Kevin Vallier, All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023)
1. What is integralism?
What is integralism? It is magisterial Catholic teaching about the nature and competence of legal authority. One especially comprehensive statement of this teaching was made in Immortale Dei by Leo XIII. The teaching is first that there are on this earth two potestates – two sovereign authorities for coercion (coercitio), meaning that they can impose legal obligations and enforce them with punishments (coercere). The Church is potestas for religion as the state is potestas for the civil order. And second, the state should recognise the Church as potestas for religion as the supreme good and, given that her people depend for their supreme happiness on religion, should be prepared to coerce for specifically religious ends – to make and enforce law to support religion as the supreme good. This could, for example, involve imposing taxes to support children’s education in the faith specifically because the faith is true. But because the Church alone has sovereign authority over religion, legislation for religious ends, in support of religious truth, requires the authority of the Church. The state can only coerce for religion as minister or agent of the Church. So Church and state cooperate, where religion is concerned under the authority of the Church, for the good of the population that they share, including the supreme good of their people’s salvation.
This Leonine ordering of Church and state as cooperating potestates is their proper ordering in that it enables them to meet their shared purpose – the flourishing of the people subject to their authority.
Of course, given human sin and unbelief, this proper and divinely ordained ordering of Church and state may not be a real possibility in the here and now. For our time, at least, God clearly has permitted the state’s detachment from the Church. The profound secularisation of modern political community is not likely soon to be reversed. So, whatever some might suppose, securing this Leonine ordering of Church and state may not currently be a plausible practical programme for the Church.
Even if securing a Leonine Church-state ordering is not a practical programme for us today, integralism cannot be dismissed. It is magisterial teaching about God’s will for legal authority. It explains the true nature of legal authority in general, that of the state as well as of the Church. For this very reason integralism provides the proper basis for criticism of Church-state relations, not only those of the present but those of the past as well. Many historical forms of the Christian state, within Catholicism as well as without, have been open to serious moral criticism. It is integralism that provides the right basis for this moral criticism, including of the Catholic Church’s own historical record – criticism for which integralism certainly leaves room.
Before we continue, an important point about the Latin terminology for coercion. There is the term coercitio with its corresponding verb coercere; but there is also coactio with its corresponding verb cogere. These terms can be used as rough equivalents to pick out coercion and compulsion broadly understood. But in Church teaching and canonical texts, coercitio and coactio can be and often are distinguished, to pick out two rather different ways in which someone may be coerced into X-ing. Then coercitio of X-ing, as I have used it and both the 1917 and 1983 Codes of Canon Law use it, means the enforcement of a directive to X by the threat of punishment should X not be done. And this is what I shall continue to mean by ‘coercion’ in what follows. While when specifically distinguished from coercitio, coactio of X-ing means what can also be termed violentia – the imposition of X-ing on someone invitus, by force and against their will.1
Coercitio of X-ing is of course by its very nature apt to involve a degree of coactio, in that someone who breaches the directive to X may find the resultant penalty being imposed on them irrespective of their will. But X-ing itself need not be imposed on them against their will. It may be perfectly open to them to take the penalty and still refuse to X; no one is forcing them not to do this. This means that coercitio of religion – the legal direction of religious belief and practice enforced by punishment – by no means implies the imposition on anyone of religion by violentia or coactio, that is a forcing of people into Catholicism against their will, or a retention of them within Catholicism against their will. From patristic writers such as Lactantius to the 1917 Code and in the encyclicals and allocutions of popes well before Vatican II, we find condemnation of violentia and coactio in religion – of the imposition of religion on people against their will. But this does not imply opposition to coercitio of religion – to the enforcement of directives for religious belief and practice by punishments, including such serious punishments as fines and imprisonment. This distinction between coercitio of religion, which may be acceptable, and coactio of religion, which certainly is not, is vital to understanding integralism and the Church’s true nature as a potestas.
Vatican II’s Dignitatis Humanae with its teaching of a right to religious liberty was drafted by theologians familiar with this distinction between coercitio and coactio and who understood the meaning of those teachings of previous popes, such as Pius XII and Leo XIII, that presupposed it. In the interpretive relationes explaining the declaration to the Council fathers and in replies to suggested amendments to the declaration, the drafting commission very consistently insisted both that the Church was the divinely instituted potestas coercitiva for religion, and that the declaration’s condemnation of coercitio of religion was consistent with this, being about coercitio ‘in the civil order’ or in ‘civil society’.2 The commission repeatedly insisted that the declaration did not address or teach about the legitimate authority, which was indeed coercitiva, of the Church within her proper jurisdiction for religion over the baptised – a point agreed immediately after the Council by such eminent but otherwise unallied Council periti as Yves Congar, a progressive, and Francis Connell, a relative conservative.3 At the same time the commission also firmly distanced the Church from all coactio of people into Catholicism, refusing to admit that the Church, or anyone else, was ever properly involved in it.
As we shall see, there is nothing novel or remarkable in the commission’s statements. They were simply respecting traditional teaching both about the liberty essential to religion and the legal authority of the Church as a religious potestas coercitiva. But some modern Catholic writers refuse to recognize the Church as a genuine potestas alongside the state, reading into Dignitatis Humanae and earlier teaching of Pius XII an allegedly corrective understanding of the Church’s authority as not really coercive after all.4 This revisionary anti-integralist project involves both legal philosophers and theologians; it depends on a liberal model of legal authority not only alien to Catholicism but implausible even for state coercion; and it involves a basic misunderstanding of traditional teaching, especially the traditional distinction between coercitio and coactio.
Vallier’s critical but thoughtful discussion of integralism provides a valuable opportunity to correct contemporary misunderstandings, even among Catholics, and to explain how the Church really can be what God established her to be – the potestas for faith.
2. Vallier’s justice argument against Catholic integralism
Could the Church really be a potestas as the state is? If she is not a genuine potestas, with sovereign authority over religion on this earth, integralism collapses. But if Kevin Vallier is right this view of the Church as potestas is incoherent.5 As a potestas, the Church is supposed to have a coercive jurisdiction based on baptism. But this view of baptism as marking a coercive jurisdiction involves what Vallier claims to be an inherently unjust combination of positions: unbaptised outside the faith cannot be coercively directed into it; yet those already baptised within it can be coercively directed to remain within the faith.
