Intransigents generally believed that such a constitutional system was the most suitable in Britain, but, once again, only due to specific historical and sociological circumstances. For the validity and effectiveness of the English system in England told rational men nothing of its potential career in France or Italy. Despite all precautions, a dogmatic and an a-historical promotion of this one ideal government in a given land could work to emasculate social authority and render it incapable of performing the task of guarding community interests effectively. This would tempt the strong, the ambitious, and the wicked to take advantage of the confused leadership that was created to manipulate the State and society to serve their private interests. All those “lovely correlations of reciprocal rights and duties traced on paper” described by liberal constitutional theorists would have nightmarish consequences masquerading the reality of who was wielding which powers to do exactly what.¹⁰³ “What does the parliamentary regime in England and America matter to us”, Veuillot asked; “it is necessary to see what it has done, what it is, and what it can become here”.¹⁰⁴

…all this lovely mechanism, which functioned so easily and so philanthropically in the inventor’s study, seems, before long, to be wicked in its use; it becomes disordered, it spreads terror and death around it. Before long, no more remains of it than a pile of debris on a heap of corpses around which, from all points on the horizon, come running the beasts of prey.

Intransigents knew that there were honest believers in the value of a constitutional system. Unfortunately, they argued, liberalism, shaped as it was by the spirit of the Revolution, turned what was an intrinsically acceptable form of government into something unacceptable and dangerous, even in the very lands where historical conditions made that system both suitable and even necessary. Taparelli discussed the reasons for this in great detail in his Esame critico degli ordini rappresentativi alla moderna. In doing so, he developed arguments found not only close at hand, in the works of Joseph de Maistre, but also others with which we are long familiar, from the days of St. Isidore of Seville. Such considerations all led to the same conclusion: despite the good will—or, to be more accurate, the ideological blindness—of some believing liberals, the whole revolutionary liberal vision worked to secure the victory of a wealthy oligarchy to the detriment of the rest of society. Worse still, from its honest supporters’ standpoint, it did so in a fashion that opened the lands under its control to ever more radical, partisan, and ultimately despotic manipulation. As Liberatore wrote, in criticizing one Parisian opponent of the Syllabus of Errors: ¹⁰⁵

The Pope wants freedom as much as you do, if not quite in the same way, M. Yung. What man does not desire freedom? Freedom, however, is only a name now. In fact, everywhere liberalism reigns we have slavery and oppression…Dressed in all colors, liberalism is in reality always tyrannical, and, what is worse, hypocritical. In one word, the Church is not the enemy of freedom but of liberalism, which is the enemy of the Church no less than of freedom.

Liberalism achieved these results first of all due to the fact that its underlying Whig spirit was rooted in the anti-social, anti-authority vision of the principle of independence as transmitted by the Moderate Enlightenment through Locke. However much toned down for the sake of good taste, it emerged from the same doctrine of total depravity and conviction that individuals were at sea on their own in a natural world of struggle as described by Hobbes. Unlike the author of the Leviathan, however, the liberals saw the power of the State as more of a danger to their property rights and personal security than the rapacious desires of their weaker fellow men. In fact, the way that many liberals spoke about social authority made it seem that any coercive action involving any limitation on an individual’s liberty was regrettable; as though a single chain on personal freedom destroyed it altogether. This, Taparelli insisted, was a manifest absurdity:¹⁰⁶

This inference…could be applied to everything a man has on earth and that is governed in society by authority. The language of the citizen, we could say, becomes useless, as soon as the sovereignty of the State can prohibit contumely and curses. Human action is destroyed from the moment that robbery and homicide are prohibited. The home is done for when it cannot be used to organize plots and fires. In sum, if the governor has the right to order society, if he possesses power, society becomes valueless {for the liberal}.

On the other hand, the State was there as a fact of life that liberals must confront, just as the Papacy had been present as a nightmarish reality for Marsilius of Padua and William of Ockham. Moreover, it was a “real presence” that could be seized by Catholics on the one hand and the kind of Radical Enlightenment supporters who had dominated during the Reign of Terror in France and initiated Rousseau-inspired changes threatening to bourgeois property on the other. Such a prospect dictated efforts to invent a State authority whose ability to seek something called “the common good” was restricted. And it required a State in possession of governmental structures reshaped to ensure protection of liberal interests alone. Some of the intellectuals involved in the movement saw those interests as boiling down to a general principle of freedom that had to be nurtured gradually, without violence, so as to prevent destructive obscurantist reaction against it as it grew and its consequences expanded. However, the moneymen supporting liberalism understood those interests to mean making the world safe for personal property and its exponential multiplication alone.

A State whose authority could not really be rooted in God or the fraternal nature of man as such had to be justified on the basis of contractual will alone. This, by the nineteenth century, entailed rooting it in the principle of “popular sovereignty”. But popular sovereignty, taken literally, could also entail a democratic system that might still yield a Catholic or radical victory. Hence, the need to underline differences between “adult” and “childlike” elements in the population, the first, clearly ready for participation in government right now, the second, requiring a tutor or proxy to speak for its “will” until such time as it matured, became true to its real nature, and thus proved capable of exercising a salubrious influence over society. Such a distinction led directly to the need to limit the vote to that small group of educated and wealthy men who knew what was best for an ordered progress permitting the “children” of the social order to grow to adulthood. Yes, the People as a whole ruled. But the now “active”, “adult” population had to serve as the Defender of the Peace for its “passive”, “childlike” brother, as the latter strove for maturity against outside forces ready to destroy it. Active, adult citizens had to do so in order to break childlike popular subservience to past tyranny on the one hand and temptation to use the evil tools of the wicked governments with which it was most familiar to pursue impassioned radical goals on the other.

But there was another problem to resolve. Once again, one was not working with a tabula rasa in creating the liberal State. An already existing executive authority might seek to thwart the desires even of a limited electorate. Moreover, the environment in which liberals lived was still rife with Radical Enlightenment ideas that might yet succeed in obtaining a democratic suffrage electing a legislature ready to mandate attacks on economic freedom. Such real threats dictated various constitutional protections; checks and balances designed to thwart promotion of anti-liberal projects and guarantee the propertied oligarchy’s continued control of political and social life, even in the face of monarchical or democratic opposition. Such protections included hemming in the executive authority with a thousand restrictions. They involved creation of a legislature that, even if democratic, was elected by individual atoms, separated from their manifold natural subsidiary societies, and therefore as little representative of human persons “as a calf…by that heap of macerated flesh to which it is reduced by the knife of a butcher”.¹⁰⁷ Meanwhile, should all else fail, they required a judiciary empowered to cashier any unwanted, anti-liberal actions of its wayward sister branches of government.

All of this was indeed of immense assistance in maintaining oligarchic control, and in both hidden as well as open ways. Men always psychologically treated the executive as “the ruler” and praised or blamed it for political and social developments. If the executive did not have the necessary authority to promote the common good, private interests were free to step into the breech and manipulate society to the detriment of the population at large. While these particular wills did what they wished, appeals and complaints would continue to be directed to the existing, façade-like executive, as though it were really able to work for the protection of society. In other words, while private interests robbed the bank, the distrusted but impotent executive would take the rap for their crimes.

Moreover, a legislature elected by isolated individuals, even a democratically elected one, if uprooted from the historical and sociological corporations that gave real influence to the otherwise weaker parts of the population in the past, was much more easily controlled. It could be rendered harmless by everything from the better organization of a well-funded liberal party to outright bribery of populist-minded deputies.

Finally, a liberal judiciary standing guard over the “spirit of the laws” would make sure that a strong executive and an outraged legislature could do nothing to harm the “true” popular will—namely, whatever needed to be done to protect bourgeois property, wealth, and the total freedom to use it as the individual man of means saw fit; whatever might ensure the “triumph of individual and collective egoisms”, and the “mercantile and savage spirit” of the utilitarian Benthamites.¹⁰⁸

Generally, Taparelli argued, liberals could count upon the intellectual inertia of the population to treat what was a purely conventional law based upon the manipulation of power as though it were somehow really written into the nature of things. If, however, some men began to call upon moral philosophy and spiritual truths as guides to State action, liberals then emphasized the need to maintain an Iron Wall of Separation between such considerations and the necessarily purely material concerns of the government and its coercive powers. Unfortunately, Taparelli insisted, such a separation contradicted the holistic character of the human person, which made a clinical division of soul and body utterly impossible. And ultimately it was not wise even for the liberals to insist upon this split, since it underlined the fact that the “laws” of their constitutional government were merely changeable, conventional decisions based upon nothing other than will and power configurations:¹⁰⁹

Man being essentially one, though composed of two substances, whoever commands man must of necessity influence both parts substantially composing the same individual. To exclude the Church, therefore, from commanding the body, and the State from obliging conscience, is a separation against nature. The two powers will always find themselves on the same field, either united for the purpose of order, or combating and triumphing over one another.

Those, therefore, who through hatred of the Church or out of a desire for unlimited freedom, promote separation cannot do anything other than permit either full anarchy of consciences or chain them under material force.

He who does not want to make use of spiritual means in temporal matters, does not know what the world is, and what are the constant relations of the two substances that God has used to compose it. He does not understand the action of God on the earth. He does not know that which he himself does when he invokes for his use “justice” and “right”. He pronounces, in sum, an absurd and incomprehensible proposition, while he imagines that he pronounces an irrefutable axiom.

But what if open and persistent protests were actually made against a bourgeois triumph of the will on the part of the poor and the democratic majority? Then, once again, as in the following statement taken from an Italian liberal, the argument of the need for an active, adult tutorship of the passive, childlike masses was evoked:¹¹⁰

‘Each people has the right to govern itself. The people is defined as that minority which thinks the way that I do; all the rest who wish to enjoy the fruits of peace must be illuminated as we are. Until they are illuminated, their vote has no value.’ Can he express with more splendid candor the theory of a despotism of a small faction over a whole people? If the ‘obscurantists’ made this discourse calling themselves alone the active and intelligent population, God knows with what invectives they would be excoriated.

Some, of course, would still not be silenced by a return to this aspect of the liberal “good story”, but even then there was an answer available. As intense opposition to liberal hypocrisy grew, the desperate, irrational willfulness underlying a system that claimed to detest the use of State authority intensified along with it. Such willfulness explained why the supposedly wicked organs of government were readily mobilized to censure Catholic journals.¹¹¹

You see, dear readers, the strange and deplorable antinomy! Those who profess freedom of opinion chain liberty, because they would sacrifice their material interests if they did not. We, who profess in theory that opinions do not have to be free, sacrifice both our theory and, with it, our material interests as well. Oh, truly, the children of darkness are more prudent!

And it also explained why otherwise dreaded mobs were stirred to action should liberal constitutional machinery somehow fail to do what it was supposed to do with apodictic certainty.¹¹²

There is no hope of winning by discussion should the majority hold firm against sophisms, ruses, threats: then the windows of the gallery, which are always arranged to look out onto the street, are opened; one cries to the crowd that the majority is betraying the people, that it wants to enchain it, that it wants to brutalize it. The crowd enters, it howls, it boos, it breaks, it silences, it votes: a street carries the motion above all the contrary voices, the majority is changed, and the law is made.

All this confirmed the Civiltà’s basic argument: either God was King with Liberty, in a system open to the corrective and transforming message of the Word in history, which taught that it was the truth that made men free; or Man was King, through the force lying behind the whole of the vision of “nature as is”—from the time of Isocrates to that of modern liberalism: ¹¹³

While man commands, nothing can reassure the conscience of the subject who obeys, neither with regard to the truth presupposed in the command, nor with regard to its justice. Obedience without such persuasion would not be the obedience of man, because not rational, and, therefore, not voluntary. It cannot, therefore, be obtained without the force either of arms or of deceitful intelligence. The liberty of the ruled, either violated or deceived, will always be tampered with. Therefore, while man is king only as man, he will govern with force.

I. Liberal Invitation to Further Radicalism

Even at its most sincere, liberalism was constructed upon an erroneous faith in the individual’s ability to achieve man’s end in life on his own. Emerging out of a secularization of the principle of independence preached in religious form from the mouths of the sixteenth-century heresiarchs, it treated the human person as though he were a self-sufficient entity, a citadel threatened only by evil that came from outside its walls. Outside evils included the authority and machinery of Church, State, and corporations that disturbed a bourgeois oligarchy’s ability to pursue its utilitarian materialist desires freely. Liberalism, as the modern Defender of the Peace, weakened all of these, accordingly.

But other representatives of the Revolution could, in fact and not just in fearful theory, operate successfully with the same principle of independence in the world of weak social authority created by the liberals for the attainment of their more radical goals. Democrats, refusing to accept the designation of the mass of men as immature, childlike subjects requiring the tutelage of active liberal citizens, could indeed succeed in satisfying their demand for political liberty for all. When they did so, however, they opened themselves to a further development of the inner logic of the independence principle in a way that involved infinitely more profound political, social, and cultural changes.

This involved the work of proponents of “freedom” who did not think that the wickedness of social authority was something limited to interference with individual economic freedom. Under their more radical guidance, Church, State, corporations, and even individual parents of families themselves had to abandon authoritative control over one or the other or even all aspects of personal human activity entirely. Some such freedom fighters, the most radical of all, could not bring themselves to endure the despotism of purely internal intellectual authorities either. They felt obliged to eradicate the tyranny represented by standards of beauty, conceptual truths, and the very structure of logic and linguistic forms as well. Each individual freedom fighter might disapprove of the increased zeal of his next most radical brother-in-arms. None, when accepting the basic disdain for authority implicit in the principle of independence, could develop a convincing rational ground for limiting this social wreckage. Cry all that moderate liberalism or a purely political democratic ideology might do, it cried against the consequences of principles that it had established.¹¹⁴

Devastating as this expanding liberation was from the standpoint of those open to the corrective and transforming mission of the Word, worse, still, was its proponents’ demonstrated recourse to a pseudo-fraternal spirit to form pseudo-corporations—parties, sects, and terrorist organizations—to achieve their goals. Incited by a given passion—and liberalism’s principle of independence potentially blessed and divinized them all—the “party” that each group formed rushed for control of the arms of the weakened State, insisting that it was transmitting into action the “will of the People” to effect whatever particular liberating change it supported.

Opposition, even from a numerical majority, caused no special difficulties for the party in question. As with liberals, it merely indicated to it the lamentable persistence within the population of the influence of former “real” authorities. These, of course, were, by definition, totally tyrannical and unacceptable. Such forces had clearly drugged the People into expressing what was actually not its will at all. Popular “opposition” to the party was thus actually a subconscious plea to crush the remaining oppressors of the individual. Less radical attacks of the early nineteenth century, the intransigents lamented, thus fertilized the soil for the egotism, passion, and off-handed injustice characterizing the fanatical assaults of its later decades. Contemporary madness was explicable after one visit to the schools created by the liberal State but yesterday. The carts carrying the moderates to the embrace of the guillotine rolled through the streets resounding to the hymns of liberty that these partisans of a prudent Enlightenment had themselves first composed.

Insofar as purely political protections could be found against the pretensions of parties seizing control of State machinery, they had to be based upon the existence of independent centers of authority from which resistance could be mounted. The multiform corporate life inspired by Catholic recognition of the goodness of association and authority could—and had—given birth to this type of protection in the past. But liberal insistence upon the need for an ever-greater atomistic freedom had destroyed this efficacious corporate order. Revolutionary liberal governments of the nineteenth century, eager to defend materialist man from spiritual despotism and individual property from social controls, had dismantled the authority of the oppressive corporate society that thwarted the exercise of oligarchic “freedom”. They thus left the liberal State as the sole remaining viable power in society. Once this power was seized by more radical partisan elements to strengthen immeasurably and do with what they willed there would be no effective force left to prevent them. Hence, the liberal system ended by handing the “free individual” over to confront a partisan “pseudo-State”, guided by the strongest wills, capable of doing whatsoever it pleased---in his name, and even against his will. This permitted an ever more radical “horde of Janissaries” to impose upon an entire population “by means of the cudgel, the code of its follies”.¹¹⁵ And, barring a rejection of the basic revolutionary principle of independence lying behind this development, society was left with no way to fight or think itself out of its dilemma:¹¹⁶

Bonaparte reestablished religion in spite of freedom: if he had wanted to undo that which he had done, would he have been prevented by freedom? By the freedom of the Church, yes; that is to say, if there were found enough priests and Christians to resist him at the peril of their fortune and their life. By political freedom, no.

All societies at all times have seen wickedness and wicked people, ambitious and oppressive men. But when such wickedness and oppression were only born from the passions, the guilty man, free as he was to dominate his passions through the use of reason, began to come to his senses almost as soon as he put his mind to it. Modern society in contrast, entertains principles and theories that are at the root of the evil. Hence, the more a man reasons, the more he is constrained to oppress society; and, vice versa, the more society is oppressed, the better logicians the oppressors are. Thus, resolute Protestants were better logicians than groping moderates; rationalists, better logicians than Protestants; atheistic communists…better logicians again than rationalists.

Now I {Liberatore} have demonstrated one hundred times in the course of these articles that pagan civilization is a regression for humanity, its liberty entailing the most shameful slavery and the liquidation of the human personality, absorbed by the omnipotence of the God State. Therefore, even without my saying it, anyone can see by himself that modern liberalism, under the fiction of promoting liberty, tends to destroy it; under the shadow of desiring progress, it desires barbarism…It is not an aversion to liberty or sympathies for despotism that lead the Church to fight their wicked efforts…Rather, it is the love it feels for true liberty, its native repugnance for all kinds of despotism, the mission it has from God to save the personal independence of man that inspires it, and urges it to such a battle.

