The 150 Points of the Phalange, Catholic, Royal, and Communitarian - Point 26

Point 26. Against all Schism and Heresy

The Phalangist embraces Christ and the Church with one and the same love; he refuses to make any division or opposition between them. To be Christian and to be Catholic is one and the same indivisible grace, not by the will of the flesh and and mere received conviction, nor by the will of man, but by God’s predestination and grace. And so in the light of the four perfections of the Holy Spirit revealed in the true Church, the Phalangist will be able to discern, in and around him, in the world and in history, what is of God and Catholic and what is of the devil and of man’s sin, that he might follow the one and hate the other. But he will submit his judgement to the infallible discernment of the hierarchical Church.

1. The Phalangist dreads and detests schism, which is a revolt against the divine and hierarchical authority of the Roman Church, a break in fraternal charity, which no reason can justify, for it flies in the face of the Church’s unity and catholicity, gifts of the Holy Spirit. Similarly, he abhors and flees from any innovation and distortion of the faith which, through a stubborn rebellion against the infallible magisterium, leads to heresy and wounds the Church’s holiness and apostolicity, gifts of the Holy Spirit.

2. The schisms and heresies of the past, together with those of our own tragic epoch, testify to the perfidy and criminal intentions of their instigators and, alas, to the blindness and perversion of the people who follow them. Left to their own solitary strength, these schisms and heresies fall back to the common level of human politics and ideologies, and their history thereafter is no more than a series of further malevolent divisions arising from the earlier dissidence and a welter of errors creating new heresies from the first one, all of which are mutually and fiercely exclusive.

The fruits of all this are detestable and a danger to the wellbeing of civilisation, for schisms and heresies convey too much in the way of passion, murder, pillaging of Church property, age-old hatred, abandonment of religious vows, and ambition, not to effect the regression of humanity into barbarism.

3. In accordance with the Church’s constant tradition, the Phalangist, giving witness to his Catholic faith and docility, anathematises the heresiarchs and the instigators of schism, past and present, and will not allow that any merit should be invented for them to justify or excuse their rebellion against the Holy Spirit and the Church. On the contrary, he will abominate their memory and hold them to be the greatest wrongdoers of mankind. Such were Photius and Michael Cerularius; such were Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and Henry VIII.

The Phalangist aims to live and die as a son of the Holy Catholic Church, which is Roman.