The evil of modern society is so prevalent that even atheists and progressives can no longer ignore it.

Our economies foster and monetise addiction, and the global agenda of the liberal regimes amounts to a total war on our civilisation, often partnered with the waging of wars abroad.

That we are ruled into chaos by the wicked is a fact which unites an increasing number of people in the formerly free world.

How did Christendom fall so fast - into a state in which it is legal to buy and sell AI-edited babies?

The worship of technology is producing a nightmarish vision of hell on earth - governed by algorithm - whilst the artificial means of the production of human life promise to replace mothers and the family.

Today we consider how a remarkable letter from Leo XIII predicted the rottenness of the modern state we are in - and how his remedy - to restore all in Christ - would prove to be more urgent now than ever before.

THE POISON AND THE REMEDY

Before Pope Leo XIII wrote the nine encyclicals of the Catholic Social Teachings, he released an encyclical letter in 1878.

Echoing the great victories at the siege of Malta, at Lepanto - and that of the first Pope Leo who turned back Attila the Hun from Rome, Inscrutabili speaks of

“On the evils affecting modern society: their causes and remedies”.

Pope Leo XIII does not endorse the reduction of human life to a component in global trade1. He does not recommend the dismantling of industrial civilisation.

Nor does he celebrate the acceptance of mortal sin in the lives of those so given to it that their identities are secured in their disordered sexual behaviour.

Leo XIII reminds us of the duty of the Pope - to condemn the defection from the teachings of the Catholic Church, founded by Christ Himself - and to warn men of the damnation they face here and in eternity in their dedication instead to sin.

In this series I have referred to Etienne Gilson’s excellent book on the Catholic Social Teachings, titled The Church Speaks to the Modern World.

It is a complete guide to the nine encyclicals themselves - and adds at the end the letter which began what is now called the Leonine Corpus.

This letter not only shows how the defection from the Church of Christ is the root of all evil in our modern world.

It speaks of a Catholic Church which was fearless and valiant, which won wars against overwhelming odds, and for which heroic men would face death without fear.

The power of the writings of Pope Leo XIII is tremendous.

He was a lion of the faith, worthy of the name of Pope Leo the Great - whose great piety turned back the tide of the Huns.

In the eleven pages of this letter is a call from the deep which could reawaken the West.

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In this latest instalment we look at the last of the nine encyclicals which together comprise the Catholic Social Teachings of Pope Leo XIII.

Published in January 1890, On Christian Citizenship reminds us of our duties as citizens of the City of God- and teaches us that there is hope for our world.

This hope resides in what we do. This encyclical is a call to Catholic action.

It shows us what we must to do in order to live the Good Life, that we may recover our nations from the darkness which has consumed them today.

The first encyclical (linked below) showed how the restoration of our world must be founded on the truth, and demonstrated that the correct theory of knowledge is that which corresponds to the natural order created by God.

The second examined the nature and limits of human liberty - raising the question as to whether Man is good enough to be absolutely free. It asks as well - what liberty is it to be liberated into evil? We can see the evidence around us today.

The third shows the sacramental and foundational institution of Christian marriage, and explains why its defence is vital to our civilisation.

The fourth encyclical has one subject - Naturalism and Freemasonry - but as with all the others, its explanatory power illuminations the raising and the ruin of the foundations of our civilisation.

The fifth encyclical -titled Diuturnum - is called “On Civil Government”. It explains that we are at war, and this war is between mankind and The Enemy, which is Satan. This war, we are told, is raging in the institutions of the state.

The sixth encyclical explains how the State can serve the Common Good in aligning itself with the Divine order and the true nature of reality.

Published on December 28th, 1878, the seventh encyclical was titled Quod Apostolici Muneris - and was originally styled as a condemnation of the unholy trinity of “Socialism, Communism, Nihilism” in English.

The eighth encyclical is the masterpiece of the Catholic Social Teaching. Known as Rerum Novarum, it speaks of the rights and duties of capital and labour, showing how class conflict can be replaced with harmony with the mutual recognition of the reciprocal rights and duties of rich and poor.

Rerum Novarum is so replete with the practical wisdom of how to rescue our rotten society that it was treated in three parts. The second is here, the third here.

Every one of the nine encyclicals show how reality itself is to be understood in accordance with the Divine order, and that the defection from this order is chaos.

The Catholic Social Teachings condense some of the most luminous and precious wisdom ever written down.

They can be understood as many things - as a guide as how to live, to determine what is the truth, and perhaps most vitally at this moment - as a manual as to how to reconstitute our civilisation from the dissolving counterfeit culture which sought, and failed, to replace it by artificial design.

