1941: “Mr. Averell Harriman will come to London within a fortnight. President Roosevelt indicated that Mr. Harriman will handle such questions as the British Defense Estimates, Priorities, and Contracts.” On this communique, The Social Creditor of March 1, 1941, makes the following comment: “Messrs. Harriman, the New York financiers, are more or less ‘Gentile front’ for Messrs. Kuhn, Loeb and Company. They were granted enormous concessions, amounting to thousands of millions of dollars, by Lenin and Trotsky, for the industrialisation of Russia. These were carried out in the Socialist paradise practically by slave labor, directed by American technicians, thus providing the American ‘Prosperity’ boom. Evidently, it is not too early to prepare for the ‘reconstruction’ of Europe in general, and Great Britain in particular, through the same channels and similar ‘Socialist’ methods.”

Let us now take some proofs of American financial interest in Germany. “American General Electric is said to have large holdings in Italian super-power which is making that country independent of British coal.… In 1929 it increased its holding in the German electrical manufacturing trust, the A.E.G., to one-third, and made an agreement with it for co-operation in every country in Europe.… In the winter of 1928–29, slackness in shipbuilding accounted for 32% of Britain’s unemployed. Germany’s mercantile marine has been brought up to 80% of its pre-War strength by the building of new tonnage. This building has been financed mainly by the ‘Harriman interests’ which, as we have seen, seems to be just another name for the Warburg group. America, we are told, has now on a conservative estimate a three-quarter interest in the North German Lloyd line, and another big first mortgage on the Hamburg-America line.”[40] “Germany’s new ships,” writes Mr. Denny, “including the victorious S.S. Bremen, represent Yankee money.…The United States is thus rebuilding a new German commercial fleet. This is a combination of American capital and German skill—similar to the combination in the chemical, automobile, aviation, electrical, and other industries—to compete with the British. The effect is threefold. First, it makes Britain’s task of maintaining a profitable merchant marine naval reserve more difficult. Second, it enables American capital to profit in the trans-Atlantic trade with vessels of lower operating costs and stronger competitive power than American-flag ships. Third, it retains the most lucrative, coastwise, and Atlantic-Panama Canal-Pacific trade for American-flag ships, which, under the protective policy excluding foreign ships, enables this country to build up a merchant naval reserve.”[41]

It is worth noting that, in 1914, both the German Emperor and the banking house of Kuhn, Loeb and Co., were large shareholders in the Hamburg-America line. So much we learn from the memoirs of Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, British Ambassador at Washington from 1913 to the end of 1917.[42] Again, the Governor of the Bank of England, Mr. Montagu Norman, spent part of his apprenticeship in New York, with the banking firm of Brown Brothers & Co., now Brown Brothers, Harriman & Co.[43]

In Chapter XVII, we saw that the center of Jewish financial activity was moved from Spain and Portugal to Amsterdam and again from Amsterdam to London at the time of the “Glorious Revolution.” Our epoch seems to have witnessed the transference of the center from London to New York, the Great War (1914–1918) being utilized for the purpose. Though many, including the present writer, do not agree with Major Douglas’s social credit scheme of reform of the monetary system, nobody questions his knowledge of the financial world. According to Major Douglas, the real objectives of the Great War (1914–1918) were the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the League of Nations, and the financial subjugation of Great Britain. Thus we see that he agrees with what has been said above about the removal of the Jewish financial center from London to New York. Then about 1930, he pointed out the proximate preparations for the next war. We read in The New English Weekly of Jan. 8, 1940, from the pen of Eric S. de Mare, that, about ten years before, Major Douglas had written “If there is a spark of nobility left in this country (England) the day the next war breaks out, the local (i.e., national) representatives of Finance will face a firing party in the Long Gallery of the Tower.” Major Douglas was evidently aware of the truth which was emphasised by The Weekly Review of May 30, 1940, in the following terms: “The most important of the things we have said and repeated—and repeated with insistence—is the truth that the German army which now proposes to destroy this country…was revived by the bankers of London and New York, led by the Bank of England. That is the major political event of our time, and only here in The Weekly Review was any word breathed of it.”[44]

Major Douglas seems to have been quite well aware of the reason for the weakening of France after the Great War. Another war was being prepared, in order to consolidate the position already attained and proceed further with the preparations for the coming of the natural Messias. According to Major Douglas the objectives of the international financiers in the present conflict are as follows:

“(1) The establishment of the International Police State on the Russian model, beginning with Great Britain. ‘Can we finally rid Europe of barriers of caste and creed and prejudice?…Our new civilization must be built through a world at war. But our new civilization will be built just the same’ (Mr. Anthony Eden, Broadcast to America, September 11, 1939).

“This contemplates the complete abolition of civil rights.

“(2) The restoration of the Gold Standard and the Debt System.

“(3) The elimination of Great Britain in the cultural sense, and the substitution of Jewish (Masonic) ideals.

“(4) The establishment of the Zionist state in Palestine as a geographical center of World Control, with New York as the center of World Financial Control.”[45]

These statements of war aims require to be amplified somewhat, in order to take full account of the combat under Satan against the supernatural life of Christ in the world. Behind the financial conflict there is always the struggle of Satan against Our Lord. Readers will remember Palmerston’s anti-supernatural plan treated of in chapter fifteen. To a person cognizant of that plan, it is clear that the break-up of Austria was one of the aims of the last war. Austria was broken up at the Peace Conference and Germany was left almost intact, nursing a grievance. Another war was therefore inevitable. Since then, Vienna has been brought completely under the domination of Berlin. In spite of the National-Socialist reaction against the Jewish nation, Soviet Russia freed Prussia, at the beginning of the new war, from the fear of having to fight on two fronts, and thus enabled the long-prepared subjugation of France to be quickly accomplished. The anti-Catholic vigor displayed by the National-Socialist government promised to be such a mighty asset in the elimination of the supernatural life of Europe that its anti-Jewishness was offset—for the moment at least. Does the present war of Germany against Russia prove that Prussia has definitely turned against the forces that have contributed to raise her up? Is there a bid by German finance to shake itself free of Judaeo-American trammels and put itself at the service of the German race to dominate Europe—and the world? There may be, but we must not forget that the financiers who enabled Germany to rearm knew that the war was bound to come and knew all about the anti-Jewish attitude of the National-Socialist Party. All that had been taken into account.

One thing at least is certain. Satan wants to lure on his dupes in both warring camps to strive for a naturalistic union of states, that is, for some form of organization from which the influence of the Vicar of Christ will be excluded. This will make for increased regimentation of human beings and more complete elimination of respect for human personality. Unless there is a return to the full acknowledgment of God’s rights, men will be treated more and more as mere individuals, that is, as animals without personal rights.

At the Congress of the Third International of Communist Parties held in 1935, a resolution was passed urging the unity of all peoples against Fascism. By the term Fascism was meant, of course, every form of opposition to Communism including, needless to say, every attempt to eliminate the class-war and to return to the corporate organization of the state insisted upon by Pope Pius XI in the Encyclical Letter, Quadragesima Anno. Accordingly, Communist writers and papers have been continually alluding to the governments of Spain and Portugal as Fascist, it is ominous to see all those persistent attacks on every attempt on the part of any state to acknowledge the Divine Plan for Order. Behind this opposition to every vestige of Fascism, it is clear that there is the satanic hatred of the supernatural life of grace.

This book had been written a considerable time, when Germany’s Master Plan, by Joseph Borkin and Charles A. Welsh, appeared. In this work, published by John Long, an account is given of the steps that had to be taken by the United States government in consequence of the cartel activities of American firms and financiers. A cartel means a combination or agreement, national or international in scope, in which the members seek to control one or more phases of the production, pricing and distribution of a commodity.

[1]The Role of Money, p. 50.

[2]Morley’s Life of Gladstone, Quoted by John Hargrave in his book, Professor Skinner, alias Montagu Norman.

[3]Tax-Bonds or Bondage, p. 23. The Bank of Ireland was accorded the same privilege by the (British) Act of 1918 referred to in the text.

According to The Sunday Dispatch, Sept. 21, 1941, “in 1934—Hitler’s second year of power—the Bank of England granted the Reichsbank a credit of £750,000.…Germany needed lots of raw materials at the time…When the Germans overran Czecho-Slovakia in 1939, Mr. Montagu Norman handed over the £6,000,000 of gold belonging to Czecko-Slovakia which the B. I. S. had deposited with the Bank of England.…Sir John Simon admitted that the Bank of England had not consulted the British government about the matter.”

[4]Quoted by Mr. John Mitchell in Tax-Bonds or Bondage, p. 12.

[5]Sir Josiah Stamp was on the Board of Directors of the Bank of England in 1932. Cf. The Old Lady Unveiled, by J. R. Jarvie (Webster Co., 1933).

[6]America Conquers Britain, pp. 169–171 (published by Alfred Knopf, New York). A good deal of what is quoted in the text from Mr. Denny’s book is not in Mr. Field’s work. In the original, the section is entitled by Mr. Denny “The Federal Reserve rules London.”

[7]The Truth about the Slump (1931), chap, 4, pp. 28–32,

[8]The Truth about the Slump p. 85–86.

[9]The Truth about the Slump p. 87. One of the bankers consulted by Colonel House was Mr. Frank A. Vanderlip, then President of the National City Bank. From Mr. Vanderlip’s memoirs, it appears that he and Henry Davidson (of J. P. Morgan and Company) and Paul Warburg (of Kuhn, Loeb and Company) held a secret conference on Jekyll Island near Savannah, Georgia, and there arranged the bill, of which the framework was supplied by Warburg. Cf. The Reign of the Elders, pp. 59, 60.

[10]The Truth about the Slump p. 83.

[11]Readers are recommended to refer to Mr. A. N. Field’s book (pp. 89–92) for an interesting account of the efforts made by Mr. James G. Strong, a Kansas member of the House of Representatives, to get his Bills accepted. These Bills embodied the obligation for the Federal Reserve Board to use its powers and authority to promote “a more stable purchasing power of the dollar so far as such purposes may be accomplished by monetary and credit policy.” Mr. Field remarks: “A feature of the hearings on the second bill was the epidemic of invalidism which afflicted the members of the Federal Reserve Board when the time to give evidence approached.”

[12]Among them was Mr. William Jennings Bryan, who should certainly have known better. Cf. A. N. Field, op. cit., p. 83.

[13]Wall Street Under Oath was published by The Cresset Press, London, in September, 1939.

[14]Wall Street Under Oath, pp. 3, 4, 27, 28, 30, 54, 55, 56.

[15]Op. cit., pp. 283, 281.

[16]Money Creators by Miss G. M. Coogan, pp. 95, 104, 105. 103.

[17]Quoted in The Weekly Review, Oct. 5, 1944

[18]For the list of the Supreme Councils of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry throughout the world, see The Kingship of Christ, and Organized Naturalism, p. 139 (Loreto 2017).

[19]Fools Gold, pp. 3, 4, 98, 100 (published by Madison and Marshall, Inc., New York, in 1936).

[20]Mr. A. N. Field refers to and quotes Waters Flowing Eastward, by L. Fry. Cf. The Rulers of Russia (pp. 58, 59). On page 59 is quoted the sentence, from the P.E.P. Journal: “Only in war, or under threat of war, will a British government embark on large scale planning.’’

[21]Text, as given in The Pope Speaks, by Charles Rankin, p. 179.

[22]Wall Street Under Oath, p. 10.

[23]Cf. The Truth About the Slump, by A. N. Field (p. 57). Dr. Melchoir took a leading part in the foundation of the Bank for International Settlements and became Chairman of the Financial Committee of the League of Nations.

[24]Quoted by A. N. Field in All These Things, p; 155.

[25]This is summarized from Ludwell Denny’s book, America Conquers Britain, p. 164.

[26]Freedom in Finance (published by Fisher Unwin in 1919).

[27]The Truth About the Slump, p. 45.

[28]The rest of what is quoted from Mr. Field is taken by him from an article by Mr. Arthur Kitson, which appeared in March, 1925.

[29]The Truth about the Slump (pp. 53–55).… The period referred to above appears to be about 1924 or 1925.

“Most realists who have given the matter any consideration see that big business makes the profit out of Compulsory Health Insurance. The ‘sweet refreshing fruits’ of Compulsory Health Insurance go neither to the doctor nor to the patient…. From the viewpoint of big business the more so-called free services the lower the standard of wages can be made relative to the cost of living” (Dr. Douglas Boyd in M. D. Private Bulletin, September, 1942). In M. D. Private Bulletin of November, 1943, Dr. Boyd points out that “Sir William Beveridge is a well-known Fabian and associate of the political and Planning Groups. It will be remembered that he was a-co-worker with Mr. David Lloyd George in 1911 at the introduction of National Health Insurance based on the original German scheme. He was also largely responsible in bringing forward National Unemployment Insurance, which also originated in Germany, and now seeks to introduce, a comprehensive system of state insurance backed with proposals for compulsory labor.”

[30]Encyclical Letter, Tametsi, On Christ Our Redeemer.

[31]Published by A. A. Knopf, New York, in 1930.

[32]The Truth About the Slump, by A. N. Field, p. 119.

[33]Op. cit. (pp. 331–333). “We have been viewing with increasing disquiet the sale to America of Courtaulds’ very valuable subsidiary, American Viscose.…Our curiosity is even further aroused by the actual identity of the parties to the contract. We would point out that Sir Edward Peacock is Baring Bros. and the Bank of England. He is also a director of the Bankers’ Industrial Development Company, a concern that is run by the Bank of England in conjunction with the leading London Finance houses. The Purchasing Committee is headed by Morgan Stanley & Co., and comprises such firms as Kuhn, Loeh & Co., the Mellon Securities Corporation, Dillon Read & Co., Harriman, Riley Co., and others.…Then it does seem to be a prima facie case for inquiring whether the actions of international finance have not in this instance been flatly contrary to the national interest” (The Catholic Herald, London, April 4, 1941).

[34]Op. cit., pp. 333–334.

[35]The Truth About the Slump, p. 124.

[36]Op cit., p. 123.

[37]Quoted by Mr. Ludwell Denny from Washington Editorial Research Reports, April 1. 1929, p. 263.

[38]Nickel is one of the six metal and non-metal industrial minerals—antimony, chromite, nickel, tin, nitrates, potash—in which the United States depends almost entirely on (uncontrolled) foreign sources as compared with four—mercury, potash, sulphur, talc and soapstone—in the case of Britain. Since Germany has retaken Alsace, she has a very large portion of the world’s supply of potash. which is essential for commercial fertilisers and largely used in the manufacture of glass, soap, and explosives, etc. At the beginning of the war, Great Britain and US.A. had, if not monopolies, at least extremely large holdings of the world’s supplies of nickel (International Nickel Company and Mond Company merger controling 90%; tin (British-American Tin Corporation); copper, oil, rubber, and large holdings of zinc.

[39]The Truth About the Slump, by A. N. Field, pp. 120–123.

