Prof. Roberto de Mattei: A history of revolutions and their consequences for the family
18 May 2017
This address by Prof. Roberto de Mattei, President of the Lepanto Foundation, was delivered on 18 May 2017 at the fourth annual Rome Life Forum organised by Voice of the Family.
A History of Revolutions and their Consequences for the Family
We appreciate good things when we lose them. If we do not wish to lose them, then we must appreciate them for their worth.
The family is a good thing which we are losing. This is the obvious reality from which we must start. The family in Europe and in the West is undergoing a profound crisis. Relativist-Sociologists do not want to speak of a crisis, because this word contains, according to them, a moral judgement on the analyzed phenomenon. They speak, rather, of a transformation of family patterns or of an evolution of familial forms. But these words, too, contain a moral judgement. According to the relativist perspective, all that takes place in history and in society is good. The absolute good is represented by change, evil by stability and permanence in being. Relativist morals are founded on an evolutionary cosmology, which pretends to be scientific, without being so. Evolutionism is a false philosophy which stands on a false science, and at the same time, is a pseudo-science based on an erroneous philosophical choice. Because of this, a speech on the family, like every speech, must begin with the definition of terms and concepts of which we wish to speak.
The family is a true juridical and moral society, founded on matrimony and intended for the transmission of life and the raising of children. The procreation of children is the primary end to which marriage is ordered by nature, from its very origin. The origin of the family and of matrimony is in human nature. The child is not born because of his own choice, and he is not autonomous. The law of birth and the raising of the child is dependence. Dependence, is the law of humanity reunited in society. Everything depends on something, nothing is determined by itself. The principle of causality governs the universe. This rule belongs to the first and indemonstrable principles which Aristotle already learned from reality. [1] This principle presupposes the first philosophical primacy of being, to which modern culture opposes the primacy of becoming, which is the negation of any immutable and permanent reality.
The Family in History
The family is a society whose primary end is to transmit life and to raise children. Because it is the source of life and of new human relationships, it constitutes the fundamental and irreplaceable cell of society. All the classical philosophers and political thinkers have affirmed it, and history has confirmed it. Well before Christianity, in ancient Rome, the familia was the cell of the civitas, and matrimony assured social stability, constituting, according to the precise definition of Cicero, the seminarium rei publicae [2] the seedbed of society which is born and expands from the family.
Christianity elevated matrimony to a sacrament, and when the Roman Empire fell, crushed by the barbarians, the only entity which survived and constituted the basis of the society which was born, was the family. The birth of the European nations, from the beginning of the year 1000 coincided with the development of the institution of the family. The same etymology of the word ‘nation’ (from the Latin natus) moreover, does not refer to a “choice” but to birth, and indicates a set of men who have a common origin and a blood-tie. The territory in which various authorities were exercised in medieval society – referring to the head of the family, of the feudal baron or of the king – was uniformly called in documents, the patria, the dominion of the father. [3]
Such a conception of the family, which survived until the French Revolution and beyond, is founded on the idea that man is born within a given historical condition, which has insurmountable limits, beginning with death; that an objective and unchangeable nature exists; that this nature has its origin in God, Creator of the order of the universe. The Catholic Church, in her teaching, has always confirmed this conception of man and of society. [4
Many documents of the Church in the last two centuries reiterate this teaching, but the most ample and articulate of these are the encyclicals Arcanum (Leo XIII) of February 10, 1880, [5] and Casti connubii (Pius XI) on December 31, 1930. [6] This teaching would be reconfirmed in many documents of Pius XII and in the apostolic exhortation Familiaris consortio of John Paul II on November 22, 1981. [7]
The Attack on the Family
The most violent attack that the family has ever undergone in the West was with the Cultural Revolution of 1968: a Revolution against the family conducted in the name of sexual liberation. But hate for the family characterizes all the heretical sects which have developed throughout history, and constitutes a supporting element, although not always an explicit one, of that Revolution which for over five centuries has assaulted the Church and Christian Civilization. [8]
The act of procreation is the object of anti-Christian hate, because this affirms that man has an end which surpasses him. The negation of procreation turns Christian morals upside down and affirms a Gnostic metaphysical principle: sex as an ultimate end of man, closed up in its own immanence.
