The Kingship of Christ

According to

the Principles of Saint Thomas Aquinas

BY

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

Professor of Philosophy and Church History

Senior Scholasticate, Blackrock College, Dublin

With a Preface by

Very Rev. J. C. McQuaid C.S.Sp., M.A., D.D.

Loreto Publications

Fitzwilliam New Hampshire 03447

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First Published 1931

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Dedication

To the Sacred Heart of Jesus

Heart of Our High Priest and Our King,

Who said:

“In the world you shall have distress: but have confidence,

I have overcome the world.”

(John 16:33)

This Work Is Lovingly And Humbly Dedicated By The Author

May the Holy Ghost enkindle in our souls, O Lord, that sacred fire which Our Lord Jesus Christ brought down upon earth, and willed should fiercely burn in the hearts of all His disciples.

(Prayer of the Mass of Whit Sunday)

Prayer to Our Lord Jesus Christ, Universal King

O CHRIST JESUS, I acknowledge Thee as universal King. For Thee all creatures have been made. Do Thou exercise over me all Thy rights. Renewing my baptismal vows, I renounce Satan, with all his works and pomps, and I promise to live as a good Catholic. Especially do I pledge myself to work with all my power for the triumph of the rights of God and of Thy Church.

Divine Heart of Jesus, I offer Thee all my poor actions to obtain that all hearts may recognize thy Sacred royalty, and that thus the reign of Thy peace may be established throughout the entire world. Amen.

Plenary Indulgence once a day on the usual conditions.

Sacred Penitentiary, 21st February, 1923.

Imprimatur:

Mechliniar, 20 Maii, 1927.

J. Thys, can. lib. cens.

Permitssu Ordinarii Dioec. Dublinen. die 17 Augusti anno 1927.

Table of Contents

Preface

Author’s Note

Editor’s Note

Chapter 1:

Man’s Fallen State

Chapter 2:

The Kingship of Christ

Chapter 3:

The Real History of the World

Chapter 4:

What the Church Has Said About the State’s Putting All Religions on the Same Level

Chapter 5:

The Spirit of the Age

Chapter 6:

Pope Leo XIII on Tolerance

Chapter 7:

Constitutions of Some Catholic States

Chapter 8:

The World Struggle Around the Divinity of Our Lord

Chapter 9:

Some Extracts From Papal Documents on the Duties of Catholics

Appendix 1:

Our Supernatural Life and Nationality

Appendix 2:

The Association of Reparation to the Most Holy Trinity

PREFACE

This book is chiefly a confession of faith in Our Divine Lord, Jesus Christ. It proclaims that He is God and that, therefore, His rights over mankind are absolute. It also declares that He is man, and that, as such, He is head of the Mystical Body, Priest and universal King.

Dr. Fahey develops his thesis on the Kingship of Jesus Christ by applying the doctrine of the Incarnation to the history of the modern world. He is guided throughout by the safe principles of the prince of theologians, St. Thomas Aquinas. Students of St. Thomas will readily see that this work is not—in fact within its scope cannot be—an exhaustive treatise either of the doctrine of St. Thomas concerning the Kingship of Jesus Christ or of the modern acceptance and rejection of that doctrine. They will, however, see, especially if they are accustomed to the handling of historical documents, that this slender volume is a valuable summary of dogmatic truths and historical facts. There is not, as far as my knowledge goes, certainly not in the English language, any other work which attempts such a synthesis of principles and events. In modern works one often notices a tendency to substitute for grave historical documents the deductions, however correct, of commentators. It is then a delight to the serious reader to find such a wealth of documentation as this book supplies.

To the study of his sources, Dr. Fahey has brought a rare maturity of scholarship. Not merely does he share with all fellow priests the ripe judgment developed by the incomparable training which is a Catholic priest’s grounding in scholastic philosophy and theology (in both of which sciences the author holds the Degree of Doctor) but he has had the privilege of personal access to the literature and scholarship of at least five European countries. He holds, moreover, a first class honors degree of the Royal University of Ireland in civil and constitutional history, political economy, and general jurisprudence. I consider it useful for a reader, in these days of anonymous journalism, to have a fair knowledge of the qualifications of an author, especially of a Catholic author. Besides, the conspiracy of deliberate silence which permits so much of Catholic scholarship to be passed over in the public press, and therefore to be nullified, may well be expected to bring its forces to bear on this important work.

The public press is usually not a stimulus but a soporific. If Catholics duly study this book, overcoming bravely the initial difficulty of a little hard thinking, they will find themselves not only roused to the significance of current events but also possessed of a power to judge rightly concerning the modern world. For the value of Dr. Fahey’s work is largely in this—that he sets forth clearly the things that are of God and the things that are of Caesar, or, in harder terms, that he explains the interrelation between Church and state which is called the “indirect power.”

Thus expressed, the doctrine sounds to us vague and abstract, but, in real life, it means the acceptance or rejection by all states of Jesus Christ and His Church, with, as necessary consequence, the true progress or certain decay of these states. The acknowledgment of the Kingship of Jesus Christ in all its implications is, and must be, in the plan of God for men and for nations, the acid test of ordered life. God the Holy Ghost has said it—and the words are firm solace to us of the Faith in these darkening times—“other foundation no man can lay, but that which is laid, which is Christ Jesus” (1Cor. 12:2), and again: “the stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner. By the Lord this has been done and it is wonderful in our eyes. And whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken; but on whomsoever it shall fall, it shall grind him to powder” (Mt. 21:42, 44).

It is very strange how even Catholic historians have not grasped the importance of this doctrine of the indirect power, which in our day is, by the action of God we must believe, forcing itself into more urgent prominence. Of two important histories of Europe recently published by Catholic authors, one work shows a grave misconception of the value of the doctrine of the indirect power of the Church in things temporal; while the other is rendered almost useless by its failure to explain the revolutionary movements of the last century, in the light of their true origins, the effort to dethrone Jesus Christ in favor of a religion of naturalism and the action of secret societies that espouse this cause. Both authors would have profited much by the scholarship of the non-Catholic, Mrs. Nesta Webster, who, though she has been always gravely hampered by the want of the true faith, has yet proved one of the most able historians of the origins of political revolutions. One would have thought that at least the published official statements of successive sovereign pontiffs might have been utilized by these Catholic authors. Dr. Fahey, on the other hand, has woven both the statements of the Vicars of Jesus Christ and pertinent secular documents into his commentary on current history. Taken in conjunction with Godefroid Kurth’s Les Origines de la Civilisation moderne and Maritain’s La Primaute du Spirituel (in English, The Things that are Not Caesar’s), this present work will, I trust, prove a storehouse of defensive arguments for Catholic students, clerical and lay.

I may be permitted here to thank the author for the privilege of being associated with him in the strong act of faith which is this book, and I unite with him in the prayer that the Mystic Body of Christ, the Church, may be in some way benefited by this public assertion of the inalienable rights of Jesus Christ, true God and true man, our Priest and King.

John C. McQuaid, C.S.SP.

Blackrock College, Dublin

On the Feast of the Most Holy Name of Mary,

12th September, 1931.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The author hopes that this work, imperfect though it be, may contribute in some way to the rebirth of order in the world, by helping Catholics to grasp the integral truth. When the nightmare of modern disorder shall have run its course there will come a reaction, in fact it is with us already. To guide that reaction, a clear-cut view of what Our Lord Jesus Christ means to the world is indispensable.

For the Letters of Pope Leo XIII, the translation published by Benziger Brothers, New York, has been utilized. For most of the letters of the other sovereign Pontiffs quoted the source is indicated in the text. If no reference is given, it means that the translation has been made directly from the text published by La Bonne Presse (Paris).

I beg to thank Messrs. Browne and Nolan for permission to reprint as an Appendix, with some additions, an article on the relation between nationality and our supernatural life which appeared in the Irish Ecclesiastical Record in March, 1923.

My most grateful thanks are also due to the Very Rev. J. C. McQuaid, C.S.SP., formerly Dean of Studies and now Superior of Blackrock College, without whose kind encouragement and unstinted help neither this work nor anything else I have written would have seen the light.

Denis Fahey, C.S.SP.

Senior Scholasticate, Blackrock College

Feast of the Sacred Heart, 1931

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.

CHAPTER I

Man’s Fallen State

As man is historically, he has never been destined by God to be endowed with merely natural life. God poured supernatural life into the soul of Adam, with a view to drawing the whole human race into the cycle of his inner life in three divine persons. Having done so. He treated our first parents in accordance with their rational nature, by asking them to answer freely His loving question: Do you accept my inner life for yourselves and your descendants? That question they could have easily answered in the affirmative, for their whole being was in order, their reason being subject by grace to God and consequently their sense-life to their reason and their bodies to their souls (Ia. P. Q. 95 a. i). The revolt of the passions against reason, disease, and death would have been unknown to us if they had assented.

Their refusal to accept God’s plan meant that we all come into the world in disorder, deprived of our most real life, the supernatural life of grace, exposed to moral corruption and subject to physical decay. God, however, undid the evil in His own sublime way, through the Incarnation, Passion and death of the second person of the Blessed Trinity made man. The Word, Who was God and is God, became man, like unto us in everything except disorder of any kind. The supernatural life in person, true God and true man, walked the earth, met in perfect order and with perfect love all the consequences of the disorder introduced by the first Adam, and by His death became for the human race the second Adam. Through Our Lord, crucified and risen from the dead, God again pours his inner life into us.

The following diagrammatic representation of God’s plan for man’s return to Him may help to a better understanding of what has been said in this section and of what follows:

CHAPTER II

The Kingship of Christ

Our supernatural life of divine 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. “For, if by one man’s offence, 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 (Rom. 5:17). Our Lord is then our head. 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 says, “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 actions (III. P. Q. 8. a. 6). St. Thomas then goes on to remark that Christ also, by His grace of headship, has a twofold influence upon souls: an interior influence of supernatural life, because His humanity, united to His divinity has the power of justification; an exterior influence by His government of His subjects. The role of justification and sanctification is that of Christ as priest, while the second prerogative of government and direction constitutes the spiritual Kingship of Christ. We have said the “spiritual” Kingship of Christ, for we must distinguish between the spiritual and the temporal Kingship of Christ or between His primacy in the supernatural order and His primacy in the natural order. “That this Kingdom, indeed, 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. 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 His 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” (Encyclical Letter, Quas Primas, of His Holiness Pope Pius XI).

Christ’s Kingship is, above all, Spiritual

To Jesus Christ then as King, spiritual ruler, it appertains to set before the faithful the common end they should attain and to point out to them the means of attaining it, thus guiding the exterior and visible movement of the whole Mystical Body to eternal happiness.

To Jesus Christ as King, it belongs also to determine the proper sanction for the precepts He imposes, to reward and punish His subjects according to their deserts.

Finally, it is for Jesus Christ as King, in virtue of the work of Redemption, which He must accomplish, to conquer His Kingdom and defend His faithful subjects against the enemies who strive to overthrow His reign here below. Christ’s spiritual kingship is militant and the struggle against moral evil must go on as long as men remain here below exposed to suffering and death, to corruption and sin. Only in eternity shall the triumph be complete, by the victory of the good and the defeat of the wicked.

Of course it must not be forgotten that this struggle against evil on the part of Christ the King is in close relation with His priesthood: for it is by sanctifying souls and uniting them to God that He withdraws them from sin and conquers them for His kingdom. As has been pointed out above, we must here keep in mind the twofold aspect of Christ’s headship: the negative aspect of His combat against sin and His warring down of evil, which belongs to His kingship, and the positive one of uniting souls to God, which is the function of His priesthood.

Spiritual Kingship comprises the Right of Intervention in Temporal Affairs

Our Lord, as has been said, came down to restore to men the divine life of grace, their highest and most real life, and this mission of salvation confers on Him full power of governing in the spiritual order. But, though we have been raised to the life of grace, we must, nevertheless, continue to live our human life, and the organization demanded by this life remains always necessary. Our human or natural life must, however, be in subordination to our divine life, so that instead of hindering its development, it may, on the contrary, indirectly contribute thereto. Grace gives to our activity a new elevation by lifting it up to the God of Revelation, known and loved in Himself, but we have to work out our salvation in the conditions of existence imposed on us by our situation in the world and in contact with the lowly realities of daily life. The temporal order, with the rulers appointed to maintain it, subsists along with the supernatural order and the ecclesiastical hierarchy. In both spheres authority is exercised in its proper domain.

But, because the temporal is in subordination to the spiritual and because the final end of man, the end which dominates all others, is supernatural, we must concede to the ruler in the supernatural order a right of intervention in the strictly natural sphere, a right which must be measured by the necessity or utility of maintaining and developing the divine life of grace in souls. The spiritual kingship of Christ, then, comprises the power of intervention in human affairs and, in fact, we see Our Lord in the Gospel making use of it, when, for example, drove the traffickers from the Temple, thus proclaiming the right of God to be honored in becoming fashion, even though that meant imposing restrictions upon the commercial liberty of men.

It must, however, be borne in mind that this power of intervention in the temporal order does not confer a new royal dignity upon Christ, but is comprised in the attributes of His spiritual royalty. For it is not here question of commanding and legislating in view of conducting human society to its common good in the natural order, which belongs to the civil power, but of opposing everything that could hinder the progress of the supernatural life and of the social order consonant with it, and of obtaining from the rulers in the civil order the co-operation necessary therefor. This power forms part of the attributes of the spiritual kingship, for it is at its service and is so to say its instrument.

Temporal Kingship of Christ

Here we are no longer concerned with a right of intervention in temporal affairs for the sake of the higher interests of His Mystical Body. Temporal kingship supposes that he who is invested with it pursues a temporal end and that he has directly in view the common good, in the natural order, of the society confided to him and the temporal welfare of his people. Of course there is no question of Our Lord having taken over or being about to take over the government of any particular country or people. The kings and rulers of the earth need not fear that they shall be deprived of their authority: Our Lord’s royalty is universal. But is not Christ the sovereign and judge of all kings and rulers? Has He not a 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? The Encyclical Quas Primas, in the passage above quoted, answers these questions decisively in the affirmative. 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 final judgment on the Last Day on the civil administration of all earthly rulers as well as on their attitude to the supernatural order. For rulers will have to render an account both of the manner in which they sought the natural common good of their subjects and of the way in which they observed the objective order of the world that belongs to Christ, by their acknowledgment of the indirect power of the supernatural society founded by Him, the Catholic Church, in temporal affairs. This power is, as we shall see immediately, a part of the Church’s participation in the spiritual kingship of Christ.

The Church’s Participation in the

Spiritual Kingship of Christ

The title makes it clear that the temporal Kingship of Christ has not to be considered here. The mission of the Catholic Church, supernatural and supra-national, is the spiritual one of the outpouring of the divine life. The Church has not received purely temporal royalty from her divine founder, so it is here question of spiritual kingship only. But the spiritual kingship of Our Lord could not be exercised in an efficacious manner without a visible, permanent intermediary, capable of giving to souls at all times and in all places the directions needed for the safeguard and diffusion of the divine life. This mission has been confided only to the Catholic Church. Accordingly, in order to form an adequate idea of the spiritual kingship of Christ, we must consider its radiation down the centuries in the Church and through the Church in the world. The Pope and the Bishops are the representatives of Christ, the lieutenants of His spiritual royalty. They have the charge of 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 divine life, to establish fitting sanctions for all offences that jeopardize the interests of that life, and, finally, to carry on the struggle against the powers of evil by every form of missionary effort, following the example of Christ.

Here we must carefully distinguish between the Church’s participation in Our Lord’s priesthood and her participation in His kingship. “The interior influence of grace can come from Christ alone, whose humanity united to the divinity has the power of justifying. But the influence which Our Lord exercises by His exterior government can be communicated to others. Those others are the heads of the Church…they are heads because they take Christ’s place” (Summ. Theol., III. P. Q. 8. a. 6).

In other words, when the Church governs in the name of Christ she is truly a proper and principal, though subordinate, cause of her government. Thus, as Spouse of Christ and True Regent of souls on earth, she has the right that we should recognize her authority and should bow down before her. When, on the other hand, through her priesthood and the sacraments, she communicates grace to us, she is in this, only the instrument used by Christ to vivify our souls. It must, however, be remembered at once that, since the sacred humanity of Christ is immediately united to the Word, His royalty and His priesthood receive thereby a fullness, a universality and a perfection which can be participated in by the Church only in a limited fashion. St. Thomas points out that Christ rules the men of all places, times, and states, while the heads of the Church either govern only in certain places for a limited time as Bishops, or without limit as to place, but only for a limited time as is the case with the Pope, the rule of both Pope and Bishops being limited to those living on the earth (III. P. Q. 8. a. 6). Besides 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.

The influence, then, which Christ exercises on the world, by His priesthood and His kingship, surpasses in extent and compass, even here below, the influence of the visible Church. All men, St. Thomas teaches (III. P. Q. 8. a. 3. c. et ad Ium), 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, in order to be converted, by even raising them to the divine life, if their invincible ignorance keeps them outside the one True Church. The Church always remains the center from which the divine life, which is found in its fullness in Christ, radiates throughout the world. By right the Church is universal and her influence here below ever seeks to be coextensive with that of her divine head and founder. Men are subject to the priesthood and kingship of Christ while yet outside the Church, but in order to reap the full benefit, for the spiritual life, of this subjection to Our Lord, one must be fully incorporated into Christ, in accordance with the order He Himself has established. One must be a child of the Church to which He has confided the infinite riches of the Redemption.

We have previously seen that the spiritual kingship of Christ comprises the right of intervention in temporal affairs, in so far as the interests of the divine life of souls demand it. Charged by Our Lord with the continuance of His mission here below, the Church, though without direct power in temporal affairs as such, has, nevertheless, by her participation in the kingship of Christ, the right of intervening in temporal affairs in order to safeguard the interests of the divine life. This is the divine origin of what has been usually called, since the time of St. Robert Bellarmine and Suarez, the indirect power of the Pope.

Here it may be well to open a parenthesis concerning the temporal sovereignty of the Pope in his own state, so as to preclude any confusion in minds between this temporal sovereignty and the indirect power of which we are speaking. The temporal sovereignty of the Pope in the Vatican state is completely different from his indirect power in temporal affairs. It is, however, a consequence of the Pope’s participation in the spiritual kingship of Christ as His Vicar on earth. The temporal sovereignty of the Pope in the Papal States or in the Vatican City is the condition by which alone in normal fashion obstacles and hindrances are removed to the enjoyment of that full immunity bestowed on him by Our Divine Lord when He made St. Peter His Vicar on earth, with the charge of spiritually governing the whole Church. That particular temporal sovereignty is the normal condition which divine providence has provided for the exercise of the spiritual kingship of Our Lord’s Vicar. Accordingly, the Pope, who is supreme judge the world over, directly of spiritual matters, indirectly of temporal affairs, by reason of the spiritual interests involved, is also temporal and civil ruler of a small state. In the latter capacity he stands in a special relation to his civil subjects.

This chapter is a summary of a series of articles which have been running in the Catholic Mind (Dublin) since April, 1931. In those articles free use has been made of the writings of Rev. Ch. V. Héris, O.P., Professor at the Dominican House of Studies of Le Saulchoir, Belgium, with his kind permission.

CHAPTER III

The Real History of the World

If we wish to place ourselves at the proper point of view for the appreciation of the history of the world, we must consider man as he is fully and completely in God’s sight, for the real history of the world is the account of the acceptance or rejection by the world of God’s plan for the restoration of the divine life. In other words, it is the story of God’s undoing of the awful consequences of original sin, taken in conjunction with man’s response to God’s overtures. Thus the real history of the world will be a narrative of how man, destined by nature to develop into different nations and states and restored to the possession of the divine life by the Passion and death of Our Lord, corresponded with God’s designs for the development of His most real life. Man is moving forward to the unity of the Mystical Body in Heaven, where, through the one mediator, Our Lord Jesus Christ, priest and king, God in three divine persons shall be present, seen face to face, in each member and to all. To borrow a metaphor from natural science, just as water always, seeks a common level, in different spaces that intercommunicate, so in the universe the divine life come down from heaven mounts up again and we shall be at its level of stable equilibrium for all eternity, “through Him and with Him and in Him.” Whose death was our life. Here below, however, Our Lord’s priesthood and spiritual kingship are participated in by the rulers of the one supernatural supra-national society, the Catholic Church, while His temporal kingship is shared by the rulers of the natural social developments of humanity—states or nations. Here below we see the Church and states, spiritual and temporal kingship, in heaven Our Lord shall be the one ruler, priest and king. But God, subsistent being, in whose intelligence is infinitely perfect order, wants order in the works of His hands. So the world is meant to mirror forth, however imperfectly, the unity of the Mystical Body in heaven, for the social life of which we are meant to prepare here on earth. Accordingly, the history of the world, viewed from the highest standpoint, to which everything else is subordinate, turns around the social acceptance and rejection of the kingship of Christ, and thus the attitude of states to the one supernatural society and to the indirect power of the Catholic Church is the keystone of the arch of the world’s social order.