“The basic industry is steel in peace and war. To that older basic industry this age has added the electrical, automotive and chemical industries.…Hence the importance of such materials as coal, iron, manganese, chromite, nickel, tungsten, antimony, vanadium, copper, lead, zinc, tin, aluminium, nitrates, potash and rubber” (America Conquers Britain, p. 189, by Ludwell Denny).

[40]The Truth About the Slump, pp. 120, 125.

[41]America Conquers Britain, p. 366.

[42]The Truth About the Slump, p. 91.

[43]Professor Skinner alias Montagu Norman by John Hargrave, p. 20.

[44]This extract is taken from the leading article. In another article in the same issue, signed by Mr. H. Belloc, we read: “The German revival could not have succeeded, of course, had it not been supported by the international money power and particularly by the Bank of England.” Cf. the statements by Hans Heymann in Plan for Permanent Peace, p. 53.

[45]Major Douglas’s statements concerning War Aims are taken from Tax-Bonds or Bondage, by John Mitchell, pp. 9, 12.

Chapter XXI

The Principles of St. Thomas Aquinas and Monetary Reform

general principles

In Chapters 1, 2, and 3, we saw the political and economic principles involved in the full acknowledgment of the Kingship of Christ. Those principles were drawn from the Encyclical Letters of the sovereign Pontiffs and from the writings of the Angelic Doctor who, to quote again the words of Pope Pius XI, “is our source for economic and political science.”[1] In the modern world, the welfare of men, who are Christ’s members, actual or potential, is subordinated to the production of material goods and the production, distribution and exchange of material goods are made subservient to financial manipulation. This fundamental disorder is based upon the denial of human personality. Accordingly, to rectify it, the fact of man’s personality and of his personal relation to God must be insisted upon.

The teaching of St. Thomas concerning man as an individual and as a person, elaborated in the second part of chapter one, has been strikingly set forth by Pope Pius XI in the Encyclical Letter, Divini Redemptoris, on Atheistic Communism. The illustrious Pontiff begins with man’s personality and gives a summary of the personal duties incumbent on man in consequence of God’s rights to his love and service. Man’s duties to God are the foundation of his personal rights. “Man has a spiritual and immortal soul,” writes the Pope, “he is a person, marvellously endowed by his creator with gifts of body and mind. He is a ‘microcosm,’ as the ancients said, a world in miniature, with a value far surpassing that of the vast inanimate cosmos. God alone is his last end, in this life and in the next. By sanctifying grace he is raised to the dignity of a son of God, and incorporated into the Kingdom of God in the Mystical Body of Christ. In consequence he has been endowed by God with many and varied prerogatives: the right to life, to bodily integrity, to obtain the necessary means of existence; the right to tend towards his ultimate goal in the path marked out for him by God; the right of association and the right to possess and use property. Just as matrimony and the right to its natural use are of divine origin, so likewise are the constitutional and fundamental prerogatives of the family fixed and determined by the creator. In the Encyclical on Christian Marriage, Casti Connubii (1930), and in Our other Encyclical on education, Divini illius Magistri (1929), We have treated these topics at considerable length.”

But man is also an individual and as an individual he is a part of society. Society, however, is meant to serve him in so far as he is a person, and all social regulations have for object the development of human personality. “God has likewise destined man for civil society,” the Pope continues, “according to the dictates of his very nature. In the plan of the creator, society is a natural means which man can and must use to reach his destined end. Society is for man, not man for society. This must not be understood in the sense of liberalistic individualism, which subordinates society to the selfish use of the individual; but only in the sense that by means of an organic union with society and by mutual collaboration the attainment of earthly welfare is placed within the reach of all. Further, it is society which affords the opportunities for the development of all the individual and social gifts bestowed on human nature. These natural gifts have a value surpassing the immediate interests of the moment, for in society they reflect the divine perfection, which would not be true were men to live alone. But on final analysis, even in this latter function, society is made for man, that he may recognize this reflection of God’s perfection, and refer it in praise and adoration to the creator. Only man and not society in any form is endowed with reason and a free will subject to the moral law.

“On the one hand, man cannot be exempted from his divinely-imposed obligations toward civil society, and representatives of authority have the right to coerce him when he refuses without reason to do his duty. Society, on the other hand, cannot defraud man of his God-granted rights, the most important of which We have indicated above, or make their use impossible. It is therefore according to the dictates of reason that all earthly things should be for the use and benefit of man, and so, through him, be referred to the creator. This accords with the words of the Apostle of the Gentiles, who writes to the Corinthians on Christian salvation: ‘All things are yours, and you are Christ’s, ‘and Christ is God’s’ (1Cor. 3:22). While Communism impoverishes human personality by inverting the terms of the relation of men to society, to what lofty heights is man not elevated by reason and Revelation!” The tendency to the perversion of order, common to all socialist schemes and modern schemes of planned economy, must be borne in mind in all discussions on monetary reform.

Money, according to St. Thomas, was invented by the art of man for the convenience of exchange by serving as a common measure of things saleable.[2] As a common measure, it ought to be stable. “As a measure used for estimating the value of other things,” writes St. Thomas, “money must keep the same value, since the value of all things must be expressed in terms of money. Thus exchanges can readily take place and, as a consequence, communications between men are faciliated.”[3] The saint had previously remarked, in the same chapter of the Commentary on the Ethics of Aristotle, that “it is the same with money as with other things, namely, that one does not always get what one wants for it, because it is not always endowed with the same purchasing-power.…But, nevertheless, things should be so arranged that it should be steadier in value than other things.” It may not always be possible, the Angelic Doctor insists, to get the same amount of goods for money. This can happen without injustice where supplies of goods become scarce for some cause outside our control, but every precaution must be taken not to have the difficulty arise through manipulation of the exchange-medium itself. We have seen that planned deflations are against justice.

Thus money is essentially an exchange-medium. It is a claim for goods or services admitted as acceptable by the authority of the society in which it circulates. Stability in value is a property or necessary attribute following from the essence of an exchange-medium or accepted claim for goods or services. An exchange-medium, which renders price-stability impossible, is opposed to justice. Money as a stable exchange-medium is meant to facilitate families in procuring by exchange the sufficiency of material goods required for the virtuous life of the human personalities composing them. The virtuous life of human persons is simply their ordered development as members of Christ.

Now we have seen two great evils growing apace under the gold standard régime. The first of these evils has been the general instability of price levels in all countries. This has led to the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the relatively few and to harassing insecurity in the lives of the many.[4] The second of these evils has been the gradual growth of control over governments by the manipulators of credit money. As examples of this second evil, we have seen that President Wilson of the United States confessed that sovereign power was not in his hands; and that Mr. Thomas Johnston. M.P., Lord Privy Seal in the English Labor government in 1931, and the other members of the British Cabinet were compelled to wait humbly for a final decision from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in regard to unemployment benefit. It must be borne in mind also that the financial forces which control the Central Banks represented at the Bank for International Settlements—twenty-six of them were founded after the 1914–1918 war—mean to retain their power after the present war (1939–?). Mr. Paul Einzig, in his book Montagu Norman, a Study in Financial Statesmanship, published in 1932, informs us that “a condition on which Mr. Norman and his collaborators insisted was that the Central Banks should be independent of their governments.” He even adds that “they insisted rather dogmatically” on this. From a question asked in the British House of Commons, we learn that in the Report of the Bank for International Settlements, dated 27th May, 1940, the names of Mr. Montagu Norman, Governor of the Bank of England, and Dr. Funk, German Economic Minister, figure on the list of directors. Evidently the Bank for International Settlements is meant to survive the present conflict. The President of the Bank is from the United States, and we know the power that is in the hands of the Federal Reserve Board, owing to the enormous quantity of gold buried in Kentucky. At the international conference held in Genoa in 1922 it was resolved that “Banks and especially banks of issue (central banks) should be free from political pressure, and should be conducted solely on lines of prudent finance.” Again, at the World Economic Conference held in London in 1934, it was resolved that it was essential, in order to provide an international gold standard with the necessary mechanism for satisfactory working, that independent central banks with the requisite powers and freedom to carry out an appropriate currency and credit policy should be created in such developed countries as had not at present an adequate central banking institution.[5]

national monetary reform

a. abandonment of the

domestic gold standard

From what we have seen of the functioning of the Domestic Gold Standard, it will be evident that it is opposed to the common good to have the volume of exchange-medium in a country proportioned, not to the actualization of the country’s potential productivity, but to the amount of gold that may happen to be in the country. “The aura of security that still hangs about gold,” writes Mr. Geoffrey Crowther, “is, in fact, the only remaining sound or semi-sound argument left for the Domestic Gold Standard. In France and America there would probably be anxious distrust in the national currencies, if they were not known to be ‘backed by gold.’ In England, we already have a more rational approach. As has already been pointed out, the gold backing of the Bank of England’s notes has been reduced virtually to nothing, and the whole gold reserve has been concentrated in the Exchange Equalization Account, where it is available for export but not as currency backing. The ordinary man is probably not yet aware that this has happened, but after a few years it will be accepted by the public that money does not need either to be gold or to be backed by gold in order to be good money. When that time comes, the Domestic Gold Standard will have died a natural death without its demise having done anybody harm.”[6] About this first point of reform there will be no difficulty.

b. issuing of lawful

exchange-medium by state

Great evils have resulted from the functioning of the gold standard and the control of the exchange-medium of countries by private individuals. To remedy these evils in a manner fully in accordance with the political and economic principles of St. Thomas, three points must be emphasised. The first point of reform is that the creation or issuing of exchange-medium must be taken out of private hands.[7] The issuing of claims to goods and services valid and acceptable to all the citizens of a country is by ‘right the prerogative of the authority exercising jurisdiction over the whole country. This is clearly seen by the fact that additional credit-money issued or loaned into existence, if it does not happen to coincide with a proportional increase of goods for sale, “will raise prices and make the value of everybody’s money in the country worth less in goods, so repudiating part of the nation’s debt in goods and services to the owners of money.”[8] To put this another way, whoever originates the exchange-medium must, by the very nature of money or exchange-medium obtain something for nothing, that is, he must obtain the original purchasing-power throughout the state, at a trifling cost. Again, whoever has the power to issue the exchange-medium controls the volume of it. Arbitrary changes in the volume of money cause prices to rise or to fall. Whoever originates and controls the volume of money thus controls every single economic operation. If a private group exercises the power to originate the exchange-medium and then manipulates the volume of it, that group becomes a power greater than the government itself. It becomes a supergovernment, paralysing the efforts of the lawful government for the common good. It is perfectly idle to talk about a democracy or a republic, when the sovereign power is really being exercised by an invisible super-group.[9] In his excellent book from which I have already quoted, viz., Economic Tribulation, Mr. V. C. Vickers points out this truth and its consequence. “Through our own base carelessness and ignorance,” he writes, “we have permitted the money industry, by the very virtue of its business, gradually to attain a political and economic influence so wide and powerful that it has actually undermined the authority of the state and usurped the power of democratic government.…This national and mainly international dictatorship of money, which plays off one country against another and which, through the ownership of a large portion of the press, converts the advertisement of its own private opinion into the semblance of general public opinion, cannot for much longer be permitted to render democratic government a mere nickname.…The finance industry, the exchange bankers and the Stock Exchange grow rich upon the ups and downs of trade, and are largely dependent on variations and changes of the price levels of commodities. But productive industry grows rich upon stable markets, a constant price level, and the absence of violent economic fluctuations.…Under such general conditions the Communist is naturally content to abide his time; for he observes that the trend of affairs is slowly converging towards the very conditions he most desires to see—a growing discontent with finance and the money system, an increasing weariness of the present form of party government, and an increasing poverty and loss of influence among those who have so recently been the mainstay and backbone of the country.”

As nations have to struggle to maintain their national sovereignty against the international manipulators of money, the sovereign authority in the nation must take over the creation of the entire medium of exchange, consisting of the lawful, physical or tangible money of the country. Private individuals engaged in finance cannot be entrusted with the struggle to safeguard national sovereignty against “the deadly and detestable international imperialism of money,” to use the words of Pope Pius Xl.[10] This is especially important since bankers in every country have already succumbed to its rule and are accustomed to look upon the trends favored by it as indicative of the true line of progress for the world. They have hitherto conspicuously failed to practice the virtue of general or legal justice.

Accordingly, the entire medium of exchange, consisting of the lawful money of each country, should be paid into use by the sovereign power in the country. No private promises-to-pay should be allowed to circulate as legal tender, but should be subjected to the penalties applying to counterfeit money. The money created and paid into use by the sovereign power should be non-interest-bearing at the source and non-cancellable, except by recalling it through taxation. It should not be brought into existence as a loan. The whole amount of new money issued should be paid into circulation to defray legitimate government expenses or to pay off existing government debt. The people, as a whole, would thus share the benefits and the advantages involved in a change in the volume of money in existence in a nation. “By placing this first buying power in the hands of the government, the benefits fall to all the people, for by whatever amount the new money is issued, tax collections may be correspondingly reduced. This statement can be twisted into the thought that taxes can be abolished by merely issuing money ad infinitum. This is fallacious, for new money should be paid into use (circulation) only as the total stock of consumer goods—the things the people have produced and need in civilization—has been increased by expanded production.”[11] Besides, it seems opposed to the dignity of human personality that the issuing of exchange-medium necessary for the common good should place some in a position of inferiority, as happens when money is loaned into existence. As we shall presently see, the sovereign power in the state should not engage in lending money.

c. lending of lawful

exchange-medium by banking guild

The creation of exchange-medium, then, should be withdrawn from private individuals. It should be reserved to the national government, but the lending of money should be completely divorced from money origination. This is the second point of monetary reform. The lending of the lawful money issued by the governmental monetary authority should not be carried out by the governmental monetary authority, but by privately-owned corporations erected into a guild and functioning under a guild charter. Let us take these two proposals in turn.

