“Freedom of religion” was always intended to mean “suppression of the Church”…

….by the instigators of what I demeaningly call the endarkenment, because, in many ways, it absolutely was.  A blogger posted at Catholic Lane a rebuttal to Simcha Fisher’s diatribe against Putin which was very similar to my own, although with not near so much depth, panache, and style.  Heh.  Anyways, Mrs. Fisher replied with this:

Yep, you heard it here first:  The Catholic Church has longstanding contempt for liberal ideals, such as “freedom of speech” and “freedom of religion.”

If John Paul II were alive today, he’d be punching Philip Primeau in the back of the head when no one was looking.

In reality, prior to Vatican II, the Church most certainly did have “longstanding contempt” for such enlightenment ideals as “freedom of religion.”  For most of the history of the Church, the dominant belief and practice viz a viz heretical sects and government support for same was “error has no rights.”  There was a massive double standard, absolutely, and no Pope wept over it. The Church, being formally instituted by Christ as His Body on earth as the ONLY vehicle of salvation for all humanity, was expected to be supported, endorsed, and embraced by all virtuous government. That was simply Her due as the Body of Christ.  Examples of this Church-state alliance included government serving as the enforcement arm of ecclesiastical law, the use of government force against heretics, and the massive aid and prestige given to many entities of state by their formal association with the Church.  This form of culture, of politico-ecclesiastical organization, was not without its problems and drawbacks, but it was, for well over 1000 years, the established order of Christendom.

But when the protestant revolt permanently destroyed this established order through their damnable ideas regarding “private interpretation” (I can make Scripture say what I want……weeee!) and their slow but steady chucking of constant Christian morality (divorce was approved of by all protestant sects almost instantly, which helped both the Lutheran and Episcopal sects get off to a strong start with government force at their backs, provided by German princes and English kings), Christendom began to break down.  The initial protestant sects tended to model the Catholic system of a state religion for each state, but soon that hideous error of private interpretation led to more and more new sects of protestants, the “dissenters.”  These dissenters were initially weak and fragmented (because they could not agree on anything, with 50,000 little popes!) However, through a confluence of events, the dissenters actually came to power in England for a brief period in the mid-17th century, which period featured huge amounts of fratricidal bloodshed and the cutting off of one king’s head.  Another king was forced from office under foreign invasion, again at the behest of the “dissenters.”

When the dissenters (also known as Puritans, Anabaptists, and others) wanted to vilify a king or any other opponent, they accused them of papist tendencies.  It was in this dissent-dominated milieu, with all manner of perverse ideas floating about regarding Sacred Scripture, orthodox Christian belief and practice, and steadily declining morality, that the “enlightenment” thinkers first appeared in England.  Thomas Hobbes, Sir Isaac Newton, and John Locke were all adherents to the most liberal of the dissenting protestant sects.  They reviled ordered religion. In fact, their beliefs were really deist.  Deism was the dominant belief pattern of all the leading enlightenment thinkers.  Deism posits, at most, a God who sort of set the universe in motion, and then stepped back and just lets it take care of itself. Deists also believe God has no care over human sin, except, maybe, corporate sins, such as those that might persecute enlightenment philosophers, or sins which offend against the rights of the secular state (I am not making this up) .  If this sounds very similar to leftist attempts to co-opt Christianity for themselves today, it should, because they are simply fulfilling the basic liberal theory of the enlightenment.

As I said, Hobbes and Locke, very explicitly, set about creating a new philosophy and a new political system that would accomplish three things:

1. Permanently sunder the link between religion and politics, by….
2. defining a God that did not care a whit about “right” or “wrong” belief of practice of the Faith, which would
3. lead to the crushing of established religion and its replacement with the most liberal, inconsequential practice of the “faith” possible.

Ultimately, all the above was intended, directly or indirectly, to crush the “tyranny” the Church supposedly exercised over men through her alliance with the leaders of various nations and principalities. Locke, Hobbes, Newton, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Jefferson, et. al., were all violently anti-Catholic.  It is not fair to say that they envisioned their philosophies and political systems solely to destroy the Church, but it was certainly an aspect of the errors they proclaimed that they both foresaw, and relished.

In order to achieve this end, Hobbes, Locke, and all the other enlightenment types pushed their very liberal, unorthodox, and deist views on all their readers and adherents.  They constantly attacked and ridiculed any orthodox beliefs (such as, the Real Presence, the idea of Sin, the Incarnation, atonement for sin, the 10 Commandments, etc), all the while selling to very confused minds in England and France (minds already led badly astray through adherence to protestantism, or being fallen away Catholics), the idea that their views were somehow up to date, backed by “science,” and based on “reason.”  Both Hobbes and Locke belittled Scholasticism at every possible turn.

