On What Rational Basis?

Warnings About Papalism and its Opposition to Freedom

Pope Pious XII — “Hitler’s Pope”

If you’ve read my articles for some time, then I’m sure you’re aware of the fact that I am completely opposed to the World Economic Forum, the Great Reset, and the United Nations and their anti-Christ, anti-human agenda. You may have also noticed that I’m very much opposed to Roman Catholicism, and have spent a considerable amount of time talking about how it is not conservative, but is essentially opposed to classical liberalism. Since the WEF poses an immediate, well-funded, and seemingly indefatigable existential threat to national and individual freedoms and rights, you may be wondering why I focus on Romanism. Why have I spent time and energy explaining that devout Roman Catholics cannot truly be our allies if we are conservatives, i.e. classical liberals?

In the past, the church of Rome has taken advantage of culturally tempestuous moments like ours in order to once again take dominance over the churches and the state. The Roman Church has presented itself as an ally of the conservative cause at hand in order to push for greater “unity” and “dialogue” between itself and Protestants. Foregrounding a supposedly identical crusade against the secular forces of evil in the West, the Roman Catholic Church has urged Protestants to believe them to be cultural, social, moral allies. This initial socio-political and moral unity later will evolve into a socio-political and religious unity, one in which Protestants and Romanists call one another brothers in Christ — despite what our differing and mutually exclusive confessions of faith openly state. The allure of having a massive body of support from Romanists has clouded the judgment of many Protestants in the past, and it may be doing so in our historical context.

Today, many Protestants are rightly opposing the epistemologies of postmodernism and Van Tillianism, and seeking out a better philosophy that does not undermine human reason and our capacity to know what is objectively the case. In this search, many have landed on the work of Thomas Aquinas, whose work is systematic and thorough, but serves as the philosophical justification of Roman Catholic Social Teaching, in which man’s personhood/self-hood is only properly achievable and knowable within the context of a social body, man’s primary and definitive duty is to help the social body achieve “the common good,” individualism is viewed as an evil directly related to the Fall, an individual’s rights are revocable if they stand in the way of the social body achieving “the common good,” and an episcopal monarchy is viewed as the ideal form of political governance.

The reality of the situation is that Roman Catholicism has no lasting place for individualism, freedom of conscience, and capitalism. Within the context of Aquinas’ own teaching on politics, there is room for the church of Rome to justify allowing individualism, freedom of conscience, and capitalism — if they are being used to achieve “the common good.” In the teaching of Rome, having an episcopal monarch is the best state of affairs for the members of any given society — and this is primarily wherein lies my concern. If Protestants ally ourselves with devout Roman Catholics against the common threat of the WEF and win, will the church of Rome then turn on us?

This may seem like a ridiculous question to ask, but considering the history of the Roman Church it is not. Rome changes as the tides change, shape-shifting in order to preserve her life. When Hitler was in power, the Roman Church supported Hitler. John W. Robbins writes —

The evidence outside the Vatican’s archives indicates that the papacy encouraged, supported, and collaborated with both the Mussolini and Hitler regimes, as well as setting up its own totalitarian state in Croatia during the war.

[…]

Writing in the New Individualist Review in 1965, Stephen J. Tonsor pointed out the hostility of the Roman Church-State to Republican Germany after World War I, and its support for Nazi Germany:

“There is the fact that German Catholicism was hostile to the Weimar Republic; that it marshaled its great power against the ideological and social pluralism, the liberalism, the democracy, the secular tone of Weimar Germany The Church’s vision was dominated by the ideal of an authoritarian state whose object was the promotion of virtue and true religion....”

Despite its hostility to the Weimar Republic, the Roman Catholic Church in Germany flourished during those years. Subsidized by the government, by 1930, there were twenty million Catholics in Germany, led by twenty thousand Catholic priests. New monasteries, new schools, new houses for religious orders were being rapidly built. In 1931, Karl Bachem, historian of the Roman Catholic Center Party, gloated, “Never yet has a Catholic country possessed such a developed system of all conceivable Catholic associations as today s Catholic Germany.” The Center Party, started in 1870 in opposition to Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, was an ally of the Socialist Party in Germany during the 1920s.

The fountainhead and stronghold of the Nazi movement in Germany was Bavaria in south Germany, Roman Catholic Germany, not Protestant north Germany. German Roman Catholics joined the Nazi Party en masse and enthusiastically supported the Hitler regime. Over half of Hitlers troops were Roman Catholic.

At the height of his power in 1942, Hitler ruled over the largest Roman Catholic population in the world. They were accustomed to authoritarian government in their religious lives, which made them unquestioning and enthusiastic supporters of authoritarian civil governments as well. Of course, Roman Catholic laymen were simply following the example and the instructions of their religious leaders. Pius XI was the first head of state to recognize Hitlers government in 1933. Pius XI praised Hitler in public, even before he extended official recognition to the Hitler regime. In 1933, Pius XI told Hitlers Vice Chancellor Fritz von Papen, also a Roman Catholic, “how pleased he was that the German Government now had at its head a man uncompromisingly opposed to Communism....”¹

After the demise of Hitler, the Roman Church continued to strive against the Communists for cultural prominence, and Roman Catholic public figures presented Roman Catholic Social Teaching as a third way between the twin evils, in Rome’s view, of classical liberalism and socialism, playing to the moral sensibilities of all who who vigorously opposed to the atrocities of the Holocaust.

