Overt and Covert

Totalitarianism

The French Revolution offers a stark lesson we keep relearning:  when people shout loudest about the “separation of Church and State”, they often mean the State should run the Church — from drawing diocesan maps to picking bishops. 

The rhetoric of neutrality masks an urge to control.

The first step to totalitarianism: denying the truth
Saint John Paul II put it crisply: “As history demonstrates, a democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism.” (Centesimus Annus, 46). Those values aren’t arbitrary. They arise from a basic human right: the right to seek, know, and live by the truth — ultimately, the right to discover and freely accept Jesus Christ, “who is man’s true good” (Centesimus Annus, 29).
Refuse that right, and the ground gives way. In Fides et Ratio, John Paul II called the “denial of all foundations and the negation of all objective truth” a nihilist interpretation of reality — a corrosive mindset partly “justified … by the terrible experience of evil which has marked our age” (Fides et Ratio, 91). Nihilism isn’t just a philosophy seminar problem. It hollows out the person and society alike, amounting to “a denial of the humanity and of the very identity of the human being” (Fides et Ratio, 90).
At the heart of that identity is freedom — not licence, but the freedom of the children of God, redeemed by the blood of Christ. “Christ has set us free in order that we should remain free” (Galatians 5:1). Tear freedom away from truth, and you don’t liberate people; you trap them. “Once the truth is denied to human beings, it is pure illusion to try to set them free. Truth and freedom either go together hand in hand or together they perish in misery” (Fides et Ratio, 90).
The second step: we can save ourselves
Reject the Saviour and, sooner or later, you’ll reject the need to be saved. That illusion breeds another: that we can engineer an earthly paradise by our own lights. John Paul II warned that when people imagine they possess “the secret of a perfect social organisation” that makes evil impossible, they are tempted “to use any means, including violence and deceit” to build it. Politics then becomes a “secular religion” trading on the fantasy of heaven on earth. But “no political society … can ever be confused with the Kingdom of God” (Centesimus Annus, 25).
This is one of Christianity’s greatest gifts to Europe: it de‑idolised the State. As the Pope told the European Parliament in 1988, “after Christ, it is no longer possible to idolise society as a collective greatness that devours the human person and his inalienable destiny.” States and structures are temporary and fallible. They “cannot be a substitute for human conscience or for the search for truth and the absolute.” They can never deliver “eschatological perfection”  on this earth.
The third step: taking on the powers of creation
Once Christ and His Church are pushed aside, a “demiurgic temptation” creeps in, as John Paul II described in Memory and Identity: man sees himself not merely as the maker of social arrangements but as the master of life and death, defining good and evil at will. Enlightenment elites in the eighteenth century gave this temptation intellectual prestige, rejecting the paschal mystery — the Cross and Resurrection — and, with it, the Christian form of Europe. If man alone decides what is good and evil, then man may also decide “that a certain group of people should be annihilated.”
That’s the logical slide: set aside objective truth under the banners of “liberating reason” and “fighting fanaticism”, and you clear a path for totalitarian politics that will happily rationalise the persecution or elimination of the so‑called enemies of freedom.
The French Revolution: “totalitarian democracy”
“It is within our power to create the world anew,” boasted a Jacobin deputy. That line could serve as a caption for the demiurgic mindset John Paul II warned about. Jacob L. Talmon famously called this phenomenon “totalitarian democracy”: the belief that the general will, properly enforced, can refashion humanity. The goal was not simply a new regime but a new man.
And what of those who refused to be remade — who would not bow to Robespierre’s “rule of virtue”? For them, “citizen guillotine” waited. Louis de Saint‑Just, Robespierre’s lieutenant, spelled it out: “There is no freedom for the enemies of freedom.” The Republic, proclaimed in 1792, was not just a system without a king; it aspired to be a “zealous community”, a kind of para‑Church. As historian Reynald Secher notes, in this logic dissenters became “non‑humans”, stripped of rights and property.
No surprise, then, that the first targets were those who believed in Christ and his redeeming work. The Revolution’s Christophobia wasn’t a bug; it was a feature. If you want to build a new secular religion, you must first erase the Christian face of France. Dechristianisation was the price of creating the “new Frenchman”.
Total dechristianisation in practice
The programme began in 1789 with the confiscation of Church property — a classic move of anti‑clerical regimes before and since. For centuries those lands had funded alms, hospitals, hospices and schools. They also protected the Church’s independence: clergy could live from Church resources rather than State salaries, serving souls without political strings attached.
Confiscation shattered that independence and harmed the poor. In theory, the assets backed the State’s paper currency (the assignats). In practice, as so often, they were sold off, largely to those already wealthy — prosperous burghers and sympathetic nobles — or to people who enriched themselves during the turmoil. Meanwhile, the very Revolution that declared property “inviolable” cheerfully violated ecclesial property that had long underwritten works of mercy. The slogan “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” rang out — selectively.
Next came direct assaults on religious life. Still in 1789, vows were banned, effectively blocking new entrants to monasteries and convents. This wasn’t about freedom; it was about remaking society. In February 1790 the National Assembly dissolved all religious orders. On 15 August 1791 — tellingly, on a great Marian feast — priests were forbidden to wear clerical dress in public. The message was unmistakable: the Church had to be driven from public life.
What “separation” really meant
The key blow fell in July 1790 with the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Edmund Burke, watching from across the Channel, saw through it: the plan, he said, was “preparatory to the utter abolition … of the Christian religion,” achieved by bringing its ministers into contempt. The law created a de facto schismatic national church. The Pope’s right to appoint bishops was denied; dioceses were redrawn to match the new départements; and bishops were chosen by popular vote — believers and unbelievers alike. In short, the State claimed the right to decide the Church’s inner life while advertising the “separation” it was busily dismantling.
The larger pattern is hard to miss. Deny objective truth, and you end up coercing people “for their own good”. Promise salvation through politics, and you build a secular religion that cannot tolerate rival loyalties. Pretend the State is neutral, and you will soon find it dictating the Church’s doctrine, personnel and boundaries. The French Revolution didn’t just illustrate these steps; it accelerated them. And as John Paul II warned, once truth and freedom are prised apart, both wither — and the first casualties are the Church and the poor she serves.

Totalitarianism 2