In ‘Liberalism is a Sin,’ Don Félix Sarda y Salvany explains why the worldly spirit reaches its height and apotheosis in the system of liberalism – which is the very air we breathe.
Editor’s Notes
The first period of the preparation for St Louis de Montfort’s Total Consecration to the Blessed Virgin is focused on gaining a greater awareness of the spirit of the world, and emptying ourselves of it.
Today’s meditation is a repeat of yesterday’s – and our reading is from a different source, which will build on and supplement what we have seen so far.
That source is Don Félix Sarda y Salvany’s classic work Liberalism is a Sin. The author cuts to the heart of the matter and shows that liberalism, properly understood, is the apotheosis of the spirit of the world.
We all breathe in “second-hand liberalism” every day, and it infects us all to a greater or lesser degree. Our job is to find it and root it out of ourselves.
You can read a recent overview of the history of this work, and the controversy from which it arose, at
’s Substack here.The audio attached to this piece is taken from a new translation of the original Spanish by
– albeit with a few tweakings for readability. However, the text below was made afresh.The themes, as well as vocal prayers and readings associated with this ‘Week 0’, can be found here. You can find the book here.
Although this is part of the Total Consecration preparation, it also stands alone as a great text in its own right.
CONTENTS:
READING: The text consists of a few chapters from Don Sarda y Salvany’s Liberalism is a Sin. This text is intended to provide material for further consideration of the subject of this week.
MEDITATION: Repeat the meditation from yesterday, asking God to grant you a greater knowledge and detestation of the spirit of the world. A guide on how to use these points in meditation can be found here.
Reading: What is Liberalism?
Liberalism is a Sin
Don Sarda y Salvany
Base text translated with AI and every line compared for accuracy and readability.
II – What is Liberalism?
In studying any object, after asking an sit – does it exist? – the ancient scholastics posed the further question quid sit – What is it? It is this which will occupy us in the present chapter.
What is Liberalism? In the order of ideas it is a set of false ideas; in the order of facts it is a set of criminal acts, the practical consequence of those ideas.
In the order of ideas, Liberalism is the whole of what are called liberal principles, together with the logical consequences derived from them. Liberal principles are these:
The absolute sovereignty of the individual, with complete independence from God and from his authority
The sovereignty of society, with absolute independence from whatever does not arise from itself
National sovereignty – that is, the right of the people to legislate and to govern with absolute independence from any criterion other than that of its own will, expressed first through suffrage and then through parliamentary majority
Freedom of thought without any limitation in politics, in morals, or in Religion
Freedom of the press, likewise absolute or insufficiently restricted
Freedom of association with equally broad scope.
These are the so-called liberal principles in their crudest radicalism.
Their common foundation is individual rationalism, political rationalism, and social rationalism. From these are derived:
The more or less restricted freedom of worship
The supremacy of the State in its relations with the Church; secular or independent education without any tie to Religion
Marriage legalised and sanctioned by the exclusive intervention of the State
Its last word, the expression which embraces and sums everything up, is the word secularisation – that is, the non-intervention of Religion in any act of public life, true social atheism, which is the final consequence of Liberalism.
In the order of facts, Liberalism is a set of works inspired and governed by those principles. Such are, for example, the laws of the confiscation of ecclesiastical property; the expulsion of religious orders; attacks of every kind, official and unofficial, against the freedom of the Church; corruption and error publicly authorised in the pulpit, in the press, in entertainments, in customs; the systematic war upon Catholicism, which is nicknamed clericalism, theocracy, ultramontanism, etc., etc.
It is impossible to enumerate and classify the acts which constitute the practical liberal procedure, for they include everything from the minister and the diplomat who legislate or intrigue, to the demagogue who declaims in the club or murders in the street; from the international treaty or the iniquitous war that usurps from the Pope his temporal principality, to the covetous hand that steals a nun’s dowry or seizes the lamp on the altar; from the profound and pedantic book used as a textbook in the university or institute, to the vile caricature that amuses the urchins in the tavern. Practical Liberalism is a complete world of maxims, fashions, arts, literature, diplomacy, laws, machinations, and outrages entirely its own. It is the world of Lucifer, today disguised under that name, and in radical opposition and conflict with the society of the sons of God, which is the Church of Jesus Christ.
