The Virtue of Intolerance

God is intolerant and requires all believers to be intolerant of all errror, false worship and of immorality in all it's forms. Just consider the first commandment:

"I, the Lord, am your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, that place of slavery. You shall not have other gods besides me. You shall not carve idols for yourselves in the shape of anything in the sky above or on the earth below or in the waters beneath the earth; you shall not bow down before them or worship them. For I, the Lord, your God, am a jealous God, inflicting punishments for their fathers' wickedness on the children of those who hate me, down to the third and fourth generation but bestowing mercy, down to the thousandth generation, on the children of those who love me and keep my commandments." Deuteronomy 5:6-10

The first necessary principle of respect for the human person and of right reason is to have solid ideas: i.e. to acknowledge the Absolute.

The truth imposes itself with apodictic force upon the intelligence and everyone who possesses or think he possesses it tries to spread it, to impose it on the rest of men and to remove the darkness of error which blinds them. And it happens, by the hidden relation and harmony which God has given to our faculties that intolerance of the will should follow this fatal intolerance of the understanding; and when it is firm and entire and the manly spirit of peoples has not been extinguished or whithered these should fight for an idea, at the same time with the weapons of reason and logic as with the sword and fire.

So called tolerance is an easy virtue ; it is a sickness of sceptical ages or of no faith. He who believes nothing, nor hopes in anything, nor neither strives for the salvation nor is concerned about the damnation of souls, can easily be tolerant. But such meekness of character cannot depend except upon a weakness and emasculation of the power of understanding.

The second principle of respect of the human person is to acknowledge and promote the equality and liberty and supreme dignity of all men under God. Any proper principle of "tolerance" is based on the antecedent principle of intolerance (i.e. the truth must first of all be unshakable for any other principle to apply universally and to therefore have any meaning at all for the true good of each person and of humanity). "Tolerance" is therefore not tolerance at all but it's opposite: the intransigent upholding and defense of the inviolable dignity of each person, not tolerating any unjust opposition to that necessary respect for the person and for the truth on which his dignity depends!

The third principle of respect of the human person is union among believers. Catholics must be true and loyal to Christ and to the Church and so influence society by their love and commitment to the truth. They will thus live the virtue of intolerance and save themselves and all who would be saved.

cf. Antologia General de Menendez Pelayo, I Tomo: Madrid 1956 (pp. 49-51).