From the time of the Apostles the true followers of Christ have been called Catholics. The meaning of this appellation has always been that they belonged to the One, Holy Catholic, Apostolic and Roman Church. The term “Catholic” has always distinguished them from every heretical sect. They were known by this term in every part of the world.

Within the few last years, however, certain persons have arisen who are not satisfied with the name of Catholic. Hence they call themselves “Liberal Catholics.” If asked in what they differ from Catholics, they answer:  “Our motto is: Catholic with the Pope, but liberal with the government.”

Liberal Catholics falsely assert,  “that it is a mistake to protect and foster religion, because religion,” they say, “will flourish much better if left alone; that the world has entered a new phase, and has begun to run a new course, and consequently the Church should accommodate herself to the spirit of the age; that religion has nothing to do with politics; that it has to do only with the private lives of men; that religion must keep inside the church that it is meant for Sundays alone; that we must be generous in our religious feelings toward non-Catholics; that a Catechism, therefore, in which every truth, taught by the Church, is set forth in its full bearing, is not fit to be put in the hands of our children, because it is calculated to repel the children of non-Catholics, and alienate their feelings, and to make religious fanatics of our good children,” and the like.

A liberal Catholic, therefore, is a compound of true and false principles. He has two consciences : one for his public, and another for his private life. The motto, “Catholic with the Pope, but liberal with the government,” has for its basis the infidel doctrine of the separation of the Church from the state; of the spiritual from the temporal, a doctrine condemned by Pious IX., in the fifty-fifth proposition of the Syllabus. This doctrine tends to put the State above the Church, as if the State were the omnipotent ruler of all things, the teacher of truth, the fountain of right, the source of law, and the interpreter of the truths of faith.

In the eighteenth proposition of the Syllabus, all the false principles of liberalism, of progress, and of modern civilization, are declared to be irreconcilable with the Catholic faith.

On the 18th of June, 1871, Pope Pius IX., in replying to a French deputation headed by the Bishop of Nevers, spoke as follows : ” My children, my words must express to you what I have in my heart. That which afflicts your country, and prevents it from meriting the blessings of God, is the mixture of principles: I will speak out, and not hold my peace. That which I fear is not the Commune of Paris, those miserable men, those real demons of hell, roaming upon the face of the earth no, not the Commune of Paris ; that which I fear is liberal Catholicism. . . .I have said so more than forty times, and I repeat it to you now, through the love that I bear you. The real scourge of France is liberal Catholicism, which endeavors to unite two principles, as repugnant to each other as fire and water. My children, I conjure you to abstain from those doctrines which are destroying you. . . . if this error be not stopped, it will lead to the ruin of religion and of France.” In a brief, dated July the 9th, 1871, to Mgr. Segur, the Holy Father says: “It is not only the infidel sects that are conspiring against the Church and society which the Holy See has often reproved, but also those men who, granting that they act in good faith and with upright intentions, yet err in caressing liberal doctrines.” On July 28, 1873, his Holiness thus expressed himself: “The members of the Catholic Society of Quimper certainly run no risk of being turned away from their obedience to the Apostolic See by the writings and efforts of the declared enemies of the Church ; but they may glide down the incline of those so-called liberal opinions which have been adopted by many Catholics, otherwise honest and pious, who, by the influence of their religious character, may easily exercise a powerful ascendency over men, and lead them to very pernicious opinions. Tell, therefore, the members of the Catholic  Society that, on the numerous occasions on which we have censured those who hold liberal opinions, we did not mean those who hate the Church, whom it would have been useless to reprove, but those whom we have just described. Those men preserve and foster the hidden poison of liberal principles, which they sucked as the milk of their education, pretending that those principles are not infected with malice, and cannot interfere with religion; so they instil this poison into men’s minds, and propagate the germs of those perturbations by which the world has for a long time been vexed.”

A liberal Catholic, then, is no true Catholic. The word Catholic is no vain and empty word. To be a true Catholic means to hold most firmly all those truths which Christ and his apostles have taught, which the Catholic Church has always proclaimed, which the saints have professed, which the popes and councils have defined, and which the Fathers and Doctors of the Church have defended. He who denies but one of those truths, or hesitates to receive one of them, is not a Catholic. He claims to exercise the right of private judgment in regard to the doctrine of Christ, and therefore he is a heretic. The true Catholic knows and believes that there can be no compromise between God and the devil, between truth and error, between orthodox faith and heresy. St. Stephen, the first martyr, was no compromiser. When accused of being a follower of Jesus of Nazareth, he, in his turn, accused his enemies of being the murderers of Christ. All the holy martyrs of the Church were no compromisers. Being charged by the heathens with the folly of worshipping and following a crucified God, they, in their turn, charged the heathens with the impiety of worshipping creatures, and following the devil. Why became our Holy Father, Pope Pius IX., a prisoner? It was because he was not, and could not be, a compromiser. Why are, at this time, so many bishops and priests exiled or in prison? It is because they are no compromisers. Why is the Catholic Church persecuted in Germany and other parts of the world ? It is because God, by means of persecution, purifies his Church from liberal or compromising Catholics. And as there are so many liberal Catholics in this country, persecution must come to separate them from the Church.

The good Catholic knows and understands that the Catholic Church never has required, nor will require, a particular form of civil government ; for she has lived with the Venetian aristocracy, with the Swiss democracy, with the mixed aristocracy and democracy of Genoa, with the British and the United States constitutions, and with many absolute monarchies. But he knows, at the same time, that no form of government, no times and circumstances, can change the doctrine and constitution of the Church, because they are .divine, immutable, and everlasting. The good Catholic, therefore, is always in readiness to obey, in all things, the true Spouse of Christ our Lord, the holy Roman Catholic Church. The well- instructed Catholic knows that between Jesus Christ and his Spouse, the Church, there is but one and the same Spirit, who governs and directs us all to our salvation, that same Spirit and Lord who one day gave the law on Mount Sinai, and who now rules and governs the holy Church. This firm adhesion to every truth of the Church distinguishes the true Catholic from the liberal Catholic, as well as from all Protestants, from all schismatics, from all heretics. When Protestants abandoned the Church the guardian of divine truth they gave themselves up to hundreds of errors. Good Catholics, on the contrary, keeping, as they do, in the footsteps of the Church, and humbly submitting to all her doctrines, retain within themselves the principle of truth and of divine certainty. They feel assured that what the Church orders, is ordered by Jesus Christ; and that what the Church forbids, is also forbidden by Jesus Christ.

The principle of heresy is the principle of rebellion against the Church, and against every lawful authority on earth. The principle of the Church, on the contrary, is to be submissive to every lawful authority. The essential principle of politics and of life is ardently to love the Church, profoundly to revere the Church, unhesitatingly to submit to the Church, and to be most closely united with the Church. Our Lord asks of us no other submission; he requires of us no other faith than that which the Church teaches. His will and his truth are made known in the Church. As he and his father are one, so also he and his Church are one. No one can, in truth, call God his Father, who does not look upon the Church as his mother.

In the Church alone there are certainty and security against error. Around this Rock we behold nothing but raging tempests, nothing but disastrous shipwrecks, in difference to religion, negation of all worship, the abomination of atheism and immorality, derision of holy things, a fanatic pietism, a delirious religiousness, rationalism, or the denial of all revelation and of everything supernatural, Every non-Catholic who earnestly seeks to learn what he is to believe, every one who yearns to obtain certainty in religious matters, must sooner or later turn to the Church as the only source of certainty, the only guardian of the true religion, the only fountain of true peace and happiness in life and in death.

Taken from  The Greatest and The First Commandment
By Father Micheal Muller