Condemned Catholic Liberalism

The Essay on Indifference and "Common Sense"

Felicite Robert de Lamennais was born in Saint-Malo on 19 June 1782 and ordained a priest in 1817^[4]. That same year appeared the first volume of his Essay on Indifference in Matters of Religion (the second would follow in 1823): against unbelievers, he argues there that individual reason does not suffice to reach religious truth and that one must rely on the authority of universal consent, the "common sense" of mankind^[5]. The book was a triumph: within months it made its author the most celebrated defender of the faith in France.

But the system carries its flaw: by lowering individual reason in favour of external authority, the early Lamennais verges on fideism and paves the way for what the Church would later condemn under the name of philosophical traditionalism — reason being no longer able to prove anything by itself^[6]. When the authority to which he submits changes, the whole system will topple with it.

The Ultramontane of the Restoration

Under the Restoration, Lamennais is the most ardent ultramontane in the kingdom: in On Religion Considered in Its Relations with the Political and Civil Order (1825-1826), he defends the alliance of throne and altar and the full liberty of the Church against the Gallicanism of the Bourbons^[7]. Then comes the break: the ordinances of 1828 against the Jesuits and the minor seminaries convince him that thrones are betraying the altar. In 1829, Progress of the Revolution and of the War against the Church seals the reversal: since kings abandon the Church, the Church must do without kings — and seek the support of peoples and liberties^[8]. The July Revolution of 1830 gives him his hour.

The Programme: Separation, Liberties, Suffrage

On 16 October 1830, Lamennais founds with two young disciples, Abbe Henri Lacordaire and Count Charles de Montalembert, the daily L'Avenir, under the motto "God and liberty"^[9]. The programme is clear: complete separation of Church and State, liberty of conscience, liberty of the press, liberty of education, universal suffrage, decentralisation. The argument is clever: only a Church freed from the grip of governments can be truly free; and modern liberties, claimed for all, will benefit the Church as they benefit all^[10].

"God and liberty" — Motto of L'Avenir, at the head of the newspaper, 16 October 1830^[11]

Lamennais backs the newspaper with a General Agency for the Defence of Religious Liberty, a veritable judicial and media war machine. Within months, L'Avenir becomes the most discussed newspaper in Europe — and the most watched in Rome, where alarm grows at seeing a priest exalt liberties that the Church has just seen used to persecute her^[12].

The Pilgrimage to Rome and the Suspension

Attacked by the French episcopate, the three editors suspend the newspaper on 15 November 1831 and set out to submit their cause to the Pope himself: the famous "pilgrimage to Rome" of late 1831^[13]. In Rome, the reception is icy. Lacordaire then Montalembert break away and return home; Lamennais persists, waits months for an answer that never comes, and learns of the condemnation while staying in Munich: on 15 August 1832, Gregory XVI publishes the encyclical Mirari vos^[14].

What Mirari vos Condemns

The encyclical names neither Lamennais nor his newspaper, but everyone recognises the theses of L'Avenir beneath the condemned errors: indifferentism (all religions are equal), liberty of conscience erected into an absolute right, unlimited liberty of the press, and contempt for the authority of princes^[15]. The most famous passage targets liberty of conscience:

"From this poisoned source of indifferentism flows that absurd and erroneous maxim, or rather that madness: that liberty of conscience must be secured and claimed for everyone." — Gregory XVI, Mirari vos, 15 August 1832^[16]

The following table summarises the condemnation, thesis by thesis:

Lamennais first signs a submission, then retracts it: for him, Rome has mistaken the century^[17].

The Words of a Believer and the Break

In April 1834, he anonymously publishes the Words of a Believer, a lyrical and violent prose calling peoples to shake off the yoke of kings and complicit priests^[18]. Gregory XVI answers on 25 June 1834 with the encyclical Singulari nos, which condemns the book, describing it as small in size but immense in perversity, and denounces in it the separation of Church and State, revolt against sovereigns and a false liberty that is mere license^[19].

"Small in size, immense in perversity" — Gregory XVI, Singulari nos, 25 June 1834, on the Words of a Believer^[20]

The break is complete: in 1836 Lamennais publishes the Affairs of Rome, an indictment of the pontifical court, and sinks into a Christianity without the Church, then into a humanitarian deism (Sketch of a Philosophy, 1840, placed on the Index)^[21]. Elected deputy to the Constituent Assembly in 1848, he ends in misery and dies in Paris on 27 February 1854, having refused the succour of religion: according to his wishes, he is buried without religious ceremony in the common grave of Pere-Lachaise^[22].

Quanta cura and the Last Four Propositions

Thirty years after Lamennais, the battle resumes under Pius IX. On 8 December 1864, the encyclical Quanta cura and its appendix, the Syllabus of Errors, list eighty propositions already condemned by the Magisterium — including the whole liberal programme: liberty of conscience as a natural right (prop. 15), separation of Church and State (prop. 55), and the final triptych on the established religion and modern civilisation (props 77 to 80)^[23].