One of the “liberating” forces that exploited the weakness of liberal society to form conspiratorial organizations, seize control of the State, and then make a totalitarian use of its machinery in the absence of corporate opposition was that of nineteenth century nationalism. Nationalists could not endure the rule of one ethnic group over another even when that rule was good and efficient. Each distinct ethnic nation had to be totally “free” of any outside “tyranny” even in obtaining the common good. Unfortunately, attaining this “national freedom”, as the case of the Italian Risorgimento demonstrated, involved promotion of morally wicked political assassinations, unjust wars, and the destruction of those religious beliefs and cultural customs that were precisely deemed to be at the heart of the popular heritage by Catholic opponents of nationalism. No matter. Once again, the childlike population had to be forcibly remade in order to become true to its “real self”---as dictated by the willful, prophetic, “adult” nationalist. As one of the Ministers of Education of the new Kingdom of Italy said:¹¹⁷

But among us, the citizen is the property of the State. The law of conscription binds him to the soil of the fatherland during the most florid period of life. The State has, therefore, the right and the duty of exercising over him an almost parental tutelage. It scarcely would be able to hold itself responsible to the laws of the country if it had been delinquent, or permitted its moral or political education be perverted by others. It would only half understand the office of legislator if it did not claim for itself the domination of education.

Nationalism, as far as the intransigents were concerned, was a truly vicious development of the principle of independence. Another, which was considerably more understandable, was that of modern materialist socialism. Contemporary socialism was in many respects a totally rational—though erroneous—reaction to problems created by the bourgeois oligarchy standing behind revolutionary liberalism. The Revolution, in barricading itself in nature alone, had cut society off from the corrective and transforming message of the Word. It thus completely misunderstood human personality, man’s purpose in life, and the means of fulfilling his temporal and eternal happiness. Revolutionary liberalism interpreted the naturalism of the independence principle in an individualist manner, with an emphasis upon a personal “freedom” that destroyed man’s social character and ensured the triumph of a materialist and ultimately self-destructive elite over the weak mass of the population. This explained the existence of the factory that Veuillot visited at the beginning of his career as a Catholic journalist. Its “free” owner and wife supported all the politically correct liberal causes. Meanwhile, its “free” workers slaved day and night for a pittance in suffocating conditions salubrious only for the machinery, with their only certainty in life being the awareness that one day, broken in spirit, when sickness or old age dictated, they would be put out to pasture like exhausted beasts, “free” to die whenever their bodies chose to do so.¹¹⁸ La Civiltà Cattolica, lamenting the miserable conditions of most modern workers, insisted that a Church loyal to the fullness of the corrective and transforming message of the Word in history could never accept such an anti-social “freedom”:¹¹⁹

What a horrible train of woes accompanies {workers}, and what horrible physical and moral miseries so many thousands of unhappy men suffer and perish from in manufacturing centers. Damned to machines and mines, they are sacrificed to the luxury and cruel gluttony of a small number of speculating capitalists!

An immense mass of adults bury themselves ever day in caves of fossilized carbon to eke out just a little more of existence while they choke on pestiferous fumes. And an infinite number of children standing amidst the racing machinery of sweet-smelling factories stupefy their minds and ruin their health as they throw a piece of cotton or wool amidst the burning embers, with no other result than that of not dying straightaway of hunger.

The spirit of the century does not occupy itself with anything other than commercial utility and political greatness. It only desires comfort in physical life and movement in commercial life. Laws must be made in favor of the rich, and the populace must be given a great deal of labor and little bread. If the rags of the poor and the sighs of the hungry bother the indolent rich who pass by in groups through crowded streets, the spirit of the century takes from the beggar the liberty to beg and punishes him for being hungry. If a missionary arouses remorse in a rich man by preaching the reality of hell, if a procession crosses the rich man’s path, if a burial troubles his thoughts, if a bell takes possession of his ear, the spirit of the century demands that bells, funerals, processions, and preaching be prohibited. The spirit of the times, in sum, would have the clergy limited, like hermits, to prayers and blessings spoken in the clouds. It wants joyful free men to dance and divert themselves on earth. Now this progress, this spirit of the times, and accommodation of it…is impossible for Rome…{to accept}.

Such horrors gave a semblance of justice to socialists who appealed to the same principle of independence as their liberal oppressors:¹²⁰

I accept that excuse for what it is worth, and I say that the unbelieving poor man can equally use it for himself. He also has become a philosopher, and his philosophy only obliges him when and how well it seems to him to observe the precept which commands him to respect the property of others.

It permitted them, in seeking to be freed from the social tyranny exercised over them through the authority of the individual property owner, to appear as legitimate agents of God’s vengeance:¹²¹

With the total suppression {of guilds} the artisans lost their political and civil importance. The whole class fell into oppression plain and simple. Workers—individuals on their own and divided—lacked hierarchy and organization. Irritated by their oppression, they rose in revolt, associating themselves anew with that spirit of insubordination and vendetta that today disturbs society and humbles governments.

It even aroused sympathy for their usurpation of the State machinery created by liberalism and its subsequent transformation into a tool for completing their own work of “liberation”—namely, by destroying the oppression brought about through uncontrolled private ownership of property for once and for all:¹²²

Catholicism created in all states a multitude of living forces that united individuals in powerful and durable associations, and placed them under shelter from the oppression of power. Protestantism and philosophy demolished all these fortresses of liberty one after the other. Nothing has remained facing the state but individuals impotent in defending themselves against it. Now the socialists propose recognizing that the state has the same rights over individuals that Protestantism and philosophy gave it over those moral persons {i.e., the network of corporate societies} that it killed one by one. This is logical: why should it not absorb individuals like it has absorbed all the rest?

For all the above reasons, the intransigents condemned the call of the Party of Order to support liberalism as though it were the bulwark against “true” revolution as a monstrous absurdity. Far from being a block on demagogic socialism, it was the bourgeois liberals, with their “moderate” use of the principle of independence, who were the original and primary catalysts for radical change of every variety in the nineteenth century. It was they who weakened all social authorities, allowing any number of private, partisan, unnatural groups to conspire together to seize the machinery of the State to do with what they willed without fear of effective opposition. It was they who first gave the socialists the idea for stealing property from its legitimate possessors by cooperating and delighting in the robbery of the goods of the Church in 1790. It was they who aroused a spirit of rebellion that the People as such, when left to their own devices, did not really feel.

“The Revolution is not popular”, Veuillot concluded; “it is bourgeois. It is the bourgeoisie who made it, has defended it, restored it, continued it, and who, for the unhappiness and ruin of France, will finish it if it can. For fifty years, the assemblies arising from bourgeois suffrage have been revolutionary; they made 1830 and 1848.”¹²³ Liberals could call themselves “conservatives” all they might want. In doing so, they merely evoked bad memories of legitimists who used the same term, without realizing that it was not their “moderation” or the specific form of government that they supported that determined the shape of things to come. It was the spirit of the Revolution itself that did so---the spirit of the Revolution, with its refusal to recognize the need for individual and social man to be corrected and transformed in Christ. And this spirit, modern legitimists and liberals, in some way, in every country, all shared as one:¹²⁴

Those men have been labeled conservatives who, since 1815, have formed the parliamentary majorities that have been seen to fight the revolution, but for the profit of the revolution. The conservative majorities have not conserved anything. Gradually they have delivered everything and have themselves been delivered to the violent minorities that they have seemed to combat, but to which, in reality, they submitted.

J. Thesis and Hypothesis

After the disillusioning experiences of 1848, intransigents felt the need for a more profound meditation on exactly what might need to be done to build a society that was truly open to the full teaching of Christ. This led to their embrace of the distinction that some contemporary Catholic thinkers had already developed; a distinction between what was referred to as the thesis and the hypothesis. So long as the principle of striving for a Catholic society —the so-called thesis—were to be firmly maintained, a wide scope for tactical experimentation—the hypothesis—in pursuit of practical victory was permitted. Should experimentation threaten the purity of the Catholic principles involved, retreat into Catholic fortresses could take place. Still, this would only be proper if it were done to recoup strength to sally forth anew when fresh opportunities for ascending Mount Tabor came down one’s path. And in this enterprise, a pilgrim spirit, ready for new steps in the dance of life, would definitely always be required.¹²⁵

Intransigents argued that a primary focus on the thesis in their time was very much needed. This was because of the obvious confusions that had emerged out of the effort of so many contradictory groups, both naïve and ill-willed, to cooperate with one another during the recent spate of revolutionary activity. Catholics clearly required a firmer grounding in their own Faith and its unique political and social considerations. Not only did this demand authoritative doctrinal teaching, but a frank, hard-hitting, and consistent Catholic journalism operating on a much more popular level as well.

Adoption of a conciliatory spirit in the midst of the confusions revealed by the Revolutions of 1848 would be a miscalculation of cosmic proportions: it would sacrifice the souls of existing believers in the gamble for some uncertain future entente—a strategy equivalent to a medieval embrace of the malitia before experiencing the changes brought about in their ranks through the work of Cluny. The contemporary enemy already had tremendous advantages in the spiritual combat that had to be waged. Catholics found that they unconsciously used his language and teaching methods and were susceptible to sweet blandishments from him at every turn. It was therefore most important, at least to begin with, to adopt all legitimate weapons to save the home camp from infection, subversion, and demoralization. “We are fighting a war”, Veuillot concluded, aptly summarizing the concerns of such sister journals as the Civiltà as well, “wherein it is always necessary to burn one’s ships”:¹²⁶

We see them in the schools, in the midst of a young generation that they water without scruple with all the poisons of error; they have audacity on their faces, mockery in their mouths; they permit us to believe that they have atheism in their hearts. We count their victims by the hundreds, and in our souls themselves there stirs a remnant of their poisons. May God convert them tomorrow! Our task is to escape them today.

Finally, will we, out of respect for a small number of mad or wicked men, who, being devoted to the propagation of evil, will always cry that they are being injured when one attacks evil, suffer it to pass and circulate insolently, to carry demoralization along with error into minds, so that the spirits that it will darken will not be able to recover the light; so that the Church, defamed, will not find an immediate defense?

Enunciation of firm positions would prepare bewildered and wavering Catholics for coming battles. “If our voice is not able to make a believer out of an unbeliever”, Veuillot argued, “it can make an apostle of a believer, like the stories and good examples of war, like the sound of the trumpet makes a warrior of a soldier”.¹²⁷ Ultimately, however, intransigent concern for the thesis was dictated not by any purely utilitarian considerations but by simple sense of duty. The Catholic’s obligation was to proclaim the truth, in season and out of season, and to allow providence to take care of the rest:¹²⁸

The truth is attacked, it is necessary to save our brother; the land of servitude is evil, the faith is lost therein, the soul is oppressed therein. It does not matter what floods and what dryness separate us from the land promised to our ancestors, and it is necessary to flee servitude. A way will open up under the waves; manna will rain down in the desert!

Besides, a continued focus on reconciliation with the supporters of modern revolutionary naturalism ignored one other clear lesson of 1848: the fact that Reason played no role in their calculations. For willful pride alone was at the center of naturalist man’s politics:¹²⁹

…{F}erocious pride is correctly the genius of the Revolution; it has established a control in the world which places reason out of the struggle. It has a horror of reason, it gags it, it hunts it, and if it can kill it, it kills it. Prove to it the divinity of Christianity, its intellectual and philosophical reality, its historical reality, its moral and social reality: it wants none of it. That is its reason, and it is the strongest. It has placed a blindfold of impenetrable sophisms on the face of European civilization. It cannot see the heavens, nor hear the thunder.

Veuillot satirized the type of irrational, willful, and ultimately ridiculous liberal who condescended to “dialogue” with Catholics under current circumstances in one frequently cited passage from Les Libres Penseurs:¹³⁰

He is the author of {a} volume, he speaks in it of everything: there lies a title to the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences. It is here that the debate between Leibnitz and Bossuet is definitely settled; it is here that the hidden motives of Descartes are revealed, and that the secret incredulity of the simple Malebranches is demonstrated as clear as day. Here, too, the final word on Voltaire is pronounced, and one sees in it how the author of Candide is more spiritual and orthodox than the devout have cared to believe. In a certain section, found towards the middle, the master takes a very objective position in the struggle of the Church with philosophy. The Church would be wrong to complain: the young man does not hate her at all, he is rather good-willed. Without a doubt, ‘the priests are not that which a vain people thinks’; there is in their doctrines and in their general character a goodness that the young man recognizes and confesses. This is not the generosity of a beginner; it is the judgment and sentence of a mature spirit. He is not at all generous; he is wise. He is not dazzled, he knows. The Church rests upon certain needs of the human soul; it has a right to these, it can go that far, but not further! Further lies the superior domain of the reason and philosophy. If the Church had the temerity to breach this limit, it would find the young man there, respectful but inflexible; he would cry to it: Stop! Do not fear that it may pass this limit. This is why he does not approve his friends who are alarmed, and who, ‘in the heat of an anger more legitimate than philosophical’, write that all priests are scoundrels, all pious women adulterous, the whole Catholic edifice a heap of impostures. No! Here lies exaggeration. He will deny these hyperboles. He is just, he is calm, he has studied, and he has meditated. He sees that the lower class has need of a religion and the Catholic system seems to him to satisfy better than another that need of the rabble. All this is said in an academic form, without fault of French, without pause, without emphasis…citing Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Saint Bonaventure, Thomas Reed, Brockius, Pintus, Chopinetti, and the Third Council of Sardis. He is titular professor, chevalier of the Legion of Honor, intimate of the Journal des Debats. He will be married well, his books will be bought for the public libraries, and he will be deputy, royal counselor, and minister. He is called the hope of philosophy now; he will one day be called its honor. Myself, I call him a turnip.

Intransigents insisted that the price that believers had to pay to join a Party of Order that supported this kind of dialogue was simply much too high. For one thing, Catholics would be permitted by their liberal friends to pursue criticisms of those Enlightenment and French revolutionary principles that produced socialism, but they would be obliged to abandon objections to any of the very same precepts that had fashioned liberal capitalism. One would have to parrot the slogan that “obvious common sense” dictated a joint liberal-Catholic polemic versus the socialist evil, while continued Catholic anti-capitalist attacks would have to be represented as an inexplicable, pointless, peevish waste of intellectual energy, useful only to the destructive advance of the palpable Red Menace. The message would be clear: that the Church would better protect herself if her freedom were used to fight the one thing that liberals believed needed fighting; if the Church, in effect, became nothing other than a liberal institution supporting bourgeois enslavement to the “business as usual” demands of “nature as is”.

Instead of this, the intransigents argued, a coherent Catholic response to contemporary evils had to emphasize the truth that liberal capitalism and democratic socialism were actually blood brothers; that both had exactly the same naturalist Enlightenment roots; that the arguments of the liberal capitalists had given intellectual birth to the doctrines of the socialists; that capitalist excesses had provided psychological stimulus to the desperate spirit of the June Days. In fact, Catholics had to be on particular guard against the Party of Order, for, despite its total unacceptability, it was clearly immensely tempting to respond to its call of the wild. For, as Taparelli himself said:¹³¹

I will candidly add that in the past I experienced in myself the force of social influences that rendered plausible and just to me many of those institutions the fallacy, insufficiency, contradiction, and iniquity of which I see today so plainly, and have seen ever since the facts of experience constrained me to bring a new light of examination to the principles that inform them.

What followed from all of this was a total break with the liberal Catholic position, which the intransigents found to embody more of a new and willful fideism rather than any ordinary, debatable, hypothetical strategy. Veuillot complained that Montalembert refused to allow any discussion of the question of the validity of cooperation with moderate revolutionary institutions whatsoever. Acceptance of the English parliamentary system was axiomatic. “He made a crime of a simple disagreement of opinion”, the editor of l’Univers complained. Or, barring that, “even of remaining firmly of an opinion that he had shared and sometimes imposed”.¹³² Veuillot’s qualms were by definition subjective, uncharitable, and absurd. The result of this liberal intransigence, Veuillot lamented, was the gradual transformation of the earlier prudential use of “modern freedom” by the Catholic Party into its unqualified affirmation:¹³³

We said that the Church had a right to the same liberties as everybody, not that everybody had a right to the same liberties as the Church; that all the liberties that we demanded were of natural law and of divine law, good, necessary, legitimate, holy; not that all liberties that were demanded had the same character, the same title, and had to be decreed. Never was our liberty that of the liberals, still less that of the democrats, and never were they unaware of this. Whatever the danger of chilling their friendship, when accidentally and for a moment they were allies; whatever the danger of irritating them as enemies, we—M. de Montalembert and the rest of us—thought that the peril would be infinitely greater accepting or tolerating a single one of their errors. Our conscience demanded this; the interest of our party demanded this. The right tactic for us is to be visibly and always what we are, nothing more, nothing less. We defend a citadel that cannot be taken except when the garrison itself brings in the enemy. Combating with our own arms, we only receive minor wounds. All borrowed armor troubles us and often chokes us.

In the islands of Oceania, the savages who fill the office of priests often indulge the whim of declaring that such and such an object is…taboo, that is to say, sacred, and from that point no one can touch it under pain of sacrilege and of death. Are we going to accord the same faculty to the flamines of the ideas of ‘89, and will everything that they have regarded with a pleasurable eye be taboo for the rest of mortals?…All revolutionary institutions and all their consequences, whatever they may be, taboo! One must be quiet and adore, or perish! This fetishism is new, at least among Catholics and conservatives.

