Liberalism Is a Sin

"Liberalism is necessarily sympathetic with the depraved nature of man, just as Catholicity is essentially opposed to it. Liberalism is emancipation from restraint; Catholicity the curb of the passions." —From inside

Born in Barcelona in 1844, Fr. Felix Sarda y Sarvany wrote in the latter half of the 19th century in Spain. The editor of La Revista Popular, the "Popular Review," a Catholic magazine with political emphasis, Fr. Sarda y Sarvany conducted an immense apostolate against the spirit of the age, which sought to overthrow the old order of a religion-imbued society and prop up in its place an idol of man.

In Liberalism Is a Sin, Fr. Sarda y Sarvany excoriates the political and social moves being made at his time and which have come to fruition in the 20th and 21st centuries—namely, the aggressive and total separation of Church and State, the removal of religion and especially Catholicism from the public eye, and the unmooring of morality from anything other than private choice. Writing in the backdrop of a secularizing and anti-clerical revolution that had deposed the Spanish monarchy and stripped the Church of many rights and privileges, Fr. Sarda y Salvany comments that "Modern Liberalism . . . imposes a false notion of charity: our neighbor first, and, if at all, God afterwards. By its repeated and trite accusations toward us of intolerance, it has succeeded in disconcerting even some staunch Catholics." But he himself remains unabashed and unashamed, holding fast to the truth of the Faith and spurning the errors of the age. In our own time, when the errors have almost completely taken root and nearly everything is overturned in what was once Christendom, this book comes as a useful guide to understand some of the origins of the present predicament.