The image of St Michael above reminds us that we shall be judged for what we do - and for what we do not do. What is weighed in the scales of St Michael is the sum of our actions, our sins committed and by omission, the silt of our limited days on earth which decides our eternal fate.

The ninth encyclical is a guide to the duties of the Christian soldier in a time of spiritual and temporal war on our Christian civilisation.

THE THE NINTH ENCYCLICAL

As is customary, the title of the ninth encyclical Sapientiae Christianiae - On Christian Citizenship is taken from the opening passage, which reads:

Sapientiae Christianae revocari praecepta, eisque vitam, mores, instituta populorum penitus conformari, quotidie magis apparet oportere.

This means, in English

It becomes more and more evident every day that the precepts of Christian wisdom must be recalled, and the lives, morals, and institutions of peoples must be thoroughly conformed to them.

The message of this encyclical teaches us how to live amidst the chaos of the modern world - produced by the defection from Christ.

It outlines the duties of Catholics to promote the Christian way of life - and to work towards the common good in every way we can.

Here again the Catholic Social Teaching combines spiritual and practical wisdom to promote human flourishing.

As Gilson’s excellent introduction makes clear, On Christian Citizenship differs from the previous eight encyclicals.

It does not deal with the problems between Church and State, nor with the moral and social collapse which follows from the pursuit of nihilistic Godless cults falsely promising prosperity, equality and liberation.

Instead, Sapientiae Christianiae

“…considers Catholics as citizens of the perfect society called the Church” -

In brief, it tells us what we must do to restore our civilisation - and that it is our duty to do it.

TAKE UP THE YOKE OF CHRIST

If this seems like a tall task, the simple and exhilarating wisdom of Pope Leo XIII reminds us of the true mission - and meaning - of our lives.

Sapientiae Christianiae reminds us that we have a duty, we are not alone, and that instead of shrinking from the magnitude of the task, we should be inspired.

“For the yoke of Christ is sweet, and His burden is light”.

What these duties are, how we should perform them, and why - is the subject of this, the last of the nine encyclicals of the Catholic Social Teachings of Leo XIII.

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If people have heard of the Catholic Social Teaching they will usually think of Rerum Novarum.

This 1891 encyclical of Pope Leo XIII is the eighth out of nine in total. Rightly considered the masterpiece of Catholic Social Teaching, Rerum is a readable yet extremely subtle guide to the practical restoration of harmony to our disintegrating society.

In this third post on Rerum Novarum we will look at how it proposes to promote cooperation between the classes of men. It seeks to do this by

• the recognition of the reality of the human condition

• acknowledging the limitations of men

• inflexibly defending the right to provide property

• condemning excessive taxation

• stressing the duties of capital to labour…

• …and the duties of the working man to the common good

• arguing for a distributive justice which harmonises society

Rerum Novarum is a robust defence of human dignity. Based in reality, it seeks to defend man against vice, deception and exploitation.

Correctly understood, it is a recipe for the restoration of our civilisation.

It being Michaelmas today, I include a note on the magnificent image at the top of this post1.

RESTORATION VIA RERUM NOVARUM

At the end of Rerum Novarum we are reminded that the wisest of schemes for the common good will fail if the natural order is not restored.

It may seem odd to begin with this - the end of Rerum Novarum. Yet it is important to remember that we have now suffered the total moral collapse which it foretold in 1891.

We see more severe social division in our nations today than in the civilisation before the World Wars.

After a century in which Bolshevism claimed the lives of more than a hundred million souls, the social revolution which adopted its technique has dissolved our populations into factions of universal vengeance.

There is widespread and justified resentment of a robber-baron class which has plundered our nations under lockdown and similar orchestrated crises. If the State does not restore balance to the economy and justice to society it will never recover the right to rule.

The State we are in is wicked, and in mass producing misery creates the conditions for Communist, socialist and other nihilist causes to prosper.

Rerum advises rulers, owners and workers to be mindful of their duties toward the Common Good.

This cannot be done if no one can agree on the meaning of basic words - like “good”. Or “woman”. Or “evil”.

That is why Rerum Novarum ends as it begins - by saying why our world has suffered a total moral collapse, and why nothing can improve until this has been rectified.

There is no hope for any political or economic programme, nor for the restoration of sanity and justice more generally, if there is no attempt to re-establish what is right and wrong.

Today this is more urgent than ever, as liberal “rights-based justice” has produced a State whose laws promote vice, punish virtue, and persecute the sane.

RIGHTS FOR WRONGS

Rerum Novarum applies the Catholic concepts of natural justice to identity the rights and duties of capital and labour - the owner and the working classes - or more simply rich and poor.

The war on our Christian civilisation has been so successful that practically no one notices the terms it uses are fraudulent.

Social Justice was the cause of the Church. This means the application of natural justice, which is the recognition of what is good and what is not in the sight of God.