In Medieval times, one of the most noted sects was that of the Brethren of the Free Spirit. The adherents were convinced of having reached such an absolute perfection as to be incapable of sin: “In fact, one can be so united to God so as to not sin no matter what one does.” [9] The focal center of the ideology of the Free Spirit was not God, but divinized man, who is freed from the sentiment of personal sin and stands at the center of creation.
In the 15th Century, the Thaborites, a pre-Lutheran sect, preached, like the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the return to an Adamic state, which expressed itself in nudity and sexual promiscuity. Basing itself on the affirmation of Christ regarding prostitutes and publicans (Matthew 21:31) these declared that the chaste were unworthy of entering the Messianic Kingdom. Nudism assumed a worth of “liberation” from all the brakes of law and of morality: the same worth that “free love” possesses in our day. The “spiritual” person frees himself from every moral limitation: his will identifies himself with that of God and sin loses for him every meaning.
Lutheran Antinomianism
But the process of the dissolution of the family had its first decisive moment in the Protestant Revolution. In Wittenberg, the city in which on October 31, 1517, Martin Luther nailed his famous theses to the Cathedral door, the religious Revolution exploded in all of its virulence. While Luther was “protected” by the Elector Friedrich the Wise in the Wartburg Castle, his followers put his ideas into practice, to the extreme. Among these were the priest Andreas Bodenstein (Karlstadt: cir. 1480-1541) who on Christmas Day in 1521 celebrated in lay clothes the first “Evangelical Mass” of the Reform, omitting the elevation of the host and every reference to the sacrifice, [10] and Johannes Schneider, also known as “Agricola” (1494-1566) who proclaimed the abolition of the ancient Mosaic law. Martin Luther fought Agricola and coined the term “Antinomian” to describe his negation of the nomos, the moral law. Agricola, however, was a disciple of his, who brought to fulfillment the Lutheran principle of sola fide. Luther had said, in fact, that man radically corrupted by sin, is incapable of observing the law, and can be saved only by faith, without good works. The sentence pecca fortiter, crede forties [11] sums up Luther’s moral theology. That which counts is not sin, which is inevitable, but confidence in the mercy of God, which the believer must have before, during and after the sin. For the Antinomians, as for the Gnostics of the first centuries, the “spiritual” man is incapable of sin. God acts in him, and every action, good or bad, becomes a divine action.
One can say that Agricola was a marginal figure in the Protestant Revolution, but one cannot say this of Anabaptism, which is one of the most famous expressions of the so-called “left wing” of the Protestant Reform. The Anabaptists did not limit themselves to expressing Antinomian ideas, they practiced them in the years 1534-35 in Münster, [12] the “New Jerusalem of the Apocalypse”, where the Dutch tailor Jan Bockelson, better known as John of Leiden (1509-1536) came to power, and the upholsterer Bernhard Knipperdolling (cir. 1500-1536) was made burgomaster.
Münster became a sort of “sacred city” for the “sons of Jacob” who had to help God to establish His Kingdom punishing the “sons of Esau”. In an atmosphere of terror, the private possession of money was abolished, and measures were adopted, aimed at instituting the collective possession of goods and obligatory polygamy. To symbolize the rupture with the past, all the books of the city, with the exception of the Bible, were brought to the Cathedral square and burned in a bonfire. Orgies and the worst sexual license were presented as a “baptism of fire” which had to substitute that of water. John of Leiden became king of the “holy City” while Knipperdolling, armed with a heavy sword administered “justice” by decapitating recalcitrants.
The Anabaptist community was repressed with the iron and fire of united Catholics and Lutherans, but the utopia did not disappear. “Moderated” Protestantism rejects the violent and extremist methods of the Münster Anabaptists as a heresy. However what is refuted is not the doctrinal substance, but the tragic failure of the experience. Münster remains a betrayed dream for many Protestants, analogous to the city of Paris for the socialists in the 19th century.
Shortly after 1540 in Emden, a center of eastern Friesland, there began another Anabaptist sect, that of the “Familists” founded by Hendryck Niclaes (1502-cir. 1580). [13] He gathered among himself a clandestinely-organized community, under the name of Familia caritatis (Family of Love, Huis der Liefde) in which an ecumenical pantheism was professed and the sharing of goods and free love were practiced. Niclaes based this on the principle of mystical union with God meant for the absolute identification of the creature with the Creator and by this metaphysical principle, deduced that sin could not exist in the hearts of the regenerated. He held himself to be the third and last great prophet, after Moses and Jesus. His mission consisted in revealing the fullness of love, the work of the spirit.
