Integralism and Gelasian Dyarchy

(Note: I have revised the central section of this essay since its original posting in the light of constructive criticism.^[1]A printable version can be found here).

1. Introduction: Three Theories

Political philosophy or politics, according to Aristotle, has an architectonic role in the practical order because it is concerned with the highest good.^{^[2]} All other practical sciences and arts are ordered to it, because their goals are sought for the sake of the goal of politics, but the goal of politics is sought only for its own sake. Politics is concerned with the final end, and hence it is the final judge of good and bad, of what is to be sought and of what is to be shunned. It is politics that judges something to be good without qualification, and not only in some respect.^{^[3]}

Aristotle sees this as following from the very notion of the good as a final cause. In order to desire anything at all, one must see it as tending toward one’s end, one’s perfection. Most goods are desired for the sake of something else; food, for example, is desired for the sake of preserving life, and the preservation of life is desired for the sake of other activities such as festivity and philosophy. But such a chain of ends cannot go on forever. There must be some final end that is desired for its own sake. If there were no such final end nothing could be desired at all; human desire would make no sense. Nor can there be more than one final end, since in that case there would be no rational way of choosing between different goods—the human will would be radically split and turned against itself.^{^[4]}

And this final end, which Aristotle calls eudaimonia (blessedness), is not only the goal of man merely considered as an individual, but even more his goal as a part of political society: “For even if the end is the same for a single man and for a state, that of the state seems at all events something greater and more complete.”^{^[5]} That is to say, the final end of man is a common good, a good that is shared in by all without being divided or diminished.^{^[6]} And Aristotle sees this common good as being the good of the city-state, which he thinks of as a “perfect society” (to borrow a later term): a society whose end is man’s complete good, and which includes all other societies (such as the family, the village, and voluntary associations) as its parts. Thus politics has the role of ordering and integrating all of human life, both individual and corporate, by guiding it toward its final goal. Politics is not a violent imposition of power, but a legitimate and binding authority that aids human persons in the achievement of their true end.^{^[7]}

Aristotle’s marvelously simple account of politics and the good seems to be challenged, or at least complicated, by Christianity. “Duo… sunt:” there are two by which the world is chiefly ruled, Pope St. Gelasius wrote in his classic letter to the Emperor Anastasius, which was to be endlessly cited and interpreted by subsequent popes:

There are two, august Emperor, by which this world is chiefly ruled, namely, the sacred authority (auctoritas sacrata) of the priests and the royal power (regalis potestas). Of these, that of the priests is weightier, since they have to render an account for even the kings of men in the divine judgment. You are also aware, most clement son, that while you are permitted honorably to rule over human kind, yet in divine matters you bend your neck devotedly to the bishops and await from them the means of your salvation. In the reception and proper disposition of the heavenly sacraments you recognize that you should be subordinate rather than superior to the religious order, and that in these things you depend on their judgment rather than wish to bend them to your will. If the ministers of religion, recognizing the supremacy granted you from heaven in matters affecting the public order, obey your laws, lest otherwise they might obstruct the course of secular affairs by irrelevant considerations, with what readiness should you not yield them obedience to whom is assigned the dispensing of the sacred mysteries of religion?^{^[8]}

The so-called “Gelasian dyarchy” of pontifical authority and imperial power, of spiritual and temporal power, was deeply rooted in Scripture and tradition.^{^[9]} From the beginning Christianity did not deny the legitimacy of the existing political order, it recognized therein an authority founded in God’s creation and granted by His providence. But like any part of creation it saw the political as wounded by sin and in need of healing in the present, and in the eschatological future of elevation, fulfillment, and transcendence by a higher form of communal life. The order of creation was seen as a good, but temporary and preliminary order—a sign of a yet better order to come. The Lord’s famous dictum according to which one must render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, but unto God the things that are God’s (Mt 22:21) did not at all conform to expectations about the Messiah. The Messiah was expected to end Roman rule and re-establish the rule of God. But our Lord does not immediately destroy the existing order; instead He plants the Kingdom of God as a seed that is to grow in the midst of that existing order. Only at His triumphant return at the end of time will He replace earthly powers with the New Jerusalem.

There are many different ways of understanding the Gelasian dyarchy. I will discuss only three of them: Augustinian radicalism, integralism, and Whig Thomism. My main focus will be on what I term integralism, which I will argue is the only adequate understanding of Gelasian dyarchy. Integralism reads Gelasius in the light of the unfolding of his teaching in the magisterium of the popes of the High Middle Ages—from St. Gregory VII to Boniface VIII— and in the light of the opposition to modern liberalism in the popes of the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Integralism sees the two distinct powers as being harmonized by the explicit subordination of the temporal to the spiritual.

Integralism has fallen out of fashion since the teaching Church ostensibly abandoned it at Vatican II, and opinion is now divided among various alternative positions. I shall argue, however, that Vatican II did not and could not abandon the essence of integralism. Nevertheless, I shall unfold chiefly by considering two of the many alternate understandings of dyarchy. The two that I consider are not necessarily the most important, but I consider them because they formulate clarifying objections to integralism, and because they contain important insights that have to be integrated into integralism.

What (for lack of a better term) I call Augustinian radicalism comes close to abandoning the idea of dyarchy altogether. It takes a highly pessimistic view of earthly power, which it associates with Augustine’s city of man, it emphasizes the temporal, passing nature of such power, and sees a quasi-inevitable conflict between it and the Church. The Church on this account should reject the coercive means used by earthly power, and by already living in an anticipatory fashion the peace of the heavenly Jerusalem, serve as a sign of contradiction to the powers that are passing away. This position comes in many forms and degrees. The writers of whom I am thinking in particular are Stanley Hauerwas, Michael Baxter, John Milbank, and William T. Cavanaugh as well as Dorothy Day, whose practical example serves as an inspiration to many of the others.

Whig Thomism on the other hand, takes a much more positive view of temporal power. The Whig Thomists emphasize the distinction between the two powers. Welcoming a certain form of the separation of Church and state, they reject any juridical subordination of the state to the Church, and hold that the influence of the Church on the state should come only through the Church’s influence on the consciences of individual citizens. By far the most eloquent and insightful expositor of Whig Thomism was John Courtney Murray, S.J.