La Civiltà Cattolica shared the evaluation of the situation of Catholics in Europe offered by Veuillot and l’Univers. Knowing this, liberal Catholics in France ipso facto condemned the Roman journal as equally intransigent. Montalembert, whose works the Civiltà was accused of “disfiguring”, led the assault, continually expressing exasperation at having to deal with a mindlessly reactionary, ill-willed clique whose flaws could never be rationally corrected. For Montalembert, the Jesuit editors were “exalted, violent, gross, and servile”; “implacable, fanatical, and base”; “wicked men” whom Pope Pius IX “substituted for the honest men who had formerly pleaded his cause”. These dogmatic opponents of modern ideas had tried to demonstrate that freedom was a plague “not only in its abuses and its excesses, but in its very essence”. More evil than that Garibaldi who was determined to rob the Papacy of its rightful property, such fools entertained ideas and exhibited behavior suitable for one thing only: producing enemies of the Catholic Church. In short, the Civiltà did not understand that liberalism was the only possible means of obtaining the “counterrevolutionary” goal of Catholic security.¹³⁴

Although there is no need to point out once more the injustice of the accusation that the Civiltà rejected all concern for human freedom, it is necessary to underline the complete refusal of Montalembert and most of his allies even to examine the journal’s real arguments. These were always presented to him in an excessively humble, even downright obsequious manner. The Civiltà constantly reiterated its appreciation of the splendid work done by militants like Montalembert, “alone and young…facing a group of Orleanist Voltaireans”. It attributed much of the success of the Catholic revival in France to them. Indeed, Taparelli went so far as to justify Montalembert’s book on Catholic Interests, “disfiguring” it only in the sense of not being critical enough of some of its fundamental palingenesist flaws.¹³⁵

These flaws, La Civiltà Cattolica eventually and reluctantly concluded, evinced that same blind, fideist acceptance of moderate revolutionary principles that always opened the floodgate to further radicalization; a radicalization that ensured the victory of the strong, the emasculation of the weak, and Catholic entry into a danse macabre that eventually eradicated all memory and understanding of their own faith and its proper pilgrim spirit from their minds and hearts. It was this fideist faith in the unquestionable and divine character of liberal concerns--constitutions, checks and balances, the separation of Church and State, freedom of the press, and so on—that rendered liberal Catholics closed to rational discourse and oblivious to the succor they gave to more logical and more brutal revolutionaries. Hence, they could not see how much they, too, resembled the Girondins, singing the Marseillaise in 1793 on their way to the guillotine. Such true closed-mindedness prevented them from recognizing that they were actually also blood brothers of shallow legitimists. For, despite their differences concerning governmental forms, they, too, placed love for a specific political system above Christ.

Furthermore, this blind fideism explained why Montalembert, who was badly informed about the Civiltà’s position and who boasted of not reading it regularly if at all, could nevertheless unceasingly condemn its editors. It explains why he refused to look at Taparelli’s Esame critico or even to answer the Jesuit’s letters begging for a critique from him. This is why he was not ashamed, as Taparelli lamented, “to abuse the weapons of publicity by turning them against persons who, remembering his former deeds, renounce the right of defending themselves”.¹³⁶ La Civiltà Cattolica, its editors, and their arguments were so willfully dismissed and so much distorted that Taparelli ended by noting: “we have often asked ourselves if we have written in Sanskrit or Chinese”.¹³⁷ The ideas expressed in the journal, like those of Veuillot, were by definition outside the realm of discussion. For liberal Catholics were always rational and always right. To question but one of their teachings was an infallible sign of irredeemable obscurantism.

La Civiltà Cattolica and Le Correspondant did, on one occasion, enter into a discussion of principles—much to the dismay of most liberal Catholics. Despite the expressions of civility and fraternity on both sides, one can easily see that this dialogue had no chance of success. The Roman journal once again insisted that participation in the modern naturalist danse macabre had led its opponents to value liberalism above the teaching of Christ, and that the Catholics who followed them down this pathway became hopeless schizophrenics. They publicly proclaimed Catholic doctrines but simultaneously believed and repeated liberal ones as well: the obsession with freedom as an end in itself; the fear of reaching definite conclusions that would become “authorities” guiding individuals’ lives; the treatment of sin not as a reality in and of itself but only as a by-product of non-liberal political systems and oppression; the conviction that the mechanics of liberal government and not the struggle of individuals for sanctity were responsible for justice, a superior culture, and personal happiness; and, finally, the inability to conceive the basic truth that sinfulness might wreak havoc with a constitution---especially a constitution administered by haughty men who laughed at checks and balances and mocked the childlike masses who hailed their own enslavement as the pinnacle of liberty.

Would the liberal Catholic ever recognize his schizophrenic character? The Civiltà doubted so. His proclamation of personal infallibility made it possible for him to baptize the Revolution, call it Catholic, and then exchange the authentic Catholic dance of life for the danse macabre. Moreover, his allies from the “practical”, non-Catholic, liberal bourgeoisie assured him that this was the only pragmatic thing for a serious believer to do. Such outside liberal opinion was important to him, because pleasing it had become his overriding concern. He stood in awe of true liberalism even while he remained a member of the Church and could not quite give himself over wholeheartedly to revolutionary principles. In fact, he almost seemed to regret not being able to become more non-Catholic.¹³⁸

Intransigents also deplored the liberal Catholic ideas encouraged by Ignaz von Döllinger. Döllinger was symbolic in the Civiltà’s mind of the arrogant, acerbic, and increasingly chauvinistic spirit that had invaded much of European thought in the nineteenth century. He was also representative of the liberal exaltation of the raw act of freedom—behaving without restraints—over the purpose of freedom: the conformity of man to Christ, his proper end and guide. For Döllinger, like every supporter of the spirit of the Revolution, placed a distorted importance on means—free, rational inquiry, in his case—over and above their just end: possession of the Truth.

Should his liberal Catholic school triumph, the Civiltà feared, the natural use of the intellect, developed through “free” research and “freedom” to publish, would be perceived as being more valuable to Catholicism than the supernatural corrective and transforming authority of the Word Incarnate. But this was just the beginning of the resulting nightmare. For we have seen that the Roman journal believed that respect for the authority of the Word in the Church was itself historically responsible for building confidence in the value of Reason in the first place. A victory for the Döllinger school of thought would therefore mean that the endless groping of the theologian, always beginning his work over and over again from its starting point, would be prized more highly than an actual definition of any truth, natural or supernatural. Döllinger’s liberal revolution would thus be a revolution of ignorance, a revolution that would give the ignorant but proudly “free” theologian the status of a witch doctor, whose ideas and actions could never be criticized. As Kleutgen wrote to the Canon Moufang (1817-1890), a leader of the neo-scholastic school in Mainz, soon after the publication of the Syllabus, Rome was convinced that German theologians of the liberal Catholic Döllinger faction had forgotten the very essentials of their science. They had pitted their raw act of academic freedom not simply against the arguments of another “school of thought” but against crucial aspects of the fullness of the Christian message; a message essential to the defense of the dignity of the human mind in general.¹³⁹

K. The Attack on the Christ of the Barricades

Liberal Catholics were not the only troublesome opponents that intransigent students of the Catholic “thesis” had to confront. There were also the supporters of the “socialist” Christ of the Barricades to answer. Again, given the nineteenth century victory of the liberal revolutionary vision, intransigents in no way found their appearance on the socio-political scene to be either surprising or irrational. Still, they were problematic from the standpoint of the catholiques avant tout, and for two specific reasons.

One was their romance with democracy, conceived of as the absolute requisite for a legitimate political order. The Catholic Party, as Veuillot complained at the height of their influence in France in 1848, “has not worked twenty years to extirpate monarchical idolatry to seed it anew; it will not now seed that other idolatry, no less dangerous and degrading, that has justly been called the democratic idolatry”.¹⁴⁰ This idolatory was manifested through the tendency to use the word “democracy” as a talisman to convince Catholics that the “will of the People” could never be in conflict with the Faith; as though experience had not shown that “democracy” meant wildly varied things to different people with opposing ideological obsessions:¹⁴¹

Alas! If one at least told us with what kind of democracy Catholicism must reconcile itself! Since, as we have noted, democracy is not one thing, one party, but a word; a deceptive word under which one hundred different parties, all irreconcilable enemies of one another, take refuge and are torn apart.

Supporters of the Christ of the Barricades then made compromises with this undefined democracy that seemed, in practice, only to involve unhappy Catholic concessions to the naturalist Zeitgeist. These concessions were then declared a necessary response to the “new needs” that the leaders of the movement, as a freshly awakened intellectual oligarchy, alone could somehow grasp. Veuillot found this modern elitist faith and fetishism to be particularly strong and offensive among the editors of the democratic Catholic journal, l’Ère Nouvelle :¹⁴²

Does one discuss? It agrees with us on the facts, the doctrines, the final ends. At least it does not indicate others. And, nevertheless, it concludes in such a way that all Catholics are astonished or are grieved, while their enemies cry ‘bravo’. It has a way of criticizing the revolution that does not make it lose the friendship of the warmest of revolutionaries at all.

“What! New needs! For new needs, one requires new dogmas! Therefore, the supposed Christian revelation is not complete! Humanity has marched and Christianity remains stationary. Thus, Christianity is not divine! Democracy responds to the new needs of the world: thus true Christianity is democracy. Here is their argument. Why not cut short this dialectic by telling them {the revolutionaries} straightforwardly that the new need of humanity is simply that of putting into practice faith, hope, and charity?

But democratic ideology was obviously only one of the evils afflicting the Christ of the Barricades vision, especially after 1848. For democratic socialism, in the decades that followed the revolutions of that year, more and more reflected the same naturalist mindset as liberal capitalism. Human beings, to the developing socialist mind, were nothing more than individual machine parts engaged in conflict on the basis of their economic interests. The goal of this ever more dangerous modern socialism was simply that of combining these exploited individual machine parts together in order to become an exploitative class mechanism in its own right, crushing the natural and just individual right to private property in the process. Espousing the same soulless materialism as capitalism, the late nineteenth century Socialist Movement equally misunderstood the life of the spirit, the real character of the person, and the final end of human life. If capitalism destroyed property for the bulk of the population in the name of the individual’s unlimited freedom, socialism---in its role as a legitimate avenger of the weak gone amok---did so under the banner of the community and its concerns. Support for revolutionary socialism as the answer to revolutionary capitalism was a tragic dead end that no student of the Catholic thesis could ever believe acceptable to the mission of the Word in history.¹⁴³

L. A Word Drenched Catholic Social Doctrine

No, rather than a Christ of the Barricades, born of an understandable reaction to the evils of liberal capitalism but still steeped in naturalist errors of an all too similar variety; rather than a palingenesist democratic ideology enamored of a vague utopianism easily manipulated by word merchants for their own willful purposes; rather than any of this, what was required to deal with the legitimate problems of an industrial age was an investigation of the Catholic “thesis” that would yield a fully Catholic Social Doctrine dealing properly with political economy. Given its importance for the future, let us explore in detail exactly what such a Social Doctrine would entail---and from its earliest roots in the pre-Christian Seeds of the Logos.

Western civilization grew to maturity in emphasizing the existence of an objective order of nature, the importance of individual freedom within that order, and the need for individuals to be enlightened as to the character of nature and freedom through the guidance of authoritative societies like the family and the State. Sacred and secular thinkers together argued that individuals, left to their own devices, simply could not properly see all that they had to see in order to understand either the objective order of things or the essence of human liberty. Individual knowledge and personal freedom could only be perfected though life in community. Social beings alone could become wise and free. Unaided, anti-social individuals could possess but a fragmented, flawed science of nature and knowledge of their place within it. They would thus be condemned to use their liberty to destroy themselves as well as the people around them.

We have shown that such ideas, while already shaped by the ancient Greeks, really only gained sociological influence due to the impact of the corrective and transforming message of the Word in history. Christ provided supernatural teaching and medicine to heal the weaknesses and flaws of a natural world that had chosen to mar itself through sin. His message confirmed an order and purpose to Creation that even the best of non-believers were tempted to question intellectually and to contradict in practice. His labors for the salvation of human persons underlined the central value of the individual to the plan of God. His demand for individual submission to Him and to His Mystical Body placed a supernatural stamp upon the importance of authoritative communal guidance of men. Christ taught that it was only through full membership and participation in supernatural society—only, in effect, by choosing to see Creation through God’s eyes—that individuals and societies could fully understand nature and use it fittingly. The Incarnation gave men the ability to use nature to serve the God who had created it to the utmost degree, raising their consciousness to the intrinsic value and responsibility of all of nature’s specific tools, from its sciences to its temporal authorities, as it did so. Without the supernatural grace of God, imparted through a socially powerful Church, individuals could not suitably understand and exploit what they seemed to be capable of knowing and putting to use even on purely natural grounds alone.

Enlightenment thought was flawed precisely because it violated all these western philosophical and Catholic theological precepts, thereby blinding its proponents to the truth. Its atomistic freedom reduced men to precisely that unaided, anti-social condition which the previous development of our civilization had condemned as parochial and self-destructive. Its naturalism compounded the problem by prohibiting consideration of God’s plan for His Creation and man’s eternal destiny in secular matters as unpardonably invasive. Enlightenment man thus lived and acted in a world whose every basic daily activity, both mundane and serious, was cut off from its final purpose.

In consequence, the “sciences” produced by Enlightenment freedom and naturalism were studies that uncovered nothing other than the laws of an incomplete nature, and a fallen one to boot. These sciences were then studied for incomplete, fallen reasons---chiefly to gain unwarranted power over the world and to provide some immediate satisfaction perceived as being good by flawed individuals. Such “sciences” obstinately refused to admit the possibility of learning how to change and heal nature through reason, revelation, and grace; they dedicated their practitioners to the encouragement of limitation and weakness. Ideological and arrogant in their self-sufficient rationalism, they closed themselves off to all criticism of their errors and responded to rational evidence in irrational ways. This irrationality was reflected in their appeal to the need to submit to the dictates of an unexamined “common sense”. It appeared in their frequent calls for a “consciousness-raising” that would transform the unenlightened creatures who rejected their vision into men who were finally able to distinguish natural “facts” that were acceptable from those which were strictly verboten. It was obvious in their sophist reliance on psychological and rhetorical tricks rather than rational tools to influence the mob and trump their opponents. Highest on the list of these ploys was their call to consider the respective financial success rates of those individuals and nations skilled in exploiting a world governed purely by the standards of unrestrained Original Sin compared to those who were not.

All Enlightenment atomists and naturalists taught flawed, iron-clad, materially satisfying “scientific laws of nature” to which they demanded unquestioning submission from the Church and Christian believers along with everyone else. Nevertheless, we have seen that they differed greatly as to what these laws were, merrily lambasting their fellow illuminati with as much rhetorical disdain as they did the members of the retrograde Catholic community. Prince Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898) of Prussia and Count Camillo Cavour (1810-1861) of Sardinia saw that the rules of Machtpolitik yielded their states an immediately greater power and wealth than any nation following the guidelines of a St. Louis IX or a Pius IX might expect. Therefore, they insisted that Church doctrine bend to its “natural laws” and political science. Piety could be no excuse for neglecting the demands of a Machtpolitik whose victories might even still be presented to believers by Pietists like Bismarck as actually reflecting the higher will of God Himself. Sexual libertines had proof positive that the unrestrained pursuit of physical satisfaction could result in much more immediate carnal rewards. Therefore, Church doctrine had to bend to accept the “science” of seduction and perhaps encourage experts to raise the sexual consciousness of religious critics to make them, too, act more “naturally”.

Hence, it was no surprise that liberal bourgeois capitalists witnessed the way in which the totally free market produced vast wealth for clever entrepreneurs and therefore proclaimed naturalist economic science to be an infallible guide before which western philosophy and Catholic theology must kneel and worship. Regardless of differences in emphasis, the “free” individual operating under the spell of all of these “sciences” was everywhere the same: a self-limiting, parochial being; a willful, passionate child who specialized in learning how to get more toys for himself than the other kids around him, regardless of whether he needed or benefited from them. He wanted what he wanted when he wanted it, and no better informed parent was going to force him to give up his rattle and learn the meaning of true knowledge and virtue.

Atomistic liberalism, justifying an individualism which sinful men quite eagerly aimed towards material ends, provided the capitalist with his ticket to a destructive journey across nineteenth-century Europe. Capitalism as a whole then firmly insisted that eye had not seen nor ear heard the benefits that would result from economic liberty; from submission to the law of supply and demand. The weakened State either collapsed before its desires or became its ideological tool. Justice, to the capitalist, was but the assurance that the economically defenseless, along with those lacking a purely economic ambition in life, received no protection from his demands. The European continent was littered with the results of his “freedom”.

Believing the above description with all their hearts, intransigents argued that what Catholics needed in their own day was a much clearer political and social vision recognizing the two central truths that no modern naturalist promoting the cause of “business as usual” would ever accept: first of all, man’s simultaneously natural and supernatural character, the former requiring the correction and transformation provided by the latter; and, secondly, his real existence as both an individual and fraternal being, with private and communal concerns. Both these truths were crucial to confronting the “social problem” brought about through the Industrial Revolution, which the intransigents recognized to be the most explosive issue of the age and which, as we have seen, they were convinced both liberal capitalist and socialist partisans failed miserably to understand. Any thinker formed by the Socratic Tradition and the corrective and transforming message of the Word would know that he could not base his knowledge of the functioning of the economy upon his unaided, atomistic reason and desires alone. He would realize that his economic reasoning and decisions must be informed by the deeper wisdom gained by actively living under the authoritative guidance of the family, fraternal and professional organizations, and the State; by accepting the supernatural moral authority of the Church; by ultimately seeing economic needs through the eyes provided by all of nature’s tools and those of nature’s Creator and Redeemer as well.

Such an economist would enter into his studies with his eyes wide open. He would be aware that his discipline was not merely the science of gaining wealth but of gaining wealth in union with all other natural and supernatural requirements for attaining the good life. He would understand that he could not promote behavior that might, at least in the short run, make men wealthier, if it would be better for them and for their neighbors, in the long run, to act differently. Again, he would recognize that what this “better” meant would have to be defined by taking stock of a variety of factors that the collective natural and supernatural wisdom of the ages deemed to be important: a balance of agriculture and industry; neighborhood stability and access to the necessities of life; stewardship of the environment; defense of deeply-rooted customs and the beautiful achievements of high cultures; the demands of justice and charity; the need to transform all things in Christ so as to aid man’s quest for eternal salvation. The truly wise economist would teach that men were not free to gain wealth obtained at the expense of leveling the Roman Forum to create more parking spaces for easier shopping at the supermarkets of the Eternal City; of turning patriotic celebrations and sacred festivals into nothing other than elaborate occasions for purchase and consumption; of marketing whatever might satisfy the wishes of revelers participating in a Gay Pride Week. Simply put, the truly wise economist would see that man did not live by bread alone, nor did it profit him if he gained the whole world and lost his soul in the process. And he would encourage wise social authorities to use all their strength to oppose the victory of economic materialism, even if this were democratically, but mistakenly, supported by ninety-nine per cent of a given population.

