Chapter 5 Beneficial Constraints

Do not consider that you are constrained, but to what you are constrained, if it is to the good

or to the evil.

St. Augustine

Liberalism, as I have told you, makes liberty of action defined in the preceding chapter

as exemption from all constraint, an absolute, an end in itself. I will leave to Cardinal Beo the care of analyzing

and refuting this fundamental pretension of the liberals. He writes,

The fundamental principle of liberalism is the freedom from all coercion, whatever it may be,

not only from that which is carried out by violence, and which aims only at external acts, but also from the coercion, which proceeds from

the fear of laws and penalties, from social dependencies and necessities, in a word, from the ties of every nature which prevent

man from acting according to his natural inclination. For the liberals this individual liberty

is the good par excellence, the fundamental inviolable good, to which everything should yield,

except perhaps that which is required for the purely

material order of the city.

Liberty is the good to which all the rest is subordinated.

It is the necessary foundation of all social construction.

Now, Cardinal B.O. always says, this principle of liberalism is absurd, against nature,

and visionary. There you have the critical analysis that he develops. You will permit me to

outline it by commenting on it. This principle is absurd.

Inchipid ob absurdo, it begins in absurdity by pretending that the principal good of man is the absence of every tie capable of hampering or restraining liberty.

The principal good of man indeed should be considered as an end, that which is desired in itself.

Now liberty, liberty of action is only a means. It is only a faculty that can permit man to acquire

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