The question of the relation of spiritual to temporal power is intimately connected to the question of the relation nature and grace. Christianity is able to distinguish between the two powers, because it is a religion of grace, which does not destroy the order of nature, but presupposes, elevates, and perfects it. I shall argue that Augustinian radicalism tends to exaggerate towards a monism of grace, in which the natural loses all standing. Whig Thomism, on the other hand, tends to exaggerate the distinction, not sufficiently understanding that nature is for the sake of grace. Only integralism fits well with a fully satisfactory account of the elevation and perfection of natural teleology in grace.

The question of dyarchy is not, however, reducible to the problem of nature and grace. Insofar the relation of the two powers is a political question, it depends on an account of the common good. Augustinian radicalism’s theology of grace leads to an inability to see the transcendence of the natural common good of political life, and thus to a misunderstanding of what it means for political authority to be derived from God. Hence its excessively negative judgment on all coercive power, a judgment that is ultimately irreconcilable with magisterial teaching on political authority. Whig Thomism adopts a “personalist” account of the good, reducing the common good to a mere instrumental/useful good, and adopting a liberal misunderstanding of the role of political authority. This misunderstanding is at the root of the Whig Thomists’ erroneous notion that the indirect influence of the Church on the temporal order through the consciences of individual citizens is enough to fulfill the demands of the Social Kingship of Christ.

2. Augustinian Radicalism

2.1 The Two Cities

The establishment by Christianity of an authority distinct from earthly power without the immediate destruction of earthly power can be seen as necessarily causing a violent conflict.^{^[10]} I have called the position that tends in that direction “Augustinian radicalism.” The term “radicalism” is meant to suggest that it sees Christianity as challenging the roots of earthly power, and as having revolutionary social implications. “Radicalism” is also meant to suggest affinities with certain “radical” secular political movements such as anarcho-syndicalism, with which Augustinian radicalism often shares an approach to concrete social problems, but Augustinian radicalism is itself thoroughly anti-secular.

A figure often held up as an example by Augustinian radicals is the founder of the Catholic Worker movement, Dorothy Day. Michael Baxter, describes Day’s movement as follows:

The ethos of the Catholic Worker may be summed up as a commitment to embodying the lesson in the parable of the last judgment. In that parable, the Son of man is identified as a king and the virtuous enter eternal life by putting into practice the works enumerated by the king: feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the sick, and caring for prisoners. Thus, performing these practices is what it means to live under the Kingship of Christ. […] Thus the concrete embodiment of this christologically-formed politics has ranged widely over the years: fighting for housing rights for the poor; supporting labor, such as striking sailors and farm workers; setting up work camps for conscientious objectors during World War II; protesting against nuclear weapons; organizing resistance to the draft and the Vietnam War; harboring Central American refugees; and so on. […] [T]he Catholic Worker takes Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno in a distributist or decentralist direction, which results in a “localist politics” that provides an alternative to the depersonalizing bureaucracy of the modern liberal nation-state.^{^[11]}

Dorothy Day was deeply mistrustful of the nation-state. She often quoted St. Hilary as saying “the less you have of Caesar’s the less you have to give him.”^{^[12]} That is, she wanted to accept as little as possible from the state so as not to be in a relation of dependence on it. If one accepts coins from Caesar, one must render taxes to Caesar, but if one makes no use of money, then one is not bound to pay taxes. Day wanted to begin living another kind of society within the “shell” of the old society: a new kind of cooperative society that would live entirely without coercion, applying the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount as literally as possible. The hope was that this new society would slowly begin to replace the old, violent, coercive, acquisitive society. As she put it:

But, and I cannot stress this enough, we must never forget our objective, which is to build that kind of society “where it is easier for people to be good.” […] We must keep in mind the fact that we are active pacifists and anarchists. Or peacemaker personalists. Or libertarians, pluralists, decentralists – whatever you want to call it. It certainly needs to be presented in many lights, this teaching of revolution, non-violent social change. We begin now within the shell of the old to rebuild society.^{^[13]}

The new society that is growing within the old is a sort of anticipation of the eternal city; the old is passing away. It is not clear whether the old society will pass away entirely before the Second Coming. Baxter and the Protestant theologian Stanley Hauerwas, in a notable paper that the co-authored, write that the old society will to some extent endure till the ἔσχατον, and that therefore the tension between the societies will societies will remain. Significantly, Baxter and Hauerwas identify the new society with the Church herself, which they describe as a form of political life. Therefore, they can describe the enduring tension as a tension between Church and state:

Christians are called first and foremost not to resolve the tension between church and state, but to acknowledge the Kingship of Christ in their lives, which means leaving church–state relations profoundly unresolved, until the day when He comes again in glory.^{^[14]}

I have called Augustinian radicalism “Augustinian” because its proponents often use St. Augustine’s City of God to describe the relation between the old and the new. The “shell of the old society” is identified with the city of man, while the new society that is being built by the practice of the Gospel is identified with the City of God. Thus the Anglican Augustinian radical John Milbank writes:

In Augustine, there is, disconcertingly, nothing recognizable as a ‘theory of Church and State’, no delineation of their respective natural spheres of operation. The civitas terrena is not regarded by him as a ‘state’ in the modern sense of a sphere of sovereignty, preoccupied with the business of government. Instead this civitas, as Augustine finds it in the present, is the vestigial remains of an entire pagan mode of practice, stretching back to Babylon. There is no set of positive objectives that are its own peculiar business, and the city of God makes a usus of exactly the same range of finite goods, although for different ends[.]^{^[15]}

It is hard to see how such a reading that identifies earthly power as such with the civitas terrena, and thus sets up an inevitably antagonistic relation between the Church and earthly power is reconcilable with the Gelasian duo sunt. Of course, as an Anglican, Milbank need not scruple at rejecting the Gelasian teaching. Catholic Augustinian radicals, however, ought to do so. Surprisingly, however, Catholic theologian William T. Cavanaugh seems to argue that there is an opposition between the Augustinian and Gelasian positions, and that the Augustinian position is the correct one:

The problem can be seen in considering the difference between Augustine’s “Two cities have been formed by two loves” and Pope Gelasius I’s famous and influential dictum “Two there are…by which this world is ruled.” For Augustine church and coercive government represent two cities, two distinct societies which represent two distinct moments of salvation history. There is not one society in which there is a division of labour. In Gelasius’ words half a century later, there is one city with two rulers, “the consecrated authority of priests and the royal power.” The eschatological reference is not absent; for Gelasius, the distribution of power between priest and king is a sign that Christ’s coming has put a check on human pride. Nevertheless, the element of time has been flattened out into space. The one city is now divided into “spheres,” and, as Gelasius says, “each sphere has a specially qualified and trained profession.”^{^[16]}

There is an important element of truth in what Cavanaugh is saying, as well as a subtle misreading of Gelasius (to both of which I will return), but first it is important to note his identification of “coercive government” with the city of man.

