Chapter 1 The Origins of Liberalism

If you do not read, you will sooner or later be traitors, because you will not have understood

the root of the evil. Father Paul O'Lonnier, September 17,

1981. It is with these words that one of my colleagues recommended to the seminarians the reading

of good books on liberalism. Indeed, it is not possible to understand the present

crisis of the church or to know the true character of the people in present day Rome or to find

out the proper attitude to take vis-à-vis the events without investigating the causes. In order to

achieve this, it is necessary to go back into history

and discover the primary cause in that liberalism condemned by the popes for the past two centuries.

We will set out then from the origins, as the sovereign pontiffs do, when they denounce the confusions that are at hand.

Now always, while indicting liberalism, the popes look further into the past. All of them,

from Pius VI to Benedict the 15th, take the crisis back to the struggle waged against the church

in the 16th century by Protestantism,

and the naturalism of which this heresy was the cause and the propagator.

Naturalism is found beforehand in the Renaissance, which in its effort to recover the

riches of the ancient pagan cultures and of the Greek

culture and art in particular came to glorify man, nature, and natural forces to an exaggerated

degree.

In exalting the goodness and the power of nature, one devalued and may disappear from the minds of men

the necessity of grace and the fact that humanity is destined for the supernatural order

and the light brought in by revelation. Under a pretext of art, they determined to introduce

then everywhere, even in the churches, that nudism,

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