The term integralism does not describe a movement or a philosophical school. It is simply a word coined in the nineteenth century to describe the opposite of a grievous error condemned by the Church— liberalism. It is thus analogous to terms such as dyophysite, iconodule or transubstantiationist. It names orthodoxy in a particular area of Catholic teaching.
Liberalism is the movement to eliminate divine revelation as a principle of public policy and public law. In tandem with political liberalism there grew up theological liberalism which is a movement to render the act of faith so irreducibly subjective that it could never function as a principle of public policy or public law.
The classic refutation of political liberalism is Leo XIII’s 1888 encyclical Libertas. The classic refutation of theological liberalism is Pius X’s 1907 encyclical Pascendi.
Defined positively the best summary of integralism is paragraph 2244 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
Every institution is inspired, at least implicitly, by a vision of man and his destiny, from which it derives the point of reference for its judgment, its hierarchy of values, its line of conduct. Most societies have formed their institutions in the recognition of a certain pre-eminence of man over things. Only the divinely revealed religion has clearly recognized man’s origin and destiny in God, the Creator and Redeemer. The Church invites political authorities to measure their judgments and decisions against this inspired truth about God and man: Societies not recognizing this vision or rejecting it in the name of their independence from God are brought to seek their criteria and goal in themselves or to borrow them from some ideology. Since they do not admit that one can defend an objective criterion of good and evil, they arrogate to themselves an explicit or implicit totalitarian power over man and his destiny, as history shows.[1]
These two concepts and their contraries produce four basic political/theological stances:
(Anti)theological integralism with political liberalism which would be the view that atheism is rationally demonstrable and thus religion is an inherently negative force which should at best be tolerated in as far as the measures necessary to irradicate it might occasion worse evils.
Theological liberalism with political liberalism which would be the view that religion is good so long as it accepted to be irreducibly subjective. The sort of rational agnosticism this position requires ultimately entails moral agnosticism and thus the willing surrender of the public sphere to nihilistic hedonism. As the catechism says “they do not admit that one can defend an objective criterion of good and evil” and ultimately they demand a greater and greater role for the state, the mortal god.
Theological liberalism with political integralism is the view that all societies are necessarily founded upon vital collective myths that cannot be vindicated as objectively true. The question of which of these myths is preferable is ultimately a matter of taste but as it is necessary that there be such a myth for the very existence of society adherence to it can be legitimately coerced.
Finally there is the position defended by Leo XIII in his great social encyclicals theological integralism with political integralism. After 1925 this became known as the Social Kingship of Christ. It is the doctrine alluded to by the Mexican Martyrs with the cry of “Viva Cristo Rey!”
I doubt that it is news to anyone reading this essay that the extremely widespread perception of the Second Vatican Council as having in some sense repudiated the previous definitive teaching of Popes and Councils has exercised a debilitating and destructive effect on the Church over the last sixty years. This ‘hermeneutic of rupture’ is constitutive not only of movements which to a greater or lesser degree oppose the Council such as the Society of Saint Pius X but also of the deformed culture of so many older institutions which have been captured by liberalism and have been cheerfully burning through the Church’s sociological capital since the nineteen sixties.
Pope Benedict XVI opposed to this catastrophic phenomenon an alternative approach to the Council which he called the “hermeneutic of reform in continuity”. ‘Reform’ usually has two senses: a return to an antecedent true form which has become overlaid with corruptions or a changed prudential approach which is more faithful to the antecedent and true form than contingent practices whose utility in achieving its essential goals have waned with changed external conditions. Understood in either way reform is ‘in continuity’ by definition. Any purported ‘reform’ which in fact constitutes a rupture is merely a corruption in drag.
Some of the reaction to the Second Vatican Council can be explained by the long shadow of the First. At Vatican I there was a well organised group of fathers with backers in the media and a strong theological agenda who were determined to steer the Council in their preferred direction. They did not in fact get everything they wanted but they were able to a large extent to act as if they had by talking and acting as if that is what had happened.
