The decisive factor which made the efforts of the [French] Revolution toward the enhancement of individual liberty so abortive was that it created the belief that, since at last all power had been placed in the hands of the people, all safeguards against the abuse of this power had become unnecessary.#
The Vatican in its social thinking throughout most of the modern period did not sufficiently understand the varieties of liberalism with which it was dealing. Being based on the continent, it saw a more militantly secular type of liberalism with a whole metaphysics it correctly found to be offensive, and it did not appreciate until the late nineteenth and early twentieth century how the Enlightenment project had been moderated significantly in the Anglo-American tradition by pre-existing Christian sources.#