This point may be expressed in another way. By their natural life men are destined to attain perfection in societies. States and nations; by their supernatural life they are members of the Mystical Body of Our Lord, the Catholic Church, with God in three divine persons present within them, seen here on earth, it is true, only as “in a glass, darkly,” but one day to be seen “face to face” in heaven. Our adoption as sons of God is by our being conformed to the likeness of the eternal Son of God by nature. This conformity is twofold: the one imperfect, by divine grace in this life; the other perfect, in the glory of our heavenly native land, as we read in 1Jn. 3:2: Dearly beloved, we are now the sons of God; and it hath not yet appeared what we shall be. We know, that when He shall appear, we shall be like to Him: because we shall see Him as He is (III. P. Q. 45 a. 4 c.). Now, in order to safeguard and favor their ordered tendency to that clear vision of the Blessed Trinity, in perfect likeness to Our Lord, men have a right to exact that the natural societies of which they form part observe their due subordination to the one supernatural society. This means the acknowledgment by these societies of that supernatural society and thus of the indirect power of the Catholic Church. Thus it is again clear that the attitude of states to the indirect power of the Catholic Church is the true test of the world’s social progress. The full development of human personality cannot be harmoniously striven for, unless there be order in the relations between the authority in the state or society, whose business is the cultivation of that natural social perfection termed civilization, and the Catholic Church. The attitude, therefore, of the authority in the state towards the kingship of Our Lord and the Catholic Church may be spoken of as the spiritual principle or soul of the civilization and is the real touchstone of the value of a culture, namely, its capacity to aid in forming true personality, resemblance to Our Lord Jesus Christ (cf. St. Thomas, De Regimine Princip. Lib. I. c. 15). There is only one God, one world and one objective order for redeemed man in that world, the return to God through the One Lord and Master Jesus Christ, Who is the Way, the Truth and the Life, in the manner He Himself has laid down.

Has that order ever been realized in the world to any great extent? Yes. The thirteenth century, the high-water mark in man’s acceptance of the order established by God, saw Catholic Europe organized in the way which we may attempt to represent diagrammatically as follows:

In the Middle Ages the state fulfilled its obligation of professing that religion which God Himself has established and by which alone He wants to be adored and worshipped—the Catholic religion. When Catholics are answering the objections of non-Catholics to the Inquisition, they sometimes seem to lose sight of the formal principle of order animating the civilization of the Middle Ages. They speak of heresy being then considered a crime, because the state recognized the Catholic religion for what it objectively is, the one true religion established by God. The phrases employed are liable to leave the reader under the impression that the order then acknowledged was a mere temporary arrangement and that at the present day another arrangement has arisen, also in order. The truth is that the state then grasped the formal principle of ordered social organization in the actual world and that the Inquisition was set up to defend the hold of the world on order against the fomenters of disorder. Of course the particular manner according to which that formal principle was concretely realized in the states of the Middle Ages has passed away; but that same principle is meant by God to mold the new matter and the new circumstances of all succeeding ages. Socially organized, man in the world redeemed by Our Lord is not as God wants him to be unless he accepts the supernatural, supra-national Catholic Church. The modern world has turned aside from order and is suffering for its apostasy and disorder. This great truth needs to be proclaimed un equivocally, so that the interior life with which we celebrate the Feast of the Kingship of Christ may be deepened. It is infinitely better to go down struggling for the integral truth than to win a seeming victory by whittling it down.

But, from the thirteenth century onwards, there has been steady decay. When once we have understood that, for Luther, divine grace, which is our real life, remains outside of us, since it is nothing else than the external favor of God, it is easy to represent diagrammatically the Lutheran tendency of life:

The note of interrogation at the head of this diagram and of those that follow is meant to emphasize the fact that those who are not in the order laid down by God for return to Him are objectively in a state of aimless disorder. Those who deliberately reject that order come under the leadership of Satan in his struggle against the Mystical Body of Christ (IIIa. P. Q. 8. a. 7).

The resultant Protestant state-organization may be depicted as follows:

This Lutheran ideal received international recognition at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, at the end of the Thirty Years War. That “Peace” has been well termed the funeral of the Catholic order of the world. Luther’s separation of the Christian from the citizen prepared the way for the deification of the state, realized in modern times, and the social influence of Protestant society thus made easy the advent of the modern public man who may, as a private citizen, be a Catholic, but as a public man will get himself represented at Protestant worship or even on occasion assist thereat. “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 ruler, he is not called a Christian but a prince. The man is 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” (Weimar Edition of Luther’s Works xxxii., pp. 391, 439, 440).

The French Revolution marks another stage in the process of decay. It aimed at the violent overthrow of the ordered grasp of life still prevailing in Catholic countries. The tendency of social life in states which have gradually accepted “The Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789,” during this post-revolutionary era of the world in which we are living, may be thus expressed:

The state or nation falsely holding that it is not obliged to make public profession of any religion tends henceforth to stand supreme over all the various forms of religion professed by its subjects. The state, as the natural development of human life, is, however, bound to favor the order established by God for man’s return to Him. “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.” In spite of that, it proclaims itself equally satisfied with God not being worshipped in the way He said that He wanted to be, nay even with God not being recognized at all, and with Catholic worship. This is what has erroneously been termed, allowing freedom of conscience. Thus we find enunciated expressly the supremacy of the natural in public life, never-ending source of disorder and confusion for Catholics in their endeavor to follow Christ the King. Thus is ushered in the principle of the supremacy of the state or nation above the Catholic Church, in countries where the greater part of the people were still Catholic, leading to that conflict between religion and patriotism which has made life so hard for many Catholics. Religion and patriotism in God’s plan for ordered life are not meant to be in conflict. “It would be most repugnant to think thus of the wisdom and goodness of God. Even in physical things, albeit of a lower order, the almighty has so combined the forces and springs of nature with tempered action and wondrous harmony that no one of them clashes with any other, and all of them most fitly and aptly work together for the great purpose of the universe. There must accordingly exist between these two powers—the ecclesiastical and the civil—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 its proximate and chief object the well-being of this mortal life; the other the everlasting joys of heaven” (Encyclical Letter of Pope Leo XIII Immortale Dei, On the Christian Constitution of States).

Here it would be interesting, but unfortunately it would necessitate too lengthy a digression, to point out how much of the myth of Rousseauist and Masonic democracy is found in the Articles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789. This is easily seen, for example, in the following articles:

Art. I.—“ Men are born free and equal and continue so.”

Art. 4.—“ Liberty is the power of doing what we will, so long as it does not injure another: the only limits of each man’s natural rights are such as secure the same rights to others; these limits are determinable only by the law.”

Art. 6.—“The law is the expression of the general will…All the citizens being equal in its eyes can be equally admitted to all dignities, positions and public employments according to their capacity and without any other distinction than that of their virtues and their talents.”

Art. 10.—“ No one can be molested for his opinions, even for his religious opinions, provided their manifestation does not trouble the public order established by law.”

Art. 11.—“The free communication of thoughts and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man; therefore every citizen is allowed freedom of speech, of writing and printing, but will have to answer for any abuse of that liberty in cases determined by the law.”

The confusion between “Democratism” or Democracy, as conceived by Rousseau, and the legitimate democratic form of government has been and is one of the most fruitful sources of evil in post-revolutionary states and nations.

For St. Thomas, the human intellect grasps the order of what is, either by revelation from God, by which it shares in the divine grasp of that order, or by its own efforts, in seizing the nature and exigencies of being. Thanks to liberty, the human being has the power to choose means so as to adapt his development to the order thus grasped.

For Rousseau, there is no order, supernatural or natural, expressing the essential exigencies of what is. The majority of the expressions of individual will (votes) is the sign or the evocation of the will of the Immanent Social God decreeing and making the good. The dogma of the Sovereign People combined with the dogma of the General Will, which is not the same as the sum of the individual wills, involve the error of the Multitude-God. According to the dogma of the Sovereign People, the people are perpetual possessors and sole lawful possessors of sovereignty. (Cf. Maritain, The Things that are Not Caesar’s, p. 132.)

CHAPTER IV

What The Church Has Said About the State’s

Putting All Religions on the Same Level

A.—Pius VII

After the restoration of the French Monarchy in the person of Louis XVIII, Pius VII (1800–1823), faced with a proposed French Constitution, wrote his famous Letter, Post tam diuturnas, 29th April, 1814, to Mgr. de Boulogne, Bishop of Troyes. The following extracts are especially important—“We had hoped that, thanks to the happy change which has taken place, the Catholic religion would without any delay not only be delivered from all the shackles imposed on it in France in spite of our continual remonstrances, but that so favorable an occasion would be utilized to restore to it its ancient splendor and dignity. We have been struck, first of all, by the fact that in the Constitution in question no mention is made of the Catholic religion…You, Venerable Brother, will easily be able to understand what pain, suffering and bitterness this caused Us, to Whom Jesus Christ, the Son of God, has committed the charge of the supreme government of the Catholic Church. How can We view with equanimity that the Catholic religion, which France embraced even in the first centuries of the Church, which in that very realm so many glorious martyrs sealed with their blood, which is the religion of the great majority of Frenchmen, clung to by them with courage and constancy in the midst of the terrible calamities, persecutions and dangers of recent years, and which the family of the designated sovereign itself professes and has always defended with so much zeal, is not only not declared the only one in the whole of France having a right to the favor of the laws and the protection of governmental authority, but is even completely left out of account in the very inauguration of the new reign!

“But Our heart is more grievously and even most vehemently afflicted by the 22nd Article of the Constitution, by which We confess that We are pained, oppressed and grieved. By this Article We see that liberty of worship and liberty of conscience, to use the words of the Article in question, are not only permitted, but that help and protection are promised to those who are called the ministers of the different forms of worship. There is certainly no need of a long discourse, when speaking to you, to get you to see clearly what a deadly blow is thus dealt to the Catholic religion in France. By the fact that the freedom of all forms of worship without distinction 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. Besides, when aid and protection are guaranteed to heretical sects and their ministers, not only are their persons tolerated and favored, but even their very errors. This attitude involves that awful and ever lamentable heresy referred to by St. Augustine in the following terms: ‘This heresy affirms that all heretics are on the right path and that all teach the truth. This is so monstrous an absurdity that it seems to me to be incredible”(De Haeresibus, No. 72).

Certainly, the teaching of Pius VII on the attitude of a state which refuses to profess publicly the one true religion and proclaims itself so completely indifferent to all forms of religion that it is ready to show favor equally to them all is quite clear and definite. This example of Catholic teaching on this subject is taken from the first twenty years of the nineteenth century. Let us now add to it another authoritative statement from the last twenty years of the same period.

B.—LEO XIII

In the letter sent to the Archbishop of Bogota on April 6th, 1900, by the Secretary of State, Cardinal Rampolla, the Cardinal uses the words of Pope Leo XIII, when treating of the different degrees to be met with amongst those who do not profess integral Catholicism, and says of the third and last degree that to it belong those who affirm “that the life and conduct of private citizens should be regulated by the divine laws but not the life and conduct of the state. According to them, it is lawful in public affairs to depart from God’s commands and to take no account of them in legislation.

From this follows that pernicious conclusion that Church and state should be separated.” The Cardinal then quotes the Pope to the effect that “there are many who do not approve of the separation of Church and state, but, nevertheless, think that the Church should be got to yield to circumstances and bend to and accommodate herself to what prudence demands at the present day in the government of realms.” This opinion is declared by the sovereign Pontiff to be worthy and respectable “if it be maintained thereby, in a manner in conformity with truth and justice, that the Church in view of the hope of some great benefit should show herself indulgent and should concede to the circumstances of an epoch what it can do so without violating the sanctity of her mission. But, on the contrary, this opinion is to be held unworthy and productive of evil, if thereby it is maintained that the Church should practice dissimulation with regard to error or injustice or shut her eyes at what is harmful to religion.” The Cardinal then adds: “From these principles, which the Holy See has very often condemned as false and opposed to Catholic doctrine, follow naturally as from an impure source what are called modern liberties, namely, freedom of worship, freedom of speech, freedom of teaching and freedom of conscience. The Pope has treated of these liberties in the Encyclical Immortale Dei, On the Catholic Constitution of States, Nov. 1st, 1885, and Libertas, On Human Liberty (Libertas Praestantissmum, 20th June, 1888), in the clearest possible fashion.” We shall therefore have recourse to these Encyclicals, so that we may be able to set forth Pope Leo’s teaching in its purity.

After having in the beginning of the Letter Immortale Dei sketched the Catholic organization of society in opposition to that modern “plan which, it is maintained, is the outcome of an age arrived at full stature and the result of the evolution of liberty,” the Pope goes on to say that in the Catholic “organization of state there is nothing that can be thought to infringe upon the dignity of rulers, and nothing unbecoming them; nay, so far from degrading the sovereign power in its due rights, it adds to it permanence and luster.” He then gives an outline of the course of history upon which has been based what has been written in these pages on the subject. “There was once a time when states were governed by the principles of 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 important beyond all expectation, whose remembrance is still and always will be in renown, witnessed to as they are by countless proofs which can never be blotted out or even obscured by any craft of any enemies…A similar state of things would certainly have continued had the agreement of the two powers been lasting. More important results even might have been justly looked for had obedience waited upon the authority, teaching and counsels of the Church, and had this submission been specially marked by greater and more answering loyalty…

…Sad it is to call to mind 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 sequence, invaded the domain 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 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.”

Having thus outlined the origin of the principles based on the so-called ‘rights of man’ and gradually embodied in the Constitutions of modern states in this, the post-revolutionary era, advanced. Pope Leo XIII proceeds to deal with some of these false principles of Rousseauist democracy in particular: “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. In a society grounded upon such maxims, all government is nothing more nor less than the will of the people, and the people being under the power of itself alone is alone its own ruler. It does choose, nevertheless, some to whose charge it may commit itself, but in such wise that it makes over to them not the right so much as the business of governing, to be exercised, however, in its name. The authority of God is passed over in silence, just as if there were no God…And since the people is declared to contain within itself the spring-head of all right and of all power, it follows that the state does not consider itself bound by any kind of 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 right to every creed, so that public order may not be disturbed by any particular form of religious belief. And it is a part of this theory that all questions that concern religion are to be referred to private judgment; that everyone is to be free to follow whatever religion he prefers, or none at all, if he disapproves of all. From this the following consequences logically flow: that the judgment of each one’s conscience is independent of all law; that the most unrestrained opinions may be openly expressed as to the practice or omission of divine worship; and that everyone has unbounded licence to think whatever he chooses and to publish abroad whatever he thinks.

“Now when the state rests on foundations like those just named—and for the time being they are greatly in favor—it readily appears into what and how un-rightful a position the Church is driven. For when the management of public business is in harmony with doctrines of such a kind, the Catholic religion is allowed a standing in civil society equal only, or inferior, to societies alien from it,…to hold, therefore, 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.

“So, too, the liberty of thinking, and of publishing, whatever each one likes, without any hindrance, is not in itself an advantage over which society can wisely rejoice. On the contrary, it is the fountain-head and origin of many evils. Liberty is a power perfecting man, and hence should have truth and goodness for its object. But the character of goodness and truth cannot be changed at option. These remain ever one and the same, and are no less unchangeable than nature herself. If the mind assents to false opinions, and the will chooses and follows after what is wrong, neither can attain its native fullness, but both must fall from their native dignity into an abyss of corruption. Whatever, therefore, is opposed to virtue and truth, may not rightly be brought temptingly before the eye of man, much less sanctioned by the favor and protection of the law. A well-spent life is the only passport to Heaven, whither all are bound, and on this account the state is acting against the laws and dictates of nature whenever it permits the licence of opinion and of action to lead minds astray from truth and souls away from the virtue…“From these pronouncements of the Popes[1] it is evident 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; 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…Especially with reference to the so-called ‘liberties’ which are so greatly desired in these days, all must stand by the judgment of the Apostolic See, and have the same mind. Let no man be deceived by the outward appearance of these liberties, but let each one reflect whence these have had their origin, and by what efforts they are everywhere upheld and promoted. Experience has made us well acquainted with their results to the state, since everywhere they have borne fruits which the good and wise bitterly deplore. If there really exist anywhere, or if we in imagination conceive, a state, waging wanton and tyrannical war against Christianity, and if we compare with it the modern form of government just described, the latter may seem the more endurable of the two. Yet, undoubtedly, the principles on which such a government is grounded are, as we have said, of a nature which no one can approve.”

Not to lengthen these citations unduly, only a few passages from the Encyclical Letter, On Human Liberty, 26th June, 1888, will be quoted. The Pope deals first with the so-called modern liberties and says: “We have shown (in the Letter Immortale Dei) that whatsoever is good in these liberties is as ancient as truth itself, and that the Church has always most willingly approved and practiced that good; but whatsoever has been added as new is, to tell the plain truth, of a vitiated kind, the fruit of the disorders of the age, and of an insatiate longing after novelties. Seeing, however, that many cling so obstinately to their own opinion in this matter as to imagine these modern liberties, cankered as they are, to be the greatest glory of our age, and the very basis of civil life, without which no perfect government can be conceived, We feel it a pressing duty, for the sake of the common good, to treat separately of this subject…Let us examine that liberty in individuals which is so opposed to the virtue of religion, namely, the liberty of worship, as it is called. This is based on the principle, that every man is free to profess as he may choose any religion or none. But assuredly of all the duties which man has to fulfil, that, without doubt, is the chiefest and holiest which commands him worship God with devotion and piety…Wherefore, when a liberty such as We have described is offered to man, the power is given him to pervert or abandon with impunity the most sacred of duties, and to exchange the unchangeable good for evil; which., as We have said, is no liberty, but its degradation, and the abject submission of the soul to sin. 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. But to justify this, it must needs be taken as true that the state has no duties to God, or that such duties, if they exist, can be abandoned with impunity, both of which assertions are manifestly false…God it is Who had made man for society, and has placed him in the company of others like himself, so that what was wanting to his nature and beyond his attainment, if left to his own resources, he might obtain by association with others. Wherefore, civil society must acknowledge God as its founder and parent, and must obey and reverence His power and authority. 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. 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 recognized without difficulty, especially in Catholic states, because the marks of truth are, as it were, engraven upon it. This religion, therefore, the rulers of the state must preserve and protect, if they would provide—as they should do—with prudence and usefulness for the good of the community. For public authority exists for the welfare of those whom it governs; and although its proximate end is to lead men to the prosperity found in this life, yet, in so doing, it ought not to diminish but rather to increase man’s capability of attaining to the supreme good in which his everlasting happiness consists: which never can be attained if religion be disregarded…

“Another liberty is widely advocated, namely, liberty of conscience. If by this is meant that everyone may, as he chooses, worship God or not, it is sufficiently refuted by the arguments already adduced. But it may also be taken to mean that every man in the state may follow the Will of God, and from a consciousness of duty and free from every obstacle, obey His commands. This, indeed, is true liberty, a liberty worthy of the sons of God, which nobly maintains the dignity of man, and is stronger than all violence or wrong—a liberty which the Church has always desired and held most dear. This is the kind of liberty the Apostles claimed for themselves with intrepid constancy, which the apologists of Christianity confirmed by their writings, and which the martyrs in vast numbers consecrated by their blood. And deservedly so; for this Christian liberty bears witness to the absolute and most just dominion of God over man, and to the chief and supreme duty of man towards God.”

We have given the teaching of Pope Leo XIII at some length, that it may be clearly seen how fundamentally opposed to the divine plan for the organization of human life is the attitude of modern states to the Catholic religion, and therefore to the real progress of the world.

There is a further incongruous result of the state’s putting itself above all forms of worship or all religious denominations, as they are usually styled, namely, that the state, of itself, claims to settle questions of morality, for the free profession and practice of religion are, subject to public order and morality, guaranteed to every citizen of the modern state. In the Encyclical Immortale Dei, Pope Leo XIII lays down that “the Church of Christ is the true and sole teacher of virtue and guardian of morals, while the condemned Proposition 44 of the Syllabus of Pius IX runs as follows: “The civil power can interfere in matters which belong to religion, morals and spiritual government.” We have seen above the protest of Pius VII against a Constitution involving a similar attitude on the part of the French state at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It may be interesting for readers, who are not accustomed to following the evolution of state action in this, the post-revolutionary period of the world’s history, as it must be again and again called, to have a few instances of what the French state considers opposed to public order and immoral at the beginning of the twentieth century. On 7th June, 1917, therefore, during the terrible war, when France was fighting for her very existence, the French Minister for War, Painleve, issued a confidential instruction to the general in command of the French army as follows:

“General—I have been informed that ceremonies having for object the consecration of the Catholic soldiers of the allied armies to the Sacred Heart are to take place about 15th June, on the occasion of the Feast of the Sacred Heart…Now, by the terms of Article 357 of the Decree of 22nd August, 1913, the public manifestation in any form of political or religious opinions capable of injuring the general interests of the country, compromising discipline, or creating difficulties for the authorities is considered either as conduct unbecoming a soldier or as a breach of discipline. I, therefore, request you to remind the military authorities under your command that all religious propaganda of the kind in question is expressly forbidden, especially at the present time, when manifestations, calculated to lessen the existing close union of all the forces of the nation, should be carefully avoided.” In accordance with this instruction a notice was issued by General Headquarters the following day. It is especially sad to learn that eight days before, on 31st May, 1917, the Minister for War gave detailed orders for arrangements, to permit the Mohammedan troops to celebrate their great annual fast of Ramadhan, from June 21st to July 21st.