Here, then, is Liberalism portrayed, both as doctrine and as practice.
III – Whether Liberalism is a sin, and what kind of sin it is
Liberalism is a sin, whether one considers it in the order of doctrines or in the order of facts.
In the order of doctrine it is a grave sin against the faith, because the totality of its doctrines is heresy, even though perhaps some one or another of its isolated affirmations or negations may not be such. In the order of facts it is a sin against the various Commandments of the law of God and of his Church, because it is a violation of them all. To put it more clearly: in the order of doctrine, Liberalism is the universal and radical heresy, because it includes them all; in the order of facts it is the radical and universal transgression, because it authorises and sanctions them all.
Let us proceed step by step with the demonstration.
In the order of doctrine, Liberalism is heresy. Heresy is any doctrine that denies, with formal and pertinacious denial, a dogma of the Christian faith. Liberal doctrine denies them all – first in general, and then each one in particular. It denies them all in general when it affirms or presupposes the absolute independence of individual reason in the individual, and of social reason or public criterion in society. We say affirms or presupposes, because at times, in secondary consequences, the liberal principle is not explicitly affirmed, but it is taken for granted and admitted. It denies the absolute jurisdiction of Christ God over individuals and societies, and consequently the delegated jurisdiction received from God by the visible Head of the Church over all and each one of the faithful, whatever their condition or dignity. It denies the necessity of divine revelation, and the obligation man has to accept it, if he wishes to attain his last end. It denies the formal motive of faith, that is, the authority of God who reveals, accepting from revealed doctrine only those truths reached by its short understanding. It denies the infallible magisterium of the Church and of the Pope, and consequently all the doctrines defined and taught by them. And after this general, all-embracing denial, it denies each of the dogmas, partially or in concrete, as it finds them, according to circumstances, opposed to its rationalistic criterion. Thus it denies the faith of Baptism when it admits or presupposes the equality of all cults; it denies the sanctity of marriage when it lays down the doctrine of so-called civil marriage; it denies the infallibility of the Roman Pontiff when it refuses to admit as law his official commands and teachings, subjecting them to its pase or exequatur, not, to assure itself of their authenticity in principle, but in order to judge their content.
In the order of facts it is radical immorality. It is so because it destroys the eternal principle or rule of God by imposing the human in its place; it canonises the absurd principle of independent morality, which is at bottom morality without law – or, what is the same, free morality: a morality that is not morality, since the idea of morality, apart from its directive character, essentially contains the idea of restraint or limitation. Moreover, Liberalism is every immorality, because in its historical development it has committed and sanctioned as lawful the violation of all the commandments, from the one that commands the worship of the one God, which is the first of the Decalogue, to the one that prescribes the payment of temporal rights to the Church, which is the last of her five precepts.
From all this it may be said that Liberalism, in the order of ideas, is absolute error, and in the order of facts, absolute disorder. And by both accounts it is a sin, ex genere suo, most grave: it is a mortal sin.
V – On the different degrees that may exist, and do exist, within the specific unity of Liberalism
Liberalism, as a system of doctrine, may be called a school; as an organisation of adherents to disseminate and propagate it, a sect; as a grouping of men dedicated to making it prevail in the sphere of public law, a party. But whether one considers Liberalism as a school, as a sect, or as a party, it presents within its logical and specific unity various degrees or shades which it is fitting for the Christian theologian to study and set forth.
Before anything else, it should be noted that Liberalism is one – that is, it constitutes an organism of errors perfectly and logically linked together, for which reason it is called a system. Indeed, starting from its fundamental principle that man and society are perfectly autonomous or free – with absolute independence from any other natural or supernatural criterion than their own – everything that the most advanced demagogy proclaims in its name follows from it with perfect logical sequence.
Revolution possesses nothing great except its inflexible logic. Even the most despotic acts which it performs in the name of liberty, and which at first sight we all denounce as monstrous inconsistencies, obey a lofty and superior logic. For once society recognises as its only social law the criterion of the majority, with no other norm or regulator, how can the State be denied the full right to commit any outrage against the Church, provided that, according to that its sole social criterion, it is judged expedient to commit it? Once it is admitted that the majority is always right, one thereby admits as the sole law the law of the stronger, and therefore it becomes entirely logical to push through to the final brutality.
