Robert de Lamennais: The Church and The New Order

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Robert de Lamennais: The Church and The New Order May 5, 2019 14:17:09 GMT

Post by Admin on May 5, 2019 14:17:09 GMT

The Angelus -March 1978

THE CHURCH & THE NEW ORDER

PART I

Kent Emery, Jr.

In his addresses and sermons Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre refers frequently to the principles of the French Revolution: liberty, equality and fraternity. Whereas previous Popes have rejected these principles from their conception, those currently governing the Church, the Archbishop points out, have accepted them. The Archbishop charges that the acceptance of these principles conceived in hatred of the Church and alien to her traditions, underlies the current disaster. In the nineteenth century Catholic liberals urged the faithful to pursue ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity in the temporal order, where man works out much of his eternal salvation. Now the descendants of those earlier liberals have applied the notions of liberty, equality and fraternity to the Church's supernatural order. The result is evident in the three innovative themes of Vatican II: religious liberty, community and collegiality, and ecumenism.

Catholics in France understand well what the Archbishop is saying, as do the ecclesiastical authorities in Rome. American Catholics, however, seem confused by Archbishop Lefebvre's repeated allusions to the French Revolution. Some dismiss his remarks as relevant only to the European situation; others judge them to be political considerations unrelated to the question of the Mass. These opinions are incorrect. The Novus Ordo Missae is the chief instrument for a new religion which interprets the Gospel in light of the naturalistic principles of the Revolution. Modernists know as well as traditionalists that the lex orandi is the lex credendi.

It is not surprising that Americans do not comprehend the force of Archbishop Lefebvre's remarks concerning the French Revolution and it guiding principles. For decades American Catholics have been taught that the Catholic Faith and the American Way are in perfect harmony. Unfortunately, there is no historical or theoretical basis for such a belief, unless one accepts the novel theories of John Courtney Murray, the principal author of the Vatican II document on Religious Liberty. Seldom have we reflected that our founding fathers were inspired by the same basic principles which produced the French Revolution; seldom have we meditated the import of the words proudly blazoned on our major sacramental, the dollar bill: Novus Ordo Seclorum. Historians embarrassed by the violence of the French Revolution have tried to separate it from our own. If our revolution was less violent, however, it is because the American revolutionaries did not have to topple a regime in which ancient religious and social traditions were embodied in powerful, on-the-spot institutions.

The United States is the first western nation never to have had a Catholic past. It is the first aboriginal Protestant state, serving also as a tabula rasa for the experiments of enlightenment thinkers. This historical reality has affected greatly Catholic life in this country. At the turn of the century St. Frances Xavier Cabrini understood that the United States was not a Christian (i.e. Catholic) country and therefore needed to be missionized from scratch. Significantly, Paul VI failed to include Mother Cabrini in his roll-call of American saints and heroes at recent canonizations, probably because she represents an "old" way of thinking. On the other hand, it is striking that conventional American Catholic notables, men such as Bishops John Carroll, John Ireland and John England, Isaac Hecker, founder of the Paulists, and in a refined fashion, Orestes Brownson, are distinguished by their reconciliation of Catholic teaching with the political and social principles of the new republic. Leo XIII rejected such a reconciliation in his Apostolic Letter against what he called "Americanism" (Testem Benevolentiae, 1899). Leo XIII treated Americanism as a localized subspecies of Modernism, then as now ravaging the Church. Characteristically, American Catholic historians have called Americanism a "phantom heresy," arguing that Leo XIII was the victim of false factual information (in much the same way, one supposes, that he was subject to "false information" when he declared Anglican orders null and void). It is more probable, however, that Leo XIII knew perfectly well what he was condemning.

Americanism, which has permeated American Catholic life, has in turn paved the way for the easy acceptance of the New Church in this country. As Modernism was born in the attempt to reconcile Catholic teaching with the revolutionary principles of liberty, equality and fraternity, so Americanism was born in a similar attempt to reconcile the Faith with the same principles as they are expressed in American life. Hilaire Belloc in his penetrating Characters of the Reformation, says that Protestantism would have died without the economic and political support of the rising English nation. Likewise, Modernism, originally the plaything of a few European intellectuals, has been nurtured by the conscious or unthinking support of American Catholic leaders and the many dollars they command. As England in the sixteenth century was open market for the grab-bag of continental Reformation ideas, so modern America is the dumping ground for the ideas of modern reformers such as Maritain, Rahner, Schillebeckx, Kung, etc. It is we who provide a mass market for their expensive books and expensive lectures. It is our bishops who travel to Rome as groupies to be instructed by these reformers, returning home inebriated, perhaps for the first time, by IDEAS.