In England, the same world vision was expressed in the pantheistic and libertine sects, which in the 17th century represented the extreme Puritanical left, known as the “Ranters.” [14] Against the “Ranters”, libertines and “blasphemers,” the English Parliament promulgated the famous Blasphemy Act on August 9, 1650, by which all those who held that acts of “homicide, adultery, incest and sodomy” were not sinful but sanctioned by God Himself, would incur the wrath of the law. [15]
Sexual promiscuity, nudism, and free love became a fundamental ritual in these sects. Thanks to interior illumination, they said, man becomes “deified” and recovers his Adamic integrity, i.e. the state of innocence enjoyed by Adam and Eve before the fall. In this sense, sexual promiscuity and the sharing of women is a fundamental point of Anabaptist doctrine, as theologian François Vernet observed. [16]
The French Revolution
Pan-sexualist utopia also accompanied the revolutionary process in 1789 when it passed from the religious level to the political one. The fateful date of the French Revolution was July 14, 1789, the day on which the Bastille fell – a fortress which the revolutionaries believed was overflowing with political prisoners, holding instead only seven common criminals, among whom was the Marquis Alphonse-François de Sade (1740-1814).
The name of the Marquis de Sade, author of pornographic novels, is tied to sexual perversion. In reality he was a “philosopher” who, after having been freed, actively participated in the Revolution. On July 1, 1790 he became an “active citizen” of the Jacobin section of Place Vendôme which went down in history as the “square of the beatings.” On September 3, 1792 while the famous “September massacres” began, he was named secretary and a year later, president of the section. Citizen Sade composed numerous political writings during the Revolution, of which the most famous is called “Frenchman, (make) another effort if you want to be Republicans” (Français, encore un effort si vous voulez etre républicains). [17] In this text, he invited the French people to put into practice all the principles of 1789, and extirpate the roots of Christianity: “O you who have the scythe in hand, deal the last blow to the tree of superstition;” [18] “Europe expects you to be delivered at once from the scepter and the thurible.” [19] The ideology is that of 1789. Once freedom of conscience and of the press is admitted, it was necessary to give to all the freedom to act (of expression). If everything can be said, everything can be allowed.
De Sade listed as revolutionary achievements the following: blasphemy, theft, homicide and every type of sexual perversion, incest, rape, sodomy: “”Never was lust considered as criminal in any of the wise nations of the earth… All philosophers know very well that its being declared a crime was because of Christian impostors.” [20] He imagines building places in all the towns, where: “all sexes, all ages, all creatures will be offered to the whims of the libertines who will come to enjoy themselves, and the most complete submission will be the rule of those present, the slightest refusal will be punished immediately by the one who has experienced it (the refusal).” [21]
One can freely vent impulses and desires, including mating with animals, since there is no qualitative difference between men and animals: both are born, procreate, and deteriorate. For Sade, life is nothing else but matter in movement. Death is no more than a “transmutation” at the foundation of which is “the perpetual movement that is the true essence of matter.” [22]
De Sade does not merely propose pleasure as the individual’s ultimate goal, but goes far beyond this. He wants to convince us that vice is a virtue, that horror is beautiful, and that torment is pleasure. In this sense, his vision of the world is satanic. The devil at first seems an angel of light to be worshipped, but will achieve his final triumph when he is worshipped in all his horror, making us believe that the sufferings in hell are the peak of pleasure. This is the philosophy underlying the 120 days of Sodom, where men and women, old people and small children, mothers and their children, and fathers and their children decide to practice incest, rape, coprophagia, necrophilia, and all kinds of aberration.
Every sexual difference is obliterated. The supreme goal is to abolish all differences and inequalities in order to bring society to primordial chaos. Noirceul, a character of (De Saude’s book) Juliette says: “I want to marry twice in the same day. At 10 in the morning, dressed as a woman, I want to marry a man; at 12, dressed as a man, I want to marry a homosexual dressed as a woman.” [23] All “gender theory” is already contained in these words.
