Part Three

THE DECLARATION OF THE RIGHTS OF MAN

Few English-speaking Catholics are familiar with the French Revolution's Declaration of the Rights of Man or with its background. The Rights of Man were discussed by the French National Assembly during the meetings of August, 1789 and adopted in October of the same year. Some of the articles are not simply acceptable but actually commendable, e.g., Article 7, concerning the detention of citizens; Article 8, stating that laws cannot have a retroactive effect; and Article 9, concerning those who have been arrested but whose guilt has not been proven. Other articles are ambiguous. But some others are positively incompatible with Catholicism, particularly Article 6, which begins by stating that the law is the expression of the general will. This is a complete negation of the teaching of the Church that all authority comes from God. Pope Pius VI had no hesitation in condemning the Declaration as "contrary to religion and to society." [2]  Acceptance of the Declaration of the Rights of Man rules out the possibility of a Catholic state and the social reign of Christ the King. This is hardly surprising in view of the Masonic origin of the Declaration. Father Denis Fahey wrote:

That the preparation and the triumph of the French Revolution were the work of Freemasonry does not need proof since the Masons themselves boast of it. Accordingly, The Declaration of the Rights of Man is a Masonic production. [3]

Father Fahey quoted in support of this contention a statement by Monsieur Bonnet, the orator at the Grand Orient Assembly in 1904:

Freemasonry had the supreme honor of giving to humanity the chart which it had lovingly elaborated. It was our Brother, de la Fayette, who first presented the project of a declaration of the natural rights of the man and the citizen living in society, to be the first chapter of the Constitution. On 25 August 1789 the Constituent Assembly, of which more than 300 members were Masons, definitively adopted, almost word for word, in the form determined upon in the Lodges, the text of the immortal Declaration of the Rights of Man. [4]

Father Fahey summarized the Declaration as a formal renunciation of allegiance to Christ the King, of the supernatural life, and of membership in Christ's Mystical Body. He continued:

The French State thereby officially declared that it no longer acknowledged any duty to God through Our Lord Jesus Christ, and no longer recognized the dignity of membership of Christ in its citizens. It thus inaugurated the attack on the organization of society under Christ the King which has continued down to the present day. [5]

The principle that all authority comes from the peopIe is now all but universally accepted throughout the West. The basis of public morality is whatever the contemporary consensus of citizens is prepared to accept. It would be very hard to convince the average Catholic today that his country should not be governed by the will of the people or that our elected representatives are anything more than delegates of the people who voted them into power.

WHAT IS A "RIGHT"?

In his encyclical letter Tametsi futura, published in 1900, Pope Leo XIII commented: "The people have heard quite enough about what are called the rights of man. Let them hear about the rights of God for once."

This is precisely what we shall do now. Strictly speaking, God alone has rights which belong to Him of His very nature. As human beings we possess only contingent rights, rights which are accorded to us by God. We have a right to do only what is pleasing to God. This is synonymous with stating that we are free to do only what is pleasing to God, and the freedom referred to here is moral freedom, or moral liberty.

Whenever the term "right" is used in this study, it must be taken to mean "moral freedom." To state that a man has a right to perform an action means that he is morally free to do so, and he can never be morally free to perform any act that is displeasing to God.

The fundamental meaning of the word "liberty" is the ability to act without constraint. There can be three forms of constraint: physical, psychological, and moral.

 Freedom from physical restraint simply means the absence of any external constraint which could pre- vent a person from carrying out a desired action. A football player who wished to take part in an important match, but who had broken his leg and was in hospital at the time of the game, would not be physically free, or able, to participate in the event.

Psychological liberty is better known as free will and involves the capacity to make moral choices. It is thus restricted to angels and to men. Beings who possess free will, or psychological liberty, are the masters of their acts, and hence are responsible for them. Animals have physical but not psychological freedom. A pair of blackbirds necessarily selects the tree in which they will build their nest on the basis of which tree seems most useful; they cannot choose to sacrifice the better tree and select a poorer one. Nor do they possess the free will enabling them to decide whether or not to build a nest and raise a family, or even what type of nest to build.