“The most dangerous thing that could be done would be to place the merchandising of money in the hands of the national government. Such a step would give the internationalists their final weapon to destroy the property and personal rights of loyal citizens.”[12] Government in the lending business is the essence of Socialism or Communism. For a government to create money as loans is even more vicious than for private banks to create money as loans: for, in the case of private banks, arbitrary discrimination is not the primary motive in denying loans. No private business can long endure if the government engages in the lending of money, even money created by itself, or determines what businesses may acquire savings from the people in return for part ownership. This seems to be a grave defect in the German banking system, even though the fallacy of making the volume of exchange-medium of a country depend on the amount of gold under the control of the government has been decisively shown up in that country. It is quite true that the volume of exchange-medium ought to be proportioned to the development of a country’s productive capacity, not to the amount of gold in its Central Bank. But the German financial system as a whole, in conjunction with the race-theory, will tend to disregard human personality. The Reichsbank creates bank credit as loans to the German government, and the German government allows this new bank credit to reach the channels of trade by granting loans of it to whatever businesses it arbitrarily chooses. This means that the German government is determining what businesses may or may not borrow. Such acts of a government allow it to aid the businesses it chooses via grinding loans, and destroy those it chooses through denial of loans. This method destroys the individual person’s right to the disposal of his own earnings and the inalienable right of the human person to own, use and control honestly acquired private property. As has already been remarked, the human being is thus in danger of becoming a mere individual, at the mercy of the state. He is not being treated as a person.[13]

With regard to the second proposal, namely, that the lending of money should be carried out by privately-owned corporations, “each of the existing banks should be divided into two separate institutions or at least into departments of the original bank. The first set would be giro-banks.[14]
The Americans designate them ‘check banks.’ All banks carrying deposits subject to check would be required to treat these deposits as trust-funds of money held for the depositors.…A full 100% reserve has the status of a trust-fund the real owners of which are the depositors.[15] Thus bank deposits would once more become real deposits entrusted to the banker and withdrawable on demand. No interest would of course be paid on them; on the contrary, the depositors would have to pay the bank for its book-keeping service in arranging for transfers by check.…In addition to giro-banks there would be loan-banks, but not so limited in their scope, for lending or investing. How would these new savings-banks get money to lend? From their own money (capital), from the money received from customers (savings accounts), from the money repaid on maturing loans.…. The only new limitation on bank loans would be a wholesome one, namely, that no money could be lent unless there was money to lend. That is, the banks could no longer overlend by manufacturing money out of thin air so as to cause inflation and a boom.…Under the 100% system, banks would make loans just like anybody else, either out of their own savings or out of somebody else’s, precisely as the earliest lending banks did before they were perverted by somebody’s ‘bright idea’ to lend other people’s money while still letting these other people think they had that money to use as money.’[16]

“It must be distinctly understood that this scheme does not involve the nationalisation of banking. There are three functions involved: (1) The issue and cancellation of money, which pertain to the community. Historically the banks have managed to annex this monetary function, which the 100% plan proposes to restore to the state; (2) The transfer of money-claims by book-entries. Historically this giro-function was a service provided by the state or by the city: but it is proposed to allow private institutions to conduct it if they wish; (3) Money-lending. As I already remarked, the banker of today would be insulted if you called him a money-lender! But, apart from the safe-keeping of valuables and the custody of a fund (transferable by giro) this is really the only strictly banking function. It is not proposed to nationalise this. ‘The 100% system would involve only a nationalisation of the monetary function now usurped by the banks, not a general nationalisation of banking.…So far from nationalising the banks, the 100% system might afford the banks the only escape from nationalisation. For if in another decade we should have another depression like the one we have just been passing through, the banks would probably find themselves permanently in the hands of the government, it would be better for the banks to give up gracefully their usurped function of minting money—in the form of bank-notes—and be content to conduct their strictly banking business, unmolested and uninterfered with by booms and depressions—so largely of their own making. ‘The 100% system would afford protection both ways; for it would also safeguard the government against the domination of the banks.…We must denounce the notion that bankers, because they deal in money, have anv right whatever to control money, to manufacture and destroy money and so to lower or raise the value of the monetary unit of our nation.’”[17]

Mr. A. N. Field gives an excellent account of the functioning of banking under this system. “Banking business,” he writes, “would he divided into two departments: (1) a check-account department, and (2) a loans department. A borrower would interview the loans department, and on depositing his collateral, would be given a loan of an agreed amount for an agreed period. The money loaned would be paid over in actual cash by the loans department to the credit of the customer’s account in the check-account department. All check accounts would thus be credit accounts, with actual cash in hand in the bank. The check department would be on a trust-account basis, with everything fully covered. Its income would be derived by charging a fee to customers, varying according to the amount of work involved in keeping their accounts. The department would thus stand on its own feet as a business proposition. The loans department would receive money on fixed deposits, make advances to customers, discount bills, and so on. From the customer’s point of view, the chief change would be the disappearance of the overdraft system.”[18]

In drawing up the charter for the banking guild or corporation, particular care must be taken that the needed exchange-medium be readily obtainable by those engaged in agriculture. They supply the primary necessities of bodily life and, therefore, they must have the preference over those who supply articles of secondary utility or luxury articles. We have seen how the present reversal of order, by which men are subordinated to production, and production, distribution and consumption to the manipulation of finance, has told heavily against agriculture with its slower rhythm. The evil must be undone: money must be brought into order. “The fundamental processes of farming are governed by nature’s laws and not by our own: seed times and harvest, the period needed to produce an animal, the age at which a cow can begin to give milk—these and many other things which set the pace of farming operations are out of our control. The unit of time is not the day or the week, but the year; sometimes indeed it is longer, and covers the whole period of the rotation.

… From about 1880 onwards the opening up of the North American prairies led to the production of quantities of wheat which was sold here at prices far below those at which our farmers could produce it. Public opinion was entirely against the imposition of any tariff on food, and farmers both on the prairies and at home were left to solve the problem as best they could. The prairie farmers suffered and had to accept a very low standard of living and to adopt methods which led ultimately to terrible destruction of the soil. The home farmers suffered equally: many went under, and there was great distress in the countryside.[19]

“A state is composed of two elements,” writes Mr. A. N. Field, “the nation and the territory, and a primary object .…is to secure the nation in possession of its territory. This requires protection against external dangers: and, the nation being composed of families, it further requires that these families shall be secure in possession of their respective portions of the nation’s territory. If any third agency has power to separate the people of the state from occupation of the territory of the state, the whole structure is imperilled. Under the mortgage system every period of low prices makes the hold of the people on their homes and farms very precarious, producing discontent and unrest, and, if reaching a certain point, a revolutionary situation. Our own (New Zealand) local history shows that depressions throw the people into the arms of the Socialists, and prosperity swings them to Conservatism: a fact which speaks for itself. A stable price-level is thus a first necessity of national stability, a matter on which more will be said later.

“There are several other requirements however. A state cannot be in a healthy condition if increased production of material wealth is swallowed up by inflated land values: this is inevitable when land is on a commodity basis. Nor is a state in a sound position when private persons can detach its citizens from occupation of the soil. The most effective way to meet the first of these requirements is to demonetize land. This can be sufficiently achieved for practical purposes by recognizing existing monetary values, but checking their future growth.[20]…. Taken on the whole, farming in New Zealand has now been reduced largely to tenancy under the money-lenders. At the same time much of the rougher and poorer land has gone out of occupation, and farmers have been turned off holdings that would yield a modest living but could not be made to pay interest as well. Many such idle holdings are reported, with rubbish growing on them, and presently costing more to recondition than they will ever be worth. Such are the results of sacrificing farming to finance. The wrong interest has been put first, and a high price will ultimately be paid for the error.”[21]

The reader must complete these remarks by a study of Mr. Hilaire Belloc’s splendid pamphlet on the restoration of property, especially property in land.[22] He lays down certain principles in view of the restoration of proprietorship in England, which is the typical example of a country in which the desire for land and the sense of ownership in it has, for the mass of the people, fallen to its lowest.”[23] These principles must be carefully borne in mind in countries where the problem is one of safeguarding existing proprietorship and going against the current of financial domination. “The fourth principle,” he writes, “will, when it is stated plainly, appear fantastic, but it is essential. The burden laid upon the land of the small owner, the tribute he has to pay—wherein I include usury in all its forms—must he a minimum. In other words, when you are attempting to re-establish a peasantry under adverse conditions, that peasantry must he privileged as against the diseased society around it. Today false statistics could easily be prepared showing that a great mass of the English land is in the possession of those who till it; but as a fact it is really in the possession of money-lenders—principally the banks. The ownership is nominal; the real control is in the money-lending power which exacts tribute. Now, unless you are prepared to start afresh with a system under which usury shall not drain the lifeblood of the tiller of the soil, your efforts will fail. Even cooperative banks, of which we will speak later, should play a subsidiary, not a dominating part.…We can spread (and it is the duly of every good citizen to spread), a knowledge of the arbitrary power possessed by modern banks and proclaim the duty of controlling it. That general action is open to us, and of great service it is.…Any development of the guild system would modify the position of the banks and weaken their monopoly. As small property gradually developed, the banking monopoly would progressively lose more and more of its power. For instance, bank credit, by the law of its being, discriminates in favor of the big capitalist and against the small man: But, it would begin to sing a different tune when it had to meet the power of organized corporations of small men and when differential taxation began to make it more and more difficult for the large unit, no matter however well supported by bank credit, to eat up the small.”[24]

d. stability of price level

To understand how stability of the price level is to be obtained, we must consider the method by which it is proposed to issue and lend lawful exchange-medium. Sir Reginald Rowe gives an excellent summary of Professor Soddy’s proposals[25] for England as follows: “The huge balance of liabilities for cash which the banks have in fact no means of meeting should be met by the nation by an equivalent issue of national money in the form of notes, and there should be no further creation or destruction of money by the banks. A national issue equal to the total of current account bank deposits would be needed, say £2,000 million. The state would take over from the banks securities to this amount. Where these were collateral securities against loans, their owners could redeem them by repaying the loans. Where the state became the owners of government securities, having paid for them with national notes, it could cancel these securities. Any other securities could be exchanged by market process for government securities. The conclusion of the whole matter would be that the banks would hold money (physical money in the form of notes) to the exact value of their total current account deposits. It would be real money, a great part of which (i.e., all current account balances) they could not lend, but must hold in trust for its individual owners. (Money on time-deposit could be lent in the fashion already explained above under (c). The banks could not create money to lend, as now. One obvious result would be that when £2,000 million had been issued in new notes, that amount of national debt would have been cancelled. It should be emphasised that the issue of further new money would not be at the mercy of any government, but in the hands of a statutory independent body, which would work scientifically on data readily obtainable. Its economic thermometer would be price level, the maintenance of average price level being its single aim when increasing or decreasing the supply of money.[26]

We can supplement the above succinct statements by quotations from Miss Coogan’s Money Creators and A. N. Field’s The Truth About New Zealand. According to the former, a scientific statistical authority, called in the U.S.A. Monetary Trustees, appointed by and directly responsible to the legitimate government, should determine the rate at which lawful money should be issued or withdrawn, in order to maintain the price index of the main commodities constant at a level which would permit full employment. ‘‘The Monetary Trustees,” she writes, “should maintain scientific records of prices—price indices which would reliably indicate at what levels the aggregate of raw commodities and aggregate finished goods are changing hands at any particular time. Once raw material price levels had reached a point wherein the nation’s productive and business activity had absorbed its unemployed, and the price structure was high enough to afford sufficient national income to carry the legitimate private debt structure of the nation, that price level should be maintained. The fluctuations thereafter should be minor, because the flow of money would always be scientifically related to the actual quantity of physical consumer goods available for distribution.… In case it became necessary to curtail the volume of money, that could be done through taxation.…Only a decrease in the volume of consumer goods, due to famine or disaster, would necessitate a decrease in the volume of money.… If price levels are too low, too large a share of the products goes to satisfy those who own claims on the fixed assets and those engaged in actual production receive less than would enable them to consume the products of industry. After the desired price level is reached, money should be paid into the stream by the Monetary Trusteeship only as goods appear ready for distribution, which goods cannot be moved into consumption at the existing price levels without additional money. Given an adequate supply of money, the volume of goods distributable at a given price level would be limited only by the capacity of the nation to produce the goods. The volume of goods produced would be limited only by the amount of natural resources, fixed capital, and the number of workers available.…The result would be, not a fluctuating dollar as the deceivers shout, but a stable dollar, as common sense proves. Stability means constant purchasing power of a dollar in terms of things people buy.…The national Monetary Trustees would be required to file for publication, once a month, an intelligible and easily understood report, which would indicate exactly how much currency was outstanding as at that date.…At any time currency was issued, the exact amounts and exactly to whom and how issued would be made public information. There is no reason why such reports could not be simple and understandable to every one.”[27]

The Monetary Trustees should be exclusively full citizens of the country, should have an unblemished record for honesty and integrity and should have had no connection with international banking, either as owners, partners, employees or advisers. They should receive adequate salaries, but should benefit in no way whatsoever, except as citizens of the country, in the amounts of money added to or withdrawn from the money stream.[28]

Mr. A. N. Field treats of stability of price level in connection with the exchange rate with Great Britain. “Up to 1914,” he writes, “our New Zealand pound was tied up very closely with the British sterling pound: one could always be obtained for the other with very small fluctuation in the rate of exchange.…in August, 1914, the British pound became inconvertible paper, and the New Zealand pound followed suit. The exchange rate remained pretty constant between the two until the slump set in. The banks then gradually let the rate widen to 10% and then in January, 1933, the government put it up to 25%. At this point it has since been held, except for one very slight reduction.[29] The fixed exchange policy was thus broken between 1931 and 1933, but thereafter it was resumed on a different level. This fixed exchange money policy means that if commodity prices in Britain remain steady, commodity prices in New Zealand also remain steady. If British prices fluctuate violently—as they have done to a ruinous extent—New Zealand prices must also fluctuate with equal violence. That is the position so long as the one monetary unit is freely exchangeable for the other at a fixed rate. At present the fixed rate remains, but free exchange is prohibited.

“The alternative monetary policy to a fixed exchange is to regulate the supply of money in New Zealand to maintain a steady internal price level, and let the exchange rate fluctuate as the outside price level fluctuates. Low prices in Britain would then mean a low exchange rate. Exported produce would bring all the time a steadier price in our money. Money would thus be made a much more accurate measure of value than it now is. This would naturally mean a reduction of financial anxiety and worry for everyone exchanging goods and services in return for money payments, which is practically everybody. If the people maintained production, the money end would take care of itself. This is the most urgently needed social reform in the world.

“The banks in the past have regulated the quantity of money in circulation so as to be able to deliver sterling on demand at the fixed rate of exchange.…Methods of regulation would suffice to maintain a steady internal price level. Those controlling the issue of money, instead of watching the exchange rate, would simply watch the various price indices now compiled, and any additional ones they thought necessary to have compiled. If prices started rising above the point fixed, money would be withdrawn from circulation: if prices began to fall more money would be got into circulation. This is done all the time now. To vary the circulation of money, interest rates on overdrafts and fixed deposits are altered; bank advances are contracted or expanded.…In controlling money to keep the price level steady no attempt would be made to control the price of individual commodities.[30] What would be done would be, in effect, to make up a market basketful of staple commodities, the quantity of each article in the basket being in proportion to the quantity passing in trade. The objective would then be so to regulate the volume of money in circulation that a New Zealand pound-note would, as nearly as possible, always buy this basketful. Flour might be up, butter down, and every item moving according to demand and supply, but, averaged over the lot, possession of a pound-note would enable its holder to walk home with just about the same total basketful all the time.

“Stabilizing money takes the money factor out of price fluctuations, and leaves just the non-monetary factors of demand and supply of commodities. As one well-known writer on these subjects has pointed out, the money factor is like the tides of the ocean, and the commodity demand-and-supply factor is like the waves of the sea, bobbing up and down to different levels all the time. The tides are the big factor determining the level of the water, and the waves a comparatively small factor, even in the greatest storm. The money factor is like the tides, and is the principal thing determining the price level. If it is got under control we can have a stability and a prosperity in industry that we can never know today.”