The big difference between the two councils is that the conciliar vanguard at the first had roughly the same agenda as the pope who called the council whereas the conciliar vanguard at the second did not. This gave many people prior to the Second Vatican Council an exaggerated impression f the degree to which and the ease with which councils are controllable by the Pope.
After both councils there were voices in the wilderness trying to impress upon their contemporaries (intoxicated with euphoria or despair) the actual moderation of the Conciliar pronouncements and (in spite of all anticipation and popular reception) their lack of substantial novelty. The most famous of these were John Henry Newman and Joseph Ratzinger. Unlike Newman, Benedict was also able to point out that for all their prolixity the Conciliar documents are of a relatively low theological note. As Ratzinger observed in 1988
The Second Vatican Council has not been treated as a part of the entire living Tradition of the Church, but as an end of Tradition, a new start from zero. The truth is that this particular council defined no dogma at all, and deliberately chose to remain on a modest level, as a merely pastoral council: and yet so many treat it as though it made itself into a sort of super-dogma which takes away the importance of all the rest.[2]
This last observation, however, for all its general utility in lowering the temperature of the debate, is relatively ineffective in regard to the most neuralgic issue of all – religious liberty.
While Paul VI himself pointed out that Vatican II defined no dogmas, dogmatic definitions do not exhaust the infallible magisterium of the Popes or Ecumenical Councils. There are also merely doctrinal definitions pertaining to the secondary object of the magisterium which extends to “all those teachings … which are necessary for faithfully keeping and expounding the deposit of faith, even if they have not been proposed by the Magisterium of the Church as formally revealed.” Though such teachings are not dogmas and their denial is not heresy, it is nevertheless the case, as Ratzinger explained in 1998, that
Every believer … is required to give firm and definitive assent to these truths, based on faith in the Holy Spirit’s assistance to the Church’s Magisterium, and on the Catholic doctrine of the infallibility of the Magisterium in these matters. Whoever denies these truths would be in a position of rejecting a truth of Catholic doctrine and would therefore no longer be in full communion with the Catholic Church.[3]
It is clear from the exalted character of the language which introduced the key statements at the beginning of the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Liberty and from the Notification given by the Secretary General of the Council at the 123rd General Congregation on 16th November, 1964 that these statements are definitive and demand not just the religious submission of intellect and will attaching to the merely authentic magisterium but the firm and definitive assent which definitions of the secondary object command.
This is no doubt why no final normalisation of relations with the Society of St Pius X has proved possible and despite the lifting of their bishops’ excommunications this society remains outside “full communion with the Catholic Church.”
The question of the continuity of the teaching of the Second Vatican Council’s Decree on Religious Liberty Dignitatis Humanae with prior definitive dogmatic and doctrinal definitions must therefore be met head on if the rupturists whether liberal or conservative are to be put to flight (or even better converted).
This task really ought not to be so difficult as the Council itself declares (in a passage inserted at Paul VI’s personal insistence) that “it leaves untouched traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ.”[4]
The appearance of difficulty is doubtless generated by the distortion caused by the prism of Anglo-American Liberalism and French Baroque Absolutism through which the document is too often read. No doubt this is why for thinkers such a Karol Wojtyła (born and raised in a country with established Catholicism, religious liberty and an elected republican monarchy since the sixteenth century) the difficulty simply did not occur.
The pseudo-difficulty was further enhanced by the early but ultimately rather unimportant involvement of Fr John Courtney Murray S.J. in the first drafts of the Decree. His presence (which had ended by the final stages) seemed to the rupturists a confirmation that Dignitatis Humanae constituted a full capitulation to the classical liberalism condemned as satanic by earlier popes such as Leo XIII.