It is frightful to think, as I have implied, that there have been few American Catholic leaders who have not compromised, at least in some small degree, an wholly traditional Catholic teaching. It is painful to think that our habitual, facile synthesis of the Faith and the Bill of Rights may contribute to the current autodemolition of the Church. It is painful also to admit that bigots such as Paul Blanchard may have an half-correct intuition that if America were fully imbued with Catholic teaching, it would be a quite different place (slightly uncomfortable, one might add, for Protestants and freethinkers).

In subsequent portions of this essay I shall try to show why Archbishop Lefebvre is correct in placing responsibility for the ills of the modern Church on those of her members who compromise with the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity. Ultimately I shall show why each of these principles, as understood by modernity, is inimical to the Catholic Faith. Firstly, however, I must sketch briefly a history of the conflict between tradition and revolution within the Church. Our story begins, as so much in Catholic history does, in France. The eldest daughter of the Church is much like the girl in the nursery rhyme:

"When she is good, she is very, very good,
But when she is bad, she is horrid".

To be continued...

[Emphasis - The Catacombs]

Last Edit: May 5, 2019 14:47:39 GMT by Admin

"So let us be confident, let us not be unprepared, let us not be outflanked, let us be wise, vigilant, fighting against those who are trying to tear the faith out of our souls and morality out of our hearts, so that we may remain Catholics, remain united to the Blessed Virgin Mary, remain united to the Roman Catholic Church, remain faithful children of the Church."- Archbp. Lefebvre 1980

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Robert de Lamennais: The Church and The New Order May 5, 2019 14:33:41 GMT

Post by Admin on May 5, 2019 14:33:41 GMT

The Angelus - April 1978

THE CHURCH & THE NEW ORDER

PART II

Kent Emery, Jr.

Since the French Revolution, open warfare between the forces of liberalism and the forces of tradition has afflicted the Church. The liberal Catholic historian Henri Daniel-Rops aptly delineates the terms of conflict facing the Church after the initial wave of Revolution had subsided:

Two problems called for solution, one concerning the nature and another the origin of that crisis which has caused so much upheaval. First, was the Revolution a movement intrinsically perverse, tainting the legitimate order of the world, a sacrilegious rebellion on the part of man against the whole divine content of an age-old tradition? Or, as its supporters maintained, did it mark the promotion of certain fundamental human values hitherto despised—Justice and Liberty? Second, was it a fortuitous incident, a rupture brought about by the conspiracy of a few evil minds, or a gigantic phenomenon whose causes must be sought in a remote past...? Conceptions of the order to be rebuilt would naturally depend on the answers to those two questions. If the Revolution were a satanic enterprise, a revolt of man against God, there of course could be no thought of accepting any of its principles. But if it were the result of an evolution extending over almost a thousand years, it would be absurd to treat it as null and void. (The Church in an Age of Revolution, 1789-1870 [Garden City, 1967], pp. 160-161).

Through the reign of St. Pius X, the Popes answered these questions unambiguously. The Revolution was satanic, a revolt of man against God, and thus null and void. In the twentieth century, as the events of 1789 receded further into the past, Church authorities, although not confirming the principles of revolution, were more tolerant of their espousal and application to the social order. Thus, where the initial hurricane failed, gradual erosion succeeded. In Vatican II, Catholic liberalism won a total victory, a victory now being solidified in the policies of Paul VI.

After the calamities of the Revolution and the tyranny of Napoleon, Europe grew weary of the new ideas and their false promise. The Hapsburg minister Metterich and other diplomats attempted to re-establish social order on the principles of legitimacy and hierarchy. As a consequence, monarchs regained authority in many countries. In 1814, the Bourbon Louis XVIII assumed in France both the throne and the ancient title, The Most Christian King. Louis XVIII, and his successor Charles X, recognized Catholicism as the State religion.

The restoration of the monarchy enabled French Catholics once again to teach and live their Faith freely, and to revive religious orders and other Catholic institutions. Relations between the Church and the temporal order in France were not perfect, as they seldom are anywhere. The monarchy and its ministers tended to view the Church as an instrument of temporal order, ignoring the Church's role as a guide to supernatural ends that far transcend natural ones. This attitude, of course, is not novel. Throughout its history, the Church has confronted it in dealing with temporal rulers. Moreover, the French episcopacy was largely Gallican as before, claiming as much independence from Roman authority as possible. Finally, the laity was influenced by such spiritual and temporal rule. Catholics tend to express their piety in isolation from the day-to-day business of the world.

