Point 53: You Are all Brothers.
You Have but one Father!
THE Phalangist regards universal human brotherhood as a possibility, a right, a hope, and consequently a duty.
1. Universal brotherhood is based on the unity of the human race, a unity that testifies to the common origin of all men in accordance with the certain data of philosophy and the most probable scientific hypotheses, a unity that is anterior to all inequality of race or civilisation as well as to all diversity of language and custom. The human race forms one family that stems – in accordance with divine Revelation, philosophical reason, and the greatest anthropological probability – from one single couple. That is why God, Who is strictly speaking their Creator, can analogically or metaphorically be called the Father of all men. By His providential grace He gives men’s natural fraternity a sacred character, a moral value of truth, of supernatural goodness and beauty.
2. This brotherhood, however, has been rejected, violated and destroyed by men’s refusal and crimes, the fatal consequences of original sin, their first rebellion against God their Father. This brotherhood nevertheless remains a natural duty; it remains in all its breadth and all its truth, even though its observance may seem heroic in our broken world or even impossible without help from On High.
3. Even though other men may renounce this brotherhood in order to accommodate their religions, their philosophies, and their laws to their passions and fratricidal customs, Christians nevertheless proclaim that Jesus Christ by His Cross has destroyed every barrier of pride, egoism and hatred, reconciling all men with God, Who in Him and through Him reveals Himself as truly their Father, thus reconciling them among themselves, absolutely all of them, by virtue of their common adoption as sons of God.
Thus the universal human brotherhood – so admirably constituted by the Creator and founded on the unity of nature and the community of original grace and justice, restored even more admirably by Christ – has already been won for all men by right, whilst it waits to be lived out by them in fact in the Church through faith.
4. It follows that the Phalangist, in the same way as the Church, stigmatises and condemns all ideologies and political systems that advocate racism or other forms of moral, religious and philosophical elitism. These systems conclude from the inequality of individuals, peoples and races that there exist essential differences of nature, final purpose and moral law, the supermen or superior races being destined to wield knowledge, power, and possessions, whilst the inferior races, the subhumans, are doomed to slavery and annihilation. Such was Nazism, which was essentially anti-Christian, and its excessive Germanism and frantic anti-Semitism, its inept, scientifically pretentious racism, and its Nietzschean morality. Such is still today Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist Communism – the most appalling totalitarian barbarity of all time –, which transposes biological racism into class warfare, whereby historical dialectic makes the suppression of those who stand in the way the condition for mankind’s future happiness.
On the contrary, the Phalangist will be, in accordance with the expression and example of Father de Foucauld, « the universal brother ». His politics is not a domain apart from his faith. It is only beneficial to his brothers insofar as it is in felicitous harmony with the Church’s mission, which consists in accomplishing the work of Redemption by bringing to realisation this universal brotherhood for which Christ died. The Phalangist thus returns to the ideal of Christendom that alone brought about a significant progress for humanity, to which our history testifies.