Louis Veuillot (1813-1883)
XXIII
Two powers are at war in our modern world: the Revelation and the Revolution. These powers are incompatible with each other, that is what the whole thing comes to.
The war between them has given rise to three parties:
(1) The party of Revelation, or the party of Christianity. The Catholic party is its head, so high above current ignorances and meannesses, that it might well seem to have no body at all; but, in spite of that, this body, often well-nigh invisible, does exist and is in reality the most powerful one on Earth, because, regardless of number, it alone possesses in very truth that unique superhuman force which is called the Faith.
(2) The Revolutionary party: the schools termed liberal are nothing but protean masks and the term itself is elastic and dishonest.
(3) The Third Party: it professes to take the other two in hand and force them to compose their differences.
The Third Party terms itself Eclecticism, but it is really Confusionism, that is to say, Futilitarianism.
By the very fact that the Third Party espouses the Revolution, it denies Christianity, of which the Revolution is the absolute contradiction and the precise negation. By the very fact that the Catholic party is the affirmation of Christian truth, it denies the Revolution, which is the antichristian lie; it denies both Liberalism and Eclecticism, which are, in most cases, nothing but the glossing over of that lie and, in a few cases, the upshot of being duped by its hoaxes. The Catholic party rejects them all. We reject them as our fathers rejected idolatry, heresy and schism; we reject them, even if we have to perish for it. We do so knowing that even if we do perish in this conflict, we shall not be defeated.
It is under the banner of the Third Party, under the auspices of its confusion and futility, that liberal Catholicism announces its would-be conciliatory compromises, which meet with a bad reception from both sides, being frequently repulsed with positive derision. The Catholics, who have their dogmatic conception and their historical practice of liberty, will have nothing to do with its schemes, complicated and cock-eyed as they are on no end of counts; the revolutionaries, the liberals and the eclectics, who pretend to share their Christianity, remand the Third Party to their own Church, whose yoke they have not altogether shaken off. They remind the latter that their Church does not allow such fraternization, that she even warns them to be on their guard against it. They give them to understand that the Church of the latter is not theirs; that into theirs no Christians may enter except by the gate of outright apostasy.
* Reprinted from The Liberal Illusion (1866) by Louis Veuillot, translated by Rt. Rev. Msgr. George Barry O’Toole, 1938, National Catholic Welfare Conference, Pg.28-29
