On 11 December 1925 Pope Pius XI promulgated his encyclical letter Quas Primas, on the Kingship of Christ. The encyclical dealt with what the Pope described correctly as "the chief cause of the difficulties under which mankind was laboring."
Pope Pius XI explained that the manifold evils in the world are due to the fact that the majority of men have thrust Jesus Christ and His holy law out of their lives; that Our Lord and His holy law have no place either in private life or in politics; and, as long as individuals and states refuse to submit to the rule of our Saviour, there will be no hope of lasting peace among nations. Men must look for the peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ -- Pax Christi in Regno Christi.
In the February, 1976 issue of Approaches, Hamish Fraser stated with, alas, complete accuracy, that Quas Primas is virtually ignored by the so-called Catholic nations and by the Catholic clergy. It was, he lamented, the greatest non-event in the entire history of the Church.
What is it that caused the Catholic clergy, and the bishops of the world in particular, to be so embarrassed by this encyclical that it was virtually ignored at the time of its promulgation, and has been all but forgotten in the post-Vatican-II epoch? What is it about this encyclical which caused its teaching to be passed over in silence, if not actually contradicted, by the Second Vatican Council? It is an incontrovertible fact that this Council conspicuously and, one must conclude, deliberately, failed to reaffirm the teaching of Quas Primas.
The answer to these questions is that in this encyclical Pope Pius XI reaffirmed the unbroken teaching of His predecessors upon the papal throne that states as well as individuals must submit themselves to the rule of Christ the King. In affirming this fundamental truth of our Faith, Pope Pius was not referring simply to Catholic nations, or even to Christian nations, but to the whole of mankind. He stated this truth unequivocally by quoting a passage from the encyclical Annum Sacrum of Pope Leo XIII:
"The empire of Christ the King includes not only Catholic nations, not only baptized persons who, though of right belonging to the Church, have been led astray by error, or have been cut off from her by schism, but also all those who are outside the Christian faith; so that truly the whole of mankind is subject to the power of Jesus Christ."
All men, both as individuals and as nations, are subject to the rule of Our Lord Jesus Christ the King, and this for two reasons. Firstly, because, as God, He is our Creator. Psalm 32 summarized the correct Creator-creature relationship in the following inspired terms:
"Let all the earth fear the Lord: and let all the inhabitants of the world be in awe of Him. For He spoke and they were made: He commanded and they were created."
"For He spoke and they were made: He commanded and they were created." God is our Creator. We are His creatures. Without Him we would not exist. We owe Him everything, and He owes us nothing. Those who are created have an absolute obligation to love and serve their Creator. This obligation is unqualified; there are no "ifs," no "buts," and, as we shall see, no question of any possible right on the part of any man at any time to withhold his obedience.
It is only when men live their lives within the correct perspective of the Creator-creature relationship that social and political harmony and order prevail. "The peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ." When men repudiate this relationship, disharmony and disorder take over, the disharmony and disorder of sin, the disharmony and disorder introduced for the first time into the whole of creation when the Archangel Lucifer, the most magnificent of all God's creatures, was overcome with pride and boasted: Non serviam -- "I will not serve." The Catechism teaches us that our purpose in life is to know, love, and serve God in this world so that we can be happy with Him forever in the next. We cannot claim to love God if we do not serve Him, and we cannot claim to serve God if we do not subject ourselves to the law of Christ the King. "If you love Me," He warned, "keep My commandments." (John 14:15).
In Quas Primas, Pope Pius XI explains the second reason that we must subject ourselves to Our Lord. He explains the beautiful and profound truth that Christ is our King by acquired, as well as by natural right, for He is our Redeemer. "Would that those who forget what they have cost our Saviour," the Pope admonished us, "might recall the words: 'You were not redeemed with corruptible things, but with the Precious Blood of Christ, as of a Lamb unspotted and undefiled'. We are no longer our own, for Christ has purchased us 'with a great price'; our very bodies are the 'members of Christ'."
The double claim of Our Lord Jesus Christ to our allegiance, as our Creator and our Redeemer, is well summarized in the Book of the Apocalypse, where St. John tells us that Christ is "the Ruler of the kings of the earth." (Apoc. 17:18). The fact that the kings of the earth -- in other words, the nations and those who rule them are subject to the Kingship of Christ pertains to what is known as His Social Kingship, that is, His right to rule over societies as well as individuals.