Although there are many differences between different proponents of Augustinian radicalism, they all share a profoundly negative view of coercion. Stanley Hauerwas is of course a pacifist. Following the Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder, he claims that Christian theological justifications of coercive power are all betrayals of the Gospel aimed at making Christianity acceptable to rulers.^{^[17]} John Milbank’s view is more subtle. He notes that St. Augustine sees coercion as an effect of the fall, but that St. Augustine also teaches that the City of God makes “use” of the peace established by earthly coercion, ordering that superficial peace to the peace of the Heavenly City, and that she can even make a “pastoral” use of coercion herself.^{^[18]} But Milbank sees this position as the “most problematic” element of Augustine’s social thought.^{^[19]} Milbank argues that given Augustine’s own principles even a “pastoral” use of coercion cannot escape the taint of sin:

The revolutionary aspect of [Augustine’s] social thought was to deny any ontological purchase to dominium, or power for its own sake: absolute imperium, absolute property rights, market exchange purely for profit, are all seen by him a sinful and violent, which means as privations of Being. But his account of a legitimate, non-sinful, ‘pedagogic’ coercion partially violates this ontology, insofar as it makes some punishment positive, and ascribes it to the action of divine will. This is inconsistent, because in any act of coercion, however mild and benignly motivated, there is still present a moment of ‘pure’ violence, externally and arbitrarily related to the end one has in mind, just as the school-master’s beating with canes has no intrinsic connection with the lesson he seeks to teach. […] Because punishment must, by definition, inflict some harm, however temporary, it has an inherently negative, privative relationship to Being, and cannot therefore, by Augustine’s own lights, escape the taint of sin.^{^[20]}

The position that we see emerging from the Augustinian radicals is of an insoluble conflict between the City of God and any coercive earthly authority. All earthly powers belong to a tragic drama of sin that is passing away. The role of the City of God is to enact on the same stage a comic drama, through a practice of entirely non-coercive social life generously giving without expectation of repayment, and suffering evil without murmur or retaliation. In an evocative and amusing comparison, Cavanaugh compares the city of man to Ariadne in Richard Strauss’s opera Ariadne auf Naxos, and the city of God to Zerbinetta, disrupting Ariadne’s opera seria with an improvised opera buffa.^{^[21]}

2.2 An Integralist Critique of Augustinian Radicalism

There is much truth in Augustinian radicalism. It is quite right to emphasize that there is no third city between the City of God and the city of man.^{^[22]} I can even agree with Milbank’s words: “insofar as imperium lies outside ecclesia, it is an essentially tragic reality.”^{^[23]} Augustinian radicalism is right to resist an exaggerated distinction between nature and grace (as the discussion of Whig Thomism below will demonstrate). Its own account of the relation of nature and grace, however, goes too far in the opposite direction. In following Henri de Lubac’s teaching on natural desire for the supernatural, Augustinian radicals tend to evacuate the theonomic structure of natural teleology.^{^[24]} Grace elevates and perfects nature, but does not replace it. Divine charity does not invalidate the demands of natural justice. The supernatural end of the City of God is indeed the absolutely final end to which all other ends must be in some way subordinate; but it does not do-away with a common good of temporal life that is final in its own order. And crucially, it does not do away with the coercive methods of natural political authority, even while it subordinates them (in some sense) to a higher authority.

The coercive authority of temporal rule derives from the primacy of the common good, from the fact that the common good is more divine than any good of an individual as an individual. Human persons are not parts of a community the way that parts of a body are parts. Nevertheless, they do relate to the common good in a way similar to the way parts relate to a whole. The participate (share in a partial way) in that good, as a good which is for them better than any private good of their own. The common good is really the good of the citizens (they are the subjects who attain to it), but it is not ordered to them as its end. Rather they are ordered to it as their end. Created perfection is a participation in the perfection of God, who is the most universal common good. That is, a creature’s own good is found more in God than in itself, and all creatures by nature (not only by grace) tend more toward God than toward themselves. But God is not the only common good. In the order of nature, God’s perfection is participated in most fully by the universe as a whole. Thus the order of the universe is for any creature a better good than its own private good, a better good for which it can give up any private good. And, again in the natural order, the highest created common good attainable by human action is the common good of a perfect human society, which is a microcosm of the common good of the universe, and a higher good than any good belonging to individual men as individuals.^{^[25]} Thus Hauerwas is completely wrong to suppose that the Catholic tradition’s acceptance of political uses of coercion (including capital punishment) is a watering down of Christian ethics to make them acceptable to rulers. Rather that tradition is a recognition of the fact that even the temporal common good transcends all individual goods. The use of the sword by temporal rulers is therefore not violence done by one individual against another, but rather the exercise of an authority granted by God (cf. Rom 13) through the common good, which is “more divine” than any private good. Similarly, Milbank is wrong to suggest that any punishment must be sinful, since its violence is only extrinsically related to the good to which it is trying to lead the sinner. In view of the common good, the authoritative use of the sword is really like a surgeon cutting the body for the sake of health—the violence, though a physical evil, is a moral good because it is intrinsically demanded by justice.

Cavanaugh writes: “the Church is not a merely particular association, but participates in the life of the triune God, who is the only good that can be common to all.”^{^[26]} This amounts to saying that God as directly attained to by grace (“life of the triune God”) is the only common good. This is an unacceptable monism of grace, totally un-reconcilable with the Catholic tradition (as re-iterated for instance in Gaudium et Spes^{^[27]}). Nevertheless, Cavanaugh’s position has a certain plausibility derived from his critique of the modern, liberal state, which he argues is not really ordered to any common good, and does not see itself as so ordered.^{^[28]} Cavanaugh’s portrait of the modern, liberal nation state is highly persuasive, and it raises serious questions about the legitimacy of the political authority exercised by such states. Questions similar to those raised by Augustine in his critique of the Roman Empire as being ordered to a false illusion of justice. To the extent that political authorities do not subordinate the temporal common good to the eternal common good they almost inevitably are sucked into the sinful dynamic of the city of man. All of earthly reality must be subjected to the Kingship of Christ.