And the Minister for War, Maginot, on August 14th, 1930, carried on the tradition by issuing the following instruction to the generals commanding the different sections of the French army: “It has come to my knowledge that certain associations, counting on their organizing committees officers of high rank belonging to the Army Reserve, send circulars annually to the pupils of our military schools and to the officers who have passed through these schools, inviting them to come together for religious worship in common. This religious propaganda is absolutely opposed to the principles which should be observed in the army. In the army…any act of proselytism in favor of any religion must be rigorously excluded…In the domain of religion, any constraint, any pressure, any invitation to collective worship cannot be tolerated…These principles inspired the circulars of July 5th, 1844, 20th February, 1845, etc.” Of the process by which modern Constitutions, in spite of the lofty indifference professed by them with regard to all religious, have been used to justify persecution of the Catholic Church, something will be said further on.

[1]Gregory XVI and Pius IX

CHAPTER V

The Spirit of the Age

We frequently see it stated that modern Constitutions are the embodiment of the spirit of the present age of progress, as the principles of state organization of the thirteenth century expressed the ideas of that obscurantist epoch. Behind this attitude there is, of course, the horrible error with which Pantheism and materialism have so impregnated modern minds, namely, that there is not one definite order laid down by the True God for man’s return to Him through Our Lord Jesus Christ. Thus the present disorder, instead of being taken for the disease, which it really is, is looked upon as a sign of health; it is only when minds have been poisoned that such a mistake is made.

“For many nowadays seek to learn truth by the aid of reason alone, putting divine faith entirely aside; and through the exclusion of this strength and of this light, they fall into many errors and fail to discover the truth. They teach, for instance, that material one exists in the world; that men and beasts have the same origin and a like nature; and some even there are who go so far as to doubt the existence of God, the Ruler and Maker of the world, or to err most grievously, like unto the heathen, as to His divine nature. Hence the very essence and form of virtue, of justice and of duty, are of necessity distorted. Thus it is that, while they hold up to admiration the high authority of reason, and unduly extol the subtlety of the human intellect, they fall into the just punishment of pride through ignorance of what is of the greatest importance. When the mind, has thus been poisoned, the moral character becomes at the same time deeply and substantially corrupt; and so diseased a state can be cured only with the utmost difficulty in this class of men, because on the one side their opinions vitiate the judgment of what is right, and on the other they have not the light of Christian faith, which is the principle and foundation of all righteousness” (Encyclical Letter of Pope Leo XIII Exeunte iam anno, On the Right Ordering of Catholic Life, 25th December, 1888). But, as the order of the world has been already sufficiently insisted upon, it will be well now to say something of the forces that have contributed to the naturalistic spirit of this age, that is, to man’s exaltation of his own powers above God and his social indifference to God’s plan for order in the world.

The prevalence of Kantian philosophy—metaphysical expression of much of Rousseauist disordered sentimentality—or rather, of the spirit and attitude of mind which is the legacy of Kantism to generations ignorant of what Kant taught, is one of the influences making for the deification of human reason. For Kant, our ideas have the properties of God’s creative knowledge, for they are, like the divine ideas, the measure of things. We thus mold the order of the world and have not to try to grasp an order that imposes itself on us and measures our ideas. Pope Leo XIII points out in the Encyclical, On Human Liberty, that modern so-called statesmen are simply introducing into the domain of morality and politics what the naturalists or Rationalists lay down in philosophy. “The fundamental doctrine of Rationalism (or naturalism) 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.”

Another influence, tending in the same direction, has been and is the success of human reason in the practical conquest of matter, that is, in the utilization of the forces of nature for man’s purposes. Thus the world is being made subservient to man. “From the fact that it has been vouchsafed to human reason to snatch from nature, through the investigations of science, many of her treasured secrets, and to apply them befittingly to the divers requirements of life, men have become possessed with so arrogant a sense of their own powers, as already to consider themselves able to banish from social life the authority and empire of God. Led away by this delusion, they make over to human nature the dominion of which they think God has been despoiled; from nature, they maintain, we must seek the principle and rule of all truth; from nature alone, they aver, spring, and to it should be referred, all the duties that religious feeling prompts. Hence they deny all revelation from on high, and all fealty due to the Catholic teaching of morals as well as all obedience to the Church” (Encyclical Letter lmmortale Dei).

These currents have contributed considerably to what, following Pope Leo XIII, we may call naturalism, or the naturalistic spirit of this age. This spirit is characterized, as has been said, by the denial of the divine supernatural life coming to us from Our Lord Jesus Christ Crucified, and by the social refusal to take into account that supernatural life and the order of its flow into our souls, accompanied, of course, by the claim to be able to make good men and good citizens by purely natural efforts. But one fact stands out clear for all thinking men to see in the history of the world for the last century and a half. The propagation of naturalism prior to and since the French Revolution is characterized by organization. The spirit of this age is neither the inevitable result of the necessary progress of the human race nor the product of individual efforts, with a more or less haphazard co-ordination. “Impiety has never been absent from the world and impiety was always a crime; but it has not always had the same character, the same intensity, especially the same organization…in the eighteenth century impiety became really formidable…the pretext for the introduction of the new social order was Liberty; the Code, the social contract; the means, Demagogy; the final end, the setting up of a colossal atheistic state, supreme arbiter of all rights and omnipotent dictator of what is tolerated or condemned, of what is forbidden or allowed, under whose sway the infamous name and worship of God would be abolished for ever. It is on this that all else converges, to this that everything else serves as a means. For this is the family undermined, guilds wiped out, for this municipal and provincial liberties are destroyed, that the power of the atheistic state alone should remain, without whose permission nobody should move hand or foot in the world. This is the end aimed at, not civil liberty. Liberty is the pretext; liberty is the idol destined to seduce peoples, an idol which has hands and yet will not feel, which has feet and will not walk, a lifeless deity, under whose aegis Satan is preparing to reduce nations to a state of slavery far worse than that in which he held the ancient world under the material idol of paganism. But religion is the matter at stake. We want, they proclaim, to organize a humanity which can get on without God” (Billot, S.J., De Ecclesia, Vol. 11. pp. 38–42). The last phrase, be it remarked in passing, is a quotation from Jules Ferry, and brings forcibly to mind the Marxian formula: “Religion is the opium of the people,” as well as Lenin’s opinion, given at the Congress of the Communist Internationale in 1922: “it is of paramount importance that a magazine devoting itself to problems of militant materialism should at the same time be conducting an untiring campaign of propaganda for atheism.”

But what then is this organization aiming at the promotion of naturalism and atheism? Out of the long list of Pontiffs who have condemned Masonry since 1738, let us consult in turn the Popes from whom we have already quoted—Pius VII in the opening quarter and Leo XIII in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. One short quotation from Pius VII will suffice. In his Encyclical Letter Ecclesiam a Jesu Christo, of the 13th September, 1821, the Pope applied to the Italian secret society of the Carbonari the condemnation of Clement XII and of Benedict XIV against the Freemasons, saying that along with these latter they propagate “indifference in religion, the most dangerous of all systems.” Masonry, then, is the organized promoter of the natural man’s contempt for God’s plan of restoration of the supernatural life of the world, with, of course, inevitably, the persecution of the Church by the state. Pope Leo XIII treats of the whole question at full length in his Encyclical Letter Humanum genus, On Freemasonry, 20th April, 1884, and in his Apostolical Letter of 19th March, 1902. In the Letter Humanum genus, the Pope, after having quoted the celebrated words of St. Augustine, “Two loves formed two cities: the love of self, reaching even to contempt of God, an earthly city; and the love of God, reaching to contempt of self, a heavenly one,” continues: “At every period of time, each (of these cities) has been in conflict with the other, with a variety and multiplicity of weapons, and of warfare, although not always with equal ardor and assault. At this period, however, the partisans of evil seem to be combining together, and to be struggling with united vehemence, led on or assisted by that strongly organized and widespread association called the Freemasons…Now, the Masonic sect produces fruits that are pernicious and of the bitterest savor. For, from what we have above most clearly shown, that which is their ultimate purpose forces itself into view, namely, the utter overthrow of that whole religious and political order of the world which Catholic teaching has produced, and the substitution of a new state of things, in accordance with their ideas, of which the foundations and laws shall be drawn from mere ‘naturalism.’…Now, 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 opinions…In those matters which regard religion, let it be seen how the sect of the Freemasons acts, especially where it is more free to act without restraint, and then let anyone judge whether in fact it does not wish to carry out the policy of the naturalists. By a long and persevering labor, they endeavor to bring about this result, namely, that the office and authority of the Church may become of no account in the civil state; and for this same reason they declare to the people and contend that Church and state ought to be altogether separated. By this means they reject from the laws and from the commonwealth the wholesome influence of the Catholic religion; and they consequently imagine that states ought to be constituted without any regard for the laws and precepts of the Church…If those who are admitted as members are not commanded to abjure by any form of words the Catholic doctrines, this omission, so far from being adverse to the designs of the Freemasons, is more useful for their purpose. First, in this way they easily deceive the simple-minded and heedless, and can induce a far greater number to become members. Again, as all who offer themselves are received, whatever may be their form of religion, they thereby teach the great error of this age—that a regard for religion should be held as an indifferent matter, and that all religions are alike. This manner of reasoning is calculated to bring about the ruin of all forms of religion, and especially of the Catholic religion, which, as it is the only one that is true, cannot, without great injustice, be regarded as merely equal to other religions…It is held also that the state should be without God; that in the various forms of religion there is no reason why one should have precedence of another; and that they are all to occupy the same place. That these doctrines are equally acceptable to the Freemasons, and that they would wish to constitute states according to this example and model, is too well known to require proof.”

State supremacy over and indifference to all religions is then the steady aim of Freemasonry, according to Pope Leo XIII. But there has been a difference in the mode of procedure of Masonry in Protestant and Catholic countries, and it is well at this point to say a few words about this. Protestants find little difficulty in accepting that religion be a purely private matter, since, logically for them, all visible Churches are purely human organizations. As Catholics, on the contrary, believe in the existence of one True Church, through which alone one becomes member of the Mystical Body of Christ, which they know to be supra-national, and to which they claim that all states should be indirectly subordinate, in view of man’s real end, union with God in supernatural life, they are bound to oppose this sectioning of public and private life. The movement known as the Protestant Reformation was an appeal to evangelical liberty, conceived as an attachment to Christ, but in flagrant conflict with the order established by Christ for His communication of Himself to man. It was thus a revolutionary movement aimed at the destruction of the order established by Our Lord for the return of man to God. It failed signally in the countries of Latin civilization and in Ireland, where there was a better grasp of order and of the supremacy of spiritual values than in Germany or England. Ireland’s traditional social institutions molded by Catholicism were, it is true, broken up, but the Irish people still retained their hold on God’s plan for order in the world, in spite of the efforts of the disordered minds in power. In the Latin countries, in spite of much decay, down to the French Revolution, the social institutions retained the impress of the Kingship of Christ. Revolution then has always been aimed at by Masonry in these countries in order to get rid of the existing social structure in which the Kingship of Christ is respected, and to install naturalism. In Protestant countries, on account of the public rejection of God’s order, the gradual ousting of what is retained of Our Lord’s doctrine from the constitution and public life of the country goes on inevitably. The advent of naturalism in Protestant countries being only a question of time, there is in general no need for Masonry to take forcible steps for the uprooting of the past. Satan can there afford to bide his time in his struggle against Christ the King.

It is to the mode of procedure of Masonry in Catholic countries, that is, to these revolutionary attacks on order in the countries of Latin civilization, that Leo XIII is principally but not exclusively alluding in the Letter of March 19th, 1902. The Pope says that when history is read with an unbiased mind, one sees that the Church has not oppressed the state. “It is therefore,” he continues, “with malignant purpose that they level against the Church accusations like these. It is a pernicious and disloyal work, in the pursuit of which, above all others, a certain sect of darkness is 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 whole purpose is to make war against God and against the 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, first attracting and afterwards retaining its members by the advantages which it procures for them, bending 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 and 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…It becomes more evident day by day that it is to the inspiration and assistance of this sect that we must attribute in great measure the continual trouble 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 the 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.”

Can we confirm these solemn words of the Vicars of Christ by statements of Freemasons themselves? In this there is no difficulty. The 16th July, 1889, there was held at Paris a universal Masonic Congress destined to commemorate and celebrate the principles of 1789, in other words, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Revolution. It was there clearly established that the Declaration of the Rights of Man proceeds from Freemasonry and that the doctrines of the Declaration constitute purely and simply the quintessence of Masonic teaching. We quote the following extracts from the speech of Brother Colfavru, who spoke in the name of the French Grand Orient: “The Revolution, by embodying in a new social and political organization the broad and liberal doctrines of Freemasonry, by giving to a regenerated world the immortal Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the citizens, and to France the loyally democratic Constitution of 1791, replaced by its more energetic, more militant and more practical action the speculative propaganda which had marked the action of Freemasonry down to 1789. From the programs and the desires expressed in the Cahiers, after having been prepared in the Lodges, the National Assembly passed to practical realizations. In reality each Mason was preparing to take his place in the drama, as yet mysterious, but which it was felt would be formidable, drama which was to mark the dolorous birth of the new society, based on the indefectible principle of the sovereignty of the People and the necessary supremacy of reason and science over the theocratic and military tradition of the past.” Freemasons avow that they have realized a part of their program. The “objects which the men of 1789 as well as those of 1848…and of 1869 had set before themselves have been attained or very nearly: Sovereignty of the People, Universal Suffrage, Secular Education obligatory for all, Separation of Church and state, Tax on Revenue, etc. Practically everything is there. It remains for us only to perfect the general organization. Our struggles are not yet completely over. There will be attempts at reaction…But we may proclaim with truth that our predecessors have left us a noble inheritance” (Report of the Assembly of the French Grand Orient, 1923).

Again, the supremacy of the state over all religions, with the inevitable consequence spoken of above, the persecution of the Catholic Church, is plainly indicated. “Let us not forget that we are the Counter-Church. Let us strive in our Lodges to ruin the influence of religion in every form” (Masonic Congress of the East of France, Belfort, 1911). “Religion is the womb which begets Clericalism and Clericalism has only one aim—to make use of religion to dominate the world. Let us uphold energetically liberty of conscience for everyone, but let us not hesitate to make war on all religions, for they are the real enemies of humanity. All down the ages they have only contributed to engender dissensions between individuals, peoples and nations” (Bulletin of the Grande Loge de France, October, 1922). “If there is an act of which Masonry can claim all the responsibility, it is certainly the separation of the Churches and of the state. For the last half-century a day has not passed that Masonry has not demanded to be liberated from that awful burden. If we examine the Lodge programs we shall see that there is not one which has not marked down for discussion the separation of Church and state” (Report of the French Grand Orient, 1907). “Our task must be to bring to completion the law concerning the separation of Church and state and to push it forward to its final consequences” (Masonic Congress of Eastern France, Belfort, 1911).

Vistas, too, are opened up of a further revolution which is to lay the foundations of the federation of the world: “Permit me to give expression to my hope that Freemasonry, which has done so much for the emancipation of mankind, and to which history is indebted for National Revolutions, will succeed in bringing about that still greater Revolution—the International Revolution” (Official Bulletin of Grande Loge de France, October, 1922). “This International Revolution is Freemasonry’s work for tomorrow” (Assembly of Grande Loge de France, 1922). “The principal tasks of the society 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 Grande Loge de France, 1922). “The Anti-Religious Defense Congress, relying on the League of Nations to secure peace amongst peoples, denounces the intrigues of the Catholic Church, directed towards undermining that noble Institution of International Concord which it fears as a rival of its program of ‘restoration of all things in Christ’” (Lay-Defense Week or Anti-Religious Defense Congress, December, 1923).

In order to confirm the teaching of the sovereign Pontiffs, and show clearly the influence of Freemasonry on the spirit of the age, we have only to examine in Anderson’s Constitutions of the Freemasons, the first of the charges or obligations of a Freemason, namely, that concerning God and Religion. This Article runs as follows: “A Mason is obliged by his tenure, to obey the moral law; 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 Honour and Honesty, by whatever Denominations or Persuasions they may be distinguish’d; whereby Masonry becomes the Center of union, and the means of conciliating true Friendship among persons that must have remained at a perpetual Distance.”

It is unnecessary now to dwell on the fact that this article does not exclude atheists. “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” (Article on “Masonry” in The Catholic Encyclopaedia, Father H. Gruber, S.J.). As readers are doubtless already well acquainted with this ambiguity, we need not dwell further on it. But what do the Constitutions of Anderson suppose Masonry to be? A society which obliges its members to observe the moral law and to be good men and true, but which insists that to be good and moral men, it is a matter of indifference what attitude is adopted towards God’s plan for the restoration of our supernatural life through the second person of the Blessed Trinity become Man. We lost supernatural life by original sin and we need divine grace that we may live an ordered life, yet this society proclaims that one can be a good man and true while utterly indifferent to the source of grace, Our Lord Jesus Christ, and to His Divinity.

Again, this society puts itself above all “forms of religion.” Further on in the Constitutions, “Masons are ordered to observe all these charges and also those that shall be communicated to them in another way, cultivating Brotherly Love.” The other way is evidently by that secret knowledge which Masonry is to impart and which is celebrated in the Fellow-Crafts’ or Companion Masons’ song, part of which, according to the Constitutions, runs as follows:

Hail Masonry! thou Craft divine!

Glory of Earth, from Heav’n revealed;

Which dost with jewels precious shine.

From all but Masons’ eyes concealed.

As men from Brutes distinguishe’d are,

A Mason other men excels;

For what’s in Knowledge choice and rare

But in his Breast securely dwells.

Chorus

His silent Breast and faithful Heart

Preserve the Secrets of the Art.

This society, then, which asserts the indifference of the Divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, claims to be able to communicate knowledge, which raises a Mason as far above a man who believes in the Divinity of Our Lord and His teaching as a man is above a brute beast.

Accordingly, we find in Masonry the two characteristics which we have seen to be amongst the hall-marks of so-called “progress” in modern states—-social indifference to religion and superiority of the natural organization over the Catholic Church. As this society—“invincible and irresponsible state existing within the legitimate state,” to repeat Pope Leo XIII’s phrase—has gained in power, it has gradually molded the outer visible state to its own image and likeness. Thus, where the Constitution of a state proclaims that state indifferent to ordered return to God, and guarantees equal favor to what God considers order and to what He terms disorder, a Mason can be quite at home while a Catholic cannot.

We must remember also that the world is not in a static condition, but is continually being moved in the direction of the ideas of those who dominate. An idea is a grasp of the order (or the disorder) that they envisage in their minds. We have seen what has come to be forbidden by the state in present-day France in the name of good order and morality. At the International Congress held in Paris in 1889, to celebrate the centenary of the French Revolution, one orator, Brother Louis Amiable, declared that the reorganization of the Grand Orient in 1773 was the distant preparation and forerunner of the great Revolution of 1789. “The regime,” said he, “inaugurated by the Grand Orient gave force and vigor to that great truth which was to be formulated sixteen years later by the declaration of the rights of the man and the citizen: ‘The law is the expression of the general will.’” Another orator, Francolin, warned us on the same occasion of the fate that awaited countries that still slept securely. “The day will come when, among the peoples who have not had an eighteenth century nor a 1789, monarchies and religions will collapse. That day is not far off and we are awaiting it… that day will bring about the Masonic universal fraternity of peoples, the ideal which we have set up for ourselves. It is our business to hasten its coming.”

In his Histoire Religieuse de la Revolution française (Vol. I, p. 60), Pierre de la Gorce paints a pathetic picture of a Corpus Christi procession in 1788. It must be termed pathetic, though the beauty described must have been a ravishing spectacle, for it terminates with the words, “No one (of the spectators) doubted or imagined that the radiant solemnity, which they had just witnessed, was the review of what was going to disappear.” Palm Sunday was to be followed by Good Friday. And then came the sad spectacle so often renewed in the history of Our Lord’s Mystical Body, since the first journey to Calvary, “there followed Him a great multitude of people, and of women who bewailed and lamented Him” (Lk. 23:27).

There is no need, after what has been written, to dwell upon certain of the influences that were and are working against the kingship of Christ in Ireland. Freemasonry and that sub-Masonry, the Orange Society, were, of course, two of them. Before passing on, however, it will be well to draw attention to another influence that was directed against our country’s acceptance of the Kingship of Christ. Article 19 of the Constitution of the Irish Republican Brotherhood lays down that “there shall be no state religion in the Irish Republic.” This means the impossibility for the Irish state, as a social unit, to acknowledge the order established by God. The Church, in the 77th Proposition of the Syllabus of Pius IX, deals explicitly with this attitude towards God’s plan. In that proposition the doctrine is condemned that “in our day it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be acknowledged as the one state religion, to the exclusion of other forms of worship.” Proposition 55 condemns the same doctrine under another aspect.