If it did constitute such a capitulation then the document must be very confused indeed as it itself appeals to Leo XIII’s own classic treatment of relations between the temporal and spiritual powers Immortale Dei in illustration of its own teaching that “Government is also to help create conditions favourable to the fostering of religious life, in order that the people may be truly enabled to exercise their religious rights and to fulfil their religious duties, and also in order that society itself may profit by the moral qualities of justice and peace which have their origin in men’s faithfulness to God and to His holy will.”[5]
The importance of Leo XIII’s doctrine on this point was singled out by John Paul II in his 1991 Encyclical Centesimus Annus where he wrote “Here, particular mention must be made of the Encyclical Libertas praestantissimum, which called attention to the essential bond between human freedom and truth, so that freedom which refused to be bound to the truth would fall into arbitrariness and end up submitting itself to the vilest of passions, to the point of self-destruction.”[6]
The Classical Liberal approach (denounced by Leo XIII in Libertas) would be to deny the temporal community any competence in religious matters and so comprehensively to exclude Divine Revelation as a source of public policy and public law. As Karol Wojtyła pointed out during an intervention at the Council itself this would completely destroy the argument of the document as Religious liberty is presented therein as “substantialiter tamquam doctrina revelata”[7] in essence a revealed teaching.
For the secular liberal freedom of religion results not from the uniquely transcendent nature of our obligations to God but from their supposedly uniquely subjective not to say irrational or mythological character. When public measures, adopted to support disease control or the latest bizarre set of ‘rights’, prove to be seriously inconvenient or even wholly unacceptable to the adherents of some particular religious tradition then, as far as liberalism is concerned, so much the worse for them. Antiquated science fiction cannot be admitted as a principle of public policy and public law and Catholic worshipers have no more right to special treatment than the attendees at Comicon.
The doctrine of Dignitatis Humanae is thus essentially integralist in that it invites political authorities to measure their judgments and decisions against the divinely revealed religion. Of course, conservative rupturists would insist that the specific measures demanded by Dignitatis Humanae are not in fact compatible with divine revelation as definitively interpreted by the Church’s magisterium over the last two thousand years. Liberal rupturists in contrast would claim that that very interpretation was a betrayal of revealed truth and that the measures outlined in Dignitatis Humanae contain nothing which right reason would not arrive at on its own.
Eminent representatives of these schools when confronted with the passages in the Declaration which require the hermeneutic of reform in continuity will (in my experience) tend to answer (if conservative) that these saving phrases simply render the document essentially incoherent and that consequently it has no teaching at all or (if liberal) will dismiss the assertions of continuity by the council fathers on the grounds that ‘sometimes you have to say these things to get it through’.
The truth of the matter is that the thought-world that lies behind the document lies neither in a desire to repudiate Baroque Royal Absolutism (per se) nor to capitulate to modern liberalism but in the political philosophy of Jacques Maritain. Many of the Council fathers were enthusiasts for Maritain not least Pope Paul VI himself. Indeed, it is hard to overstate Paul VI’s devotion and debt to Maritain. The Pope personally translated Maritain’s Three Reformers into Italian, wrote the introduction to the 1936 Italian edition of Integral Humanism, he presented him with the Council’s ‘Message to Men of Thought and Science’ at its closing ceremonies, he called upon Maritain to draft (and then adopted virtually unchanged) the Credo of the People of God and wept upon hearing of his death. In understanding the motivations behind the Declaration it is therefore to Maritain we must look rather than waste our time trying to fasten the text to the procrustean beds proffered by the liberal and conservative rupturists.
Maritain had been an adherent not merely of Royalism but of the sinister integral nationalist movement Action Française condemned by Pius XI in 1926. Led intellectually by the agnostic Charles Maurras, Action Française sought to establish an authoritarian social and political order in France under a restored monarchy with established Catholicism; not, however, because Catholicism is true but because a national myth is necessary to bind together the integrated nationalist society. The Gospel was to be to this new France what Wagner would be to Hitler’s Germany. Any discomfort that might have been felt by the many Catholics involved in the movement at this pragmatic not to say pagan attitude to the Holy Faith was to be assuaged by the slogan “politique d’abord!” Theoretical differences could be set to one side to facilitate the achievement of shared political goals. As far as Pope Pius XI was concerned this was nothing more than ‘Political Modernism’. After the condemnation, Pius XI personally instructed Maritain to defend it, a command which effected an (at least superficially) radical transformation in Maritain’s political thought.