By now, it should be clear that the kinds of Catholic criticisms represented by journals like La Civiltà Cattolica had nothing whatsoever to do with a desire to return to some idyllic, pastoral past on a feudal manor filled with altruistic barons and voluntarily servile peasants. It was not at all concerned with adulating the personal early morning collection of eggs or the milking of cows. Intransigent criticisms were partly the product of a philosophical, historical, and sociological study. But, more importantly still, they were the result of a militant, revived understanding of the meaning of the Word in history that battled coherently all declarations of independence from God’s creative and redemptive plan, including those concerning economic methodology and morality. Thinkers involved with developing a Catholic Social Doctrine realized that capitalist investment in modern industry was yielding a greater productivity than man had ever known before. A number were fully aware of benefits emerging from industrialization. And they were also convinced that having entered down its pathway there was no easy, charitable way out of it either. Its machinery, once activated, was relentless in its demands.

What these thinkers wanted was what they indeed got: a basic clarification of the difference of the Catholic from the revolutionary spirit in economics. This began, appropriately enough, with that general symbol of the enunciation of the Catholic thesis: Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors. For the fifty-eighth error attacked in its assault on the whole of modern naturalism was the one that claimed that “no other forces are to be recognized except those that reside in matter, and all the rectitude and excellence of morality ought to be placed in the accumulation and increase of riches by every possible means, and the gratification of pleasure”.¹⁴⁴ And what the Syllabus dealt with “negatively”, by condemning the unacceptable positions of Catholic opponents, Leo XIII (1878-1903) approached “positively”, outlining, in encyclicals like Rerum novarum (1891), the necessary underpinnings of a truly Word-friendly economic order.¹⁴⁵

It is true, as critics of the Catholic Social Doctrine now taking shape have noted, that this positive teaching is in many respects a very sketchy and flexible one. It does indeed allow for a kaleidoscope of practical responses to modern economic conditions, ranging from calls to scrap the liberal capitalist system entirely to acceptance of the basic framework that this system has created and vigorously maintained as a prudential necessity. Still, there is no doubt whatsoever that the Church deemed the “intransigents” to be correct on one absolutely crucial matter: the importance of rejecting the principle of the unrestrained free market as a morally reprehensible standard that understood neither man’s simultaneous individual and social character nor his need to satisfy his supernatural as well as his temporal destiny. This rejection rings loud and clear through every papal statement on political economy. To paraphrase a certain American Catholic weekly, the Church decided that no one could be a sincere Catholic and a supporter of the unrestrained free market simultaneously. Such a supporter would write himself out of the Catholic camp by his purely natural and individualist vision of life. He would do nothing other than serve as a conduit for a socialist reaction of equally reprehensible spirit.¹⁴⁶

M. Culture Wars

Although the intransigent position gained an effective dominance in the life of the Church after 1848 and played a major and direct role in her teachings involving politics and social justice, this by no means freed it from continued and quite influential opposition even inside the Catholic camp. Yes, it is true that the Syllabus caught the majority of liberal Catholics off guard. And, indeed, most of them took its publication as a deathblow to their movement. Montalembert saw the Syllabus as a vindication of Veuillot, who happened to be in Rome at the time of its release. He also expressed a passion to chastise with “an avenging whip the brazen faces of these Jesuits of the Civiltà” for their part in inspiring such a document.¹⁴⁷

But Msgr. Dupanloup, the Bishop of Orleans and a liberal Catholic stalwart, did not lose heart. Encouraged by various friends in the curia who claimed that both the pope and Cardinal Antonelli (1806-1876), the Secretary of State, wanted the Syllabus to be interpreted contextually and prudentially, he decided to intervene to save the day for “openness” to the modern world. He did so by transforming a planned essay criticizing the Franco-Italian Convention of 1864—a political agreement concerning the removal of French troops from papal Rome—into a liberal Catholic interpretation and “defense” of the Syllabus.

Dupanloup’s pamphlet was a masterpiece of liberal Catholic equivocation; a good story if ever there was one. He actually appealed in it to the Civiltà’s thesis-hypothesis distinction, which he repeatedly attributed to the journal by name, claiming to share the same approach as that truly pro-Syllabus journal. But Dupanloup’s definition of thesis and hypothesis was very different, in fact, from that of the Civiltà. He made it appear that the evil castigated in the Syllabus was the exaggeration of good liberal hypotheses—e.g., Belgium’s wonderful liberal government must immediately exist everywhere—when the difficulty really concerned liberal definitions of freedom and progress which, while always erroneous, might nevertheless have to be tolerated in practice—e.g., Belgium’s evil separation of Church and State might have to be endured in order to avoid civil war in that specific country. The spirit of Dupanloup’s pamphlet was one of sighing over a temporary inability to be “modern” everywhere, whereas the spirit of the Syllabus was that of lamenting the need to be liberal anywhere, in view of the eventual state of enslavement to arbitrary will that this liberalism ensured.

Dupanloup’s pamphlet reached Rome on January 26^th, 1865, accompanied by the blessing of Msgr. Chigi, the nuncio in Paris. It was indeed warmly received, although liberal Catholic claims that it became the official interpretation of the document are absurd. Pius IX himself said that no popular pamphlet of this nature could be looked to for a precise definition of the meaning of the Syllabus. Moreover, the letter of praise sent to Dupanloup by Francesco Mercurelli, the Pope’s Latin Secretary, was similar if not practically identical to the large number of others he sent to persons who had written essays in support of the Syllabus that offered interpretations completely opposed to that of Dupanloup.¹⁴⁸

But the truths of the matter are insignificant. Liberal Catholic claims concerning Dupanloup and the Syllabus are still generally believed to be true today. Dupanloup effectively turned a pro forma approval of his pamphlet into the argument that a pope whose “hands were tied” really favored liberal Catholics in his heart of hearts—and that this meant that one day in the future the validity of liberalism would again be made manifest. Dupanloup succeeded partly because his arguments were so sophistic that they even confused and temporarily convinced La Civiltà Cattolica itself—at least until Veuillot enlightened it.¹⁴⁹ But, more importantly, he succeeded because the danse macabre was dragging so many people into a revolutionary way of life that for a large segment of the Catholic population the very possibility of grasping a truly pro-Syllabus argument was rapidly fading away.

In France, liberal Catholicism gained support from continued proponents of Gallicanism. This might seem surprising, given the role played in the movement by Mennaisiens like Montalembert. After all, Gallican bishops had been deeply angered by the assault on their seminaries and their liturgies by the Ultramontanism that the disciples of Lamennais, Montalembert included, had stimulated. Such bishops, however, generally supported French governmental policies, whatever they might be, and this, in fact, had been one of Lamennais’ chief complaints against them. Therefore, when the Second Empire entered the lists against militant, anti-modernist intransigents deemed dangerous to the projects of Napoleon III---which included assistance for the Italian Risorgimento---they were gradually able to make common cause with their former enemies within the now bitterly divided Catholic Party.

Although most Gallicans tended to be restrained in their outright opposition, some, like Henri Louis Maret (1805-1884), were quite openly eager to fight attempts by the intransigents to free the Church and Catholics from complete submission to local civil law. Nominally Catholic bureaucrats, alongside those of Jansenist mindset who lamented the turn of the tide against either naturalism or enlightened piety, joined them. The situation improved, from the intransigent standpoint, for most of the 1870’s. This was due both to a sense of national humiliation after the defeat at the hands of Prussia widely attributed to the frivolity of the regime of Napoleon III, as well as to the possible restoration of a legitimate monarch, “Henry V”, who was decidedly friendly to the anti-liberal cause. But it took a drastic turn for the worse with the victory of the anticlerical republicans by the end of that decade. That victory for a “Republic of the Republicans” boded ill both in terms of a revival of internal Catholic opposition to intransigent goals as well as direct anti-Catholic governmental measures.¹⁵⁰

Catholic enemies of the intransigents in the German countries also remained active after the publication of the Syllabus. Just as in France, Gallican/Febronian-minded bishops augmented their number, along with moralists convinced that the anti-Jansenist spirituality central to the intransigent spirit would ensure the formation of a dull-witted, superstitious, lazy, Catholic flock, unsuitable to life in modern industrial society. Members of this alliance were not averse to calling in the secular authority to support their positions when they believed that such intervention could guarantee them an ecclesiastical victory--hence, the attempt by those who would become known as Old Catholics to obtain governmental interference to prevent the proclamation of Papal Infallibility at First Vatican Council.

Catholic and Protestant German bureaucrats who were upset by the ecclesiastical autonomy demanded by the intransigents aided the more religious minded opponents of the victorious Ultramontanist position. German liberals and nationalists in general joined together with them, both those of the Prussian dominated Empire proclaimed in 1871 as well as their brethren in the remaining Hapsburg lands who detested the revived spirit of Roman universalism and longed for Austrian union with the new Reich. Moreover, Hapsburg humiliation at the hands of Prussia forced that cooperation with Hungary that created the so-called Dual Monarchy, temporarily weakened the budding Catholic Movement, and thus gave new opportunities for liberals to flex their always very powerful muscles. In short, supporters of the Old Catholic schism, liberals, and nationalists in all the German States linked in continual calls for a “proper” secular purgation of the “errors” of intransigent disturbers of the peace. The modern age was indeed proving to be one that Marsilius of Padua would have appreciated.¹⁵¹

Such efforts at purgation multiplied and intensified throughout Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century, affecting Italy, the German countries, the Netherlands, and eventually Belgium and France as well. Sometimes these purgative measures focused on a single issue, especially that of education. Very frequently, however, the crisis they provoked was a universal one, striking not only at primary and secondary schooling but at the existence of the religious orders engaged in it, the ability of Church authorities to control their dioceses and parishes, the general freedom of association, and the very right of individual Catholics to speak out on any political matter whatsoever: in short, to use the German term for such activity, due to a full-scale Kulturkampf or “culture war” of the kind that was openly proclaimed in the Kingdom of Prussia and the new Empire that it dominated.¹⁵²

Catholic reaction to these measures was often very impressive, giving hope to intransigent dreams of a powerful political and social reaction to the Revolution. Lay Catholics were particularly incensed over school issues, which directly touched the average family. “They are not going to have it, the beautiful souls of children”, Flemish peasants sang.¹⁵³ “ The generosity and ardor of the Catholics surpassed everything imaginable”, one observer of the Belgian scene reported. “Almost every Catholic meeting which I attended at that time”, a witness of Austrian passion noted, “was a fiery furnace for the souls, from which a torrent of sparks and flames of holy enthusiasm was generated; a powerful forge, in which the armaments were hardened for a battle for the Cross which now threatened from all sides”.¹⁵⁴ Catholics saw such liberal-fomented “School Wars” as the first step towards the complete destruction of the Church. If secularists succeeded in destroying Catholic education, one activist noted, “the church will then be a building with four walls, whose interior, as the liberals count on, will become emptier with every decade”.¹⁵⁵

Self-conscious hierarchies in various countries often called upon Catholic lay associations to fight the good fight in these battles. Thus, Belgian prelates summoned the laity to three seminal organizing congresses in Mâlines in 1863, 1864, and 1867, culminating in the formation of the Fédération des cercles catholiques in 1868. After collective appeals for repeal of nefarious educational laws were ignored, the organized hierarchy and laity moved on to stronger action--teachers by resigning their positions in public schools, parents by refusing to send their children to them, and priests by denying the sacraments to anyone who failed to toe the designated line. A private Catholic school system was planned, and a campaign launched to pay for it. By 1880, this network was in place and had managed to garner the majority of Belgian students. Its creation provoked still more anticlerical legislation. Committees of resistance of all kinds were then formed, with the Catholic press publicizing a petition signed by 317,000 against the repressive educational legislation.

After similar episcopal action, Dutch Catholics also focused on the construction of a primary school network. One ought to note that their organizational vigor was matched, if not surpassed, by pious Calvinists. Abraham Kuyper’s (1837-1920) league against school reform and his newspaper, De Standaard, joined with Catholics in a massive petition movement demanding repeal of the Netherland’s detested 1878 decrees on secular education. At a time when the entire Dutch electorate was limited to around 100,00 voters, Kuyper’s petition collected 305,000 signatures; its Catholic counterpart an additional 164,000 names.

Popular reaction to the cultural wars in Austria came with demonstrations in favor of the Venerable Bishop Franz Rudigier of Linz (1811-1884), imprisoned in 1869 for his vociferous opposition to the changes of the newly liberal government of the Hapsburg Empire. Various lay organizations came into being at this moment, with Karl von Vogelsang’s (1818-1890) newspaper, Das Vaterland, drawing up a complex battle strategy for the future, economically and socially as well as politically.

Perhaps most impressive was the organizational fever initially excited by the Kulturkampf in the German Empire, leading to the formation of the Katholische Frauenbund, Katholische Mütterverein, Katholische Kaufmännische Vereinigung, and a large number of youth, student, and teacher groups. Growth in the Catholic Press was enormous, the Kölnische Volkszeitung and the Berlin Germania being the giants of the media. Most famous of all the associations formed after 1870 was the Volksverein für das Katholische Deutschland (1890), whose stronghold was the Rhineland, and whose secretaries, Franz Hitze (1851-1921) and August Pieper (1866-1942), presided over a vast membership undertaking all manner of tasks on behalf of the Catholic population.

Catholic associations seeking not just to overturn anticlerical legislation but also to replace it with Church-friendly laws often did “play ball” with the existing system, first approaching existing “conservative parties”—i.e., conservative liberals—to serve as their agents. Such parties would be offered what were in essence contracts. The network of active Catholic associations would do much of the propaganda and legwork for the election of conservative deputies to parliament, with the proviso that these, when winning office, would follow Catholic bidding on state matters touching upon religion.

Results rarely matched expectations, thereby confirming the validity of the basic intransigent argument. Conservatives were too inclined to negotiate with immovable enemies of the Catholic cause. Gradually, Catholic activists came to loathe conservatives as “doubtful friends”, people who were happy to have the support of a religious electorate but only to twist that backing to serve their own narrow purposes. It thus became clear, as the Italian activist, Ruggiero Bonghi, said in 1879 that this “exchange between Catholics and Conservatives is a great error and is very suspect”; that “Catholic feeling is not necessarily conservative, and conservative feeling is not necessarily Catholic”.¹⁵⁶ Catholics were not alone in this bitterness, either. The Dutch Calvinist leader and fellow traveler Kuyper insisted that the battle being fought by all religious people was also “against conservatism; not conservatism of a specific brand but against conservatism of every description”.¹⁵⁷ Although in many places they called themselves “rightists”, conservatives were soon understood to be merely “liberals who had been mugged”. Conservatives were men who shared with liberals the same basic Enlightenment principles, especially with regard to the concept of economic freedom, but who had simply become more cautious about their implementation in most other realms. Hence, one saw an activist temptation to move from contractual agreements to the establishment of consciously Catholic parties of their own.¹⁵⁸

We have already noted that the first clear instance of such a venture was the “Committee for the Defense of Religious Freedom”. This organization, promoted by Charles de Montalembert and Louis Veuillot’s Parisian daily newspaper, l’Univers, elected 144 representatives to the French Parliament in the 1840’s. Another example of early political development was the “Catholic Club”, composed of various prelates, clerics and laymen, which took shape at the German revolutionary Frankfurt Assembly of 1848. A third initiative was the Prussian “Catholic Faction”, founded in 1851 by August Reichensperger (1808-1895), his brother Peter (1810-1892), and Hermann von Malinckrodt (1821-1874) for the purpose of defending the freedoms enshrined in the religious clauses of their Kingdom’s Constitution and faithfully respected until the cultural war twenty years later. After 1870, these rather loosely organized factions began to tighten up. Catholics from Prussia formed the Center Party, which also functioned in the new, democratically elected, imperial Reichstag. The increasing severity of the Kulturkampf legislation from 1872 onwards made the Center Party’s fortune, since the devastation of the Catholic hierarchy and priesthood during these very difficult years necessitated what amounted to a temporary assumption of church guidance by the active laity.

Belgium, in 1884, witnessed the formation of the Union nationale pour le redressement des griefs as a temporary “war machine against liberalism” and its secularist educational laws. Although the Union still desired to work with conservatives, it nevertheless aimed to “absolutely prevent the return to power of an autonomous Right, which would not take into account, as it did [not] in the past, the demands of the Catholic world”.¹⁵⁹ The electoral campaign “was animated, enthusiastic, marked by religious mysticism”, and helped enormously by the various Catholic associations. Results were spectacular. June of 1884 brought a triumph over the Liberals that was actually “more a massacre than a defeat”, and the hated laws were repealed.¹⁶⁰

In the Netherlands, Kuyper formed the Antirevolutionary Party, its Declaration of Principles proclaiming consistent resistance to the world of 1789. Catholics, under the guidance of Fr. Hermann Shaepman (1844-1903), were by that time also building a “war machine” of their own out of a federation of local groupings. Despite enormous disagreements and even hatreds, Kuyper proclaimed the so-called Unio Mystica of Catholics and Protestants in 1888.¹⁶¹ Both denominations coordinated their support for candidates. The Conservative Party broke up under the pressure, and, just as in Belgium, the Liberals were soundly trounced. Calvinists and Catholics then continued to share power, ensuring their separate, autonomous free development, though the “party” formed by the latter remained an amorphous entity until some years into the next century.

