Dear Reader,

If the previous issue of The Angelus gave us an exotic tour of the antipodes, Australia and New Zealand, this time, we are back home again, in the thick of real American life all around us. We wanted to bring under the spotlight the oft-quoted topic of social doctrine.

For the average person, the expression is vague enough to include disciplines like economics and politics, problems touching on religion and race, so-called opposition between law and liberty, let alone the validity of democracy and socialism. These are indeed some of the issues well worth the attention of our readers.

And why should these issues about the conditions of society be such a concern to us? Because, in the words of Pius XII, “Of the form given to society, in harmony or not with the divine laws, there depends and filters the good and evil of souls, that is to say, the fact that men, all called to be vivified by the grace of Christ, breathe, in the contingencies of the earthly course of life, the sane and life-giving air of the truth and the moral virtues or, on the contrary, the morbid and often mortal virus of error and depravity.”

It is a mystery to no one that our Western culture is fast depleting its rich patrimony, so slowly and wisely acquired through ages of faith and courage. Today, the most natural human rights are denied us. Laws protects the rascals and perverse while putting behind bars the honest and godly. We seem to be living “1984” or a preview of the “Lord of the World,” with the addition of a religion gone mad. Put bluntly in the happy wording of Dr. Rao’s hard-hitting article—harder than usual—“Gangster Society, Gangster State, Gangster Church!”

By way of relief in the seemingly dark background of present-day vision of society, we offer you a biography of Louis Veuillot, the 19th-century journalist who was the Nemesis of the Liberals. May Veuillot’s clear vision and love for the Papacy inspire us to preserve the perennial principles of the Church’s social doctrine.

Fr. John Fullerton
Publisher