When Rerum Novarum talks of “rights” it means natural rights, flowing from the recognition that God made Man and all things in nature.

Today, “social justice warriors” promote insane hierarchies of privilege based on claimed victim status. Modern “social justice” is simply a campaign of destructive vengeance on sanity itself, its object the annihilation of all norms.

Rights are invoked to die, to kill the unborn, to demand men are called women, to permit mass scale human trafficking, to prevent the punishment of the wicked.

Rerum Novarum predicted the process which would lead to this disordered world, which is desperately in need of rebalancing.

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The eighth encyclical of the Catholic Social Teachings of Pope Leo XIII is called Rerum Novarum - on New Things.

What’s new today? The news today is a series of updates on the factional warfare that is tearing apart our society. The class struggle of the Marxists has escaped the bounds of the material world, and is now driving new narratives of liberation. Yet theirs is not the only class at war with the Common Good.

From left and right, reality is distorted by powerful interests, mobilising vengeance and often erotic desire, to recruit millions into self destructive factions.

Today, politics is a matter of identification with one faction or another. Each offers an identity, a history, a narrative of struggle.

Most of these factions are simply the masks of evil.

Only one faction promotes the Common Good.

TOWARDS THE COMMON GOOD

Today, I will show how Rerum Novarum explains how this crisis was created, and how it can be solved.

The Catholic Social Teachings provide a politics of the Common Good to replace the normalised evil which has victimised our peoples into hatred and strife.

Rerum Novarum says there is no reason for class war. As we examine why the Church says there is no reason for capital to fight labour, we see the practical solutions offered by the Church to end the war between ruler and ruled.

I will argue that the class war popularised at the turn of the 20th century has itself been refined by technique.

The solution offered in the Catholic Social Teaching also applies to the post-marxist social revolution currently at war with the basis of reason and reality.

Now more than ever we urgently require a practical manifesto to restore our civilisation.

The Catholic Social Teachings provide a clear and simple path for Man to harmonise his mind and soul with the reality created by God. It teaches the State to maximise human flourishing in all dimensions of life.

The State we are in is a result of over a hundred years of corruption and lies, sold as progress towards the universal emancipation of humanity.

We have been liberated from God and from meaning, from sense into nonsense, and out of order into chaos by the machinery of mass society mobilised in the service of nihilism. We are ruled by a death cult and our people are going insane.

We do not have to live like this.

If we do not stop this machine it will consume us all.

Rerum Novarum is often subtitled “Rights and Duties of Capital and Labour”.

The previous post explored the nature of rights and their definition.

This one will consider how the remedy of the Church to resolve class conflict extends beyond the enmity of capital to labour, and vice versa.

The same practical wisdom can resolve the conflict in our society between the factions of social revolution who have moved beyond the demand to abolish private property - and now seek to abolish the basis of reality itself.

IS A BETTER LIFE IMPOSSIBLE?

How could this be done? Surely all the signs today are that our society is consumed by wickedness and insanity - and that the civil war that is rumoured is in fact already underway?

Rerum Novarum speaks of the duties of working people as well as those of the owner class.

Its every argument applies equally to the ruler and to the ruled.

Factions of grievance have dissolved our societies into tribes of passionate moral nihilism.

This is the continuation of the revolutionary idea beyond the material realm, and into that of imagination and desire and will.

What began with Marxist demands for the seizure of property, production and exchange has produced a revolution to overturn the basis of reality itself.

Rerum Novarum shows us how this pernicious mobilisation of grievance has been utilised by the factions of communism, socialism and consumer nihilism.

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The Western world has been driven mad. Today, people are beginning to realise that the fake consensus of liberalism conceals one obvious fact: politics is not about “left” and “right”.

Politics reduces to friend and enemy.

If you are a friend to evil, everyone sane is your enemy.

One side celebrates crime and murder and the most depraved acts imaginable in the name of liberation.

The other side is good, and is hated for that fact.

The social revolution of the liberal system has taught people to hate anything and anyone good. The situation seems dire - if you have no idea what to do.

The End of History has ended. A new chapter beyond the Satanic lies of liberalism is opening. It is time to fight the Good Fight, and to discover the heroism in that noblest of causes.

If you want to know what to fight for, and would like to know your enemy - you will find the answers in Rerum Novarum.

The message of the most famous encyclical of the Catholic Social Teaching has never been more urgently necessary than it is right now.

Rerum Novarum is a manifesto to replace conflict with harmony. In this second post on this encyclical, we shall see how its warnings of a total moral collapse have been realised, as counter-Christian customs have replaced those inherited from Christ.