De Sade spent the last years of his life in an insane asylum. His lucid folly made him a prophet of the Revolution. Erik Kuehnelt-Leddihn defines him as “the patron saint of all leftist movements.” [24] The last two centuries have seen his plans realized, to a great extent. That which still hasn’t come to pass is, perhaps, part of our future. We owe him for not having left in the dark, any of the goals of the Revolution. [25]
While with De Sade revolutionary Pan-sexualism was theorized, the French Revolution started, with the introduction of divorce in 1791, a process of radical reform of the institution of the family, which Napoleonic law would extend to the whole continent. [26]
The utopic socialism of De Sade and Charles Fourier (1772-1837, who in his book “Phalanstère” argued for the uninhibited freedom of the passions to reach the highest point of social evolution, was then surpassed by the so-called “Scientific Socialism” of Karl Marx (1818-1863) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895)
The American ethnologist Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881), starting from the existing family relationships among the Iroquois of North America, produced a fantastic history of the family, tracing its origins to a primitive throng, in which sexual relations were totally promiscuous and not subject to any rules. Marx and Engels enthusiastically subscribed to this materialistic idea, which confirmed Darwinian theories. Engels’ booklet “The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State” (1884) is an attack on the fundamental institutions of society, to bring about the utopian “classless society” which is the totally egalitarian society: without the family, without private property without the State, without God.
The Russian Revolution
The Russian Revolution brought the French Revolution to completion. In the sealed carriage that in April, 1917 brought back to Petrograd the “professional revolutionaries,” with Lenin, Zinoviev and Radek, also travelled Inessa Armand (1874-1920), member of the Executive Committee of the Bolshevik Party, foundress of the “Zhenotdell”, the ‘female department’ of the party; a woman who had the absolute confidence of Lenin, her lover. She died of cholera in 1920 and had the honor of being buried in the “Red Cemetery” under the walls of the Kremlin with the principal protagonists of the Revolution. Her name is less-noted than Aleksandra Kollontaj’s (1872-1952), but her influence on Lenin was perhaps greater. [27] Inessa Armand and Aleksandra Kollontaj publicly advocated for free love and fought for the introduction of divorce and abortion in Russia. They were convinced that sexual liberation was a necessary premise for the bringing about of a socialist society. On December 17, 1917, a few weeks after the Bolsheviks rose to power, divorce was introduced and, in 1920, abortion was legalized; it was the first time that the procedure was available without restriction, in the whole world; prostitution and homosexuality were de-criminalized in 1922. [28] Trotsky wrote in 1923 “The first destructive period is still far from being over in the life of the family. The disintegration process is still in full swing.” [29]
Kollontaj wrote in 1920 in the second edition of the magazine Komunistka: “In place of the individual and egoistic family, a great universal family of workers will develop, in which all the workers, men and women, will above all be comrades. This is what relationships between men and women will be like in the communist society. These new relationships will ensure for humanity all the joys of a love unknown in the commercial (capitalist) society, of a love that is free and based on the true social equality of the partners… The red flag of the social revolution which flies above Russia and is now being hoisted aloft in other countries of the world proclaims the approach of the heaven on earth to which humanity has been aspiring for centuries.” [30]
In Russia and Germany, in the 1920’s and 30’s, the transition from the Political Revolution to the Sexual Revolution was formulated. [31] In 1922, a meeting was held at the Marx-Engels Institute of Moscow, directed by David Ryazanov (1870-1938), to examine the concept of cultural Revolution, or a total Revolution which would involve man himself, his nature, his customs, his deepest being.
The Marx-Engels Institute of Moscow was connected to analogous institutions born in those same years. In 1919 Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, (1868-1935) founded in Berlin the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexology) with the goal of “normalizing” homosexuality. [32] In 1921 Hirschfeld organized the First Congress for Sexual Reform, which led to the formation of the World League for Sexual Reform, a league for coordinating knowledge about the enhancement of sexual activity. Grigory Batkis, director of the Moscow Institute for Sexual Hygyene, led the Soviet delegation to the World League for Sexual Freedom’s first conference .