This might seem an incoherent mix – liberalism for the unbaptised but illiberalism for the baptised. If retention of the baptised within the faith is just, why not coercion of the unbaptised into the faith as well; and if justice does rule out coercion of the unbaptised into the faith, why does it permit coercion of the baptised to remain? Moreover, integralism, in treating the Christian state as a possible Christian brachium saeculare, an agent for the Church’s authority in matters of religion, draws the state into this incoherent structure: ‘it seems strange that states cannot force people into the faith but can make them remain in it, and odder still to think that baptism makes the difference’ (Vallier p208).
But is the traditional view of the Church’s coercive authority really an incoherent mixture of liberalism and illiberalism? It looks as though a version of the traditional view applies to coercive jurisdictions at the political level. States generally cannot legally coerce people outside their jurisdiction. But states can coercively direct people once they are within their jurisdiction, imposing obligations on individual citizens without their consent and then punishing their breach. So if the Church really is a potestas, why should her coercive jurisdiction work any differently?
Actually there is indeed an important difference for the case of the Church. Even as an adult one can come to fall under the jurisdiction of a state entirely without one’s consent. A treaty is signed to transfer your territory and you pass into a new state jurisdiction – without your consent. This can legitimately happen. But one cannot as an adult enter the Church’s jurisdiction without one’s consent; one’s uncoerced acceptance of the faith is required. Though, by contrast, infants can be baptised without their consent, and they can be bound by baptismal obligations thereafter. It seems there is an important consent requirement to entering ecclesial jurisdiction that lacks political parallel – but for adults, not infants. Why should this be so? And why is consent not equally important to remaining within the Church’s jurisdiction? Many would suppose that the need for uncoerced acceptance of the faith by adults reflects a deep incompatibility between faith and any sort of coercion. In which case how can the Church legitimately coerce anyone to retain the faith?
To resolve this one way or the other, we need a theory of legal authority and jurisdiction to see what possible forms they might take. Here there is an important lack in Vallier. He does not actually provide a worked out anti-integralist theory of legal authority. But this is going to be crucial. An earlier opponent of the idea of the Church as a potestas, Thomas Hobbes, did provide such a theory, as we shall see.
3. The liberal theory of authority
The appearance of a problem here really comes from applying a liberal theory of legal authority to the Church, when this theory does not even apply to states. There really is no such thing as the liberal state; but there is such a thing as liberal political philosophy and the liberal state is merely its imaginary and never-to-be-realised construction.
Modern liberal political and legal philosophy lack an adequate metaphysics either of human liberty or of the legal authority that both protects freedom as a right but also when necessary obligates freedom and subjects it to sanction-backed direction. Since Herbert Hart, the founder of modern analytic jurisprudence, theories of legal authority have ignored its involvement of forms of power or force that, unlike ordinary causation, are specific to rational nature. These Hartian and post-Hartian theories of authority constitute the working out of a metaphysically naturalistic programme in legal theory that goes back to Hobbes. No Catholic should ever accept this programme.
Central to much post-Hartian legal theory is an assumption, repeatedly insisted on by Hobbes, and by Locke after him, and reformulated very influentially in our day by Hart, that sanction-backed legal direction is properly of the voluntary – of what can be done or refrained from at will or by choice, simply in order to comply with legal direction and avoid sanctions.6 So there is no proper legal direction of belief – a psychological attitude which is not voluntary or subject to the will.
Vallier not only adheres to this consensus but assumes that integralism adheres to it too. He insists his case against integralism says nothing about the legal direction of belief itself, because, he claims, even integralists concede that the direct coercion of belief is not possible. Belief is a truth-directed attitude. But orders or commands to believe something are in themselves irrelevant to truth, as are threats of punishment. So belief itself cannot be coerced. Vallier claims (p90) that even integralists concede that there is only room for the coercive regulation of voluntary actions, actions that are subject to will and command. That does include voluntary actions that might influence belief; I might use legal direction to induce you to believe something by legally directing you to go and look at convincing evidence, which would then lead you to form the belief. But the belief itself is not voluntary or formable to command. So you can coerce belief indirectly – but not directly.
But this is to get the integralist understanding of legal direction very badly wrong. Vallier includes integralism within a thoroughly post-Hobbesian consensus about legal direction. Whereas integralism assumes a pre-Hobbesian theory of natural law and this brings with it a very different and thoroughly pre-Hobbesian view of legal direction.
The Church is a potestas for faith, so the coercive direction of belief itself is central to her jurisdiction, and the canon law of the Church provides for it. That is exactly what magisterial teaching involves: the Church not only teaches you that something is the case but imposes a canonical, legally enforceable obligation on you to believe it. This is an obligation specifically to believe. It is not an obligation to perform further voluntary actions that might somehow, indirectly, get you to believe.7
Hobbes thought the Church’s claim to be a potestas for religion over the baptised was absurd (and dangerous), but he clearly recognised that the coercion of belief was essential to her supposed legal authority. He rightly focused his critique of the Church as potestas specifically on her alleged legal direction of belief. The jurisdiction of the Church, if it really is a coercive jurisdiction belonging to a genuine potestas, is at the service of faith; and then a central exercise of that jurisdiction, if there is such a thing as an ecclesial jurisdiction, is going to be the coercive direction of belief itself. If belief cannot be so directed, the Church’s claim to be a potestas for faith is empty.
It is clear where the view that law is directive of the voluntary comes from. We find it in modern theorists of legal authority from Thomas Hobbes to Joseph Raz, and also the Catholic New Natural lawyer John Finnis. Legal authority is viewed as coordinative in function – it solves coordination problems. We all want security in life and property, transport, education, welfare – but provision of all these goods is so dependent on burdensome and complex cooperation as to give rise to serious problems of coordination. To solve these we need legal authority to determine cooperation and to deter free riding. We need the directive decision of authority to resolve the problem of how we are to cooperate; and we await this needed direction, being motivated and willing (within limits) to act however we are legally directed.8 But then legal direction really is only of the voluntary – of what we can do or refrain from doing at will, just because we have been directed so to do. And belief, central to religion, is certainly not voluntary in that way.9 Legal authority with its enforcing threats of sanction is one vast coordinative mechanism for ensuring satisfaction of widely shared desires. The Church as centrally a teacher and former of beliefs is plainly not that – so she is not a potestas.