No one claiming to be a Christian would, one hopes, dispute the fact that as individuals we must submit ourselves to the rule of Christ the King, but very few Christians, Catholics included, and conservative Catholics among them, understand, let alone uphold, the Social Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ. This is an attitude which is very common among certain well-known politicians in the United States who, while claiming to be Catholics, state with apparent pride that they do not permit their private beliefs to impinge upon their public duties. They uphold with apparent certainty the principle of the separation of Church and State. (This is a very strange attitude for a Catholic to take, but some of these politicians appear to be very strange "Catholics.")
The separation of Church and State was condemned unequivocally by the Supreme Pontiffs until the Second Vatican Council. The Church's teaching is that the State has an obligation to render public worship to God in accord with the teachings of the One True Church, the Catholic Church, and positively to aid the Catholic Church in the carrying out of her functions. The State does not have the right to remain neutral regarding religion, much less to pursue a secular approach in its policies. A secular approach is by that very fact an anti-God and an anti-Christ approach. This unequivocal teaching was summarized very clearly by Pope St. Pius X, who, in his encyclical Vehementer Nos, condemned the principle of the separation of Church and State as "an absolutely false and most pernicious thesis." Pope Pius IX in His "Syllabus of Errors," condemned with the penalty of excommunication any Catholic who held to this heresy.
The practical consequences of this Catholic teaching are difficult to imagine for those of us who have known nothing but a secular state, in which the State claims to have no responsibilities in matters of religion and morality. (The secular state outlaws certain immoral acts, not because they are immoral, but because the majority wish them to be outlawed.) Nevertheless, we must admit that this claim of the secular state is profoundly wrong.
The only word adequate to describe the claim by a Catholic politician that he will not allow his private beliefs to impinge upon his public duties is blasphemy -- or at least open rebellion against God. For the Commandments of God are binding in public as well as in private, and it is blasphemous for a Christian to maintain the contrary.
The Commandment "Thou shalt not kill" precludes the taking of innocent human life. We can take another human life only as an act of self-defense, to save our lives, those of our families or friends, of our clergy or our fellow citizens against an unjust aggressor, or in defense of the true Catholic Faith (e.g., the Crusades, the Inquisition, etc.); but never, never, never, does any human being have the right to take the life of an innocent person. Unborn infants certainly come into this category, a fact stated forcefully, courageously, and unambiguously by our Holy Father Pope Pius XII, commemorating Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum Novarum. May God bless Him for it.
Who could be more innocent of aggressive intent than an unborn child within the womb of his mother? Who could be more clearly protected by God's absolute prohibition against taking the life of the innocent than an unborn child within the womb of his mother?
What exactly is a politician such as Governor Cuomo (and many other so-called "Catholic" politicians) claiming when he states that he is personally against abortion but that, as a politician, he must respect the right of a woman to murder her unborn baby? He is basing this alleged right on the fact that it has been "granted" by the law of the United States, just as it has been granted by the governments of almost every country in the Western World. In other words -- and I am sure that Governor Cuomo would not dispute this -- he believes that a right is acquired when it is accorded by the majority of citizens within a state. In believing this, he has accepted, in place of the Social Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and His right to rule over societies as well as individuals, the abominable theory of democracy enshrined in the French Revolutions's Declaration of the Rights of Man, the declaration which constituted a formal and insolent repudiation of the Social Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the declaration which enshrined the greatest heresy of modern times, perhaps of all times: that authority resides in the people. On the contrary, as the Popes have taught, Omnis potestas a Deo -- "All authority comes from God."
"Not so!" reply the revolutionaries. Omnis potestas a populo -- "All authority comes from the people."
How well the term "revolutionaries" applies to these men! A revolution is best defined as the forcible overthrow of a legitimately established authority or government, and this is precisely what they did. They overthrew the Social Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ in favor of what is rightly termed the heresy that authority resides in the will of the majority -- the heresy that is the source of all the evils in society today, and which is a chief tenet of the heresies of Liberalism and Americanism.
