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12 November, Austria, Austrian Empire, Hans Karl von Zessner-Spitzenberg, Legality, Legtimacy, Old Empire Day, Republic of Austria
The 12th of November, 1918, was a Revolution, a breach of law, a breach of faith, against the Emperor as Emperor, and especially against him as the Sovereign of his countries [Landesfürsten] and at the same time a revolution against the Crownlands and the authorities of the Crownlands.
The act of November 12th, 1918 can not be objectively judged any differently. It lacks any derivative or original legitimacy. It established usurpatory powers. They have established for themselves a legal state, to be respected as a legal power, but have not eliminated the moral right of the repressed legitimate authority to return, as well as the moral duty of all those today in power to return to the legitimate order as far as is possible; here again, even during such times when the Restoration is impossible, emphasis must be placed on obligation of loyalty.
-Dr. Hans Karl von Zeßner-Spitzenberg, Legitimität und Legalität
Austriae est imperare orbi universo
The War for Christendom 
What are your thoughts on the idea that the papal encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge somehow supports nationalism? Or at least a milder, non-militaristic and protectionist variety?
Here are the relevant exceprts:
” If the State organizes a national youth, and makes this organization obligatory to all, then, without prejudice to rights of religious associations, it is the absolute right of youths as well as of parents to see to it that this organization is purged of all manifestations hostile to the Church and Christianity. These manifestations are even today placing Christian parents in a painful alternative, as they cannot give to the State what they owe to God alone.
No one would think of preventing young Germans establishing a true ethnical community in a noble love of freedom and loyalty to their country. What We object to is the voluntary and systematic antagonism raised between national education and religious duty. ”
Even some traditionally minded Catholics have recently suggested that this implies that nationalism in the sense of ensuring the integrity of ethnic communities through homogeneity as well as the establishment of communities and/or countries on a general national basis is legitimate politically or even endorsed by this.
What is your take on this?
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The key word in that passage from Mit Brennender Sorge, Volksgemeinschaft, has a quite different meaning from “ethnical community”. The concept as it would have been known to Pius XI and Eugenio Pacelli (later Pope Pius XII) referred to unity of all peoples in the Germanies in a common effort during the Great War. The word volk itself referred not to a national or an ethnic grouping, but the people of a society through which they participate in the Gemeinwohl, the Common Good. Notice that the Volksgemeinschaft is established “zu unverbrüchlicher Treue gegen das Vaterland,” in “unbreakable loyalty to the Fatherland, the Country.” It is precisely the nationalization of the Gemeinschaft, the perversion of the idea of a people united in a common good to an ethnic or racial community, which Pius XI hoped to combat in issuing this encyclical. He indeed had no objection to a state organizing its youth (note: Staatsjugend, not as the English translation misidentifies it “National Youth”) for a greater political goal, but the nationalization of political life by the National Socialist movement and indeed by movements in the greater part of Europe was distorting and perverting “an order of the world planned and created by God… far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds.“
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