THE KINGDOM OF SATAN
Part 4 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.
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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