If Belloc did support the revolution, it will be because he did not fully understand it.

Remember, the principals of the ongoing revolution SOUND very Catholic... liberty, equality, fraternity. Well, if by liberty you mean that the Church of Christ is totally free, and her people to follow Her...

If by liberty you mean...
-a man may work for himself, and keep his own goods, and provide for his family, and do whatever job he chooses
- freedom to say, teach and defend the truth...


If by equality you mean...
- a rich man isn't given the preference over the poor man (though a king because of his office will be given the preference because of the authority he bears from God)...
- a man of one race cannot trample upon the God given dignity and free will of a soul of another race

If by fraternity you mean...
-loving one's neighbor as you love yourself, or as God loves you

then there's nothing wrong with those ideas.

BUT...

If by liberty you mean, "no law, no authority, no restraint moral or legal" ... and if by equality you mean "no authority because authority is a distinction" and you deny that God endowed all men with very different and unequal gifts, and defy reason by trying to live or set up society according to that falsehood... and if by fraternity you mean something like communism... then of course, this is wholly anti-Catholic.


But like so many other issues, we have to remember. At the time, the well meaning and good willed people had no way of knowing where these ideas would go, and what people REALLY meant by them. They were not yet accustomed to looking at words, and having to assume the other guy meant them in the most immoral or evil way possible. So for any Catholic, even if they were saintly, to have said at that time, or around that time, that they agreed with the principals of the revolution... well, in their mind, they just meant those things in the light of what they really mean.

If you had asked them, however, whether they were for a complete destruction of moral and even social law and authority, or whether they wished to deny that men were in any way different, or whether they wished everyone to be despoiled of what is justly theirs, so that some men don't have to work at all... they probably would have said no, if there was any real Catholicism in them anywhere.

Of course, there was a papal encyclical or two AFTER the revolution, I believe, which exposed the errors of the revolution (modernism, dreamers of utopias, etc). Any Catholic who adhered to them after that, unless they didn't understand those proclamations, would of course have problems. But I think we have to be careful not to condemn people who, at the time, could not have realized that already people were beginning to use very good and noble words, to MEAN very immoral and evil ideas.

Certainly I doubt there were any sane Catholics, who would have embraced it if they had known what was really meant by it's ideas. Unfortunately, the best tactic of the infernal enemy, is to cloak evil under the guise of something good or true, because when one does that, the good people will often swallow it as they take the disguise at face value. In this case, as the real, Catholic version of those three ideas, rather than the diabolical way in which they were meant.

ALSO... be careful about things you read on the internet. Anyone can put together a website, fill it with lies and misinformation or a distortion of information, misquote or misinterpret people, etc... and pass it off easily as the truth. Unless you read the man's books for yourself, understand what he really meant by his words, and the circuмstances and reasons for his saying so, it's dangerous to take just anyone's word about "so-and-so" being "this-and-such".

Remember, someone could take the words of any one of us, misquote and skewer them, and paint us to be for just about anything. (Like what people do with the Bible to support any position they like.) And then there are those who will simply downright lie, and put words in someone's mouth they never said at all. The internet is the deadly cesspool of this art.

It's my understanding that Belloc was a good man, and his books quite informative. But anyone can be fooled by misleading labels put on poisonous ideas.