This model of legal authority as coordinative, as serving to resolve coordination problems, has been vastly influential – as has the accompanying claim that you cannot directly coerce belief, a staple doctrine of the modern liberal tradition. Bernard Williams once noted (without entirely endorsing) as one ‘very important argument in favour of religious toleration’ that the coercion of belief is ‘essentially fruitless, because the forces of the state cannot reach a person’s centre of conviction’.10
Much in this modern picture of legal direction as coordinatory now comes decorated in the language of reason, state authority being described by contemporary liberal political philosophy as founded on terms of cooperation that are ‘reasonable’. But nothing of substance depends on this. The term ‘reasonable’ is being used now as a metaphysically empty term of approval. After all, this view of legal authority as coordinative of the voluntary was expounded with especial clarity and brilliance by David Hume without recourse to any such verbal decoration, Hume being in his metaphysics an avowed reason-sceptic.11
If the Church really is a potestas, as Leo XIII taught, that may be because legal authority, even at the level of the state, is not a purely coordinatory device exclusively directive of the voluntary. If legal authority can coerce such non-voluntary attitudes as belief, it must serve a purpose more fundamental than mere coordination. Perhaps the legal direction of belief, far from impossible or an aberration, exhibits legal authority’s true nature and real purpose. And this purpose may explain what might otherwise be puzzling about the Church’s authority and jurisdiction.
When the Church legally directs us to form a belief, she does so teaching that the belief legally required of us is true. So that may be what is central to legal coercion – teaching and witnessing to truth. Truth about what? Legal authority has jurisdiction over a community and it serves the good of that community. So it teaches its people about what matters to the flourishing of their community; it witnesses to the truth about what that flourishing involves, and to the obligation on each member of the community to be committed to that flourishing. And obedience to its direction occurs through a trusting reception of that witness: the legal authority is believed.
4. Legal authority as coercive teacher
Humans are both rational and social. Rationality as conceived in the Catholic tradition involves receptiveness to normative power – to divinely provided forces of truth and goodness that move us to form attitudes supported by these values and that are essential to our happiness. I use ‘normative power’ to mean a genuine form of power or force, productive of outcomes as is ordinary causation, but that unlike ordinary causation involves the power of a justifying value to produce, through potential objects of our psychological attitudes (so through mental objects that we entertain in thought), beliefs or motivations directed at those objects that the value supports. At the natural level normative power exists as the force of reason, to get us to believe what we have justification for thinking true, and wanting and deciding and pursuing objects – goals or ends – that we have justification for thinking good. So we have rationality as receptivity to a force or power specific to the rational mind – a force that moves us to form attitudes, beliefs and motivations, essential to our flourishing as human beings.
This metaphysics of reason is not a feature of contemporary philosophy, which as just noted treats reason as a standard of approval, but does not seriously seek to model it as a directive force. By contrast common sense does indeed take reason and the values basing it to constitute a directive force. We talk of the force of evidence and argument sometimes as overwhelming and compelling our belief, or the goodness or desirability of a possible outcome as attracting and inclining us to desire it or to decide on it as our goal. The more reasonable someone is, the more susceptible they are to the force of reason and apt to be moved by it in their beliefs, in their desires and in their decisions. But this force of reason passes non-rational nature entirely by. Catholic scholasticism long accepted this view of reason as a normative power specific to rational nature, without which there could be no theory of a moving power of grace as its supernatural elevation – a point to which we shall return.12
Our social nature means that our happiness depends on being committed members of a flourishing community that is complete and public, that extends beyond private connexions, to involve many who are not already our friends, relations, enemies or otherwise particularly connected to us. As members of this community we are committed to others just as fellow-citizens; each of us depends for our own happiness on the others to contribute to the community’s flourishing, and we are obligated to each other and to the community and its governing authority independently of our consent. This obligation is grounded just on our co-existence as fellow citizens in a political community on which we all depend.
This obligation does not depend on what modern political philosophy often uses to explain political obligation. It does not depend on factors that may matter greatly to private association – consent, or gratitude towards others, or standards of fair play or associative attitudes. Vallier shows that that none of these explains baptismal obligation. But that is hardly surprising; they do not explain political obligation either.
The flourishing of the community and people’s happiness within it deeply depends on their responsiveness to reason. It depends on members generally holding those attitudes that reason supports as vital to our social nature. These attitudes involve a proper understanding of the nature and dignity of others and of our obligations to them as our fellow citizens. And they involve too an understanding of communally required institutions; so (for example) an understanding not just of goods and needs for goods in those to whom we have private connexion, but of property as a public institution involving people with whom we have no such connexion. The function of political authority and its legal direction is to facilitate this understanding and reinforce it – to facilitate our response to reason as it concerns the bonum commune, the common good of a complete human community. Authority does this by witnessing to what constitutes the bonum commune and what it justifies.
The state and its legal authority serves as a coercive teacher. As witnessing to the bonum commune, the state’s legal direction and its accompanying sanctions are communicative – they serve to inculcate understanding of what the bonum commune involves and a motivation to pursue it. The direction of the law serves to produce not simply a coordinated pattern of voluntary actions, but shared attitudes, beliefs and motivations that are not voluntary, so not subject to brute command or will, but which are responsive to truth and goodness and to authoritative witness given for that truth and goodness.
Since legal direction is communicative, the authority behind it is importantly epistemic. The obedience of its citizens standardly involves taking the state to be a credible witness for what the bonum commune requires. And an at least presumptive degree of epistemic trust in political authority is normal – it comes with human nature.
Take the case of property. The civil law that criminalises theft functions not only to guide actions that are directly subject to will and to brute command, such as whether we steal, but belief. The law with its accompanying threats of punishment witnesses to citizens that theft is wrong morally, and sufficiently damaging to the community as to deserve punishment. The judge who sentences the thief to prison will often announce the penalty as ‘sending a message’ – that theft is a very serious violation of the moral rights of others. The law serves to ensure that the law-abiding generally refrain from theft not simply out of fear of sanction or penalty, but out of genuine belief in its moral wrongness. In prohibiting and punishing theft the state is obviously not imposing some arbitrary rule. It witnesses to a prior moral reality – to the moral importance of property rights and to the damage to the community of their violation. And citizens generally comply with the state law on theft through accepting that witness and believing it.