It would be a mistake to imagine that the dethronement of Our Lord began at the end of the 18th Century with the promulgation by the French and American Revolutionaries of the so-called "Rights of Man." The process began four centuries earlier, in 14th-century Italy, during what has become known as the "Renaissance." The word is French and means "rebirth." It refers to the rebirth of classical studies which began in Italy in the 14th Century. Those engaged in these studies were known as "humanists" because their studies were concerned with purely human topics, whereas in Europe, until that time, God had been the focus for almost every aspect of scholarship and art. Music, architecture, literature, painting, drama, philosophy, cosmology and, above all, theology -- the Queen of the Sciences -- were centered upon the Creator, and the Creator-creature relationship was axiomatic to every aspect of human thought.
Initially, there was no conflict between Humanism and the Church. Many humanists were also ecclesiastics. But as time passed, it became clear that the movement was tending to relegate religion to a place where it had little or no influence on human thought or human behavior. This tendency was implicit rather than explicit. It gave rise to the attitude that whereas faith is valid in its own domain, reason should be concerned only with what is scientifically demonstrable. The Creator-creature relationship was not formally denied, but attention became focused almost exclusively on man, to the neglect of God, Who was, effectively, confined to the sacristy. Man was seen as an autonomous being, the focus of truth in a world of which he was master and which he had the ability to subdue and perfect, a being capable of building an earthly paradise by its own efforts -- a utopia. The extent to which these ideas were reflected in the Freemasonic principles of the French Revolution, and later in atheistic Communism, hardly needs pointing out.
The practical result of Humanism was the divinization of Man. The more God was diminished, the more man exalted himself and became his own God. In his book Christian Humanism professor Thomas Molnar provides us with the following definition: "Humanism was a doctrine, or network of doctrines, putting man in place of God, and endowing him with features that he was inevitably to abuse."
I have mentioned the extent to which the principles of Humanism reached their logical conclusion in the Freemasonic French Revolution and in Communism, but the Protestant Reformation cannot be exempted from this charge. Our Lord Jesus Christ founded a visible Church, His Mystical Body, to continue His mission in the world until He comes again in glory. This Church was endowed with a visible head, the Bishop of Rome, the Vicar of Jesus Christ. A vicar is a person who is authorized to perform a function on behalf of another, as his officially designated deputy. The Vicar of Christ has the authority to teach infallibly the true meaning of the Scriptures as intended by their Divine Author.
The Protestant Reformers repudiated the authority of the Vicar of Christ, and hence the authority of Christ Himself. They claimed to accept the authority of the Scriptures, but the inevitable logic of Protestantism is that they accept the authority of Scripture as each individual Protestant interprets it. In other words, every Protestant makes his own reason his ultimate authority in religious matters. It has often been said that, in the final analysis, every Protestant is his "own pope." We can go further still and state that in the final analysis Protestantism makes each Protestant into his own god. This is Humanism with a vengeance.
Catholics did not, of course, remain free from these influences, and in 1907, in the fifth year of his pontificate, Pope St. Pius X felt obliged to promulgate his encyclical letter Pascendi Dominici Gregis, condemning the errors of the Protestantized version of Catholicism known as Modernism, the ultimate logic of which, explained the Pope, was atheism.
The most deplorable example of man's self-deification in our day is man's arrogation to himself of God's supreme and most fundamental authority, that is, His authority over life and death.
"I," says contemporary man, "shall decide for myself when a new human life shall begin and, once it has begun, whether it shall continue or be terminated. I shall use contraception to ensure that no new life is conceived without my consent, and, should a conception take place that I deem inconvenient, I shall terminate it by abortion." The next step in this diabolical process is the legalization of euthanasia.
Although I have said that it would be a mistake to imagine that the dethronement of Christ the King was inaugurated by the promulgation of the French Revolution's Declaration of the Rights of Man, there can be no doubt that his Declaration constituted the first formal repudiation of Our Lord's Social Kingship, and that it was the most influential act in the process of securing His virtually universal dethronement during the next two centuries.
Before examining the extent to which this Declaration constituted a repudiation of Catholic teaching on the authority of the State, it is necessary to have a clear grasp of the content of this teaching. The doctrine of the Popes on the authority of the State is clear and self-evident to those with a proper understanding of the Creator-creature relationship, which is fundamental to a well-ordered society.