Mr. Field then shows by means of index figures the practical working on the exchange rate with London of a stabilized price level in New Zealand and adds that the effect of the exchange movement would be to iron out price fluctuation to a large extent. He concludes the chapter with the observation that “stability in internal purchasing power is the only sensible basis on which to control money. Money must be made a just measure of value. If it is not, every money transaction perpetrates injustice, with debts on one level and prices of commodities on another level. And injustice sooner or later means the disintegration of the existing social order.”

Some important remarks on this aspect of national monetary reform are to be found in Minority Report No. III of the Irish Banking Conmmission (1938), drawn up by Mr. P. J. O’Loghlen. In Chapter 1 of his report and in his Appendix 11. Mr. O’Loghlen stresses the fundamental disorder of modern economic life, which has been so much insisted on in this book, namely, the subordination of members of Christ to production and of production to finance, or, to put it more succinctly, the domination of money over society. After a brief allusion to the foundation of twenty-six central banks in twenty-six different countries, affiliated to the Bank for International Settlements established at Basle, he quotes from the Majority Report, from which he is a dissentient, the following statements on the functions of a central bank. “The principal duty of a central bank is to maintain the integrity of the national monetary unit. To carry out this task the central bank has to ensure the maintenance of external stability (in terms of gold, or sterling, or some other currency), and to take care of the monetary reserves of gold or foreign exchange, and also to have certain means to influence the currency and credit position within the country.” Mr. O’Loghlen then adds: “The objective of monetary policy, here so plainly stated, namely, the control or restriction of currency and credit within the country, appears to me to be one in which the interests of bondholders, and those who trade in money, are given complete precedence, and the interests of the ordinary people in each country, who need remunerative employment above all else, are considered to be of a very minor importance. I have already stated my view that the currency and credit position within the country should reflect its own power to produce wealth, its capacity for development, and the necessity to provide employment for its people. It is the stated view of my colleagues (of the Majority Report) that these things…are secondary considerations and should be sacrificed to maintain a fixed foreign exchange rate.”

Now, the maintenance of stability in purchasing power of national exchange-media has not been a desideratum wherever the money power has exercised domination over society. In fact, money has come to dominate, as we have seen, largely through the disregard of this indispensable condition of the just functioning of an exchange-medium. Mr. O’Loghlen rightly insists upon aiming at stability of the price level in view of reversing the present disorder. “Owing to our attaching the Irish currency to that of Great Britain,” he writes, “prices in Ireland have been determined hitherto by the prices ruling in England, with disastrous results for Irish agriculture.… As agriculture will have to keep its costs down to the lowest possible level in order to retain its market in England, all hope of either a rising standard of living, or of an increasing internal market, will be in vain; and in vain, also, will be any hope of increased employment in the rural areas.

…Self-government does not consist in having a flag and the trappings and appearance of independence, but in having effective control over vital national interests. We have been persuaded by the Banking Commission of 1926 to relinquish all but the appearance of control over such important and vital national interests as our price level.” But “there is no special validity attaching to any particular price level. The price level for any country is the level at which that particular country is best able to attain and maintain the fullest possible use of its resources. As the circumstances vary within wide limits, the levels of prices at which they will be able to maintain full employment will vary also. The maintenance of fixed rates of foreign exchange tends to force the prices in different countries to conform to a common level, thus preventing the development of price levels which are most conducive to the maintenance of full employment, and a remunerative return for industry.…

“It is quite practicable to develop such levels of wages and prices within a particular country as are most conducive to the common good, and the appropriate, and indeed the only, means by which such a policy can be carried out is a national monetary system which has regard principally to the internal conditions of the country in which it operates, and which is directed to the maintenance of full employment for productive purposes, and also of such prices and wages as are most conducive to national wellbeing. On the other hand, a monetary system which aims at being international and which, by maintaining fixed rates of foreign exchange, forces internal conditions to accord with those of other countries, precludes us from adopting measures which would enable remunerative prices, or wages on which people can live in decent comfort, being realized in practical daily life.…

“If a fixed rate of foreign exchange is abandoned, and a policy of the internal development and use of all our resources is followed, there is no reason whatever to apprehend any wide or constant fluctuations of the exchange rates. As between England and ourselves, the movements of the exchange rate would correspond with movements in the levels of prices in the two countries; and price levels, apart from abnormal conditions such as another war, will tend to move slowly and gradually. My proposals would not introduce wide or rapid fluctuations of prices in Ireland; but would allow the two countries to adjust themselves to each other in accordance with their respective purchasing power, which would not be subject to any greater condition of instability than at present. Not only is this the case, but active steps could and should be taken by the Irish monetary authorities to minimise such inconvenience to importers and exporters as a moving rate of exchange may otherwise bring, by taking appropriate steps for this purpose. These steps should be:

“(1) To establish and maintain a forward market for foreign exchange in Ireland.

“(2) To provide and control an equalisation fund, designed not to peg the rate of exchange at an arbitrary level, but to render as gradual as possible any movements of exchange rates which were the results of an active policy of internal development.…

“In Appendix I, I have outlined the character and scope of an Economic Development Commission which would be able to organise and to direct the unused productive resources of the nation, with the object of maintaining full employment, and so raising the standards of economic life.…An effective balance between expansion and contraction of the volume of money would require to be maintained by the Economic Development Commission. The practical daily test of the fluctuations of such a balance would be the maintenance of a constant and equal activity of the country’s production and consumption, as disclosed by statistical indices (to be compiled by the Economic Development Commission), and the absence of any considerable degree of unemployment.…The Economic Development Commission should be in close touch with the Currency Commission, the Department of Finance, and the banks, and should be represented “The Foreign Exchange Committee which I recommend should be established.”[31]

Of course, Mr. O’Loghlen’s recommendation, on page 41 of his report, to the effect that the banks should not be allowed to inflate the volume of credit, is unnecessary, when the state has reserved to itself the exercise of its sovereign right of issuing money. We have seen this in sub-sections (b) and (c).

e. concluding remarks on

national monetary reform

The foregoing ideal of national monetary reform in harmony with the political and economic principles of St. Thomas has been set down, in order that Catholics and all men who believe in the Divinity of Our Lord, after having grasped the connection between the propagation of naturalism and the manipulation of the exchange-media of different countries, may have a clear idea how to go to the root of the financial disorder. This clear idea of the radical remedy to be applied, namely, the resumption by the state of the position of sovereign power, which has been allowed to fall into private hands, is all the more necessary now that national independence itself is threatened by international money-manipulators. It is vital for the future of the world that private individuals with ill-defined or carefully-concealed international connections should not continue to exercise the sovereign right of issuing money, uncontrolled. “Free competition and still more economic domination,” writes Pope Pius XI, ‘‘must be brought under the effective control of the public authority, in matters appertaining to this latter’s competence.[32] That this effective control may licitly take the form of the complete return of the sovereign right to the state. Pope Pius XI quite definitely teaches: “It is rightly contended,” he says, “that certain forms of property must be reserved to the state, since they carry with them an opportunity of economic domination too great to be left to private individuals without injury to the community at large.[33]

The method of control of the issue and lending of money in view of stability of the internal price level, outlined in the preceding pages, represents an ideal towards which we should tend. We may have to content ourselves for the time being with the more moderate plan of reform sketched by Professor O’Rahilly in his book, Money, and in his criticism of the Irish Central Bank Bill in the Standard (Dublin), but we must not lose sight of the ideal. There are many who will not be roused to the effort required to relegate money to its rightful subordinate position and so contribute to the return to order in the world, if the full ideal is not kept clearly before them. They will be afraid of any compromise with the evils they see.

In order that the state may be able to seek the common good of its subjects in such wise as to facilitate their efforts to live their lives as members of Christ, it is clear that effective control must be exercised over the issue and cancellation of money. Care must be exercised also to correct another defect in modern elective governments, which has largely contributed to the domination of money. Men who attain to political power as a result of a party triumph at the polls are often devoid of training, administrative experience or special aptitudes. It seldom happens that a popularly elected minister has the mental formation necessary to apply the considered policy of the legislature to the problems of daily life or is competent to discuss matters with heads of departments who have spent their lives in public administration. However able and energetic a minister may be, he seldom has the training and never can have the time to understand fully all the documents he signs or to know of all the decisions that are made in his name. Inevitably, ministers who are only a short time in office are dependent to a greater or less degree on their permanent officials—some absolutely. In practice, the permanent officials are the government. Now, owing to the domination of money in our day, the permanent heads of the Treasury Department, who are the spokesmen of the “ruling powers” of the modern world, are by far the most influential.

The net result is that elected ministers can seldom perform any act outside of previously sanctioned routine, without the consent of a small number of permanent financial experts. In other words, everything must pass through the Finance Department for a visa. Thus while the work of government is carried on in the offices, Parliament and elected assemblies generally are reduced to the position of centers of discussion, largely futile, on legislation that is conceived, drafted and administered by permanent officials under the dominant influence of finance. Now, how many permanent officials of Treasury departments throughout the world have given thought to the reversal of order in the modern world, by which members of Christ are subordinated to production, and production, distribution and consumption to money? Many of them are certainly not even aware of the disorder and easily support the forces working for the undoing of national sovereignty, the elimination of the small independent owner, the prevention of diffused property, and the regimentation of human beings.

Lest anyone may think that, in insisting so strongly upon the control of finance over elected governments, there may have been exaggeration, it will be well to quote a recent issue of The Weekly Review on the subject. In the issue of Nov. 6, 1941, we read: “Financial control is in the hands of a cosmopolitan clique with beneficiaries in every country of the world: it is therefore sometimes thought that, in order to counter it, something in the nature of a world government is necessary. Nothing could be further from the truth. Finance lives by the subservience of nations and individuals in nations to its dictates. It will cease to live, as soon as the nations dethrone it in their own countries and begin to make themselves and their governments responsible for the equitable use of money.… So long as men recognize the nation as a desired unit, national finance and the control of currency must be in the hands of governments.”

Since the preceding paragraphs were written, the writer has read Lord Perry’s pamphlet, Beware Bureaucracy in which the ideas above outlined are forcibly expressed by one with inside experience. He writes: “I do not suggest anything so dramatic as that the bureaucrats have unlawfully seized power; or that they are the willing tools of some underground conspiracy to convert Britain to a Socialistic state without the people being aware of their purpose. This view, I know, is held in many quarters. The cunning draftmanship of legislation during the past decade: the insidious pursuit of foreign policies of hesitation and appeasement… the use of the Companies Acts permanently to crystallize government departmental control of private enterprise: the careful ‘placing’ of advisers known to be favorable to particular schemes of National Planning—all these activities give color to such contentions. I do not support them, and am not concerned to support them. What I do support and am very much concerned to emphasize is the belief that whether or not the seduction of Britain from her old traditions of free enterprise and individual responsibility is deliberate or accidental, it is going on.…I am primarily a man of business, but it has been my lot in two wars and through some years of peace to see the operations of bureaucracy from within…

“‘The House of Commons has become a veritable manufactory for new legislation. In piling up statute law, Parliament finds time only to discuss the outline of an enactment: administrative detail is left nominally in the hands of a Minister, but in fact and practice, for the bureaucracy to frame under the guise of regulations as the inexperience of Whitehall in its ignorance may desire. Thus the common sense and knowledge of the world possessed by our legislators is lost, and responsibility to the electors—the democratic system—is betrayed.…Let it be emphasised that whatever new fields of government the bureaucrat commands, he does not add to his responsibility. That is still borne by the political ministers whom he directs, whom he tutors and whom he paralyses. The natural trend, then, of a political minister’s professional advisers is towards legislation which gives wide scope to the department which launches it. It is this thirst for power which inspires that type of legislation which Lord Hewart in his book, The New Despotism, found so objectionable—legislation which leaves departments free to lay down rules and to impose regulations against which there is no appeal either to the Courts of Law or to the Parliament itself.…For instance, in the Rating and Valuation Act of 1925, the Minister—that is, in practice, the department—was given the right to do whatever he thought expedient and to make orders which might actually ‘modify the provisions’ of the very Act itself. In effect, the department was given carte blanche to interpret or vary the Act as it thought fit.… “Every head of a department and the Minister himself all stand in spellbound awe of the curious taboo known as ‘Treasury Sanction.’ Why this should be is difficult to comprehend and still harder to explain. In ordinary business it would be the Cashier’s office—an important but quite subordinate functionary. But in the bureaucratic hierarchy the Treasury fiat overrides the judgment and decision of all other departments of state.…

“Lord Hewart, writing in 1929, sums up the methods of the ‘new despotism’ as: (a) to modify provisions of statutes: (b) to take power to determine as the Minister thinks fit: (c) to secure that the Minister’s decision shall be final and conclusive: (d) to secure that the Minister’s order shall not be subject to appeal to any Court; (e) to secure that the Minister’s rules, orders, and regulations shall have effect as if enacted in the Act: (f) to secure that the making of the order shall be conclusive evidence that the requirements of the Statute have been complied with.

“All of these processes are deliberately planned devices to remove the making of laws from the Parliament of the people and place power in the hands of the bureaucracy. They bypass the administration of justice and the preservation of individual liberty so that regulations enacted by irresponsible bureaucrats shall control our daily life, penalize the freedom of our conduct and destroy the rule of Law.…In so far as these things are necessary for defeating the alien enemy with whom we are at war, we need not, and do not grumble. But let us beware of the Bureaucracy, the hidden enemy within our gates, who whilst Germany was still a friendly nation, had already arrogated power and planned regulations for our enslavement. Power is a difficult thing to relinquish. What today we are told to endure as a war necessity, we shall be told to accept tomorrow as a necessity of reconstruction.”[34]

Lord Perry abstracts from the point whether the “Bureaucratic Planning” which is going on under the domination of finance is deliberate or accidental. The Right Hon. Lord Hewart of Bury, Lord Chief Justice of England, from whose book, The New Despotism, Lord Perry quotes, writes in that book as follows: “The complaint is not that rules and regulations are made, though they are made, to be sure, in the most embarrassing multiplicity. The complaint is that they are made at such a stage, in such a form, and in such circumstances as to deprive, at one and the same time, both Parliament and the Law Courts of any real authority in relation to them. The citizen is delivered over to the department. The department becomes judge in its own cause. The measure which produces these results is itself the handiwork of the department. More than that the method is not occasional or sporadic. It has become quite systematic. The conclusion is irresistible that it is manifestly the offspring of a well thought out plan.”