It makes any thoughtful mind sad to contemplate the state of slavery that is being prepared for future generations in the name of “liberty” and “progress.” And yet, even the most cynical avowals on the part of the leaders of modern democracy fall to awaken people to a sense of what is really taking place. “We brought about the French Revolution,” sneered Clemenceau, in the Senate, 17th November, 1903, “our ancestors thought it was in order to set them free. No such thing: it was simply a change of masters…Yes, we guillotined the King. Long live the State-King! We dethroned the Pope. Long live the State-Pope! We are driving out God, as the gentlemen of the Right express it. Long live the State-God!” (Quoted in L ‘Eglise Catholique el le Droit Commun, by l’Abbé A. Roul, P. 48.)

Is the Catholic Church then the enemy of liberty? No better answer can be given to this horrible calumny than the words of Pope Leo XIII in his Apostolical Letter of March 19th, 1902: “The Church the enemy of liberty! Ah, how they travesty the idea of liberty, which has for its object one of the most precious of God’s gifts, when they make use of its name to justify its abuse and excess? What do we mean by liberty? Does it mean the exemption from all laws; the deliverance from all restraint, and, as a corollary, the right to take man’s caprice as a guide in all our actions? Such liberty the Church certainly reproves, and good and honest men reprove it likewise. But do they mean by liberty the rational faculty to do good, magnanimously, without check or hindrance, and according to the rules which eternal justice has established? That liberty, which is the only liberty worthy of man, the only one useful to society, none favors or encourages or protects more than the Church. By the force of its doctrine and the efficacy of its action the Church has freed humanity from the yoke of slavery in preaching to the world the great law of equality and human fraternity. In every age it has defended the feeble and the oppressed against the arrogant domination of the strong. It has demanded liberty of Christian conscience while pouring out in torrents the blood of its martyrs; it has restored to the child and to the woman the dignity and the noble prerogatives of their nature, in making them share, by virtue of the same right, that reverence and justice which is their due, and it has largely contributed both to introduce and maintain civil and political liberty in the heart of nations.”

But if the Catholic Church is not the enemy of liberty and true progress, why is she the object of such hatred and systematic opposition? Let us again have recourse to the words of Pope Leo XIII in the same Apostolical Letter for an authoritative answer: “During the whole course of her history the Church of Christ has had to combat and suffer for truth and justice. Instituted by the divine Redeemer Himself to establish throughout the world the Kingdom of God, she must, by the light of the Gospel law, lead fallen humanity to its immortal destinies; that is, to make it enter upon the possession of the blessings without end which God has promised us, and to which our unaided natural power could never rise—a heavenly mission, in the pursuit of which the Church could not fail to be opposed by the countless passions begotten of man’s primal fall and consequent corruption—pride, cupidity, unbridled desire of material pleasures; against all the vices and disorders springing from those poisonous roots the Church has ever been the most potent means of restraint. Nor should we be astonished at the persecutions which have arisen in consequence, since the divine Master foretold them, and they must continue as long as this world endures. What are the words He addressed to His disciples when sending them to carry the treasure of His doctrines to all nations? They are familiar to us all: ‘You will be persecuted from city to city; you will be hated and despised for my Name’s sake; you will be dragged before the tribunals, and condemned to extreme punishment.’ And wishing to encourage them for the hour of trial. He proposed Himself as their example: ‘If the world hate you, know you that it hath hated Me before you’ (Jn. 15:18).

“Certainly, no one who takes a just and unbiased view of things can explain the motive of this hatred. What offence was ever committed, what hostility deserved by the divine Redeemer? Having come down amongst men through an impulse of divine charity, He had taught a doctrine that was blameless, consoling, most efficacious to unite mankind in a brotherhood of peace and love; He had coveted neither earthly greatness nor honor; He had usurped no one’s right; on the contrary, He was full of pity for the weak, the sick, the poor, sinners, and the oppressed; hence His life was but a passage to distribute with munificent hand His benefits amongst men. We must acknowledge, in consequence, that it was simply by an excess of human malice, so much the more deplorable because unjust, that nevertheless He became, in truth, according to the prophecy of Simeon, a sign to be contradicted! What wonder, then, if the Catholic Church which continues His divine mission, and is the incorruptible depositary of His truths, has inherited the same lot. The world is always consistent in its way. Near the sons of God are constantly 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. It is on this account that the spirit of the world, in the presence of the law and of him who announces it in the name of God, swells with the measureless pride of an independence that ill-befits it.”

CHAPTER VI

Pope Leo XIII on Tolerance

The Pope wants all Catholics to be of one mind with regard to the so-called modern “Liberties,” and urges all to strive unceasingly for the return of the civil society to the acceptance of God’s plan. A text already quoted is worth repeating here: “Especially with reference to the so-called ‘liberties’ which are so greatly coveted in these days, all must stand by the judgment of the Apostolic See, and have the same mind. Let no man be deceived by the outward appearance of these liberties, but let each one reflect whence these have had their origin, and by what efforts they are everywhere upheld and promoted. Experience has made us well acquainted with their results to the state, since everywhere they have borne fruits which the good and wise bitterly deplore. If there really exist anywhere, or if we in imagination conceive, a state waging wanton and tyrannical war against Christianity, and if we compare with it the modern form of government just described, the latter may seem the more endurable of the two. Yet, undoubtedly, the principles on which such a government is grounded are, as We have said, of a nature which no one can approve” (Encyclical Letter Immortale Dei On the Christian Constitution of States, November 1st, 1888).

Pope Leo called for a reaction against the so-called “rights of man” in the Encyclical Letter Tametsi, November 1st, 1900, On Christ Our Redeemer: “Think it the chief part of your duty to engrave in the hearts of your people the true knowledge, and We might almost say the Image, of Jesus Christ, and to illustrate in your letters, your discourses, your schools and colleges, your public assemblies, whenever occasion serves, His charity, His benefits and institutions. 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.” This reaction he again appealed for in the touching review of his Pontificate given in the Apostolical Letter of March 19th, 1902: “In point of fact, and there is no one who does not see it, liberty as it is now understood, that is to say, a liberty granted indiscriminately to truth and to error, to good and to evil, ends only in destroying all that is noble, generous, and holy, and in opening the gates still wider to crime, to suicide, and to a multitude of the most degrading passions…When an organism perishes and corrupts, it is because it had 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. So society, in its foolhardy effort to escape from God, has rejected the divine order and revelation; and it is thus withdrawn from the salutary efficacy of Christianity, which is manifestly the most solid guarantee of order, the strongest bond of fraternity, and the inexhaustible source of all public and private virtue. This sacrilegious divorce has resulted in bringing about that trouble which now disturbs the world. Hence it is the pale of the Church which this lost society must re-enter, if it wishes to recover its well-being, its repose, and its salvation.

“Just as Christianity cannot penetrate into the soul without making it better, so it cannot enter in 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 identifies itself with that perfect, spiritual, and, in its own order, sovereign society, 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. It is the continuation of the mission of the Savior, the daughter and heiress of His Redemption.”

Accordingly, insisting upon the vital necessity of returning to order in public life, Pope Leo XIII forbids the concession of rights except to truth, but he does not refuse to tolerate what is at variance with truth. “With the discernment of a true mother, the Church weighs the great burden of human weakness, and well knows the course down which the minds and actions of men are in this our age being borne. For this reason, while not conceding any right to anything save to what is true and honest, she does not forbid public authority to tolerate what is at variance with truth and justice, for the sake of avoiding some greater evil, or of obtaining or preserving some greater good…One thing, however, remains always true—that the liberty which is claimed for all to do all things is not, as We have often said, of itself desirable, inasmuch as it is contrary to reason that error and truth should have equal rights. And as to tolerance, it is surprising how far removed from the equity and prudence of the Church are those who profess what is called Liberalism. For, in allowing that boundless licence on which We have spoken, they exceed all limits and end at last by making no apparent distinction between truth and error, honesty and dishonesty” (Encyclical Letter, On Human Liberty). The Church is obliged to condemn such tolerance, the Pope continues, but no one has a right to accuse the Church of being wanting in gentleness or opposed to true liberty. “Nor is there any reason why anyone should accuse the Church of being wanting in gentleness of action or largeness of view, or of being opposed to real and lawful liberty. The Church, indeed, 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, allow patiently 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, for, as St. Augustine wisely reminds us, ‘man cannot believe otherwise than of his own free will’” (Encyclical Letter Immortale Dei).

CHAPTER VII

Constitutions of Some Catholic States

The Constitutions of all Catholic countries have not succumbed to the corroding influence of Rousseauist and Masonic teaching. Though the Constitutions of the Catholic Cantons of Switzerland bear unmistakable traces of the revolutions of 1789 and 1848, yet the grasp of God’s plan, with the attitude towards order that follows thereon, is clearly affirmed. The Constitution of the Canton of Valais, where non-Catholics form a very small percentage of the population, begins in the Name of Almighty God, and Article 2 runs as follows: “The Catholic Apostolic and Roman Religion is the State Religion.” The Constitution of the Canton of Fribourg, the population of which is fourteen per cent. non-Catholic, begins also in the Name of Almighty God, and in Article 2 we read: “The Catholic, Apostolic and Roman Religion is that of the majority of the people of Fribourg…The relations between the Catholic Church and the state in mixed matters which have given rise to conflicts or might be likely to do so, shall be determined by a concordat to be concluded between the two authorities.” Special arrangements are made, according to this Constitution, with the Protestant population of the canton.

As has been remarked, the grasp of order embodied in the above Constitutions has been retained in spite of pressure from non-Catholic, revolutionary forces. The Treaty and Concordat between the Holy See and the Italian state, signed in 1929, and which begins in the Name of the Most Holy Trinity, are clearly a reaction against the downward tendency of this post-revolutionary epoch. The First Article of the Treaty runs as follows: Italy recognizes and reaffirms the principle consecrated in the First Article of the Constitution of 1848, according to which the Catholic, Apostolic and Roman religion is the one state religion. By the Eleventh Article of the Concordat, the state recognizes the Holy-days established by the Church.

The Holy Father, in his recent beautiful Encyclical Letter Casti Connubii, On Christian Marriage, 31st December, 1930, singles out for special praise Article 34 of the Concordat, in which the “Italian state, desirous of restoring to the institution of Matrimony, which is the basis 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 points this out as a happy result of the agreement between the two powers and adds: “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 every 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.” (Translation of English C.T.S.)

CHAPTER VIII

The World-Struggle Around the Divinity of Our Lord

“And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all things to Myself” (Jn. 12:32). We Catholics know that Our Lord crucified and risen from the dead is the center of the world, center and culminating-point, too, for in Him and through Him, humanity is linked with God. The hillock of Calvary is really and truly (if the metaphor may be allowed) the watershed of the world’s history. The human race moves on down to Calvary and from Calvary onwards, dividing at the foot of the Cross, according as men accept or reject the divinity of Him who died there on the first Good Friday. But this view of Calvary requires, for its completion, to be supplemented by a full perspective of the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Our Lord. In the words of St. Augustine (De Unitate Ecclesiae, IV.): “The whole Christ is the Head and the Body: the head is the only-begotten Son of God and His Body is the Church.” Our Lord re-lives the phases of His life on earth in His Mystical Body, the Catholic Church, and in His members, till time shall be no more. This truth has also been beautifully expressed by St. Augustine: “All that took place on the Cross, in the tomb, at the Resurrection on the third day, in the Ascension, and on the throne at the right of the Father was so carried out that our Catholic life here below should be conformed thereto” (Enchirid. C. 53).

Two duties that follow from this adorable mystery of Christ’s life in the Church have been touched on by His Holiness Pope Pius XI in his Encyclicals—the duty of suffering and expiating with Christ and the duty of standing for the Kingship of Christ. The duty of suffering and expiating with Christ as His members has been dwelt on in the Encyclical, On Universal Reparation to the Sacred Heart, 8th May, 1928: “It should be also remembered that the expiatory Passion of Jesus Christ is renewed and, in a manner, continued in His Mystical Body, the Church. To use once more the words of St. Augustine: ‘Christ suffered all that He had to suffer, and to the number of His sufferings nothing is wanting. Hence the Passion is complete, but in the head only: there remained still the sufferings of Christ to be completed in His Body’ (in Psalm 86). Jesus Christ Himself taught the same truth when to Saul, ‘as yet breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples’ (Acts 9:1). He said: ‘1 am Jesus Whom thou persecutest’ (Acts 4:5). By these words He clearly meant that persecutions directed against the Church are a grievous attack upon her divine head. Christ, then, as He still suffers in His Mystical Body, rightly desires to have us as His companions in the work of expiation. In this manner. He desires us to be united with Him, because, since we are ‘the body of Christ and members of member’ (1Cor. 12:27), what the head suffers the members should suffer with it. That the necessity of expiation or reparation is especially urgent today must be evident to anyone who considers the present plight of the world ‘seated in wickedness’ (1Jn. 19). From every side we hear the cry of nations whose governments have in very truth stood up and met together against the Lord and against His Church (Psalm 11:2). In these countries we have seen the rights of God and man trampled under foot, churches razed to the ground, religious orders of men and women driven from their houses, imprisoned, starved, attacked with insults and hatred; children torn from the bosom of Mother Church, made to deny and blaspheme Christ, and led into horrible crimes of impurity; all Christians threatened, oppressed, in constant danger of apostasy from the faith, or of a cruel death. So distressing are these events that they would seem almost to portend that ‘beginning of sorrows’ which is to be brought by ‘the man of sin…who is lifted up above all that is called God, or that is worshipped’ (2Thess. 11:34).”

The other duty incumbent on Catholics, because of the great truth of Christ’s life in the Church, is brought home to us in the Encyclicals Ubi Arcano Dei: On the Peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ, and Quas Primas, On the Kingship of Christ. In the former, the Holy Father insists that “unless the precepts, doctrines, and example of Christ are faithfully followed by all in public and private life, no peace worthy of the name can be attained, and certainly not the peace of Christ, which is preeminently to be desired. It is necessary, therefore, that human society be rightly organized, in order that the Church, following its divine mission, may be in a position to defend the rights of God towards men, individually as well as collectively. This is what We have briefly expressed as the reign of Christ. He then goes on to point out that “the Lord Jesus reigns in civil society, when therein sovereign homage is paid to God, and He is recognized as the source of authority and of law, without which there would be no standard of rule, no obligation to obey, nor honor in doing so; He reigns in it when the Church holds that position of dignity which was allotted to it by its divine author, that of a perfect society—mistress and guide of all other societies. Not that it lessens the power of these societies, for each is legitimate in its own sphere, but rather that it perfects them, as grace doth nature: and this connection between the Church and other societies places within their reach the power to assist man in the attainment of his final end, which is eternal beatitude, and to secure for him, even in this life, happiness and prosperity. From this it is clear that there is no peace save in the Kingdom of Christ, and no more efficacious way of establishing peace than by restoring the reign of Christ.”

In the Encyclical Quas Primas, the Holy Father treats of the revolt from Christ and the Church: “We refer to the plague of secularism, its errors and impious activities. This evil thing you know, Venerable Brethren, has not come to the surface in one day. Its seeds have been long developing within the vitals of the nations. First Christ’s authority to rule over nations was denied. The Church’s right, which follows on that of Christ, to teach the human race, to make laws, to rule over peoples unto their eternal salvation, was denied. Then by degrees the religion of Christ was put on a footing with false religions, and placed ignominiously in the same category with them. It was put under civil authority, and tolerated more or less at the whim of princes and rulers. Some went further, and desired to have a natural religion, mere natural instinct, set up in the place of divine religion. There were not wanting states that thought they could dispense with God, and make their religion consist of impiety and neglect of God. Bitter, indeed, are the fruits that this revolt of individuals and of nations against Christ has borne so frequently and for such long periods. The disastrous consequences of this revolt We lamented in the Encyclical Ubi Arcano, and today We reiterate the lament…We earnestly hope that the Feast of the Kingship of Christ, which in future will be yearly observed, may hasten the return of society to our loving Savior.

“It would be the duty of Catholics to do all they can to bring about this happy result. Many of them, however, do not seem to enjoy the social status or to wield the influence befitting those who bear the torch of truth. This drawback may, perhaps, be due to slowness and timidity on the part of good people, who shrink from contest or offer but a weak resistance; with the result that the enemies of the Church become more and more reckless and more daring in their attacks. But if the faithful would generally understand that it is their duty to fight bravely and continually, under the banner of Christ their King, then, fired with apostolic zeal, they would endeavor to win over to Our Lord those who are estranged from Him or know Him not, and would valiantly defend His rights. Moreover, the annual and universal celebration of the Feast of the Kingship of Christ is very much calculated to fix men’s attention on, and remedy in some way, this great ruin of society. While nations insult the sweet name of our Redeemer by suppressing all mention of it in their conferences and parliaments, we ought all the more loudly proclaim it, and all the more universally affirm the privileges of His royal dignity and power.”

In St. John (15:18–27 and 16) Our Lord exposes to His disciples, of whose union with Himself as the branches of the true vine He has just spoken, some of the consequences of that vital union. They must love one another; their disciples in all the nations they were to teach must love one another; yet the Church of which they are the leaders and guides, being one with Him, will meet with the same treatment from the world as that given to Jesus Christ. The world that rejected the Father and Christ and the supernatural life He came to restore will also reject the Church and her divine mission of radiating that life. To Our Lord, then, reliving His Passion in His Church down the ages, the duties of Catholics are twofold. Firstly, they must stand up for Christ the King and strive that He be not dragged before earthly tribunals to be condemned. They must, in other words, profit by the enthusiasm of Palm Sunday to organize, in order to avert the crime of Good Friday. The Holy Father, Pope Pius XI, in addition to the texts just quoted from the Encyclicals Ubi Arcano and Quas Primas, speaks also in the Encyclical On Reparation of the rejection of Christ the King, which is evident in so many ways in modern society. “Christian modesty is lamentably forgotten in modern habits of life and dress, especially among women: there is an insatiable desire for the goods of the world, an unbridled lust for success in business, a reckless pursuit of popularity, a contempt for legitimate authority and for the Word of God, with the consequence that the faith is lost, or at least is in considerable danger.” He then paints a sad picture of the abandonment of Christ the King. “And then to all these evils must be added the cowardice and indolence of those who, like the sleeping or fleeing disciples, are weak in faith, and abandon Christ while He is oppressed with anguish and beset by the allies of Satan; also the perfidy of those who, following the example of Judas the traitor, receive Holy Communion unworthily, or pass over to the enemy’s camp. One cannot but think that the time is approaching of which Our Lord prophesied: ‘Because iniquity hath abounded, the charity of many shall grow cold’” (Mt. 24:12). Before the Sanhedrin no one stood up for the King Who had gone about doing good. To strengthen Pilate and prevent him from being vanquished by fear, in spite of his desire to liberate the King whose Kingdom “was not of this world,” there was only a woman, his wife. She, however, did her best to save her husband from responsibility for the most awful crime the world has ever seen, that of Deicide.

Secondly, Catholics must suffer with Christ the King when He is condemned to death. “If, then, in foreseeing the sins of the future the soul of Jesus became sorrowful unto death, it cannot be doubted that He already felt some comfort when He foresaw our reparation…Hence, even now, in a mysterious but true manner, we may, and should, comfort the Sacred Heart, continually wounded by the sins of ungrateful men; for Christ—as we also read in the sacred liturgy, complains by the mouth of the Psalmist that He is abandoned by His friends: ‘My heart hath expected reproach and misery. And I looked for one, who would grieve together with me, but there was none and for one that would comfort me, and I found none’” (Psalm 68:21). (Encyclical Letter, On Reparation.)

The valiant gesture of St. Veronica brought relief that was not merely physical to the Heart of Our King, and His answer to the penitent thief shows how deeply He was and is affected by the compassion and sympathy of the lowliest.

In order to have a clearer view of the struggle around the divinity of Christ and of His Church, on account of which His Passion is said to be renewed and His friends are called on to stand for His Kingship down along the ages, let us consider the agents of Christ’s Passion and Death. They are indicated to us, with his usual limpid clearness, by St. Thomas, in the Third Part of the Summa Theologica, especially in Q. 41, a. I.; Q. 42, a. 2, Q. 47, a. 4, 5,6. In order of malevolence and guilt come first Satan, in the second place the leaders of the Jewish nation, whom St. Thomas calls Maiores Judaei (the more influential Jews), in the third place the rank and file of the Jews, called by St. Thomas Minores Judaei (the less influential Jews), lastly, the Gentiles, Pilate, and the soldiers who acted as executioners. Something must be said about each of these in turn.