The communicative nature of law allows for the legal direction of belief itself – or what, even if not formally presented as such, clearly amounts to the same. Obviously as Hobbes and his successors have insisted, we cannot form beliefs to order, just to fulfil a command so to believe, or simply to avoid sanctions for not so doing. Commands and threats of punishment in themselves are irrelevant to truth, but belief is a truth-responsive state. So if a state authority legally directs and obligates us to believe something, it cannot be asking us just to obey a brute command. It is directing us towards truth: its directive presents us with its witness to that truth, to which we are to respond as we would to any witness in whom we trust. What moves us to believe is not mere fear of sanction, but the force of reason mediated by this witness. Beyond the truth communicated, coercion – the imposition of obligation and the threat of punishment for non-compliance – serves a further communicative function. It communicates the vital importance to the community that certain truths be generally acknowledged, and the great damage done to that community by doubt or disbelief in them.
In the past, states used coercive direction to witness to religious truths.13 In much of modern continental Europe, the state now uses coercion to witness to the truth that the Holocaust did happen, disbelief in the Holocaust being seen as a malign vehicle of anti-Semitism and so as pernicious to human community as religious unbelief once was viewed to be. Expression of that disbelief is legally forbidden and subject to punishment accordingly. This is not an attempt to coerce belief indirectly, regulating voluntary action as means to the indirect production of belief that the Holocaust did happen. Stopping someone from publicly denying the Holocaust certainly won’t itself make them believe it happened. Nor is the state legally directing people to perform such belief-inducing voluntary actions as consulting evidence proving that the Holocaust did happen. The state is instead using its legal direction to provide witness – both to the truth that the Holocaust really happened, and to the seriousness of the damage to the community from disbelief in it, damage sufficient to warrant punishing that disbelief’s expression in the external forum. Even if not formally presented as laws on belief, Holocaust denial laws effectively operate as modern heresy laws; they similarly employ coercive direction to witness to communally vital truth by policing the public expression of belief.
The use of legal direction to witness to truth and thereby form belief is not an unintelligible or ‘medieval’ aberration but an historically normal feature of human legal systems. And there is a view of legal direction and its power to produce compliance that explains this – the view of legal direction characteristic of natural law theory in its classical, pre-Hobbesian form.
A central question that any philosophy of law must address is how legal direction ever moves us to comply. The imposition by authorities on those within their jurisdiction of legal obligations to do this or that is not mere sounding off. Its function is to secure compliance – to produce performance of the action directed. That plainly involves the operation of a power or force – a capacity to produce outcomes. But what kind of power?
The post-Hobbesian model of law as coordinatory allows the power that produces compliance to be exclusively ordinary causation – the only form of power in which Hobbes believed, and operative uniformly throughout nature, whether rational or non-rational, whether to produce human behaviour or the motions of inanimate matter. Cognition of a specific legal directive engages our already existing motivation or will to act however the law directs (like many modern philosophers Hobbes took mental states to be ordinary causes, indeed entirely material causes) and compliance follows through their effect. For classical natural law the force by which human law primarily moves compliance is rather different. It is not causation operating through existing attitudes as ordinary causes on what is voluntary, but a force of reason specific to the rational mind to produce attitudes that are not voluntary. Authority serves as a witness mediating this force, representing truth and goodness to us, and facilitating our response to these values in attitudes that they justify.14
In fact, on this classical natural law view, legal direction involves two metaphysical powers specific to rational nature. One that we have already been discussing is a power of reason productive in us of attitudes. As Aquinas said: law in general, not only human law but natural law itself which is reason in obligatory form, is an ‘external principle’ of action – productive of action that conforms to law.15 So natural law is itself an action-directive and -productive force. Human law at the political level serves to mediate and apply this force of natural law – this force of reason.
The other power is freedom: a power of control over alternatives that we exercise contingently and that is sharply to be distinguished from voluntariness – from a simple capacity to do things as an effect of a will or desire to do them. Freedom as a power over alternatives can be exercised non-voluntarily, as direct control of non-voluntary attitudes – such as, within limits, what we believe and what we intend. Just as it is to a degree up to us what we do to others at the level of our voluntary actions, so it may to a degree be immediately up to us whether we intend evil to them or conceive of them in terms that are contemptible and disregarding. So too within limits it can be up to us what we believe religiously.
Without immediate power over some of our belief we could never be directly responsible morally (or legally) for what we believe, and directly subject to obligations to believe. Without this power the act of faith could not be what Catholic teaching takes it to be – a metaphysically free act, not only an object of obligation but a source of merit. But this is a view of belief and our power over it that we seem ordinarily to assume when we blame people and hold them directly responsible, as indeed we sometimes do, not just for their racist voluntary actions in disregard of others but also for what animates and motivates these – their racist and equally disregarding beliefs about those they mistreat, and their intention so to mistreat them.16
The use of coercion to form belief, even directly to regulate belief itself, may seem oppressive to some liberals. Does it not offend rights of conscience, and must not conscience be uncoercedly free? But the value of conscience is better recognised by the use of law to form and direct it, than by the restriction of conscience to a sphere of the ‘private’ supposedly beyond the state’s concern. A state that was content just to impose voluntary actions on its citizens while entirely disregarding their consciences really would be a state that failed to respect conscience. But states, coercive teachers as they are, certainly do not disregard the consciences of their citizens, using coercive direction carefully to form them. A state that failed so to form the conscience of its people, that relied solely on fear of sanctions, would find even direction of the voluntary very difficult. To prevent theft through threats of punishment alone, with no reliance on a widespread conviction that theft is immoral, would require unusual and very expensive powers of detection and fearful punishments – punishments more fearful, perhaps, than morality and desert allow. No wonder that a sophisticated liberal such as Rawls conceded the need for limits to liberty of conscience:
Liberty of conscience is limited, everyone agrees, by the common interest in public order and security (A Theory of Justice p186).
Only an unthinking liberalism supposes that there is an unrestrained liberty of conscience – that the state cannot legitimately coerce the consciences of its citizens. Such coercion amounts not to disregard for conscience but to genuine respect for it, marking the importance of the proper formation of conscience to a flourishing political community.