Generally, nevertheless, Rome was happy with the restoration. The restored temporal order was not inimical to the supernatural; grace and Revelation were not debarred from the public forum. Given the freedom to teach and live, the Church could rely on grace and the creation of new saints to clarify the minds and mollify the hearts of men, not least those who possessed legitimate, God-bestowed authority. If Rome was generally satisfied, however, other impatient spirits in the Church were not. The most influential of these was the brilliant journalist, Robert Felicité de Lamennais (1782-1854).

Lamennais almost perfectly represents the romantic reaction to the philosophes of the Enlightenment. The philosophes had loosed reason from its mediaeval moorings in Faith, and had conceived morality without grace. These conceptions were doomed to fail, for the cosmos is far larger than man's capacity to understand. Furthermore, the malicious horrors of the Revolution dashed the belief that human evil was solely the result of inadequate education. Whilst reacting to Enlightenment platitudes, however, romantics threw out baby and bath. Rather than putting reason in its proper place subordinate to Faith, they rejected reason altogether. But if they spurned reason, most romantics did not neglect religion. They celebrated religion insofar that they considered it irrational, emerging, like other noble sentiments, from the well of emotional experience. The romantics thus founded religion on the most infirm ground, human sentiment. Their good intentions have paved for many the road to hell.

As a child Lamennais already exhibited the romantic habit of melancholy. He withdrew from his family and peers, preferring the solitude of his uncle's library. There he read "voraciously and indiscriminately." Whereas he came to despise the philosophes, he was captivated by the writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Lamennais's undisciplined mind, like others in his generation, did not see that Rousseau's Pelagian optimism was the same as the philosophes' although translated to a different sphere of human psychology. Thus, in order to remedy the Enlightenment disease, Lamennais imbibed poison.

Lamennais's distaste for the arrogance of human reason, the result if not the intent of Descartes's philosophic exercises, was just. In fairness, it must be said that Descartes's speculations were not rooted in irreligion. The saintly and mystical founder of the French Oratory, Pierre de Berulle (1575-1629), had encouraged Descartes's efforts, hoping that they would affirm God's transcendence in His dealings with men. In his proof of God's existence Descartes followed an ancient tradition of St. Augustine, St. Anselm, and St. Bonaventure. A later Oratorian, Malebranche, developed from Cartesian principles a thoroughly Christian if thoroughly vulnerable metaphysics. Descartes's philosophy, none the less, is wounded mortally by a fallacious general principle. He did not understand, as mediaeval scholastics did, that the acquisitions of human reason were the effect of collective effort guided by Revelation, in other words, of tradition. Descartes thought wrongly that one could construct a true vision of the world from his own individual reason and intuition. This idea had frightful consequences, for it led to pure intellectual subjectivity and perverse conclusions among impious men (See E. Gilson , La Liberte chez Descartes et la theologie [Paris, 1913]; God and Philosophy [New Haven, 1941]; Henri Gouhier, La Pensée religieuse de Descartes [Paris, 1924]; Jacques Maritain, Three Reformers [1929, rp. N.Y., 1970]).

Lamennais seems to have discerned this consequential weakness in rationalist thought. Therefore, in order to overcome rationalist individualism, Lamennais turned to tradition. In doing so, however, he conceived a new, irrational, and tyrannical notion of tradition. Significantly, Lamennais's contemporary in England, John Henry Newman, another romantic reactionary, developed a similar (but more tortuous) understanding. Indeed, Newman so saw himself in Lamennais, that when the latter's thought was eventually condemned, he felt constrained to separate himself, tepidly and ineffectually, from the French thinker (H. L. Weatherby, Cardinal Newman in His Age [Nashville, 1973], pp. 254-257). In our day, with more subtlety, theologians such as Yves Congar continue to expound a romantic traditionalism. Worse, Vatican II virtually sanctioned the new idea of tradition. Not surprisingly, therefore, it holds sway among most establishment theologians.

After several years of internal struggle, Felicité de Lamennais was ordained priest in 1817. In the same year he published the first volume of his Essai sur l'indifférence en matière de religion, wherein he castigated the idea that society could be conducted without the continual, governing influence of religion, particularly Catholic religion. This work brought Lamennais instant fame. He was hailed, inappropriately, as a new Pascal or Bossuet. Subsequent volumes to the Essai, however, cast suspicion on Lamennais's virtue as Catholic apologist.

