Rev. Jon Tveit

April 22, 2024April 22, 2024

Bishop Barron and D.C. Schindler on ‘Integralism’

Last week, Bishop Robert Barron interviewed D.C. Schindler and integralism was among their topics of conversation. Their discussion of our approach to Catholic political philosophy was revealing in two important ways.

First of all, their interview revealed how much these two formidable thinkers have misunderstood the very terms of the debate. Bishop Barron introduced the topic by noting some might think Schindler “sounds like an integralist,” like someone who “just wants to create one great theocratic society.” These two things are not the same; integralism does not imply theocracy, or the rule of secular society by clerics. While the Vatican City State exists as a theocracy, as did the Papal States when they existed, the hope of the integralist is not to extend such rule throughout the world. In 2024 it should be clearer than it is to some that theocracy is not the only illiberal option for structuring society. Andrew Willard Jones’s Before Church and State, for instance, helps to expand our vision to see that a strict separation of Church and State on the one hand and theocracy on the other are not our only options. The France of Saint Louis which it depicts is an integralist society, not a theocratic one.

Dr. Schindler tries to find a via media between liberalism and integralism. With the integralist, he recognizes that the Church has an authority and a voice in politics and in the structuring of secular society, which liberalism denies. He admits overlap with integralist thinking but finds in it a fundamental problem. Schindler’s version of integralism is one in which the secular society provides “partial human goods,” to be supplemented by the Church’s provision of supernatural goods. He rejects this because as he sees it, spiritual goods are essentially human goods. They are not superadded to the goods which secular society aims to provide.

At the heart of Schindler’s objection seems to be his view of the interaction between nature and grace, a view he shares with Henri de Lubac and other 20^th-century theologians. Dr. Schindler believes that we humans have even on the natural level a desire for the supernatural, a desire for what only grace provides. This subsumes the realm of the natural into that of the supernatural, and so for Schindler it does not make sense when the integralist distinguishes these two realms in terms of different ends. For him, there is only one end of human life, which is our union with God in glory.

The integralist follows the teaching of Pope Leo XIII on the natural and supernatural societies in Immortale Dei. As the document makes clear, both the society of the Church and the society of the State are given us by God Himself, both are necessary. Leo also teaches that both of these societies are perfect, that is to say, each of them possesses its proper end together with all the means necessary to reach that end. One cannot be subsumed by the other. The Holy Father wrote of the Church:

This society is made up of men, just as civil society is, and yet is supernatural and spiritual, on account of the end for which it was founded, and of the means by which it aims at attaining that end. Hence, it is distinguished and differs from civil society, and, what is of highest moment, it is a society chartered as of right divine, perfect in its nature and in its title, to possess in itself and by itself, through the will and loving kindness of its Founder, all needful provision for its maintenance and action. And just as the end at which the Church aims is by far the noblest of ends, so is its authority the most exalted of all authority, nor can it be looked upon as inferior to the civil power, or in any manner dependent upon it.¹

Each of these societies, Church and State, has its proper end and all the means necessary to achieve it, the supernatural society of the Church having a supernatural end, the natural society of the State a natural one. For this reason, neither society can be seen to be ordered to merely a partial human good or any set thereof. Each is ordered to human happiness, which is the complete human good. But there exists a twofold end of happiness for man, who exists as it were in two realms, natural and supernatural, to which these societies correspond.

While our supernatural end is our ultimate end, toward which our temporal end must therefore be ordered, the two cannot be collapsed into one another:

The Almighty, therefore, has given the charge of the human race to two powers, the ecclesiastical and the civil, the one being set over divine, and the other over human, things. Each in its kind is supreme, each has fixed limits within which it is contained, limits which are defined by the nature and special object of the province of each, so that there is, we may say, an orbit traced out within which the action of each is brought into play by its own native right.²

The State “has for its proximate and chief object the well-being of this mortal life,” the Church “the everlasting joys of heaven.”³ This “is the Christian organization of civil society…confirmed by natural reason itself.”⁴ There ought to exist between these two societies not identity, but harmony:

