Paris is about to conclude its job as host of the Summer Olympics, and we are invited to celebrate France on these grounds. But Catholics might consider a few reasons to check their esteem for the Eldest Daughter of the Church.
These reasons go beyond the blasphemous tableau of the Last Supper during the Olympics’ opening ceremonies. That display was a symptom of the secular sickness France has not only succumbed to, but also, in many ways, spawned.
The French Revolution of 1789-1799 was a movement that bled Catholic France out before spreading its errors all over the world, from then all the way up to today. The Revolutionary concepts of “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity” were, and still are, at the heart of the rot.
After the Protestant Reformation and the Renaissance, France was in a vulnerable position. She moved with the tides that first rejected the authority of the Church over the word of God and then embraced the authority of individual thought. These humanist winds gave flight to the French Enlightenment, including Rousseau’s Marxist philosophy, which loomed large in the French Revolution, and also Voltaire’s assault on religion.
There were errors at that time that made Christians susceptible to secular criticism. First, the reaction against dualism made many Christians focus overmuch on the spiritual, leaving the body behind as evil, and opened them up to secular refutation as useless to society. Second, the French monarchy had grown so entangled with the Church that the latter was seen as a political inveigler, worth taking down. Third, the hypocrisy of many Christians’ un-Christian behavior gave anti-Christian sentiment more than enough fodder to dismiss the Faith. It was commonly held that the wars France fought for religion were inconsistent with Christian teaching, but the war France fought for the Revolution was totally consistent with secular teaching, giving it popular legitimacy over religion.
These three conditions facilitated the irreligious bent of the French Revolution. Catholics must guard against them even now. Catholics must be in the world but not of it, harmonizing heaven and earth in accordance with God’s creative wisdom. Catholics should also keep religion out of power-grabbing politics, though magisterial teaching should inform political action. And, of course, Catholics must remain true to the Faith and the teachings of the Church, lest the Faith be seen as a hollow thing.
At the time of the Revolution, tensions were high in France’s semi-feudal society, with the high clergy and the nobility as the ruling Estates over the Third Estate, comprising of the bourgeois, peasants, and priests. With the country in dire economic straits, King Louis XVI summoned representatives of the three Estates to find a solution.
The result was revolution. The Third Estate rebelled against the deck stacked against them by the First and Second, proclaimed themselves the National Assembly, and began work on a new constitution. They stormed the Bastille fortress-prison to assert their freedom from feudalism and issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man.
This is where so many of our current political and societal problems began. The Declaration was an attempt to enshrine justice and freedom through humanity instead of divinity. It recognized a “Supreme Being,” but the nebulous nature of that Being was the first iteration of a now-beloved doctrinal haziness. And so followed the Reign of Terror, with blood running in rivers from the screaming pulleys of the guillotine, as an initially reasonable-seeming and religious people collapsed into a totalitarian fury, defining right and wrong according to their whim, rhetoric, and political advantage, and slaying all who appeared to stand in their way.
More to the Catholic point, the de-Christianization of France was key in these efforts, as it is in the history of totalitarian takeover. These wounds upon the Christian West fester to this day, with three prominent and pernicious manifestations.
- The Church is required to bend the knee to the government in every way, acquiescing to policies and principles that the state mandates, creating situations such as an outward Church that follows the law of the land and an underground Church that follows the law of God. Cafeteria Catholicism is dominant in these times as a direct result of the Revolution’s religious rejection, with the real course-setters being the talking heads of a relativist and hedonist society and an ideologically motivated government. The Church’s voice echoes faint in the “real life” issues of the world. That’s just the way the Revolution wanted it.
- In order to make the government, and not the Church, the final arbiter of manners, morals, and even mankind, the revolutionaries maligned, villainized, and marginalized the Church, relegating it to the object of contempt, abuse, and scorn. This is all too familiar. Church leaders who toe the line of truth are targets (even by bishops), the faithful are branded as extremists, and tradition is unceremoniously balled up into a syncretic melting pot with all religions and even with defunct mythology. In these efforts, the Church and the Magisterium are disenfranchised in the public square and aggressively shown as behind the times and behind the eight-ball. Christian figures, whether living or dead, are labeled as enemies of the state and blamed for atrocities and anarchies.
- Alternatives to religion are established to fulfill or suppress humanity’s innate desire for spiritual nourishment and provide regime propaganda. The Revolution encouraged the cult of the fatherland and the worship of reason. The deities of our day are legion—cell phones, celebrities, social media, all to replace Christianity with a new secular religion. And the attitude behind this movement will not shy away from mocking religion to trivialize it (as the Olympics Last Supper debacle demonstrated).
The French Revolution launched all these attacks on Christianity in furthering its lunge for utopia. The Revolution’s watchwords, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” signify the sly slant of the attack. The idea of liberty as license is foremost: the will of the people, instead of the will of God, declares people free so long as they “do no harm,” and leaves the idea of freedom and harm up to those writing the rules. The desire for equality paradoxically tore down inhibitions against destroying other lives and made all religious views equal until they were equated with secularism and sophism. And fraternity morphed into standards of individualism held over the Christian tradition of duty to neighbor, service, and sacrifice.
Besides giving rise to the division of the political left and right—referring originally to the liberal and (relatively) conservative wings of the National Assembly—the French Revolution also brought on a kind of synthesis of all heresies, which would be called Modernism by Pope Pius X. Modernist views are alive and well in our politically charged, gridlocked, and thoroughly secular society. Liberty still stands for doing as you please, so long as it “harms no one,” but there is always a victim in any sin. Equality is distorted more and more with homosexual and transgender terrorism. Fraternity has new equivocal and empty slogans, such as “love is love” or “my body, my choice,” but all these are dedicated only to rampant self-service and self-aggrandizement.
Though liberty, equality, and fraternity are words for beautiful realities, made good by God, the French Revolution twisted them into forces for evil. And these three rotten fruits of the Revolution still cause Catholics to suffer over 200 years later.
We must be watchful. Ideas form realities, and if Catholic ideas are diluted or abandoned, they will not have a place in the future. Good ideas without God become bad ideas. Moreover, Catholic ideas must counteract the anti-Catholic ideas that will, if unchecked, indoctrinate a new godless generation. Catholics must remember how de-Christianization rears its ugly head, and send that head rolling.
There is much to learn from France and her bloody, mad Revolution, especially as the blood and the madness prevail in many ways today. In our worldly society, the Catholic worldview is the favorable alternative to the Revolution’s dark brand of liberty, equality, and fraternity.