Yet while they fought against the Communists, they were supportive of the activist work of ex-Communist, Communitarian activists like Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day, two individuals who, although not yet canonized, serve for many Romanists as exemplary Roman Catholics who “took their faith seriously.” This was not only the case in America, but also in Europe. John W. Robbins notes —

Following Vatican directives, Roman Catholic politicians, legislators, and intellectuals brought us the Progressive movement, the labor union movement, the graduated income tax, the New Deal, and the growth of government in the United States.

[…]

In other nations in which Roman Catholic influence was greater, governments became even more socialist than they did in the United States. In Italy, for example, an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country, the Communist Party was once the largest Communist Party in the world outside the Soviet Union and China. The nationalization, taxation, and regulation of private enterprise and life have progressed much further in other countries than they have in the United States. One of the reasons is that Roman Catholicism theoretically justifies and has historically fostered authoritarian, interventionist - not to say totalitarian — governments.

Pius XI, not wanting to boast, of course, wrote in his encyclical, Quadragesimo Anno (1931):

“We do not, of course, deny that even before the Encyclical of Leo, some rulers had provided for the more urgent needs of the working classes and had checked the more flagrant acts of injustice perpetrated against them. But after the Apostolic Voice had sounded from the Chair of Peter throughout the world, the leaders of the nations became at last more fully conscious of their obligations, and set to work seriously to promote a broader social policy.”

Rerum Novarum, by clearly aligning the Roman Church-State with the working classes and against capitalism, thus fostering class warfare, was the voice of moral authority needed to ensure the development of effective interference by all governments in the twentieth century…²

The Church of Rome and its activists differed from the Communists primarily with respect to the spiritual nature of man and the seat of socio-political authority, not the belief that man’s identity is socially constructed by means of his placement in the social body, nor the belief that capitalism is bad and destructive of the nature communal nature of humanity, nor the belief that man’s humanity is only truly achievable and knowable by means of his placement in the social body, nor the belief that those who are opposed to “the common good” may be duly punished (socially, monetarily, and physically) for their failure to conform to the Church-State’s “infallibly” defined “common good.”

A similar phenomenon can be observed in Rome’s actions during the 1980s and 1990s. While Romanists were joining hands with Reformed Evangelicals and other political conservatives, they were also lauding the work of pope John Paul II who issued Centesimus Annus³ (celebrating the 100th anniversary of the blatantly communitarian and anti-classical liberal document Rerum Novarum⁴), promoted Protestant-Romanist ecumenism, “inter-faith dialogue,” and happily endorsed the goals of the United Nations. In his 1995 address to the United Nations, Pope John Paul II put it this way —

The Holy See, in virtue of its specifically spiritual mission, which makes it concerned for the integral good of every human being, has supported the ideals and goals of the United Nations Organization from the very beginning. Although their respective purposes and operative approaches are obviously different, the Church and the United Nations constantly find wide areas of cooperation on the basis of their common concern for the human family.⁵

The statement may have been surprising for some to hear, but to those who know that the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights was greatly influenced by the French Roman Catholic Personalist philosopher Jacques Maritain, this is simply par for the course. Rome was solidifying bonds with Evangelicals under the guise of preserving conservative moral values, all the while praising the UN, an organization that is decidedly opposed to Christianity, as well as classical liberalism.

The problem here, then, is not superficial; it runs deep. Roman Catholic Social Teaching plays both sides, at once opposing socialism and classical liberalism. It does this by means of presenting communitarianism as the ideal sociopolitical philosophy, seeing as it supposedly corrects individualism and collectivism by granting them both equal importance. What isn’t mentioned by its proponents upfront, however, is that this third way is derived from Aquinas’ Neo-Aristotelian philosophy which, in the end, is another form of collectivism. The personhood of the individual inextricably binds him to the collective, makes his actions subject to the rule of the collective whose goal is to achieve “the common good.” And the way in which in “the common good” will be achieved, according to Rome’s personalist philosophers, by addressing the wholeness of man as an essentially social being — which is the very view held by one of the key architects of the West’s ongoing demise, namely Paulo Friere, and which is being rammed down the collective throat of the West by the World Economic Forum.

It was Rome who helped make the philosophical school of Phenomenology as widespread as it was,⁶ helping to create the foundation for postmodern philosophy. It was Roman Catholic personalist and phenomenological philosophers — like Etienne Borne, Emmanuel Mounier, Jacques Maritain, and Gabriel Marcel — under whom Jacques Derrida began formulating Deconstruction. And it was the Roman Catholic Personalists who gave platform to one of Derrida’s great influences, the Personalist Jewish Philosopher Emmanuel Levinas.

On what rational basis, then, do Protestants think that the faithful Romanists will remain advocates against a Catholicized form of technocracy? If a true Roman Catholic is one who fully embraces the dogmas of the Roman Church, and those dogmas include Aquinas’ canonized form of communitarianism and Pope John Paul II’s personalism, both of which have been directly influential on the World Economic Forum, then what will happen when the WEF is taken down and the Roman Church is no longer facing a massive secular opposition to its goal achieving “the common good” by establishing a communitarian society for “the common folks” over which an established episcopal monarch rules by dictatorial decree?

—h.

1. Ecclesiastical Megalomania, 189-190. (emphasis added)

2

50. (emphasis added)

3. https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_01051991_centesimus-annus.html.

4. https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum.html.

5. https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/speeches/1995/october/documents/hf_jp-ii_spe_05101995_address-to-uno.html. (emphasis added)

6. See Gubser, Michael. “Catholicism and the Making of Continental Philosophy”, Church Life Journal, Jun 4, 2020, https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/catholicism-and-the-making-of-continental-philosophy/.