But how does such subordination take place? Not by replacing natural coercive power with a Christian anarcho-syndicalism, but rather with a (moderate version) of what Henri-Xavier Arquillière controversially called “political Augustinianism.”^{^[29]} Political Augustinianism differs from Augustinian radicalism in that it recognizes the legitimacy of coercive political power, but sees the need of integrating that power into the Church. Political authority thus integrated is not a separate city opposed to the City of God, but rather a particular order within that city, one in which the laity rather than the clergy exercise authority, an authority that they receive through the natural law and the temporal common good (at least on the moderate interpretation of the theory^{^[30]}), but which they must exercise to serve the eternal common good that is under the authority of the clergy. But that, simply put, is integralism. And it is the interpretation that the Church has always given to the dyarchy of powers.

3. The Integralist Reading of Gelasian Dyarchy

Catholic integralism (not to be confused with secular movements such as integral nationalism) was a name first applied in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries to Catholics who defended the anti-liberal and anti-modernist teachings of the popes.^{^[31]} Particularly integralism came to be associated with a defense of pontifical teachings against the separation of Church and state, and the claim that Social Kingship of Christ demands an explicit subordination of all areas of human social and political life to God through His Church.^{^[32]} But the roots of the Catholic Social teaching that integralism defends reach much further back than the anti-liberal teachings of the 19^th century popes. They reach back to the counter-reformation political theology to which those popes appealed, and even further to the development of Gelasian dyarchy in the teaching of the medieval popes.

In his classic study of the relation of lay and clerical power in the Middle Ages, Walter Ullmann argues that the medieval papacy’s claims to authority show “a unity of themes and a consistency of principles” that were detectable even in late antiquity, before the name “pope” began to be used.^{^[33]} And the most fundamental theme of these claims was the theme of the Church.^{^[34]} The Church was understood not as a purely invisible, spiritual community, but as a visible society:

The Church designates the corporate union of all believers in Christ, as it was so manifestly made clear in Pauline doctrine. But this doctrine also makes it clear that this body, the unum corpus, is not merely a pneumatic or sacramental or spiritual body, but also an organic, concrete and earthy society. This dual nature of the corpus Christi is of fundamental importance: the element, however, which brings this concrete body into existence, which makes the union a corporate entity, is the spiritual element of the Christian faith: this element alone gives this body its complexion. As a body the corpus Christi is in need of direction and orientation: although the many constitute this unum corpus, not all have the same functions within it. There are gradations of functions within this body[.]^{^[35]}

Given this account of the visible Church, Papal authority had political arguments, and Ullmann shows the arguments for Papal authority can be understood as political arguments along the following lines:

In the realm of government the teleological principle upon which any society must needs rest, operates through the principle of functional qualification. For society and its government are two complementary concepts. The latter directs the former in accordance with its underlying purpose or aim, its “finis” or “telos,” Only those who are qualified, claim to be entitled to govern; and the qualification depends upon the nature and purpose of society. The function of rulership presupposes the fulfilment of certain qualifications. He who is qualified to translate the purpose for which society exists, into concrete terms and measures, acts in the capacity of a ruler: he functions as a ruler, because he is appropriately qualified. This principle of functional qualification is operative in any society. The form of rulership or government, whether monarchic or oligarchic or aristocratic and so forth, may vary, but this does not affect the general principle.^{^[36]}

Membership in the Church was conferred by baptism, but membership did not of itself grant the necessary qualification for governing the Church:

Another element, namely ordination, was needed to secure, according to Papal views, the right to direct the Church. The distinction between ordained and unordained members of the Church, between clerics and laymen, was the distinction which was not only to give medieval society its peculiar imprint, but also to make the problems of this society, that is, of Latin Christendom, accessible to understanding. The distinction—not between Church and State, but between clergy and laity as parts of one and the same unit—is a thread that runs throughout the medieval period.^{^[37]}

The one qualified to rule the whole Church on earth was the bishop of Rome, as was already clearly expressed by Leo the Great:

When Pope Leo I spoke of himself as functioning on behalf of St Peter—“cuius vice fungimur”—he succinctly expressed the principle of functional qualification in monarchic form. By virtue of succeeding to the chair of St Peter, Leo claimed that he alone was functionally qualified to rule the universal Church, that is, to rule it on the monarchic principle. This designation by Leo of the Pope as “Vicar of St Peter” was new; the idea which it embodied was not. The formula chosen by Leo was the dress in which the idea of the principatus of the Roman Church was clothed. The idea embodied in the term principatus belongs to the realm of government. And government concerned the direction and orientation of the body of Christians, that is, of the universal Church.^{^[38]}

The conception of the Church that Ullmann lays out here seems to be monarchical rather than dyarchical; it seems to be a Christian, universalist version of the Aristotelian theory of the polis. And yet, Ullmann sees the basic lines of this theory as being already taught by St. Gelasius in the very locus classicus of dyarchy:

Since the Pope alone has the principatus over the Christian body, the emperor, according to Gelasius, must be directed by the sacerdotium. The secular power has not only no right to issue decrees fixing the faith, since the emperor is no bishop, but he also must carry out his government according to the directions given to him by the priesthood. […] Again, considering the nature and character of [the] Christian corpus, Gelasius’s claim that the priesthood must direct royal power, is self-evident[…] Consequently, in this Christian world, in the “mundus,” the secular power has a mere “potestas,” whilst the principatus of the pope expresses itself in the Pontifical auctoritas. And this auctoritas being divinely conferred for the purpose of governing the Christian body corporate, is logically enough sacrata, whilst the emperor’s power is a simple “regalis potestas”. This is a thoroughly juristic terminology employed by Gelasius. Auctoritas is the faculty of shaping things creatively and in a binding manner, whilst potestas is the power to execute what the auctoritas has laid down. The Roman senate had auctoritas, the Roman magistrate had potestas. […] Whilst, however, this fundamental difference between the pontifical auctoritas and the imperial potestas was clear to anyone versed in Roman juristic terminology and ideology, Gelasius superimposed a typical Christian argument upon it: in a Roman-Christian world, the sacred Pontifical auctoritas is all the greater, as it has to render an account even for the doings of the kings themselves on the Day of Judgment. […] And since rulership comes from God […] God’s priests are particularly concerned with the emperor’s exercise of the (divinely conferred) rulership: and since in a Christian society, of which the emperor through baptism is a member, every human action has a definite purpose and in so far has an essential religious ingredient, the emperors should submit their governmental actions to the ecclesiastical superiors and should not order the latter about, since they alone know what is, and what is not, divine and therefore Christian: they alone have auctoritas within a Christian body corporate.^{^[39]}

Ullmann’s reading of the auctoritas – potestas distinction has been criticized from an historical-critical perspective, with critics arguing that he anachronistically reads Gelasius in the light of the popes of the High Middle Ages.^{^[40]} I think that Ullmann makes a fairly strong case for his reading even on historical-critical grounds. But, in any case, a theological reading of a magisterial text has to go beyond mere historical criticism and interpret the teaching in the light of other Church teachings.

