Enter the Don Felix Sarda y Salvany: Liberalism is a Sin

Statue of Don Felix Sarda y Salvany. Photograph by Josep Renalias.

The good Dr. Don Felix Sarda y Salvany (1844-1916) was a Spanish Catholic priest and writer from Spain’s Eastern region of Catalonia. His scribal tenacity was impressive; the Don was the editor of the Catholic weekly journal La Revista Popular for more than 40 years, and in the years leading up to the start of the civilization-ending First World War, he published a twelve-volume series titled Propaganda catolica (“Catholic Propaganda”), dryly described by an unknown Wikipedia contributor as “a vast collection of short books, pamphlets, articles and conferences.” The Italian historian Roberto de Mattei says of the Don Sarda: “[he] was a popular priest in Spain at the end of the century and was considered exemplary for the firmness of his principles and the clarity of his apostolate.”

(I note here wryly that my Google Chrome browser attempts to correct the word ‘apostolate,’ describing [among other things] organized religious works, to the word ‘apostate,’ describing a religious defector.)

According to the Spanish Bibliography of Reference, the Don exercised an “apostolate of immense efficiency and resonance.” His writings against the growing liberalism of 19th century Europe achieved some level of notability after a series of Spanish political fiascoes from 1868-1874 that began with a liberal revolution and deposition of the ruling Queen Isabella II, followed by a short-lived monarchy under the Savoyard Prince Amadeo, followed by his own deposition and a similarly short-lived Spanish Republic that ended in 1874 when the original Queen Isabella II’s son Alfonso XII was restored as King of Spain in a military coup. Three coups, two monarchies, one republic, and all back to square one in just six years — politics today just isn’t as exciting as it used to be. But I digress.

I will here provide a choice quote of the Don’s so that the reader may be sufficiently intrigued to studiously follow the forthcoming backstory and analysis (my highlights in bold):

 “The theater, literature, public and private morals are all saturated with obscenity and impurity. The result is inevitable; a corrupt generation necessarily begets a revolutionary generation. Liberalism is the program of naturalism. Free-thought begets free morals, or immorality. Restraint is thrown off and a free rein given to the passions. Whoever thinks what he pleases will do what he pleases. Liberalism in the intellectual order is license in the moral order. Disorder in the intellect begets disorder in the heart, and vice-versa. Thus does Liberalism propagate immorality, and immorality Liberalism.” (Liberalism is a Sin, Ch. 26)

During the 1868-1874 interregnum, the Catholic Church in Spain suffered a number of blows to its status, especially due to the short-lived First Spanish Republic that moved to establish a secular state. While Catholicism retrieved its status as the state religion of Spain after the restoration of the monarchy under Alfonso XIII in 1874, the sense of spiritual decay that had gripped Spain since the 18th century continued unabated. Yale historian Noel Valis describes a “a growing alienation from the Church,” and refers us to the observations of a Protestant chaplain in Spain Hugh James Rose, who dedicated an entire chapter of his 1873 book on the country to the “Decay of Faith in Spain.” Choice observations of Rose’s: “The Church of Spain … is an institution which has lost its hold on the masses, both educated and uneducated … [there is in the Spanish] a sense of spiritual drift, of having come unanchored from their religious moorings.”

It is in this context that Don Sarda’s magnum opus was released, the 1886 book Liberalism is a Sin, which was subsequently reprinted up to twenty times by 1960. Salvany, who believed liberalism “is the burning issue of our century,” found a quick rebuttal to his work by the liberal-leaning Catholic intelligentsia — both pieces were submitted to the Roman Catholic Church’s Sacred Congregation of the Index (the successor institution to the Index Librorum Prohibitorum — List of Prohibited Books). The Congregation’s secretary ruled soon after in favor of Salvany, finding errors in the rebuttal and “uncharitable insinuations” about the good Don.

To illustrate the then Church’s zealous and masculine dismissal of liberal protests, I will excerpt the secretary’s letter to the liberal Bishop who ordered the rebuttal:

To The Most Rev. Jacobo Catala Et Alboso,

Bishop of Barcelona

Most Excellent Sir:

[…]

D. Felix Sarda, merits great praise for his exposition and defense of the sound doctrine therein set forth with solidity, order and lucidity, and without personal offense to anyone.

[…]

The same judgment, however, cannot be passed on the other work, that by D. de Pazos, for in matter it needs corrections. Moreover, his injurious manner of speaking cannot be approved, for he inveighs rather against the person of D. Sarda than against the latter’s supposed errors.

[…]

Therefore, the Sacred Congregation has commanded D. de Pazos, admonished by his own Bishop, to withdraw his book, as far as he can, from circulation, and in the future, if any discussion of the subject should arise, to abstain from all expressions personally injurious, according to the precept of true Christian charity; and this all the more since Our Holy Father, Leo XIII, whereas he urgently recommends castigation of error, neither desires nor approves expressions personally injurious, especially when directed against those who are eminent for their doctrine and their piety.