The last proposition, the most famous, gives the case its full stop:

"The Roman Pontiff can and must be reconciled and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilisation." — Pius IX, Syllabus, prop. 80, 8 December 1864^[24]

The Latin text, quoted by manuals for a century and a half, reads: "Romanus Pontifex potest ac debet cum progressu, cum liberalismo et cum recenti civilitate sese reconciliare et componere" ^[25]. To condemn that sentence is not to condemn railways or hygiene: it is to refuse that the Church should apologise for existing and bargain her doctrine for her tranquillity.

Immortale Dei (1885): the Christian Constitution of States

Leo XIII takes up the case without yielding on the substance, but as a great theologian: the encyclical Immortale Dei, of 1 November 1885, recalls that all power comes from God, that the State has the duty to recognise the true religion, and that separation is an error — while admitting that the Church may tolerate in fact what she cannot prevent, when the common good requires it^[26]. Condemning the principle does not forbid discerning situations.

Libertas (1888): True Liberty and Liberal License

The encyclical Libertas praestantissimum, of 20 June 1888, is the charter of discernment: liberty, "an excellent gift of nature", consists in choosing the means that lead to man's true end — God; liberal license, by contrast, makes each liberty (of conscience, speech, teaching, worship) an absolute withdrawn from every law, even God's^[27]. Hence the formula that sums up the whole 19th-century case: what the Church condemns under the name of liberalism is not liberty, but the naturalism that cuts it off from truth.

"One thing is true liberty, another the license of liberalism: the first leads man to the good, the second turns him from it under the colour of good." — Leo XIII, the mind of Libertas praestantissimum, 20 June 1888^[28]

Two years later, Sapientiae christianae (10 January 1890) draws the consequences for Catholic citizens: obey just laws, refuse unjust laws, and take part in public life instead of deserting the city^[29]. The later deviations — Americanism targeted by Testem benevolentiae (22 January 1899), the Sillon condemned by Notre charge apostolique (25 August 1910), modernism struck by Pascendi (8 September 1907) — each have their own article: refer to them instead of developing them here^[30].

Lacordaire and Montalembert: Remaining Catholic

Lacordaire accepts Mirari vos without reserve. From Lent 1835, his Conferences at Notre-Dame de Paris fill the cathedral: a priest submissive to Rome preaches there before crowds L'Avenir had never gathered^[31]. In 1839, he resumes the Dominican habit and restores in France the Order of Preachers annihilated by the Revolution; he dies in 1861, honoured by all, living proof that one could love liberty without breaking with the Church^[32].

Montalembert follows the same path in the political arena: deputy, defender of liberty of education which would lead to the Falloux Law of 15 March 1850, speaker at the Catholic congress of Malines in August 1863 where he pleads for modern liberties in fidelity to Rome^[33]. Struck by the Syllabus, he submits and dies in 1870 unbroken — the figure of the liberal Catholic who remained Catholic^[34].

The condemnation of the theses does not extinguish the current: in France, the review Le Correspondant carries liberal ideas while Louis Veuillot, in L'Univers, holds the line of intransigent submission — a fratricidal quarrel tearing French Catholicism apart for thirty years^[35]. In Belgium, Catholics and liberals unite around the Constitution of 7 February 1831, which guarantees the liberties from which the Church immediately profits to reopen seminaries, schools and convents^[36]. The Belgian model — a free Church enjoying common liberties without erecting them into dogma — shows that the Magisterium condemned a doctrine, not the prudent use of real liberties.

Here the difference with neighbouring doctrines must be marked: doctrinal Gallicanism, Febronianism and Josephism wanted the Church subjected to the State; Catholic liberalism wants the Church separated from the State — the reverse error, condemned for its indifferentism, not for its taste for liberty^[37].

The last word belongs to the continuity of the Magisterium: the Second Vatican Council, in Dignitatis humanae (7 December 1965), teaches that no one may be coerced in religious matters — not because all opinions are equal, but because truth imposes itself by itself and the dignity of the person demands the liberty to seek^[38]. The condemnation of liberalism stands; what changes is the situation of States, become pluralist, where the Church asks for the liberty of the true without claiming the privilege of the false. Hermeneutic of continuity, not rupture: the 19th-century popes and the Council speak the same faith in different centuries.

• The Gallican context: Gallicanism (15th-19th Century) and its doctrine, Doctrinal Gallicanism
• The absolutist cousins: Febronianism and Josephism
• The derivatives condemned in the following century: Americanism, Sillonism, Modernism
• The clarification of Vatican II: Dignitatis humanae — Religious Liberty
• The other modern errors: Jansenism, Quietism, Fideism