But in spite of this logical unity of the system, men are not always logical, and this produces within that unity a most astonishing variety or gradation of colours. Doctrines derive from one another of necessity and by their own internal force; but men, in applying them, are for the most part illogical and inconsistent.
If men carried their principles to their final consequences, they would all be saints when their principles were good, and all devils of hell when their principles were evil. It is inconsistency that makes good men and bad men only half-good and not thoroughly bad.
Applying these observations to our present subject of Liberalism, we may say: complete liberals are relatively few, thanks be to God; yet this does not prevent the majority – even without having reached the final limit of liberal depravity – from being true liberals, that is, true disciples or supporters or adherents of Liberalism, according as Liberalism is considered as a school, a sect, or a party.
Let us examine these varieties of the liberal family.
There are liberals who accept the principles but shrink from the consequences, at least from the crudest and most extreme. Others accept one or other consequence or application that pleases them, while assuming a scrupulous air in refusing to accept the principles themselves in a radical way. Some would like Liberalism applied only to education; others to civil economy; others solely to political forms. Only the most advanced preach its natural application to everything and for everything. The attenuations and mutilations of the liberal creed are as numerous as the people who are harmed or benefited by its application; for it is generally believed in error that man thinks with his intelligence, when in fact he usually thinks with his heart – and very often with his stomach.
Hence the different liberal parties that proclaim Liberalism of so many degrees, just as the innkeeper dispenses spirits of so many degrees, to the taste of the consumer. Hence there is no liberal for whom his more advanced neighbour is not a brutal demagogue, or his less advanced neighbour a furious reactionary. It is a matter of alcoholic scale and nothing more. Yet both those who piously christened their Liberalism at Cádiz with the invocation of the Most Holy Trinity, and those who in recent times have made its emblem “War against God!”, fall within this liberal scale; and the proof is that all accept – and in moments of crisis invoke – this common denominator. The liberal or independent criterion is one in them all, although its applications are more or less pronounced in each. On what does this greater or lesser emphasis depend? Often on interests; not seldom on temperament; on certain remnants of education that prevent some from taking the precipitous step others take; perhaps on human respect or family considerations; on relationships and friendships formed; etc., etc.
Not to mention the satanic tactic which at times counsels a man not to push an idea to its extreme, so as not to alarm, and to make it more viable and acceptable; something which, without rash judgement, may be affirmed of certain conservative liberals, in whom the “conservative” is usually nothing but the mask or wrapping of the outright demagogue. Yet in the generality of half-liberals, charity may suppose a certain dose of candour and natural bonhomie or foolishness which, if it does not wholly exonerate them – as we shall say later – nevertheless obliges us to have some compassion on them.
We remain, then, dear reader, with this: that Liberalism is indeed a single unity; but liberals, like bad wine, come in different colours and flavours.
Meditation for Day 5
(A repeat of Day 4)
It is in mental prayer that that much of the preparation will be achieved – and meditation is a means of entering mental prayer. See our guide to meditation for two ways to use the below texts.
The Preparation
Put away distractions and place yourself in the presence of God. (“Most holy and adorable Trinity, etc.”) Bring also the Blessed Virgin to mind, place yourself before her and ask for her assistance.
Humble yourself before God, recalling what we are in relation to God.
Say a preparatory prayer (“O my God and Sovereign Lord, etc.”)
Consider the First Prelude – call to mind the scene, theme, subject or tone of the meditation. Do not get hung up on imagining scenes if this is difficult for you.
The first prelude is to recall what was discussed in the previous reading on the Triple Colloquy, particularly about the spirit of the world, and to consider it in light of today's reading on Liberalism; and to see oneself before the Blessed Virgin in Nazareth, whom the spirit of the world never touched.
Consider the Second Prelude – Consider what you want from this meditation (e.g., faith, contrition, charity, temperance, knowledge of God, etc.), and ask for it.
The second prelude is to ask for a greater knowledge of the spirit of the world so that one can empty oneself of it.
The Points for Meditation
Refer back to the texts from Fr Ambruzzi and Don Sarda y Salvany for further material.