In these later volumes, Lamennais attempted to give some philosophic foundation to the mostly historical observations of his first volume. Reacting to Cartesian rationalism, Lamennais argued that certitude cannot be achieved by individual human reason. Certitude, rather, is the product of the historical consensus of mankind, what Lamennais called common sense. Such certitude is found, not only in the tradition of the Church, but in the overall tradition of mankind.

"The true religion," Lamennais says, "is that which can put forth on its own behalf the greatest number of witnesses." This religion is Catholicism (Cath. Enc., VIII, 762-763).

Conscious or not of the implications, Lamennais proposed a democratic, majoritarian, and positivistic understanding of tradition. His facts, of course, are doubtful: is it true that Catholicism can claim the greatest number of witnesses? When one realises the doubtfulness of this fact, and still maintains the principle, he will eventually posit a world religion based on a common denominator of belief. This Lamennais did at the end of his career, outside the Church. This also seems to be the tacit principle of the Secretariat of Christian (and Religious) Unity.

We have already suggested similarities between Lamennais's and Newman's understanding of tradition. Both believe that dogma develops, not as the result of Faith relentlessly seeking understanding, but in response, negative or positive, to a vague spirit of the times. This interpretation accords with a deep distrust of the intellect, evident in other prejudices Lamennais shares with his romantic counterpart in England. Like Newman, Lamennais was unimpressed by all but one (the majoritarian) of Thomas Aquinas's philosophic demonstrations for the existence of God. He dismissed Thomas's strongest arguments based on movement, contingency, and order of the created world. It was easy for Lamennais's critics to point out that if individual human reason could not produce certitude, a plethora of human reasoners could not. Lamennais, however, was impervious to such criticisms, for in speaking of the consensus of tradition, he was not really speaking of reason at all. In reality, he believed that the purported universal testimony of mankind was founded on a general sentiment, a general will. Lamennais defined tradition in the terms of Jean Jacques Rousseau.

Rousseau's superficially benign, democratic ideas ultimately lead to tyranny. Some authority, individual or oligarchic, and of necessity "prophetic," must interpret and enforce the general will. On this point Lamennais was not remiss. In the terminology of the day he was ultramontane, conferring on the Pope absolute authority. Lamennais's intrepid hatred of French Gallican bishops helped him reach this conclusion. As we should suspect, Lamennais did not conceive papal authority hierarchically, but democratically. For Lamennais, the Pope was "the expression of the universal will of man, the trustee of the entire human race" (Daniel-Rops, p. 222). Anyone who has read Jean Guitton's encomium of Paul VI will be aware how strong this sentiment is in the breast of the supreme pontiff now reigning. On the other hand, Lamennais was stunned when the Popes of his day refused the authority he conferred upon them in the terms in which he offered it.

Before he left the Church, Lamennais carried his notion of papal power to its conclusions. In effect, the Pope possessed no real authority since he was subject to the movements and evolution of the general will, "extending over almost a thousand years," or, in the cant of our day, to the "signs of the times." Newman, thinking in the same fashion, was reluctantly confident that Pius IX's Syllabus of Errors could not finally impede the irrepressible spirit of the age (Weatherby, pp. 1-10, 256-257).

Lamennais advanced a specious traditionalism and papalism which has inspired Catholic liberals ever since. The Popes of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, accurately judged Lamennais's ideas and their issue. Thus, they repeatedly condemned the idea that the existence of God could not be demonstrated by human reason. The truth that it could was solemnly defined in Vatican Council I. St. Pius X stressed this point in his various frontal attacks on modernism. So did Leo XIII when he established the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas as the touchstone of orthodoxy (Aeterni Patris, 1879). Finally, not only the intellectual pride of the Enlightenment, but papal mystagoguery like that taught by Lamennais was rejected in the first Vatican Council's declaration on Papal Infallibility.

In future articles I shall trace the further career of Lamennais's thought as he applied it to the life of the Church in his day. Lamennais, indeed, encapsulates the inevitable course of Catholic liberalism from its faulty premises to its pernicious conclusions. Whereas many Catholic liberals, like Newman, withdrew by acts of piety and will from the implications of their own thought, Lamennais did not. To their glory or damnation, Frenchmen are not afflicted by the hobgoblin of an inconsistent mind.

To be continued ...

[Emphasis - The Catacombs]

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Robert de Lamennais: The Church and The New Order May 5, 2019 14:45:12 GMT

Post by Admin on May 5, 2019 14:45:12 GMT

The Angelus - June 1978

The Church & the New Order

Part III

Kent Emery, Jr.

