“[T]he principle of the separation of the State and Church … is equivalent to the separation of human legislation from Christian and divine legislation. We do not care to interrupt Ourselves here in order to demonstrate the absurdity of such a separation; each one will understand for himself. As soon as the State refuses to give to God what belongs to God, by a necessary consequence it refuses to give to citizens that to which, as men, they have a right; as, whether agreeable or not to accept, it cannot be denied that man’s rights spring from his duty toward God. Whence if follows that the State, by missing in this connection the principal object of its institution, finally becomes false to itself by denying that which is the reason of its own existence. These superior truths are so clearly proclaimed by the voice of even natural reason, that they force themselves upon all who are not blinded by the violence of passion; therefore Catholics cannot be too careful in defending themselves against such a separation.”
– Leo XIII, Au Milieu Des Sollicitudes (1892)
Laodicea 
September 15, 2018 at 3:35 am
Reblogged this on Petty Armchair Popery.
September 19, 2018 at 5:34 pm
To say that every man has the right to choose his own religion is as nonsensical as saying that every man has the right to choose his own law, his own morality, his own biology, chemistry, or physics. Because, contrary to Enlightenment propaganda, religion is as much a part of objective reality as physics. Denying the Ten Commandments is no less a denial of objective reality than the denial of the Newtonian so-called laws of motions, and you are certainly not less of a fool for denying the former than the latter. You wouldn’t let a man pilot a jet plane without some understanding of the laws of gravity and aerodynamics, but it would be just as absurd to let a statesman rule without knowing the laws of religion. To say that every man has the right to choose his own religion, then, is to admit that religion is fairy tale with no bearing on objective reality. It is to fall into that subjectivism which leads quickly and directly to nihilism, to where men really are allowed to choose their own biology (transgenderism). A denial of all objective reality. Man is God and the world is in his creative imagination. The State exists to enthrone his divine “rights.” It would be true to say that every man is bound to accept what his conscience informs him is the true religion, but inadequate. Religion is not a matter of mere subjective conscience, which may be in error and not correspond with the true and objective reality. Therefore man has a further obligation to inform his conscience by seeking true religion. The full truth is that everyone is under grave obligation to profess the true religion which God has published to the world (public revelation). There may be degrees of pardon according to degrees of ignorance / invincible ignorance, but that does not lessen the duty one bit. Those who say that there is no duty to profess any particular religion are in essence denying that there is any public revelation; they are saying that, if there is any revelation made by God, it has only been manifest to private consciences, not to mankind in the public sphere. This opinion might be acceptable for some pagans living in ignorance, but it is totally unacceptable for a Catholic to pretend that there is no public revelation, and that the Catholic faith is a mere private revelation God has given to some individuals rather than to all mankind. This would be a grave sin against the first commandment, “I am the LORD thy God,” and a denial of the Great Evangelical Commission to baptise and preach to the nations. For the USA to enshrine this public denial of public revelation in its constitution, and to reduce all religion to a matter of private conscience, when its founders and members are in no way ignorant of Christ and the scriptures — is a grave public sin, an abomination, belonging collectively to the entire nation. For them to go around the world converting the nations to the anti-gospel of subjectivism and divine ego-tism is also the work of Satan. This is why, though I do not hate the American people themselves, I cannot help but hate and detest the USA itself, that is the political entity, or the “Great Satan” as the Muslims aptly call it. The nature of American “freedom” is to lock up God and religion in the closet of men’s minds, so that God might never appear in His objective reality and glory in the public sphere, which belongs henceforth to the lawless ego. This is diabolical because most men only grasp the objective reality of God’s existence when He is afforded the public worship due to Him, so to banish God from the public is to abandon men to all confusion and even to atheism.
September 19, 2018 at 5:54 pm
The reason that Catholic evangelism today is so timid and half-hearted is that most Catholics, including (most shamefully) the bishops, have at least tacitly admitted the American proposition that religion is a matter of private conscience rather than public duty. This makes the Catholic missionary fearful and double-minded, because while He wishes to spread the Gospel he is afraid of trespassing the so-called rights of man’s conscience to choose whatever religion (or non-religion) he merely prefers. In practice, this leaves the missionary satisfied that he has done God’s will by leaving men in the error they happen to choose. Often he is not to blame for this because he has been misled by his pastors to not be able to distinguish the worship of God from the idolatry of the human ego. Through telling us (by word or deed) to leave men’s consciences alone, our bishops have taught us that the rights of man are prior to the rights of God, essentially that man is closer to divinity than God.
September 19, 2018 at 6:28 pm
While I strongly agree with most of what you have said I think one has to be careful with statements like “There may be degrees of pardon according to degrees of ignorance / invincible ignorance”. the first requirement of the natural law is that we worship God in the manner He has appointed. God will not leave a person who acts in good faith without the knowledge of that religion. As St Thomas says “even if someone is brought up in the forest or among wild beasts … [and] followed the direction of natural reason in seeking good and avoiding evil, we must most certainly hold that God would either reveal to him through internal inspiration what had to be believed, or would send some preacher of the faith to him”. The fact that this scenario is either never realized or only very rarely simply reflects the fact that “no one does good, not even one”. If we let go of this truth then the argument for a neutral state on the grounds that ignorance excuses and reason alone can suffice becomes much stronger.