In 1825 a small book was
published that was to have enormous consequences. The book was Le Nouveau Christianisme, “The New Christianity,” the posthumous
work of Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825).
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| Henri de Saint-Simon |
Saint-Simon’s thesis was a
simple one. Traditional forms of society
and of the State might have been useful in the past but were now outdated. What was needed was a new conception of
society and of the State, with special emphasis on reforming Christianity to
bring Church, State, and Family together into one efficient entity the better
to meet the material needs of society, especially the poor.
All of society
should be associated into a unified whole, with production of marketable goods
and services carried out in accordance with a moral code based on science, with
compliance enforced by the State.
Saint-Simon’s basic creed can be summed up as, “The whole of society
ought to strive towards the amelioration of the moral and physical existence of
the poorest class; society ought to organize itself in the way best adapted for
attaining this end.”
Disciples of “the
New Christianity” that espoused what quickly became known as “the Democratic Religion”
soon formed Le Église Saint-Simonienne,
“the Saint-Simonian Church.” The new
church was intended to replace the Catholic Church and any other Christian
churches that got in the way of the “New Things.”
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| Pierre Leroux |
The effort was so
successful and there were so many copycat systems of the Democratic Religion
that in 1833 Pierre Leroux (1797-1871), one of the leading Saint-Simonians, coined
a new term as a pejorative to describe the competition: socialisme — “socialism.”
Within ten years, however, “socialism” had changed from a pejorative to
the preferred term to describe the Democratic Religion/New Things — much better
than “communism,” which had legitimate religious forms in monasticism and some
communities in the early days of Christianity.
Of course, “socialism”
and “communism” continued to be used interchangeably, even after Karl Marx
redefined communism to mean scientific socialism shorn of any and all religious
trappings. Even today there is some confusion
over the terminology, which is used to advantage by those who seek to replace
traditional forms of society with the New Things.
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| Gregory XVI |
Naturally the
Catholic Church could not let the New Things go unchallenged. In 1832 Pope Gregory XVI (Bartolomeo
Alberto Cappellari, 1765-1846, elected 1831) issued the first social encyclical, Mirari Vos, “On Liberalism and Religious Indifferentism,” and two
years later the second one, Singulari Nos,
“On the Errors of Lamennais,” in which the pope referred for the first time to rerum novarum, “New Things,” as the
problem.
By 1891 socialism
and the other New Things (modernism and the New Age) had become so bad that Pope
Leo XIII started off his encyclical on labor and capital by referring
specifically to rerum novarum, mostly
socialism, as the problem. Nor had
things improved any by 1991, when Pope John Paul II (Karol Józef Wojtyła, 1920-2005, elected 1978) wrote in § 4 of Centesimus Annus (“On the Centenary of Rerum Novarum”),
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| John Paul II |
Towards the end of the last century the Church found herself facing
an historical process which had already been taking place for some time, but
which was by then reaching a critical point. The determining factor in this
process was a combination of radical changes which had taken place in the
political, economic and social fields, and in the areas of science and
technology, to say nothing of the wide influence of the prevailing ideologies.
In the sphere of politics, the result of these changes was a new conception of society and of the State, and
consequently of authority itself. A
traditional society was passing away and another was beginning to be formed —
one which brought the hope of new freedoms but also the threat of new forms of
injustice and servitude.
What worried every pope in modern times since
Gregory XVI was the growth of an all-powerful State that has
the potential to take over every aspect of life, down to whether someone is
even permitted to be born. Yet even that
is hardly a new concern as the story of what happened to Archbishop Thomas à
Becket (cir. 1120-1170) when he stood
up to King Henry II (1133-1189) and the king’s efforts to gather more power
into the hands of the State as related by Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson in Saint Thomas à Becket: The Holy Blissful Martyr:
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