Satan

Man’s engineering and technical triumphs in modern times in the visible world tend to obscure our vision of the great spiritual struggle between Our Lord and Satan, angels and demons, with man’s free-will as the theater of the combat. St. Paul did not allow the Catholics of his day to be under any illusion about the strength of the spiritual forces fighting against the members of the Mystical Body: “Put you on the armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the deceits of the devil. For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood; but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high places. Therefore, take unto you the armor of God, that you may be able to resist in the evil day, and to stand in all things perfect. Stand, therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breast plate of justice…In all things taking the shield of faith, wherewith you may be able to extinguish all the fiery darts of the most wicked one…By all prayer and supplication praying at all times in the spirit” (Eph. 6:11–18). Satan’s energy has not waned nor has his hatred of God diminished since his terrible overthrow on Calvary. There he got men to be his instruments to bring about the death of the Son of God, but his pride had blinded him and rendered him unable to grasp God’s plan for the restoration of our real life of grace through the humiliation and death of God the Son become man. He, proud spirit, would not so stoop. It was only when the awful crime of Deicide had been consummated that he saw that thus his own rule over the world had been overthrown. This, however, only redoubled his rage against Christ’s members, and he is ever the head and leader of all the forces opposed to the supernatural life which comes from Our Lord. “Inasmuch, therefore, as men are drawn to revolt from God by sinning, they come under the government and direction of the evil one: he is accordingly styled their head” (IlIa., P. Q. VIII. a. 7). The leader, therefore, against whom we have to struggle for the Kingship of Christ is Satan.

Jews

The Jews as a nation rejected Our Lord Jesus Christ, the true supernatural Messias, and have never ceased to look forward to another Messias, who must of necessity be purely natural. Thus have they necessarily set themselves against the one order of things instituted by God, and have, thereby, become a force ever striving against the acknowledgment of the Kingship of the supernatural Messias and ever working for the downfall of that Kingship since it was accepted in the Middle Ages. The growth of indifference in religion hinders men from seeing the full force of this reasoning, that is to say, all the consequences of the unity of the divine plan and of the oneness of the world. The rejection of the true Messias and of the Church, the supernatural, supra-national society, which was founded by Him, and which respects the natural order in nations and individuals, can only mean the looking forward to the domination of their particular nation as a natural entity. Accordingly, the worldwide power of the strongly organized Jewish nation, in international finance, in the press, in the cinema industry and in Freemasonry, coupled with their skill in becoming members of the different political parties everywhere, tends inevitably to the disruption of the whole order of things that was based on the divinity of Jesus and to the establishment of their own supremacy as a nation. As this latter means the supremacy of one nation over all others, with the rejection of the Church, it will lead to the ruthless imposition of one national form, to use the scholastic phrase; this spells disorder and decay for other national forms. At different times, in modern history, we have seen nations, which as nations had rejected the Church and were thus infected with this naturalism, consider themselves entrusted with a divine mission to mold all nations to their image and likeness. The English, French, and German peoples have at times shown themselves, to some extent at least, dazzled by the belief that they were the chosen people or race. Down to the condemnation of Jesus and His definite rejection, there was a chosen people, the Jewish people, but from Calvary onwards they must be spoken of as the Jewish nation. “Turn Thine eyes of mercy towards the children of that race, once Thy chosen People. Of old, they called down upon themselves the Blood of the Savior; may It now descend upon them a laver of redemption and of life” (Prayer approved of by His Holiness Pope Pius XI, for the Consecration of the Human Race to the Sacred Heart of Jesus).

In order, however, that we may be able to maintain the attitude of true supernatural charity towards the members of the Jewish nation, while resisting their efforts to overthrow the Kingship of the One True supernatural Messias, an important explanation, based on the principles of St. Thomas, is required. We must distinguish carefully between the personality of Our Divine Lord and His individuality. Individuality, by which man is marked off from other men, from other beings of the human species, comes from the body, from matter, which demands a certain portion of space distinct from that occupied by others. By our individuality we are essentially dependent on a certain environment, a certain climate, a certain descent. Our Lord, True Man as well as True God, was a Jew of the House of David, born of the Virgin Mary, the Lily of Israel. Personality, on the other hand, springs from the soul, and is, in the last resort, the subsistence of the soul. The personality of Our Lord, True God as well as True man, is not merely that of a created soul: it is the personality of the second person of the Most Holy Trinity. In Him there is only one ‘Ego,’ the divine ‘Ego.’ Hence the majestic proclamation I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.”

The Jews, as a nation, have continually refused to accept the divine personality of Our Lord Jesus Christ and so they refuse to accept the transcendent claim of the Catholic Church to be the Mystical Body in which He continues to live and into which all must enter in order to be one with Him and the Father. “What is Jesus to the Jewish nation at the present day? To the Jewish nation, He can neither be God nor the Son of God in the sense conveyed by belief in the Trinity. Either conception is to the Jew not only impious and blasphemous, but incomprehensible. Neither can he, to the Jewish nation, be the Messias: the kingdom of heaven (the ‘Days of the Messias’) is not yet come” (Jesus of Nazareth, by J. Klausner, Jewish Professor at the University of Jerusalem, P. 414). The natural Messias to whom the Jews look forward can only have as role the imposition of the Jewish Talmudic “form” on the world. Professor Klausner says, a few lines further on, that the ethical code of Jesus is “no ethical code for the nations and the social order of today, when men are still trying to find the way to that future of the Messias and the Prophets, and to the ‘Kingdom of the Almighty,’ spoken of by the Talmud, an ideal which is of this world and which gradually and in the course of generations is to take shape in this world.”

The Jewish nation, down the centuries since Calvary, have not only rejected the personality of Our Lord but continued to insult His individuality by their calumnies of His Blessed Mother. But, thanks to that very individuality, which, as we have seen, comes from the body, they are the nation and the race from which He drew His lifeblood, which He poured out on Calvary for them and for us. just as His Sacred Heart is wrung in an especial manner by His own nation’s rejection of Him, so every effort and every prayer for the conversion of the Jews appeals to Him too. Our Lord’s Sacred Heart is a human heart and He knows how the love of our own country, our own native place, and our own people causes chords to vibrate within us which no others can set in motion. Our own author, Kickham, in Knocknagow, touchingly expresses that love when he makes Mat the Thresher murmur: “For the credit of the little village,” before lifting the sledge for the final throw. Our Lord wept over Jerusalem and used one of His most touching comparisons in order to depict His sadness at the obstinacy of His own. One of those who have entered most fully into the feelings of Our Lord in this respect was the Venerable Francis M. P. Libermann, C.S.Sp., called by God to be the nineteenth century pioneer of the evangelization of the black race, founder of the Missionaries of the Holy Heart of Mary, afterwards united to the Congregation of the Holy Ghost. Father Libermann was converted from Judaism in 1826, and died while Superior-General of the Congregation of the Holy Ghost in 1852. He is the first member of the Jewish race[1] the cause of whose beatification has been introduced, and the heroicity of his virtues was solemnly proclaimed by Pope Pius X on 19th June, 1910. Those who have read his life will remember how Father Libermann’s heart was wrung by his father’s refusal to accept the personality of Jesus.

It is well known that the Postulatum pro Hebraeis, drawn up and presented to the Fathers of the Vatican Council by the two Fathers Lémann, with the kindly encouragement of Pius IX, received 510 signatures. The interruption of the Council prevented this Postulatum from being discussed. While therefore combating Jewish efforts for the destruction of Catholic civilization and the perversion of hearts, we must ever strive to open the kingdom of heaven to those true Israelites “in whom there is no guile” (Jn. 1:47). Of course, too, we must distinguish between the leaders of the Jewish race (Maiores Judaei) and the rank and file (Minores). In the case of the former, the rejection of the personality of Jesus is more difficult to excuse. St. Thomas insists (Ilia. P. Q. 47, a. 6, ad Ium) that the excusing words of Jesus, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Lk. 23:34), were uttered on behalf of the common people, but not for the princes of the Jews. The ignorance of the latter, the Angelic Doctor says, in the previous article of the same question, was affected ignorance (ignorantia affectata), for it was hatred that prevented them from recognizing Him as the Son of God. In this connection it is well to remember the principle laid down by St. Thomas (Ia. IIae., Q. 103, a. 4) in regard to the continuance of the ceremonies of the Old Law, after the destruction of Jerusalem: “In like manner, the ceremonies of the Old Law betokened Christ as having yet to be born and to suffer; whereas our sacraments signify Him as already born and having suffered. Consequently, 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 devoutly and truthfully; so, too, it would be a mortal sin now to observe those ceremonies which the fathers of old fulfilled with devotion and fidelity. Such is the teaching of St. Augustine (Contra Faust., XIX) who says: It is no longer promised that He shall be born, shall suffer and rise again, truths of which their sacraments were a kind of image: but it is declared that He is already born, has suffered and risen again: of which our sacraments, in which Christians share, are the actual representation.” As the years go on and the supernatural character of the Catholic Church stands out more and more clearly, it becomes ever more difficult, for the Jews as a whole, and especially for their leaders and guides, not to see the divine force behind the words once addressed to the Pharisees: “Therefore I said to you, that you shall die in your sins. For if you believe not that I am He, you shall die in your sin. They said therefore to Him: Who art thou? Jesus said to them: The Beginning, who also speak unto you…Jesus therefore said to them: When you shall have lifted up the Son of Man, then shall you know that 1 am He, and that I do nothing of Myself, but as the Father hath taught Me, these things I speak…Jesus; saith to them: If you be the children of Abraham, do the works of Abraham. But now you seek to kill Me, a Man who have spoken the truth to you, which I have heard of God. This Abraham did not. You do the works of your father. They said therefore to Him: We are not born of fornication: we have one Father, even God. Jesus therefore said to them: If God were your Father you would indeed love Me. For from God 1 proceeded and came: for I came not of Myself, but He sent Me: Why do you not know My speech? Because you cannot hear My word. You are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you will do” (Jn. 8:24, 25, 28, 39–44). Here Our Lord proclaims the fact that all those who reject the supernatural, by refusing to submit to God’s order, come under the leadership of Satan, who was the first to reject the supernatural. “The devil wanted to be like to God, but not in the way laid down by God, because he wanted his final end and his happiness to be in that which he could reach by his own natural powers. He thus turned away from supernatural happiness, which is the effect of God’s grace” (Ia. Pars. Q. 53, a. 3). Satan was thus the first naturalist and became the leader, so far as exterior guidance is concerned, of all those who revolt against the supernatural order. “It is in this latter fashion (by exterior guidance) that the devil is head of all men…To the ruler it belongs to lead those he governs to his own end. The end at which the devil aims is the revolt of the rational creature from God. Hence, from the beginning, he tried to get man to break away from obedience to the divine precept. This revolt from God is conceived as an end, inasmuch as it is desired under pretense of liberty” (IIIa., P. Q. VIII. a. 7).

In recent times one can see here and there a movement amongst the Jewish nation towards the acceptance of the individuality of Jesus while rejecting His divine personality. In the work already quoted from (Jesus of Nazareth, by Joseph Klausner), we read: “Jesus is for the Jewish nation a great teacher of morality and an artist in parable…in his ethical code there is a sublimity, distinctiveness and originality in form unparalleled in any other Hebrew ethical code…If ever the day should come, and this ethical code be stripped of its wrappings of miracles and mysticism, the Book of the Ethics of Jesus will be one of the choicest treasures in the literature of Israel for all time.” Jesus is thus incorporated into Israel as only one of the great Jewish teachers of the world, and that is all. Again, we see the same tendency in the report presented by Madame Eugene Simon to the Congress of Jewish youth at Geneva on 5th August, 1930, on the question How to struggle against conversions (to Catholicism) (Les Documents de la Vie Intellectuelle, December, 1930). Madame Simon, in her address to the Jewish delegates from almost every country in the world, amongst many other interesting things, said: “The Jewish religion, as it is (officially) taught, appears to them (our children) a something belonging to another age, out of date, incapable of nourishing the intelligence and of answering to the needs of the heart. If they have not a religious nature, they become unbelievers, and, in fact, quit Judaism. But if they have religious tendencies, how can they resist the sweetness of the words of the New Testament, which sum up, in a few pages, the teachings of our writings? The knowledge of this New Testament, along with the Old, has become a primary necessity for us in order to stem the tide of conversions…We have, then, in our modern Judaism, this dangerous lacuna, the ignorance of the Gospel and of the origins of Christianity. Our young people must understand that Jesus, on whom the structure of Christianity has been raised, was a Jew, that his finest teachings are flowers that have blossomed on the ancient tree of Judaism, that he lived and died a Jew and that he never denied the religion of his people in its pure essence, but on the contrary that he is, with Moses, our greatest prophet. Rabbins, like Leonard Levy of Pittsburg, Enelow of New York, and Stephen Wise in his sensational pronouncement, have shown that they saw this. The day that we shall profess this truth openly, we shall no longer have to fear the Christian missionaries. Our young people will realize that Christianity is the offspring of Judaism and that we have all the truths it teaches. They will see that keeping our dignity as Jews, remaining faithful to our traditions, to our historical mission, we are much more in accord with the Jew Jesus than if we go over to Churches which are respectable institutions but which Jesus himself did not found. To struggle successfully against the movement of conversion, let us not abandon to the Christians the noblest fruit of our Judaism, but rather let us claim it strongly as our own. Thus we shall be better armed for the defense of our faith than by all the rites that are being abandoned more and more as time goes on.” May God grant that this acceptance of the individuality of Our Lord Jesus Christ may lead to the recognition of the central fact of the world’s history, His divine personality! Owing, however, to the decay of belief in His divinity amongst an ever-increasing number of Protestant so-called Christians these declarations of some Jews are liable to be confused with full acceptance of Jesus. Our Lord was put to death because He claimed to be what He was, God as well as Man. He wants full acknowledgment of His claim.

Sad, indeed, is the lot of the Jewish nation. They were meant to be for the world, as a nation, the heralds of the divine life. “Judaism, as it was, could not last, since it was only a stage on a journey. Its duty, when Christ came, was to abdicate into His hands, to be renewed by His word and His spirit, and thus to enter into a new way, which, however, would be in continuity with the old, as when a larva or a chrysalis changes form…By a flight of imagination we can see Israel acclaiming Christ, the Messias; its leaders giving the example, its pontiffs becoming the priests of the new dispensation,…its doctors all becoming like Paul, teachers of the Gospel and apostles of the Gentiles…One cannot doubt that this was the ideal of Jesus…Alas ! Jerusalem did not surrender. Only a few of her children without social authority recognized the things that were to her peace” (Sertillanges, O.P., Ce que Jesus voyait du haut de la Croix, p. 63). If only the Jewish nation had freely corresponded with the incomparable graces it received through Jesus, it would have been the herald of the divine life to a regenerated world, but it obstinately refused. Today, by its vast financial power over the world’s processes of exchange and its widespread influence on the press and cinema, it is placing terrible obstacles in the way of those who are striving to live that life. Some striking passages from St. Thomas will make clear the meaning of these statements.

In his treatise on civil government (De Regimine Principum, C. I, c. 15) the Angelic Doctor points out that “two things are necessary for a good life. 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” Man is composed of body and soul. Accordingly, that the multitude of men or the average man, to express it another way, may be able to lead a virtuous life without being obliged to be heroic, the needs of the body must be provided for in suitable fashion. Now, “natural wealth is that which serves man as a remedy for his natural wants such as 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 latter is invented by the art of man for the convenience of exchange and as a measure of things saleable” (Ia. IIae., Q. II. a. I, c.). Money therefore as a means of exchange is meant to facilitate the obtaining by men of that sufficiency of material goods, or natural wealth, which is required to satisfy the needs of the body, so that the soul may be set free for contemplation. It is clear, then, that the manipulation of money or token wealth can become a terrible instrument in the hands of adversaries of the supernatural Messias and of the supernatural life He confers, by hampering instead of facilitating exchange. “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 servant of disordered concupiscence” (la.IIIae., Q. 2, a. Ium ad 3um). The lust for power and control, thanks to the mastery of token-wealth, is such disordered concupiscence.

Efforts must therefore be made to bring about an organization of society in which the life of the people will not be subordinate to and at the mercy of Stock Exchange operations and financial coups by the few. Already, in the great Encyclical Rerum Novarum, 15th May, 1891, Pope Leo XIII had alluded to the havoc wrought by usury. “For the ancient workingmen’s guilds 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 working men have been surrendered, all isolated and helpless, to the hard-heartedness 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 custom of working by contract, and the concentration of so many branches of trade in the hands of a few individuals, 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 that of slavery itself.

“To remedy these wrongs the Socialists, working on the poor man’s envy of the rich, are striving to do away with private property and contend that individual possessions should become the common property of all, to be administered by the state or by municipal bodies. They hold that by thus transferring property from private individuals to the community, the present mischievous state of things will be set to rights, inasmuch as each citizen will then get his fair share of whatever there is to enjoy. But their contentions are so clearly powerless to end the controversy that, were they carried into effect, the working man himself would be among the first to suffer. They are, moreover, emphatically unjust, because they would rob the lawful possessor, bring state action into a sphere not within its competence, and create utter confusion in the community” In the letter of Pope Pius X on the subject of the “Sillon,” 25th August, 1910, the economic reorganization of society by Catholic action is insisted upon: “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 the 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 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 social question and social science are not of recent origin…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 reorganization, 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” (Irish C.T.S. pamphlet by Rev. P. Boyle, C.M.).

Control of token-wealth enables powerful Jewish financiers to wield enormous influence over the conditions of human life at the present day, but the very power they hold serves but to increase their blindness with regard to the divine personality of Our Lord Jesus Christ. St. Thomas’s words concerning riches are thereby perfectly illustrated: “All material things obey money, so far as the multitude of fools is concerned, who know no other than material goods which can be obtained for money. But we should take our estimation of human goods not from the foolish but from the wise…All things saleable can be had for money: not so spiritual things, for these cannot be sold. Hence it is written (Prov. 17:16): ‘What doth it avail a fool to have riches, seeing that he cannot buy wisdom?” (Ia. IIae., Q. 2, a. I, ad Ium et 2um). The one way to the acquisition of true wisdom is the acceptance of the Divinity of Jesus: “Jesus saith to them: Have you never read in the Scriptures: The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner? By the Lord this has been done, and it is wonderful in our eyes. Therefore, I say to you, that the kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and shall be given to a nation yielding the fruits thereof. And whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken: but on whomsoever it shall fall, it shall grind him to powder. And when the chief priests and Pharisees had heard His parables, they knew that He spoke of them” (Mt. 21:42–45).

It is almost unnecessary to emphasize that, when we speak of Jewish wealth we are speaking of the Jewish kings of Finance, especially of the dozen or so of Jewish families who possess or control such vast quantities of token-wealth. Many thousands of Jews may be poor or relatively poor, but that does not change the fact that certain leaders (Maiores) and some thousands of lesser men (Minores) wield enormous power, through the possession of a large part of the world’s gold and through the banking system. In politics, war, and peace, manufactures and commerce, their influence is far greater than most people realize. Their power over the press prevents clear statements from reaching the ordinary man.

In what precedes, Jewish opposition to the Kingship of Christ has been more particularly stressed. Another current of opposition, originating in Jewish rejection of the head of the Mystical Body, may be looked upon as directed rather against the priesthood of Our Lord and the divine life He pours out on man. This has shown itself in the Jewish Kabbala, with its pantheistic deification of the generative powers of the human race. The Kabbala is the key to the symbolism of those Masonic and occultist groups which are such happy hunting-grounds of Satan. Behind ever so many efforts directed towards the propagation of nakedness and of all forms of moral corruption in the modern world is the Kabbalistic doctrines of man’s divinity. Horrible as it seems to us. Catholics, whose supreme act of religion is the Sacrifice of the Lamb without stain, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, there are Kabbalistic secret societies which seek by impure practices to get into touch with the divine. (Cf. Revue Internationale des Societes Secretes, May 10th and 17th, 1931, as well as Light Bearers of Darkness, Boswell, London, for documents.)

Gentiles

Pontius Pilate, the Roman Governor of Judaea, was the first Gentile ruler before whom the head of the Mystical Body was brought up for trial. Pilate failed to stand between the Just One and His accusers. Through cowardly fear of being denounced to Tiberius and losing his position, he yielded Him up. Pilate’s reputation at court was not very enviable. His office had been obtained for him, not on his merits, but thanks to the favor enjoyed by Sejanus with the Emperor. The Chief Priests knew that he had been already reported to Caesar in the affair of the ensigns, and had been worsted. He feared what the result would be if Caesar learned that his governor was not zealous in putting down a king who had arisen in Judaea. Pilate sacrificed justice and right to what seemed to make for personal safety. How often down the ages have we seen the same scene re-enacted, when Our Lord has been arraigned and condemned in His Church and His ministers!

Taking into account what has been already written about the organization of opposition to the Catholic Church in and through Freemasonry and the Jewish power in Masonry, modern rulers find themselves held even more securely than Pilate was. On the one hand, to arrive at power, or to hold it, when they have succeeded in doing so, statesmen and politicians are allured into Masonry; on the other, if they oppose Masonic plans, those who refuse to accept the supernatural Messias and control Masonry wield terrible financial power over states, and can, by means of the press, incline the fickle, unthinking multitude, whose attitude decides the fate of rulers, in almost any direction.