As early as 1868 the Austrian newspaper Das Vaterland had called for an “anti-liberal confederation” of all those who ‘suffered from the financial and material consequences of the recently adopted system’”.¹⁶² A coalition was indeed formed in 1887, holding a convention the following year whose importance was grasped by Karl Lueger (1844-1910), the head of the Vienna democrats. Das Vaterland promoted Lueger’s leadership of the coalition and suggested the name Christian Social Party to designate it. In 1890, the parliamentary leader of the traditional conservatives, Alois Liechtenstein, “grew weary of his lack of tactical success” and joined the Christian Socials. By 1897 a permanent central party bureaucracy was firmly established.¹⁶³

Italy’s introduction to lay-clerical associations began with Brunone Lanteri’s (1759-1830) early nineteenth century revival of pre-revolutionary amicizie cattoliche. Many Catholic newspapers aided this work from the 1820’s onwards, the most influential of which was La Civiltà Cattolica, which we have seen began publication in 1850. The creation of an extensive network of Catholic associations was regarded by most of these journals to be the only means of making the wishes of the “real country” known in the unnatural situation established by the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861. This was due to the fact that that kingdom’s liberal constitution limited the number of people who could vote to a miniscule percentage of the population, based upon wealth and education, and insisted that its representatives act only in an “enlightened” manner. Where Catholic deputies had been validly elected, as in 1857, in what was then the Kingdom of Sardinia, they had been excluded as unacceptable because they were Catholic and ipso facto unenlightened. “When we took part in elections and in many places won a victory”, an exasperated Catholic witness noted, “we called down upon ourselves all manner of vexations, and our work went up in smoke”.¹⁶⁴

Hence, the real, long-lasting backdrop for the famous non expedit, the papal prohibition of Catholic participation in the political life of the Kingdom on the national, as opposed to local level, was not aggression against the Temporal Power. It was the recognition that participation under current conditions would be a sham. Hence, it was better to stand apart, and, as the Osservatore Romano noted in 1880, prepare for real participation in the future by temporary abstention from the existing fraudulent system. It was this that took place in Italy, where a policy of neither voting nor being elected in a liberal system designed to harm religion was adopted, and Catholics “participated” in social life by “abstaining” from a political fraud. A justifiable temporary abstention necessarily presupposed serious work outside of legal, constitutional national politics. It was to the end of laboring effectively as a kind of parallel government that the vast bulk of Catholic organizations and local parish committees came to be coordinated by the Opera dei congressi e dei comitati cattolici, founded in 1874 and given its definitive name in 1881. The Opera met in regular congresses and aided the work of local groups through five permanent sections established in 1884: Organization and Catholic Action, Christian Social Economy, Instruction and Education, Press, and Christian Art. The second section, headed at the end of the reign of Leo XIII by Giuseppe Toniolo (1845-1918), founder of the Unione cattolica per gli studi sociali, was especially active and attentive to the intransigent spirit.

N. Christendom and the Modern Death Camp

Let us conclude this chapter by asking what the intransigents’ appreciation of the reality of a liberation of mankind from the corrective and transforming mission of the Word under the specific conditions presented by a nineteenth century undergoing all the changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution actually would mean. The contemporary picture that they painted, as one might expect, was by no means a pretty one. And they felt that it was destined to become progressively worse.

Taparelli d’Azeglio, both in his Saggio teoretico di dritto naturale appoggiato sul fatto (1840-1843) as well as in numerous articles in La Civiltà Cattolica after 1850, discussed the new world order that he saw rapidly coming into being. This global community, he believed, was not only inevitable, given modern industrial advances, but actually, from a Christian aspect, in many ways desirable. After all, he argued, Christianity understood its mission to be a universal one, and had, historically, been the enthusiastic promoter of international order. Of course, a just international order would have to be one based on the acceptance, correction, and transformation of nature in Christ. This meant that any authority that it might legitimately possess would be one that was based upon the natural nations forming it. Moreover, it would have to work to perfect the national, ethnic, corporate, and individual distinctions of all of its worldwide members.

But what would happen should this global order in the making be a purely naturalist one? Taparelli did not think that one had to look far to see the consequences, since they were readily apparent already from the time of the Treaty of Westphalia onwards. International order, under naturalist circumstances, would be built upon the will of the strongest powers of the day, and it would be purely materialist in character. Rather than perfecting natural national, ethnic, corporate, and individual distinctions, it would seek to destroy them. La Civiltà Cattolica published a number of articles lamenting what was happening in the Far East as a result of the “opening” of China and Japan to Western domination to illustrate his point quite dramatically. Unless naturalism were defeated, Taparelli predicted a future filled with ever more intense and nationalist-inspired competition, ever-larger armies, ever-greater expenditures on armaments, ever more brutal warfare, and—appropriately enough—efforts biologically to improve “the races” engaged in it.¹⁶⁵

Louis Veuillot is probably the most interesting source to look to for the requisite summary of the disasters that would attend Catholic defeat in the culture wars. As far as he was concerned, the general downward spiral of the character of life brought about by modern naturalism, combined with massive industrial development and the machine like standardization accompanying it, guaranteed a gloomy future for mankind. “Everywhere”, Veuillot insisted, “the reduction of the truth has diminished intelligence, hearts, and even the instinct of life”.¹⁶⁶ Western society, stung to the quick, would soon “sail on a sea of platitudes where it will grow immensely bored”.¹⁶⁷ Men had become “barbarians of civilization”,¹⁶⁸ expressing themselves in a “jargon that would draw forth cries of indignation from the most careless writer of one hundred years ago”,¹⁶⁹ and so bourgeois in their vices that they no longer even knew how to sin with gusto: ¹⁷⁰

Between the sensualists of the past and the sensualists of our day, there is the same difference as between the great lords who ran about the world astonishing it with their prodigalities, and those sons of the enriched whose splendor and decadence one section of Paris today sees. The earlier group wanted to ruin themselves and did not succumb to it; the latter calculate, they are rich, yet succumb without even having known to make a semblance of being magnificent. Everything is lacking to the poverty of our times, including the brilliance and often even the substance of the vices it would like to have.

So numb was the modern Frenchman to the call of glory that a Saint Bernard would find himself able only “to convince a hundred bourgeois to make their Easter Duty”, and this, “above all if the socialists had preached there before {him}”.¹⁷¹ The only extraordinary enterprise for which he could arouse enthusiasm was that of “elevating the world to commercial and industrial civilization”, which signified spreading factories, knowledge of banking, and opium to China and India. A terminus to this withering of the soul was clear: the complete abolition of the man of fiber:¹⁷²

No more men anywhere! The production of man has ceased in France. Some men of more or less complete honesty, but lacking talent; some very incomplete men of talent lacking all honesty; no attachment to any truth, but the most senseless attachment to the most mad errors; no more good sense, except in damning uselessly the impotent and evil works one persists in pursuing; no more pride in the face of anything base, yet puerile and dangerous and even cowardly arrogance in face of all that which

must be feared….

Yet France had not yet tasted the dregs of the cup of the spiritual boredom brought about by naturalist materialism. The United States had already had this opportunity, and therefore offered a more depressing example of the fate awaiting western man. America was a land that had never known the benefits of Catholic community. It was composed of individual, profit hungry economic units, “men without history, without cradles and without tombs; adventurers of both sexes who are not even barbarians”.¹⁷³ Its cities did not resemble the European polis, because their citizens were “gathered together solely to make one another mutually sweat gold”,¹⁷⁴ and because they “only place in common the flesh from which they nourish machines for making money”.¹⁷⁵ It was no wonder, he answered the Journal des Debats, that a place like Chicago could be rebuilt as quickly as it was after the great fire, since nothing of lasting importance could ever have been lost in the conflagration. The same could be said of the entire nation, were it to disappear in some holocaust. Priests who entered this model land of insipid modernity “go to carry extreme unction to races who are dying and to some savages expatriated from Europe”:¹⁷⁶

This people does not cry for its dead. It only knows how to cry for money. Fire can grip its cities, but it devours in them neither a monument, nor an art object, nor a memory, and the money melted is not money lost at all. One draws it from the ruins; it is often even good business.

One can look at North America and the direction in which it is headed: its rapid progress, owed to the most brutalizing work, has fascinated Europe: but already the true results of this exclusively material progress appear. Barbarism, wicked behavior, bankruptcy, systematic destruction of the natives, imbecilic slavery of the victors, devoted to the most harsh and nauseating life under the yoke of their own machines. America might sink completely into the ocean and the human race would not have lost anything. Not a saint, not an artist, not a thinker—at least if one does not also call thought that aptitude for twisting iron to open pathways to packages.

Through fisticuffs and slander, by means of a thousand frauds, they {the Americans} manufacture for themselves from day to day governmental tools made purposely to be worn out quickly….They take a workman, a corporal, a buffalo herder, a pig-skinner, a speculator in newspapers; they place him at the head of the country, under safe guard; they heap outrages upon him, he allows himself a thousand improprieties, and this lasts three years {sic}, thanks to his tricks, when he has sufficient spirit to trick. When he departs, covered with spittle, another replaces him who spat upon his predecessor, and upon whom someone else will spit. This works for them, and it will last until they have become too savage to retain the same leader for three years. They will then create dictators who will perpetuate their rule, or they will devour one another, and the loveliest republic of the world will end by being a strongly disciplined hereditary empire, or a cave and a slaughterhouse.

An article entitled Le canon rayé, published in 1859, noted that which could happen when an absolute revolutionary power flourished in tandem with banal modern civilization. The nineteenth century, the witness to this phenomenon, would proceed inevitably towards the establishment of a universal state, headed by a charismatic dictator, whose power would rest upon a bureaucratic elite skilled in techniques of manipulation:¹⁷⁷

Everywhere the conqueror will find one thing, everywhere the same, the only thing that war and the Revolution will nowhere have overturned: bureaucracy. Everywhere, the bureaux will have prepared the way for him; everywhere they await him with a servile eagerness. He will support himself on them; the universal Empire will be the administrative Empire par excellence. Adding without end to that precious machinery, he will carry it to a point of incomparable power. Thus perfected, administration will satisfy simultaneously its own genius and the designs of its master in applying itself to two main works: the realization of equality and of material wellbeing to an unheard degree; the suppression of liberty to an unheard degree.

Men ruled by this system would be much more easily oppressed than at any time in the past. Such facility would be due not so much to the fact that new weapons would give the dictator undreamed instruments of control as to the sad reality that stupefied machine man would approve of his chains, and a dull-witted intelligentsia would bless them. The subjects created by contemporary civilization were, after all, totally distinct from men of preceding generations. “These forces, which today’s man possesses”, Veuillot wrote, “possess him also; they engage him in weaknesses as unmeasured as his pride; weaknesses which succeed in changing him completely”.¹⁷⁸ Men had been transformed into absurdities, beings unable to desire the destiny outlined for them by the Gospel, “too powerful to control the taste for pleasure”. The universal Empire would enslave such creatures by providing for their most banal needs: ¹⁷⁹

The police will take care that one is amused and that its reins never trouble the flesh. The administration will dispense the citizen of all care. It will fix his situation, his habitation, his vocation, his occupations. It will dress him and allot to him the quantity of air that he must breathe. It will have chosen him his mother, it will choose him his temporary wife; it will raise his children; it will take care of him in his illnesses; it will bury and burn his body, and dispose of his ashes in a record box with his name and his number.

As time went on, this task would become simpler and simpler. A decline in human imagination would entail a destruction of the taste for a variety of pleasures:¹⁸⁰

But why would he change places and climates? There will no longer be any different places or climates, nor any curiosity anywhere. Man will find everywhere the same moderate temperature, the same customs, the same administrative rules, and infallibly the same police taking the same care of him. Everywhere the same language will be spoken, the bayadères will everywhere dance the same ballet. The old diversity would be a memory of the old liberty, an outrage to the new equality, a greater outrage to the bureaux that would be suspected of not being able to establish uniformity everywhere. Their pride will not suffer that. Everything will be done in the image of the main city of the Empire and of the world.

Naturalist Europe merited chastisement from non-western peoples. Her divine mission---the mission for which she had been amply supplied with material blessings---was “to carry light everywhere, dissolve chains, awaken peoples sleeping in the shadow of death”.¹⁸¹ Instead of fulfilling these functions, she was responsible for ruining legitimate native cultures and replacing them with a sterile, materialistic civilization, all body and no soul. Could one not expect that the technology used to expand European power might be turned against the center of this machine society? Might it not be the case that the rest of the world would come to seek in the old continent itself that which she had refused to share? “The paths are made, the frontiers are pierced, it will come”.¹⁸² This prophecy was indeed to be proved true. But not before there first broke out a firestorm.

Chapter 10

Firestorm in the Kingdom of the Word

A. On Firestorms

Very high on the list of the many unhappy discoveries of the twentieth century is the one that gave men the ability artificially to create a firestorm by means of aerial bombardment. Both explosives and firebombs were needed for this purpose. Still, no matter how many of these devices were tossed onto a given town, without an abundance of flammable materials and the right climactic conditions the desired effects could not be achieved. But flammable materials there were, especially in the medieval and baroque centers of many German towns, large and small. And when climate cooperated, as it did in cities like Hamburg, Leipzig, and Dresden, the results were cataclysmic.

The Mystical Body of Christ in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries was to experience many “firestorms”, even before the Second World War gave to these a literal meaning. Numerous sworn enemies from the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo hurled the requisite explosives and firebombs into her bosom. Nevertheless, they could not have been so effective in doing the damage that they did had her members not also provided them with flammable materials suitable to their purpose. Although literal bombs and bombed out buildings did eventually play a role in these developments, once again, it is the question of deadly ideas and a climate of opinion suitable to their spread that is our chief concern here. Hence, our focus of attention in this dramatic chapter is the interaction of the “bombers of the words” seeking acceptance of their varied interpretations of “nature as is” with the flammable arguments and often highly flawed actions of the defenders of the corrective and transforming message of Christ. It was this interaction that succeeded in creating the cataclysmic firestorms burning through the heart of Christendom from the 1890’s onwards.

B. The Willful Fire Bombers (1890’s-1914)

A central argument of this book has been twofold in character: first of all, that the spirit stimulating the members of the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo is basically willful; and, secondly, that revolutionary Enlightenment naturalism has been the chief weapon in its arsenal in modern times. We have seen that the unprecedented violence accompanying the willfulness of the radical revolutionary movement of the 1790’s brought about a reaction against these more volatile proponents of change from both the secular and the religious world. Although the logic of naturalist Enlightenment willfulness unceasingly continued to develop intellectually, aesthetically, and politically in the first half of the nineteenth century, it could not force its way as directly and swiftly into the heart of western life as the radicals had hoped.

Instead, as Catholic journals like La Civiltá Cattolica argued, naturalism conquered the West indirectly, through the agency of liberalism. Just as the “moderate”, “reasonable” approach of John Locke was the best means for gaining western acceptance of Hobbes’ vision of life as irrational, atomistic, jungle warfare, it was the path of liberalism, which seemed to many people to be one of common sense and concern for peaceful change, that served as the fatherly “front” for a filial unfolding of the underlying willfulness of the whole naturalist project.

Whether one acknowledges intellectual and political liberals as the fathers of more radical naturalist sons or not, the fact remains that the more belligerent proponents of willfulness made a spectacular comeback as the nineteenth century moved forward. Saber rattling was a much more openly acceptable behavior in all sorts of realms from the 1890’s onwards, thereby stimulating the figurative and literal firebombing of the twentieth century. The war of all against all, always implicit in the Nominalist, Protestant, Radical Enlightenment, Whig, and, yes, liberal visions of life, had by this time made of the struggle of “inflamed wills” an outright virtue wherever western influence extended.¹⁸³

“Vitalism”—the notion that “energetic, successful action” proved the truth of one’s “ideas”—was indeed everywhere in the turn of the century air. It was called upon to serve all manner of contemporary causes, from western colonialism to radical social revolution. Parallel with it, one notices an ever more common and frank tendency to treat the intellectual baggage of any given movement as mythical—namely, as something helpful in stirring up the action, struggle, and warfare of the nations, races, or workers of the world, or useful in justifying the weaponry giving strength and vigor to a specific crusade, but perhaps not necessarily true in and of itself. Out of the struggles of life, and war, perhaps, above all else, would come purification and progress. This purification and progress would then undoubtedly clarify the meaning of existence. Barring that, it would teach the nihilist message preached with prophetic fervor by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900): namely, the pathetic and slavish absurdity of any hunt for truth and purpose in the universe. Nietzsche’s insistence that he “must destroy what other men cherish” was simply the nihilist twist on the conviction of many vitalists of the dawning twentieth century that they “must destroy in order to ensure Progress”. Both, in effect, saw the age that lay before them as one of monumental upheaval—and welcomed it with joy.

Reasons for the rise of this vitalist spirit are legion. In one sense, it was but a development of already powerful Romantic teachings regarding the importance of cultivating energetic life forces, as expressed in Catholic circles by Lamennais. Social Darwinian evolutionary theory, with its emphasis upon a “survival of the fittest” that appeared to demonstrate Mother Nature’s preferential option for struggle and strength, also strongly aided its growth. So did the basic practical problem of reaching any kind of definitive intellectual conclusions and affecting any truly serious longed-for change in the presence of an ever-increasing number of competing rational explanations of the character of nature. For just as Voltaire reminded men that a myriad of Christian sects combating with one another would cancel out the ability of any of them to achieve a definitive victory, observers of the turn of the century scene could note the same impotence triumphing out of the institutionalized and “tame” struggle of the many nevertheless well-armed offshoots of naturalism.

New, later nineteenth century additions to this naturalist army included the racists. They found that Darwin’s teaching on the overriding importance of the biological struggle for life could be plumbed for arguments proving the necessity of a jungle conflict of blood groups, just as nationalists found in it further intellectual grounds for pitting nation against nation, and liberal capitalists justification for each free individual economic agent battling against his fellow materialists. Fresh forces also included the manifold representatives of the growing Socialist Movement. This was divided between anarchists on the one hand and the mix of labor union activists, orthodox Marxists, and moderate revisionists competing for control of the Social Democratic Parties encouraged by the Second International Movement launched in 1889 on the other.

