THE NAME OF THE ENEMY
We have forgotten the name of the enemy!
Perhaps
it is that we have already infected ourselves enough, consciously or
unconsciously, of that error that our elders fought a couple of
centuries ago. But the truth is that the Catholic today has forgotten the real name of the enemy: LIBERALISM.
During the eighteenth century, misnamed "the century of lights" (perhaps a name has never been so badly given)
, liberalism made its triumphant appearance on the political scene,
preceded by Luther's Protestantism and Descartes's rationalism. with its
new immanentist philosophy, not to mention the emergence of secret
societies that wanted to bring all this to the political sphere and
reorganize society on different bases to those of the 'old regime', with
special emphasis on the destruction of the social role of Catholicism.
This
century and the next saw with stupor the explosion of 'liberal' ideas,
which were nothing but the application of rationalism to the
socio-political order of the peoples. With
the consequent dechristianization of society, under the pretext of
achieving the triumph of "freedom", supposedly chained in the dark years
of theology and inquisition. This was more or less the discourse of those years.
Strong
defenders of "modern liberties" emerged, namely, freedom of conscience,
religion, cult, press, speech, etc., all aimed to contribute their
grain of sand in the task of uprooting souls all vestige of supernatural
belief. Because the certain thing is that before the revolution (name that that process of dechristianization took in the name of the "freedom")
, all those "freedoms" existed, but for the good thing: right
conscience, catholic religion, traditional cult, edifying press and pía,
honest word. What
was sought was to use them as a springboard for the bad, to justify the
excess of individualism and subjectivism that was already gaining
ground since the revolutions of Luther and Descartes.
For this reason these 'modern liberties' were immediately condemned by the popes, who called them 'liberties of perdition'. Catholics loyal to the voice of their pastors threw themselves into the antiliberal struggle; they
understood that liberalism was basically nothing more and nothing less
than the expulsion of God from society, to install man, humanity, on his
empty throne. It was the triumph of purest Gnosticism.
In
that tremendous struggle that witnessed the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, there were plenty of champions on the Catholic side, men full
of doctrine and prudence, who knew how to expose and defend the
Catholic worldview in full fidelity to the church and for the common
good of the country. From
his writings even today we can feed ourselves with the purest Catholic
doctrine, exposed with an ardor and with a passion characteristic of the
din of battle.
But this was a long time ago. Water has flowed in abundance under the bridge and new generations of Catholics do not even know the name of the enemy.
It is not a question here of entering to analyze the causes of this softening of the spirits, they are many: overflowing hedonism, numbing consumerism and materialism, apostasy in the Catholic clergy, etc. Each one of them would need for its full exhibition not just a blog post, but entire books. Task that escapes our forces. We would rather call attention to this phenomenon to which we alluded with the title of this writing.
How can it be possible that today's Catholics do not recognize in eighteenth-century liberalism a lethal enemy of Catholicism?
It
will be said that the church was reconciled with liberalism in the
modern age and that there is no longer any reason for the Catholic to
maintain this anti-liberal crusade. Yes,
it is true that the modern clergy surrendered to liberalism and adopted
its postulates, but this does not change the doctrine of the church,
which remains unchanged for centuries, above the whims of men and the
errors of the chosen souls.
We will return several times on this matter.