In his interpretation of another important Gelasian text, Tractate IV, Ullmann gives a reading of the task of the imperial power that makes it seem similar to the to the task given to the deacons in Acts 6:^{^[41]}

According to Gelasius, Christian emperorship originates in Christ Himself. Christ was the last Rex et Pontifex, the last Melchisedek, and by “a marvellous dispensation” He had discerned between the functions of the royal and of the sacerdotal power. Since the time of Christ no emperor had arrogated to himself the title of a Pontiff and no pontiff had claimed the height of royal power, although the pontiffs were actually, through Christ’s generosity and in a very special sense, both royal and priestly. But Christ, “mindful of human fragility” had discerned between the functions of each power: “discrevit officia potestatis utriusque.” His reason for so doing was two fold. On the one hand, it is written that no one warring for God should be entangled with secular things. The raison d’être of the royal power was to relieve the clerics of the burden of having to care for their carnal and material wants. For the temporal necessities the pontiffs indeed need the emperors, so that they can devote themselves to their functions properly and are not distracted by the pursuit of these carnal matters, but the emperors, Christian as they are, need the pontiffs for the achievement of eternal salvation. On the other hand, Gelasius introduces the very important and fruitful principle of functional order operating within society. To each part of an organic whole is assigned a special function and each member should adhere to the scope of functions allotted to him: then there will be order, or as Gelasius put it, human haughtiness—humana superbia—will be prevented from coming into its own again. This principle of functional order is a principle which is necessitated by the manifold functions which a body has to perform in order to be an integrated whole: it is a principle which will play a major part in the fully developed hierocratic ideology.^{^[42]}

An important point that emerges from Tractate IV is that the functional dyarchy of powers arises from “human pride,” that is from sin. Without the effects of sin, temporal matters would not be a distraction from sacred matters, and there would be no need to distinguish them. Because, however, we live in a fallen world, it is necessary for the spiritual power to be freed of care for earthly matters. This “diaconal” or “ministerial” understanding of the temporal power was to be taught very explicitly by Gregory the Great. In a letter to the Byzantine Emperor Maurice, Gregory writes: “Power over all people has been conceded from on high to the one who governs, such that the earthly kingdom would be a service which subordinates itself to the heavenly kingdom.”^{^[43]} Gregory was certainly influenced by Augustine in this (Cf. eg. Civ. Dei V,24 and XIX,17), and, like Augustine, he sees the necessity of temporal power particularly for curbing sin. As Arquillière puts it:

[Gregory the Great] speaks of the pontiff who, with the help of princes, is concentrated on the restriction of the reign of sin and the promotion of the action of grace. The mission of the religious king had, by its very nature, become paramount in a Christianized society. It captures, from the beginning, the confusion of powers which would mark the Middle Ages, the essentially spiritual character of pontifical intervention. […] [By] inculcating the duty of kings with the discipline of the Church, Gregory opened an unlimited opening for the interventions of the Holy See.^{^[44]}

Arquillière’s reference to “confusion of powers” points to his main thesis: that the political Augustinianism of the medieval popes absorbed the temporal order too much into the spiritual order, thus destroying the legitimate autonomy of earthly authority. Douglas Kries, commenting on Arquillière’s thesis, claims that Augustine’s “obfuscation of the boundary between the natural and the supernatural” did provide the premises for the strictly monarchical view of spiritual power developed by consistent medieval hierocrats.^{^[45]} This is very similar to my critique of Augustinian radicalism above. But the tradition political theory of the medieval popes is not quite so simplistic.

In Ullmann’s portrayal, the medieval papal theory seems monarchical, not dyarchical. There is one body of Christians ordered to the end of eternal life. The ruler of this body is the pope. Temporal rulers are ministers of the pope with care of mundane matters. And yet the dyarchical element, derived from Gelasius, was always preserved: on account of human pride, God has established two powers. At times, the medieval popes seem to deny the Gelasian teaching by saying that the temporal power is derived not immediately from God, but rather mediately through the spiritual power. A careful reading, however, shows that this is not the case. The temporal power is derived from God, however, it can only have legitimacy if it submits itself to the spiritual power, which has care of the final end. That is, the temporal power inevitably serves the city of man if it is detached the spiritual power, but if it is subordinates itself to the spiritual power it can play a helpful role in the city of God.

Innocent III in one text compares spiritual and temporal power to the sun and moon:

Just as God, founder of the universe, has constituted two large luminaries in the firmament of Heaven, a major one to dominate the day and a minor one to dominate the night, so he has established in the firmament of the Universal Church, which is signified by the name of Heaven, two great dignities, a major one to preside—so to speak—over the days of the souls, and a minor one to preside over the nights of the bodies. They are the Pontifical authority and the royal power. Thus, as the moon receives its light from the sun and for this very reason is minor both in quantity and in quality, in its size and in its effect, so the royal power derives from the Pontifical authority the splendour of its dignity, the more of which is inherent in it, the less is the light with which it is adorned, whereas the more it is distant from its reach, the more it benefits in splendour.^{^[46]}

At first sight this text would seem to be in tension with the Gelasian dyarchy; if the temporal power “derives from the Pontifical authority” than how will the “human pride” of pontiffs be curbed? But at second glance one sees that the tension is indeed maintained. It is indeed God who has “constituted two large luminaries.” And therefore Innocent, in another text, teaches that the spiritual power only intervenes in earthly affairs “ratione peccati,” by reason of sin. Thus he writes:

No one, therefore, may suppose that we intend to disturb or diminish the jurisdiction or power of the illustrious king of the French just as he himself does not want to and should not impede our jurisdiction and power; as we are insufficient to discharge all our jurisdiction, why should we wish to usurp that of someone else? […] For we do not intend to render justice in feudal matters, in which the jurisdiction belongs to him, unless something may be detracted from the common law by some special privilege or contrary custom, but we want to decide in the matter of sins, of which the censure undoubtedly pertains to us and we can and must exercise it against any one. In this, indeed, we do not lean on human constitutions, but much more on Divine law, because our power is not from man but from God: any one who has a sound mind knows that it belongs to our office to draw away any Christian from any mortal sin and, if he despises the correction, to coerce him with ecclesiastical penalties.^{^[47]}