What they managed to sell to people was enlightenment deism as a replacement for Christianity, the hinge for which sell was “tolerance.”  They pointed back to the Thirty Years War, the strife England experienced due to the rampages of the protestant dissenters (their own ilk!), and other examples of religious motivated bloodshed, to “prove” that religious orthodoxy was unreasonable, ignorant, and prone to violence. Far better, they claimed, was enlightenment “tolerance” (and doesn’t that echo with us today!), which envisioned the sundering of the Catholic-state alliance, and its replacement with a government founded on “liberty,” a government which would insure “the rights of the people” through the reduction of Christianity to an utterly inconsequential, deist rump religion.

The key to selling this enlightenment reason was the prospect that, in exchange for insuring the rights of God (as the then-current construct of Christendom did), the new Leviathan “liberty” state would insure the rights of man.  Thus, “liberty” was sold as the alternative to Church-state “tyranny.”  Locke posited a government that would be determined by majority vote (a concept that came back to the fore in the Renaissance, as ancient Rome and Greek were held up by elites as somehow superior to the established Christendom), thus giving people the illusion of power and control over their destinies. This new system promised, according to Locke, prosperity, peace, and liberty. Liberty meant many things to different people. Some saw it as freedom from traditional sexual morality.  Some saw in it a license to drink.  Others saw that they could pursue their fondest dreams of avarice, without recourse to a Church-inspired conscience.  In short, “liberty” came to mean for many people freedom to do whatever they most desired, and the shucking of traditional morality.  And in the protestant environments from which this enligtenment thinking sprang, it spread like wildfire.  The English North American colonies, perhaps the most protestant-dominated entity on earth, would be the first place these ideas reached their fruition.

Locke himself created the concept of “freedom of religion,” in which numerous different religions, all well under the thumb of the libertine super-state, would “tolerate” each other by being indifferentist as all get out.  Basically, anyone who wasn’t a deist, had to keep his religious practice completely private. They might let you go to church, but don’t come spilling out of that church clamoring for your Romish God. Thus, “freedom of religion” was always an enlightenment concept intended not to protect religion, but to drive it from the public sphere, minimize its influence over men’s lives, and insure the supremacy of the secular state over every aspect of religion.  If this sounds familiar to our present circumstances in this country, it should.  We’re simply reaching the end stages of the process of “enlightenment” as intended by its creators.

Thus, it is hardly surprising that, for centuries, the Church most strongly opposed concepts like “freedom of religion,” and why the #1 complaint, without question (well, ok, after the Mass), regarding the novelties introduced at Vatican II from Catholics, was the seeming chucking of the centuries old belief and practice regarding “freedom of religion” in Dignitatis Humanae and Guadium Et Spes.  That this chucking was done under the strongest of pressure from the American contingent, highly infected with the condemned heresy of Americanism, and that it was only achieved through subterfuge and guile by blocking the signatures of several hundred Council Fathers who wanted the offending portions of the document changed, has only added to the frustration of many Catholics since the Council.

There is really no better issue to highlight the massive divide that was introduced into the Church at the Council, than this one of “freedom of religion.” From the very concept being condemned, formally, in the Syllabus of Errors (1854) to it’s being proclaimed as a “fundamental right” under the “primacy of conscience” at Vatican II, there is no single item that shows the great difficulties that will be involved in developing a “hermeneutic of continuity” between the perennial belief of the Church, and the novelties introduced at VII.

Regarding “freedom of speech,” I would simply say that such has always been a huge misnomer, as the same “tolerance” – required at Leviathan government behest – which has helped drive religion from the public square, means that “freedom of speech” has always been rather strongly limited.  I would also say that, given the present assaults against freedom of speech in this country, where just about every single one of our electronic communications is recorded, audited, studied, parsed, and filed away, I would advise Mrs. Fisher once again to perhaps consider that long in the eye of liberty, before she concerns herself with whatever is bothering the eyes of Vladimir Putin, or the state of Russia.  I would not consider the present state of “free speech” in this country something to be proud of.  I would also remind, that even “free speech” has been considered problematic by the Church, since, again, error, for most of the Church’s history, had no rights.

Finis.  I want to finish by saying I’m not a monarchist, or anything else-ist. I’m not sure what I am, other than increasingly skeptical that all the rah-rah we’ve been propagandized with our entire lives regarding “freedom,” the USA, the Constitution, “liberty,” etc., are far, far from being the best, or even acceptable, forms of government with respect to the right practice of the Faith. And this is an enormous change for me. Even a couple of years ago, I was 100% Mr. Jingoist American, ready to bomb our enemies and expressing complete fealty to the “American experiment.”  More and more, it looks like that experiment will end in disaster, so I’m not sure quite what I am.