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Is liberalism really as horrible as it is made out to be? This or that person is accused of being a “liberal,” yet a number of those accused vigorously deny that the label attaches to them. Who is right? Accusers or accused? Since “liberalism” is one name for the all-embracing error of modern times, responsible for throwing souls without number into the fires of Hell, it surely deserves one more approach.

Now freedom relates either to what I am free from, i.e. some constraint or other, or it relates to what I am free for, i.e. some purpose or other. Of these two relatives of freedom, the negative freedom from constraint comes both before the positive purpose in time, but after it in importance. It comes before in time, because if I am constrained from achieving a purpose, my achieving that purpose is out of the question. On the other hand it comes after it in importance because the value of the non-constraint will depend on the value of the purpose for which it is used. Thus holding a knife frees me from being unarmed, but if I use that freedom-from for cutting up food to eat, the freedom-from is good, but if I use it for carving up my grandmother, the freedom-from becomes murderous.

Now what liberalism does is to make the freedom-from a – or the – supreme value in itself, regardless of the freedom-for, or the good or bad purpose for which it will be used. Thus liberty or freedom-from is made independent of a good or bad purpose, independent of right and wrong. But the difference between right and wrong is an essential part of God’s creation, designed from the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden onwards for man to make his choice between Heaven and Hell. Therefore to put man’s lack of constraint in front of God’s law is to put man before God.

Being then the implicit denial of God’s moral law, of right and wrong, liberalism implicitly makes war on God, putting man’s human “right” to choose in front of God’s divine right to command. Now as Archbishop Lefebvre used to say, liberals come in 36 different varieties, by no means all of which mean to make war on God. But war on God remains the logical conclusion of liberals giving supreme value to liberty, and it is the reason why for many of them, anything goes. God and his rules having been pushed to one side, then the adoration of liberty becomes for liberals their substitute religion, a religion with no rules except their own will. Being moreover a substitute religion, it must get rid of the true religion which blocks its way, and so liberals naturally become crusaders against God’s order in all corners of his Creation: marriages free of gender, families free of children, States free of a head, life free of morals, and so on, and so on. Such a war on God’s reality is completely insane, yet liberals, apparently so sweet to their fellow-men whom they are “liberating,” can in fact be utterly cruel to anybody who gets in the way of their crusade. It is in the logic of their substitute religion that they need observe no normal decency in trampling upon anti-liberals, who deserve no compassion.

For 20 centuries the Catholic Church condemned such insanity. Yet at Vatican II the official Church gave way to it, by for instance declaring (“Dignitatis Humanae”) that every State must protect rather its citizens’ freedom-from civil constraint in the practice of their choice of religion than their freedom-for the practice of the true religion. And now the leaders of a certain religious Society want to put it under the authority of the Vatican II Romans. For the true religion, such action is, as Archbishop Lefebvre called it, “Operation Suicide.” But then liberalism is intrinsically suicidal.

Kyrie eleison.