Similarly, Pope Boniface VIII, in a speech to French ambassadors, defended himself against the accusation of contradicting the Gelasian teaching, he said:

We have been learned in the law for forty years, and we know very well that the powers established by God are two. How should or can anyone suppose that anything so foolish or stupid [as the contrary] is or has been in our head? We declare that we do not wish to usurp the jurisdiction of the king in any way… But the king cannot deny that he is subject to us ratione peccati … Our predecessors deposed three kings of France… And although we are not worthy to walk in the footsteps of our predecessors, if the king committed the same crimes as those kings committed, or greater ones, we should, with great grief and sadness, dismiss him like a servant.^{^[48]}

One could read Boniface as merely paying lip service to the dyarchy, while interpreting the power ratione peccati so broadly as to effectively make the pope a universal monarch. But this is not how the Catholic tradition developed the teachings of Boniface and his predecessors.

The key to understanding the dyarchy comes from the elaboration of the hierarchy of ends in scholastic theology. An important point is the distinction between two different kinds of happiness to which man can attain, one in the natural order, and one in the supernatural. St. Thomas Aquinas writes:

Now man’s happiness is twofold, as was also stated above. One is proportionate to human nature, a happiness, to wit, which man can obtain by means of his natural principles. The other is a happiness surpassing man’s nature, and which man can obtain by the power of God alone, by a kind of participation of the Godhead, about which it is written that by Christ we are made “partakers of the Divine nature.” And because such happiness surpasses the capacity of human nature, man’s natural principles which enable him to act well according to his capacity, do not suffice to direct man to this same happiness.^{^[49]}

Now, there is clearly an order between these two kinds of happiness. Natural happiness is ordered to supernatural happiness, as St. Thomas teaches in the De Regno:

Through virtuous living man is further ordained to a higher end, which consists in the enjoyment of God, as we have said above. Consequently, since society must have the same end as the individual man, it is not the ultimate end of an assembled multitude to live virtuously, but through virtuous living to attain to the possession of God.^{^[50]}

If supernatural final end could be attained by the power of human natural activity, then the temporal rulers would have the care of it. But since it cannot, the final end is under the care of the spiritual power. The powers are distinct, but the lower is ordered to the superior:

Thus, in order that spiritual things might be distinguished from earthly things, the ministry of this kingdom has been entrusted not to earthly kings but to priests, and most of all to the chief priest, the successor of St. Peter, the Vicar of Christ, the Roman Pontiff. To him all the kings of the Christian People are to be subject as to our Lord Jesus Christ Himself. For those to whom pertains the care of intermediate ends should be subject to him to whom pertains the care of the ultimate end, and be directed by his rule..^{^[51]}

The temporal is, however, not entirely swallowed up in the spiritual. It does receive its authority from God (through the natural law), not from the spiritual authority. As the young Thomas taught in the Commentary on the Sentences:

There are two ways in which a higher power and a lower can be related. In one way, the lower power may be completely derived from the higher, and the whole power of the lower will then be founded upon the power of the higher; in which case we should obey the higher power before the lower simply and in all things [. . .] In this way […] is the power of the emperor related to that of the proconsul. […] In another way, a higher and lower power can be such that each arises from some supreme power which arranges them in relation to each other as it wishes. In this case, the one will not be subject to the other save in respect of those things in which it has been subjected to the other by the supreme power; and only in such things are we to obey the higher power before the lower. […] Spiritual and secular power are both derived from the Divine power, and so secular power is subject to spiritual power insofar as this is ordered by God: that is, in those things which pertain to the salvation of the soul. In such matters, then, the spiritual power is to be obeyed before the secular. But in those things which pertain to the civil good, the secular power should be obeyed before the spiritual, according to Matthew 22:21: ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.’^{^[52]}

On the high-medieval view that I have elaborated, therefore, both powers are within the City of God. The temporal power must be subordinate to the spiritual power, or else it will become mere violence, and yet it does not derive its authority from the spiritual power: it derives its authority from God through the natural law. Nature is not destroyed by grace, and yet nature must be subordinated to grace.

This medieval view was, however, to become partially obscured in the context of the post-Reformation “confessional state.” Baroque scholasticism tended to treat the question not as a question of two powers within the one City of God, but rather as question of the relation of two (relatively) perfect societies: the Church and the state. There was a tendency here to slightly exaggerate the distinction between nature and grace, and not to see the extent to which nature is for the sake of grace.^{^[53]}

One can see the slight exaggeration of the autonomy of the natural in later scholastic manuals. In his 20^th century manual, the great neo-Thomist philosopher Henri Grenier argues that temporal happiness is not strictly speaking a means to the end of eternal happiness, because no natural operation can be a direct means to the supernatural end:

The end of civil society, i.e., of the State, is the temporal happiness of this life. But the temporal happiness of this life is a complete good in its own order: for it is not a part of eternal happiness, nor is it of its nature a means of directly attaining eternal happiness, for there can be no natural proportion between natural good and supernatural good.^{^[54]}

Now it is true that there is no proportion between natural good and supernatural good, but the acts in which temporal happiness consists must themselves be elevated by grace to become such means.

Grenier concludes from his position that the Church is not one all-encompassing perfect society. That there are two societies, one ordered to the temporal good, one to the eternal: the Church and the polity. And that neither of these societies is absolutely speaking a perfect society:

Neither the Church nor the State [i.e. the political community], from the point of view of the moral order, may be called a perfect society, as we have already seen. For a perfect society is a society whose end is man’s complete good, and which embraces all other societies as its parts. But the Church does not embrace all other societies as its parts—civil society is not a part of the Church; and its end is not man’s complete good, but rather his highest good.^{^[55]}

Grenier does, however, hold that both Church and state are “juridically perfect,” that is, that each has everything necessary to attain its goal, and that the goal of each is supreme in its own order.^{^[56]}

Now, in one sense Grenier is right. If by “the Church” he means the hierarchy of the spiritual power, then indeed it does not embrace the temporal order as a part. But a more proper meaning of “the Church” is simply the City of God, and in this sense the Church includes both the temporal and the spiritual powers as its parts. The City of God is indeed an all-embracing community, ruled by Christ the King.

