Chapter 4 Does the Law Oppress Liberty

Liberty

Liberty consists in the fact that by the help of the civil laws,

we can live more easily according to the prescriptions of the eternal law.

Pope Leo the 13th

I could not give a better summary of the disasters produced by liberalism in every domain

such as they are exposed in the preceding chapter than by quoting to you this passage from a pastoral letter of bishops

dating from a hundred years ago, but so very up to date a century later.

At the present hour, liberalism is the chief error of the intellects and the dominant passion of

our century. It fashions an infected atmosphere,

which envelops the political and religious world on all sides, which is a supreme peril for

society and for the individual. As an enemy of the Catholic Church, as gratuitous as it is

unjust and cruel, it heaps up in a bundle, in an insane

disorder, all the elements of destruction and of death, in order to banish the church from the

earth. It falsifies ideas, corrupts judgments, adulterates consciences, enervates characters, inflames passions, subjugates governments,

stirs up the governed, and, not content to put out, if that were possible, the torch of revelation,

it moves forward, unconsciously and boldly to extinguish the light of natural reason itself.

Is it possible to discover among such a chaos of disorders in an error so multi-form, the fundamental

principle that explains it all? I have told you following Father Roussel, the liberal is a

fanatic of independence. That is it. Let us attempt

to state it precisely. Cardinal Beio, whose theological treatises were the books I studied at the

Gregorian University and at the French seminary in Rome, has devoted to liberalism a few

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