ON CIVIL GOVERNMENT
Part five in a series on Catholic Social Teaching
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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