Chapter 9 Liberty of Conscience and of Forms of Worship

Under the seductive name of freedom of religion, they proclaim the legal apostasy of society.

Pope Leo XIII They proclaim the legal apostasy of society.

Pope Leo the 13th It is in his encyclical Libertas that Pope Leo the 13th reviews the new liberties

proclaimed by liberalism.

I will follow his expose step by step.

Pope Leo the 13th says, it is well for us to consider separately

the diverse kinds of liberties that are given as the great acquisitions of our age.

The liberty of forms of worship, or liberty of conscience, is the first. It is, as Leo

the 13th explains it, claimed as a moral liberty

of the individual conscience and as a social liberty, a civil right, recognized by the state.

He says, first in regard to individuals, let us examine this liberty so contrary to the virtue

of religion, the liberty of cults,

as it is called, a freedom that rests on this principle, that it is permissible for everyone

to profess such a religion as pleases him, and even not to profess any at all.

However, all to the contrary it is indeed there, without any doubt, among all the duties

of man, the greatest and the holiest, that which orders man to render to God a worship of piety

and of religion.

This duty is only a consequence of the fact that we are perpetually in dependence on God,

governed by the will and the providence of God, and that, having come forth

from him, we must return to him. If indeed the individual king is supposed to be the source

of his own rights, it is logical for him to attribute to his conscience a full independence

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