Evil triumphs when good men do nothing - Edmund Burke

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Understanding forms of Government

With both the USA and Canada going to election. It is a good time to look at governments.
In the USA issues in the upcoming elections include the right to life for unborn babies, homosexual unions etc. While in Canada abortions right up to the 9th month are legal and homosexual unions have been dubiously dubbed as marriages.

Let us see what Dr. Plinio Correa has to say about the forms of government

When speaking of the various forms of government, Pope Leo XIII made it quite clear that "each of them is good, as long as it moves honestly toward its end, namely, the common good, for which social authority is constituted,"

We do label as revolutionary the hostility professed against monarchy and aristocracy on the principle that they arc essentially incompatible with human dignity and the normal order of things. This error was condemned by Saint Pius X in the apostolic letter 'Notre charge apostolique', of August 25, 1910. In this letter, the great and holy Pontiff censures the thesis of Le Sillon, that "only democracy will inaugurate the reign of perfect justice," and he says: "Is this not an injury to the other forms of government, which are thus reduced to the category of impotent governments, acceptable only for lack of something better?" (If democracy is the best form of government, how then can it aloow for abortions on demand and legal sanction of homosexual unions? - note by blog author)

If one fails to consider this error, which is deeply rooted in the process under study, one cannot completely explain how it is that monarchy, classified by Pope Pius VI as the best form of government in thesis ("praestantioris monorchici regiminis forma"), has been the object in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of a hostile worldwide movement that has overthrown the most venerable thrones and dynasties. From our perspective, the mass production of republics all over the world is a typical fruit of the Revolution and a capital aspect of it.

A person cannot be termed a revolutionary for preferring, in view of concrete and local reasons, that his country be a democracy instead of an aristocracy or a monarchy, provided the rights of legitimate authority be respected. But, yes, he can be termed a revolutionary if, led by the Revolution's egalitarian spirit, he hates monarchy or aristocracy in principle and classifies them as essentially unjust or inhuman.

From this antimonarchical and antiaristocratic hatred are born the demagogic democracies, which combat tradition, persecute the elites, degrade the general tone of life, and create an ambience of vulgarity that constitutes, as it were, the dominant note of the culture and civilization--supposing the concepts of civilization and culture can be realized in such conditions.

How different from this revolutionary democracy is the democracy described by Pius XII:



History bears witness to the fact that, wherever true democracy reigns, the life of the people is as it were permeated with sound traditions, which it is illicit to destroy. The primary representatives of these traditions are first of all the leading classes, that is, the groups of men and women or the associations that set the tone, as we say, for the village or the city, for the region or the entire country. Whence the existence and influence, among all civilized peoples, of aristocratic institutions, aristocratic in the highest sense of the word, like certain academies of widespread and well?deserved fame. And the nobility is also in that number.


As can be seen, the spirit of revolutionary democracy is quite different from the spirit that must animate a democracy according to the doctrine of the Church.


(This is an exceprt from Dr. Plinio's book Revolution and Counterrevolution)

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