In 1923 Felix Weil (1898-1975) financed the Erste Marxistische Arbeitswoche (“First Marxist Work Week”), in the German town of Limenau. The success of this event led him to found the Institut für Sozialforschung [33] (Institute for Social Research), directed from 1930-1958 by Max Horkheimer. The Frankfurt Institute, a Marxist-Hegelian Frankfurt school, collaborated with the Moscow Institute for the publication of the works by Marx and Engels
In 1929 Soviet political leaders invited a student of Freud, the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957), for a series of conferences which led to the publication of his paper “Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis” in Moscow, which constitutes the founding text of so-called “Marx-Freudism.” In this, as well as in his later works, Reich presented the family as the repressive social institution par excellence, and affirmed that the nucleus of happiness is sexuality. For him the abolition of the family and the revolution from sex-negation to sex-affirmation were necessary. [34]
Reich, who dedicated the second part of The Sexual Revolution to “The Struggle for the New Life in the Soviet Union”, was a great admirer of Vera Schmidt’s nursery school (1889-1937), begun in 1921 in downtown Moscow; where small children were taught about masturbation and early sexual excitement. [35] He states: “her work was entirely in the direction of affirming infant sexuality.” [36] Trotsky supported the work of Vera Schmidt and the ideas of Wilhelm Reich. Reich’s sexual revolution was an essential part of Trotsky’s permanent revolution.
Like any Revolution, the Bolshevik one also experienced an internal dialectic. The two tendencies were that of Stalin, who, though not giving up on Terror, in order to keep power, was forced to moderate revolutionary radicalism, and the other was of Trotsky who accused Stalin of having betrayed the Revolution. [37] Trotsky’s defeat marked the end of the Sexual Revolution in Russia, but the subsequent failure of Stalinism in the 50’s saw the victory of Trotskyism, which affirmed itself in the world with the Revolution of ‘68.
Reich’s ideas, disavowed by Stalin, spread in the West and encountered those of the Frankfurt School, the representatives of which were able to occupy key-places in important American universities like Harvard, Berkeley, and San Diego. Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), researcher of the Horkheimer Institute in his best-sellers “Eros and Civilization” (1955) and “One-Dimensional Man” (1964) reduced, as did Reich, human nature to free yielding to sexual impulses. These ideas were the basis of a cultural revolution which did not compromise the previous ones, but led to something worse: the tears of a generation which lost not only its bodies, but its very souls.
‘68 was the most devastating of all the preceding revolutions because it assaulted the family and transformed the everyday life of Western society. Today the utopic dimension of ‘68 has fallen, and postmodern relativism remains as its heritage, expressed by intellectuals like Michel Foucault (1926-1984). Foucault theorized the importance of the thought of De Sade in his 1961 work Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (Histoire de la folie) and in his 1966 book The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Les Mots et les choses), His thought, according to Thibaud Collin, “constitutes the conceptual foundation of the gay lobby.” [38]
Under the influence of Foucault, the American Judith Butler was one of the first authors to elaborate “gender theory”, which is the last frontier of post-modern ideologies. Evolutionary materialism remains the subjective philosophy, which sees man as changing matter, without a proper nature, able to be molded at will according to the desires and the will of all. The final horizon is that described by De Sade and Reich.
The Second Vatican Council and its Consequences
One force alone could have stopped this process of moral dissolution: the Catholic Church. But between 1962-1965 the Catholic Church, too, knew its own revolution. It was the Second Vatican Council.
On the eve of the Council convened by John XXIII, the best Catholic theologians had compiled an excellent schema on the family, which was approved by the Pope and presented in the conciliar hall. [39] This schema confirmed with clarity, the end of matrimony and the duty of the family in the modern world, condemning widespread errors in the field of morals. But a few weeks after the beginning of the Council, the schemas presented by the Preparatory Commission were thrown out by the Bishops and theologians of Central Europe, the so-called European Alliance (“Alliance européenne”). [40] Everything was redone from the very beginning, and the schema on the family was substituted with a new working document. This text, which became Gaudium et spes was dedicated to the contemporary world, interested in entering into dialogue with it, rather than reaffirming the doctrine of the Church against it. The birth and education of children were placed on a secondary level, following the need for love between the spouses. These needs of impulses and desires, according to some theologians, could not be closed in a juridical cage, but would justify contraception and extra-marital cohabitation. The idea of nature was substituted with that of the person as a transforming reality, in continual change. Cold rigidity began to be contrasted to the warmth and fluidity of life; realizing the theory of Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937): the primacy of praxis over theory, of life over truth, of experience over doctrine, as many are affirming in the theological field.