That Socialist International was divided still further in the first decade of the Twentieth Century through the theories of Vladimir Ulyanov (1870-1924). Lenin’s Bolsheviks argued for taking advantage of historical opportunities to propel a population towards a communism that orthodox Marxists insisted could only arrive according to their master’s scientific, Hegelian schedule. This dictated a lengthy period of liberal bourgeois capitalist development before final victory. Bolsheviks also claimed that their swifter achievement of communism required the guidance of an elite party prepared to act violently and dictatorially, in total contradiction to the peaceful, democratic advance ever more envisaged by the revisionist faction within the International.

Let us once again remind ourselves, before moving on, that even if it was a “common sense” liberalism that catapulted western man into a world obsessed with irrational energies, it was not necessarily liberals as such. Many individual liberals did not “choose” or “will” that such horrible consequences should arise from their fundamental principles. Nevertheless, the logic of their vision gave them no rational basis on which to exorcise them. However upstanding individual liberals might be, they displayed a tendency to collapse before the onslaught of an active willfulness that repelled them, but whose fires they tacitly stoked. Liberals were as helpless as the inmates of the Davos tuberculosis sanatorium in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain when confronted with the vital energy stimulating an irrational strongman like Mynheer Peeperkorn, who managed to get them all to dance voluntarily to his irrational, willful tune. In fact, the preachers of common sense were even ready to call upon brutes just like Peeperkorn to protect what they themselves most “chose” to love but were increasingly unable to justify taking up arms to defend effectively on their own.

C. A Permanent Firebombing Propaganda Machine

Before moving away from the fire bombers, let us take this opportunity to return, once again, to the most important weapon in the armory of the many-headed Grand Coalition of the Status Quo: the black legends and the alternative good stories. It is appropriate to do so at the beginning of the twentieth century, because that armory was now stocked to overflowing. Each and every division in the GCSQ Army was at this point well equipped with its own favorite tales depicting the nightmare brought into the life of the world by a Christianity that took the corrective and transforming message of the Word seriously. Each and every faction used these black legends and alternative good stories to promote the Garden of Earthly Delights that its opposing vision would landscape.¹⁸⁴

Such tales, following the guidelines created by Isocrates, latched onto noble themes created by the Seeds of the Word, the Word Incarnate, and the Church in their work to correct and transform daily life. The noble themes in question were, however, co-opted to serve the specific approach of each member of the GCSQ in the overall common cause of shaping life to answer the “business as usual” demands of “nature as is”. All these themes were then linked to the kind of historical mythmaking popularized in the ancient world by Isocrates, making reference to foundation principles involving everything from Mother Nature to Christianity itself. All taught that the wicked, papal-guided, Roman Catholic Church had sought to corrupt and overturn their solid and good message. All played on the inevitable failures of Catholics to live up to the Christian vision to give credibility to their own willful plans for the individual and society.

Although there may seem to be a truly extraordinary variety of black legends and alternative good stories, they all, as indicated earlier in this work, basically reduce to two: either those condemning the Church and Catholics as the enemies of God as He should properly be understood, or others lambasting them as the manifest enemies of mankind. These tales had simply developed in variation and sophistication through the course of centuries. Opponents of Catholic Christianity had found multiple ways of fostering the two-pronged attack, all of them effective, even though one head of their general indictment of Catholic madness could often completely contradict another. Such wide-ranging and contradictory elements could also change and even disappear entirely from the scene, only to re-emerge unexpectedly in a later era, spreading dismay among bewildered believers who thought them long dead. Let us examine but a few examples of such clashing accusations below.

To begin with, we have seen that one finds instances in history when the Church and Catholics were indicted for “blasphemy” and even “atheism”. The Catholic crime in this regard was identified as that of worshipping a divinity sometimes described as tyrannical and at others as all too limited in character. On the one hand, the personal God of the Christians, a being who freely “invented” nature and then interfered miraculously in its life, was said to insult that true divinity that revealed itself in necessary actions dictated by an impersonal eternal calm. On the other, the Catholic deity was chastised as the parochial idol of a Near Eastern backwater whose missionary rampage had had the impious consequence of abolishing the many valid gods and ritual practices of the other peoples and cities of the globe.

Complaints of this sort slid easily into the related one of a stubborn, impious, Christian refusal to learn what really could and needed to be known about the true God. Catholic failure in this endeavor was often attributed to the rejection of the hunt to understand God through the messages of nature and nature alone. For it was through the natural order that God was thus said to reveal His character, whether in the eternity and regularity of the universe, or through its infinite and adorable diversity. But then Catholics were also chastised for frustrating the search for God for precisely the opposite reasons, and actually finding Him in the natural “data base”—in a flesh and blood Jewish man from the first imperial Roman century. Worship of this petty fetish then supposedly diverted men from consideration of the infinitely more magnificent divinity reflected through the majesty of the cosmos in general and of the sun and the stars in particular.

Further contradictory accusations were frequently made regarding Revelation. On the one hand, Catholics were accused of mocking the deity and cheapening His splendor through a dull-witted effort to imprison things godly in neat and petty dogmatic packages. Still, this, once again, did not prevent other critiques from depicting a Catholic mockery of the gods in a totally conflicting fashion—not as something nearsighted and parochial but, rather, as an endeavor unprecedentedly revolutionary and Promethean in character; as an outrageous attempt to allow fetid human hands to make war on Heaven and actually touch and then reflect upon ineffable wisdom.

Finally, there were specifically Christian-sounding envelopes into which the attack on the blasphemous Catholic Beast was stuffed as well. Thus, the Church could often be found reviled as an overbearing, demonic Antichrist, dedicated to a radical complication of true, simple, gospel religion; a demonic force that trampled upon Scripture, the principle of Apostolic Poverty, and the rights of local church communities. This was nuanced in Eastern Christian circles, with the Orthodox complaining of a myriad of Latin errors ranging from divergences over specific ritual actions to Roman legalism, intellectualism, and—ever more popular among Russian thinkers—failure to trust the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Conversely, she was frequently condemned for the exact reverse offense—that of all too consistently and faithfully proclaiming the evangelical message. Her transgression under these latter circumstances was identified as being that of preaching a hopelessly literalist vision of things divine; one that encouraged a childlike naiveté and resignation; one that shaped a submissive spirit permitting hypocritical strong men to pursue their cynical projects under the pious cover of God’s name, to the undoubted horror of Christ Himself.

Denunciation of Catholicism as the enemy of man also took two separate forms, depending upon whether Catholic Christianity was reprimanded for being either too positive in its view of nature’s potential or not enthusiastic enough about what could be done with the natural tools that the universe placed at man’s service. Critiques of the first type were often expressed in a spiritual manner. In these, one lamented the Church’s direction of believers to everlasting damnation by allowing them to think that they could actually work out their salvation in an intrinsically irredeemable natural cosmos. Nature, for such commentators, was merely a depraved jungle, whose degraded laws men and women were doomed to follow, engaging in a war of all against all rendering reconciliation of the world with heaven an utterly meaningless enterprise.

The second reprimand, shaped by more hopeful observers of the universe, maintained that Catholicism’s Revelation-and-Grace-rooted efforts to correct and transform all things in Christ were horribly insulting and destructive to the natural realm’s integrity and dignity. Once again, for some such thinkers, Catholic visions of supernatural interference harmed man by depriving him of the only channels for beneficial divine influence that he really did have at his disposal on this earth—natural forces, ranging from the State to personal human “feeling”, whose revelatory competence orthodox believers were said dangerously to underestimate. For others, the Catholic outlook crippled man by cutting him off from the precise, measurable progress emerging out of purely secular, scientific studies, stripped of all illusory divine concerns. Catholicism doomed humanity by replacing the hunt for real wisdom with a superstitious, magical, and ultimately insane pilgrimage to an unknowable or non-existent supernatural perfection.

Depending upon which of these approaches was emphasized, the Church and Catholics were anathematized as the opponents of everything of value to human beings: creative intellectual and aesthetic growth; economic development; individual freedom and sense of fulfillment; social peace and fraternity. Catholicism, in short, was the enemy of life and of all attempts to enjoy that power over existence which men were said to be definitely capable of exercising— if only they would consistently listen to the clear voice of the Defender of the Peace constituted by the natural world around or inside them.

Competent storytellers achieved high-minded grandeur by “seizing images” evoking the nobility of the anti-Word spirit in its tooth-and-nail conflict with a base and brutally wicked Catholic enemy. Here one found gripping, magnificent images of enduring significance, and mission statements regarding the struggle for spiritual growth, freedom, and dignity against Catholic enslavement of minds, hearts, souls, and bodies. Simplicity was added to grandeur by incarnating this eschatological battle of obvious good versus palpable evil in easily-recognizable and contrasting stereotypes: e.g., angelic popes, emperors, and kings; noble and persecuted Gospel lovers, naturalist philosophers, scientists, and economists or crusading journalists and freedom fighters on the one hand; mean spirited, obscurantist, often insane, conspiratorial, tyrannical, and persecuting pontiffs, priests, monks, mother superiors, mystics, scholastics, and all their lay slaves or cynical masters on the other.

These grand seized images, incarnated in simplistic stereotypes emphasizing the dramatic struggle of absolute Good versus total Evil, were then popularized in manifold form. Widespread effect was achieved by mobilizing and employing a mass of demonstrably appealing tools: song, novels and pamphlets; the stage; rabble-rousing, press-guided causes célèbres; the bons mots of upper class salons, transformed by their influential habitués into as many hammers to wield powerful political blows against the Catholic Sect in polite society; a brutal plebeian ridicule which avoided substantive argument the more that it ground the believer into the dirt. Points were effectively scored and high-minded lessons popularly taught even through a determined use of the weapon of silence, which subtly showed the world that Catholics and Catholicism were not to be mentioned by rational and decent men when topics of political, social, or general cultural importance were under serious discussion. Every media tool of the late 1700’s to the 1900’s was conscripted to serve the cause of broadcasting the basic principles of this naturalist message and drilling in the horror of continued Catholic influence over men and society, creating, in effect, a permanent revolutionary propaganda machine. And that propaganda machine, with all of its manifold media attachments, demanded the right to operate everywhere with reference to the liberal principle of “freedom of expression”. As the Civiltà wrote, summarizing neatly the propaganda machine in question:¹⁸⁵

Now whence come so much disagreement in opinions both with regard to theory and practice? Everyone knows. It proceeds from that absolute freedom of thought, of speech, and of the press which, as Gregory XVI said, perpetually engenders new monsters of error, eroding even Catholic minds and their doctrinal principles, little by little, as with corrosive acid. The error that in previous times had been locked up in scientific volumes and in learned languages, and had deceived the hearts rather than the heads of instructed and erudite men, was popularized and simplified in flyers to be hurled at the mob by the ham actor on the stage, by poets in odes, by musicians in songs, by the fop in the salons, by pedantic schoolmasters for children, and so found entry into the heads of idiots incapable of unmasking sophisms and of consulting documents. An impiety which at the beginning of a revolution made horrified souls shiver, was repeated audaciously by the libertine press and weakly contradicted by the majority of the timid, the moderate, the indifferent, and infiltrated into the social atmosphere through ambiguous words that were tolerated by good men and blindly adopted by simple ones. Thus was formed an erroneous body of opinion, even among many good Catholics, which compelled those who should correct it to respect it, and therefore to combat it weakly. One error then sprouts forth from another. One weakness leads to another weakness. The logic of error silences the good sense that still would like to hear the truth. False principles are embraced unconsciously. Their consequences are then tenaciously maintained so that one combats and destroys true principles that would have offered a thread to grasp onto to exit the labyrinth. Finally, an immense chaos is formed in the society of Catholics, rendering impossible all energetic exercises of will, all unity of effort. It is not possible to combat with resolute courage when one fears to fight, perhaps not out of fear of being unjust, but at least out of fear of being accused of exaggeration and fanaticism. Thus, impoverished society loses that immense force which both Catholics and other honest men would have from the unity of conscience and of faith. Meanwhile, the impious triumph, and remain tightly unified in their hatred and in their self-interest. And all this is thanks to that freedom of the press that instills error and uncertainty everywhere, from the heights of royal palaces and cabinets to the depths of hovels and huts.

Black legends and alternative good stories also gained great strength from their ability to appeal to the psychologically powerful “either-or” option that was evoked with such success from the time of Isocrates onwards. They called men irresistibly to one inescapable and overwhelming choice: support either their point of view, rooted in the satisfaction of individual earthly desires and the common human concern for social order and peace; or enter onto the Christian highway, accept its invitation to self-questioning, correction, and the endless sacrifices and disputes these bring into the life of both the human person and society at large, all the while moving towards a paradise only “seen through a glass, darkly”. Presentation of this either-or option was dependent upon blocking a clear understanding of the real substance, history, and achievements of the Catholic religion. To that end, the black legends and alternative good stories attributed all obviously popular and beneficial Christian fruits to anti-Christian beliefs and labors. Orthodox Christianity was held responsible only for what was deemed ludicrous, base, dangerous to society, and detrimental to man. The real character of the myths in question, and especially their blatant self-serving adulation of passion and power, was thereby also thrown comfortably into the shadows. This was certainly the approach encouraged by what Herbert Butterfield called the “Whig Interpretation of History”, which, through its black-and-white discussion of the past in terms of liberal good and anti-liberal evil, actually served as a means of preventing solid research into historical development. For, why bother to investigate reality when one knew already that Catholicism produced bad fruits and proponents of following the “business as usual” demands of “nature as is” good ones?¹⁸⁶

Yes, by 1900, Catholicism was the enemy of God, Holy Scriptures, peace, order, law, nations, monarchy, democracy, wealth, poverty, industry, property, the worker, intelligence, art, freedom in each and every one of its particular forms, and, last but not least, the Superman’s recognition of the underlying meaningless of all of existence. The Enlightenment’s mobilization of all of the age-old secularist forces horrified by the attempt to transform the universe in Christ may thus have seemed to be totally complete at the dawn of the Twentieth Century. And yet the units of the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo were destined to grow in its number still further in the course of a dramatic century, all of them driving home the argument that the individual human person, his political and social communities, and each and every aspect of Creation could only be understood and perfected by ignoring correction and transformation at the hand of a Creating and Redeeming God. “All things natural belong to us” was perhaps the proudest of positive revolutionary boasts. “All things Catholic are grotesquely unnatural” was perhaps its most basic negative propaganda slogan. All hell was about to break loose in consequence.

D. Flammable Catholic Materials (1890’s-1914)

But flammable Catholic materials were also available in abundance as the nineteenth century reached its end. Obviously, opponents of the intransigents, many of whom continued to be active inside the Church as well as just outside her fringes, provided some of these combustible elements. Unfortunately, however, certain of the tendencies of seemingly solid supporters of the full message of the Word in history also played their role in creating future targets for the fire bombers. For there were, indeed, flaws in the approach of the intransigents that its friends ignore or deny at their own peril. In fact, in so far as these flaws were ignored or denied, they grew to undermine the very foundations of the whole intransigent project. Let us therefore first turn to the question of the combustible elements unwittingly forged by the Ninth Crusaders before turning to those provided by their sworn enemies.¹⁸⁷

Just like proponents of the Whig interpretation of history, a number of the standard bearers of the intransigent movement, not to speak of ordinary members of the clergy and laity militating in its ranks, cultivated an unproductive and uncharitable harshness of spirit and tone. All too many of them attributed nothing but bad motivation and hidden heretical sympathies to critics who were sometimes quite nuanced and even completely accurate in their complaints.

This unhelpful spirit did not emerge from Roman sources. Rather, it was, to a large degree a legacy of that brutal prophetic deportment of the Mennaisiens. For, sadly, even when Lamennais’ followers rejected his condemned principles, they all too frequently retained his rhetorical style. Montalembert was a prime example of this inside the liberal Catholic camp, with his offhanded ridicule of anyone disagreeing with him. But Mennaisien-inspired intransigents, such as those who fought to rid French seminaries of Gallican texts and introduce the Roman Liturgy into dioceses with different ancient traditions, could be equally rough in language and tactics. It is impossible to say just how many discerning minds and hearts were lost to the orthodox camp because of their lack of charity and distinction.¹⁸⁸

Moreover, it is also unfortunate that a rich variety of disciplines, from philology to sociology, all of them immensely valuable to an understanding of how to bring the full message of the Word into daily life, came to be neglected by many intransigents. Such neglect had a deadening effect on the work of positive theology, with biblical and historical studies at the top of the list of the disciplines affected. Perhaps most important from a practical standpoint, this also weakened considerably one of the primary goals of the Ninth Crusade, which was that of identifying the self-destructive work perpetrated by the naturalist word merchants. For the use of all such disciplines was especially required in order to pinpoint this rhetorical problem accurately.

