#sillon

The Sillon [a French social movement], carried away by an ill-conceived love for the weak, has fallen into error. Indeed, the Sillon proposes to raise up and re-educate the working class. But in this respect, the principles of Catholic doctrine have been defined, and the history of Christian civilization bears witness to their beneficent fruitfulness. Our Predecessor of happy memory [Pope Leo XIII] re-affirmed them in masterly documents, and all Catholics dealing with social questions have the duty to study them and to keep them in mind. He taught, among other things, that “Christian Democracy must preserve the diversity of the classes, which is assuredly the attribute of a soundly constituted State, and it must seek to give human society the form and character which God, it’s Author, has imparted to it.”

We do not have to demonstrate here that the advent of universal Democracy is of no concern to the action of the Church in the world; We have already recalled that the Church has always left to nations the care of giving themselves the form of government which they think most suited to their needs. What We wish to affirm once again, after Our Predecessor [Leo XIII], is that it is an error and a danger to bind down Catholicism by principle to a particular form of government. This error and this danger are all the greater when religion is associated with a kind of democracy whose doctrines are false.