Chapter 20 The Direction of History I have tried to show you in the preceding chapters how

the liberal Catholics such as Laminet, Maritaine, and Yangar, have not a very Catholic view of the sense of history.

Let us try to go deeply into their point of view and judge it by the light of faith.

Sense or nonsense.

For the Catholics called liberal, history has a sense, a direction. This direction is imminent.

It is from here below. It is liberty. Humanity is urged on by an imminent breathing in the direction

of a growing consciousness of the dignity of the human person,

setting out in the direction of an always more extensive freedom from all constraint.

Vatican II will become the echo of this theory by saying, like Maritaine,

The dignity of the human person is, in our time, the object of an ever more live consciousness.

Always more numerous are those who claim for man the possibility of acting by virtue of his own options, and with all free responsibility.

That it is desirable that man determine his own way freely towards the good, no one will

dispute, but that our age and that the direction of history in general are marked by a growing

consciousness of human dignity and freedom, that is what is very questionable.

Only Jesus Christ, by conferring on to the baptized, the dignity of children of God,

shows men what consists in their true dignity, the freedom of the children of God,

of which St. Paul speaks.

To the extent that the nations have submitted themselves

to our Lord Jesus Christ, human dignity and a healthy freedom indeed have been seen to develop.

Since the apostasy of the nation set up by liberalism, we have no alternative but to report on the contrary that

Jesus Christ no longer reigning and the truths diminishing among the sons of men.

Human dignity is more and more despised and crushed and liberty reduced to a mere slogan,

...