Intransigent Catholic neglect was due to two quite contradictory factors, the first of which was, ironically, its pronounced rationalist tendency. The modern world is a time and place of many such ironies, beginning with its depiction as an “Age of Reason” itself. We have repeatedly insisted that, whatever the popular image created by Enlightenment purveyors of alternative good stories, their supposedly rational era was, in fact, anti-intellectual and reductionist in its arguments. It actually allowed scope for only practical and mathematical reasoning to flourish. And practical, experimental reasoning gradually depicted human life as something hopelessly enslaved to passion, will, and subjective value judgments; based, in short, upon irrationality rather than rationality. Nineteenth century Catholicism, on the other hand, was one of the few forces committed to defending the objective value and significance of Reason in all of its many and varied forms. First Vatican Council gave eloquent testimony to this defense of the human mind through the Dogmatic Constitution Concerning the Catholic Faith, which reiterated the Church’s belief that Reason had intrinsic meaningfulness, and could, in fact, also prove the existence of the God that blessed its work.¹⁸⁹

The intransigent flaw lay not in this proper cultivation of Reason, but, rather, in the tendency, by the end of the century and the beginning of the next, to focus on one specific line of speculative theological and philosophical reasoning to the exclusion of other natural but non-rational approaches to uncovering the truth. Thus, to take but one example of the problem this created, it was often only with great difficulty, and under accusations of heterodox tendencies, that scholars could speak of the historical context in which men like St. Thomas Aquinas wrote, suggest that this context helped to shape and limit the completeness of their work, and thereby argue that thirteenth century scholastic labors could well be complemented by the efforts of different thinkers of other eras. Such exclusivity was simply not friendly to the rich cause of the Word. Worse still, once it placed non-speculative studies beyond the pale, it became almost impossible to demonstrate the gravity of the pastoral error that had been committed. For it was precisely through the use of the excluded disciplines that the nature of the problem could be uncovered in the first place.

To say that the method and writings of a man like St. Thomas were not in and of themselves completely sufficient; to argue that they did not by themselves alone give the fullest possible expression to the Christian Faith; to discuss the historical circumstances in which St. Thomas labored and how these may have narrowed his approach to the questions to which he primarily directed his attention, was not at all the same as saying that Thomism was wrong, beside the point, or in any way dispensable. Similarly, to say that knowledge of Christian teachings might grow beyond the manner in which St. Thomas expressed it was not the same thing as denying to dogma an objective, God-given content, anymore than an appreciation of St. Thomas’s doctrinal use of Aristotelian language amounted to a denial of the divine character of the non-Aristotelian doctrinal statements of the apostles or the value of the Platonic-influenced writings of St. Augustine.

Still, many members of the intransigent school of Ninth Crusaders did often draw such inferences, with the consequence that any non-Thomist, or non-speculative, biblical, patristic, experiential, and historically based exploration of the Faith stood condemned as either heretical or frivolous and useless. This had the unfortunate effect of expelling from the seminary curriculum studies that “told a good story about the true story”, and taught the young minds present how to recount the Catholic tale themselves, thereby limiting future clerics’ training and practical skills to a dry, logical, and textbook level alone. And the fact that such reductionist, rationalist education was often imparted by uninspiring teachers made seminarians “sitting ducks” for the first “vitalist” heretic with a lively---though erroneous---alternative story to tell.¹⁹⁰

On the other hand, many intransigents also neglected a number of the studies essential to spreading the full message of the Word in a truly effective manner for a totally opposite reason: a conviction of divine action in nature that was so strong as dangerously to overemphasize supra-rational explanations for historical events. This not only prevented their coming to an accurate understanding of contemporary political and social developments; it also served to check the creation of serious Catholic organizations ready to fight the many powerful modern forces seeking to guide individual and social life solely according to the demands of “nature as is”.

To take but a single example of this phenomenon, the sense that “war in heaven”, with apocalyptic overtones, was the overriding factor shaping the course of nineteenth-century human history, seems to have been one of the chief elements contributing to French Catholic inaction and resignation to the passage of anticlerical legislation during the early years of the Third Republic, from 1877 through the 1880’s. History, in the minds of many French intransigents, was something that was made by God alone. God alone, therefore, was the sole physician for social problems, either through His direct action in human life or through the medium of a providential personality—such as a sacred monarch, a new St. Louis IX. Human organization to head off disaster could be construed almost as an insult to the redemptive supernatural forces waiting behind the bend to deal swiftly and effectively with contemporary evils. But no discernable political miracles were forthcoming in late nineteenth century France, and a Catholic defeat that perhaps need not have taken place ensued. Thankfully, numerous French Catholic luminaries, such as the great social activist, Albert de Mun (1841-1914), rejected this pious defeatism and helped to prepare the way for French militancy in the years to come. And we have seen that other intransigent militants were working as though everything did depend upon their human labors elsewhere around the Catholic world.¹⁹¹

Similarly, it may well be that the fortunate rediscovery of a pre-Jansenist piety eventually took precedence over the recovery of other valuable aspects of the Catholic past, such as its scriptural, patristic, conciliar, and even its papal teaching heritage. Contemporary apparitions came to resonate more in the minds of significant segments of the faithful than the words of the Gospel, the Church Fathers, or those of councils and popes. Ironically, the piety that was thus exalted was actually weakened in the long run, insofar as it was emphasized at the expense of familiarity with the apostolic and ecclesiastical testimony from which its very justification and value were derived. In other words, neglect of the ground of the Faith in exchange for an exclusive or exaggerated commitment to a particular pious practice, even one which had the highest backing of the Church, might well bring that specific devotion itself into question over time.

Critics of the intransigent Ninth Crusaders also claimed that the piety thus inspired was an egotistical one, centered upon individual devotions and stressing self-sanctification at the expense of a more balanced appreciation of the unity of all believers in that communal enterprise of adoration of the True God from which personal sanctification flows. This self-centeredness was then said to stand as an obstacle to true liturgical revival. One might well note that such a complaint did seem to contradict or at least weaken another valid complaint regarding the intransigents: namely, that many of them were so concerned for illustrating the interaction of the supernatural and the natural in the institution of the Mystical Body of Christ that they ended by ignoring the divinizing consequences of the Incarnation for the individual believer.

Intransigents certainly did not begin by neglecting individual “divinization” in Christ, as the many articles of La Civiltà Cattolica on this precise subject clearly indicated. Nevertheless, meditations such as those favored by its Jesuit editors may indeed have lessened as the nineteenth century moved into the twentieth. But this is hard to know. Only further study of Ninth Crusader journals of the time period--which is sadly lacking--would be able to tell for certain. What is absolutely clear, however, is that for many of the readers of such periodicals, a Jansenist obsession with hell rather than a Jesuit pursuit of transformation in Christ seems to have come to dominate their spiritual lives. As the late Dr. William Marra often quipped, the chief terror of many supporters of the intransigent position seemed to be that somewhere, someone might actually be doing what would lead him to heaven; that he might be feeling the joy of Christ in his daily life rather than experiencing a constant terror over the inevitable fall of His wrath upon him.

Neo-Ultramontanism also had its negative side, which, alas, has become much more clear to traditionalist Catholics in recent times. Like all centralizing movements, it caused problems at the diocesan level, perhaps hampering the development of local initiative. This was not so much due to the disturbing but ultimately salutary rocking of the many rather listless parochial boats of the day as it was to a gradual encouragement of the expectation that Rome could and would uncover and handle all future problems on its own initiative. When Rome could or would not do so, and when the Holy See herself became a source of confusion, local clerical and lay stimulus to confront debilitating crises was often therefore sorely lacking. Reliance on a Papacy which was both divinely and humanly incapable of confronting every Christian problem in a dance of life that was growing ever more dangerously complex was a recipe for doing nothing more than handing oneself over to the local machinations of the proponents of “nature as is”.

It is highly understandable why such a problem arose. The manner in which the definition of papal infallibility was “resolved” at Vatican One was unexpectedly problematic. Men like Henry Cardinal Manning (1808-1892) who were firmly convinced of the contemporary necessity of this definition were nevertheless also very much concerned that it be refined while deepening appreciation of the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ and of ecclesiology in general. Official plans had called for a general schema on the nature of the Church to be discussed and promulgated at the Council, and it was into this schema that the question of papal infallibility was introduced. Difficulties emerged, however, due to intense lobbying for and against the doctrine, inside and outside the council. Anger and confusion also accompanied the lifting of the discussion of papal infallibility from the basic explanatory framework in which it was embedded, and treating it on its own--first and out of context. The storm grew more violent still. When it was calmed, the resulting definition in no way met the expectations of its more fervent supporters. Meanwhile, fallout from the Franco-Prussian War then shut the Holy Synod down, leaving the schema on the Church as a whole a schema alone.¹⁹²

Vatican One did indeed bequeath the Catholic world a more solid understanding of papal power and prerogatives, but the council still failed adequately to explain how these were to be put into effect and what relation they might have with the work of ordinary bishops in their own dioceses. It especially left a good deal of perplexity regarding how papal infallibility applied to the pontiff’s use of his ordinary magisterium. This then fed the constant debate that we have witnessed for over one hundred forty years regarding whether or not that ordinary magisterium actually has been invoked with respect to one or the other specific issue.

Parenthetically, however, in defense of the council’s procedure, one ought to remember that all such synods have tended to treat issues as they arose, in the envelope of ecclesiastical crisis. All have thus left terrible conundrums for posterity, as the examples of Nicaea, Ephesus, Chalcedon, and Trent have already shown us. Nevertheless, the confusion was real, and many intransigents acted, unjustifiably, as though the maximalist position on papal infallibility that had definitely not been adopted by the council was the one that “real Catholics”, in practice, were obliged to accept anyway. That same mentality still continues to have an influence with the many contemporary faithful who insist that “real Catholics” must love the Novus Ordo, whatever the words of Benedict XVI’s Motu proprio indicating the continued validity of the Traditional Mass might indicate—so long as it can be shown that the pope personally prefers it.

Happily, a number of the criticisms of the intransigent camp outlined above can actually be discovered in the writings of many other of its prominent members besides Cardinal Manning—the editors of La Civiltà Cattolica and l’Univers, theologians of the caliber of Cardinal Louis-Edouard Pie (1815-1880) of Poitiers and Cardinal Victor Dechamps (1810-1883) of Malines, neo-scholastics like Joseph Kleutgen, liturgists such as Dom Guéranger, the historian Ludwig von Pastor, and the favorite pontiff of the Ninth Crusaders, Pope St. Pius X. Hence, the fervent Ultramontanists, Pie and Dechamps, were among the most harsh judges of exaggerations of the procedure and apologetics of the infallibilists at Vatican Council; the neo-scholastic Kleutgen demonstrated a profound awareness of the importance of history and mystical theology; Pastor presented individual nefarious popes in his “apologetic” history in anything but a “whitewashed” manner; and the “authoritarian” Pius X, the agent par excellence of the full intransigent agenda, was the man who actually, in practice, democratized the Roman Curia and encouraged the revivification of the understanding of the liturgy as the communal prayer of the Church.¹⁹³

One last intransigent-inspired problem has to be addressed, although this, we shall see, will lead us directly into a discussion of the flammable material provided by their internal Catholic opponents as well. Intransigent calls for transformation of everything in Christ through the activity of a mobilized and militant laity had the totally undesired consequence of sometimes promoting a lay Catholic naturalism. This developed as the laity’s greater consciousness of its own mission and responsibilities encouraged a corresponding willingness to judge its ecclesiastical guides and their performance as spiritual leaders. Such judgment led many laymen and laywomen to the presumption that the Teaching Church had herself to be taught, and not simply with respect to certain natural facts of political life where this kind of instruction might be more than valid. Taken beyond its proper bounds, and intensified by a sense of the urgent need to chastise insufficiently militant prelates and priests, what this meant was the reappearance of an older, Jansenist-like spirit in newer, intransigent, Neo-Ultramontanist guise.

Troubles taking shape through pilgrim-minded activists performing new steps in the dance of life were also compounded by the very success of Catholics in creating numerous new organizations competing with one another in seeking to correct and transform nature in Christ. Parties often had difficult relations with the complex network of active Catholic lay and clerical associations, which they viewed as challengers for ultimate direction of the Catholic movement. Much more significantly, however, Catholic associations expressed the concerns of an ever-greater assortment of social groups with divergent interests and agendas, especially economic ones. This complicated the life of a Catholic Party enormously, forcing it to take stands regarding given positions that might satisfy one element of its clientele but horrify another. As Joseph Edmund Jörg noted, “any attempt to construct a detailed political program would be injurious and perhaps fatal to the Party”.¹⁹⁴ Bismarck bemusedly remarked that “there are not two souls in the Center but seven ideological tendencies which portray all the colors of the political rainbow from the most extreme right to the radical left”.¹⁹⁵ Raising the banner of the Church in Danger was, therefore, the only means of assuring internal unity. But it became ever more difficult to hoist that flag when the Kulturkampf in Germany eventually eased and when each internal group increasingly demanded definitive doctrinal confirmation of its principles from Rome.

Parties also showed a propensity to easy acceptance of new “false friends”. Once they had found some way through their initial difficulties and begun to function more smoothly in a given nation, a practical opposition to the Ninth Crusader vision all too frequently emerged from their ranks, subverting the purpose for which they seemingly had been created. It made perfect sense that parties often preferred a more democratic political and social order as a means of breaking down the control of given nations by bourgeois oligarchies. But parties themselves proved to be susceptible to revolutionary transformation in their pursuit of democratic politics. Here, the transmutation was the same as that described by Max Weber in discussing the German Social Democrats: it was due to the emergence of the party functionary and his desire to win elections, at all costs, in order to justify the group’s existence and thus continue to have a party office to perform.

We have already seen that in working in a liberal constitutional system, activists tended to treat the “business as usual” rules of that system, hostile though they might be, as unquestionable givens, thereby accepting limitations upon and modification of broader Catholic expectations. But when laboring in a more democratic environment, they also began to praise the will of “The People”, no matter how rabidly nationalist, racist, Marxist, libertine, and fraudulently manipulated this “People” could be. Criticism might be met by insisting that everything the “religious party” accepted and promoted was ipso facto Catholic; as though its claim to be the “Catholic Party” protected it from error in its political defense of Christianity; as though an idea or policy which was notoriously secular could become sacred through the waving of its magic wand alone. Any corrective and transforming vision that it might possess was inevitably sacrificed as a result. Moreover, subsequent victories by opposing parties might then bring down upon Catholics a persecution for supporting positions that really had nothing to do with their Faith at all; positions that only reflected the partisan, self-interested programs of a new group of people playing by the rules of “nature as is” and supporting whatever “worked” for them at this particular moment in time.

Another problem for Catholic parties came from the hierarchy’s dislike of participation of the lower clergy in their affairs. Special circumstances were one thing, bishops reiterated; a general permission for clerical involvement was quite another matter. The bishops’ chief grievance---that political activity took priests away from their primary spiritual responsibilities and also gave them a power base enabling them to speak to their clerical superiors as equals or even inferiors—was more than understandable. The Bishop of Trier was not alone in lamenting, in 1873, that his subordinate clergy was simultaneously guilty of absenteeism and monitoring his own behavior for political correctness.¹⁹⁶ Complaints on the part of the hierarchy regarding lay and clerical activism were rejected by many in the Catholic Movement as a sign of the persistence of the high clergy’s tradition of timidity, outright cowardice, or hypocritical protection of its own unacceptable form of political activism. There are, indeed, a number of cases where all these accusations appear to be valid and as unedifying as the intransigents argued.

Still, practical examples of the failures of prelates should not blind us to the fact that parties, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, were indeed succumbing to the kind of temptations bishops identified. The Center Party redefined religious truth ever more broadly in order to win elections. “Confessional party leaders such as Julius Bachem were repeatedly attacked for setting aside the Catholic basis of the most important organization of German Catholicism in order to substitute a so-called non-denominational Christian basis as the party’s guiding philosophy.”¹⁹⁷ “Catholics must appeal to the ideas on which modern society is based in order to vindicate their belief”, Etienne Lamy, one of the French Catholic democratic leaders, argued in 1896.¹⁹⁸ An Austrian Christian Social spokesman put it most succinctly a bit later: “in politics the only thing that counted was success”.¹⁹⁹

And many laymen were, in fact, dangerously insistent upon their role as religious as well as political leaders. Archbishop Victor Dechamps complained to the pope of two prominent and politically active lay Belgian Catholics, both “fervent and good soldiers” but problematic since they “want to command within the church”.²⁰⁰ Italian lay activists often ended up “giving directives to bishops, provoking frequent complaint”.²⁰¹ Le Temps in 1881 labeled the French activist, Albert de Mun, “a lay bishop who undertakes…a political campaign, and who finds nothing better than to address the authentic bishop like a master”.²⁰² One priest bitterly criticized the special pretensions of Catholic journalists, noting their claim to a right to resolve doctrinal disputes. “Is not that a stunning victory for laicism?” he wondered.²⁰³ Worse still, Catholic organizations sometimes moved beyond support for liberal constitutionalism and democratic politics to calls for internal Church reform according to their respective principles. Austrian prelates, for example, were told that they “must cease to act autocratically” or face the consequences of the wrath of a more self-conscious democratic populace.²⁰⁴

The Italian Catholic Movement as a whole is a crucial case in point. By the late 1890’s, Opera leaders were seriously divided over future initiatives. One group insisted upon maintenance of its standard operating procedure, neither compromising with the existing liberal authorities nor opposing them in politics directly, lest the socialists pick up the pieces in a bitter national political campaign. Intransigents rejected socialist appeals for cooperation for the same reasons as they did the appeal of the liberal friends of property. Catholic understandings of freedom and community, they argued, were based on different grounds than naturalist ones and could not be compromised without danger to the Faith. A second faction that came to be known as the “clerico-moderates” wished to take advantage of yet another liberal invitation to form a broad Party of Order that could then confront the common danger of socialist extremism. Catholic abstention from national politics would thus end, and leaders who had been prepared during that abstention could move forward to exercise direct influence over Italian political life. Yet a third force, many-headed in character, considered the standard operating procedure as no longer opportune but also viewed the clerico-moderate position as a sell-out to the anti-Catholic conservatism of the “liberals who had been mugged”. One of this third force’s constituent elements wished boldly to declare liberal economic policies to be materialist and immoral. Some of their number also longed for the creation of a distinctly popular Catholic political party. These men presumed that such a party would also have a broad appeal beyond the immediate camp of the believers---to open-minded socialists in particular---and would therefore have to operate with significant freedom from the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Priests, Don Romolo Murri (1870-1944) prominent among them, played a role within the ranks of those hungry for a political party of their own.

