Point 108. Democracy is atheistic

1. Emancipation from every social framework for the supreme satisfaction of his egoism, which economic democracy preaches as his primary right and greatest duty, provokes in modern man a radical rejection, total and definitive, full of hatred or, worse still, cold and hard-hearted, of God, of Jesus Christ, and of the Church. By an implicit but reinforced social pact, every religion is forbidden any claim to intervene in the life of the economy in any way whatsoever, whether by doctrinal and moral teaching, by ecclesiastical laws, canonical sanctions or threats of eternal torments. Modern economy is atheist, or rather atheistic.

2. Refusing to be imbued with Christianity, it becomes inhuman, and monstrously so. Man freed from God – or rather chased away from Him, hounded from Him – finds himself impoverished, reduced, and emptied of his own substance, of all the thoughts, traditions, morality and customs of his heredity, of his spiritual patrimony. He is made a slave to the superstructures of the modern economy, to the driving illusions of the materialist ego-nomy: advertising, cultural myths, gastronomy, eroticism… Man becomes a stomach without brain or heart, without a thought other than technical, and without powers of decision other than commercial. For the first time in the history of the world he is an irreligious animal.

3. If economic democracy then appeals to the Churches, to spiritual values, to Christian inspiration, these divine realities are thereby basely prostituted and degraded for a vile purpose simply because of their market value and the returns they are calculated to yield by making the commercial wheels turn faster.

For the remaining members of the faithful to lend themselves to such a return of religions to the modern world would be to hasten their fall through the most abject of calculations.

4. For these three reasons, the Phalangist has a hatred and a horror of this modern economic democracy wherein he is nevertheless forced to live and survive with other men, his brothers. He knows that “ well-ordered Charity begins with oneself ”. Because it is necessary to be and to live in order to act, to act in order to serve, and to serve in order to attain one’s own end, which is of a transcendent order and of which God is the master and the judge. But that the whole of life should be a matter of loving oneself and serving oneself, he can neither conceive nor accept that this should become the unique sovereign principle of all order, human disorder!