It should be clear that being physically able to perform an action, and being psychologically able to choose whether to perform it, do not mean that one has a right to perform it. There may be a moral constraint against performing the action. Two simple examples should make this clear. A bank clerk might find himself in a position to defraud his employers of a large sum of money with very little likelihood of being detected. He would be physically free to perform the action, that is, he would be able to remove the money without being detected. He would be psychologically free to perform it, that is, he would be able to use, or rather misuse, his free will to commit the theft. But he would not be morally free to steal the money, since theft is forbidden by the Commandments of God. In this case the law of God and the law of the State concur, and just as there is no moral right to steal, there is also no legal right to steal.

But a legal right does not necessarily confer a moral right, as the following example will demonstrate. A woman may be physically, psychologically, and legally free to have an abortion, but the so-called legal right to murder her baby does not confer a true right, since murder is forbidden by the Commandments of God.

CIVIL LAW AND THE ETERNAL LAW

In his essay The Church and the Modem State, published in 1931 and referring specifically to the United States, Hilaire Belloc noted that laws declared invalid by the Catholic Church are not binding. He continued: "Where there is a conflict between the civil law and the moral law of the Catholic Church, members of the Catholic Church will resist the civil law and obey the law of the Church." [6]

  At the risk of being repetitious, I will state once more that the teaching of the Church is that the terms "right" and "moral liberty" are synonymous. We can speak of a "right" only when its object is morally licit. The Popes, Pope Leo XIII in particular, taught time and time again that there can only be a true right ----- that is, the moral liberty ----- to choose that which is good and true. No human being can ever have a right to choose what is evil or false.

To quote Pope Leo XIII, writing in Libertas:

The true liberty of human society does not consist in every man doing what he pleases, for this would simply end in turmoil and confusion, and bring on the overthrow of the State: but rather in this, that through the injunctions of the civil law all may more easily conform to the prescriptions of the ETERNAL LAW.

The teaching of Pope Leo XIII is, then, that the purpose of civil law in any state, Catholic or non-Catholic, should be to assist its citizens to conform to the prescriptions of the eternal law. However, today the laws of Great Britain and the U nited States are designed ----- I repeat, designed ----- to have precisely the opposite effect. The laws of both countries incite each and every citizen to imitate Lucifer and to say: Non serviam   -----"I will not serve."

The average citizen, and this is not hard to under stand, equates what is legally permissible with what is morally permissible. Let us take divorce as an example. In Great Britain the figure for divorce is around 30% and rising, and the reason that it is not rising far faster is due to the fact that such a high proportion of couples now live together without even the formality of a civil ceremony. In the U.S.A., I understand that the divorce rate is now in the region of 50% . If the law did not sanction divorce and remarriage, the number of those who would abandon their spouses to live in new unions that would be legally as well as morally illicit would be reduced to a very small fraction of this figure.

  The same can be said in the matter of abortions. If abortion had not been made legal, millions of women who have had abortions would not have done so, and, as is almost invariably the case, would have loved and cherished the babies they have murdered.

Pope Leo XIII insisted in Libertas  that:

The binding force of human laws is in this, that they are to be regarded as applications of the eternal law, as in the principle of all law . . . WHERE A LAW IS ENACTED CONTRARY TO REASON, OR TO THE ETERNAL LAW; OR TO SOME ORDINANCE OF GOD, OBEDIENCE IS UNLAWFUL, LEST WHILE OBEYING MAN WE BECOME DISOBEDIENT TO GOD.

Can these words not be considered a charter for the Rescue Movement? We are forbidden to obey any law that is contrary to the eternal law of God, lest while obeying man, we become disobedient to God.

This unequivocal papal teaching certainly has grave implications for any Catholic involved in the enforcement of the law. By what right can a Catholic policeman arrest those who try to rescue the unborn from abortion? By what right can a Catholic district attorney prosecute them? By what right can a Catholic judge convict them? Let such public officials not protest that they have sworn to uphold the law, because any human law contrary to the eternal law cannot be considered valid by any Catholic. But, alas, many, perhaps most, Catholics holding public office today are certainly not worthy of the glorious title of Catholic.

I quoted Hilaire Belloc earlier as stating that when there is a conflict between civil law and the moral law of the Catholic Church, members of the Catholic Church will resist the civil law and obey the law of the Church. Belloc was somewhat naive in believing this since, alas, now that precisely such a conflict has arisen in the United States with the emergence of the Rescue Movement, the overwhelming majority of Catholics involved in enforcing an immoral civil law have preferred to uphold that law rather than endanger their livelihood.

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