We did not arrive at Pope Francis’ exhortation Amoris laetitia (2016) overnight. 50 years were necessary, but the roots are there, in the Second Vatican Council. And the Council didn’t do anything except search for a compromise between the doctrine of the Church and the anti-Christian theories of the modern Cultural Revolution. Today, that which is at stake is not only the institution of the family, but the existence of an absolute and immutable moral law. Four Cardinals have recognized this, and have asked Pope Francis to confirm with clarity the absolutely universal and binding character of the natural and Divine Laws. If one allows for the transgression of morals on one point, everything collapses. If morals collapse, De Sade, Reich and the Antinomians of all the centuries triumph.
Meditate on the Divine model of the family
In the last 50 years, the crisis of the family has assumed frightening dimensions. This crisis is founded on the idea that only through the sexualization of society, the revolutionary process can find its fulfillment. That which renders the situation graver, is that the attacks on the family are not only external, but come from within the Church. The remedy is indicated by Pius XI in Casti connubii: meditate on the Divine idea of the family and marriage, and live in conformity to this model.
Meditating on the Divine model of the family means contemplating the truths which regulate the universe: overturning the thesis according to which praxis generates the theory; reestablishing the primacy of doctrine, that is the Platonic-Aristotelian-Thomistic primacy of contemplation over action; living in conformity with this truth. Against the new-Antinomians, spread throughout the Catholic Church, we must remember that the Magisterium of the Church either accepts the whole of Tradition, theological and moral, or it accepts none of it.
Tradition includes Sacred Scripture correctly interpreted – Sacred Scripture and Tradition constitute the two fonts of the one Revelation of Christ of which not even one iota can be changed (Matthew 5:18); because all created things change, but God is always the same. His words do not pass away, His law does not change. This law is carved in our hearts and we must ask God that our words will always be an echo, faint but faithful, of His own words.
Above all it is necessary that we be convinced that Tradition is a vital principle while the revolutionary process is oriented, and cannot but be oriented, towards self-destruction. The denial of procreation leads to biological extinction; the denying of the raising of children, of education – which is the handing on of traditional values – leads to death. Today, Europe is dying not only because it is killing its own children with abortion and contraception, but because it is unable to transmit – to hand on – to those who are born, the values which daily disappear.
In his book “Dialectics of Nature” (1883) Engels proclaimed this principle: “all that comes into being deserves to perish” [41] death, not life, is for him the secret of the universe. The death of humanity constitutes, according to Igor Safarevic, the heart and the goal of socialism. [42] Sade expressed the same thought, celebrating homicide and suicide. The sexualization of society is the death of society.
The family on the contrary, in itself, contains life. Physical life contained in the cribs which multiply; spiritual life, expressed by parents and children united in prayer to God Who can do everything.
At Fatima, Our Lady announced that Russia would spread its errors in the world. The anarchic-libertarian post-Trotskyism that dominates today in the West and the nationalist post-Stalinism that has affirmed itself in Putin’s Russia have the same ideological matrix. Fatima’s message is a message against any form of gnostic and egalitarian ideology, as was socialism in the 20th and 21st centuries.
The last apparition of Fatima October 13, 1917, that of the Holy Family, constitutes in this sense a manifesto which sums up all our principles and which opposes all the errors of our time.
Translated by Brendan Young
[1] Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book I.
[2] Cicero, De Officiis, I, 54.
[3] Franz Funck-Brentano, The Old Regime, Fayard, Paris 1926, pp. 12-14.
[4] Monks of Solesmes (under the direction of), Marriage, Texts of the Roman Magisterium, Desclée de Brouwer, Paris 1956
[5] Leo XIII, Arcanum divinae sapientia, of February 10 1880, in ASS, 12 (1879-1880), pp. 385-402.
[6] Pius XI, Casti connubii of December 31, 1930 in A.A.S. 1930, pp 539-590.
[7] John Paul II, Familiaris consortio of November 22 1981 in AAS(1981), pp. 81-191.
[8] Plinio Correa de Oliveira, Revolution and Counter-Revolution, (Italian translation) Sugarco, Milano 2009.
[9] Ilarino da Milano, Medieval Heresies, Maggioli, Rimini 1983, p. 26-27.
[10] George H., Williams, The Radical Reformation, Westminster Press, Philadelphia 1962, p. 40.