With regard to the Jewish power in Freemasonry, readers are referred to the excellent study on the subject in Freemasonry and the Anti-Christian Movement, (2nd ed., pp. 74-95) by Rev. E. Cahill, S.J. As that work is within reach of all, it is not necessary to quote extracts therefrom, but, perhaps, a few from another work, widely known at least in German-speaking countries, may not be out of place. In Weltfreimaurerei, Weltrevolution, Weltrepublik (World-Masonry, World-Revolution, World-Republic, by Dr. F. Wichtl, 11th ed., P. 56), we read: “Not only in Germany, Hungary and Austria, but everywhere throughout the world are the Jews the most active and most energetic Masons and they understand perfectly how to instil their own spirit into the Lodges and make them serviceable for their own ends.” Again, on page 62, we find a quotation from the English publication, The Eye Witness, September, 1911, in which the writer stated “that the present position of the Jews in England is characterized in the most striking fashion by the fact that they have won control in the secret societies, especially in Freemasonry.” Dr. Wichtl adds: “in the remarkable book by E. Demachy, Les Rothschild (Paris, 1896), it is established that this family belongs to Masonry since 1809 and to German as well as French and English Lodges; that is the reason why nothing can be set on foot against this mighty house.” Finally, in Chapter 26 of the same work, where the writer treats of World Capitalism, Zionism, Bolshevism, Freemasonry, we find the following: “It would carry us too far to name all the leading Jews of the Banking and Stock Exchange world…We have, however, to add that all these Jews are Freemasons. The majority of them belong to the directors of the Masonic Order of the B’nai B’rith…It must be remarked that this B’nai B’rith Order is directly opposed to one of the fundamental laws of Freemasonry. This fundamental law denies all distinctions of race, nation, religious belief, within the Brotherhood. Nevertheless, the Masonic Order of the B’nai B’rith is exclusively Jewish. It does not admit any Germans, English, Mussulmans, or Japanese to membership. Yet, in spite of this, it is recognized. This is indubitable proof of the fact that the Jews are the leaders of the other Masons…In the course of our considerations we have seen that the big capitalists and the political leaders of the proletariat work together in positively touching agreement…The whole Marxian Communist movement has been supported for decades by Jewish high finance.”

Taking into account the distinction drawn higher up between personality and individuality, we can easily sketch the destructive action of organized Masonry with regard to the Kingship of Christ. As an individual, a man is a unit in the family and subordinate to it, just as, analogously, from the same point of view, the family or social cell is a part of the whole, called civil society, and subordinate to it. But from the point of view of personality, the whole order of the state’s provision of supplementary goods is for the family, which provides the first or primordial goods, as the family is for the growth of the personality of the child through the full development of the life of Jesus Christ in its soul. It is this order of the growth of personality through Christ which Pope Pius XI outlines in the Encyclical Ubi Arcano, where he says in a text, a portion of which has already been quoted: “It is necessary, therefore, that human society be rightly organized, in order that the Church, following its divine mission, may be in a position to defend the rights of God towards men, individually as well as collectively. This is what We have briefly expressed as the reign of Christ. Jesus Christ reigns in the minds of individual men by His teachings, in their souls by charity, in the whole life of man by the observance of His law and the imitation of His example. Again, He reigns in the family, when, founded upon the sacrament of Christian matrimony, it preserves inviolate its character as a sacred institution, in which parental authority is an expression of the divine paternity, whence it derives its origin and its name (Eph. 3:15); when children imitate the obedience of the Child Jesus, and when the whole life is permeated with the spirit of the Holy Family of Nazareth. Finally, the Lord Jesus reigns in civil society, when therein sovereign homage is paid to God, and He is recognized as the source of authority and of law, without which there would be no standard of rule, no obligation to obey, nor honor in doing so; He reigns in it when the Church holds that position of dignity which was allotted to it by its divine author, that of a perfect society—mistress and guide of all other societies. Not that it lessens the power of these societies, for each is legitimate in its own sphere, but rather that it perfects them as grace doth nature; and this connection between the Church and other societies places within their reach the power to assist man in the attainment of his final end, which is eternal beatitude, and to secure for him, even in this life, happiness and prosperity.”

Throughout the world Freemasonry is engaged in attacking the reign of Christ in the child, by enforcing education from which Our Lord and His Church are excluded, in the family by divorce and interference with parental authority, in the state by bringing about state indifference to religion. Once the state, as such, is divorced from the supernatural, the way is cleared for onslaughts on the family and the child. Further, the World-Republic at which Masonry aims is an attack on the Catholic concept of native land and disregards utterly the role of national influence in the formation of the natural virtues. “A man is a debtor to others in different ways,” writes St. Thomas, “according to the special excellence of each and the special benefits he has received from them. In both these respects God occupies the first place, because He is supremely perfect and is the First Principle of our existence and our guidance. In secondary fashion, our parents and our native land, by whom and in which we have been begotten and reared, are also principles of our existence and guidance. Accordingly, after God, a man is most indebted to his parents and his country” (IIa. IIae., Q. 101, a. I, c.). God is the universal principle of our being, our parents are the particular principle and our native land the co-natural principle (cf. IIa. IIae., Q. 101, a. 3, and IIa., IIae., Q. 122, a. 5),

In this connection it is well to add that, under Article VI., 2, of Anderson’s Masonic Charges or Obligations (Edition of 1723), in order to preserve peace and harmony, “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 politics.” The universal Religion of Humanity, already treated of in this sketch, which gradually removes the accidental divisions of mankind due to particular opinions, or religions, national and social prejudices, is to be the exclusive bond of union among men in the Masonic Society. Masons as such are cosmopolitan, so we need not be astonished at the steady Masonic propaganda undertaken since 1789 and 1848 for the United States of Europe and of the World (cf. l’Idee de Patrie et l’Humanitarisme, by Georges Goyau). In spite of the naturalistic excesses of nationalism since the French Revolution, we Catholics must not forget the words of Pope Leo XIII in the Encyclical Letter Sapientiae Christianae, 10th January, 1890: “We are bound, then, to love dearly the country whence we have received the means of enjoyment this mortal life affords, but we have a much more urgent obligation to love, with ardent love, the Church to which we owe the life of the soul, a life that will endure for ever…Moreover if we would judge aright, the supernatural love of 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.”

Sometimes secret societies favor corruption for the sake of ruining the Catholic religion. The text of the letter of instructions of Vindice, one of the chiefs of the Italian Secret Society, the Alta Vendita, to Nubius, is well known “It has been decided in our councils that we must get rid of Catholics, but we do not want to make martyrs, so let us strive to popularize vice among the people. It must enter by their five senses: let them drink it in and be saturated with it… make men’s hearts corrupt and you will have no more Catholics. Keep the priest away from work, the altar and the practice of perfection: aim skillfully at occupying his thoughts and his time elsewhere…I recently heard one of our friends making fun of our projects and saying: ‘To overthrow Catholicism, you must begin by suppressing the female sex.’ The saying is, in a certain sense, true, but since we cannot suppress woman, let us corrupt her along with the Church. Corruptio optimi pessima …The best dagger with which to wound the Church to the death is corruption” (Cretineau-Joly, l‘Eglise romaine en face de la Revolution, Vol. II., P. 28). The phrase Corruptio optimi pessima is a formula of scholastic philosophy, which may be paraphrased as follows: The diverting to an evil end of a being, endowed with great capacity and potentiality for good, means the setting in motion of a most powerful agent of corruption and destruction.

Sometimes the efforts directed towards immorality and corruption are the outcome of the Kabbalistic divinization of man and of the denial of original sin, as already stated. “With regard to this cult of nakedness, we cannot pass over in silence the number of brutally explicit texts that have come before us in the course of studies on Judaeo-Masonry. It is clear that the evil has its source there. Recently one of our friends offered his services for the collection and systematic examination of these documents, in order to bring home to all the methodical development of this campaign of universal corruption which starts with childhood. Unfortunately, though this work is easy to plan out, it is difficult to carry it into execution, on account of the minute details, into which the author is obliged to enter. It will take a long time…In the meantime we give a few well-known extracts: ‘our children must realize the ideal of nakedness.’ This is taken from the paper called La Française (“The Frenchwoman”) and was made the subject of the following commentary in the same paper by a Masonic doctor: ‘This method plays a considerable part, not only from the physical but also from the moral point of view…Thus the mentality of the child is rapidly transformed. To escape opposition progress must be methodically graduated: first, feet and legs naked, then upturned sleeves, afterwards the upper and lower limbs, the upper part of the chest, the back, etc.,…in summer, children will go around almost naked in all weathers’” (Revue Internationale des Societes Secrets, 11th November, 1928, pp. 1062, 1063).

Nations that have become corrupt will be unable to make a serious attempt to defend their national existence. The international elements that are planning the World-Republic bide their time, but they are not idle. In 1923, at the Assembly of the French Grand Orient, the President proposed the toast: “To the French Republic, child of French Masonry. To the World-Republic of tomorrow, child of World-Masonry.” Again, in the report of the same assembly, we read: “Freemasonry is the only organization which can co-ordinate the disinterested actions of the inhabitants of the globe. Masonry can and ought to bring into being that international action from which eternal peace and concord between peoples will come forth.” One last extract from the same source, in view of recent events in Spain, is particularly interesting. Brother Barcia, former Grand-Master of the Spanish Grand Orient, spoke as follows: “I am certain that the most cultured minds in Spain are completely at one with the cause of undying France, of that France which made the Revolution, not only for herself but for the entire world.”

The mode of procedure of Masonry in Protestant countries has, in general, been different from that adopted in Catholic countries, as we have seen at an earlier stage. In this connection a few remarks about Judaeo-Masonic policy in England and Ireland will not be out of place. Masonry developed rapidly in England after 1723, and through English influence was implanted in various continental countries, even in Rome. Masonry everywhere favored the growth of naturalism, but it was also a powerful instrument for English aggrandizement in the hands of English politicians, and was so used, in the various rivalries created and the sides favored by them, on the Continent. A time came, however, when the English felt that Masonry was being moved against their interests, and that the manoeuvers of Masonry were not fully under their control. That was during the French Revolution. Accordingly, in order to combat the influence of the international element in Masonry in Ireland, the English Government aided the development of the Orange Society as an offset to the action of the international Revolutionary spirit in our country. The international Revolutionary spirit which was responsible for the uprise of the United Irishmen at the epoch of the French Revolution favored the foundation of the Irish Republican Brotherhood later on in the nineteenth century (cf. New Ireland, by A. M. Sullivan, pp. 198–202). Our country has thus for the past fifty years been the theatre of the rivalry between two sub-masonries or subordinate societies, both agreed in opposition to the Kingship of Christ. While at the same time Masonry in England, the country by which ours was governed, was gradually coming more and more under the influence of the Jewish (International) elements, as opposed to the pro-British (nationally English) elements.

When speaking of individual members of secret societies, for example, of the I.R.B., and of their subjective aspirations in joining those societies, the distinction between esoteric and exoteric initiates, which the present writer has developed elsewhere, must be borne in mind.[2] The former are those who are aware of the real secrets of the society; the latter’s knowledge is merely superficial. It is well to remember also that knowledge of secrets may not be in proportion to the grade to which a member ostensibly belongs. It may be greater or it may be less.

Since the expulsion of James II in 1688 England has been governed by the rich landowners, whose families had risen to wealth and power largely on the spoils of the monasteries of Pre-Reformation Catholic England. During all that time, until fairly recently, Jewish power, financial and otherwise, favored English schemes. “London,” writes Belloc, “became, after Waterloo, the money market and the clearing house of the world. The interests of the Jew as a financial dealer and the interests of England’s commercial polity approximated more and more. One may say that by the last third of the nineteenth century they had become virtually identical” (Hilaire Belloc, The Jews, p. 222). But for the last thirty years or so, the cleavage has been growing between Jewish interests and English national interests. International finance is becoming increasingly non-English. The great territorial English families have become Jewish to a surprising extent, owing to marriages with Jewish commercial fortunes. English Masonry which has not been urged along the paths of Continental Masonry in Catholic countries, and has been proclaimed the bulwark of the stability of the country, is gradually tending to reflect the change. Its influence will show itself increasingly hostile to Catholicism. We may, therefore, in the future, expect to see greater obstacles placed in the way of Catholic education in British possessions and strenuous efforts made to introduce divorce everywhere.

In Ireland, if one can judge by the analogy of what has taken place elsewhere, the aim of the pro-British elements in Masonry is, after having secured control in the Parliament of Northern Ireland, to work for a number of years at securing adherents in the Free State, and then strive for union on conditions which will favor Masonic influences. But we must not forget that the Jewish (International) elements in secret societies and Jewish International Finance not only control Masonry but guide Communist and Revolutionary propaganda. “With the exception of Oulianoff (Lenin) and a few other Russian traitors, as well as a certain number of Poles, Lithuanians and Georgians, all the civil and military administration of the Bolsheviks was and is, in great part, made up of Jews. Trotsky, Zinovief, Litvinoff, etc., all belong to the Jewish race and try to conceal their real nationality by assuming Russian names” (La Russie sous les Juifs, by D. Petrovsky, P. 37). The Jewish press has on occasions admitted this. Mrs. Webster, in World Revolution, quotes a Mr. M. Cohan from The Communist, a newspaper published at Kharkoff, as follows: “Without exaggeration, it may be said that the great Russian social revolution was indeed accomplished by the hands of the Jews…It is true that there are no Jews in the ranks of the Red Army as far as privates are concerned, but in the committees and in Soviet organizations, as Commissars, the Jews are gallantly leading the masses of the Russian Proletariat to victory.” He adds that the symbol of Jewry, the Red five-pointed Star, has been adopted as the symbol of the Russian proletariat, being worn, Mrs. Webster remarks, on the caps of Lenin’s guards. Propaganda directed by the Jewish financial elements which have such power in Moscow and which are, of course, capitalist, fans the flames of anti-English sentiment and thus tries to draw the whole movement for the complete severance of Ireland from the British Empire into the meshes of the anti-Catholic World-Republic. Thus will not only all hope of the Kingship of Christ ever being socially acknowledged be extinguished, but Catholic Irishmen will again become outlaws in their own land. Penal legislation is being prepared for Spanish Catholics in their country, in the name of “progress” and “liberty,” and Judaeo-Masonically controlled news agencies camouflage the sinister work.

In a Letter addressed in 1906 to the Bishop of Madrid, Pope Pius X insisted on the necessity of united action by Catholics when those whose object is the destruction of religion and society are seeking political power: “All must remember that nobody has the right to remain indifferent, when religion or the public welfare are in danger. Those who strive to destroy 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 legislators. It is therefore necessary that Catholics should strive with all their might to avert that danger.” In every country where they have succeeded in obtaining control. Freemasonry has sought by every means to centralize power, so as to be able to direct the whole country from one point and crush opposition. The Prefets des Departements in France, for example, have been and are agents of the central power, ordering local affairs in the way Paris lays down. Catholics elected to public offices and on local boards should remember this and by the sterling Catholic character of their administration give no pretext for centralization. Some of the splendid counsels on Catholic Action given by Pope Pius X in his Encyclical Letter, Il Fermo Proposito, June 11th, 1905, may be applied to this important point: “The other principles which rule the conscience of every true Catholic must be inculcated and put in practice. He should remember above all things to be, and to show himself, in all circumstances, a true Catholic, undertaking and fulfilling public duties with the firm and constant intention of promoting as much as he can the social and economic welfare of his country, especially of the people, according to the maxims of a distinctly Catholic civilization, at the same time defending the supreme interests of the Church, which are those of religion and justice” (The Pope and the People, English C.T.S.).

[1]Loreto Ed. Note – In modern times.

[2]The subjective aspirations of many members of the Fenian Brotherhood have been sympathetically sketched in Canon Sheehan’s The Graves at Kilmoma.

CHAPTER IX

Some Extracts From Papal Documents on the Duties of Catholics

The necessity of the two virtues of courage and prudence is insisted upon by Pope Leo XIII: “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, which worketh by charity (Gal. 5:6), had been generally more energetic and lively in the souls of men, and had there not been so universal a drifting away from the divinely established rule of morality throughout Christianity…As to those who mean to take part in public affairs they should avoid with the very utmost care two criminal excesses: so-called prudence and false courage. Some there are, indeed, who maintain that it is not opportune boldly to attack evil-doing in its might and when in the ascendant, lest, as they say, opposition should exasperate minds already hostile. These make it a matter of guess-work as to whether they are for the Church or against her since, on the one hand, they give themselves out as professing the Catholic Faith, and yet wish that the Church should allow certain opinions, at variance with her teaching, to be spread abroad with impunity. They moan over the loss of faith and the perversion of morals, yet do not trouble themselves to bring any remedy; nay, not seldom, even add to the intensity of the mischief through too much forbearance or harmful dissembling…The prudence of men of this cast is of that kind which is termed by the Apostle Paul wisdom of the flesh and death of the soul, because it is not subject to the law of God, neither can it be (Rom. 8:6, 7). Nothing is less calculated to amend such ills than prudence of this kind…On the other hand, not a few, impelled by a false zeal, or—what is more blameworthy still—affecting sentiments which their conduct belies, take upon themselves to act a part which does not belong to them. They would fain see the Church’s mode of action influenced by their ideas and their judgment to such an extent that everything done otherwise they take ill or accept with repugnance…

“Honor then to those who do not shrink from entering the arena as often as need calls…But men of this high character maintain without wavering the love of obedience, nor are they wont to undertake anything upon their own authority. Now, since a like resolve to obey, combined with constancy and sturdy courage, is needful, so that whatever trials the pressure of events may bring about, they may be deficient in nothing (Jam. 1:4), We greatly desire to fix deep in the mind of each one that which St. Paul calls the wisdom of the spirit (Rom. 8:6), for in controlling human actions this wisdom follows the excellent rule of moderation, with the happy result that no one either timidly despairs through lack of courage or presumes over-much from want of prudence” (Encyclical Letter Sapientiae Christianae).

Pope Pius X insisted in most appealing fashion upon the courage necessary for Catholic Action in the discourse he pronounced on the 13th December, 1908, at the Beatification of Joan of Arc. To St. Joan’s mind the coronation and anointing of the King of France were ever present, because that anointing did homage to the universal Kingship of Christ and linked up political power with the government of Jesus. She was the saint sent to remind the world of the supernatural Political Guidance of God and of that Catholic organization of Europe which was the glory of the Middle Ages. The saintly Pope spoke of the heroism of St. Joan and contrasted it with the timidity of so many Catholics in our day: “In our time more than ever before, the chief strength of the wicked lies in the cowardice and weakness of good men…All the strength of Satan’s reign is due to the easy-going weakness of Catholics. Oh! if I might ask the divine Redeemer, as the prophet Zachary did in spirit: What are these wounds in the midst of thy hands? the answer would not be doubtful: With these was I wounded in the house of them that loved me. 1 was wounded by my friends, who did nothing to defend me, and who, on every occasion, made themselves the accomplices of my adversaries. And to this reproach, which can be levelled at the weak and timid Catholics of all countries, a great number of French Catholics lay themselves open.”

In the Encyclical Letter Quas Primas, Pope Pius XI deplores the revolt of society from Our Lord which has as result that “the religion of Christ was put on a footing with false religions, and placed ignominiously in the same category with them.” He then adds: “We earnestly hope that the Feast of the Kingship of Christ, which, in future, will be yearly observed, may hasten the return of society to Our Loving Savior. It would be the duty of Catholics to do all they can to bring about this happy result. While nations insult the sweet name of Our Redeemer by suppressing all mention of it in their conferences and parliaments, we ought all the more loudly to proclaim it, and all the more universally affirm the privileges of His royal dignity and power…The very celebration of the Feast, too, 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 thus be led to reflect on the Last Judgment, in which Christ, Who has been cast out of public life, despised, neglected and ignored, will severely avenge such insults; for His kingly dignity demands that the Constitution of the whole state should conform to the divine Commandments and Christian principles.”