Rerum is a guide to the practical wisdom of the Church. It teaches you how the natural justice of Aquinas is a recipe for the Common Good. It warns you that to defect from the basis of reality and the justice which flows from the natural order created by God is to make a hell on earth.

I have heard the entirety of Western philosophy described as a failed attempt to refute Aquinas. Look around you today, and see what the attempt to contradict the wisdom of the Church in theory has produced in reality.

Against this, the Catholic Social Teachings are a practical guide to sanity in the self and in the state. As the liberal state has mobilised masses to gleefully celebrate the killing of the sane it is important to remember there is more to life than justice.

Justice will be done. Justice alone is not enough. We need a counter-revolution to replace evil with the Common Good, and we have a chance to do so.

The great evil which has colonised our nations and the hearts and minds of our people can never be permitted to hold power again. It cannot be excised with slogans, with vengeance and with hatred. It must be relentlessly countered with the theory and practice of human flourishing, set out with such clarity by Pope Leo XIII.

THE EIGHTH ENCYCLICAL

Rerum Novarum is titled, as with all the others, according to the first phrase to appear in its opening passage.

The phrase itself means “On the new things”. We have all seen the news lately.

What could a document written in 1891 have to say about the news today?

Subtitled “Rights and Duties of Capital and Labour”, or occasionally “On the Condition of the Working Class,” Rerum Novarum begins with the above passage.

It says the prevailing moral degeneracy is partnered with a parasitic economic system which has emerged from the advancement of science, technology and industry.

It warns that a “revolutionary spirit” moves throughout all these spheres.

Then it proceeds immediately to speak of “the condition of the working class”.

In the next instalment I will write about how Rerum says the interests of capital and labour can be balanced if the State seeks to promote the Common Good.

In this post I will examine some of the vital points made towards this argument for harmony in place of discord, showing how the Catholic Social Teaching explains the state we are in - and how best to get out of it.

ON THE WRETCHED CONDITION OF THE COMMON MAN

Rerum talks of the wretchedness of life for the majority of the working class in 1891 - as industry and mass society revolutionised life in the West.

Since then, crisis after crisis has further concentrated wealth in the hands of an elite whose sponsorship of social revolution amounts to a declaration of war on on our entire civilisation.

It is remarkable that anyone could speak of the duties of this kind of capital, when we pay taxes to destroy our way of life to a wicked elite which profits from the evil of usury.

Two points are worth mentioning here. The condition of labour now includes the so-called middle class, who depend equally on the access to wage labour as do those traditionally deemed to make up the “working class”.

Secondly, the ability to earn a wage is now not only dependent on labour-monopoly, but is now also dependent on terms and conditions set by liberal extremists.

The elite which rules us sponsors these rules, funds their campaigns of social revolution, and has systematically excluded white men from positions to promote a depraved and insane agenda marketed as progress towards equality.

This has deepened the wretched condition of the working class today. This means all those who work for a living must navigate a labour market monopolised by people who sponsor and reward social revolution.

The experiment we inhabit is not without precedent.

The Weimar Republic was the result of a revolution which installed a liberal democracy in Germany. This is not widely known. They do not intend you remember this when they talk about 1930s Germany.

If you would like to know more about the Weimar Republic be advised the truth is horrendous and unforgettable, and will likely fill you with righteous anger.

You can start here:

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Today’s post begins to examine Rerum Novarum - that most magnificent contribution to the history of ideas - and the eighth encyclical of the Catholic Social Teachings.

WHAT IS MEANT BY “RIGHTS” AND “GOOD”?

This post is a sort of preface to the encyclical. As the Catholic Social Teaching insists on the Common Good and the defence of natural rights, I thought it would be useful to the reader to examine what is meant today, in the secular liberal world, by “rights” and “good”.

By contrast, the Social Teachings of the Church assert the natural rights of Man which derive from God. These nine encyclicals show how the simple principle of Aquinas can correct the false idols on which modern “human rights” propaganda is founded.

A full summary of Rerum Novarum will follow this primer next week.

The insistence on natural justice is one of many gems buried in this text, which glitter from its dazzling treasures. So numerous are these precious stones of wisdom in the Catholic Social Teachings that they can be easily overlooked.

In my next posts I will examine the more commonly known themes of Rerum Novarum - which recommend the harmonisation of capital and labour, and stress that the political economy must defend and promote human dignity.

I hope that all these parts will suggest some of the whole of Rerum Novarum, which is one of the most remarkable documents in the defence of civilisation ever written.

REPLACING EVIL WITH THE COMMON GOOD

I like to say the Catholic Social Teaching shows us how to replace the Common Evil of modern life with the Common Good. Evil seems an almost glib term to apply today, because we are immersed in it.

The Catholic Social Teaching warned us of the total moral collapse of our societies which would flow from the defection from Christ and His Church.