[11] “Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly.” (Letter to Melanchton of August 1 1521, in Luther’s Works, vol. 48, Letters, Fortress Press, Philadelphia 1975, p. 282),
[12] Cfr. Ernest Belfort Bax, Rise and Fall of the Anabaptist, Sonneschein, London 1903; C. G. H. Williams, The Radical Reformation, cit., pp. 362-388.
[13] Regarding Niclaes and the Family of Love see: Serge Hutin, The English Disciples of Boehme, Denoel, Paris 1960, pp. 58-61; G. H. Williams, The Radical Reformation, pp. 477-482 J. Dietz Moss, Godded with God, Hendryck Niclaes and His Family of Love, The American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia 1981; Alistair Hamilton, The Family of Love, The Attic Press, Greenwood (S. C.) 1981.
[14] Cf. Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, Penguin, London 1991; A. L. Morton, The World of the Ranters. Religious radicalism in the English Revolution, Lawrence and Wishart, London 1979 (1970); J. Friedmann, Blasphemy, Immorality and Anarchy. The ranters and the English Revolution, Ohio University Press, London 1987.
[15] An Act against several Atheistical, Blasphemous and Execrables Opinions, derogatory to the honor of God, and destructive to human Society, in Acts and Ordinancy of the Interregnum, ed. by C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait, Stationery Office, London 1911, pp. 409-412.
[16] François Vernet, Condorments, DTC, vol. III,1 (1938), pp. 815-816.
[17] A. F. de Sade, Frenchman, (make) another effort if you want to be Republicans, in Philosophy in the Sitting Room, Gallimard, Paris 1976, pp. 187-267.
[18] Sade, op. cit. , p. 188.
[19] Sade op. cit. , p. 190.
[20] Sade, op. cit. , p. 229.
[21] Sade, op. cit. , p. 221
[22] Sade , op. cit., p. 239.
[23] Sade, Juliette, (1797) in Complete Works, Cercle du Livre Precieux, Paris 1967, vol. 9, p. 569.
[24] Erik Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism Revisited. From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and PolPot, Regnery, Washington 1991, p. 67
[25] See François Ost, Sade and the law, Odile Jacob, Paris 2005
[26] Xavier Martin, Human Nature and the French Revolution, from the Age of Enlightenment to Napoleonic Law, Dominique Martin Morin, Poitiers 2002
[27] See Letters to Lenin of Inessa Armand andAleksandra Kollontaj of March 1917 in V. I. Lenin, Opere complete, tr. It., vol. 35, Editori Runiti, Roma 1952, pp. 210-212.
[28] Cfr. Giovanni Codevilla, From the Bolshevik Revolution to the Russian Federation, Franco Angeli, Roma 1996.
[29] Leon Trotsky, Problems of everyday life, Monad Press, New York 1986, p. 37
[30] https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1920/communism-family.htm
[31] Gregory Carleton,The Sexual Revolution in Russia Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005
[32] See Rodolfo de Mattei, From Sodomy to Homosexuality. History of a Normalization, Solfanelli, Chieti 2016.
[33] Cfr. Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School. History. Theoretical development. Political significance, Carl HanserVerlag, München-Wien 1986; Martin Jay The dialectical imagination. A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950, Little, Brown and Co. Boston 1973.
[34] Wilhelm Reich, The Sexual Revolution, Peter Nevill- Vision Press, London 1951, p. 163.
[35] Vera Schmidt. Report on the Experimental Nursery School of Moscow, Andromeda 2016. For psychoanalysis in the Soviet-Union, see Martin A. Miller, Freud and the Bolsheviks, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1998, and Alexander Etkind, Eros of the impossible: the history of psychoanalysis in Russia, Westview Press, Oxford, 1997
[36] Reich, The Sexual Revolution, p. 241
[37] Leon Trotsky, The Revoluton betrayed (1936), Dover Publications, New York 2004.
[38] Thibaud Colin, Gay Marriage. The Challenges of a Claim, Eyrolles, Paris 2005, p. 97.
[39] See The First Schema on the Family and on Matrimony of the Second Vatican Council, ed. by R. de Mattei, Edizioni Fiducia, Roma 2015.
[40] See R. de Mattei, The Second Vatican Council: An Unwritten Story, Lindau, Torino 2011, pp. 203-210.
[41] Frederick Engels, Dialectics of Nature, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1976, pp. 37-38
[42] Igor Chafarévitch, The Socialist Phenomenon, Editions du Seuil, Paris 1977, p. 323