In the Encyclical Letter Longinque Oceani of 6th January, 1895, on Catholicity in the United States, Pope Leo XIII dwells upon the charitable attitude towards non-Catholics which is becoming in Catholics: “Our thoughts now turn to those who dissent from us in matters of Christian faith and who shall deny that, with not a few of them, dissent is a matter rather of inheritance that of will. How solicitous we are for their salvation, with what ardor of soul we wish that they should be at length restored to the embrace of the Church, the common mother of all, our Apostolic Epistle Praeclara has in very recent times declared. Nor are we destitute of all hope, for He is present and hath a care Whom all things obey and Who laid down His life that He might ‘gather together in one the children of God who were dispersed’ (Jn. 11:52). Surely we ought not to desert them nor leave them to their fancies; but with mildness and charity draw them to us, using every means of persuasion to induce them to examine closely every part of the Catholic doctrine, and to free themselves from preconceived notions. In this matter, if the first place belongs to the Bishops and the clergy, the second belongs to the laity, who have it in their power to aid the apostolic efforts of the clergy by the probity of their morals and the integrity of their lives. Great is the force of example, particularly with those who are earnestly seeking the truth, and who, from a certain inborn virtuous disposition, are striving to live an honorable and upright life.” On the other hand, he insists in his Letter to the Italian people, 8th December, 1892, that efforts to overthrow the supernatural and propagate naturalism must be strenuously combated: “Societies not subject to the influence of religion and, as such, easily exposed to be more or less directed and dominated by Masons, must, in general, be looked on with suspicion and avoided. Those also must be avoided which not only lend their aid to Masonry but constitute a nursery therefor and a factory for the training of apprentices. All should avoid any liaison, any 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, 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…Besides, as we have to deal with a sect like Freemasonry, which has penetrated everywhere, it is not enough to remain on the defensive, we must enter the arena and fight face to face. This you shall do, dear sons, by opposing publications to publications, schools to schools, associations to associations, congresses to congresses, action to action…Freemasonry multiplies its lodges. Do you also multiply Catholic circles and parochial committees.” Those who think that Catholics can do good by assisting at Rotary Club dinners, etc., would do well to meditate upon those instructions of Pope Leo XIII.

With regard to the method or line of conduct to be followed by all Catholics in their efforts for the return to right order the guiding principle was laid down by Pope Leo XIII in the Encyclical Letter Immortale Dei, “It is the duty of all Catholics worthy, of the name…to endeavor to bring back all civil society to the pattern and form of Christianity which We have described. It is not an easy matter to lay down any fixed method by which such 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 in all plans of action must be sought. 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” (Acts 20:28). Pope Pius XI again and again returns to the necessity of Catholics being banded together for Catholic Action under the direction of the Hierarchy. “This Catholic Action does not belong to the temporal order but to the spiritual; it is not terrestrial but divine, not political but religious,” we read in the Letter of Pope Pius XI to Cardinal Bertram, 13th November, 1928.

Catholics, therefore, must be united whenever the interests of the Church are at stake, even though they may differ on matters of secondary importance. “But 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” (Pope Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, On the Christian Constitution of States November 1st, 1885).

Again, Pope Leo XIII points out that “the Church does not condemn those who, if it can be done without violation of justice, wish to make their country independent of any foreign or despotic power” (Encyclical Letter, On Human Liberty). Yet, too great stress cannot be laid on the words of Pope Benedict XV concerning the present-day movement for a World-Republic. Unwary Catholics may be made the instruments of schemes of which they have no suspicion, and the success of which they would view with horror when too late. In his Motu Proprio, Bonum Sane, July 25th, 1920, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration, by Pius IX, of St. Joseph as Patron of the Universal Church, 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 now 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.” Lenin wrote in No. 40 of the Russian organ, The Social Democrat, in 1915: “The United States of the World (and not only of Europe), that is the state formula of the union…until the day when the complete victory of Communism will bring about the definite disappearance of every state, even purely democratic.” To proclaim that to follow Lenin’s principles is to work for the independence of Ireland is in reality a flagrant attempt to deceive innocent people. Lenin was consciously working, not for the independence of Ireland, but for the disappearance of Ireland as an independent state.

Appendix I

Our Supernatural Life and Nationality

I. National Characteristics

Man is a social being. To quote the words of Leo XIII: “Man’s natural instinct moves him to live in civil society, for he cannot, if dwelling apart, provide himself with the necessary requirements of life, nor procure the means of developing his mental and moral faculties. Hence it is divinely ordained that he should lead his life—be it family, social, or civil—with his fellow men, amongst whom alone his several wants can be adequately supplied.”[1]

Now, the social development of mankind has taken the form of nations. There is no more patent fact in the present-day world than the existence of groups of men, marked off, one from the other, by what are called national characteristics. These national characteristics are attributed to various, differentiating influences, usually enumerated as follows: (1) Physical Environment, (2) Race, (3) Language, (4) Customs, (5) Religion, (6) Common Interests, (7) History, (8) National Government.

II. Religion and Nationality

Now, this method of enumeration seems to me to labor under some serious defects.

Firstly, religion is placed on the same level as other factors which go to mold a nation. Thus the supernatural is placed on the same level as the natural, and the fact is not emphasized that the supernatural is a higher order, to which no creature has a natural right. Though the supernatural does not destroy the natural, but on the contrary, perfects it, yet we cannot insist too much on the point that sanctifying grace raises us to a higher plane to which we can lay no claim, and that this favor is due exclusively to God’s inscrutable goodness.

Secondly, Almighty God has not raised man to the supernatural order and then left the care of the supernatural to each man or group of men. No! He founded a visible supra-national society, which He constituted the official Guardian of the supernatural worship He exacts from mankind, the official Teacher of the truths He revealed concerning this worship, the official Teacher and Guardian of the moral order, and the official Distributor of sanctifying grace, which is communicated by the channels of the sacraments. To this visible society He promised at the same time perpetual and unfailing assistance in guiding men to their supernatural end.

This society—the fold to which Our Divine Lord wishes all to belong—is a necessary means of salvation to all. Not that, to repeat what has been said a hundred times by Catholic writers, we interpret the axiom: Extra Ecclesiam, nulla salus—“Outside the Church, no salvation” “—in the sense that all those who die outside the visible communion of the Catholic Church are damned. Far be such a thought from us, to use the words of Pius IX in the Allocution of December 9th, 1854: “When we say that it is necessary to belong to the visible Body of the True Church of Christ in order to be saved, our statement must be understood in the sense that those who are kept back from the True Church, by invincible ignorance, can make up for the absence of actual membership by spiritual membership in voto, or in the desire and longing of their hearts. This desire or longing is to be found present wherever there is to be met with a mind and will ready to worship God in the way He wishes.” And, pursues the Pontiff, the condition of such as are invincibly ignorant “must always be proclaimed sadly inferior to that of those who belong to the True Fold, because of the lack of the many wonderful helps and graces which are not to be had outside the Church.”[2]

Therefore, though the influence on national character exerted by the form of religion which a nation embraces, is quite manifest even to the most superficial observer of Europe, since the sixteenth century, nevertheless we must, for the sake of a clear and accurate view of the question of nationality, insist from the outset upon the fact that the distinction between the different nations of Europe did not begin with the sixteenth century. It was there already; for each nation already had its own natural individuality, subordinate to the supernatural.

Again, there can be no question of putting all religions and all sects on the same level, in estimating the value of a nation as a means by which men are guided towards their final destiny. For, the real life of a nation, the element which gives to all other elements their eternal value, is the life of the Catholic Church within that nation. “For God,” says the Vatican Council, “through His only-begotten Son, instituted a Church and stamped it with the clear marks of its origin, so that it could be known as the guardian and teacher of the revealed Word,” of the supernatural doctrine which Jesus Christ came to teach. And again, the same Council teaches that the Church is a sign raised up for the nations, inviting to her all who have not yet believed and guaranteeing to her children unshaken firmness of faith.

Now, time is a preparation for eternity, and nations are the outcome of the natural development of the human race in its journey towards eternity, Hence the proper viewpoint of a nation is that of its eternal value. If, then, we look upon a nation as a means to the end to be obtained, viz., the eternal destiny of the individuals who compose the nation, evidently the all important elements of national life, in its totality, supernatural and natural, is the supernatural element and the supernatural life of a nation, as we have seen, is the life of the Catholic Church in that nation. The different sects called Christian and non-Catholic religions have eternal value in proportion as they possess elements of that truth which the Catholic Church alone possesses in all fullness and this furnishes us with the crucial test in estimating the real state, whether of decadence or progress of a nation.

In proportion, then, as the life of the Catholic Church—the life, that is, of the supernatural worship exacted by God, of the supernatural truths, doctrinal and moral, of which the Church is official teacher and guardian, and of the supernatural gift of grace of which she is the official dispenser—is strong and vigorous, in proportion as the natural qualities of a people receive the highest possible development in ordered subordination to the supernatural, so far is the value of a nation augmented from the real, namely, the eternal point of view; so far is its efficiency as a means to help individuals belonging to it to reach the only end of their existence increased. We must insist on this great truth, because the continual reading of such expressions as “great nation” and “great statesman,” as applied to peoples and rulers, long since non-Catholic and now actively shedding whatever remnants of Catholic truth they once had—is liable to beget a habit of thinking as if there were two kinds of greatness, one according to God and the other opposed to Him. In truth, this world belongs to God alone and He has the right to dictate to it what He wants and His standards alone are just.

Louis Veuillot, in his admirable work, Les Pelerinages de Suisse, brings out remarkably well the point I have been laboring:[3]

“Switzerland [he says] is almost unknown from the point of view which is vital in a nation’s life; I mean, from the religious standpoint. Very few of the vast numbers of men and women loaded with the gifts of fortune, and mostly well-educated, as the world understands the term, who enjoy each year the spectacle of the glorious Alpine scenery, ever dream of thanking the author of all this magnificence for the pleasure they derive from it. Not one of them seeks to discover why this country, so small and so poor, why this people, so simple and so unsophisticated, has conquered for itself in the history of nations a page so full of poetry and glory. When they have hazarded a few geological guesses as to the structure of the Alps, gathered a few flowers, and connected in the vaguest fashion this people’s love of independence with the air of the mountains, they have nothing more to say. They return to their hotel, without having looked in through the half-open door of God’s house…The Catholic Church and its priests formed that Switzerland of the olden days, whose noble character is one of the glories of humanity. Catholic monks were there the founders of a pious, simple civilization. For, in spite of the ‘air of the mountains,’ the Helvetii, overcome by Caesar’s armies, had submitted to the authority of Rome…

“The influence of religion is still visible in the laws and customs of the country. It is seen especially in the eloquent simplicity of the monuments, raised in memory of victories over invaders. A chapel, built on the place where the fight had been fiercest, a Mass every year, remind future generations of the warlike exploits of the past, and express gratitude to the God of justice Who brings about the triumph of eight.”

III. Natural Characteristics and Nationality

We may now pass on to examine in detail the natural elements which serve to differentiate one nation from another, and which, by their action and reaction under the supernatural, serve to generate what is called the ‘current of national life.’

1°. Physical Environment.— There is no doubt that the climate, the configuration of a country, the nature of its soil, its geographical position, all affect the constitution of a people, and by determining its occupations react upon its mental characteristics and outlook on life. The importance of this mainly physical factor has no doubt been frequently exaggerated, but it was certainly a very important element in molding men in the primitive ages, at a time when they waged a more intense warfare with nature than is now necessary, and we must admit it still retains a high degree of importance as a nation-building factor.

2°. Race.—Doubtless, race, too, has a great influence in molding the nations of the present day. Much, however, of what has been written on this subject is to be received with caution. Some writers insist too much on the purely physical side of the race factor. Yet we must not attribute the preponderating role to the physical elements, for the spiritual forces are the ruling factors in the world and will always be such. What is true, it seems to me, is that in certain races, so far as one can learn, the spiritual seemed to be more immersed in the material than in others. This is the important point to keep in view, when estimating the importance of the race element in modern nations.

3°.—Language.—Trench says: “A nation gradually shapes and fashions its language to be the utterance of its inmost life and being.”[4] Now, as being the expression of a nation’s soul and as reacting upon and molding the minds of succeeding generations, language is one of the most potent factors in nation-molding. Through it the current of national consciousness is mainly carried on, either in increasing or diminishing vigor, and through it, principally, extraneous elements are drawn into the nation’s life and absorbed. Anyone who has reached the stage of being able to converse familiarly in a foreign tongue knows how much more readily he can appreciate the foreigner’s point of view, and as familiarity grows, so does appreciation. This is the initial stage of the absorption process. A generation or two perfects. Language, we may note in conclusion, is mainly a spiritual factor.

4°. Custom.—The laws, written and unwritten, of a nation are also an expression of the nation’s spiritual outlook, and they, too, are potent factors in shaping the successive generations of a people to uniformity of spiritual outlook and in forming the natural virtues.

5°. Common Interests and History.—By common interests we understand those of the actual present, and by history we mean the record of common interests in the past. These help to give unity of outlook, but work, to a great extent, through the other factors, namely, language, laws, and customs, etc.

6°. National Government.—It is certain that without a government of its own, a nation is severely handicapped, for its means of corporate action are minimized and its chances of surviving as a distinct unit or corporate entity of the human race are jeopardized. The object of the national government is to develop the national individuality by seeking to correct its defects and develop its virtues, so that there may be the most harmonious possible development of the corporate entity in due subordination to the supernatural. Thus is a nation fully equipped for the efficient fulfilment of its function as means towards the unique end of man, supernatural union with God.

IV. Principles Governing the Interplay of Natural and Supernatural

The figure which seems to me best adapted to express the life of a nation is that of a river. We may look on the life of a nation as a mighty current, sweeping on to God, the supernatural end of man, the majestic Sea of Being, in which we are to lose ourselves and find ourselves really.

In this current we must distinguish a double element, material and formal—to employ scholastic terms for there is both a physical similarity and a spiritual likeness between successive generations. One generation molds and fashions that which follows it into a resemblance to itself that is at once physical and moral. There are, of course, changes and diversities, but such modifications seldom come abruptly; they are gradual processes. From our present point of view, the physical element, though important, is secondary, for we are concerned with the goodness of a nation, that is. with its power of drawing the individuals, who belong to it, to the true end of mankind.[5] It is the soul, the spiritual, not the physical element, which directs and tends. Hence we insist, in the principles which follow, on the mainly spiritual elements which mold nations language, laws, and customs.

I.  In the individual man, when the natural elements of character, viz., mind, will, heart, and conduct, are found harmoniously developed, in such wise that there have been produced a well-ordered mind, a strong will, and a kindly heart, finding fit expression in becoming outward conduct, then we know that such a character will be able to reproduce magnificently Our Divine Lord’s personality in the supernatural order and to co-operate efficiently in developing it in others. So, in proportion as the natural elements of a nation are sound and healthy, and confusion is not introduced nor development arrested by introduction or imposition of elements contrary to the natural line of progress, a nation will certainly give the better results in its due subordination to the supernatural.

There is a natural line of development for nations as for individuals. The introduction of the language, laws, and customs of one people will lead to confusion and decay in those of another people, and will hinder that people’s progress in its proper subjection to the supernatural. And that, even if there be no difference of religion, even if both be Catholic.

II.  When the natural elements, language, laws, and customs, etc., have become impregnated with the supernatural worship which God has declared He must receive, with the life of the Catholic Church, it is simply disastrous to introduce elements of a civilization molded by a view of the supernatural, or at any rate impregnated with a view of the supernatural, that is not truly God’s.

In the individual the natural virtues of Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance, by which the natural elements of character are strengthened and consolidated, form the foundation and bulwark of the supernatural and infused virtues. So, too, in a nation.[6]

When a people’s language, laws, and customs have become permeated with the supernatural (as God wants it, not as man thinks God ought to be satisfied with it); when the supremacy of the world of grace is recognized in these chief molding factors of nationality, then the natural elements of that nationality are the bulwarks of the nation’s supernatural destiny; and whatever attacks or corrodes them, attacks indirectly the real life of the nation—the supernatural, that is, as I have laid down above, the life of the Catholic Church in that nation.

So long as this relation of the natural to the supernatural is maintained, so long as the natural elements do not oppose the supernatural, but rather favor it by removing obstacles and preparing minds for its action, just for so long will the nation retain real vitality and remain uncorrupted but, when the reverse process takes place, decay necessarily and immediately sets in. The supernatural is the way by which man must go, for he has been raised to the supernatural order by the creator, Who knows all the possibilities of the nature He has created and the official guardian of the supernatural is the Catholic Church alone. Where this official guardian does not exist, or is weakened by opposition, there we may inevitably expect a perversion and confusion in man’s development, to be succeeded finally by lamentable decay.

V. Application of the Above Principles

Let us now make the application, in brief, of the above principles, first to our own country’s history and then to that of the world.

1°—As long as we retained our own language and our own civilization, we molded all invaders to our own likeness and brought them to be one with us, not only in language and nationality, but also in religion. Up to the time when our own civilization began to break up, we absorbed all foreigners and assimilated them to ourselves, not only in the natural order, by language, etc., but also in the supernatural order, by religion.

The contrast is striking between the relatively rapid absorption of some of the Cromwellian soldiery and the non-absorption of Protestants since 1800.[7] Protestants in Ireland, since the end of the eighteenth century, have, to a great extent, remained untouched by the Irish spirit: they are even drawing us to Trinity College, with all that it connotes. And many, if not most of those non-Catholics, who have been drawn into sympathy with our national struggle, but who were not in touch with the living Gaelic civilization, in all its beauty, have not been drawn into the Catholic religion.

May not the contrast between a certain lack of some natural virtues in our Irish character (e.g., want of straightforwardness) and the firm acceptance by us of the supernatural, be due to the absence of development of the natural qualities of our people along our own natural lines The change of language after 1800 had, and is still having, disastrous effects on our national character.

The last three pages of Chapter VII of Canon O’Leary’s Mo Sgéal Féin form the best commentary on what I have just written. They are a commentary by one who was watching the principles in action. The introduction of cross-currents into our national development, by the imitation of the English line of development, natural to that people, led to our being ashamed of our own individuality, and to all that such confusion connotes. And thus the supernatural order in Ireland, instead of being able to utilize the harmoniously developed powers of a people, is hampered by strange weaknesses and struggles which have their origin in irregularly developed natures. Of course, the confusion has been accentuated tenfold by the fact that the language, laws, and customs we have been imitating are those of a people who had replaced the supernatural order founded by God by one of man’s own making. Thus is there confusion both in the natural foundation and the supernatural structure. This opposition between my religion and the textbooks I was obliged to read as English literature, in my Intermediate and University courses, was often painfully evident to me.

2°. The History of the World.—In the case of the Jewish people, through whom the mediator for the restoration of the order broken by original sin was to come, we have, during the long period before the advent of Our Divine Lord, the decay of the supernatural element. The official teachers and rulers of that nation substituted for the supernatural order, instituted by God, one dictated largely by their own passions the result was the rejection of the supernatural, in the person of Our Divine Lord.

Decay, of course, followed, and the Jewish nation, according to ordinary laws, should have long since disappeared. It has not done so, owing to the intervention of Divine Providence, but, on the contrary, is now in practical domination of the world in the natural order, having completely rejected the idea of a supernatural order. The suggestion of an Italian paper, the Vita Italiana, of March 5th, 1922, that the official language of the recent Conference at Genoa should be Yiddish, serves to show how completely the Jews govern Europe through their puppets, the so called representatives of the nations. And the Jews want world domination for their race, believing that thus God’s promises to them will be fulfilled, instead of by their acceptance of the supernatural mission He wished to entrust to them.

The Roman Empire, as such, never accepted the supremacy of the supernatural. The Edict of Milan merely tolerated the supernatural. The breakup of the Roman Empire led to the formation of modern nations, in which we trace the gradual acknowledgment of God’s designs in the world—a process which we see at its culminating point in the thirteenth century. The wonderful achievements of this century in art, in architecture, and in philosophy, which merit for it the title of “the greatest of centuries,” are a clear proof that man gives of his best when he most fully conforms to the order which God has established for him.

Viewed from the point of man’s national and public acknowledgment of God’s plan in the creation of mankind, the history of the world shows a progress up to the thirteenth century. Since then there has been a steady decay. The decline of philosophy in the centuries following the thirteenth, the undue avidity with which pagan authors, Greek and Latin, were studied in the Renaissance (which was greatly assisted by the arrival in greater numbers of Greek professors after the capture of Constantinople in 1553) helped the downward movement. Already the natural[8] had begun the revolt against the supernatural by the imprisonment of Pope Boniface VIII at Anagni, by order of King Philip the Fair of France. Then Europe gave up the Crusades, that wonderful affirmation of belief in the supernatural and in the fifteenth century the Turks invaded Europe. Something like a real League of Nations might have then been seen, in the Crusades, when the subordination of temporal sovereigns, each supreme in his own sphere, to the spiritual sovereign of the one visible Church, founded by Christ, was recognized.

Luther’s revolt shows the extent of the decay of Europe. The natural man, while not yet denying the supremacy of the supernatural, refuses to accept God’s idea of the supernatural, and the appointed vehicle of that supernatural, viz., the Church, God’s official guardian of the supremacy of the supernatural. The result was that the human mind proceeded to decide what was the supernatural it would acknowledge as supreme, with the inevitable consequence that the natural usurps the place of the supernatural.

Thereafter we see the gradual uprise of religions, in which portions of God’s order (Revelation) are retained, but are mingled with human elements, in which passion takes a large part. As the process goes on and corrupted human nature continues, if I may use the expression, to corrode the supernatural, we have the spectacle of the Protestant countries of today, in which most men either refuse to acknowledge any supernatural at all, or acknowledging some form of supernatural, allow it to occupy a very small comer of life. Quite other is God’s claim; for He demands absolutely that the whole of life tend back to Him through the supernatural order.

