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by John C. Rao

Editor’s Note:  This is the final installment of a three-part essay by Dr. John Rao on the roots of current Catholic ideas about the relationship between the Church and the secular order. The first was mainly concerned with the work of Fr. John Courtney Murray, SJ; the second, with the Uriage movement in France; the third, below, looks at the implications of pluralism for the Church’s self-understanding vis-à-vis the State since Vatican II. A version of this paper appeared in: Revista VERBO número 527-528: actas Ciudad Católica (September-October, 2014).
Continue reading “The Question of Res publica Christiana in Post-conciliar Catholic Doctrines (Part III)”

by John C. Rao

Editor’s Note:  This is the second part of a three-part essay by Dr. John Rao on the roots of current Catholic ideas about the relationship between the Church and the secular order. The first, posted here, was mainly concerned with the work of Fr. John Courtney Murray, SJ; the second, below, with the Uriage movement in France; the third will look at the implications of pluralism for the Church’s self-understanding vis-à-vis the State since Vatican II. A version of this paper appeared in: Revista VERBO número 527-528: actas Ciudad Católica (September-October, 2014).
Continue reading “The Question of Res publica Christiana in Post-conciliar Catholic Doctrines (Part II)”

by John C. Rao

Editor’s Note:  Dr. John C. Rao has kindly allowed The Josias to publish this brief survey of the roots of the present situation of the Church with respect to the secular order.  We will publish it in three parts. The first, found below, is largely concerned with the work of Fr. John Courtney Murray, SJ; the second, with the Uriage movement in France; and the third with the implications of pluralism for the Church’s self-understanding vis-à-vis the State since Vatican II. A version of this paper appeared in: Revista VERBO número 527-528: actas Ciudad Católica (September-October, 2014).

Continue reading “The Question of Res publica Christiana in Post-conciliar Catholic Doctrines”

Thanks to the generosity of the editors at The Latin Mass, we are able to publish the article linked below by Dr. Peter Kwasniewski:

The Catholic State: Anachronism, Arch-enemy, or Archetype?

by G Sanchez

[T]he fact that the new right-wing Germany does not tolerate us says nothing against the principles of the right. To the contrary: only from the principles of the right, that is from fascist, authoritarian and imperial principles, is it possible with seemliness, that is, without resort to the ludicrous and despicable appeal to the droits imprescriptibles de l’homme [the rights of man] to protest against the shabby abomination. I am reading Caesar’s Commentaries with deep understanding, and I think of Virgil’s Tu regere imperio . . . parcere subjectis et debellare superbos [to rule the peoples . . . to spare the conquered and subdue the proud]. There is no reason to crawl to the cross, neither to the cross of liberalism, as long as somewhere in the world there is a glimmer of the spark of Roman thought. And even then: rather than any cross, I’ll take the ghetto.

These striking words, penned by a Leo Strauss in his May 19, 1933 letter to Karl Löwith, remain at the heart of a seemingly endless debate over whether or not one of the most polarizing thinkers of the past century was not only the secret mastermind behind the ideology of neoconservatism, but also a crypto-fascist whose obscure and labyrinthine books lead unsuspecting young men to adopt opprobrious political principles. Had Strauss never become the progenitor of a controversial hermeneutics and the founder of loosely aligned “school” which, if one believes the frequent complaints of Paul Gottfried, has strong-armed itself into unmerited positions of power and prestige in American academia, the paragraph quoted above might be interpreted for what it likely is: a young German Jew’s defiant rejection of an intellectually, morally, and pragmatically bankrupt liberalism which had, since the close of the Great War, helped plunge Germany into socio-economic ruin while proving incapable of stopping the rise of National Socialism. Strauss saw first-hand what the principles of the Left had done to his native land; the principles of the Right—fascist, authoritarian, and imperial—were, to a fledgling scholar who would later inform readers that he was caught in the midst of the theological-political problem, all that was left.

Continue reading “Have the Principles of the Right been Discredited? Leo Strauss’s Rome and Ours”