We have seen what Pope Pius XI said about the terrible power accumulated in the hands of the relatively few who control the creation of money and determine the allotment of credit. The reversal of order involved in the domination of finance, namely, the subordination of man to production, and of production, distribution and consumption to money, has contributed enormously to the growth of individualism. “On account of the evil of individualism,” writes Pope Pius XI, “things have come to such a pass that the highly developed social life, which once nourished in a variety of prosperous institutions organically linked with each other, has been damaged and all but ruined, leaving thus virtually only individuals and the state. Social life has entirely lost its organic form: the state which is now encumbered with all the burdens once borne by associations rendered extinct by it, is in consequence submerged and overwhelmed by an infinity of affairs and duties.”[35]

The growing domination of finance over individuals, who are supposed to be politically free but who are becoming more and more economically dependent, will lead to ever-increasing regimentation and bureaucracy, and to legislation of the kind deplored by Lord Perry and Lord Hewart in the texts quoted. It is inevitable. The root-remedy is the return of supernatural reverence for the personality of members of Christ. The remedy in the natural order will be to get rid of the reversal of order mentioned above, by putting money and its manipulators in their proper place. To that, however, must be added the revival of the guilds in a form adapted to present-day conditions. “Just as it is wrong,” writes Pope Pius XI, “to withdraw from the individual and commit to the community at large what private enterprise and industry can accomplish, so too it is an injustice, a grave evil and a disturbance of right order for a larger and higher organization to arrogate to itself functions which can be performed efficiently by smaller and lower bodies. This is a fundamental principle of social philosophy, unshaken and unchangeable, and it retains its full truth today.…The state should leave to these smaller groups the settlement of business of minor importance; it will thus carry out with greater freedom, power, and success the tasks belonging to it, because it alone can effectively accomplish these, directing, watching, stimulating and restraining, as circumstances suggest or necessity demands. Let those in power, therefore, be convinced that the more faithfully this principle be followed, and a graded hierarchical order exist between the various subsidiary organizations, the more excellent will be both the authority and the efficiency of the social organization as a whole, and the happier and more prosperous the condition of the state.”[36]

It may be well to conclude this section by drawing attention to another aspect of this question. It is a pity that some of those who have gallantly striven to undo these evils and put money in its proper place, have not a better grasp of the real history of the world. For example, Professor Soddy, to whose vigorous writings on money the present writer is happy to confess his indebtedness, uses the world “medieval,” at least once, as a term of contempt.[37] On the other hand, he speaks of Cartesian economics as if the term “Cartesian” were synonymous with true and lasting progress.[38] Now we know that Nominalist philosophy was one of the causes why the advance of physical science, to which Descartes amongst others contributed, has not resulted in greater order and happiness for mankind. Descartes was the initiator of one of the modern currents issuing from Nominalism, and Nominalism itself was a departure from and a revolt against the “medievalism” of St. Thomas Aquinas, whose sane economic principles we have seen in outline. Nominalism was cultivated in the universities in spite of the warnings and entreaties of the Popes.[39] In the very passage, in which Professor Soddy uses the term “medieval’’ as equivalent to “backward.” and “non-progressive,” he is deploring the fact that scientific discoveries have not been utilized to give ordinary people a better opportunity to cultivate their higher faculties and “live on a less animal-like plane.” Now he has only to recall how Catholic Church Holy Days gave way to Bank Holidays to realize how low we have fallen since medieval times. The ordinary people were deprived of the Church Holy days, on which they had an opportunity of turning to the things of the soul. Then, when it was found that some more rest was needed by the poor animals, in the interests of production and return on invested money, they were granted Bank Holidays. The very name is significant of that disorder, the domination of money, which Professor Soddy has so ably combated in his works. That disorder is a reversal of the order of medieval times.

international trade and money

a. the bank for international settlements and international trade

We have seen something of the growth of Central Banks aiming at setting themselves free from national control. They have rapidly increased in number since the establishment of the Federal Reserve Board in the United States in 1913. We have seen also that the Federal Reserve Board by its control of gold practically controls the trade of the world. We know too that the network of Central Banks, with the Bank for International Settlements as the apex of the system, has for object to provide the necessary mechanism for the “satisfactory” working of the international gold standard. Dr. Funk of Germany and Mr. Montagu Norman of Great Britain retain their seats on the Board of Directors of the Bank for International Settlements under the presidency of Mr. Thomas H. McKettrick of the United States, in spite of the war which has been raging since 1939.

Some additional information concerning the Bank of International Settlements is to be found in the address given by Sir Charles Addis, K.C.M.G., to the members of the Institute of Bankers, on 3rd April, 1930.[40] “The committee appointed to organize the new bank was composed of fourteen members appointed by the Central Banks of the principal powers concerned, Great Britain, France, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Japan, and the United States. They met in Baden Baden on October 3rd, 1929, and continued in session for a period of six weeks. Basel Switzerland, was finally selected as the seat of the new bank.…It was naturally the aim of the Baden Baden Committee, composed as it was of bankers, to provide the bank with complete freedom of administration, and to exclude as far as possible any political interference with its procedure. But this at once gave rise to a very difficult question.…The problem was how to reconcile the freedom and independence of management indispensable for the successful working of any financial institution with that degree of government interference and control which in the last resort is inseparable from the assertion by any government of its sovereign rights.

“The difficulty was solved by dividing the statutes into two sections. Of the sixty articles, forty-seven are regarded as administrative, and the board of the bank are free, by a two-thirds majority, to alter them as and when they please. The remaining thirteen articles of the statutes, which deal with the objects of the bank, the composition of the bank, the exercise of the right to veto, etc., are regarded as constitutional and cannot be altered until the change has been proposed by a two-thirds majority of the board, confirmed by a general meeting, and sanctioned by a fresh Swiss law supplementing the charter of the bank, for which the agreement of the governments signatory to the treaty authorizing the charter is required.…The Charter takes the form of a Convention which was signed at the Hague on January 20th, 1930, by Germany, Belgium, France, Great Britain, Italy, and Japan of the one part and Switzerland of the other part.…The charter, as well as certain fundamental articles of the statutes of the bank, can only be altered by a fresh law passed in agreement with the other signatory powers. The bank and its foreign employees are exempt from taxation. The signatory powers, including Switzerland, also agree that the bank, its property and assets and its deposits, shall be immune as regards their respective territories from any seizure or confiscation, in time of peace or war, and from any prohibition or restriction of exports of gold or currency.…

“The Board of the bank is composed of the governors of the seven Central Banks of Belgium, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, and the United States, and of seven representatives of finance, industry or commerce of the same nationality as tbe governors who appoint them…The governors of the Central Banks other than the original seven…. may each submit a list of four candidates for directorship.…From these lists the Board may elect, by a two-thirds majority, not more than nine persons. The full Board will thus be composed of twenty-five Directors. (France and Germany have each one additional representative for Reparations).

“In explaining the objects of the new bank, it may be convenient in begin with the negative clauses.…The bank may not operate for its own account in currencies which do not satisfy the practical requirements of the gold or gold exchange standard. It may not enter into any banking operation which conflicts with the monetary policy of central banks.…The bank may not issue notes, but it can buy and sell and earmark gold. If it is prohibited from making an advance to a government, there is nothing to prevent it from buying its Treasury Bills if currently marketable, or lending money to its agent, the central bank. The Bank for International Settlements may not accept bills, but it can discount them. It may not deal in other than gold or gold exchange currencies for its own account, but it can do so for account of others, whether banks, firms or individuals, so long as the central bank does not object. In fine, the general intention of the restrictions is not so much to restrain the operations of the bank, as to ensure that they shall be confined to transactions through or with the consent of central banks. Its chief function is to act as a center of co-operation for central banks.”

Four possible lines of development of the Bank for International Settlements were outlined in the Midland Bank Review of June/July, 1930. Of these “the fourth line of monetary activity will, if followed, carry us in the direction of stabilizing the value of gold. The bank has the power, subject to the indispensable support of central banks, to ensure an even expansion of credit supplies irrespective of any shortage or plethora of gold. If gold, as seems on balance likely, becomes scarce in relation to supposed monetary needs, the bank may make good the deficiency through its powers of lending, discounting bills and buying securities, thus acting in much the same way as a central bank in its own country, with the advantage that it is not bound by any statutory or customary cash or gold ratios.” As Mr. C. M. Hattersley remarks, “in the same way that Central Banks today, by advances and investments, create the ‘bank-cash’ upon which the commercial banks operate, so the Bank for International Settlements will be in a position to create a kind of super-bank-cash upon which, in turn, the Central Banks will rely.[41]

b. international planning

and the gold standard

Every country on the gold standard has stable rates of exchange with the others. Three different methods of securing this have been evolved. The first based on the free coinage of gold may he called the gold specie standard. That based on the convertibility of paper money into bullion is called the gold bullion standard. The third is known as the gold exchange standard.[42]

Mr. Geoffrey Crowther explains the distinction between these three with his customary lucidity. “A currency system,” he writes, “in which gold coins either form the whole circulation or else circulate equally with notes is known as the ‘full gold standard.’ When gold coins do not circulate, but the Central bank is nevertheless under legal obligation to buy and sell gold in exchange for currency at a fixed price and in unlimited amounts (sometimes with a minimum amount fixed but never a maximum), it is known as the ‘gold bullion standard,’ as the currency is then convertible not into gold coin but into gold bullion.…You could still get gold for your notes, but only if you were prepared to take at least one bar of gold, at about £1,700 a bar. The man in the street could no longer get gold for his notes.… A third form is the ‘gold exchange standard’ under which the legal obligation resting upon the central bank is to redeem the currency not in gold itself but in some other currency which is itself convertible into gold. The gold exchange standard is usually adopted by a small or poor country which designates as the currency in which it will redeem its own notes at a fixed rate the currency of one of the large gold standard countries. But whatever form the gold standard may take, its essential characteristic is that the currency is, either directly or at one remove, either in volume or in value, linked to gold.”[43]

This is the theory of the functioning of the gold exchange standard. Dr. Robert Eisler will illustrate for us the system in practice. “It is obvious,” he writes, “that the introduction of the gold exchange standard allows of another large scale expansion of the world’s fiduciary circulation over and above that produced by the transition to the gold bullion standard.…If, say, the Polish National Bank includes in its gold-exchange reserves (instead of so much gold) an equivalent amount of Federal Reserve dollar notes—which need not be covered by more than 35% gold—an addition of one-third of this quantity of gold will enable the Federal Reserve Bank to compensate the restriction of note circulation in America caused by the export of the dollar notes in question to Poland. And if instead of dollar notes the Bank Polski holds checks on the Chase National Bank of New York, this bank is only obliged to hold the usual proportion of cash reserves (i.e., no more than 10% in dollar notes against this liability, against which the Federal Reserve System need not hold more than 35% in gold. Therefore, a check figuring for full 100% of its gold value in the gold exchange reserve of the Polish National Bank will immobilise only 3.5% of its value in Federal Reserve gold. This is the magic wand which enabled the U.S.A. to lend, during the four years 1925–1928, 4,789 million dollars to Europe on long account, not to mention an enormous volume of short term lending, although the gold reserves of the Federal Reserve System were never higher than 4,810 million dollars (April, 1927) during this period.[44]

Accordingly, the currency of a country on the gold exchange standard, instead of being convertible into gold, is convertible into foreign currencies which are equivalent to gold. The gold exchange standard, therefore, presupposes the existence somewhere of a gold specie standard or at least of a gold bullion standard. It practically comes to this, that in all exchanges between countries, the currencies, in which the prices of things are expressed, have all to be calculated in terms of gold. Only on this condition can trade between the countries take place. Thus those who control gold stand at the crossroads and take toll of the passers-by or turn them back, as the case may be. This is really only a more complete centralization and systematization of what was going on during the 19th century, since gold became practically the monopoly of a relatively small number of financiers. No country could contract out of the system because any country which tried to do so was immediately denounced as the possessor of unsound money.

In his book, Economic Peace Aims,[45] Oswald Dutch gives us an outline of a planned reorganization of currency and state finance after the war. A few extracts will suffice to show what some financiers hope to achieve: “A Central European Bank will be established with its headquarters in a neutral state, preferably Switzerland. This Central Bank will of course make use of national banks and their branches as executive organs for monetary exchange and for carrying out all further banking transactions. No individual state will issue its own money. The old national currencies will be provisional legal tender at the rate corresponding to their conversion to the new dollar currency.…The activities of the European Central Bank will be absolutely independent of any influence of the government of the European Commonwealth or of any national governments. Apart from coming under the part control of the American Federal Reserve Banks and the Bank of England, however, it will be a separate and independent institution. In the initial stages the Central Bank will, it is true, represent nothing more than a form of large-scale branch, of these two banks. It will only gradually become a separate institution as European economy grows stronger: even then the democratic parent institutes must retain their right of control.

“It will be a question whether it is practically possible to start off with the issue of dollar notes only or whether the Central Bank will be able to issue coins as well. If this is not possible for technical reasons, the coins of the national currencies can be retained as small change, at a fixed relation to the dollar.…The establishment of a common European currency on the gold basis would not only have a decisive effect on the economic reconstruction of the Continent; it would above all ensure the cooperation of all those peoples who. for the first time since 1914, would once more bestanding on a firm monetary basis.…

Only one who has lived the last twenty years in Central Europe can realize what it will mean to the people of this territory if Europe once again has a real gold currency, and no longer a gold-edged or manipulated currency. Despite all the attempts to shake the people’s faith in gold and to create all manner of substitute currencies and cover, gold still retains its magic influence.…A common European currency will do far more to bring the many peoples of Europe together and to unite them than the finest political doctrines, world philosophies and programs could ever hope to do. The establishment of a common currency…must, like the political Board of Reconstruction, be a lightning stroke. That is, it must come into force on the day of the Armistice. All the negotiations, between the European governments must be concluded before the war ends.…

“All the assets of the German Reichsbank and of any other banks in Europe which may still be functioning will be taken over by the European Central Bank. They will be used to cover part of the issue of dollar notes. In addition, the Democratic States will grant further supplies of gold as backing for money in circulation. The sum made available with eventual assets of the European banks must be sufficient to provide a minimum cover of 40% in gold and foreign exchange for the fiduciary issue.…The Commonwealth (Continental Ministry of Finance and the European Parliament), together with an Anglo-American Control Board, will supervise the budgets of the member states.”[46]

What are we to think of such an organization of the world by those who control the world’s gold stocks? Perhaps the best answer will be the words of Mr. Jeffrey Mark in reference to the attempts to make the Bank for International Settlements as autocratic with regard to world finance as the Bank of England is with regard to British finance. “This bankers’ dream,” he writes, “will certainly make for a ‘stable’ banking system for the world. With the whole of the world’s gold stocks centralized, and with each country’s internal banking-system co-ordinated under an all-powerful central bank, bank crashes and bank ‘runs’ (whether on a localised or national scale) will he impossible; an illusory gold-backing to a world-currency can be successfully maintained, and international gold-tokens issued and ‘redeemed’ in any quantities which suit the policy of the board of the World Bank. At the same time all hope for freedom and plenty—for the individual, for industry, and for nations—will automatically disappear, and the world will be relentlessly driven into complete helotry under an international gold idol. The actual graduation of power will then arrange itself as below:

gold

bank for international settlements
(world bank)

central banks of the world

joint stock banks
(members of federal reserve banking system)

branch banks of the above

industry

public[47]