Besides the state, the Church is a respecter of conscience too. After all, the Church is the potestas for faith. Given the necessity of belief to salvation, the Church is even more focussed than the state both on the legal direction of belief and on the moral importance of conscience. Catholicism has long taught the legitimacy of the coercive direction of belief, while at the same time also morally condemning action against conscience. The Church has especially condemned coactio or violentia of religion – the use of force to impose participation in the sacraments against their conscience on the still unwilling and unbelieving. She only values participation in worship and the sacraments if it is based on genuine faith:17
Hence they most certainly do not become Christians who though unbelieving are forced to go into a church, to approach the altar and to receive the sacraments; for the faith without which it is impossible to please God is an entirely free ‘submission of intellect and will’ (Pius XII Mystici Corporis 1943).
The coercive direction of belief, as a witnessing to truth, is about producing belief as a genuine and sincere response to supernatural truth, not the imposition of an external conformity in religion against their conscience on the unbelieving. Far from undermining the coercion of belief, the necessity of faith both for salvation and for any worthwhile conformity to ecclesial authority leaves the Church’s coercive direction of belief the more important – the more essential to the legal order of religion governed by the Church.18
So legal authority is about facilitating our responsiveness to normative power, ensuring our common possession of certain attitudes – those shared beliefs and motivations essential to the flourishing of a complete human community. In this, legal authority depends on our responding to it as an authoritative witness to truth and goodness in relation to the bonum commune – the flourishing of that community.
Suppose then God destines us for a higher and supreme level of happiness transcending our natural capacities, still involving but now elevating our human nature and so still involving but now elevating our rational and social nature. To provide for this he correspondingly elevates the legal authority on which human society depends. Again we pursue our happiness through living in a potestas-governed community of shared attitudes, this time a supernaturally oriented ecclesial community, over which he provides for another sovereign legal authority, that of the Church. As the civil authority of the state facilitates and enables our response to normative power in its natural form, inculcating attitudes vital to the bonum commune that we would not have otherwise been so ready to form, so the canonical authority of the Church facilitates our response to a higher form of normative power, that of grace, to form supernatural beliefs and motivations that without grace we would certainly not otherwise have been able to form. And central to the canonical direction of the Church is the coercion of belief. As we have already seen, magisterial teaching involves just this.
Why does God give the Church a jurisdiction based on baptism? Baptism initiates the sacramental communication of grace, which centrally comes to us through the sacraments; and the legal authority of the Church is at the service of the communication of grace. So if legal authority is all about facilitating our response to normative power it is hardly arbitrary that it should be baptism that puts us under the Church’s jurisdiction as the authority for grace.
Why are baptised believers coercively directed to retain the faith? Because as baptised they are part of a ‘political’ community, but one oriented supernaturally, the ecclesial community; retention of the faith by members is essential to that community’s flourishing, a community on which the supernatural happiness of each member depends; and this again bases obligations on each member to that community and to their fellow members that do not depend at all on their continuing consent. Coercive direction of the baptised to believe what the Church teaches communicates these teachings both as true and as truths acknowledgement of which is vital to the ecclesial community, doubt or denial of which is deeply damaging to it – just as ethnic hatred and contempt are damaging to community at the natural level.
Why not coercively direct those who do not yet believe and who are unbaptised into believing? As we have seen, there is good reason why baptism does mark the Church’s jurisdiction; and no authority has a right legally to direct those outside its jurisdiction. But we have also seen that there is something else which distinguishes the case of the Church. This is a consent condition on the entry of adults into the jurisdiction of the Church. What explains this consent condition? Does it show, as Vallier’s argument might suggest, and people nowadays often suppose, that there is some inherent incompatibility between faith and coercive legal direction? Certainly not; rather it has to do with what is required for the coercive legal direction of belief to be effective – for the legal direction of our belief by the Church to move us to comply.
The legal direction of belief depends on those directed taking legal authority to be epistemically authoritative. Since legal authority directs its people by witnessing to truth, to succeed in forming and directing their beliefs legal authority must be received and trusted by its people as indeed a credible witness to the truth of what it teaches. This applies to the legal authority of the state. But it applies to the legal authority of the Church too. Unless the Church is already taken to be epistemically authoritative both for the various truths she claims and for the importance of belief in them, her direction to believe them as a matter of obligation cannot be effective law.
Our disposition to treat the state as an authoritative witness to the bonum commune is natural. It is part of human nature to afford political authority such presumptive respect and this requires no special moment of conversion. But in the case of the Church acknowledgment of her as an authoritative witness must be granted us gratuitously, through grace. It already involves assent to revelation. The credibility of the Church as a witness depends on revelation both about Christ and about the Church’s unique relation to him, as founded by him to continue and interpret his saving mission – revelation which explains why she is indeed the authoritative witness that she claims to be. Accepting the Church’s authority as witness involves assenting to this revelation.
Such assent already amounts to entry into the faith; but as a presupposition of our responding to the Church’s teaching as directive law, this assent cannot itself occur as such a response. It cannot be an acceptance of the faith that is legally coerced. Recognition of the Church’s authority as witness may precede our moral or legal responsibility, as in those baptised from infancy who grow up with a presumptive trust in ecclesial authority. But in an adult who is already responsible but does not yet believe it must come from an uncoerced conversion – an initial acceptance of the faith that is both free metaphysically but not imposed on them through law. And this faith in adults is a condition of their baptism and entry into the Church’s jurisdiction – because the Church’s jurisdiction is at the service of faith and, as we have seen, receipt by the disbelieving of her sacraments is an abuse of them.
5. Integralism as a critical theory
The Church’s exercise of her legal authority has often been unjust. Not everything about her painted as black has been a legend, and integralism is not in the business of claiming otherwise. It would be quite wrong to tie integralism to a supposed moral infallibility of ecclesial legislation.19 Rather integralism explains where problems with the morality of ecclesial legislation may really lie – but other than by relying on a liberal myth of some absolute right to liberty of belief and conscience, which states have never respected in relation to what they take to be truths that really matter. There is no such right, not even in the case of religion; otherwise the Church would not be, as Leo XIII taught and the drafters of Dignitatis Humanae agreed, the divinely instituted potestas coercitiva for religion. But though the Church has the authority to coerce religiously, integralism both allows that her exercise of that authority might be unjust and better explains what that injustice would involve.
Punishment for canonical crimes such as heresy and apostasy may legitimately involve punishment of those baptised who now entirely deny the Church to be any epistemic authority to truth and goodness. If those punished are genuinely culpable for their disbelief in the Church’s epistemic authority (and in further revealed truths), holding them canonically or legally responsible for their heresy and imposing punishment could be just. The punishment could be deserved, and it might be very necessary to communicating the importance of fidelity, not least to other members of the Church. Heresy is gravely damaging to the community of the Church, as theft and racism are damaging to political community. But culpability should not too readily be assumed; and the communicative efficacy of the punishment should be carefully considered.