Particularly in The Primacy of the Spiritual (1927) and Integral Humanism: Temporal and Spiritual Problems of a New Christendom (1935) Maritain elaborated a new political philosophy which he expressly described as ‘integralist’. He upheld the full panoply of Papal authority in the temporal order as laid out in such documents as Boniface VIII’s Unam Sanctam of 1302 up to and including the power to depose excommunicated temporal rulers. Maritain’s position was therefore emphatically anti-liberal but he held that the sociological and intellectual conditions of his age – what he called its ‘historic skies’ – were such that the actual use of most of these powers would be catastrophically counterproductive.
He argued instead, increasingly forcefully during the Second World War, that key elements of the political order of modernity in the west were extrapolated from premises found only in divine revelation and simply by upholding them overtly on that basis Catholics could create a ‘New Christendom’ which, while formally religiously neutral, would in fact be naturally sympathetic to and socially dependent upon Christ’s Church.
This project did not meet with universal acclaim. Not only traditional royalists such as Fr Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange OP (Karol Wojtyła’s thesis director) who had been closely associated with Maritain and shared his support for Action Française until the two were estranged over this question, but also integralist Republicans such as Étienne Gilson (who John Paul II praised together with Maritain in Fides et Ratio)[8] were unhappy with this anonymous Christendom.
Gilson’s objections are of particular note because he actually invented the expression ‘Integral Humanism’ and agreed with the more fundamental epistemological claims of Maritain which underlay it.[9]
This position Maritain called ‘Moral Philosophy Adequately Considered’. Maritain argued that because the final end is, in moral philosophy, the first principle and because the final end of any intellectual creature (because capax dei) lies in the sovereign gift of God it can only be known by divine revelation in any order of providence. This end will not fall below the proportionate natural end and cannot rise higher than the supernatural vision of God but there intervene literally innumerable preternatural possible ends between these two and which of them is our actual end in this world can be known only through revelation. Thus, not only moral theology but even moral (and therefore political) philosophy can only exist in its proper form when subalternated to divine revelation.[10]
Indeed, Maritain argued that while the precepts of the natural law can be known by reason alone, their universal application cannot. That I should love my neighbour as myself is known by reason unaided but that everyman is my neighbour is known only by divine revelation on account of the supernatural end. As Our Lord says in the Sermon on the Mount “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven.” This revealed truth is transformative of the social and political order. As a social and political animal, the citizens enlightened by supernatural revelation seek, all other things being equal, to incorporate all men within the political order. As Maritain wrote in 1943,
[I]t is the urge of a love infinitely stronger than the philanthropy commended by the philosophers which causes human devotion to surmount the closed borders of the natural social groups – family group and national group – and extend it to the entire human race, because this love is the life in us of the very love which has created being and because it truly makes of each human being our neighbour. Without breaking the links of flesh and blood, of self-interest, tradition and pride which are needed by the body politic, and without destroying the rigorous laws of existence and conservation of this body politic, such a love extended to all men transcends, and at the same time transforms from within, the very life of the group and tends to integrate all of humanity into a community of nations and peoples in which men will be reconciled. For the kingdom of God is not miserly, the communion which is its supernatural privilege is not jealously guarded; it wants to spread and refract this communion outside its own limits, in the imperfect shapes and in the universe of conflicts, malice and bitter toil which make up the temporal realm. That is the deepest principle of the democratic ideal, which is the secular name for the ideal of Christendom.[11]
One might think that this would lead to the conclusion that the explicit recognition of divine revelation by the civil order would be essential to avert a civil egotism which would show no mercy to enemies and instrumentalize the stranger and the foreigner; that, as the Catechism insists, societies not recognizing the divinely revealed religion would arrogate to themselves a totalitarian power over man and his destiny. But Maritain, rather believed that, in repudiating such totalitarianism, the civil order would already be anonymously Christian.