[…]

Fr. Jerome Secheri, O.P.
Secretary of the Sacred Congregation Of the Index.

Don Sarda had the full backing of the Roman Catholic Church of the late 1800’s, and his works built on the Syllabus Errorum (Syllabus of Errors) issued by the Holy See under Pope Pius IX in 1864, which condemned, among other things: pantheism, naturalism, absolute rationalism, socialism, communism, and modern liberalism. This is all relevant to the crux of this entire piece, which finally manifests itself: that the Don Felix Sarda y Salvany, and his contemporaries in the Catholic world, were not just potentially in agreement with the tenets of the nascent neoreactionary school of thought (more introduction to it can be accessed here, here and here), but fully paleo-neoreactionaries, a clumsy description which we might condense into reactionaries, with the understanding that our contemporary neoreactionaries are rediscovering reactionaries and applying their insights to the chaotic world of 2015 (hence, neo-). I will now highlight several key tenets of the 21st century neoreactionary school of thought that were articulated nearly word-for-word by the 19th century Don, and, crucially, firmly defended by the Catholic Church at the time, as illustrated above.

1. To Hell with the journalists.

The contempt that most Westerners hold for the “mainstream media,” and the much deeper contempt that neoreactionaries hold for journalists themselves is rooted in a very real and consistent tendency for journalists to style themselves as heroic investigators of dark secrets held from the masses for illicit gain, but to act in reality as left-wing propagandists advancing a uniform agenda of feminism, multiculturalism, LGBT-ism, and a myriad of other -isms through a long-cultivated routine of mental gymnastics and/or outright fraud. The result is a “mainstream media narrative” divorced from reality to one degree or another, useful only to leftists (Don Salvany’s “liberals”) for political purposes — namely, attacking and crushing with overwhelming propaganda the rightist resistance they invariably face.

“Here are theoretical and practical Liberals. The first are the dogmatizers of the sect—the philosophers, the professors, the controversialists, the journalists. They teach Liberalism in books, in discourses, in articles, by argument or by authority, in conformity with a rationalistic criterion, in disguised or open opposition to the criterion of the divine and supernatural revelation of Jesus Christ.” (Ch. 9)

“Amongst Liberals we must not forget to include those who manage to evade any direct exposition or expression of the Liberal theory, but who nevertheless obliquely sustain it in their daily practice by writing and orating after the Liberal method, by recommending Liberal books and men, measuring and appreciating everything according to the Liberal criterion, and manifesting, on every occasion that offers, an intense hatred for anything that tends to discredit or weaken their beloved Liberalism. Such is the conduct of those prudent journalists whom it is difficult to apprehend in the flagrant advocacy of any proposition concretely Liberal, but who nevertheless, in what they say and in what they do not say, never cease to labor for the propagation of this cunning heresy. Of all Liberal reptiles, these are the most venomous.” (Ch. 9)

“And all this comes of a foolish desire to be estimated Liberal. Insane illusion! The usage of the word Liberal makes the Catholic who accepts it as his own one with all that finds shelter in its ominous shadow. Rationalism is the toadstool that flourishes in its dark shades, and with Rationalism does such a journalist identify himself, thus placing himself in the ranks of the enemies of Jesus Christ!” (Ch. 13)

2. To Hell with the “moderates.”

A more niche contempt held by the modern Dissident Right at large — including the gamut of neoreactionaries, monarchists, paleoconservatives, white nationalists, New Rightists, identitarians, right-libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, radical traditionalists and so forth — is the contempt for the mainstream right-wing political forces that exist in every Western country but act as little more than controlled opposition for the zealous Left, making loud noises in parliament halls but inevitably and invariably capitulating to the Left’s demands, only to style themselves as the vanguards of the old order a decade later — but not the primordial rightist order, but the 10-year-old new order of the Left!

“This class has not fully penetrated into the domain of truth. That they will ever enter the city of light depends upon their own sincerity and honesty. If they earnestly desire to know the truth in its fullness and seek it with sincere purpose, God’s grace will not fail them. But they are in a dangerous position. On the borderland between the realms of light and darkness, the devil is most active and ingenious in detaining those who seem about to escape his snares, and he spares nothing to retain in his service a great number of people who would truly detest his infernal machinations if they only perceived them. His method, in the instance of persons infected with Liberalism, is to suffer them to place one foot within the domain of truth, provided they keep the other inside the camp of error. In this way they stand the victim of the devil’s deceit and their own folly. In this way those whose consciences are not yet entirely hardened escape the salutary horrors of remorse; so the pusillanimous and the vacillating, who comprise the greater number of Liberals, avoid compromising themselves by pronouncing themselves such openly and squarely; so the shrewd and calculating (according to the measure of expediency—how much time they will spend in each camp), manage to show themselves the friends and allies of both; so a man is enabled to administer an official and recognized palliative to his failings, his weaknesses and his blunders. It is the obscurity that arises from the indefiniteness of clearly defined principles of truth and error in the Liberalist’s mind that makes him the easy victim of Satan. His boasted strength is the very source of his weakness. It is because he has no real solid knowledge of the principles of truth and error that he is so easily deluded into the belief of his own intellectual superiority. He is in a mental haze—a fog which hides from him the abyss into which his vanity and pride, cunningly played upon by Satan, are invariably drawing him.” (Ch. 8)