Many baptised have been so detached through upbringing, culture or sheer alienation from the Church as to leave their failure to acknowledge her authority as a credible witness entirely to be expected – and very plausibly not culpable. Nineteenth-century Catholic theology at its official level had come fully to recognise this, as the writings on this topic of eminent figures such as Manning and Ketteler clearly show, likewise the then growing popularity of references to an excusing ‘invincible ignorance’. It is hard to deny that much earlier punishment for heresy of baptised Protestants may well have been very unjust just on grounds of their non-culpability.
Culpability is not the only issue. Any punishment has to further the Church’s mission, which centres on communication of a saving message. The point of punishment is not simply to punish the culpable, but along with the legal direction it enforces, to communicate. Now this saving message does not simply concern ecclesial obligations, which are derivative, but focuses on the basis of these obligations in a fundamental duty of love. Punishment must not block what is central to the Church’s message – that our obligations to the ecclesial community are based on love, both of us for others and of the ecclesial community and community for us. Now it would be a very naive liberalism indeed that supposed love and punishment, even the kinds of punishment imposed by states, to be inconsistent in themselves. But it is arguable that the especially brutal sanctions of the past were, to say the least, apt to block any message to do with love. And in so blocking communication of the Church’s central message, these punishments would not be effective in conveying right belief. They would fail precisely as a coercion of belief. Moreover, the threat of these punishments could well be sufficient to compel a merely external conformity, terror of them removing many people’s power not to conform at least externally whatever their belief. The brutal punishments would then be imposing religion other than by the communication of genuine belief. And this would amount to unchristian violentia, not Christian integralism.
6. Conclusion
We can explain why the Church can never coerce people into the faith; why, in particular, there is a consent condition, a need for free acceptance of the faith as a condition of adult entry into the Church. But to explain why this is, we need to abandon the designedly anti-integralist account of legal authority and its function left to us by Hobbes and that still dominates contemporary jurisprudence and political theory, including that of many Catholics. We need instead to understand each potestas of Church and state as a coercive teacher, which the state plainly is, and which the Church also is under Catholic doctrine. The use of coercion to form belief and conscience is essential to legal authority, not an abuse of it.
The Church and the state exercise a coercive jurisdiction essential to the happiness of those within their community – a happiness that depends in turn on the commitment to that community of its members, a commitment that involves obligations on those members to their fellows. These obligations no more depend on those members’ continuing consent than do obligations to one’s neighbour generally, of which these political and ecclesial obligations are specific kinds. That adult entry into the jurisdiction of the Church is by free consent does not show at all that that the Church is not a potestas, nor does it show that belief excludes coercion. It reflects the fact that the Church is a potestas for a faith that is revealed. She is a coercive teacher whose authority and witness is supernatural rather than natural.
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- For example, in his authoritative and much reprinted Compendium Iuris Publici Ecclesiastici (4th edition 1954) Pius XII’s pro-secretary for the Holy Office Cardinal Ottaviani distinguishes between coercitio and coactio, the latter being a compulsion of the unwilling (p.64). ↩︎
- For references to the relevant relationes in the Council Acta see my ‘Dignitatis Humanae: continuity after Leo XIII’ ↩︎
- See Yves Congar in Vatican II: La Liberté Religieuse p13; and Francis J. Connell ‘The Church’s coercive power’ pp346-7. The two acted as periti throughout the Council. They make the same point about what the declaration does not address, though in terms suggestive of rather different theologies. Congar notes:
“Some would have wished that the declaration had contained a paragraph on liberty in the Church. [This question was excluded.] Not only would it have added to motives for opposing the declaration, not only would it have involved engagement in a delicate question which does not admit of simplification, not only would one have added to the pastoral difficulties that the text already brought wiacth it, but one would have again confused distinct questions. One must not on any account merge questions to do with civil and social liberty and highly complex questions of conduct within the Church. That would have been deeply imprudent and dangerous.”
Connell notes:
“The Declaration says nothing about the coercive power of the Catholic Church with regard to those subject to her authority. Hence, the traditional doctrine on this point remains unchanged -namely, that the Church possesses legislative, judicial, and executive power in spiritual matters over those persons who are subject to her authority by virtue of their baptismal character. This includes a measure of punitive and coercive power toward those of her subjects who fail against the law of God or the law of the Church…Strictly speaking, the Church has the right to inflict corporal punishments, such as fasting or even imprisonment, though she does not use such penalties today. In these days, when so much is said about religious liberty, it is well to bear in mind that, while the Church respects the dignity of the human person, she does not believe that those subject to her spiritual authority possess full freedom in their choice of religious creeds or practices.”