A State is composed of two elements: the government, or those who govern, and the governed, authority being vested in those who govern. The Church is not committed to any particular form of government, and despite the tendency of Popes to refer to "princes" in their encyclicals, they were not completely opposed to democracy, if all that is meant by this term is that those who govern are chosen by a vote (based on either limited or universal suffrage). What the Popes maintain, logically and uncompromisingly, is that the source of authority is precisely the same in an absolute monarchy, such as that of Louis XIV in 18th-century France, as in a country where the government is chosen in a democratic election in which every citizen has the right to vote, such as the United States today. In either situation, papal teaching on the source of authority is clear and has already been stated: Omnis potestas a Deo -- "ALL authority comes from God." Pope Leo XIII explained in his encyclical Immortale Dei that:
"Every civilized community must have a ruling authority, and this authority, no less than society itself, has its source in nature, and has, consequently, God for its author. Hence it follows that all public power must proceed from God. FOR GOD ALONE IS THE TRUE AND SUPREME LORD OF THE WORLD. Everything without exception must be subject to Him, and must serve Him, so that whosoever holds the right to govern, holds it from one sole and single source, namely, God, the Sovereign Ruler of all. "There is no power but from God."
"There is no power but from God." This quote from Romans 13:1 states all that needs to be stated concerning the source of authority. Because those who govern derive their authority from God, and govern as His legates, and not as holding their authority from the people, no government can have a true right to enact any legislation contrary to the law of God, even if such legislation is the manifest wish of the majority of the people. The Church is totally opposed to any concept of democracy in which authority is said to reside in the people and in which those who govern are said to receive their authority from the people. Pope Leo XIII insisted in Immortale Dei that:
"In a society grounded upon such maxims, all government is nothing more nor less than the will of the people; and the people, being under the power of itself alone, is alone its own ruler... The authority of God is passed over in silence, just as if there were no God; or as if He cared nothing for human society; or as if men, in their individual capacity or bound together in social relations, owed nothing to God; or as if there could be a government of which the whole origin and power and authority did not reside in God Himself. Thus, as is evident, a state becomes nothing but a multitude, which is its own master and ruler."
Few English-speaking Catholics are familiar with the French Revolution's Declaration of the Rights of Man or with its background. The Rights of Man were discussed by the French National Assembly during the meetings of August, 1789, and adopted in October of the same year. Some of the articles are not simply acceptable but actually commendable, e.g., Article 7, concerning the detention of citizens; Article 8, stating that laws cannot have a retroactive effect; and Article 9, concerning those who have been arrested but whose guilt has not been proven. Other articles are ambiguous. But some others are positively incompatible with Catholicism, particularly Article 6, which begins by stating that the law is the expression of the general will. This is a complete negation of the teaching of the Church that all authority comes from God. Pope Pius VI had no hesitation in condemning the Declaration as "contrary to religion and to society." Acceptance of the Declaration of the Rights of Man rules out the possibility of a Catholic state and the social reign of Christ the King. This is hardly surprising in view of the Masonic origin of the Declaration. Father Denis Fahey wrote:
"That the preparation and the triumph of the French Revolution were the work of Freemasonry does not need proof since the Masons themselves boast of it. Accordingly, the Declaration of the Rights of Man is a Masonic production."
Father Fahey quoted in support of this contention a statement by Monsieur Bonnet, the orator at the Grand Orient Assembly in 1904:
"Freemasonry had the supreme honor of giving to humanity the chart which it had lovingly elaborated. It was our Brother, de la Fayette, who first presented the project of a declaration of the natural rights of the man and the citizen living in society, to be the first chapter of the Constitution. On 25 August 1789, the Constituent Assembly, of which more than 300 members were Masons, definitively adopted, almost word for word, in the form determined upon in the Lodges, the text of the immortal Declaration of the Rights of Man."
Father Fahey summarized the Declaration as a formal renunciation of allegiance to Christ the King, of the supernatural life, and of membership in Christ's Mystical Body. He continued:
"The French State thereby officially declared that it no longer acknowledged any duty to God through Our Lord Jesus Christ, and no longer recognized the dignity of membership of Christ in its citizens. It thus inaugurated the attack on the organization of society under Christ the King which has continued down to the present day."
The principle that all authority comes from the people is now all but universally accepted throughout the West. The basis of public morality is whatever the contemporary consensus of citizens is prepared to accept. It would be very hard to convince the average Catholic today that his country should not be governed by the will of the people or that our elected representatives are anything more than delegates of the people who voted them into power.
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