Pax Orbis

by Kathy Clubb

Charlie Kirk’s senseless murder was a wake-up call to those who believe they can continue to live comfortably in the face of the prevailing zeitgeist. Whether you believe that a drugged-up transgender person was responsible for Kirk’s death or that the shooter was merely the unwitting scapegoat in some greater plan, the source of such an incident is the same: liberalism – the ideology which sets the individual conscience free from subjection to the law, to tradition, and to God.

In his book, They Have Uncrowned Him, Archbishop Lefebvre explained how the trajectory of liberalism is always violence and totalitarianism. It is a path that will allow no dissenting opinion or opposing philosophy to be expressed. The following section is taken from Chapter 2: The Natural Order and Liberalism, where the Archbishop lists the marks of Liberalism. He ends with spectre of Communism as the terminus of all Liberal movements.

The independence of the will in regard to the intellect: an arbitrary and blind force, the will must not at all be concerned with the judgments of reason; it creates the good just as reason brings forth the true.

In a word, it is the arbitrary: “Sic volo, sic jubeo, sit pro ratione voluntas -Thus I will, thus I order, let my will be my reason!”

The independence of the conscience with regard to the objective rule, and to the law; conscience sets itself up as the supreme rule of morality.

According to the Liberal, law limits freedom and imposes onto it a constraint which is first of all moral: the obligation; and finally physical: the sanction. The law and its constraints run counter to human dignity and to conscience. The Liberal confuses liberty and license. Now, Our Lord Jesus Christ is the living Law, being the Word of God; from there we can gauge once more how deep the opposition of the Liberal towards Our Lord is.

The independence of the anarchical powers of feeling with regard to reason: this is one of the characteristics of romanticism, the enemy of the primacy of reason.

The romantic takes pleasure in brewing up slogans; he condemns violence, superstition, fanaticism, integrism, racism, because of what those words conjure up in the imagination and in the human passions. In the same spirit, he makes himself the apostle of peace, of liberty, of tolerance, of pluralism.

The independence of the body in regard to the soul, of the animal nature in regard to reason-this is the radical overthrowing of human values.

They exalt sexuality, they sacralise it. They reverse the order between the two ends of marriage (procreation and education on the one hand, allaying of concupiscence on the other) by determining for it as a primary end carnal pleasure and “the self-fulfilment of the two spouses” or the two “partners.” That will be the destruction of marriage and of the family; this is without mentioning the aberrations which transform the sanctuary of marriage into a biological laboratory or which reduce the infant not yet born to a lucrative ingredient in cosmetics.¹

The independence of the present with regard to the past, whence the contempt for tradition and the morbid love of novelty under the pretext of progress.

This is one of the causes to which St. Pius X attributes Modernism. The remote causes seem to Us capable of being reduced to two: curiosity and pride. Curiosity, by itself, if it is not wisely regulated, suffices to explain all the errors. This is the opinion of our predecessor Gregory XVI, who wrote: “It is a lamentable spectacle to see how far the wanderings of human reason go once the spirit of novelty is given way to.”²

The independence of the individual in regard to all of society, all natural authority and hierarchy: independence of children vis-à-vis their parents, of woman with regard to her husband (women’s liberation); of the worker in regard to his employer; of the working class towards the bourgeois class (class struggle).

Political and social Liberalism is the reign of individualism. The basic unit of Liberalism is the individual.³ The individual is supposed to be an absolute subject of rights (the “Rights of Man”), without there being a question of duties which bind him to his Creator, to his superiors, or to his fellow-creatures, or, above all, of the Rights of God. Liberalism makes all the natural social hierarchies disappear; but in doing this, in the end it leaves the individual alone and without defence in regard to the crowd of which he is only an interchangeable element, and which swallows him up entirely.

The social doctrine of the Church, on the contrary, affirms that society is not a shapeless mass of individuals,⁴ but an arranged organism of coordinated and hierarchically arranged social groups: the family, the enterprises and trades, then the professional corporations, finally the State.

The corporations unite employers and workers in the same profession for the protection and the motion of their common interests. The classes are not antagonistic, but naturally complementary.⁵

The law called Le Chapelier of June 14, 1791, by prohibiting the associations, killed the corporations which had been the instrument of social peace since the Middle Ages. This law was the fruit of liberal individualism, but instead of freeing the workers, it crushed them.

In the 19th century, of the liberal bourgeoisie had crushed the formless mass of workers who had become the proletariat. A way was found by the initiative of the socialists, to regroup the workers in trade unions. The trade unions only made the social war worse by extending the factitious opposition of capital and proletariat to the scale of all of society. It is known that this opposition, or “class struggle,” was at the origin of the Marxist theory of dialectical materialism: so that a false social problem created a false system: Communism.⁶ Now, since Lenin, the class struggle has become, by means of Communist the privileged weapon of the Communist Revolution.⁷

Let us then hold on to this undeniable historical and philosophical truth: Liberalism leads by its natural propensity to totalitarianism and to the Communist Revolution. It can be said that it is the soul of all the modern revolutions and of the Revolution itself in short.

Kathy Clubb is an Australian mother, grandmother and writer who home-educated her children for the best part of 30 years. She has written on Catholic and pro-life issues at The Remnant Newspaper, Family Life International, LifeSiteNews, and Fidelity magazine. She is the author of Latina Rosarii, the Latin Primer for the Reluctant and her next book, An Unjust Law, based on her constitutional challenge to Australia’s abortion bubble-zones, is due for release in December 2025.

1. Cf. Fideliter no. 47. ↩︎
2. Pius X, Encyclical Pascendi, September 8, 1907. ↩︎
3. Daniel Raffard de Brienne, Le deuxième étendard, p. 25. ↩︎
4. Cf. Pius XII, Christmas Radio Message to the entire world, December 24, 1944. ↩︎
5. Cf. Leo XIII, Encyclical Rerum Novarum, May 15, 1891. ↩︎
6. Cf. Pius XI, Encyclical Divini Redemptoris, March 19, 1937, #15. ↩︎
7. Ibid, #9 ↩︎