What is the fundamental reason why it is to be feared that such an organization as the one outlined is destined to bring about disastrous results? It is easily given. The whole organization is naturalistic or anti-supernatural. The attitude of those who will sit on the Supreme Council towards Our Divine Lord and his Vicar may be guessed from the naturalism of the proposer, the author of the work quoted. “The nation and national feeling,” he writes, “are as exalted a creed as religion and religious feeling. The world would be poorer and sadder did not these ideas stand side by side with science and economics…religion and patriotism, these two great ideals, have become a curse to mankind wherever the attempt has been made to suppress and crush them. Once patriotism is subordinated to international collaboration it will be as much a private matter as religion has now become.”[48] To put nationality on the same level as the Mystical Body of Christ and to relegate religion to the private sphere, for example, are indicative of a mentality completely opposed to the Divine Plan for Order in the world, proclaimed by Our Lord Jesus Christ and His Church. We know that “everything must crumble that is not grounded on the one corner-stone, which is Christ Jesus.”[49] “Christ only,” writes in his turn Pope Pius XII, “is that ‘corner-stone’ upon which civil society, like the life of the individual man, must rest if it will rest secure.”[50] We know too that “Antichrist shall make all, both little and great, rich and and poor, freeman and bondman, to have a character in their right hand, or on their foreheads. And that no man may buy or sell, but he that hath the character.”[51]

Perhaps the comparison employed by The New English Weekly of Oct. 15, 1942, in its review of the book by Hans Heyman, Plan for Permanent Peace, mentioned in footote #46, will help the ordinary reader to grasp the root-objection to a central international or supranational bank of the kind denounced by Mr. Jeffrey Mark. “It is generally admitted,” writes the reviewer, “that the Postal Union has worked well.…But the trade exchanges between peoples… have been a continuous cause of annoyance, suspicion and downright robbery. Well, what would the postal service have been like if it had been run upon the lines of international finance?
Suppose that the Postal Union had been created by a monopolistic group of international postage-stamp producers, who had made it a rule to restrict the supply of stamps to any nation which did not have a favorable balance of letters. Each nation would then have to try to despatch more letters than it received so that its correspondents would always be owing it letters. It is easy to foresee the results. The epistolary ‘creditor-nations’ would be those which showered unnecessary letters on their correspondents, who would thus become epistolary debtors, receive fewer stamps from the stamp oligarchy and therefore fall deeper into debt. The creditor nations on the other hand, having an augmented supply of stamps but fewer letters to answer, would seek with increasing difficulty to find correspondents who still had a surplus of stamps: and would presently go to war with one another to seize each other’s ‘spheres of correspondence.’ The tendency would be for the whole system to slow down to a standstill, spasmodically starting up again whenever the Stamp Oligarchs chose to issue a charitable grant of stamps outside of the rules of the game. To have such a Postal Union would be a palpable piece of insanity: but would it be any more mad than to tolerate the present domination of world trade, by a system of debts accounted in international currency?”

In the light of what has just been written and of what we have seen in previous chapters, we can understand the observations of The Weekly Review of May 22, 1941, on some statements by Mr. Cordell Hull, United States Secretary of State. It first quotes Mr. Hull as saying: “There is little point in planning for foreign trade unless the outcome of the war is favorable to the free peoples of the world.” It then gives four points to guide the world or four aims inspiring the United States in the present conflict, according to the same minister. These five aims are: (1) excessive trade restrictions are to cease: (2) raw materials are to be available to all: (3) consuming countries are to be protected by international regulation of supplies: (4) international financial aid is to be given for the essential development of all countries. The Weekly Review comments on these points in the following terms: “As it is improbable that the international financial aid will lake the form of gifts, Mr. Hull might be interpreted as follows: All countries to accept international financial aid; the international financial aiders to choose the essential enterprises for development; international agreements to regulate supplies for countries designated as consumers, these countries thus being at the mercy of the regulators; raw materials to be allotted to countries agreed upon and in the regulated proportions; no discrimination in the application of these principles; trade restrictions to continue, but not those regarded by international financiers as excessive; the American financial interests to determine what is excessive and which are the free peoples upon whom to impose the system outlined above.”

Accordingly, it looks as if all countries, but especially those with important mineral resources, are destined to share the fate of Bolivia. “Tin,” writes the American author, Ludwell Denny, “is making Bolivia a colony of the United States. As we have seen in examining American financial penetration, Wall Street bankers and corporations either own or have a mortgage on much of Bolivia’s resources and have an appreciable control over Bolivian fiscal affairs if not over its domestic and foreign policies.…Washington’s political domination of Bolivia has been outlined above in the case of the recent frontier ‘war’ with Paraguay. The net result is that the Bolivian people, living in the midst of great natural riches, are poor; living in a nominally independent republic, they are subservient to the United States.…Extraordinarily bad labor conditions exist in the tin mines—American properties in Bolivia are no exception.”[52]  “The Americanization of Europe and the far places of the earth advances,” he writes elsewhere.…“To many this transformation of the world into a cheaper imitation of all that is crude and little that is good, in American civilization, seems a frightful thing. But the Americans do not doubt. We are smitten with that most potent of illusions, that we are ‘the Chosen People.’… Business conquest is as much a religion to Americans as spiritual conquest was to the early Christians and physical conquest was once to the Britons.…Geniuses of mechanical efficiency, we cannot organize an equitable distribution of our national wealth. Instead we exploit nations less rich.…Too wise to try to govern the world, we shall merely own it.”[53]

On the other hand, we have seen that the German banking system leads also to the treatment of even Germans as mere individuals. A fortiori will this system, when reinforced by the German race-theory with its abrogation of the objective moral law. lead to the oppression of non-Germans.

We can, therefore, readily see that, with the existing monetary systems, the third fundamental essential of a new order laid down by His Holiness, Pope Pius XII, in his Christmas (1941) Allocution, will be difficult of realization. His Holiness set forth this third essential point as follows: “Within the limits of a moral order founded on moral principles, there is no place for that cold and calculating egoism which tends to hoard economic resources and materials destined for the use of all, to such an extent that the nations less favored by nature are not permitted access to them. In this regard, it is a source of great consolation to see admitted the necessily of a participation of all in the natural riches of the earth, even on the part of those nations which, in the fulfilment of this principle, belong to the category of givers and not to that of receivers. It is, however, in conformity with the principles of equity that a solution to a question so vital to world economy should be arrived at methodically and in easy stages with all necessary guarantees, always drawing useful lessons trom the omissions and mistakes of the past. If in the future peace, this point were not to be courageously dealt with, there would remain in the relations between peoples a deep and far-reaching root blossoming forth into bitter dissensions and burning jealousies and which would lead eventually to a new conflict.”

The anxiety above expressed with regard to the preparations being made by naturalistic organizations for the peace at the end of the present war (1939—?) finds an echo in the statement of the American Hierarchy, issued after their meeting in November, 1942. The statement, from which I quote a few passages, reached me long after I had written what precedes.

“In the discharge of our pastoral responsibility,” their Lordships said, “we are gravely concerned about the world peace of tomorrow. Secularism cannot write a real and lasting peace.…Exploitation cannot write a real and lasting peace. Where greedy might and selfish expediency are made the substitutes of justice there can be no securely ordered world.…The spirit of Christianity can write a real and lasting peace in justice and charity to all nations, even to those not Christian. In the epochal revolution through which the world is passing, it is very necessary for us to realize that every man is our brother in Christ. All should be convinced that every man is endowed with the dignity of human personality, and that he is entitled by the laws of nature to the things necessary to sustain life in a way conformable to human dignity. In the post-war world, the profit element of industry and commerce must he made subservient to the common good of communities and nations if we are to have a lasting peace with justice and a sense of true brotherhood for all our neighbors. The inequalities of nations and of individuals can never give to governments or to leaders of industry or commerce a right to be unjust. They cannot, if they follow the fixed principles of morality, maintain or encourage conditions under which men cannot live according to the standards befitting human personality.…We urge the serious study of the peace plans of Pope Pius XII which insist that justice be inspired by love—first, love of God, and then, love of every human being. ‘The command of love among individuals found in the Gospels” said Benedict XV, differs in no respect from that which should reign among states and peoples’ (Pacem Dei, Benedict XV, 1920). If we are not to have a Christian peace, then we shall be given only an armistice and we shall begin to prepare for a third world conflict.”[54]

c. proposed reform of monetary system

in view of international trade[55]

Sir Reginald Howe depicts in excellent fashion the deadlock and confusion in international trade after the war of 1914–1918. “When the United States and France became large creditor nations after the war, they did not say to the other nations: ‘If you will not take a loan we will take gold from you.’ They said: “We will not give you a loan: pay up the gold.’…. The other nations were prepared to continue year by year to get more hopelessly into debt, since they were never asked to pay beyond England’s willingness to take payment in the form of surplus imports. When, however, the United States called upon them to pay up, she took their gold. This compelled them to contract their currency, thus forcing down prices. This ruined their producers and industries and put their people out of work. In this way it was brought home to the debtor countries in what a Fool’s Paradise they had been living. Even when they put an embargo on the export of gold they were liable to have the exchange value of their currencies depreciated by sales of those currencies in excess of the demand for them—hence the imposition of exchange limitations. They saw that in order to rectify their position they must either increase their exports or diminish their imports. They were unable to increase their exports—or if they did, they got no more foreign currency for them, owing to the fall in the price of those exports—and they were therefore driven to try to diminish imports, but…the imports of one country are the exports of another, so that when they restricted imports they automatically restricted exports, with the consequence that world trade has been rapidly diminishing until it is now (1935) a third of its 1929 value.

“It will be seen that tariffs, quotas and exchange restrictions were the means employed by all the nations in their attempts to rectify their debtor position. They were not in themselves original causes of the restriction of world trade.…The original cause was the imperative need, with which each nation was faced, of rectifying its debtor position, because although most of them had belatedly abandoned the Gold Standard, they were still liable to have their currencies sold on the exchange by the creditor nations which owned them, so knocking down their exchange rate.…A system which permits private individuals of one nation not merely to damage their own country by knocking down its exchange, but also to upset the trade of the other countries with the rest of the world, is indefensible. This buying and selling of currencies by private individuals, across the exchange, was recognised by the MacMillan Committee as a source of great danger as long ago as June, 1931.…It was the cause of England’s crisis in September, 1931, and it may at any moment become the cause of a further crisis. So long as the fear of having their exchanges knocked down exists amongst the nations, it is useless to preach to them that they should reduce their tariffs or eliminate quotas or exchange restrictions.

“In order to remove this fear we believe that it is necessary to recognize internationally the same principle which each nation recognizes internally as between its own citizens, namely, that the giving of a claim discharges a debt, but that it is for the creditor to exercise or refrain from exercising that claim. If an individual in England owes £5 to another, he has discharged his debt when he pays him £5. The £5 is, however, of value only because, being legal tender, it will buy goods and services. The debtor is not under any obligation to see that his creditor does buy goods and services.…It is unreasonable that foreigners should be required to pay their debts to Englishmen in pounds, to Frenchmen in francs, and to Americans in dollars. They do not manufacture these currencies in their own countries: they can only acquire dollars, for example, if America is prepared to allow them to sell their goods to American importers. The dollars which the American importer pays for these goods are then the property of the foreign exporters and can be used by them…to pay their debts in America. If, however, America, as she does, deliberately excludes foreign goods by means of tariffs, then foreign nations cannot possibly acquire dollars and it is preposterous that America should be able to insist upon their attempting to do the impossible.

…Nations should only be required to make payment in their own national currencies because their obligation is, in fact, to supply their own goods in exchange for the goods they import, and their own national currencies alone buy their own goods.

“Next, it is the business of the banking system to facilitate trade and to act as a clearing house between exporters and importers. We propose, therefore, that exchange rates should be immutably fixed by agreement between nations and that there should he no international currency (gold). The scientific basis of that fixation would have regard to the price levels of the various countries and the rates necessary to give each of them of the one part, and the rest of the world of the other, approximate equilibrium. For example, if a Canadian dollar would buy on an average, about a quarter as much satisfaction in Canadian goods and services as a pound would buy in England of English goods and services, then 4 dollars should equal one pound. Whilst that is the theoretical basis of computation, in practice it would be necessary to fix the rate, by negotiation, at some approximately correct figure, whether 4, 4.5 or 5 dollars to the pound. If it were then found, in practice, that these rates did not result in English exports to the world being approximately equal to English imports from the world, it would be necessary to adjust the English price level. When, however, this had been done, that English internal general price level would have to be kept stable. This does not, of course, mean that prices of individual commodities in England would have to be fixed, but merely that the General Price Index figure would have to be kept at the same point.…A given income, taken over the average of all prices, would give its owner approximately the same satisfaction in goods and services, i.e. in his standard of living, in 10, 20 or 30 years, as it does now. Surely this is a better standard of value for a unit of money than to say to the individual: ‘Prices may be doubled in 10, 20, or 30 years and a given sum of money only buy half as much then as now, but we will guarantee that that sum of money will buy the same quantity of gold in theory, though in practice, if more than an insignificant number of you ask for it the government will declare a moratorium and you will not be able to have it.…’

“The value of the pound would, therefore, depend upon its purchasing power over English goods generally, i.e. upon the internal general price level.…Assuming fixed exchanges and no international money payments, if a nation kept its internal general price level stable, all would be well with it. But suppose it raised its internal general price level by issuing more new money than was justified by expanding production, it would immediately begin to lose its export trade. For example, supposing the rate of exchange between Canada and England had been rigidly fixed, by agreement between the two nations, at four dollars to the pound, a dollar would always be worth five shillings. Let us now assume that an Englishman had been in the habit of buying something which cost in Canada eighty dollars, and which therefore cost him £20. If Canada were then to inflate, i.e. issue more Canadian money than was justified by the volume of business to be done, prices in Canada would rise. The Englishman would now find that his commodity cost in Canada, let us say, 120 dollars, and with a rigidly fixed exchange cost him, therefore, £30 instead of £20. He would cease to buy from Canada: in other words, Canada would lose her export trade.

“Similarly, if a country, e.g. Japan, came out of equilibrium with the rest of the world by lowering its general price level, its traders would export more, but would import less… She would not even get the other nations into debt to her; she would merely have acquired claims on foreign goods (blocked credits in foreign currencies) which, through her own action in dropping her price level, she could not clear by taking imports. The Japanese importer could not afford to buy the more expensive goods of foreign countries, take them into Japan and sell them at a profit. The credits, therefore, created by the Japanese exports would remain unused and useless.”

The Economic Reform Club pamphlet sums up the proposals as follows:

(1)  That each nation should have its own national money.

