Editorial Introduction: The purpose of this article is to further introduce the work of Fr Denis Fahey, whose writings we at Christ is King Action Ministries greatly admire and wholeheartedly commend. Father Fahey wrote with a clarity and forcefulness that are rare in any age and almost entirely absent in our own. His insistence on first principles, his unwavering defense of the supernatural life of grace, and his willingness to identify the enemies of Christ and His Church by name, rather than obscuring them behind abstractions, make his work a powerful aid for souls seeking to understand the true roots of disorder in the modern world. We believe that those who engage seriously with his writings will find not only intellectual illumination, but real spiritual benefit, as Fahey consistently directs the reader away from human solutions and back to Christ the King and the life of grace found only in His Church.
Before any society can be judged, and before any program of order can be examined, one fundamental question must be answered. Is man ordered to a supernatural end, or is he not? Father Denis Fahey insists that the whole drama of history turns upon this point. The answer determines whether Christ is acknowledged as King or excluded as an intruder. It determines whether society is ordered to God or organized against Him. If man is ordered only to natural ends, then society may be constructed without reference to Christ. In such a view, religion becomes an ornament, a private consolation, or a moral influence among others. But if man is ordered to a supernatural end that exceeds the powers of his nature, then any social order that excludes Christ and His Church is not merely deficient. It is false in principle and destructive in consequence.
The Catholic Church has always taught, with unchanging clarity, that man is ordered to a supernatural end wholly disproportionate to his natural powers. St. Thomas Aquinas expresses this truth with precision. Nature, though real and intelligible, is wounded by original sin and incapable of elevating itself. It cannot heal itself. It cannot save itself. It requires sanctifying grace as an absolute necessity. Grace does not destroy nature. It perfects it. But what grace perfects must first be subject to grace. This principle governs the whole of Fahey’s thought. He does not argue that grace is useful, advantageous, or morally uplifting. He argues that without grace there is no salvation, and without salvation there can be no true order. The supernatural life is not an optional addition to human existence. It is the only principle by which fallen man can be restored to God and the only principle by which human society can be rightly ordered.[1]
Fahey insists with equal clarity that this supernatural life exists in one place alone. It exists in Christ and in Christ’s Mystical Body, the Catholic Church. Grace is not scattered anonymously throughout the world. It is not attained through sincerity, goodwill, or humanitarian effort. It is communicated sacramentally through the Church founded by Christ, outside of which there is no salvation. For this reason, Fahey does not hesitate to affirm, with the Church, that there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church, either for individuals or for societies.[2] This doctrine is not an act of exclusion. It is a statement of reality. Salvation is not a sentiment or a moral achievement. It is a participation in divine life. That participation requires a divinely instituted means. To attempt to organize society while setting this truth aside is not prudence. It is rebellion against the order established by God.
From this foundation Fahey draws a conclusion that modern men find intolerable but cannot escape. Where the supernatural life of grace is excluded, not only souls but civilizations and nations perish. Nature severed from grace does not remain stable. It turns inward upon itself, absolutizes its own limited goods, and finally sets itself against God. This is why Fahey describes Naturalism not as a harmless philosophical error, but as “pure undiluted anti-Christianism,” because it denies revelation itself and therefore denies the only source of salvation.[3] Within the supernatural order stands the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. It is not a mere devotional practice. It is the supreme sacramental act by which grace is applied to souls and order is restored between God and man. The Mass is the sacramental continuation of Calvary, the renewal of the perfect obedience of the Son to the Father. Through it the supernatural life is sustained in the Mystical Body. Through it any true order must endure.[4]
For this reason the Mass becomes the principal object of diabolical hatred. Satan does not direct his chief fury against social programs or moral exhortations. He directs it against the source of grace itself. As Fahey states with unmistakable force, “All the frightful energy, then, of Satan’s hatred is especially directed against the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, which is the renewal of the expression of submission of Calvary.”[5] The Mass is hated because it is submission. It is hated because it is obedience. It is hated because it restores the hierarchy that pride seeks to overthrow. Fahey does not allow this conflict to remain abstract. Error does not remain theoretical. It organizes. Once the supernatural order is denied, organized forces arise to establish a rival order in its place. History, for Fahey, is not neutral chronicle. It is the visible unfolding of a war between Christ’s program for order and Satan’s counter-program of Naturalism.[6]
It is within this framework that Fahey identifies Jewish naturalism and Freemasonic naturalism as the two principal organized expressions of revolt against the supernatural order. These are not strictly racial categories, nor are they reducible to sociology. They are theological realities defined by their rejection of grace and their attempt to establish an order directed to purely natural ends. Jewish naturalism, as Fahey defines it, consists in the refusal of the supernatural Messias and the persistence of a messianic expectation ordered to temporal power and earthly fulfillment. By rejecting Christ, it rejects sanctifying grace. By rejecting sanctifying grace, it rejects the only means by which man can attain his supernatural end. This rejection does not remain confined to belief. It necessarily seeks expression in social and political life ordered without reference to Christ the King.[7] Freemasonic naturalism represents the systematic effort to universalize this error. Proceeding on principles deliberately detached from revelation, Freemasonry seeks to reorganize law, education, economics, and political authority on a basis that excludes the supernatural order by design. Its aim is not tolerance but replacement. It seeks the displacement of the Kingship of Christ by a purely naturalistic ideal of human progress.[8]
Despite their differences, both forms of organized naturalism share the same fundamental denial. They deny that man requires grace for salvation and that society must be ordered to Christ. For this reason both must oppose the Mass, the sacraments, and the Church’s authority to judge in matters touching man’s supernatural end.