While the reasons that Grenier gives are not quite right, his practical conclusions tend to match those of the medieval popes: the temporal power is subject to the spiritual power ratione peccati. Later, however, the neo-scholastic framing of the question in terms of Church and state as juridically perfect societies, with only indirect subordination of one to the other, lent itself to erroneous interpretations. Thus Grenier’s fellow Laval School Thomist Charles de Koninck was to write:

[T]he distinction between State and Church is radical. The ends that define these societies are different; and these societies can be called perfect to the extent that they are sufficient unto themselves. […] I do not believe that it is henceforth permitted to maintain that the State can again consent to be the secular arm of a religious society. […] To be the secular arm of the Church appears to me to be contrary to the nature of the State as complete society, sovereign and autonomous.^{^[57]}

Such misunderstandings could have been avoided by a more careful reading of the teachings of Pope Leo XIII, who gave a very full account of the relation of the two powers. In Immortale Dei Pope Leo writes:

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. But, inasmuch as each of these two powers has authority over the same subjects, and as it might come to pass that one and the same thing related differently, but still remaining one and the same thing might belong to the jurisdiction and determination of both, therefore God, who foresees all things, and who is the author of these two powers, has marked out the course of each in right correlation to the other. ‘For the powers that are, are ordained of God.’ […] There must, accordingly, exist between these two powers a certain orderly connection, which may be compared to the union of the soul and body in man. The nature and scope of that connection can be determined only, as We have laid down, by having regard to the nature of each power, and by taking account of the relative excellence and nobleness of their purpose. One of the two has for its proximate and chief object the well-being of this mortal life; the other, the everlasting joys of heaven. Whatever, therefore in things human is of a sacred character, whatever belongs either of its own nature or by reason of the end to which it is referred, to the salvation of souls, or to the worship of God, is subject to the power and judgment of the Church. Whatever is to be ranged under the civil and political order is rightly subject to the civil authority.^{^[58]}

Like his medieval predecessors, Leo frames the question as a question of the relation of two powers. Each of the two powers is instituted by God, and each has a certain legitimate sphere. But the temporal power can only live properly if it is subordinated to the spiritual power, which is like its soul.

Leo XIII’s position is that such integration should have juridical form. That is, that the earthly power should explicitly and officially recognize the authority of the Church, and form its laws in accordance with Church law. But we now turn to another theory of how the primacy of the spiritual should be realized: Whig Thomism.

4. Whig Thomism

The term Whig Thomism refers to various writers who agree with Lord Acton that the first Whig was St. Thomas. That is, they try to show that there is harmony between the Whig strand of Enlightenment liberalism and the political philosophy of St Thomas.^{^[59]} Notable examples are Michael Novak, George Weigel, and Richard John Neuhaus, all of whom have been deeply influenced by Fr. John Courtney Murray, S.J.^{^[60]}

Unlike some of his later followers, John Courtney Murray was careful to try to avoid contradicting any element of authoritative Catholic Social Teaching. He did not, however, succeed. In an important essay, written over a decade before Vatican II, he proposed that the American model of Church-state relation escaped the condemnation since it is able to preserve the primacy of the spiritual:

What the First Amendment fundamentally declares, as the constitutional will of the American people, is the ‘lay’ character of the state, its non-competence in the field of religion, the restriction of its competence to the secular and temporal. There is here a unique historical realization of the ‘lay’ state—unique because this lay state is not laicized or laicizing, on the Continental model. This lay state does not pretend to be The Whole—an absolutely autonomous, all-embracing religio-political magnitude with its own quasi-religious content—such, for instance, as the Third Republic was in the minds of the small knot of men who shaped it. On the contrary, there is in the First Amendment a recognition of the primacy of the spiritual—a recognition that is again unique, in that it is a recognition of the primacy of the spiritual life of the human person, as a value supreme over any values incorporated in the state. There is too an implicit recognition that this region of man’s spiritual life is the source from which the state itself receives its ethical content, its moral purpose, and the higher norm that governs the operation of its political processes.^{^[61]}

For Murray, the primacy of the spiritual power is thus realized not by an official recognition of the authority of the Church, but rather by a recognition on the part of the state of the authority of the individual consciences of its citizens, who are to form the state according to the dictates of those consciences through democratic processes. Thus, according to Murray, the Catholic citizens of such a state can subordinate its end to the final end, by making sure that its laws are in accord with the law of God.

Murray argues that this amounts to a new application of the Gelasian teaching on dyarchy:

Its premise is the Christian dualist concept of man; and it recognizes that a dyarchy therefore governs the life of man and of society. However, this dyarchy has not the form that prevailed in the Middle Ages—the dualism of auctoritas sacrata pontificum and regalis potestas (with its oscillations between caesaropapism and hierocratism). Nor is it the dyarchy constituted in the so-called confessional state of post-Reformation times—the juridically established co-partnership in society of state and Church (Catholic or Protestant—the Protestant form being the ‘Church-state’ of Erastian tendency, and the Catholic form being the ‘state-Church’ with boundaries of jurisdiction laid down chiefly by concordat). The terms of the dyarchy visible in the First Amendment are not state and Church (that manner of dyarchy is constitutionally excluded by the provision against ‘establishment of religion’), but state and human person, civis idem et christianus (to adopt Leo XIII’s phrase).^{^[62]}

The reference to Leo XIII’s Immortale Dei is crucial to Murray. He puts much weight on Leo XIII’s teaching that spiritual and temporal power come into contact because they rule over the same persons. Seventeen years later he was to claim that Vatican II’s Dignitatis Humanae adopted a “personalist” account of society that supported his thesis:

[T]he Declaration embraces the political doctrine of Pius XII on the juridical state (as it is called in Continental idiom), that is, on government as constitutional and as limited in function—its primary function being juridical, namely, the protection and promotion of the rights of man and the facilitation of the performance of man’s native duties. The primacy of this function is based on Pius XII’s personalist conception of society—on the premise that the ‘human person is the foundation, the goal, and the bearer of the whole social process,’ including the processes of government.^{^[63]}

The main problem that I have with Murray’s position is with his understanding of the “personalist” conception of society (supposedly) taught by Vatican II and Pope Pius XII.