(2)  That each nation should keep its internal general price level stable, using Price Index figures for this purpose.

(3)  That the exchange values of these national currencies, i.e. the exchange rates, should be immutably fixed by agreement between the co-operating nations, regardless of gold.[56]

(4)  That there should be no international money.

(5)  That all international trade should be done on Bills of Exchange negotiated, as at present, through the ordinary channels of the Banks, and rediscounted by them with the National Central Bank.

(6)  That no private individual or private institution should buy, sell or own foreign currencies.

(7)  That all the foreign currencies acquired by a nation through the sale abroad of its goods…should be held for the nation by its National Central Bank, the individual citizens of that nation receiving their own national money at the fixed exchange rate in lieu of those foreign currencies.

(8)  That there should be a Central Bankers’ Clearing House which would in no sense be an International Bank, but merely a common meeting place where the respective National Central Banks of the co-operating nations could meet one another to exchange the claims which they might hold to the goods of one nation, for claims to the goods of others, and where they might cancel out their claims on one another.

The object of each nation would be to keep its imports in approximate equilibrium over a period of time with its exports. Each nation would, therefore, be as much interested in its import as in its export trade, and international trade would become an exchange of goods and services between the nations to their mutual advantage, instead of a desperate struggle by each to lower its general price level with a view to underselling others and getting them into a position of unpayable debt.

This last point has been treated in excellent fashion in A Twentieth Century Economic System, also published by the Economic Reform Club. In it we read: “The responsibility which this scheme places squarely upon each nation to keep its own imports and exports in equilibrium must in no circumstances be transferred to a Central International Clearing Bank. If a Central International Bank were entrusted this task instead of each nation being free to solve its own domestic problem in its own way, we should once more be back to the old condition of financial war to control a central monetary authority which, in its turn, would control the domestic affairs of so-called independent nations.”

It may be well to quote here what Sir Reginald Rowe wrote about the Morgenthau Plan in a letter to The Times, which remained unpublished. “The Morgenthau proposals,” he said, “quite frankly put gold on its former pedestal or nearly there. This means that any country possessing or producing large stocks of gold, which add nothing to the world’s real wealth, will be enabled to obtain a large proportion of that real wealth without adding to it. Can anybody who realises this approve of it? The actual movement of gold, unless I am much mistaken, would continue to be from one hole in the earth (the mine) to another, but the second hole would be underneath the guardians, of the new international fund instead of as now under Fort Knox. Apart from this, the proposals issued by Mr. Morgenthau involve to so serious an extent, if indirectly, the subjection of the internal monetary policy of any ‘member country’ to the judgment of twelve individuals that these financial apostles may in effect come to rule us all.”

Professor Soddy’s criticism of the Morgenthau and the Keynes Plans will be found in the pamphlet, The Arch-Enemy of Economic Freedom, already referred to.

international economic code

At the end of Chapter VIII of his useful work, An Outline of Money, already quoted more than once, Mr. Geoffrey Crowther speaks of the necessity of as precise a code of international economic law as can be contrived and of agreement amongst the powers to use their economic power against any transgressor of the rules. We have already insisted in Chapters 2 and 3 that the Holy Father’s voice must be the deciding factor with regard to the morality of the political and economic decisions of any future League of Nations. His Holiness, Pope Pius XII, has pointed out in his Encyclical Letter, Summi Pontificatus, that the standards adopted by the modern world are corrupted at their source, because the peoples of the world, owing to decay of faith in Christ, are losing touch with the principles of right dealing. The Pope alone can found the new order on the immovable rock of Christian Revelation and natural law. Without him, all these much-vaunted schemes are hardly worth the paper on which they are written.

Two points concerning economics must be made the subject of special international agreement. The first concerns trading in money. Trading in a country’s monetary standard of measurement as a commodity and thereby varying its value should be made a punishable crime exactly the same as attempts to interfere with national weights and measures. Nations should agree upon the penalties to be inflicted for all attempts to interfere with their respective exchange-media and upon the mode of procedure for extradition, etc., in the case of such crimes. Stock-exchange speculations in money, then, should be forbidden altogether, as opposed to peace and order, national and international. Secondly, stringent regulations should be made for stock-exchange speculations in general. The reform of the stock-exchange all over the world is long overdue. We have already seen how speculations opposed to social justice and the common good are favored by the private manufacture of bank-credit. Stock-exchange speculations aiming at gain by all kinds of deceitful maneuveres are opposed to the Christian social doctrine of the just price. Such speculations substitute for the just price a forced or factitious price fixed by one or several in view of private gain.[57]

Finally, I would recommend the following remarks on Death Duties by the Earl of Portsmouth, in Alternative to Death, to the consideration of my readers: “Death Duties are the enemy of continuity and personal responsibility.…The policy of imposing Death Duties on responsibly held property can only benefit the banker, the speculator, and mass capitalist, and as a corollary, the Communist, who desires a proletarian dictatorship and slave values to achieve his ends.…Land is not the only class of responsibly held property to which freedom from Death Duties should apply. Industrial concerns which are a matter of family ownership and direction, and where conditions are sound and healthy for the workmen, should likewise be relieved of Death Duties for the same reason that continuity and security in personal relationship are thereby established.…The principle of the limited liability company is wrong in that it substitutes for responsible ownership an anonymous direction which may conceal all sorts of financial subterfuge and inter-relationships. It results in the monopolies and so-called gigantic rationalization inherent in the slave state. At the other end of the scale the limited liability company allows for all the fraudulent machinations of the professional bankrupt. Shares held in limited liability companies should, therefore, be subject to Death Duties. Bonds held in so-called trustee securities should be subject to an even higher rate of Death Duties, for these bear even less risk and even less responsibility than holdings in the ordinary stock of limited liability companies.

“The international ownership of money is a source of even greater irresponsibility, and even greater evils, since it may involve the sacrifice of one’s own people for the sake of irresponsible gain. It covers up the causes of wars and slumps, and creates a vast insecurity over the whole world jn the name of progress. There can be no peace until the family is secure and that aggregation of families known as the nation is also secure in what it can itself control. This may not eliminate war, but it will certainly eliminate the most fertile causes of war. Therefore, it is right to discourage such holdings by the imposition of severe Death Duties upon them.…By such means land would be once more regarded in its true light as a most precious possession, demanding the greatest responsibility in ownership. By the same token it will discourage what the French so rightly call the Societé Anonyme, or Limited Liability Company, in favor of the open and responsibly owned small business.
It will discourage the conception fostered by the government in ever-increasing range since the days of William and Mary that, for the sake of immediate political advantage, the misery of usurious debt can be fastened about the necks of future generations.” As an example of the monopolies to which he alludes, the Earl of Portsmouth mentions the economic power of the Palestine Economic Corporation in 1941. He then adds: “The quarters of the Palestine Economic Corporation were not in Palestine or the Levant nor in England which is responsible for law and order in Palestine. Instead they were in New York on Lexington Avenue.” He then gives the names of the Directors from Moodie’s Manual of Investments, 1942.

Appendix

pope pius xii’s five peace points

In his allocution to the Cardinals on Christmas Eve, 1939, His Holiness formulated the essential requisites of a satisfactory peace as follows:

1) The right to life and to independence of all nations, great and small, powerful and weak, must be secured. The will of a single nation to live must never be equivalent to sentence of death on another nation. Reparation must be made for past violations of these rights, in accordance not with military force or arbitrary self-interest but with the rules of justice and mutual equity.

2) The order thus established, if it is to have the characteristics of true peace, viz., tranquillity and stable duration, must be accompanied by spiritual and material disarmament, mutually agreed upon, organic and progessive. Unless this is secured, terms of peace will, sooner or later, show that there is no life in them. The nations must be delivered from the slavery of the race for armaments and from the danger of material force becoming, instead of a protection for rights, a tyrannical instrument for their violation.

3) In creating or reconstituting international institutions, which have so high a mission, it is important to profit by the experience of the ineffectiveness or faulty functioning of similar institutions in the past. Since it is practically impossible to foresee and provide for everything at the time when peace is being negotiated, it is important that juridical institutions be established to guarantee the faithful execution of the terms of peace and, in case of admitted need, to review and amend them, so as to avoid unilateral and arbitrary breaches and interpretations of those terms.

4) To achieve a better European order, attention must be paid to the true needs and just demands of nations and peoples, as of ethnic minorities. Even if these demands are in conflict with existing treaties or other juridical titles, they merit benevolent examination with a view to a peaceful solution, even, if necessary, by an equitable, prudent, and agreed revision of the treaties.

5) The best and most complete terms of peace will prove a failure unless governments and peoples acquire more and more of that spirit which alone can give life, authority and binding force to the dead letter of international conventions: a sense of deep responsibility, judging human laws by the standards of the law of God: the hunger and thirst after justice, blessed in the Sermon on the Mount: that universal love which summarily expresses the Christian ideal.[58]

pope pius xii’s allocution, christmas, 1941

the five essentials of a new order

(1) Rights of Small Nations:

Firstly, within the limits of a new order founded on moral principles, there is no room for violation of the freedom, integrity and security of other states, no matter what may be their territorial extension or their capacity for defense.

If it is inevitable that the powerful states should, by reason of their greater potentialities and their power, play leading roles in the formation of economic groups, comprising not only themselves but smaller and weaker states as well, it is nevertheless indispensable that, in the interests of the common good, they, and all others, respect the rights of those smaller states to political freedom, to economic development, and to adequate protection, in the case of conflicts between nations, of that neutrality which is theirs according to the natural, as well as international, law.

(2) The Rights of Minorities:

Secondly, within the limits of a new order founded on moral principles, there is no place for open or invisible oppression of the cultural and linguistic characteristics of national minorities, for the hindrance or restriction of their economic resources, for the limitation or abolition of their natural fertility.

(3) No Hoarding of Economic Resources:

Thirdly, within the limits of a new order founded on moral principles, there is no place for that cold and calculating egoism which tends to hoard economic resources and materials destined for the use of all, to such an extent that the nations less favored by nature are not permitted access to them.

(4)  Progressive Limitation of Armaments Essential:

Fourthly, within the limits of a new order founded on moral principles, once the more dangerous principles of armed conflict have been eliminated, there is no case for total warfare or for a mad rush to armaments. The calamity of a world war with the economic and social ruin and the moral dissolution and breakdown which follow in its train should not he permitted to envelop the human race for a third time.

In order that mankind may he preserved from such a misfortune it is essential to proceed with sincerity and honesty to a progressive limitation of armaments.

(5)  No Persecution of Religion:

Fifthly, within the limits of a new order founded on moral principles, there is no place for the persecution of religion and of the Church.[59]

some extracts from pope pius xii’s allocution, christmas, 1942

It is true that the road from night to full day will be long.…On its first five milestones, there are chiselled the following maxims:

first milestone

Dignity and rights of the human person:

He who would have the Star of Peace to shine out and stand over society should cooperate for his part in giving back to the human person the dignity given to it by God from the very beginning.

He should oppose the excessive herding of men as if they were a soulless mass, rooted in economic, social, political, intellectual, and moral quicksands, without firm principles and strong convictions, the prey of emotional excitement and fickleness.

He should favor by every lawful means, in every sphere of life, social institutions in which a full personal responsibility is assured and guaranteed both in the earthly and eternal order of things.

He should uphold respect for, and the practical realisation of, the following fundamental personal rights:

The right to maintain and develop one’s corporal, intellectual and moral life, and especially the right, in principle, to religious formation and education.

The right to worship God in private and public, and to carry on religious works of charity.

The right to marry, and achieve the aim of married life.

The right to conjugal and domestic society.

The right to work as the indispensable means towards the maintenance of family life.

The right to a free choice of a state of life, and hence, too, of the priesthood or religious life.

The right to the use of material goods in keeping with his duties and social limitations.

second milestone

The Sense of Social Unity and Especially of the Family:

He who would have the Star of Peace shine out and stand over society should reject every form of materialism which sees in the people only a herd of individuals who, divided and without any internal cohesion, are considered as a mass to be lorded over and treated arbitrarily. He should strive to understand society as an intrinsic unity, grown-up and matured, under the guidance of Providence, a unity which, within the bounds assigned to it, and according to its own peculiar gifts, tends, with the collaboration of the various classes and professions, towards the eternal and ever new aims of culture and religion.

He should defend the indissolubility of marriage.

He should give to the family that unique cell of the people—space, light and air—so that it may attend to its mission of perpetuating new life, and of educating children in a spirit corresponding to its own true religious convictions, and that it may preserve, fortify and reconstitute, according to its powers and its purpose, economic, spiritual, moral, and juridic unity.

He should take care that the material and spiritual advantages of a family be shared by the domestic servants.

He should strive to secure for every family a dwelling where a materially and morally healthy family life may be lived in all its vigor and worth.

He should take care that the place of work be not so separated from the home as to make the head of the family and the educator of the children a virtual stranger to his own household.

He should take care, above all, that the bonds of trust and mutual help should be re-established between the family and the public school; that bond, which, in other times, gave such happy results, but which now has been replaced by mistrust where the school, influenced and controlled by the spirit of materialism, corrupts and destroys what the parents have instilled into the minds of the children.

third milestone

Dignity and Prerogatives of Labor:

He who would have the Star of Peace shine out and stand over society should give to work the place assigned to it by God from the beginning. As an indispensable means towards gaining over the world that mastery which God wishes for his glory, all work has an inherent dignity, and at the same time a close connection with the perfection of the person. This is the noble dignity and privilege of work, which is not in any way cheapened by the fatigue and the burden which has to be borne in obedience and submission to the will of God as the result of Original Sin.