This post is an attempt to justify the claim that modern society is in fact a death cult - a cult whose idols are created from the death of meaning and morality in the modern and postmodern condition.

RIGHTS AND DUTIES OF CAPITAL AND LABOUR

If people know anything of the Catholic Social Teaching, they think of Rerum Novarum.

It is titled in English - On the Rights and Duties of Capital and Labour.

This is by far the most famous of all the nine encyclicals - and for good reason.

If you seek a manifesto to restore order from the chaos we inhabit, here it is.

Rerum Novarum is also, as is said above, a sort of summary of the position of the Church on social matters as expressed elsewhere by Pope Leo XIII.

The Catholic Social Teaching describes the problems of modern society and prescribes the remedy.

Rerum Novarum is not confined to the rebalancing of the State, nor of harmonising Capital with Labour. It is sometimes subtitled as

“On the Condition of the Working Classes”

Rerum Novarum is also more than a manual as to how to restore the human dignity of labour and rightfully enshrine the ownership of property at all levels of social class.

It also speaks of rights and duties - towards the promotion of the Common Good.

Before we look at how the Church teaches the harmony of the social classes, we must understand what is meant by “good” and” rights” today.

The Catholic Social Teachings remind us that rights proceed not from Man but God. Natural rights flow from the Divinely created natural order.

This is Natural Justice.

St Thomas Aquinas (for example) explains natural justice in detail. In brief, the basis of natural law relies on the pursuit of virtue and the rejection of vice.

As Aquinas said, the Church teaches that:

“Good is to be done and pursued, and evil avoided”

Here we will examine what rights have come to mean since Rerum Novarum was published in 1891 - the fourth year of the pontificate of Pope Leo XIII.

As we shall see, the modern concept of justice reverses the definition of St Thomas.

What is commonly today called good is often evil, and this is a consequence of a theory of human rights which protects, promotes and prioritises human wrongs.

HUMAN RIGHTS FOR HUMAN WRONGS

The liberal system which is dissolving today advances “human rights”.

These rights were derived from the reduction of mankind first to a purely materialist condition, and then from the pure abstraction of the theories of people like John Rawls. This is called reductionism.

Reductionism is the attempt to discard the Divine and to explain the human condition in purely material or phenomenological1 terms. This means it tries to reduce life to things and the fantasies we have about them.

MORAL INVERSION

As I explain in a forthcoming video, the work of Michael Polanyi explains this point in some detail2. He said the reductionist project of secular liberalism created a void in humanity, which in turn promoted moral inversion.

How does everything bad become good? How was our morality inverted?

Polanyi explained that removing God from the pinnacle of the meaning of life left Man with homeless moral passions.

This means when we stop loving God, we infuse other things - practically anything else with intense moral fervour bordering on hysteria.

I think this process of moral inversion explains why so many people so often furiously support things which are wicked, insane, or even meaningless.

The common crazes mocked online as The Current Thing are examples of periodic crazes, mass produced through media, into which people pour intense feeling - and to which they attach, however briefly, their sense of identity.

Covid “vaccines”, the masks, the rituals of the lockdown, George Floyd, the Ukraine war, abortion, Net Zero - from the harmful to the criminal, every Current Thing is a feverish celebration of some form of destruction.

It is the deletion of God from the secular script of human life which makes chapter and verse of anything and everything which makes life worse.

The reason millions of people sing from the same deranged hymn sheets is because the rejection of God has cut off the head of the body politic, and the headless chickening of mass hysteria is the result. Our system is mad because it has supplied an insatiable hunger in deleting Christ from our lives.

This is extremely convenient to an economic system which relies on ever increasing demand for consumer trash, as a population starved of meaning will be forever desperate for anything to fill the hole within them.

This is how the political economy of consumer liberalism is secured. The liberal system replaces wisdom with folly, cuts off the head of reality and replaces it with an endless series of fever dreams. Its chief product is hunger, and its marketing strategy is the presentation of sin as liberation.

How is this advertised? As the promotion and progress of “human rights”.

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Here I continue my series on the nine encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII, known as the Catholic Social Teachings.

Today’s post is on the seventh encyclical, which explains why the Church condemns socialism and promotes the Common Good instead.

It is a profound assessement of the crisis we inhabit. Correctly understood, it is also an invitation to us, the prodigal sons and daughters of modernity, to come home.

The first encyclical (linked below) showed how the restoration of our world must be founded on the truth, and demonstrated that the correct theory of knowledge is that which corresponds to the natural order created by God.

The second examined the nature and limits of human liberty - raising the question as to whether Man is good enough to be absolutely free. It asks as well - what liberty is it to be liberated into evil? We can see the evidence around us today.

The third shows the sacramental and foundational institution of Christian marriage, and explains why its defence is vital to our civilisation.