First Point: The first characteristic of the world is naturalism – living as if there were no God, or the Christian religion were not true, or as if this need not affect our manner of thinking and acting.
Second Point: The second characteristic of the world is pride and rebellion – the impulse towards unmitigated human freedom, without regard for the rights of God or of Christ’s Kingship over society, our families, our work, ourselves.
Third Point: The third characteristic of the world is sensuality – both in the vulgar kind that dominates society today, and in the more refined kind that easily deceives Christians. That is, a love of comfort, amusements and our own will – leading to laziness, unchastity, gluttony, and so on.
One could consider these points in reference to oneself: How far have we been conscious of these truths in our daily lives so far, what practical conclusions should we draw from these truths, how far have we lived up to them so far, what must we do to live up to them in the future, etc.
One could consider the acts of virtue we can make in response to these truths – Acts of faith, humility, hope/confidence, thanksgiving, contrition and love – talking all the while to God, the Blessed Virgin, our Guardian Angels, etc.
Consider whether any practical resolutions can be drawn from these reflections, and ask God to help with them.
The Colloquy
The points of the meditation are intended to lead us to the colloquy, by which he means speaking to Our Lord, the other persons of the Holy Trinity, Our Lady, or any other of the saints.
Fr Ambruzzi offers some suggestions for colloquies (see the previous piece), but it is important to speak frankly to God in our own words, rather than simply reading somebody else’s.
If one feels moved to speak to God before meditating on all the points, one should certainly do so. The same applies if one feels moved to simply rest in God, rather than engaging in discursive meditation. These impulses should be followed over any particular method of meditation.
The End
End the meditation with a vocal prayer – such as the Our Father, the Anima Christi. Prayers from the Byzantine Paraclisis may be fitting for this 33-day preparation – for example:
Deliver thy servants from all dangers, O Mother of God, for next to God, thou art are our stronghold, our indestructible fortress.
O thou who art worthy of all praise, O Mother of God, look down upon the ills of my afflicted body, and heal the infir-mities of my soul.1
Reflect on how well we have prayed, and how well we have followed our chosen method.
Select a spiritual nosegay from your meditation to keep with you for the rest of the day.
See you tomorrow. Hit subscribe to make sure you don’t miss it or any of our other material:
For more on Liberalism:
For more on the St Louis de Montfort’s True Devotion and Total Consecration, for which we are preparing, see here:
The theological basis of ‘True Devotion’ and the Consecration to Mary (Garrigou-Lagrange)
The fruits of ‘True Devotion’ and Consecration to Mary (Garrigou-Lagrange)
For more on the importance of not getting bogged down with methods, and on allowing God to act, see here:
For more on Week 0, and the vocal prayers that are are suggested for each day, see here:
‘Week 0’ of St Louis de Montfort’s Total Consecration preparation (Prayers, practices and reading)
Get the book here:
True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary (St Louis de Montfort)
HELP KEEP THE WM REVIEW ONLINE WITH WM+!
As we expand The WM Review we would like to keep providing free articles for everyone.
Our work takes a lot of time and effort to produce. If you have benefitted from it please do consider supporting us financially.
A subscription gets you access to our exclusive WM+ material, and helps ensure that we can keep writing and sharing free material for all.
You can see what readers are saying over at our Testimonials page.
(We make our WM+ material freely available to clergy, priests and seminarians upon request. Please subscribe and reply to the email if this applies to you.)
Subscribe to WM+ now to make sure you always receive our material. Thank you!
If you are enjoying this preparation for Total Consecration, why not get it in mug form?
Follow on Twitter, YouTube and Telegram:
Twitter (The WM Review)
These prayers are drawn from the ‘Office of Consolation’ or the Small Paraklesis (Παράκλησις, “supplication” or “comfort”), a service of intercession addressed to the Theotokos, and written by Theophanes/Theosterictus the Monk in the 9th century. The texts have been lightly adapted from the Melkite Byzantine Daily Worship.
The Paraklesis is chanted in times of distress and sorrow of soul, and daily during the first fourteen days of August in preparation for the feast of the Assumption. It is among the most beloved devotions of the Byzantine tradition.
We are offering a selection of these prayers to be used as readers see fit – at the start or end of meditation, for morning or evening prayer, or at any other time.