Those who are familiar with the great Encyclicals of Our Predecessors and Our own previous messages know well that the Church does not hesitate to draw the practical conclusions which are derived from the moral nobility of work and to give them all the support of her authority. These requirements include, besides a just wage which covers the needs of the worker and his family, the conservation and perfection of a social order which will make possible an assured, even if modest, private property for all classes of society; which will promote higher education for the children of the working class who are especially endowed with intelligence and goodwill; which will promote the care and the practice of the social spirit in one’s immediate neighborhood, in the district, the province, the people and the nation—a spirit which, by smoothing over friction arising from privilege or class interests, removes from the workers the feeling that they are isolated from a genuinely human and paternally Christian solidarity.

fourth milestone

Restoration of the Rule of Law:

He who would have the Star of Peace shine out and stand over social life should collaborate in a complete restoration of the rule of law. The sense of law today is often altered and uprooted by the profession and the practice of a positivism and utilitarianism which are subjected and bound to the service of determined groups, classes and movements, whose programs direct and determine the course of legislation and the practices of the courts. The cure for this situation becomes feasible when we awaken again the consciousness of a rule of law resting on the supreme dominion of God and safeguarded from all human inconsistencies; a consciousness of an order which stretches forth its arm, in protection or punishment, over the inalienable rights of man and protects them against the attacks of every human power. From the rule of law as willed by God flows man’s inalienable right to security before the law, and by this very fact to a definite sphere of right safeguarded from all arbitrary attacks. The relations of man to man, of the individual to society, to authority, to civil duty; the relations of society and of authority to the individual should he based on a firm legal fooling and be guarded, when the need arises, by the authority of the courts. This presupposes:

(a)  A tribunal and a judge who take their directions from a clearly formulated and defined code;

(b)  Clear juridical norms which may not be upset by unwarranted appeals to a supposed popular sentiment, or by merely utilitarian considerations;

(c)  The recognition of the principle that even the state and the functionaries and organisations dependent on it are obliged to alter and to withdraw measures which are harmful to the liberty, property, honor, progress, or health of the individual.

fifth milestone

Conception of the state according to the Christian spirit:

He who would have the Star of Peace shine out and stand over human society should co-operate towards the setting up of a conception and practice of the state founded on reasonable discipline, noble charity, and a responsible Christian spirit. He should help to restore the state and its power to the service of human society, to the full recognition of the respect due to the human person and his efforts to attain his eternal destiny. He should apply and devote himself to dispelling the errors which aim at turning the state and its authority from the path of morality and severing them from the essentially ethical bonds which link them to individual and social life, making them deny, or, in practice, ignore their essential dependence on the will of the creator. He should work for the recognition and diffusion of the truth which teaches, even in temporal matters, that the deepest meaning, the ultimate moral basis and the universal right of government lies in serving.[60]

[1]Encyclical Letter, Studiorum Ducem.

[2]Ia IIae, Q.2, a. 1, c.

[3]Comment in Ethic., Lib. V, Lect. IX.

[4]We have already quoted Mr. Geoffrey Crowther to the effect that “the pursuit of price-stability is not compatible with the maintenance of the Gold Standard” (An Outline of Money, p. 356). We have seen besides that the urge to get interest on debt, which is behind the alternate booms and slumps, has led not only to unemployment and starvation in every country but to something of a deadlock in international trade, coupled with the destruction of food, the lessening of production and the urge to war.

[5]Cf. Minority Report No. III of the Irish Banking Commission, by Mr. P. J. O’Loghlen, p. 26.

[6]An Outline of Money, p. 333.

[7]The three points which will be, developed under (b), (c) and (d), are taken from Money Creators (Chapters XII and XVII), by Miss G. M. Coogan. In his foreword to this book, Mr. Robert L. Owen says that “it contains scientific truths—not quackery.” Mr. Owen’s standing in the banking world has already been referred to.

[8]The Role of Money, by Professor Soddy (p. 91). The private creators of exchange-medium are not concerned about the alterations of the price-level. Their preoccupation is with interest on money. “Professor Soddy is very insistent that the banks by the issue of new money to themselves or their borrowers actually enforce a direct levy in kind on the wealth-on-sale of the community (i.e., on all there is for sale).…Anyone can see that this is the case when a counterfeit note is put in circulation, but the forced levy on the wealth-on-sale is just the same whoever creates the new money” (The Root of All Evil, by Sir Reginald Rowe, p. 59).

[9]“We have always maintained, that the foreign policy of this country where it came into touch with exceptional expenditure upon international action—notably in connection, with English armament—…depended upon the decision…of the Bank of England supported by their financial allies beyond the Atlantic.…They were certainly opposed to an adequate army.” (The Weekly Review, Oct. 17, intro).

[10]The Pope’s words in the Encyclical Letter, Quadragesimo Anno, are: “funestus et exsecrandus rei nummariae ‘imperialismus’ seu ‘internationalis’ cui ubi bene, ibi patria est.” This International Imperialism” will tend to eliminate all that is enshrined in the Calholie concept of patria. This end coincides with that of Marx’s dictum: “Workmen have no country.”

[11]Money Creators, by Miss G. M. Coogan, p. 333.

[12]Op. cit., pg. 334.

[13]Miss Coogan wrote as follows in 1937: “If the government controls the lending of money, it can determine who may or who may not borrow money, and hence, can control every single business in the country. Controlling every business means controlling every economic activity; control of every economic activity gives power to control also the cultural and spiritual activities of the citizen. Lenin recommended government origination and control of the lending of the medium for exchange. Unless the power to originate money is returned to sovereignty and scientifically exercised, and lending is restricted exclusively to private, independent, state-chartered corporations, it is nothing short of childish prattle to talk about preventing the onrush of Socialism, Communism, or whatever name one wants to use to designate an anti-Christian state, in which all but the ‘chosen few’ are hopeless slaves.”

[14]A Girobank is a bank in which the money (coins or bullion in the early days) remains the property of the customers or members, thus being a depositum in the strict sense, the banker being a custodian or bailee. The owners can withdraw the money and the ownership of it can also be transferred by written orders. Hence, when the claims are circulated from one to another, they are said to make a giro (a circuit or turn) from hand to hand.

“Deposit has an entirely different meaning today from depositum, just as the word bank itself has changed its meaning. In Roman Law, depositum means anything entrusted for safe-keeping to another who does not acquire any property in the thing. It can be translated a bailment, or—to invent a new term—an entrust. This primitive function still subsists in modern banks—in the plate, jewelery, securities, etc., kept in a banker’s safe or strong-room. Nowadays a deposit is the liability of the banker to pay a sum on demand, a right of action which he has created against himself in order to purchase an asset or counter-claim, it is not a depositum, it is not the cash in reserve, it is not some thing or some value entrusted to the banker as bailee. Even if the customer lodges legal tender, this is not a depositum but what in Latin is called a mutuum, i.e., a loan…. A ‘deposit’ no longer means a depositum but a debt.” Cf. Money, by Professor O’Rahilly, pp. 57, 48, 49, 70.

[15]Irving Fisher, 100% Money, 2nd Ed. (1936).

[16]Op. cit., pp. 17, 92.

[17]Irving Fisher, op. cit, pp. 201, 203, 215. The whole quotation is from Money, by Professor O’Rahilly, pp. 350–354.

[18]The Truth About New Zealand, pp. 147, 148.

[19]English Farming, by Sir John Russell, pp. 13, 16.

[20]Cf. what Mr. Field suggests here with what Sir Reginald Rowe advocates on page 131 of The Root of All Evil, in order to prevent profiteering in site values. Sir Reginald holds that an Act of Parliament should be passed, after a valuation of the whole country, giving the state the option to purchase any part thereof at the price thus decided to be its fair present value. This is very different and quite apart from the scheme of land nationalization advocated by him a few pages earlier. In that suggestion he differs from Pope Leo XIII and Pope Pius XI.

[21]The Truth About New Zealand, pg. 123–128.

[22]An Essay on the Restoration of Property, by Hilaire Belloc (The Distributist League, 7 & 8, Rolls Passage, London, L. C. 4).

[23]“The historical process (by which the English peasantry were swallowed up by the greater landowners and became a proletariat) is now familiar to many—perhaps by this time to most educated men, though our official academic history long remained silent upon it. First came the strengthening of the greater landowners by the loot of the Church in the sixteenth century, then in the seventeenth century came the eating up by the greater landowners of the smaller yeomanry, notably under that ironically entitled ‘Statute of Frauds,’ passed by Parliament, that is, by the greater landowners themselves (who were by that time masters of the country) in the reign of Charles II” ‘(Hilaire Belloc, op cit., p. 63).

[24]Hilaire Belloc, op. cit., pp. 68, 69, 87.. See also what he says on page 81 about wholesale and retail exchange. Though a small man is heavily handicapped in retail exchange, “he may struggle on. But wholesale exchange and all the machinery of it have been captured by highly centralized capitalism.” He mentions in particular wheat and jute.

Along with Lord Northbourne’s Look to the Land, (Dent, and Sons), the excellent work of the Earl of Portsmouth (Viscount Lymington), Alternative to Death (Faber and Faber), is to be highly recommended for its exposition of the right relation which should exist between finance and farming. Unfortunately, in Alternative to Death pp. 7, 121], in stressing the respect due to the order of nature and the great truth of the Immanence of God in the world, the author goes too far and compromises the great complementary truth of God’s Transcendence.

[25]Contained in Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt, pp. 196–199.

[26]The Root of All Evil, pp. 53, 54. It may be interesting to read some of Professor Soddy’s own vigorous phrases on the point: “As regards transition stages,” he writes (in The Role of Money, p. 211), ‘‘fix a price index on the cost of the more important expenses of an average middle-class household, require the banks always to keep pound for pound of national money against their current accounts drawable by check, set up a national advisory statistical bureau on an independent scientific basis, and reconstitute the mint for the issue of all money. Avoid as the plague schemes for nationalizing banks. The object is to stop private minting and nationalize money itself…To nationalize the banks is to make money-creating and money-lending powers both a national function. Hence Professor Soddy is rightly opposed to it. A recent pamphlet of his, The Arch-Enemy of Economic Freedom, published by himself at Knapp, Enstone, Oxon, England, is strongly recommended to students of finance.

[27]Money Creators, pp. 251, 252, 338, 254, 255.

[28]Money Creators, p. 250.

[29]For the advantages to New Zealand of the higher exchange rate, cf. Money, by Professor O’Rahilly, pp. 404–409, 423.

[30]What is said here by Mr. Field in The Truth About New Zealand must be supplemented by the teaching of Pope Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno on the role of vocational groups. When the guilds or vocational groups are organized and functioning under a state charter, the activities of the groups will be directed to the common good and they will strive to arrive at a just price for the goods or services they furnish. The state will exercise supreme control.

[31]Minority Report No. III, by Mr. P. J. O’Loghlen, pp. 26, 42, 45, 50.

[32]Encyclical Letter, Quadragesimo Anno, On the Social Order.

[33]Ibid.

[34]Op. cit., pp. 3, 4, 5, 6, 11, 12, 17, 22, 23, 24, 25.

Lord Perry insists that the Treasury or Finance Department must function exclusively as the Account office of each nation. He expresses it in business language as follows: ‘‘From being the final arbiter on all questions of policy and expenditure the Treasury mst return to its proper place as Accountant to the Board of Directors of Great Britain Home and Colonial Ltd. A trusted and powerful servant of the Management it must by no means be permitted to usurp the powers of the Nation’s Shareholders through their elected Chairman and Directors, either openly or by packing the departments, head, body, and tail, with its nominees and sycophants” (op. cit., p. 23). Cf. also Humanity’s Challenge (Pamphlet issued by The Service for Economic Action, 115 Essex Road, Southsea, Hants).

[35]Encyclical Letter, Quadragesimo Anno, On the Social Order.

[36]Encyclical Letter, Quadragesimo Anno, On the Social Order.

[37]Wealth, Virtual Wealth, and Debt, p. 201.

[38]Cf. The Role of Money, p. 7

[39]Cf. Antimoderne, by J. Maritain, p. 137.

[40]It is quoted from the Journal of the Institute of Bankers for May, I930. by C. M. Battersley, in Appendix K of This Age of Plenty.

[41]This Age of Plenty, p. 404.

[42]Cf. Article, Money, in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

[43]The Outline of Money, pp. 314, 30.

[44]The Money Maze, pp. 39–41, quoted by C. M. Hattersley in This Age of Plenty, pp. 165, 166.

[45]Edward Arnold and Co., London, 1941

[46]Op. cit., pp. 201–204.

It is interesting to see this author opposing a manipulated currency to a gold currency, as if a gold currency were not a manipulated currency.

In his book Plan for Permanent Peace, Hans Heymann outlines an even more elaborate scheme than that of Oswald Dutch for world-control by a hierarchy of banks and bankers. As The New English Weekly of Oct. 15, 1942, says: “It is the complete diagram for the organization of humanity upon what the author calls the ‘new’ principles of ‘socialist capitalism’ which are really the old methods of financial imperialism writ larger.” The naturalism of the book is appalling and is bound to lead to disaster, if the attempt is made to realize the scheme.

[47]The Modern Idolatry, pp. 214, 215, 229. This book appeared in 1934.

[48]Economic Peace Aims, pp. 19, 20, by Oswald Dutch.

[49]Encyclical Letter of Pope Pius XI, Divini Redemptoris, On Atheistic Communism.

[50]Encyclical Letter, Summi Pontificates, Darkness Over the Earth.

[51]Apoc. 13:16–17.

[52]America Conquers Britain, pp. 202, 203, by Ludwell Denny. With regard to the bad labor conditions in Bolivian tin mines, he refers to The Bankers in Bolivia, pp. 40–42, by Margaret A. Marsh. Ludwell Denny’s book was published in 1930.

In the lecture on Social Justice quoted in Chapter I, Pére Gillet, O.P., points out that those who invest money in an industry should at least interest themselves in the conditions of labor therein. It is a question of Social Justice and, indirectly, of Commutative Justice. The worker in an industry has a right to conditions which safeguard his right to live a human life as becomes a human person, conditions of salary and of duration of work, of lodging, of promiscuity, and of hygiene. The shareholder may not content himself with merely pocketing dividends: he has a social duty to fulfill, which obliges in conscience.

[53]Op. cit., pp. 404, 407

[54]The text is quoted as given in the Letter from America of December 4, 1942.

[55]These Proposals of which an outline is given here are to be found in the Appendix to Sir Reginald Rowe’s book, The Root of All Evil. The Appendix is published as a separate pamphlet by The Economic Reform Club, 32. Queens Avenue, Muswell Hill, London, N 10.

[56]It will he noticed that, when Sir Reginald Rowe and the Economic Reform Club are speaking of fixed exchanges, they are envisaging a very different set of circumstances from those in which Mr. P. J. O’Loghlen proposes the abrogation of fixed exchanges.

[57]Mgr. Pie of Poitiers, in 1855, asked to have decrees concerning speculation placed on the program of the Vatican Council.

In the Middle Ages, great severity was shown towards crimes against social or legal justice, such as monopolies or factitious prices. Certain points of examination of conscience for confession, taken from old manuals, are quoted in L’Usure aux temps présent, by Pére Dehon: “I accuse myself of having arranged a monopoly with those of my trade, that is to say, of having made an agreement to sell a thing at too high a price, or to buy it at too low a price, or to keep it, in order to raise the price. I accuse myself of having succeeded in selling an object for more than it was worth, by lying and deceptive statements. I accuse myself of having sold a thing necessary to my neighbor at more than it was worth.”

Cf. La Bourse et la Conscience, by Edg. Janssens, Professor at Liège University, pp. 24–25, and L’Evangelique Vix Pervenit, by L’Abbe P. Tiberghion (Editions Spes), pp. 63, 64.

In the Lecture on Social Justice, already quoted, Père Gillet, O.P., points out that those who invest their money in such things as cinemas and dance-halls, in view of gain and regardless of the common good, sin against social justice. He says the cinema has become a school of immorality and that dance-halls are centers of immorality.

[58]The Five Peace Points are taken from Pope Pius XII on World Order, by Rev. Lewis Watt, S.J., pp. 40, 41.

[59]Taken from The Catholic Herald, January 2, 1942.

[60]Taken from The Catholic Herald.