The Church no less than the State itself is a society perfect in its own nature and its own right, and that those who exercise sovereignty ought not so to act as to compel the Church to become subservient or subject to them, or to hamper her liberty in the management of her own affairs, or to despoil her in any way of the other privileges conferred upon her by Jesus Christ. In matters, however, of mixed jurisdiction, it is in the highest degree consonant to nature, as also to the designs of God, that so far from one of the powers separating itself from the other, or still less coming into conflict with it, complete harmony, such as is suited to the end for which each power exists, should be preserved between them.⁵

This harmony brings the two necessary societies into quite close cooperation with one another, so close in fact that Leo XIII speaks of their relationship as that of the soul to the body. Not in such a way that one is subsumed by the other, but that both are fully active in their own realms.

Rather than by inventing sets of human goods, we have always defined integralism in terms of the ends of human life and the perfect societies which are necessary in achieving those ends. We have had such a clear definition of integralism for many years in the Three Sentences:

Catholic Integralism is a tradition of thought that, rejecting the liberal separation of politics from concern with the end of human life, holds that political rule must order man to his final goal. Since, however, man has both a temporal and an eternal end, integralism holds that there are two powers that rule him: a temporal power and a spiritual power. And since man’s temporal end is subordinated to his eternal end, the temporal power must be subordinated to the spiritual power.

This subordination is not one of domination (and therefore theocracy). It is one of cooperation. It is one in which ideally the membership of a secular society and the membership of the Church in that society are coextensive. In such a circumstance, as we see in St. Louis’s France, while the civil leaders have their requisite autonomy, they are nonetheless subject to the munera docendi, regendi, and sanctificandi exercised by the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The relationship is not one in which the clergy dictate to the civil leaders, but one in which the clergy help to inform them, as the soul in-forms the body.

Dr. Schindler wants the Church to “allow the integrity of the political sphere” rather than dictating to it. The Church, he says, has no place in making laws for the society of the State, but helps to inform what law ought to be in the secular realm. We do not disagree in the least. The relationship of the ecclesiastical to the secular does not have to be one of power and domination, which again brings us into theocratic territory. Yet the Magisterium and the Code of Canon Law are often quite clear in indicating what the civil law must provide, without dictating it.⁶ They elaborate the requirements of justice and the rights of Christians, and what the State must legislate in order not to run afoul of such requirements.

Integralism is political Catholicism, it is the faith lived out in the world. Our definition of integralism is purposely broad. As long as one gets right the relationship of the two ends of these two necessary societies, one is an integralist, which is to say, one has the only possible Catholic position.⁷ But below this level of general principle, integralism may work itself out in practice in an infinite number of ways, because of the infinite variety of practical circumstances.

There is no science of the infinite.⁸ It has always been our aim to define the principles, and to let Catholics figure out the practical applications of those principles, much as the Church always does in her social teaching. We may differ on our conclusions at the practical level, but two Catholics in good faith and in good conscience can always differ about such prudential matters. To my mind, if you accept the Three Sentences, you have a place beneath the integralist umbrella.

It is a wonderful thing that we have many Catholics working to bring about a post-liberal society, an integrally Catholic one. But the theory of any one integralist cannot be equated with integralism as a whole, any more than a particular economic theory espoused by a Catholic could be equated with Catholic economics.

Second of all, the interview between Bishop Barron and D.C. Schindler reveals the enduring importance of integralism. As His Excellency himself put it, Catholic integralism is “a rising movement today.” That to so many Catholics, liberal and illiberal alike, integralism continues to be such a bête noire, and that so many need to justify their own positions in contraposition to ours (or some imagined version of it), shows that integralism remains a touchstone in this conversation. We thank His Excellency and Dr. Schindler for giving us a place at their table, but ask that they let us speak for ourselves.

Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, 10. ↩︎
Ibid., 13. ↩︎
Ibid., 14. ↩︎
Ibid., 16. ↩︎
Ibid., 35. ↩︎
Take, for example, c. 793 §2 on the State’s duty to help parents provide a true, integrally Catholic education for their children: “Parentibus ius est etiam iis fruendi auxiliis a societate civili praestandis, quibus in catholica educatione filiorum procuranda indigeant.” ↩︎
Cf. John Joy, “The Teaching of Quanta cura is Definitive: A Reply to Robert T. Miller.” ↩︎
Cf. Boethius, De arithmetica, Book I, ch. 1. ↩︎

March 4, 2024March 2, 2024

Thomystagogy

Urban Hannon, Thomistic Mystagogy: St. Thomas Aquinas’s Commentaries on the Mass (Lincoln, Nebraska: Os Justi Press, 2024).

It was a commonplace among twentieth-century theologians of a certain stripe that Thomism was cold, rationalistic, and “dry as sawdust” as one put it. As if the Common Doctor and his students were cut off from the life-giving streams of Scripture and the Fathers of the Church. This was one of the ideas motivating the ressourcement movement of the last century. But if you read Saint Thomas for more than five minutes, and especially if you read his work, rather than reading him only through the lens of some of his successors, you see how absurd and unfounded an idea this is.

The criticism we see in general we also see in particular, with certain theologians’ desire to get beyond the Thomistic theory of transubstantiation, as if a vague theology of hand-waving more effectively described the mystery than a theology using the infrastructure of Aristotelian philosophy. As if mystery meant our theology must be imprecise.

To read Saint Thomas is to see how scriptural and patristic his theology is, how deeply he has drunk from these sources. All those who reject scholasticism and especially Thomism in favor of a theology built on the writings of the Fathers would do well to recognize that this is exactly what the scholastics have given us. Peter Lombard’s organization of the patristic patrimony in his Sentences served not as the springboard, but as the very foundation for the truly systematic theology of Saint Thomas and the schoolmen.

The Holy Spirit has revealed that Divine Wisdom “orders all things sweetly.” Thus, to those who are wise, to those who participate in that Wisdom, does it belong to order, as Saint Thomas teaches with the Stagirite. And who has given more order to the edifice of Catholic theology than Aquinas?

Saint Thomas’s theology of the Eucharist is a profound reflection upon this mystery which lies at the center of our Christian life. Who recognized better both the heights of what theology can achieve and its utter inability to comprehend completely the mystery of God than the one who wrote:

Tibi se cor meum totum subjicit,
Quia te contemplans totum deficit

better than the one who wrote:

O sacrum convivium!
in quo Christus sumitur:
recolitur memoria passionis eius:
mens impletur gratia:
et futurae gloriae nobis pignus datur.

better than the one who said, “I have seen such things in prayer that all I have written seems to be straw”? Not ‘sawdust,’ mind you, and not ‘straw’ as we might think of it either, dry and good for nothing but as kindling and fodder for beasts. In the famous quote, Saint Thomas was using a concept common in medieval thinking, that the literal sense of Sacred Scripture is merely the ‘husk,’ which must be broken open to access the corn, the truly nourishing kernel of the spiritual senses. Not that the ‘husk’ or ‘straw’ of the literal sense can ever be thrown away, but that it is merely the first step in coming to understand the truth. In this sense, his work certainly is ‘straw,’ not fodder for beasts, but fodder for contemplation.

Our former editor Urban Hannon has given us an important book as we contemplate the mystery of the Blessed Sacrament of the altar, which is at the center of our lives as Christians, and which therefore ought to be at the center of the life of a Christian people. It is an especially timely contribution, as we honor the 750^th anniversary of the death of the Common Doctor this week.