Revolution: Lamennais

La Mennais . . . discerned the Christian future with astonishing clarity: papal infallibility, abandonment of the temporal power, acceptance by the Church of democracy and liberalism, separation of Church and State, together with liturgical reform, development of biblical studies, widening pastoral methods. . . . All or nearly all of what the Church has achieved in our own times is to be found in La Mennais. —Henri Daniel-Rops, The Church in an Age of Revolution, 1789-1870, trans. J. Warrington (N. Y., 1967), I, 215.

These words of praise, written in 1965, reveal all. If Lamennais was rebuked in his own time, he is celebrated today as the herald of the glorious reforms of Vatican II which have brought the Church, and western society, to their current happy condition. St. Bernard, recapitulating the tradition of the Church Fathers, stated that one must possess personal sanctity in order to attain and preach religious truth. One would infer that the converse is also true. Daniel-Rops, however, seems oblivious to such considerations when he adds one modest qualification to his praise of Lamennais:

"He was undoubtedly a genius, a genius whose work would have been more effective if his innermost heart had not been tainted by a lethal pride" (Ibid.).

Lamennais thrived during the decade 1820-1830. At first he confined his attack to the social order, but soon this attack broadened to include the French Church, which Lamennais accused of supporting a decadent regime. By arguing vigorously for the independence of Catholic schools, Lamennais gained support from many of the devout. Eventually he concluded that the ills of French society and the French Church could be cured by the application of one principle: liberty. Founding his program of reform on this principle, Lamennais joined forces with proponents of the Revolution.

The regime of Charles X fell in 1830, replaced by the bourgeois republic of Louis-Phillipe. Lamennais was delighted, feeling that his prophetic vision had been confirmed. Later, however, Lamennais became as disenchanted with merchants and shopkeepers as he had been with the monarchy. Nevertheless, Lamennais took advantage of the more liberal climate and founded a new journal to propagate his ideas more widely. The journal bore the brave name, L'Avenir, "The Future". Lamennais was surrounded by a small coterie, the chief members being two young men, Vicomte Charles de Montalembert (1810-1870) and Henri Lacordaire (1802-1861). Montalembert and Lacordaire were destined to play important roles in the history of revolution in the Church. A direct line connects Montalembert, Jacques Maritain's "integral humanism" and the policies of Paul VI.

The ideas put forward in L'Avenir seem rather tired and dreary today, but they were pretty spiffy in their time. The motto of the journal was "God and Liberty". Lamennais believed, as reformers have been believing ever since, that the West was in "the flood-tide of transformation", undergoing an "irresistible evolution". This "evolution" was bringing about the total emancipation of all mankind. The Church, in the face of this "irresistible" change, had no choice but to flow with the tide, and declare herself the champion of liberty. Lamennais's devotion to progress and the future may appear contradictory to his earlier theories of tradition. We must remember, however, that Lamennais employed the word tradition in the fashion of Orwell's Newspeak. By tradition Lamennais certainly did not mean the preservation and careful cultivation of ancient customs and ideas. Rather, in Lamennais's usage, the word tradition meant the progressive course of human sentiment and the ever-changing excretions of religious experience. The spiritually acute were those persons able to anticipate the next mutation of the spirit of the times.

In order to carry out the necessary adaptation Lamennais proposed a threefold liberation. Firstly, the Church should liberate herself from the support of temporal governments. She should negotiate no more concordats and refuse economic aid. Lamennais urged a complete separation of Church and State. Today his dream has come true even in the last bastions of Catholic civilization, Spain and Italy, where separation has produced marvelous pastoral fruits. It is ironic that Lamennais thought separation entailed freedom from economic support of the State. In our country, the exemplar of separation of Church and State, Catholic bishops deny that government support of Catholic schools violates the sacred principle.

Secondly, free from the contagion of temporal governments, the Church would be free to pursue her true mission, "the liberation and advancement of peoples", or the progressio populorum. As Paul VI continually repeats, "mission today means development." To achieve their advancement, peoples must, as has happened in modern Africa with the blessing of the Church, "rid themselves of foreign oppression." Peoples must be free in the political, social, and economic spheres. Such freedom, Lamennais taught, is a religious imperative. "Democracy is the new legitimacy." "Where the people is, there is Christ. Their struggle is Christ's struggle." Vatican II's teaching on the missions and the liberation theology were born in the pages of L'Avenir.

