Four Catholic Political Postures: Lessons from Leo XIII and Ralliement

by Felix de St. Vincent

The Catholic Church has no magisterial teaching about the “best regime.” On the contrary, the Church teaches that she does not favor one form of government or political system over another, and expects Catholics in different times and places to have different opinions on the matter.[1] The peaks of Catholic political philosophy scarcely go further. St. Augustine argues for a constitution in a well-ordered society that is at least somewhat democratic: if citizens value the common good above their own, then they ought to create their own governing officials.[2] St. Thomas Aquinas offers a kind of Aristotelian praise for Moses’ mixed regime, a monarchy with democratic and aristocratic aspects.[3] But that’s about it. These venerable Doctors of the Church largely leave the question of the best regime aside, focusing instead upon how Christians might prudentially serve the common good in a variety of regimes.

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Introductory Note

Pope Benedict XV’s letter Celeberrima evenisse resulted from one of the diplomatic triumphs of his brief pontificate: the reëstablishment of diplomatic relations with Portugal. The anti-clerical revolutionaries, who in 1910 had overturned the Portuguese monarchy and established a republic, had soon passed laws on the “separation” of Church and state that in reality amounted to a programme of persecution of the Church. Monasteries and seminaries were closed, Catholic teaching in the schools was abolished, bishops were expelled from their dioceses, even the wearing of the cassock was forbidden. Pope St. Pius X vehemently protested these outrages in the encyclical Iamdudum in Lusitania. Such extreme anti-Catholic measures contributed to deep divisions in Portuguese society, and the country was torn by unrest in the years following the Revolution of 1910. By 1918 the government was ready to compromise with the Holy See, and it reëstablished diplomatic relations, asking that in return the Holy See “insist on the faithful’s fuller acceptance of the Republic.”[1]

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