↩︎ - See, discussed below, Dunnigan, Religious Liberty and the Hermeneutic of Continuity; Finnis, ‘John Finnis on Thomas Pink’, in Reason, Morality and Law; Guminski and Harrison, Religious Freedom: Did Vatican II Contradict Traditional Catholic Doctrine? A Debate. ↩︎
- See Vallier, All the Kingdoms of the World, chapter 6, ‘Justice’. ↩︎
- For Hobbes see below; for Herbert Hart’s very influential modern formulation of the link of legal coercion to the voluntary, see his famous theory of sanction-backed law as a fair choosing system:
“…what a legal system that makes liability generally depend on excusing conditions does is guide individuals’ choices as to behaviour by presenting them with reasons for exercising choice in the direction of obedience, but leaving them to choose” (Hart, Punishment and Responsibility, p44). ↩︎ - See the 1983 Code of Canon Law, which in canons 750-54 legally obligates belief in magisterial teaching, footnoting the teaching on the authority of the magisterium of Lumen Gentium of Vatican II. Canon 751 defines the crimes of heresy and apostasy as breaches of these obligations. For the general authority for the Church to impose punishment, temporal as well as spiritual, on the baptised for breach of canonical obligation, see canons 1311-12. Canon 1311 asserts the Church’s ‘right to coerce (coercere) offending baptised with penal sanctions’. This formulation, and reference to penalties both spiritual and temporal, is also to be found in canon 2214 in the 1917 Code of Canon Law. ↩︎
- This view of legal direction as coordinatory is central to Leviathan. John Finnis and Joseph Raz are prominent defenders of the view today. Finnis states it repeatedly: in Natural Law and Natural Rights in chapter 9, section 9.1 ‘The Need for Authority’, where legal authority is explained as providing a much needed ‘stipulation for action’ or ‘say-so’ to decide between rival cooperative plans – see pp231-2 and p246; in ‘Law’s authority and social theory’s predicament’ (Finnis Philosophy of Law p61) where he observes ‘Political authority has its most thorough explanation as the source of solutions to coordination-problems’; and in ‘Law as coordination’ (Philosophy of Law p66) where he begins ‘Recent writings by, for example, Raz, Postema, Gans, and myself offer to explain law’s authority by law’s function as providing solutions to coordination problems’. This passage references Raz’s appeal to the coordinatory function of legal authority to show that legal direction provides exclusionary reasons for action:
“Our purpose is to show that if authority is to be justified by the requirements of co-ordination we must regard authoritative utterances as exclusionary reasons. The proof is contained in the classical analysis of authority. Authority can secure co-ordination only if the individuals concerned defer to its judgement and do not act on the balance of reasons, but on the authority’s instructions. This guarantees that all will participate in one plan of action, that action will be co-ordinated. But it requires that people should regard authoritative utterances as exclusionary reasons, as reasons for not acting on the balance of reasons as they see it even when they are right” (Joseph Raz, Practical Reason and Norms p64). ↩︎ - A model of legal direction as addressing a will to act however one is directed was proposed by Hobbes in The Elements of Law p68; and in Leviathan pp398 and p414. In Leviathan Hobbes then relied on this tie of legal direction to voluntariness to deny, repeatedly, the legal direction of belief:
“As for the inward thought, and beleef of men, which humane Governours can take no notice of, (for God onely knoweth the heart) they are not voluntary, nor the effect of the laws, but of the unrevealed will, and of the power of God; and consequently fall not under obligation. p738…But what (may some object) if a King, or a Senate, or other Soveraign Person forbid us to believe in Christ? To this I answer, that such forbidding is of no effect; because Beleef, and Unbeleef never follow mens Commands. Faith is a gift of God, which Man can neither give, nor take away by promises of rewards, or menaces of torture. p784…Nay more, a Christian King, as a Pastor, and Teacher of his Subjects, makes not thereby his Doctrines Laws. He cannot oblige men to beleeve” (p894). ↩︎ - See Bernard Williams ‘Toleration, a political or moral question’ in his collection In the Beginning was the Deed ed. G. Hawthorn, (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2005) at pp133-4. ↩︎
- See Hume’s theory of political obligation as an artificial virtue of conformity to mutually advantageous convention, A Treatise of Human Nature, book 3, part 2 ‘Of justice and injustice’ pp477-573. ↩︎
- Models of reason and grace as natural or elevating forms of normative power occur throughout early modern scholasticism, Protestant as well as Catholic. See, for example, the discussion of reason in terms of Aristotelian causation in Suarez’s Metaphysical Disputations and similarly of grace in his De Gratia.
The existence of forms of power or force specific to rational nature was consistently denied by Hobbes, in his critical Examinatio of Thomas White’s De Mundo, in the debate with Bramhall in The Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance, and in De Corpore. This denial was essential to Leviathan and its attack on the very possibility of the Church as a coercive potestas.
For early modern scholastic theories of reason and grace see my ‘Final causation’; for the relevance of early modern debates about the metaphysics of causation and force to political theory see my ‘Suarez on authority as coercive teacher’ and the introduction to my forthcoming edition of The Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance for the Clarendon edition of the works of Hobbes. ↩︎ - Not only Catholic states were involved. Much to Hobbes’s dismay and disapproval, heresy (now determined by Anglican criteria) survived the Reformation to his day as still a punishable crime under English law. For discussion of heresy as a crime under the laws of England after the Reformation as well as before, see the introduction to Thomas Hobbes: Writings on Common Law and Hereditary Right eds. Alan Cromartie and Quentin Skinner (Oxford: Clarendon Press 2005). ↩︎
- Of course the classical natural law tradition well understood the state’s legal direction also to play a coordinatory role. But this role was secondary to law’s teaching function. Before directing us to cooperate this way rather than that, law first teaches us both to understand the value of cooperation founded on obligation to political community, and to be motivated to pursue it so understood. ↩︎
- See Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1.2 q 90 ‘On the essence of law’ (ed. P. Caramello, Rome: Marietti 1950) p410. ↩︎
- See my Self-Determination (Oxford 2016) for the importance to moral responsibility of freedom as a power to determine outcomes contingently that can be directly exercised over non-voluntary attitudes. The very idea of a freedom of will – of decision and intention – implies that freedom or control is exercisable immediately over the non-voluntary. For intention is just as non-voluntary an attitude as belief, as Kavka’s famous toxin-puzzle illustrates (see Gregory Kavka, ‘The toxin puzzle’). As Hobbes rightly observed, using ‘willing’ for’ intending’:
“I acknowledge this liberty, that I can do if I will, but to say, I can will if I will, I take to be an absurd speech” (Questions p29).
For an account of obligation as directive of freedom rather than the voluntary, and of applying immediately to non-voluntary motivation, see my ‘Law and the normativity of obligation’, which also treats of the importance of such a conception of obligation to the classical natural law tradition.
It is unfortunate not only that Vallier seeks to dismiss the legal direction of belief as irrelevant to integralism, but that he does so based on the claim that we never directly control what we believe:
“I have chosen not to examine the famous “coercion” argument against religious intolerance. The familiar line runs as follows: Yes, if we could forcibly change the beliefs of others, such coercion might be justified. After all, coercion could produce beliefs that save souls! But coercing belief doesn’t work because we humans lack any direct control over our own beliefs. Direct coercion of belief harms us without any benefit. Integralists do not dispute this point; indeed, they oppose the direct coercion of belief, even for the baptized” (Vallier p90).
Not only is the denial of freedom of belief deeply contentious, and flat contrary to Catholic teaching and canon law. It misrepresents the original case against the legal direction of belief which, in Hobbes and his successors, appealed to the non-voluntariness of belief. It was the (accurate) thought that we clearly cannot form beliefs just to order or command that based early modern scepticism about the legal direction of belief.
