Some more extracts from Louis Cardinal Billot's De Ecclesia:
"Liberalism... is a multiformed doctrine which to a greater or lesser extent emancipates man from God, from his law and from his revelation, and consequently dissolves all the bonds of dependence of civil society on religious society - that is, the Church, which is the guardian, interpreter and mistress of the law revealed by God.
....Indeed, emancipation from God was the end that [liberalism] was principally aimed at.... However, its principle is this: that liberty is the fundamental good of mankind, sacred and inviolable, which it is sacrilege to limit and restrict.... This was the theory of the promoters of that memorable Revolution of the year 1789, whose bitter fruits are now being harvested in almost every part of the world. This was the beginning, the middle and the end of the "Declaration of the Rights of Man". This serves for their ideologues as a basis for reconstructing society from its deepest foundations, not only in the political realm, but also in the economic, domestic and in particular the moral and religious realm....
I call [the principle of liberalism] absurd from its first beginning, insofar as it seeks to locate the principal good of mankind in the lack of any bond which in any way limits or restricts liberty....
At the outset, it must be noted that there will never be an opportunity for the complete and full application of this chimerical and unnatural principle. If you chase Nature away with a pitchfork, it will always come back. It will never be within the power of dreaming philosophers to construct a real society according to the rule of their ideas in the way that a potter has the power to fashion any kind of vessel according to his wishes from a lump of clay....
Liberalism, taken in its entirety, pursues the emancipation of the individual.... It posits, moreover, that society is repugnant to the emancipation of the individual - organised society, that is, and society which is founded on solid bonds and laws - society which truly deserves the name of society....
It is therefore clear that, in itself, the task of liberalism is to dissolve all social organs into one. Just as the organs of the physical body are not atoms and molecules, but limbs and members, in the same way the organs of the social body are not individuals, but the family and the corporation and civil society. Once these things have been broken down into their individual organisms, we may suppose that all true liberties must thereby perish completely.... [N]othing can then remain except the great colossus of the all-devouring State, which, once every inferior organisation and area of autonomy has been destroyed, will absorb in itself all force, all power, all law and all authority...."