3.  Demotism

Demotism, the idea that a ruler must rule “in the name of the people,” is a malady of civilization omnipresent in the post-Enlightenment period: the three great dragons of the 20th century, capitalism, communism and fascism, all ostensibly ruled “by the will of the people,” a stark contrast to the aristocratic monarchies of Old Europe which ruled not “by the will of the people,” but “by the will of God.” The idea of demotism is a uniquely neoreactionary insight, which the Don Felix Sarda y Salvany foreshadowed heavily in this excerpt on the differences between Catholic and secular governments, and their relationships to monarchical and republican governments. Don Sarda’s point seems to be that the crucial worth of a government lies not in its constituted political form i.e. whether it is republican or monarchical, but rather in its agreed-upon basis for legitimacy — the people, or God? Couldn’t an absolute monarch be a demotist, and wouldn’t this constitute a problem? And couldn’t a republican government consist of ardently religious aristocrats sharing a divine right to rule over the masses? There is ample room for debate here.

“A government, whatever be its form, is Catholic if its constitution, its legislation, and its politics are based on Catholic principles; it is Liberal if it bases its constitution, its legislation, and its politics on rationalistic principles. It is not the act of legislation—by the king in a monarchy, by the people in a republic, or by both in a mixed form of government—which constitutes the essential nature of its legislation or of its constitution. What constitutes this is whether it does or does not carry with it the immutable seal of the Faith and whether it be or be not conformable with what the Christian law imposes upon states as well as upon individuals. just as amongst individuals, a king in his purple, a noble with his escutcheon or a workman in his overalls can be truly Catholic, so states can be Catholic, whatever be the place assigned them in the scale of governmental forms. In consequence, the fact of being Liberal or anti-Liberal has nothing whatever to do with the horror which everyone ought to entertain for despotism and tyranny, nor with the desire of civil equality between all citizens; much less with the spirit of toleration and of generosity, which, in their proper acceptation, are Christian virtues. And yet all this, in the language of certain people and of certain journals, is called Liberalism. Here we have an instance of a thing which has the appearance of Liberalism and which in reality is not Liberalism at all.

On the other hand, there exists a thing which is really Liberalism and yet has not the appearance of Liberalism. Let us suppose [i.e., imagine] an absolute monarchy like that of Russia, or of Turkey, or better still, one of the conservative governments of our times, the most conservative imaginable; let us suppose that the constitution and the legislation of this monarchy or of this government is based upon the principle of the absolute and free will of the king or upon the equally unrestricted will of the conservative majority, in place of being based on the principles of Catholic right, on the indestructibility of the Faith, or upon a rigorous regard of the rights of the Church; then, this monarchy and this conservative government would be thoroughly Liberal and anti-Catholic. Whether the free-thinker be a monarch, with his responsible ministry, or a responsible minister, with his legislative corps, as far as consequences are concerned, it is absolutely the same thing. In both cases their political conduct is in the direction of free-thought, and therefore it is Liberal. Whether or not it be the policy of such a government to place restraints upon the freedom of the press; whether, no matter under what pretext, it grinds its subjects and rules with a rod of iron; a country so governed, though it will not be free, will without doubt be Liberal. Such were the ancient Asiatic monarchies; such are many of our modern monarchies; such was the government of Bismarck in Germany; such is the monarchy of Spain, whose constitution declares the king inviolable, but not God.

Here then we have something which, without seeming to resemble Liberalism, really is Liberalism, the more subtle and dangerous precisely because it has not the appearance of the evil it is.” (Ch. 12)

Without regard to political or religious identity, I recommend all sane men take a day or two to carefully read the Don Felix Sarda y Salvany’s Liberalism is a Sin. Filled with biting commentary, no-holds-barred reactionary criticism, and such ardent and unforgiving opposition to the leftist-liberal movement that would make the staunchest Ultramontane blush, the entire text is available for free online at this link. Go, young men of the post-modern world: let your ancestors’ spiritual guides teach you the real things that they’ll never teach you in school.

Mark Yuray is verified on Gab. Follow him there and on Twitter.

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