By Robert Royal
The huge crowds that came out to greet Pope Leo everywhere in France surprised everyone; not least, unfortunately, the French bishops. Let us hope his visit will have even greater effects. But only days later, France is engulfed in widespread riots and arson, which are being misrepresented as “student unrest,” when in reality this is an extreme-left operation with Islamist collaborators. In the message the Pope read at his reception by French President Emmanuel Macron, Leo proposed what can only be called “corrections” to the three terms (liberté, égalité, fraternité) that marked the French Revolution. It was a bold gesture, but it needs to be bolder still to remedy what ails France and much of the West.
If asked (and it is not something one expects sitting down), I would say Leo would do well to go much further and make this a project for his entire pontificate. For the late Fulton Sheen—also recently in the news—already saw in his 1938 book Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity that, beneath those apparently simple and good words, perverse developments emerged from the very beginning.
The French revolutionaries began using the guillotine and other instruments of mass terror against religious figures and then—as night follows day among those whose politics have gone completely mad—against one another.
It did not stop there. In the early years of the twentieth century, a radical socialist government under Émile Combes seized all the cathedrals, monasteries, convents, shrines, and other religious buildings in France, closed 10,000 religious schools, and drove many priests and religious into exile. In some accounts, this is described merely as the “separation of Church and State” in France. But, as the great Charles Péguy said, it was in reality a betrayal of what French socialism itself claimed—a greater respect for human beings than had existed before—in practice, persecuting people “for saying their prayers.”
And today, as Leo pointed out, the “humanist” interpretation of the three ideals has led, among other evils, to the monstrosity of inserting abortion into the French constitution as a fundamental right and to the Orwellian euphemism of the “right to die” (i.e., lethal medication).
Let it be recorded: wherever abortion—the deliberate killing of human life in the mother’s womb—is confused with “freedom” and made a fundamental right, we place ourselves on the same moral level as the worst of human history: Canaanites, Ammonites, Aztecs, Soviets, Maoists, Khmer Rouge, and more. There is no égalité or fraternité for those innocent unborn whom we kill, year after year, in numbers far greater than those of the historical monsters.
Fulton Sheen already understood decades ago that such things follow from mistaken notions of “liberty.” The Founding Fathers of the United States also warned against “license,” the false belief that freedom means doing whatever one wants. Sheen: “Liberalism destroyed freedom by dispensing the individual from social responsibilities; communism and fascism destroy freedom by enslaving the individual to the will of a dictator.”
True freedom, Sheen argued, is like Aristotle’s (and the Church’s) golden mean, not merely something halfway between the two, but a “both… and…” that is quite different from either.
Similarly, “equality” in the modern, uprooted sense inevitably becomes what our DEI gurus call “equity,” whereby people are not only treated equally, but the industrious and the lazy, the virtuous and the vicious, one “race” or group or another, must be statistically equalized through state tyranny and social ostracism.
The remedy lies in the correct understanding of “fraternity”—brothers and sisters as God intended, not the ideological substitutes: citoyen, tovaritsch, comrade, the “woke”—which would also help correct modern mistaken notions of liberty and equality.
Leo put it this way to modern France:
May your freedom grow in constant concern for the common good. May your fraternity embrace the whole human family. And may the equality you seek be built always on the foundations of justice and charity, not by erasing differences among persons, but by allowing them to flourish harmoniously for the benefit of the whole society.
This is a good beginning, but it is not enough. Some of the things Leo has already been emphasizing in his pontificate—a still greater mass immigration, less “fear of Islam,” resistance to the “far right” (i.e., populist reactions to social disorder and violence), and a “disarmed and disarming” Christianity—play into the hands of the forces that destroy the common good.
He stood on firmer ground when he said that equality must be founded not merely on charity—and a charity that has not been reduced to mere niceness and the avoidance of conflict—but on justice. True justice inevitably involves a due appreciation of truth—about the world, man, and God. Idealistic or ideological substitutes for truth have a terrifying track record. And not only in France.
There is a better way.
A journalist asked the Pope during the press conference on the flight (a dangerous practice the Vatican would do well to suspend) whether he had not interfered in French politics. He hesitated briefly, but then recovered his balance, stating that while there may be a proper separation of Church and State, religious groups, like non-religious ones, have the right to speak about politics.
And furthermore: “I went above all to preach the Gospel, to preach the Good News, to reaffirm what Jesus Christ himself says when he says ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life’; so to speak, the truth that Jesus offers us […]. So I would say that, if that is politics, that is what I did, but it was not to get involved in French politics. It was to teach what the Church really believes.”
Some French progressives expressed “fear” at the enthusiasm for the Pope’s visit; others deplored the power the Catholic Church still has to draw crowds. In truth, most of the Pope’s words were applauded because they were compatible, all too compatible, with the current liberal understanding of human life and society.
But there was a difference: the difference Christ makes. And even in a still-developing form, it stands above everything else.
About the author
Robert Royal is editor-in-chief of The Catholic Thing and president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C. His most recent books are The Martyrs of the New Millennium: The Global Persecution of Christians in the Twenty-First Century, Columbus and the Crisis of the West, and A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century.