Gilson and John Paul II concluded instead that this anonymous Christendom would be no such thing. “It is the end which commands” Gilson wrote in 1952 (when Maritain’s theories were at the height of their popularity in Europe) “The human city cannot be built, in the shadow of the cross, other than as the suburb of the City of God.”[12] For Maritain’s theory of the harmonious relationship between the Church and a formally secular polity built on universal franchise and inviolable human rights rests upon the fallacy of affirming the consequent (if A then B. B therefore A). Just because divine revelation implies an all-encompassing civil order does not mean that an all-encompassing civil order implies divine revelation. Maritain’s anonymous Christendom might just as easily, indeed might far more likely, become a rival than a friend of Christ’s Church. And, as the Catechism observes, this is indeed what history has shown.
John Paul II alluded to this disastrous process in the year 2000 when protesting against the refusal of the European Union to make any mention of Christianity or God in its Charter of Fundamental Rights
[W]e must not forget that the ideologies which unleashed rivers of blood and tears during the 20th century came from a Europe that had wanted to forget its Christian roots. The European Union’s effort to formulate a ‘Charter of Fundamental Rights’ is an attempt at a new synthesis, at the beginning of the new millennium, of the basic values that must guide the coexistence of European peoples. The Church has followed the drafting of this document with keen attention. In this regard, I cannot conceal my disappointment that in the Charter’s text there is not a single reference to God. Yet in God lies the supreme source of the human person’s dignity and his fundamental rights. It cannot be forgotten that it was the denial of God and his commandments which led in the last century to the tyranny of idols. A race, a class, the state, the nation and the party were glorified instead of the true and living God. In the light of the misfortunes that overtook the 20th century we can understand: the rights of God and man stand or fall together.[13]
And yet the problem of Maritain’s ‘historic skies’ remains. It was because of his enthusiasm for Maritain’s political theories that Paul VI was able put into Dignitatis Humanae the claim that “it leaves untouched traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ.” The Church continued to hold that, in the words of the 1983 Code of Canon Law she “has the innate and proper right to coerce offending members of the Christian faithful with penal sanctions.”[14] The Church continues to hold that she possesses in principle the right to make use of the temporal power in doing so, but simply judges it pastorally counterproductive to do so. But this is not what the world sees or many of the baptised. They see an ecclesiastical capitulation to secularism and its continued triumph. Maritain insisted that the historic skies could change and the use of the temporal sword become appropriate once more,
“The fecundity of analogy in this domain is, moreover, clearly not exhausted by the historical ideal whose main outlines I have tried to sketch. Others still could arise, under historical climates of which we have no idea. And there is even nothing to prevent minds attached to a Christian sacral conception from admitting the hypothesis of an eventual cycle of culture in which it would prevail anew, under conditions and with characteristics which we cannot foresee.”[15]
But – out of sight out of mind – these nuances are lost in translation. Most dangerous of all is the assumption (incorrectly drawn from a contextless reading of Dignitatis Humanae) that a society which fails to fulfil its moral duty toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ could nevertheless constitute an ideal and not merely a provisionally acceptable social order. These distinctions were ones which Leo XIII was careful to draw but which were difficult for Dignitatis Humanae’s rhetorical purposes and were consequently only alluded to and not overtly made.
The problem was perceived long ago by Newman in his 1874 Letter to the Duke of Norfolk in which he defended (in the context of papal infallibility) Pius IX’s dogmatic definition of the central integralist premise. In his 1864 Encyclical Quanta Cura Pius IX had by his “Apostolic authority” commanded “all children of the Catholic Church” to hold “as reprobated, proscribed and condemned”, indeed as contrary to “the doctrine of Scripture, of the Church, and of the Holy Fathers”, the claim that “that is the best condition of civil society, in which no duty is recognized, as attached to the civil power, of restraining by enacted penalties, offenders against the Catholic religion, except so far as public peace may require.”[16]
The principles enunciated in Quanta Cura had brought down the government of the British Prime minister Gladstone because a key piece of legislation that would have secularised all the universities in Ireland (thus allowing Catholics to go to the Anglican ones but removing the episcopal control of the solitary Catholic institution) was rejected by the Irish MPs in Gladstone’s coalition as contrary to their faith. An enraged Gladstone wrote a tract denouncing papal infallibility, Pius IX and all his works and pomps.
Newman pointed out the hypocrisy of Anglican opposition to Pius IX’s doctrine when it was itself an established church with, until only a few decades earlier, a complete monopoly on higher education and political office throughout England and Ireland.
Such was the position of free opinion and dissenting worship in England till quite a recent date, when one after another the various disabilities which I have been recounting, and many others besides, melted away, like snow at spring-tide; and we all wonder how they could ever have been in force. The cause of this great revolution is obvious, and its effect inevitable. Though I profess to be an admirer of the principles now superseded in themselves, mixed up as they were with the imperfections and evils incident to everything human, nevertheless I say frankly I do not see how they could possibly be maintained in the ascendant. When the intellect is cultivated, it is as certain that it will develop into a thousand various shapes, as that infinite hues and tints and shades of colour will be reflected from the earth’s surface, when the sunlight touches it; and in matters of religion the more, by reason of the extreme subtlety and abstruseness of the mental action by which they are determined. During the last seventy years, first one class of the community, then another, has awakened up to thought and opinion. Their multiform views on sacred subjects necessarily affected and found expression in the governing order. The State in past time had a conscience; George the Third had a conscience; but there were other men at the head of affairs besides him with consciences, and they spoke for others besides themselves, and what was to be done, if he could not work without them, and they could not work with him, as far as religious questions came up at the Council-board? … As a necessary consequence, the whole theory of Toryism, hitherto acted on, came to pieces and went the way of all flesh. This was in the nature of things. Not a hundred Popes could have hindered it, unless Providence interposed by an effusion of divine grace on the hearts of men, which would amount to a miracle, and perhaps would interfere with human responsibility. The Pope has denounced the sentiment that he ought to come to terms with “progress, liberalism, and the new civilization.” I have no thought at all of disputing his words. I leave the great problem to the future. God will guide other Popes to act when Pius goes, as He has guided him. … All I know is, that Toryism, that is, loyalty to persons, “springs immortal in the human breast”; that religion is a spiritual loyalty; and that Catholicity is the only divine form of religion. And thus, in centuries to come, there may be found out some way of uniting what is free in the new structure of society with what is authoritative in the old, without any base compromise with “Progress” and “Liberalism.”[17]
Newman realised, what far too few of our contemporaries do, that theological and political liberalism are two sides of the same coin. The exclusion of divine revelation as a source of public policy and public law implies that divine revelation is either false or so irreducibly subjective that it can never be the basis of an objective legal order. Either claim is utterly fatal to the Catholic Church. The quotation from Pius IX which Newman is paraphrasing comes from the last condemned error of the Syllabus of Modern Errors issued at the same time as Quanta Cura. Pius X’s 1907 Syllabus Against the Errors of the Modernists self-consciously mirrored this condemnation with its own concluding condemnation of the proposition “Modern Catholicism can be reconciled with true science only if it is transformed into a non-dogmatic Christianity; that is to say, into a broad and liberal Protestantism.”[18]
Integralism: A Manual of Political Philosophy is intended to vindicate the truth that Catholicism is the only divine form of religion by beginning to explore how “some way” may be found “of uniting what is free in the new structure of society with what is authoritative in the old, without any base compromise with ‘Progress’ and ‘Liberalism.’” It upholds the fundamental moral philosophical claims on which Maritain’s theories were built and takes him at his word regarding an eventual cycle of culture in which the Christian sacral conception of society would prevail anew. It is, in short, a systematic rejection of rupturism and a vindication of the doctrine of the Second Vatican Council within the hermeneutic of reform in continuity.