The fourth encyclical has one subject - Naturalism and Freemasonry - but as with all the others, its explanatory power illuminations the raising and the ruin of the foundations of our civilisation.

The fifth encyclical -titled Diuturnum - is called “On Civil Government”. It explains that we are at war, and this war is between mankind and The Enemy, which is Satan. This war, we are told, is raging in the institutions of the state.

The sixth encyclical explains how the State can serve the Common Good in aligning itself with the Divine order and the true nature of reality.

Every one of the nine encyclicals show how reality itself is to be understood in accordance with the Divine order, and that the defection from this order is chaos.

The Catholic Social Teachings condense some of the most luminous and precious wisdom ever written down.

They can be understood as many things - as a guide as how to live, to determine what is the truth, and perhaps most vitally at this moment - as a manual as to how to reconstitute our civilisation from the dissolving counterfeit culture which sought, and failed, to replace it by artificial design.

Professor Etienne Gilson’s excellent book remains my guide, which you can read - free of charge - on the internet archive here.

I paywall my Monday posts in recognition of those subscribers who pay for my work.

If you would like to read this but cannot pay, send me an email saying “SKINT” and I will let you in (if I believe you are not telling Tommy Peppers, that is).

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Here I continue my series on the nine encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII, known as the Catholic Social Teachings.

Today’s post is on the sixth encyclical, which explains how the State can serve the Common Good in aligning itself with the Divine order and the true nature of reality.

The first encyclical (linked below) showed how the restoration of our world must be founded on the truth, and demonstrated that the correct theory of knowledge is that which corresponds to the natural order created by God.

The second examined the nature and limits of human liberty - raising the question as to whether Man is good enough to be absolutely free. It asks as well - what liberty is it to be liberated into evil? We can see the evidence around us today.

The third shows the sacramental and foundational institution of Christian marriage, and explains why its defence is vital to our civilisation.

The fourth encyclical has one subject - Naturalism and Freemasonry - but as with all the others, its explanatory power illuminations the raising and the ruin of the foundations of our civilisation.

The fifth encyclical -titled Diuturnum - is called “On Civil Government”. It explains that we are at war, and this war is between mankind and The Enemy, which is Satan. This war, we are told, is raging in the institutions of the state.

Every one of the nine encyclicals show how reality itself is to be understood in accordance with the Divine order, and that the defection from this order is chaos.

These Catholic Social Teachings condense some of the most luminous and precious wisdom ever written down.

They can be understood as many things - as a guide as how to live, to determine what is the truth, and perhaps most vitally at this moment - as a manual as to how to reconstitute our civilisation from the dissolving counterfeit culture which sought, and failed, to replace it by artificial design.

Professor Etienne Gilson’s excellent book remains my guide, which you can read - free of charge - on the internet archive here.

I paywall my Monday posts in recognition of those subscribers who pay for my work.

If you would like to read this but cannot pay, send me an email saying “SKINT” and I will let you in (if I believe you are not telling Tommy Peppers, that is).

Read more

Here I continue my series on the nine encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII, known as the Catholic Social Teachings.

The first encyclical (linked below) showed how the restoration of our world must be founded on the truth, and demonstrated that the correct theory of knowledge is that which corresponds to the natural order created by God.

The second examined the nature and limits of human liberty - raising the question as to whether Man is good enough to be absolutely free. It asks as well - what liberty is it to be liberated into evil? We can see the evidence around us today.

The third shows the sacramental and foundational institution of Christian marriage, and explains why its defence is vital to our civilisation.

The fourth encyclical has one subject - Naturalism and Freemasonry - but as with all the others, its explanatory power illuminations the raising and the ruin of the foundations of our civilisation.

Every one of the nine encyclicals show how reality itself is to be understood in accordance with the Divine order, and that the defection from this order is chaos.

These Catholic Social Teachings condense some of the most luminous and precious wisdom ever written down.

They can be understood as many things - as a guide as how to live, to determine what is the truth, and perhaps most vitally at this moment - as a manual as to how to reconstitute our civilisation from the dissolving counterfeit culture which sought, and failed, to replace it by artificial design.

THE FIFTH ENCYCLICAL - ON CIVIL GOVERNMENT

This post is on the fifth instalment of the Catholic Social Teachings. Titled Diuturnum, it begins with a remarkable statement. We are at war, the war is between mankind and The Enemy, and it is raging in the institutions of the state.

The encyclical - as all the others - derives its title from the opening passage:

Diuturnum illud teterrimumque bellum, adversus divinam Ecclesiae auctoritatem susceptum, illuc, quo proclive erat, evasit; videlicet in commune periculum societatis humanae, ac nominatim civilis principatus, in quo salus publica maxime nititur.