Against this organized revolt, Fahey proposes no compromise. There can be no stable synthesis between grace and Naturalism, between Christ and His enemies. Either society acknowledges Christ the King and submits to the supernatural order He established, or it builds upon a lie and reaps disorder. The Church, as the Mystical Body of Christ, possesses not only a spiritual mission but a divine mandate to proclaim this truth, whether it is welcomed or resisted.[9] The Mass therefore stands as a silent but inexorable judgment upon every civilization. It exposes the falsity of all projects that promise peace without grace, unity without sacrifice, and order without Christ. Where the supernatural life flourishes, order, however imperfect, can endure. Where it is denied, no accumulation of laws, techniques, or good intentions can prevent decay. Outside the supernatural grace found only in the Catholic Church, there is no salvation and no true or lasting order.
Footnotes (2017 Loreto Publications Edition)
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- Denis Fahey, C.S.Sp., The Kingship of Christ and Organized Naturalism (Fitzwilliam, NH: Loreto Publications, 2017), pp. 5–6.
Fahey (via the Loreto editorial introduction) explains that Naturalism “denies the very existence of revelation” and that wherever it prevails “the very source of Christian life is dried up,” resulting in “complete sterility in regard to salvation and eternal life.”
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- Fahey, The Kingship of Christ and Organized Naturalism, pp. 6, 20–21.
Fahey explicitly states that “the means for establishing that order by which a fallen world may return to God is the Catholic Church and the life of sanctifying grace,” and affirms that “there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church, either for individual persons or for the life of society and of nations.”
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- Fahey, The Kingship of Christ and Organized Naturalism, p. 5.
Naturalism is defined as a denial of revelation itself, striving “to exclude Our Lord Jesus Christ… from the minds of men as well as from the daily lives and habits of peoples, in order to set up the reign of reason or of nature.”
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- Fahey, The Kingship of Christ and Organized Naturalism, pp. 50–51.
Fahey treats Calvary as the supreme act of obedience restoring order to the world and explains that the supernatural life of grace is restored to mankind through Christ’s sacrificial submission.
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- Fahey, The Kingship of Christ and Organized Naturalism, p. 50.
“All the frightful energy, then, of Satan’s hatred is especially directed against the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, which is the renewal of the expression of submission of Calvary.”
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- Fahey, The Kingship of Christ and Organized Naturalism, pp. 38–39, 50.
Fahey describes history as the conflict between Christ’s program for order and Satan’s organized opposition, identifying Naturalism as an active, organized revolt against the supernatural life of grace.
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- Fahey, The Kingship of Christ and Organized Naturalism, pp. 50–53.
Fahey explains Jewish opposition to Christ as rooted in the rejection of the supernatural Messias and the supernatural order He came to establish, resulting in hostility to the restoration of grace and divine order.
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- Fahey, The Kingship of Christ and Organized Naturalism, pp. 55–63.
Fahey analyzes Freemasonry as a consciously organized system working to exclude the supernatural order from public life, law, education, and political authority, in harmony with papal condemnations of Masonic Naturalism.
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- Fahey, The Kingship of Christ and Organized Naturalism, pp. 6, 64–67.
Fahey affirms the Church’s divinely instituted authority and duty to judge social and political arrangements insofar as they affect man’s supernatural end and the reign of Christ the King.