I should like to conclude, if I may, with an observation of how concretely these new historic skies might come about. This is a question of prudence and discernment too concrete and particular for my co-author and I to engage in the text itself. Newman is, of course, right that it was cultural and technological development which rendered the Anglican supremacy unsustainable but he is also correct to insist that Catholicism as “the only divine form of religion” has resources it may call upon unavailable to those outside the “one fold of the Redeemer”.
Although the English-speaking world’s journey of faith began with the evangelisation of a barbarian king by a Benedictine monk, the Roman world that preceded it was won for the Cross in a period of high culture and literacy, integrated transportation and (relatively speaking) technological advancement. It was redeemed for Christ not with the assistance but in the teeth of the coercive power of the civil order.
The use of coercive power by the spiritual through the temporal power was ‘on the books’ from the late fourth century onwards. The spiritual power never formally sought execution but the temporal power began to treat a conviction for obstinate heresy as automatically constituting treason in civil law. The first heretic to be executed by a Christian ruler was Priscillian, sent to his death by the emperor Magnus Maximus in 385. Despite this, executions for heresy were vanishingly rare for the first thousand years of Christendom. A few occurred under Justinian in the sixth century and few more under Alexios Komnenos in the beginning of the twelfth century. Suddenly, at the beginning of the thirteenth century the practice exploded with hitherto undreamt of and frankly appalling levels of force which now all of a sudden seemed to be required to enforce doctrinal orthodoxy. Eventually the whole exercise became unsustainable and Christendom was consumed in the fires of the Reformation. What had changed? No doubt high culture and literacy, integrated transportation and technological advancement were important but these were also features of Byzantium and of the ancient world so they cannot tell the whole story.
Precisely the same period as saw this explosion of violence also saw the end of the election of bishops.[19] Far from being associated with excessive coercion, the ancient Church even after its establishment in the fourth century was a haven of republican values. As even the godless Gibbon admits,
The freedom of elections subsisted long after the legal establishment of Christianity and the subjects of Rome enjoyed in the church the privilege which they had lost in the republic, of choosing the magistrates whom they were bound to obey. As soon as a bishop had closed his eyes, the metropolitan issued a commission to one of his suffragans to administer the vacant see, and prepare, within a limited time the future election. The right of voting was vested in the inferior clergy, who were best qualified to judge of the merits of the candidates; in the senators or nobles of the city, all those who were distinguished by their rank and property; and finally in the whole body of the people, who on the appointed day flocked in multitudes from the most remote parts of the diocese […] The emperors as the guardians of public peace and as the first citizens of Rome and Constantinople, might effectually declare their wishes in the choice of a primate but those absolute monarchs respected the freedom of ecclesiastical elections, and, while they distributed and resumed the honours of the state and army, they allowed eighteen hundred perpetual magistrates to receive their important offices from the free suffrages of the people.[20]
The papacy began in the eleventh century to exercise on a routine basis (instead of as a last resort) the ordinary universal jurisdiction given it by divine law. It did so at first only to vindicate the freedom of election by the clergy and people of each diocese. Even the most implacable upholders of papal jurisdiction, such as Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida, insisted on this point “According to the decrees of the holy fathers, anyone who is consecrated as a bishop is first to be elected by the clergy, then requested by the people and finally consecrated by the bishops of the province with the approval of the metropolitan … Anyone who has been consecrated without conforming to all these three rules is not to be regarded as a true, undoubted, established bishop nor counted among the bishops canonically created and appointed.”[21]
Eventually, however, dioceses began to be handed out to absentee bishops as a means of funding the ever-expanding Roman curia and the prestige of the Holy See began a long and terrible decline. Soon, as its moral power waned, the national monarchies whose attempts to appoint bishops had originally provoked the newly assertive papacy, were able to blackmail the Holy See into appointing their own creatures to vacant sees. This arrangement endured even after the fall of the royal houses in the nineteenth century and ended only with the expansion of secularism in the twentieth. By then, however, the clergy had long ago become a self-perpetuating caste and the eucharistic discipline that underpins the visibility of the church as a social body united in faith and morals had been replaced by a Faustian bargain between clergy and laity: “you do not look into our faith and morals and we will not look into yours.” The passing of the concordatory order in the last century was not replaced therefore by a restoration of the ancient system of elections tempered and shaped by the vigorous exclusion from communion of heretics and notorious sinners. Instead, episcopal appointment was centralised to an unprecedented degree in Rome and the curia began to resemble FIFA, the International Olympic Committee or the UN. The consequence has been a near total collapse in conformity of doctrine and life, eucharistic discipline and the confidence of the faithful in their clergy and a near complete disappearance of the Social Kingship of Christ.
