Fray Nelson Medina, Dominican priest and Doctor in Fundamental Theology, known for his vast apostolate on social networks, offered 5 reasons from the Catholic faith to better understand the Storming of the Bastille and the French Revolution.
On July 14, 1789, the Storming of the Bastille occurred, “a central moment of that long, complex and bloody process that today we call the French Revolution,” the theologian explained to ACI Prensa.
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1. The manipulation of popular discontent
Friar Nelson highlighted that “the French Revolution is one of the most notable examples of the strategic use of popular discontent.”
For the Dominican, “no one doubts that there were conditions of injustice and exclusion that make the discontent of the masses understandable, but it was the combination of cunning and oratory of specific leaders that made this discontent a force capable of changing the social order from its foundations.”
This “use of the people, or the emotionality of the people, has later served as a template and base method for many other drastic changes, all marked by large doses of violence,” he said.
“This is specifically the case of the Marxist methodology of about 150 years ago and of the neo-Marxist social engineering that has strength and continues to give results in our time,” he assured.
2. The French Revolution and the Enlightenment
The priest also explained the link between the revolution and the Enlightenment, a “movement that spread steadily throughout 18th century Europe” that “exalted the role of reason but not in a general way but with specific features.”
A first feature was that it considered “reason as the sole criterion of truth, and therefore, to the exclusion of other forms of knowledge, such as popular wisdom, family experience or biblical revelation.”
The second was to have “reason as a flag that opens the way for a new social class (that of intellectuals) and at the same time declares itself hostile or openly enemy of the social classes of France at the time, thereby establishing as a project the elimination of the nobility and the subjugation of the clergy.”
The third feature refers to the understanding of reason as a “fundamentally individual good (in the way Kant understood and preached it), to the detriment of the possibility of a dialogic collective reason that discovers and applies the common good.”
3. The “goddess” reason and the contempt of the Catholic faith
With this approach and considering reason as the new “goddess” there were five attacks against the Catholic faith.
The first was “the contempt for revelation and for everything sacred, considered as ‘superstition’, fostered the culture of ‘secularism’ that sought and continues to seek to eliminate all public reference to faith.”
The second was about “the oppression or open persecution against numerous clerics, for the simple fact of not swearing their fidelity to the new regime, which according to those revolutionaries, could not admit any ‘external’ interference (which excluded Rome, of course). )”.
The third has to do with “the direct impact on public education, considered since then and practically to this day, as a method that ensures the survival of the ideals and values of the ‘revolution’ and the ‘republic’ above any another consideration.”
The fourth referred to the “educational work of the Church, so traditional everywhere from the most tender ages to adulthood, was mutilated, excluded and gagged.”
The fifth was “the limitation of rational work to the limits of science and technology left the elaboration of public morality without a rational basis, which from then on was subject to the short-sighted and manipulable vagaries of simple figures and parliamentary majorities.” ”.
4. The French Revolution, human rights and the Christian faith
One aspect that can be rescued from the French Revolution, Friar Nelson told ACI Prensa, was mainly “what has to do with the universal and public recognition of human rights.”
“But it must be noted that, more than an original contribution, such recognition is nothing more than the sanction, by the legislative power, of what the Christian faith preached and practiced long ago.”
In that sense, the priest highlighted, “the statement of such rights does not greatly exceed what is obtained by distilling some of the Christian elements but without giving them the credit and place they deserve. This also applies to the great slogans that we have all heard: freedom, equality, fraternity.”
5. False opposition between faith and reason
“Today it is not so much about exalting the monarchy, for example, or ensuring privileges for the clergy, but rather, about dismantling the lies and false conflicts that the Enlightenment-Revolution binomial established, such as, for example, the false opposition between reason and faith,” concluded Friar Nelson.
Pope Saint John Paul II explains at the beginning of his encyclical Faith and Reason (1998), that “faith and reason are like the two wings with which the human spirit rises towards the contemplation of truth.”
Originally published July 14, 2022. It has been updated for republication.
Walter Sanchez Silva
I have been a husband since 2008. My wife and I have three children here and one who went to heaven in 2023, before he was born. Since I joined ACI Prensa in 2005, I have had the opportunity to cover various events of the Catholic Church. Among them, the World Youth Days in Cologne, Madrid and Rio de Janeiro and the apostolic trips of Pope Benedict XVI to Mexico and of Pope Francis to South Korea. I have been sent to the Vatican to cover the Family synods, in 2015; of the Amazon, in 2019 and that of Synodality, in 2023. I closely follow the situation of the Catholic Church in Nicaragua, which suffers persecution from the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega, as well as current ecclesiastical events in the region.