The issue was to a degree clouded by Locke’s and subsequent English-language compatibilism’s attempt to retain an idea of freedom as a kind of power by (very implausibly) identifying it with voluntariness: freedom is supposedly a capacity to act or not as we will. Hobbes never took this view. He denied that voluntariness amounted to a power of freedom. Hobbes thought the very idea of a power of freedom or control was anyway quite absurd, and that political and legal theory should never appeal to it – as in his case against the legal direction of belief he never did. ↩︎ - Pius XII elsewhere condemned the retention of people within the Church by force against their will (see Allocution to the Roman Rota 6 October 1946). ↩︎
- There are recent Catholic writers who, disregarding repeated relationes of the drafting commission and the view of Council periti such Congar and Connell, seek to read Dignitatis Humanae of Vatican II as addressing and condemning all forms of religious coercion, including that under the legitimate authority of the Church. Since Dignitatis Humanae cites Pius XII’s outright condemnations of any imposition of religion by force, these writers often try to base their reading of Dignitatis Humanae on these citations of Pius XII. They accordingly read Pius XII’s outright condemnations of any imposition of religion by force as denying, by implication at least, the Church any genuine authority to direct coercively, whether to impose serious punishments on the errant baptised, or in imposing them to use a Catholic state as her punitive minister or agent. The ‘coercive’ power of the Church is supposedly not really coercive; at any rate it is not coercive like that of the state, and so cannot extend to using coercive state law to enforce her authority. For a very recent example, see Dunnigan, Religious Liberty and the Hermeneutic of Continuity (pp.346-9 and 435-40).
But this interpretation of his teaching would have astonished Pius XII. Pius XII’s statements are clearly condemnations, not of the Church’s legal coercitio of religion, but of coactio or violentia, understood as the imposition of religion on the unwilling. Both in Mystici Corporis and in the 1946 Allocution, Pius consistently bases his teaching on canon 1351 of the 1917 Code that forbids coactio of someone into embracing the faith invitus – against their will; and he understands this imposition as a forcing of people to participate in worship and the sacraments without genuine belief. As Pius XII observes, genuine belief and a will properly informed by it can arise only through persuasion of the truth, not through coactio or violentia that bypasses truth. But we have seen that the Church’s coercitio of belief does not bypass truth at all or impose religion on the unbelieving and unwilling; its function is to persuade by its witness to the truth, through that witness producing the required belief and will. The point of coercitio is of course not to impose religious participation on the unbelieving and unwilling, but to use legal direction to ensure that members of the Church meet obligations on their belief, and, when the good of the community requires, to punish culpable breach of those obligations. In the case of someone’s culpable disbelief, any necessary punishment should certainly not involve the forcible imposition of religion on them against their will.
In his Compendium, Pius’s doctrinal advisor Ottaviani made these very points. He insists with canon 1351 that religion is not to be imposed through coactio on the unwilling, but that the Church properly uses coercitio to enforce religious obligations, such as punishing someone baptised for culpable heresy, not to impose religion on anyone by force but to protect the ecclesial community:
“Hence the Church does not impose religion on souls that are unwilling but conveys it to those that are instructed and willing; the deeds she punishes in heretics have been damaging to the public order [of the ecclesial community] and are to be coerced (coercenda) by the law of the community” (Compendium p300).
Far from the Church’s outright condemnation of coactio in religion excluding the state and its law from assisting the Church’s religious coercitio, Ottaviani consistently defends the Church’s legitimate use of the Catholic state as her assistant punitive minister or agent in enforcing her potestas coercitiva over religion (pp191 and 364) – something specifically provided for by the 1917 Code in canon 2198. (Ottaviani cites on pp190-1 the still extant provision for this ministerial function of the state in some Church-state concordats of his time.)
So both the 1917 Code and Ottaviani combined condemnation of the coactio of religion with integralism. This is consistent. Consider the Church’s punitive dismissal of a theologian from all ecclesial educational employment for culpable heresy. No matter that this penalty might be very costly to the theologian, this clearly would not amount to coactio of religion – a forcible retention of the theologian within Catholicism against his belief and will. But no more would that theologian count as being forcibly so retained if a publicly Catholic state, to drive home the message of the theologian’s serious wrongdoing and protect the faith of its political community, punitively banned the theologian from any educational employment in its country. There simply is no general identity between the use of the power of the state to support the Church’s coercitio of religion and coactio of religion on the unwilling.
Because official theologians at Vatican II relied on the canonical tradition just as did Pius XII and Ottaviani, Dunnigan’s misinterpretation of that tradition leads to equally basic misinterpretation of the official relationes of the Council commission that drafted Dignitatis Humanae. In this he follows others (see also Finnis Reason, Morality and Law p571, and Guminski and Harrison Religious Freedom p232). Like these others Dunnigan makes much of the commission’s insistence (against a suggested amendment) that though the Church was indeed a potestas coercitiva in matters of religion as the commission explicitly agreed, she did not impose coactio (Dunnigan pp348-9). With Finnis and the others, he suggests that along with Dignitatis Humanae’s footnoting of Pius XII’s teaching against the coactio of religion, this rejection of specifically ecclesial coactio shows that the drafting commission clearly intended the declaration to condemn all (serious) legal coercion of religion, even that involving the authority of the Church over the baptised.
But the commission’s rejection of ecclesial coactio shows nothing of the kind. Coming with no further explanation (there is none) it is obviously no more than the conventional distinction of the Church’s use of coercion from any forcing of people into religious acts against their conscience. Ottaviani had made the same point earlier in the Council, speaking of ‘the principle that always held within the Church that no one is to be cogendus (forced unwillingly or against their conscience) into religion’ (Acta p375). And in reference to adults Dignitatis Humanae consistently uses cogere and the like for forcing action against conscience. There is nothing here to correct Ottaviani, either in his robust conception of the Church’s authority to direct belief coercively or in his integralism. ↩︎ - At one point Vallier models an integralism that assumes legislative infallibility for the church: ‘Sin will not lead the church to teach in error on matters of faith and morals, nor will the church impose unjust canon law’ (p173).
Theories of the Church’s legislative infallibility have in the past been an important and long-standing part of Catholic ‘official theology’. But they have not been magisterially taught, and they face many historical and theoretical problems – see my ‘Papal authority and the limits of official theology’. Integralism has no commitment to legislative infallibility. ↩︎