Pope Leo's Unfinished French Revolution
The Catholic Thing
By Robert Royal The large crowds that turned out for Pope Leo everywhere in France surprised everyone – not least, sad to say, the French bishops. Let's hope that his visit has even greater effects. But just days later, France is gripped by widespread rioting and arson, being misreported as "student unrest," but actually a far-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 move, but he needs to be even bolder, to remedy what's ailing France and much of the West. If one were asked (one is not holding one's breath), one would say that Leo would do well to go much further, and make this a project for his whole papacy. Because as Blessed Fulton Sheen – also recently in the news – already saw in his 1938 book Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, underneath those seemingly simple and good words, perverse developments rose from the very start. The French revolutionaries began using the guillotine and other instruments of mass terror on religious figures, and then – as the night follows the day among those radically crazed by politics – on one another. It didn't stop there. In the first years of the twentieth century, a radical socialist government under Emile Combes took possession of all of France's cathedrals, monasteries, convents, shrines, and other religious structures, 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 put it, it was actually a betrayal of what French socialism itself claimed – greater respect for human beings than had existed previously – in effect, persecuting people "for saying their prayers." And today, as Leo pointed out, the "humanistic" interpretation of the three ideals has led, among other evils, to the monstrosity of abortion being inserted into the French constitution as a fundamental right and the Orwellian euphemism "right to die" (i.e., lethal medication). Just for the record, wherever abortion – the deliberate killing of human life in the womb – is confused with "liberty" and made a fundamental right, we put ourselves on a moral level with the worst of human history: Canaanites, Ammonites, Aztecs, Soviets, Maoists, Khmer Rouge, and more. No égalité or fraternité for those unborn innocents whom we kill, year after year, in numbers far greater than the historic monsters. Fulton Sheen already understood decades ago that things like these follow wrong notions of "liberty." The American Founders, too, warned of "license," the false belief that liberty means doing whatever you want. Sheen: "Liberalism destroyed liberty by dispensing the individual from social responsibilities; Communism and Fascism destroy liberty by enslaving the individual to the will of a dictator." True liberty, Sheen argued, is akin to Aristotle's (and the Church's) Golden Mean, not just something midway between the two, but a "both/and" that is something quite different than either. Similarly, "equality" in the untethered modern sense inevitably turns into what our DEI gurus call "equity," whereby individual people are not just treated equally, but the industrious and the lazy, the virtuous and the vicious, one "race" or group or another, have to be made statistically equal via state tyranny and social ostracism. The remedy lies in the right understanding of "fraternity" – brother and sisterhood as God intended, not the ideological substitutes: citoyen, tovaritsch, compañero, the "woke" – which would also help correct mistaken modern notions of liberty and equality. Leo put it this way to modern France: May your liberty grow in constant concern for the common good. May your fraternity embrace the entire human family. And may the equality to which yo...