The French Revolution carried on still further the process of decay, for this revolt was the commencement of an open campaign to blot out the supernatural and to make the natural triumph everywhere. “We want,” said Jules Ferry, “to organize humanity, so that it can do without God” and Clémenceau: “Since the Revolution we are in revolt against divine and human authority.” Both are quoted by Billot,[9] when he speaks of the intensity of the hatred and the efficiency of the organization with which, in Catholic countries, the work of overthrowing the supernatural is carried on. By the organization is to be understood Freemasonry and its subordinate societies. The learned theologian refers his readers to Abbé Barruel’s famous work.

In Protestant countries, the work of corrosion does not need the same activity on the part of Freemasonry, for, as I have shown, the principles of Protestantism itself practically suffice. For example: opening a paper some time ago I saw that greater facilities for divorce were being granted in three, different, Protestant countries. In view of these principles, what a hollow mockery it sounds to speak of “a nation’s message to the world,” when officially it refuses to accept God’s principles for its own! What other message can it possibly have for the world but one of ultimate decay. And will not its influence tend to degrade the world more and more Material success it may indeed have for a time—but we know what our Savior says about “whited sepulchres.”

VI. Some Erroneous Views

A few remarks about some inaccurate views concerning the relation of supernatural life and nationality may be of help to my readers.

Mrs. Stopford Green is a non-Catholic, who has been drawn into sympathy with our nation on the natural level, but who, unfortunately, does not seem to have grasped the full significance of the Catholic Church as the Mystical Body of Christ. As we have seen in this essay, the development given to man by a nation as such belongs to the natural order, national formation, however, and the sentiments inspired by it are good in themselves and in accordance with the dispositions of Divine Providence. Thanks to his membership of a nation, a man is clothed, so to say, with a connatural group of habitus which enrich his personality. But man’s supernatural destiny demands that nations enter into the one supra-national society, the Catholic Church, and the formation of the human person is meant to be perfected by the nation’s acceptance of the Church.

When Mrs. Green, on pages 50 and 51 of Irish Nationality, is speaking of the dispute about the date of Easter in early Irish Catholic history, she loses sight of the fact that, if the Irish people had had the misfortune to separate from the Mystical Body of Christ by schism, they would have cut themselves off from the fountain of life and would have become as a branch that is broken off from the parent trunk. Surely the decay of the supernatural life in the Protestant national Churches that have arisen since the sixteenth century is patent to all. Mrs. Green speaks of the Easter question as having been settled in accordance with Roman usage, because “the Europe of imperial tradition had lost comprehension of the passion of national loyalty.” In that explanation, she sinks down to mere naturalism. On page 55 she points out that, when Irish missionary influence was set aside in England in the ninth century, “English mission work died down for a thousand years or so.” Certainly, however, she cannot mean to convey that the modern English Protestant missionary is a herald of the faith of Saints Columbkille and Columbanus.

Again, at the end of the same work, where she speaks of the national tradition as the bond between classes, races and religions, she yields to the deplorable misunderstanding of the order of the world which has become so widespread since the French Revolution. Since 1789, the state or nation is supreme over all religions. National life, though natural, is the supreme form of human activity (while awaiting the advent of the Masonic United States of Europe and the World-Republic). Of course, it is quite true that nationality can be, and is a bond of union, but the relation of national life to supernatural life and to the Catholic Church, the one appointed guardian and dispenser of supernatural life, must never be lost sight of.

It would be impossible in a few paragraphs to touch on all the inaccuracies contained in Mr. P. S. O’Hegarty’s The Indestructible Nation. On page 21 Of that work, he says: “The Church of St. Patrick was founded as a national Church, and in the course of time the ecclesiastical instinct became segregated and developed a consciousness of its own…In the beginning, the consciousness of the Irish Church towards the Church of Rome was a consciousness of equality…it paid Rome no homage of an Imperial nature…If it (the Irish Church) had had any national feeling it would have declared a holy war on the English if it had had any dignity, it would have at least fought for its autonomy against the English” The fundamental cause of Mr. O’Hegarty’s errors seems to be that he does not grasp that the supernatural life of grace, which the Catholic Church is charged with diffusing and safeguarding, is infinitely above the highest form of merely natural life. The Catholic Church always respects national life, and will foster it, so that a nation may be aided in developing its supernatural life, but the Church has not for mission to cultivate nationality. This historian also seems to be impregnated with the modern post-revolutionary idea, namely, that the nation or state stands supreme over all the various religious denominations as they are called, and that religion has for object the furtherance of national life.

English Catholics sometimes take occasion of such expressions of opinion as those just quoted to lecture us, poor benighted Irish Catholics, on our fault of putting nationality above religion. They smile at the juxtaposition in an Irish house, of pictures of Wolfe Tone, imbued as he was with French Revolutionary ideas, and St. Patrick. May we, in our turn, not be permitted to smile at the comfortable way some English minds can juxtapose the ideals of Cecil Rhodes or Joseph Chamberlain and devotion to the Kingship of Christ? Is not imperialism just over-grown or exaggerated nationalism? It is regrettable that some English Catholics do not seem to be able to visualize clearly the elementary fact that the British Empire, as a social entity, is not in harmony with the one order of the world established by Almighty God. Yet the beam in their eye does not prevent them from seeing the mote in their neighbor’s. As the Irish people had retained the fundamental grasp of order, the Catholic Faith, the whole force of the British Empire should have been directed towards favoring the development of the Irish nation, so that it might give of its best for the diffusion of the supernatural life of the British Empire and of the world, thus hastening the return to order. The rulers of England failed in their duty to the Kingship of Christ, but God, of course, drew good out of evil. Many strange reversals of earthly judgments we shall behold on that Final Day of Reckoning when “many that are first shall be last and the last, first” (Mark 10:31)

The following summary of Thomistic principles with regard to erroneous views of nationality is taken from the pen of Pére Lavaud, O.P. (St. Thomas, Guide des etudes, pp. 158, 159, 160) and will fittingly close this section.

Pius XI insists very particularly on the necessity of taking St. Thomas as guide in the study of the Law of Nations, that is to say, of the reciprocal rights and duties of nations. Two extreme errors, which finally coincide, are to be avoided in this question of national relations.

The first is imperialism, according to which a particular nation would have the right, if it were strong enough, to lord it over the others, and to realize absolute unity of temporal power upon earth. “For, though love of country and of race, when guided by the dictates of Christianity, becomes a spur to many deeds of virtue and of heroism, it may also become the seed of widespread injustice and iniquity, when, transgressing the bounds of right and justice, it develops into a spirit of excessive nationalism. Those who fall into this error surely forget, that all peoples, as members of the universal human family, are linked together by the common ties of brotherhood. That other nations, also, have a right to live and seek prosperity, and that it is neither permissible nor expedient to divorce the pursuit of what is useful from the practice of honesty; ‘justice exalted a nation, but sin maketh nations miserable’ (Prov. 14:34). That a family, a city, or a state should have acquired advantages at the expense of its neighbors may seem to some a brilliant and splendid achievement, still St. Augustine wisely warns us that such achievements are neither lasting nor exempt from decay; ‘a joy which possesses but the dazzling fragility of glass, tempered by the ever impending fear of being shattered’ (De Civitate Dei, lib. iv. c. 3).”—(Encyclical Ubi Arcano Dei of Pope Pius XI. Translation, Browne and Nolan, Ltd.) From this excessive pretension there necessarily follows the ambition to dominate and enslave the spiritual power of the Church, which opposes and condemns these excesses. This is Caesarism.

The second extreme error is internationalism, which denies nations the right to distinct national life within their own frontiers, and proclaims the necessity of setting up an immense World-Republic. This idea is just as absurd as that of the Communists, who deny the rights of families and individuals to own land, and other temporal goods, in the form of private property. According to the Communist doctrine, everything in the bosom of the nation must be in common amongst individuals: the family must cease to be. According to internationalism, everything in the world must be in common amongst men nations must disappear. Communism and internationalism complete one another; the second is simply a prolongation of the former. Internationalism, which dreams on the temporal plane of a World-Republic, which can exist only on the spiritual plane, is not less hostile to the Church than imperialism.

Between these two extreme errors, but dominating them, is to be found the true doctrine: patriotism or moderate nationalism. Moderate nationalism denies, against imperialism, the right of one nation to dominate over the others, and claims for each the right not to be sacrificed for another, but to preserve its independence, and assure it by all necessary means, in order to give of its best for the Kingship of Christ. It is opposed also to the so-called Principle of Nationalities, which proclaims for each race the absolute right to break the national unity in which it lives and set itself up as an independent nation. Against internationalism, it maintains the right of nations not to be submerged in the vast whole, called humanity. It proclaims that humanity itself is interested in the existence of independent nations, just as national prosperity and the common good demand the maintenance of private property and of family life.

Material goods are essentially divisible by reason of their very materiality: it is normal and natural that they should be divided up. Humanity is impossible without nations, with their particular territories, nor can a nation survive without private property. Spiritual goods, on the contrary, are essentially indivisible. Nobody loses them by sharing them with others, and the progress of humanity is possible only if these goods are held in common. That is the reason why internationalism is possible only on the higher spiritual plane.

True nationalism has not the ambition to suppress or enslave the spiritual power any more than it seeks to enslave temporal societies. From its national point of view, it defends the supra-national Church, just as the Church, from its divine standpoint, defends the rights of the nation.

These principles are clear in themselves: we must draw the correct conclusions from them. The actual state of the world, reduced almost to chaos by the errors of imperialism and the folly of internationalism, makes this duty more urgent than ever. For this work the Pope tells us St. Thomas is the best guide. It is ridiculous to say that the historical circumstances of the age in which he wrote were very different from those of the modern world, and that he could be of no assistance to us in solving modern problems. The natures or essences of things, with which the theologian and the philosopher are concerned, are unchanging, and the principles which express the nature of things and contain the consequences that follow therefrom hold good for all time.

VII. The Missionary Spirit and Nationality

In conclusion, as a member of a missionary Congregation, I should like to add a few words on the missionary spirit in a country. Missionary endeavor I regard as a part of the working of the law of mortification, which is the great law of life for nations as for individuals. We see this law continually operating in ourselves and in others, in the imperious demand of reason that the inferior life of the senses should be subjected to the rational. Sense-life must be mortified or kept in check, that intellectual life may have its fullest vigor. If the palate, for instance, be indulged and all its cravings be acceded to, intellectual life will not flourish.

In the still higher sphere of the supernatural order, we see that the cutting off of even the legitimate pleasures of the natural order is made the condition of the fullness of the life of union with Jesus. “And everyone that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands for My name’s sake, shall receive an hundred-fold, and shall possess life everlasting,”[10]

Now, the going forth of missionaries from a nation may be considered to have an action on its higher life analogous to that of the sacrifices of even legitimate pleasures, in the natural order, on the life of the individual. The sons and daughters of a people who go forth for Christ are near and dear to the nation’s heart. They love their country, and at home would be, by their self-sacrificing qualities, among its most cherished citizens. But they cut themselves off from their own country in the natural order, with the purpose of implanting the true life of the supernatural in other lands, and their sacrifice will make for the development of supernatural life at home. And if the true life of a nation remains vigorous nothing can overthrow that nation.

The going abroad to build up material civilization on the part of those who are needed at home to build up their own native, national civilization, that is to build up the body which contains the soul, is a very different process; and if carried on over a long period of time, as has been the case in Ireland, may endanger the survival of the old race in its own land. It is a process similar to the excessive mortification of the body, a practice against which the saints warn us as being one of Satan’s means of preventing good from being accomplished for it is thus that he impairs the efficiency of one whom he fears.[11]

This is the Allocution to which Fr. Fahey seems to be referring from footnote 2 above.

-Loreto Editors

Singulari Quidem

Allocution of Bl. Pius IX

Dec. 9th 1854

English Translation

Not without sorrow have we learned that another error, no less destructive, has taken possession of some parts of the Catholic world, and has taken up its abode in the souls of many Catholics who think that one should have good hope of the eternal salvation of all those who have never lived in the true Church of Christ. Therefore, they are wont to ask very often what will be the lot and condition after death of those who have not submitted in any way to the Catholic faith, and, by bringing forward most vain reasons, they make a response favorable to their false opinion. Far be it from Us, Venerable Brethren, to presume on the limits of the divine mercy which is infinite; far from Us, to wish to scrutinize the hidden counsel and “judgments of God” which are “a great deep” [Psalms 36:6] and cannot be penetrated by human thought. But, as Our Apostolic duty, we wish your episcopal solicitude and vigilance to be aroused, so that you will strive as much as you can to drive from the mind of men that impious and equally fatal opinion, namely, that the way of eternal salvation can be found in any religion whatsoever. May you demonstrate with that skill and learning in which you excel, to the people entrusted to your care that the dogmas of the Catholic faith are in no wise opposed to divine mercy and justice.

For, it must be held by faith that outside the Apostolic Roman Church, no one can be saved; that this is the only ark of salvation; that he who shall not have entered therein will perish in the flood; but, on the other hand, it is necessary to hold for certain that they who labor in ignorance of the true religion, if this ignorance is invincible, are not stained by any guilt in this matter in the eyes of God. Now, in truth, who would arrogate so much to himself as to mark the limits of such an ignorance, because of the nature and variety of peoples, regions, innate dispositions, and of so many other things? For, in truth, when released from these corporeal chains “we shall see God as He is” [1 John 3:2], we shall understand perfectly by how close and beautiful a bond divine mercy and justice are united; but, as long as we are on earth, weighed down by this mortal mass which blunts the soul, let us hold most firmly that, in accordance with Catholic teaching, there is “one God, one faith, one baptism” [Eph. 4:5]; it is unlawful (nefarious) to proceed further in inquiry.

Singulari Quidem

Allocution of Bl. Pius IX

Dec. 9th 1854

Original Latin

Errorem alterum nec minus exitiosum aliquas catholici orbis partes occupasse non sine moerore novimus, animisque insedisse plerumque catholicorum, qui bene sperandum de aeterna illorum omnium salute putant, qui in vera Christi Ecclesia nequaquam versantur. Idcirco percontari saepenumero solent, quaenam futura post minime addicti sunt, vanissimisque adductis rationibus responsum praestolantur, quod pravae huic sententiae suffragetur. Absit, Venerabiles Fratres, ut misericordiae divinae, quae infinita est, terminos audeamus apponere; absit, ut perscrutari velimus arcana consilia et iudicia Dei, quae sunt abyssus multa [Ps. 36:6], nec humana queunt cogitatione penetrari. Quod vero apostolici Nostri muneris est, episcopalem vestram et sollicitudinem et vigilantiam excitatam volumus, ut, quantam potestis contendere, opinionem illam impiam aeque ac funestam ab hominum mente propulsetis, nimirum quavis in religione reperiri posse aeternae salutis viam. Ea qua praestatis sollertia ac doctrina demostretis commissis curae vestrae populis, miserationi ac iustitiae divinae dogmata catholicae fidei neutiquam adversari.

Tendendum quippe ex fide est, extra apostolicam Romanam Ecclesiam salvum fieri neminem posse, hanc esse unicam salutis arcam, hanc qui non fuerit ingressus, diluvio periturum; sed tamen pro certo pariter habendum est, qui verae religionis ignorantia laborent, si ea sit invincibilis, nulla ipsos obstringi huiusce rei culpa ante oculos Domini. Nunc vero quis tantum sibi arroget, ut huiusmodi ignorantiae designare limites quaet iuxta populorum, regionum, ingeniorum aliarumque rerum tam multarum rationem et varietatem? Enimvero cum soluti corporeis hisce vinculis videbimus Deum sicuti est [1 Io. 3:2], intelligemus profecto, quam arcto pulchroque nexu miseterris versamur mortali hac gravati mole, quae hebetat animam, firmissime teneamus ex catholica docrtrina unum Deum esse, unam fidem, unum baptisma [Eph. 4:5]; ulterius inquirendo progredi nefas est.

[1]Encyclical Letter, Immortale Dei.

[2]Vide Billot, De Ecclesia, q. I, Thesis ii. § 3. – Loreto Editors note – We have researched this lengthy quote that Fr. Fahey states is from Cardinal Billot, who is supposed to be quoting Bl. Pius IX from his allocution of Dec. 9, 1854. We could not confirm the accuracy of the quote either in Cardinal Billot or from Pius IX. Therefore, in the interest of scrupulous accuracy, on page 108 at the end of this appendix, we have inserted the exact text from the Allocution to which Fr. Fahey seems to be referring.

[3]Cf. “Is it not lawful for me to do what I will? Is thy eye evil because I am good?” (Mt. 20:15.)

[4]English, Past and Present.

[5]The good is that which suits the nature of the being that desires it. The greatest good for a being is the realization of its end; and the means towards this are also good, because they contribute to this realization. Thus we see that the notion of goodness is correlative with the notion of an end, towards which, or for which, a being has a natural tendency or desire. Without the concept of a nature as tending to realize an end or purpose, the notion of ‘the good’ would be inexplicable,”—Dr. Coffey, Ontology, p, 169.

[6]Cf. Benigni, Historiae Ecclesiasticae Propaedentica, p. 73.“Experientia docet a populis quamdam ‘Personalitatem’ indui, quae eisdem prorsus regulis quibus persona proprie dicta (individua) subicitur ”

[7]It should be remembered that many of the Cromwellian rank and file sold their allotments to their officers and returned to England.

[8]By “the natural” I mean man, as he is historically, “qui expoliatur gratuitis, vulneratur in naturalibus.” (Vide St. Thomas, I. II. q. 85, a. I etc.)

[9]De Ecclesia vol. ii. Q. xvii.

[10]Matt. 19:29.

[11]St. Teresa, Way of Perfection, chap. 21.

Appendix II

The Association of Reparation to the Most Holy Trinity

The aim of Masonry is the triumph of naturalism, that is to say, the rejection of the supernatural life of mankind. This means the refusal to enter into the society of the three divine persons, and the result of that turning against the Blessed Trinity is eternal disorder and misery. To make reparation to the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, for man’s rejection of eternal life with them, and to pray for the overthrow of secret societies and the conversion of their members, a special society was approved of by Pius IX in 1875. As this highest ground of Catholic opposition to Masonry is apt to be lost sight of where there is a struggle against Masonic influence in public life, the following brief account of the object and conditions of membership of this association, taken front one of its leaflets, may be of interest to some readers.

Association of Reparation to the

Most Holy Trinity

The work of Masonic Lodges has never been carried on more feverishly than at the present time. This activity on the part of the forces of evil calls for a reaction on the part of Catholics. It calls for anti-Masonic action, which will have its center in the Blessed Eucharist and be a homage of reparation to the Blessed Trinity. This association of prayer has for its end: firstly, to implore of God the overthrow and destruction of secret societies, and the conversion of their members secondly, to adore God’s patience, and to offer reparation for the outrages offered to the Most Holy Trinity in these societies.

Foundation of the Society

The society was founded by Father L. Douillard, a priest of the Archdiocese of Paris, in 1873. It was approved of by Pope Pius IX, in 1875, who honored it with a Brief, from which we take the following extract:

“…We think then that we ought to recommend the project you have formed of appeasing God, outraged by this impious society…of imploring from the Lord the destruction of this sect and the conversion of those who belong to it, and for that purpose of forming, with the permission of the ecclesiastical authority, an association of which the members, if they are priests, will unite in groups of three, in order to offer the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass to the Blessed Trinity, and if they belong to the laity, will receive Holy Communion in groups of three for the same intention. We rejoice to learn that, though this Association has only just been formed, it has already become widely known. We hope that it may become more widespread, so that by the increase in the numbers of those who pray, it may more quickly appease the anger of God and obtain the favor we desire.”

Shortly afterwards, Cardinal Guibert, Archbishop of Paris, approved the Statutes of the Association, and placed it under the patronage of Saint Michael the Archangel. In 1911, Pius X accorded the Apostolic Benediction to the Association.

Conditions of Membership

In order to become a member of the Association of Reparation, all that is required is to have one’s name inscribed on the register of the Association. Priests, in groups of three, promise to offer a Mass every month (principal or secondary intention), the faithful undertake, also in groups of three, to receive Holy Communion once a mouth. If the Associates cannot conveniently form groups of three, the Secretary of the Association will arrange them. A certificate of admission is sent to each applicant for admission. There is no charge for admission to membership, but to cover expenses any offering made will be gratefully accepted.

Indulgences

A Plenary Indulgence is granted twice a month to the Associates (Briefs of Pius IX of February 15th, 1876, and August 14th, 1877) “on condition that, on such days, being truly contrite and having confessed their sins, they, if priests, offer the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, or, if lay persons, receive Holy Communion in a spirit of reparation, in accordance with the rules and objects of the Society, visit any church or public oratory and offer fervent prayers to God for union amongst Christian rulers, for the extirpation of heresy, the conversion of sinners, and the exaltation of our Holy Mother the Church.”

Director—P. Augustus, O.M.C.

Secretary—Sister Amable, 8 Rue Joseph-Bara, Paris VP.

Nihil Obstat: F. Isaias, O.M.C.

Imprimatur: V. Dupin, V. G. Parisus, die 26 martii, 1926.