Friction among these contesting components of the Opera was stirred by brutal government repression of both socialist and Catholic organizations in the midst of the riotous years of the 1890’s. It was also fed by the failure of the still dominant proponents of maintaining standard operating procedures to make more of an issue of the governmental injustices that they, too, at least in theory, deeply abhorred.²⁰⁵

France became yet another hot spot, and one that leads us directly into discussion of the camp of the internal Catholic opponents of the intransigents as well. Once it appeared that the Third Republic was there to stay and that there were differences among its leaders, with the so-called Opportunists playing the role of conservative liberals who might be more open to cooperation with the Church than their Radical counterparts, some Catholics thought that a corresponding openness of spirit on the part of believers was necessary. Pope Leo XIII encouraged this “hypothetical” outlook with his call to “rally” to the support of the Republic in the 1890’s. Many French intransigents found such a call impossible to accept, especially after all of the anticlerical republican legislation that had devastated Catholic education in the country. Ultimately, their reason for refusing the papal rapprochement was similar to that of their like-minded counterparts within the Italian Opera dei congressi. All that the ralliement would entail, they feared, was yet another seduction of Catholics by modern naturalist opponents of Christ.

But some believers were more hopeful, among them the young Marc Sangnier (1873-1950).²⁰⁶ In 1893, Sangnier and a group of “democratic Catholics” at the College Stanislas of the École Polytechnique in Paris created the movement called the Sillon—The Furrow. At first, Sangnier and the members of the movement talked about the need to work within the republican system to correct and transform it, thereby making it perfectly compatible with the full message of the Word in history. Nevertheless, when the situation in France deteriorated, and the Radical faction, taking power, unilaterally ended the Napoleonic Concordat in 1905, the Sillon changed its argument. Now its language seemed in many respects palingenesist and Mennaisian in character. Christ was once again depicted as the real founder of modern democracy. While those who grew deeper in the faith were said to progress to a point where no system other than the democratic republican system would be fit for them, democratic republicans were identified as already being Catholics in the depth of their hearts—due to their political faith alone. Hence, Sangnier, in 1906, created the Grand Sillon, whose fraternal glue was the “grace” given by joint commitment to the ideals of democracy. Those not accepting the truth of this vision were, as usual, treated with the arrogance typical of the palingnesist prophetic spirit—as Catholics who stubbornly nurtured an anachronistic autocratic spirit and could never therefore understand human freedom and dignity in the modern world. In short, once again, it was democracy that defined, corrected, and transformed Catholicism rather than the other way round.

Many Catholics opposed to the outlook of the Sillon were attracted to that of the League of l’Action Française. This was founded in 1905, and accompanied by a journal of the same name that began publication three years later. The inspiration behind both was the French writer and political theorist, Charles Maurras (1868-1952). Maurras, while not a believing Catholic, was an appealing figure to many intransigents because of his critique of the self-destructive fraudulence of liberalism and the still more radical leftist movements that grew under its fatherly wing. Arguing on historical and sociological grounds alone, Maurras reached the conclusion that a patriot eager to preserve a sound French nation had to be a supporter of the legitimate monarchy, a decentralized government, the Catholic Church, and Greco-Roman culture. It was historically demonstrable, he insisted, that these forces, working together, had built and sustained France, whereas others hostile to them had weakened her. Did it not follow, his Catholic followers argued, that a believer eager to correct and transform society in Christ was on safe ground listening to what this man had to say, non-believer though he was? Heeding a Maurras, they insisted, was essentially different from hearkening to a co-religionist like Sangnier who wanted the faithful to accept the notion that democracy and the Faith enshrined one and the same outlook. Besides, they concluded, the League actually came to the practical aid of Catholics, physically defending churches from their possible confiscation by the government after the unilateral Radical Republican denunciation of the Concordat, while the supporters of the Grand Sillon remained painfully silent and inactive.

Archbishop John Ireland (1838-1918) of St. Paul, Minnesota, a French-speaking Irish-American prelate active in political and social life in the United States, had been an inspiration to the supporters of the “rally to the Republic” of the 1890’s in general. Marc Sangnier and the Sillon also greatly admired him. But Ireland, along with Cardinal James Gibbons (1834-1921) of Baltimore, and two Rectors of the Catholic University of America, Archbishop John Keane (1834-1918) and Bishop Denis O’Connell (1849-1927), were also important and inspirational for another controversial reason. They were the most prominent supporters of what, by the end of the nineteenth century, became known as Americanism. What, exactly was this new “ism”, and what was its relationship to the corrective and transformative message of the Word in history?²⁰⁷

Let it suffice for the moment to say that Americanism was the complicated and contradictory teaching that emerged out of an attempt to harmonize an atomistic Protestant radicalism rooted in the doctrine of total depravity and transformed, through secularization, into a general demand for individual freedom with that conservative naturalism of the Moderate Enlightenment designed to protect the dominance of an oligarchy of merchants and planters—all within the context of a potentially ever more chaotic multicultural immigrant society. Its chief doctrines were firmly in place by the late 1890’s, and its central theme was clear. America had discovered a unique, non-dogmatic, pragmatic formula for providing a peaceful, ordered community that simultaneously guaranteed freedom to all of God—or, Nature’s—spiritually, intellectually, and culturally divided children. In short, America had become a totally inimitable Defender of the Peace; one that offered mankind its “last and best hope” for a liberty, tranquility, and happiness greater than any ever known before in human history.

“Pragmatic” though its vision was, Puritan and pious Moderate Enlightenment influence also promoted the conviction that the American system had in some way arisen through the mysterious Providence of God. The American Republic, like the Venetian Republic, was a godly Republic. Unfortunately, however, God reigned but did not really rule within its confines. It was the “will” of providentially inspired “Founding Fathers” that shaped its Magisterium. In many respects the nature of their will seems to have paralleled that described by the Venetian Giovani. This is no particular surprise, given the fact that the Founders’ chief philosophical and political guide, John Locke, was a man whose theories are often close to those of the earlier Venetian movement.

Both moderate Enlightenment pietist conservatism as well as secularized Puritan radicalism led defenders of the budding Americanist vision to insist that dogmas, doctrines, and intellectual fancies were all alien to the Founders’ will. Theirs was a purely practical, experiential wisdom. Nevertheless, many partisans of the new dispensation, from Benjamin Franklin to Abraham Lincoln and beyond, gradually expanded upon the concept of a providential American Foundation to create a distinct “civil religion” serving a Divine Republic similar to that adored by the Giovani. This then was presented to the world as the real corrective and transforming agent in human life; the pillar of a novus ordo saeclorum overcoming the manifold evils of the Old World. Its ethos clearly taught that it was 1776---the first year of the Revolution---and 1787---that of the Founders’ definitive intervention in human socio-political affairs---that marked the real beginning of mankind’s redemption.

Still, this Americanist religion was always somehow simultaneously depicted as a purely “pragmatic” approach to political and social life. In any case, the redemption it offered was certainly not Catholic in character. For the mankind that the will of the Founders redeemed was nothing other than a totally depraved herd of atomistic, self-interested brutes. Moreover, its path to redemption involved a pragmatic, cooperation with Original Sin rather than a means of overcoming its ravages. All that it entailed was a systematic “management” of the individualist “war of all against all” that seemingly allowed for it to continue while maintaining the power of its momentary victors. A call to cease and desist in the name of God’s plan for the universe, justice, virtue, and ultimate transformation in Christ played no role whatsoever in its salvation history. To say that this---from a Catholic standpoint---revealed a deep confusion or cynicism about the nature of God, man, creation, religion, and pragmatism itself is but to touch the tip of an iceberg that we will examine in painful detail in the next chapter.

Be that as it may, America’s pragmatic civil religion prospered. As it grew, it was ever more tightly wrapped in a patriotic cloak, reminiscent of the monarchical regalism of the bons français as well as the divine republicanism of the Giovani. By the 1890’s, its liturgy involved eternal flames before the temples of divinized Founders and Heroes in Washington; kowtows in front of the sacred documents of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution; spiritual readings from the writings of Thomas Jefferson as well as those of Franklin and Lincoln; and invocations to the Goddess-Statute of Liberty in New York Harbor. Rooted in the country’s Protestant religious past, this earthbound and materialist cult continued to use traditional biblical terms in its liturgical language, thereby seducing many believing American Christians into misunderstanding the destructive character of the naturalist path that it was urging them to trod. The result was that Americanism hid the reality that it ensured—the victory of the willful, “business as usual” demands of ‘nature as is’— underneath the secularized Puritan and Pietist but Christian sounding mantras of pragmatism, common sense, openness, freedom, diversity, tolerance, and peace that it taught its disciples to recite in place of theological and philosophical judgements.

Equivocal use of already problematic Protestant Christian language on behalf of this happy vision of peaceful order and freedom, accompanied by the appeal of material success in the New World and a desire to “fit in” as quickly as possible, tempted many Roman Catholic immigrants to the United States into the Americanist camp even before the 1890’s. The prelates mentioned above were simply more vocal and coherent in their acceptance of Americanist precepts, treating them as “no lose” propositions, even from a Catholic standpoint, given the opportunity they supposedly assured for a free propagation of the Church’s message. For the union of American freedom and Catholic truth, as the motto on the tomb of Fr. Isaac Hecker (1819-1888) asserts, could not help but produce “a future brighter than any past”.

Still, their attitude was by no means uncontested. Anti-Americanism had a very broad set of supporters. Leaders of German-speaking Catholics were prominent among them. So were several foreign faculty members at the new Catholic University of America, who spread criticism of this problematic, pragmatic, civil religion back in Europe once their enemies expelled them from its precincts. Although the Americanist spokesmen were generally Irish in background, many Irish-American bishops, such as Michael Corrigan (1839-1900) of New York and Bernard McQuaid (1823-1909) of Rochester, were also highly critical of their teachings.

All these anti-Americanists were disturbed by the fact that prelates like Ireland stated flatly that nothing in a purely pragmatic American system providing both order and freedom could in any way prove to be detrimental to Catholicism. Through such glowing and uncritical endorsements, they made it crystal clear that the corrective and transforming Catholic vision had no American social role to perform. The Founders’ system was already in possession of the politically and socially True, Good, and Beautiful. To be an American, for men like Ireland—just as to be a democrat for figures such as Sangnier—was already to enjoy everything that the full message of the Word might claim to give to mortal men in their communal environment. In short, if Christ walked the earth in the 1890’s, he would not be a member of the Party of Order or that of the Barricades. He would recognize his Gospel in the pragmatic civil religion of America.

In light of this entire broad discussion of problems arising from the Culture Wars, it seems safe to say that many of the developments emerging from encouragement of militant Catholic political activity in the nineteenth century can be critiqued along the very same lines that the proponents of the Ninth Crusade had chastised legitimist political life when first entering into battle. Sacred monarchies of the past had bent religious concerns to parochial secular considerations. Clergy had played too great a governmental role within them, sullying their spiritual mission along the way. Now, out of an initial desire to fight precisely such corruption, the sacred political party had emerged, twisting Catholic goals to the divinized requirements of anticlerical liberal constitutions, willful democratic Peoples, and the charismatic party leaders and journalists interpreting the “true meaning” of their desires---sometimes even claiming to be the voice of the Holy Spirit while doing so. In Europe, the Divine Right of the past had not just reappeared; it had resurfaced compounded, with militant laymen and secularized clerics boasting of their protection of what amounted to a twisted understanding of human freedom and progress that assured little other than their own political advantage and the corruption of the Catholic Faith. And as the concept of Divine Right celebrated its rebirth, it gained further succor from the New World; from the myth of an American system whose secularized Puritan and Whig Founding Fathers were said to be friendlier to the Catholic Church than any other group of men in human history—Church Fathers and saints included.

It is, of course, unfair to the intransigents of the Ninth Crusade to blame all of the difficulties emerging from the lay political movements of the late nineteenth century upon them. Obviously, most of the French supporters of the “rally for the Republic”, as well as the Catholic proponents of Americanism, were not the “intransigents gone astray” that I have generally been criticizing. Instead, they were conscious heirs of the earlier committed foes of the intransigent school of thought from the first days of the post-1848 battles. Many of those foes, in turn, were the intellectual and spiritual children of the still earlier supporters of that heady combination of regalist, Gallican, Pietist, Jansenist, and Enlightenment ideas regarding the relationship of nature and the supernatural, pragmatism and doctrine, religion and civic duty, Church and State, that had first been battled by the Ninth Crusaders. Those who were not were often proponents of condemned Mennaisien views concerning not simply democracy, but, much more importantly, the need to submit to “vital” energies in life wherever they emerged and wherever they ultimately aimed their bearers and adherents.

Whatever the provenance of such enemies of the intransigent position might be, they also provided flammable materials for the fire bombers of the turn of the century to exploit, and not just in the political arena. The thinkers among them threw their hearts into the widest variety of “vital” but suspect modern activities, ranging from the so-called “higher scriptural exegesis”, Kantian philosophical studies, and historicist research to nationalist and racist apologetics. Almost all such thinkers accepted the treasury of anti-Catholic black legends and alternative good stories as they went about their work, contributing their own slight but closely related variations to this stock of tall tales. They bemoaned the Church’s loss of esteem in the eyes of that energetic, contemporary, secular world that the intransigents insisted was on the path to self-destruction. For them, intransigent insistence on correcting and transforming the world through a “frozen” understanding of Christ was a fundamentally exaggerated enterprise, one that dangerously obscured the truths that natural investigations of everything from holy writ to history would more clearly reveal. They considered the Ninth Crusade approach to be a wrong-headed, anachronistic, impossibly holistic project blinding Catholics to the lessons taught by the particular, evolving spirit of each revelation-bearing race, ethnic group, or individual conscience and genius---“unique” and “diverse” teachings which, as Taparelli and Veuillot sarcastically noted, somehow always uniformly emphasized exactly the same predictably parochial, materialist, and ultimately willful themes.

Let me hasten to note that I am not speaking of men who merely disagreed with certain of those truly exaggerated features of the intransigent approach noted above—thinkers like John Henry Newman (1801-1890) and Fr. Marie Joseph Lagrange (1855-1938). Newman was indeed concerned for the history of the development of doctrine in a way that appeared to give him more in common with anti-speculative, nature-focused, modern historians than with the anti-historical theologians increasingly dominating the papal entourage by the time of St. Pius X. Lagrange did, in fact, lament the exegetical backwardness of many powerful leaders of the later intransigent camp, who began to cause him severe difficulties when they fully realized where he was headed with his own scriptural studies by the time of the International Congress of Fribourg in 1897. Opponents of the intransigents certainly did like to claim both of these men as sympathizers and could point to scholarly connections with them. Nevertheless, the attack by Newman on the kind of theology, both liberal and vitalist in character, that would evolve into what Catholics call Modernism, and the assault by Lagrange on Alfred Loisy’s (1857-1940) school of scriptural exegesis, created an iron curtain between their basic attitudes and the one that I am identifying here. Newman and Lagrange were men who thought with the Church, but were sometimes unjustly treated by fellow Catholics. Their criticisms reflected an intellectual “pilgrim spirit” requiring a patience and perspicacity equal to their own genius to digest, appreciate---and also properly assess for any needed censure. But such patience and perspicacity are all too rare in any age---much less one forced to confront the arrogance of a vitalist prophet a minute.²⁰⁸

In contrast, the kind of critical spirit that was the pride of the anti-intransigent school, even though it helped pass down many specific insights to posterity, was marred by its dogmatic refusal to allow for the very possibility of any human perception and discussion of supernatural influence over the natural world. It was also seriously corrupted by a display of bitterness and arrogance that were at least as unedifying--if not, actually, much more so--than any that it could justly ascribed to its intransigent opponents within the Catholic camp. Every defeat rankled in the hearts of the men motivated by it. A desire for vengeance at the first available opportunity was noticeable in their writings and their actions. One can almost imagine a collective unclenching of teeth in the graves of such anti-intransigents across Christendom during the 1960’s, as one ecclesiastical change after another apparently vindicated their own position.

Conspiratorial mythmaking was one of the anti-intransigents’ strengths. This was a bit ironic, given their disdain for their opponents’ intellectual “system building”. Here were men who mocked as overblown and a-historical all of the best efforts by modern speculative thinkers to tie together theological principles, historical developments, and pastoral approaches into some cohesive intelligible whole; men whose dislike of systematic theology and philosophy contributed mightily to killing that ecclesiological schema on the Church at Vatican One which would have made the infallibility decree more cohesive, comprehensible, and efficacious. And yet these same people harped upon the existence of a highly structured intellectual-political plot, led by intransigent Jesuits and their scholastic drones, responsible for every setback and defeat that progress-loving Peoples and their prophets experienced. One would almost be tempted to say--as modernists themselves did when rejecting Pius X’s attack upon them as members of a unified faction within the Church--that there would be no intransigent movement as such to criticize at all were it not for the work that its opponents did in bringing its disparate and complex elements together into an artificial and simplistic caricature of a union.

Intransigent Ninth Crusaders, like all fervent believers in every age in the history of the Church, were a flawed lot. A critical spirit was truly needed to correct their errors. The critical spirit of their late nineteenth and early twentieth century opponents was simply not up to that laudable task. All that this spirit did was to provide more flammable material for the fire bombing soldiers in the turn of the century army of the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo. But before it could do so, the sins of both camps were about to be chastised by higher authority.

E. A Second Retrenchment

No one counts Leo XIII among the intransigents, despite his firm pursuit of the strengthening of papal power and his support for many of their projects. We have seen that his encouragement of the Ralliement, the Rally for the Republic, discussed in some detail above, caused great dismay among many Ninth Crusaders active in political life. Moreover, even though the members of their camp certainly did consider him to be one with them in their love for St. Thomas Aquinas, Leo also accomplished more for historical and scriptural studies than any pontiff of the century. In fact, Leo’s insouciance regarding potential dangers emerging from allowing “a hundred flowers to bloom and a hundred schools to contend” underlines the absence of authoritative intervention during almost all but the last years of his long pontificate:²⁰⁹