In a previous essay, I unfolded David Schindler’s profound critique of Murray’s teaching on religious liberty.^{^[64]} Schindler argues that the sort of separation of Church and state found in the First Amendment to the American Constitution actually involves an implicit theory of religion:

The human act in its basic structure, for purposes of the constitutional ordering of society, is understood to be silent about God (cf. “articles of peace”). But this means that, when theists go on to fill this silence with speech, they must now do so precisely by way of addition and in their capacity as private members of society.^{^[65]}

In my previous essay I discussed how Schindler shows that Murray separates nature and grace too much, taking insufficient account of the way in which nature is ordered to grace. But here I want to attend to Murray’s problematic account of the common good to which Schindler’s critique also alludes. Note Schindler’s emphasis on the private nature of the influence of the spiritual power on society through the consciences of its citizens in Murray’s account.

Murray’s “personalist” understanding of human society is “personalist” in the precise sense of that term so ably attacked by Charles de Koninck in On the Primacy of the Common Good: Against the Personalists.^{^[66]} On Murray’s account the political community is ordered not to the greatest temporal good of man, but simply to “the protection and promotion of the rights of man and the facilitation of the performance of man’s native duties.”^{^[67]} But this is to fundamentally misunderstand that man’s chief temporal good is the common good of natural happiness. And since the primacy of the common good is based on the fact that even in the natural order it is greater participation in the divine good than any merely private good, it is necessary that those who have charge of the common good order it explicitly to God. As de Koninck argues:

When those in whose charge the common good lies do not order it explicitly to God, is society not corrupted at its very root? […] If, in truth, the politician must possess all the moral virtues and prudence, is this not because he is at the head and must judge and order all things towards the common good of political society, and the latter to God?^{^[68]}

This is true even on the natural level. But, according to the consistent magisterium of the popes from Gelasius I to Leo XIII, the coming of Christ means that the ordering of the temporal common good to God must be achieved by the one who has care for it submitting to the auctoritas sacrata of the Church.^{^[69]} Thus Leo XIII writes in Immortale Dei:

Men living together in society are under the power of God no less than individuals are, and society, no less than individuals, owes gratitude to God who gave it being and maintains it and whose ever-bounteous goodness enriches it with countless blessings. Since, then, no one is allowed to be remiss in the service due to God, and since the chief duty of all men is to cling to religion in both its teaching and practice—not such religion as they may have a preference for, but the religion which God enjoins, and which certain and most clear marks show to be the only one true religion—it is a public crime to act as though there were no God. So, too, is it a sin for the State not to have care for religion as a something beyond its scope, or as of no practical benefit; or out of many forms of religion to adopt that one which chimes in with the fancy; for we are bound absolutely to worship God in that way which He has shown to be His will.^{^[70]}

The consistency of this teaching with Dignitatis Humanae has been amply demonstrated by Thomas Pink.^{^[71]} As a matter of policy, the Church does not currently make use of the state as an instrument for coercing her members, but this does not affect the duty of the state to recognize the true religion. As Dignitatis Humanae itself declares: “Religious freedom […] leaves untouched traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ.”^{^[72]}

In 1951, Fr. F.J. Connell criticized Murray for not leaving traditional Catholic doctrine on the duty of societies toward the true religion untouched.^{^[73]} Connell gave the usual account of Church-state relations found in neo-Scholastic manuals of the day. But Murray lashed back in an angry reply, in which he accused Connell of being a “crypto-monarchist,”^{^[74]} and argued that Connell’s position on the duties of the temporal power would only make sense in the most extremely paternalistic form of absolute monarchy:

Perhaps Fr. Connell is not a conceptualist in his political philosophy. Perhaps when he speaks of “the state” he may actually, if unwittingly, mean the unlimited monarch, the king in the tradition of the French classical monarchy, who was also “Father of the People,” possessed of the total ius politiae, and therefore the single source of law and governmental decision. […] Clearly, if the term, “the state,” really means a regimen regale in the technical sense, a monarchic state governed singly from the top down, with unlimited power centered in the hands of “the civil ruler,” the king, it might become possible to make sense out of Fr. Connell’s theory of the obligations of “the state.” The obligation to investigate the claims of the Church and to permit her to preach could be exactly located—in the king; for nothing that concerns the state lies outside his official duty, and there are no limits to his functions. […] This leads to an important conclusion. In the logic of Fr. Connell’s theories there is inherent a denial of the transcendence of the Church to political forms—the principle that occupied so central a place in the doctrine of Leo XIII.^{^[75]}

Now, I am by no means a crypto-monarchist (having always been quite open in my monarchism), but the question of monarchism is entirely irrelevant, and is raised by Murray merely to throw dust in his readers’ eyes. Nothing prevents a political community with a democratic, republican, or mixed form of government from fulfilling its obligations toward the true religion in the manner described by Connell.

The reason why it would be difficult for the United States of America to fulfill those obligations is not because they form a republic, but because (at least as Murray understands them) they have enshrined a liberal conception of political life in their constitution.^{^[76]} The American Republic (at least by Murray’s time) does not see itself as ordering itself to the common good of earthly happiness, but rather to securing the God-given rights of its citizens. And that is precisely the problem. Murray’s reference to Leo XIII’s teaching on the Church’s official indifference to different political forms is stunningly inapposite. Because Leo explicitly teaches that all such forms can be legitimate on the condition that they serve the common good. And, in fact, Leo concludes from that principle that any society must have some (whether one or many) who have charge of the common good, and order the whole society to it:

A society can neither exist nor be conceived in which there is no one to govern the wills of individuals, in such a way as to make, as it were, one will out of many, and to impel them rightly and orderly to the common good; therefore, God has willed that in a civil society there should be some to rule the multitude.^{^[77]}

The reason why Murray’s Whig Thomism fails, is that by taking an overly personalistic view of political community, he does not understand the transcendence of the temporal common good, and therefore cannot understand how that good is to be ordered to the eternal good.

5. Conclusion: A Practical Synthesis

One reason why in our day Augustinian radicalism and Whig Thomism seem more plausible to many than integralism is that the first two seem to offer much clearer guidance on what practical steps to take in our current historical situation. There is no country on earth today where an integralist program is likely to have any immediate success. But the Christian anarcho-syndicalist projects of Augustinian radicalism can be started at anytime. And nothing prevents one from making the Whig-Thomist attempt at influencing the laws of one’s country through democratic procedure. What is an integralist to do?

In part I think that an integralist will do both what Augustinian radicals do and what Whig-Thomists do, but he will do them in a way formed by integralism. In the wasteland of late-capitalist society there is certainly a great need for the sort of alternative communities advocated by Augustinian-radicals. