©2025 Victor r. Claveau, MJ
Protestantism naturally gives way to toleration of error. Rejecting the principle of authority in religion, it has neither foundation nor definition of faith. On the principle that every person may interpret the Scriptures according to the dictates of private judgment, it gives birth to endless contradictions and differences. Required by the law of its own impotence, because of the lack of any decisive authoritarian voice in matters of faith, it is forced to recognize as valid and orthodox any belief that springs from the exercise of private judgment. Therefore, it arrives at the conclusion that one creed is as good as another, and attempts to cloak this conclusion under the appearance of liberty of conscience. The individual interprets as he pleases, rejecting or accepting what he chooses. This is popularly called freedom of conscience. If one creed is as good as another, then no creed is as good as any. Taking the battlefield with the fatal weapon of Rationalism, Infidelity has stormed and taken the very castle of Protestantism, helpless against the enemy of its own making.
We find as a result among the people of this country, with the exceptions of honestly practicing Catholics, that authoritative and positive religion has met with utter disaster, and religious belief or unbelief have come to be mere matters of opinion.
This is the heresy that constantly bombards us, flooding our current literature and our press. It is against this that we have to be always on guard. The more so as it insidiously attacks us on the grounds of a false charity or a false liberty.
Religion is the bond, which unites us to God, the alpha and omega of all good. Infidelity, whether virtual as in Protestantism or explicit as in Agnosticism, breaks the bond, which binds men to God, and seeks to build a human society founded on the principle of man’s independence.
In the assumption of the absolute sovereignty of the individual, that is, his entire independence from God, we find the common source of all evil. Secularization results when Rationalism is made the measure and sum of all truth. Secularization denies any active intervention in the concerns of public and private life whatever they may be. This could also be defined as social atheism.
Rationalism finds its actions and expression in social and civil life in a thousand ways, and regardless of its diversification, there is always unity in its antagonism to Catholicism. Wherever it is found, Protestantism in its practical application is systematic warfare against the Church. Whether it calls itself liberty or government, or the state, or humanity, or reason, its fundamental characteristic is an uncompromising opposition to the Catholic Church.
Protestantism is a complex world in itself; it has its maxims, its fashions, its art, its literature, its diplomacy, its laws, its conspiracies, and its disguises. It is the world of the Evil One, disguised in our time under the name of Protestantism, in radical opposition to the Church established by Jesus Christ.