Finally, to reciprocate the State, the Church must divest herself of all temporal claims and interests. Lamennais would have approved Paul VI's many gestures in this regard: the shedding of papal Juridical insignia, the reduction of the Swiss Guard, the selling of religious art, the return of St. Mark's relics to the Copts, the return of the standard of Lepanto to the Turks, the kissing of the feet of schismatic patriarchs, the bestowing of a papal ring on the Archbishop of Canterbury, the almost weekly, virtual apology for the teaching of Unam Sanctam.

Lamennais, like our liturgical reformers, hoped that the Church would return to the ethos of the early Church. He never noticed a fundamental contradiction in his thought. How could the world be governed democratically by a pure Pope, whom Lamennais called the "father of human kind" and the "dictator of Christian conscience", when Christians would either be martyred or holed-up in catacombs? The answer is simple: like modern reformers Lamennais never for a moment took the shibboleth of the early Church seriously, but used it as an instrument to relieve the Church of temporal authority and attachment to its medieval past.

Lamennais never proved to be a very good martyr. Most Catholics, as well as bona fide liberals, recognized his ideas as nothing more than the Revolution sprinkled lightly with holy water and certainly not purged with hyssop. Thus, Lamennais faced violent, or worse, sneering criticism. Sore wounded, Lamennais, ever the ideologue, acted according to his theory. He decided to seek approbation from the Pope, the father of the people, who, Lamennais was confident, would see the future as he did. In 1831 Lamennais, Montalembert, and Lacordaire embarked on pilgrimage to Rome.

Like Gromyko, Janos Kadar, African tribal chieftans, Walter Mondale, Betty Friedan, and other emancipators of the human spirit, Lamennais would have been received warmly in the Rome of today. However, as modern historians universally agree, Gregory XVI, reigning in Lamennais's time, was blind to the spirit of the age, and unable to discern the true worth of Lamennais's vision. One would have thought that Gregory XVI might have had some understanding. As a former Camaldolese hermit, he might have known something of the spirit of the early Church. As an ardent and precise student of St. Thomas Aquinas, he might have had some idea of the proper relation between the spiritual and the temporal. Strangely, in the audience he granted to the three pilgrims, Gregory did not seem to comprehend the urgency of their plans. Instead, he talked about the bells of St. Peter, reminisced about Montalembert's mother, and offered Lamennais a pinch of snuff.

Gregory XVI's opinion of L'Avenir became apparent later. A year after he had returned disappointed from Rome, Lamennais received, at a banquet celebrating his good works, a copy of Gregory XVI's encyclical, Mirari Vos (15 August 1832). This encyclical has been a scandal to progressives ever since. It is not reprinted by the Daughters of Saint Paul. In Mirari Vos, Gregory condemns, among other things, separation of Church and State, liberty of the press, liberty of conscience, revolt against princes, collaboration with liberals of "good will", and the need to regenerate Catholicism. This encyclical is not often cited in the documents of Vatican II.

After making a grand gesture of submission, Lamennais began to sulk. He rationalized that L'Avenir was not the object of the Pope's condemnation, and that anyway, the encyclical was only the exercise of juridical authority. The rationalizations could not withstand the obdurate quality of reality. In 1834, Lamennais left the priesthood, blaspheming the Pope, "the dictator of Christian conscience", as he went. Henceforward he lived by his literary talents. He immediately published a book, Paroles d'un croyant ("words of a believer"), in which he apposed the people, God's beloved, to their "oppressors and executioners", the legions of Satan, priests and kings. Gregory XVI had continued to watch with concern Lamennais's progress. In another encyclical, Singulari Nos (15 July 1834), Gregory condemned Paroles, which he called a book "small in size, but immense in perversity". In the encyclical, Gregory took the occasion to condemn once again the whole notion of liberal Catholicism.

Singulari Nos ended Lamennais's life as a Catholic. He continued to write raving books about the coming age of the Demos. He died in 1854, virulently unrepentant.

Lamennais's program, however, lives on. His disciple Lacordaire remarked of the master:

"If he had been humble and submissive, or even merely shrewd and farsighted, he would have found himself again, in 1841, head of the liberal Catholic school, leader of a fresh crusade, greater, stronger and more respected."

From Lamennais's fate Catholic liberals learned a cardinal tactic: do what is necessary to stay juridically within the Church. It was Lacordaire himself who carried the torch of revolution into the next generation.

Dr. Emery is Professor of History at The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina.

[Emphasis - The Catacombs]