In English:

That long and most terrible war, undertaken against the divine authority of the Church, ended up in the direction it was headed: namely, into the common danger of human society, and in particular civil government, on which public safety most depends.

This message is more striking for its obvious relevance today, as the conditions we now inhabit are obviously the result of a war waged on our entire Christian civilisation.

Read it carefully and it will tell you how we win.

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Here I continue my series on the nine encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII, known as the Catholic Social Teachings.

The first encyclical (linked below) showed how the restoration of our world must be founded on the truth, and demonstrated that the correct theory of knowledge is that which corresponds to the natural order created by God.

The second examined the nature and limits of human liberty - raising the question as to whether Man is good enough to be absolutely free. It asks as well - what liberty is it to be liberated into evil? We can see the evidence around us today.

The third shows the sacramental and foundational institution of Christian marriage, and explains why its defence is vital to our civilisation.

Typically each encyclical has one subject, but each informs a total vision.

The fourth encyclical has one subject - Naturalism and Freemasonry - but as with all the others, its explanatory power illuminations the raising and the ruin of the foundations of our civilisation.

Every one of the nine encyclicals show how reality itself is to be understood in accordance with the Divine order, and that the defection from this order is chaos.

These Catholic Social Teachings condense some of the most luminous and precious wisdom ever written down.

They can be understood as many things - as a guide as how to live, to determine what is the truth, and perhaps most vitally at this moment - as a manual as to how to reconstitute our civilisation from the dissolving counterfeit culture which sought, and failed, to replace it by artificial design.

THE FOURTH ENCYCLICAL

The fourth encyclical in Etienne Gilson’s ordering is called Humanum Genus.

Published in 1884 it deals with the errors of Naturalism expressed through the current of Freemasonry. These are two expressions of the Enemy of the Divinely created order of the world, leading to the encyclical opening with a definition of two kingdoms.

These two kingdoms, say Leo XIII, are the kingdom of God and the kingdom of Satan.

Humanum Genus then refers to Saint Augustine, whose famous conception of the Two Cities is briefly explained.

In addition to the restatement of the Augustinian position, this encyclical adds that the enemies of the Church are also the enemies of the nation. They are so, as they are in the service of the enemy of Mankind, which is Satan.

In the following two encyclicals (numbered five and six by Gilson) the point foreshadowed here is made in detail: that the Church is not the enemy of the State but its ally, for as long as the State respects the divinely ordered nature of reality and all creation in its actions.

Pope Leo explains that the aim of the many sects defined under the Freemasonic umbrella are the enemies of Church and State: they seek to supplant the divine order with the false doctrine of Naturalism.

They are called Naturalists as their worldview begins with a Godless appeal to nature, but ends in the formulation of a cult of the self.

This dissolves belief generally as it resolves the State into incoherent factions of mutual antagonism, with each man seeking the axis of the world within himself, and thereby vanishing into nothing.

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Here I continue my series on the nine encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII, known as the Catholic Social Teachings. You can find part one here, and part two here.

Published on February 10th, 1880, the third encyclical is titled On Christian Marriage.

As with all encyclicals, it is also named after the first word or phrase in Latin with which it begins. This one is also called Arcanum Divinae Sapientae, as it begins with this:

Arcanum, divinae sapientiae consilium, quod Salvator hominum Iesus Christus in terris erat perfecturus, eo spectavit, ut mundum, quasi vetustate senescentem, Ipse per se et in se divinitus instauraret.

In English, it reads as:

The hidden design of the divine wisdom, which Jesus Christ the Saviour of men came to carry out on earth, had this end in view, that, by Himself and in Himself, He should divinely renew the world, which was sinking, as it were, with length of years into decline.

It begins with the invocation of the mystery of God, and the message that a world in obvious decline must and can only be restored in Christ.

Later, it charges the Bishops of the Catholic Church with the mission to defend the sanctity of Christian marriage, after warning of the dire consequences of its corruption.

What does this mean in practice?

The first encyclical (linked below) showed how the restoration of our world must be founded on the truth, and demonstrated that the correct theory of knowledge is that which corresponds to the natural order created by God.

The second (also linked below) examined the nature and limits of human liberty - raising the question as to whether Man is good enough to be absolutely free. It asks as well - what liberty is it to be liberated into evil? We can see the evidence around us today.

This third encyclical also has one subject, but as with all the others, its explanatory power extends to those of the foundations of our civilisation. Like the others, Arcanum shows how reality itself is to be understood in accordance with the Divine order, and that the defection from this order is chaos.

The nine encyclicals of the Catholic Social Teachings condense some of the most luminous and precious wisdom ever written down.