As Archbishop Aquila of Denver has recently taught in his passionate call for a return to ‘Eucharistic coherence’, “What fills our churches is not a soft-pedaling of the Gospel but deep, authentic belief in Jesus rooted in our personal love for him as our Lord and saviour. This is the model of the saints. They show us how faith in Jesus leads to a radical surrender to the will of the Father regardless of political or social consequences, no matter the cost, as witnessed in the martyrs of today.”
As I mentioned earlier, John Paul II was able to see beyond the dichotomy between authoritarian establishment and secular liberalism because he came from a country which had enjoyed established Catholicism, religious freedom and republican government throughout its golden age in the sixteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Nevertheless, the republicanism of Poland was purely civil it did not enjoy the ecclesiastical culture of the patristic age or of the Italian Republics of the High Middle Ages. In the encyclical Ut Unum Sint, St John Paul II suggested that the future of the Church might lie in a return to the structure of ecclesiastical government in the first millennium.[22] Here perhaps is the true route to a New Evangelisation of individuals, families and finally the whole of human society.
[1] CCC 2244
[2] Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, “Address to the Bishops of Chile”, 13th July 1988.
[3] Congregation to the Doctrine of the Faith, Doctrinal Commentary on the Concluding Formula of the Professio fidei, 29th June 1998.
[4] Vatican II, Dignitatis Humanae, 7th December 1965, §1.
[5] Dignitatis Humanae, §6.
[6] John Paul II, Centesimus Annus, 1st May 1991, §4.
[7] Acta Synodalia Sacrosancti Concilii Oecumenici Vaticani II, Volumen IV, Periodus quarta, pars II, 293.
[8] John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, 14th September 1998, §74.
[9] See: Etienne Gilson, Saint Thomas D’Aquin (Librairie Victor Lecoffre, 1925), Page 7 where he argues for “identité foncière d’un christianisme en qui l’humanisme tout entire se trouverait inclus et d’un humanisme intégral qui ne trouverait que dans le christianisme sa complete satisfaction”.
[10] Ralph McInerny, The Question of Christian Ethics (CUA, 1993).
[11] Jacques Maritain, Christianity and Democracy and the Rights of Man and Natural Law (Ignatius, 1986) 53-54.
[12] Etienne Gilson, Les Métamorphoses de la Cité de Dieu (J.Vrin, 1952), 290-291.
[13] John Paul II, Message on the occasion of the 1,200th Anniversary of the Imperial Coronation of Charlemagne by Leo III, 14th December 2000.
[14] CIC (1983) 1311.
[15] Jacques Maritain, Integral Humanism (Notre Dame, 1973), 209-210.
[16] Pius IX, Quanta Cura, 8th December 1864.
[17] John Henry Newman, Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching Vol. 2, (Longmans, Green and Co., 1900), 268.
[18] Pius X, Lamentabili Sane, 3rd July 1907.
[19] Editor’s note: We are not convinced by the theory of the importance of a particular method of choosing bishops propounded here, but think it is worth discussing.
[20] Edward Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Vol 3 (Everyman, 1993), 280.
[21] Brian Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State, 1050-1300 (University of Toronto Press, 1988), 40.
[22] John Paul II, Ut Unum Sint, 25th May 1995, §55.