Fr. Hugh Barbour notes in his introduction that this book serves as the second panel of a diptych with the work of Dom Anscar Vonier. In his Key to the Doctrine of the Eucharist, the abbot of Buckfast detailed the sacramental representation which is at the heart of Saint Thomas’s theology of the Eucharist. Vonier gave us the Thomistic theory of how this sacrament signifies, Hannon collects for us Saint Thomas’s writings on that signification as we find it in the rites, words and gestures of Holy Mass. As Hannon indicates, Saint Thomas reads the liturgy like he reads the Scriptures. Beneath the ‘husk’ of the literal sense, Saint Thomas finds the deeper spiritual meaning, an often-allegorical reading of the kind which has been so disdained in modern liturgical scholarship, but which is so fruitful for our Christian life.

Though unlike many of his contemporaries, Saint Thomas did not compose a standalone commentary on the Mass, he did comment upon it in two of his works, in his Scriptum on Peter Lombard’s Sentences and in the Summa Theologiae. Mr. Hannon assembles these texts for us into a running commentary. Helpful appendices provide the Latin texts themselves, with Hannon’s own accurate and eminently readable translation, plus several useful diagrams.

Hannon analyses Saint Thomas’s commentary on the Mass according to the four causes, spending most of his time on the material cause, what is said and done in the Mass. The other three causes correspond to Saint Thomas’s various divisions of the Mass. He divides it according to its form, for instance in his Sentences commentary, seeing in the structure of the Mass a pattern of exitus-reditus. He also makes a division according to who is speaking—a kind of instrumental efficient cause, since God Himself is the primary agent in the liturgy—either the priest alone, the ministers, the choir, which enable “the whole hierarchy of the mystical body to be represented” (15). As a final cause in the Mass, there is a division according to signification: “For St. Thomas, the words and actions of the Mass come together for the sake of signifying three things: the representation of Christ’s Passion, the disposition of the Church, and the devotion and reverence due to this sacrament” (21).

Saint Thomas’s commentary reminds our age of widespread liturgical minimalism that what is important in the Mass is not merely the essential, what is necessary for the validity of the sacrament of the Eucharist. Nothing is superfluous, the whole of the rite is important, including “the things said around the sacrament,” which are not for the sacrament’s validity, for its being, but “are for the sacrament’s well-being” (ST III, Q. 66, a. 10 ad 4).

If this book has a shortcoming it is its brevity; it is little more than an essay. It leaves you wanting more. Perhaps there is sense in this, as a meta-level comment on our theology of the Eucharist itself. But at times one feels that more could have been said. A clarifying comment here and there would have been helpful. But this is to a certain extent mere hair-splitting. It is a short book, but one which offers much food for thought, one to which we can return again and again as we contemplate the mysteries we celebrate.

March 27, 2023December 5, 2023

A Brief Introduction to the Common Good

The common good is an uncommon concept today, and the genuine article is often confused with counterfeits. It may, therefore, be helpful to set out clearly and simply some definitions and distinctions, to explain what ‘the common good’ means to the integralist, as opposed to what it means to the totalitarian, the utilitarian, or the liberal. These notes are mostly gathered from other Josias posts; follow the links and footnotes for more in-depth treatments.

January 10, 2022January 10, 2022

The Liturgy and Society

By the Rev. Jon Tveit

“Liturgia est culmen ad quod actio Ecclesiae tendit et simul fons unde omnis eius virtus emanat.”^[1]

These lapidary words from the Second Vatican Council’s constitution on the sacred liturgy have become commonplace in explaining the centrality of the liturgy in the life of the Christian. So too has the document’s declaration that “the full and actual participation of the whole people” in the liturgy is “the primary and indispensable source from which the faithful are to derive the true Christian spirit.”^[2] While these statements are often applied to the spiritual life of the individual Christian, their scope is far broader. The action of the Church tends toward the sacred liturgy. Not merely the action of the clergy and hierarchy, but that of the whole of the Church of God together. Not merely as individuals, but as “the whole people,” the Body of Christ in union with its Head. The liturgy—and in a particular way the Eucharist^[3]—is the source and the summit of Christian life, not of private life, but of the whole of life. These words, therefore, apply as much to the life of the family and to the life of society as they do to the life of the individual.