They can be understood as many things - as a guide as how to live, to determine what is the truth, and perhaps most vitally at this moment - as a manual as to how to reconstitute our civilisation from the dissolving counterfeit culture which sought, and failed, to replace it by artificial design.

WISDOM VERSUS NOVELTY

Speaking of the Church and its teachings may seem outmoded to some. Why bother? Why even seek to explain these dusty old writings from a time before mass production in machines and meaning?

What could they possibly have to say to us, belonging as they do to a world which has all but vanished from the earth?

The evidence of the charges made in this encyclical is all around us. In many cases, it is in us as well. As Arcanum predicted, the corruption of the sanctity of Christian marriage has unleashed a process of moral and social degradation that is rotting our way of life.

Yet these powerful testaments to the eternal Truth do not leave us without consolation. To read them is to read well the secrets of our sinful hearts, and of the sickness prescribed as medicine by the now-disintegrating and wicked liberal system.

There is a light in the darkness that will never go out. Read the Catholic Social Teachings and you will be illuminated.

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Here I continue my series on the nine encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII, known as the Catholic Social Teachings.

Following on from the first - which I covered here - the second encyclical explores the question of human liberty.

''Such, then, being the condition of human liberty, it necessarily stands in need of light and strength to direct its actions to good and to restrain them from evil.''

Pope Leo XIII

Published in 1888, Libertas Praestantissimum explains the concept of human liberty in alignment with the natural order of God.

It directly addresses the “calumny” against the Church, levelled by Liberals to this day, that its teachings are opposed to human liberty.

This encyclical very presciently argues that liberalism directs humanity into the freedom to destroy itself in predictable and known errors, which reduce to a rejection of God and the basis of the reality He created.

Such a dramatic statement may have seemed almost absurd in the late 19th century, but in an age of informational decoherence ruled by powers who hate anything that is good it is simply a statement of the obvious.

So too is the obvious conclusion. Liberalism, says this excellent and brief encyclical, liberates men from meaning and the truth - into the hands of Satan.

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In this series I will publish brief posts on the encyclicals of Catholic Social Teaching. This post treats the first one, which is concerned with the foundation of our knowledge of the world and its correspondence with the natural order.

Modern man is remembering he has a soul. The modern world has supplied the hunger which reveals it in starvation. Surely there must be more to life than addiction economy, its lies and a life of liberation into the void?

Well, there is. What is more, there is a body of work which shows us how to restore our secular institutions and orient their function to harmonise with the natural order created by God.

The modern Church no longer teaches this tradition. Catechisation today is non existent, and so most Catholics don’t even know Social Teaching exists. Why?

The modern Church teaches women’s liberation, gay liberation, liberation from nations and earth worship. Social liberation frees us all from meaning. The system we inhabit is dishonest, because all the liberationist movements combine in the annihilation of the value of life and the natural order.

That the modern Church chooses this over its own treasure house of wisdom is a tragedy which explains the comedy of errors we call our culture today.

The restoration of reality, sanity and human dignity to our lives begins with the foundation of knowledge, which is the use of the intellect to discern what is true.

This is the reason the Catholic Social Teaching begins with an explanation of the basis of reality. Their principles are derived from St Thomas and St Augustine1. If you are pro-reality, pro-sanity, pro-human life and against the death machine of the enemy, this is the philosophy for you.

This week the Vatican is set to publish the “final phase” of “Synodality”.

Synodality is still undefined. It is clearly a work in progress. What is its destination?

There is to be a New Church. Leaving aside why the Catholic Church requires regime change, you can’t compare and contrast the teachings of this new religion to those of the old if you don’t know what you stand to lose.

Catholic Social Teaching begins with the mind and proceeds to what is the matter with our world. It is a total discipline of how to approach and order our affairs in reality.

This is the reason it begins with the question of how we know what is true.

Encyclical One - On Christian Philosophy Aeterni Patris

This first encyclical of the Social Teachings of Leo XIII makes the case for reality-based ideas.

As is usual, the encyclical is named after its first two words.

In this case they are Aeterni Patris2. You can read it here in full.

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The globalised liberal death machine is dying.

The US is weaning itself off the diabolical ponzi economy which has sponsored counter-sane social revolution at home and forever war abroad.

The total bankruptcy of the liberal global model is powering an electoral paradigm shift. Across the West, parties who seem to reject the postwar liberal consensus are in the ascendant.

Yet populism does not have a coherent politics. After remigration returns homelands to the homeless, what then?

Populism does not have an alternative to the debt-fuelled economics of destruction which has made life cheap and nasty.

Today I will explain how populism could - and probably will - find a new political economy by going back to the source of our European civilisation.

Catholic Social Teaching has the answers to the questions that electorates will soon be asking their populist politicians: how do we fix this mess?

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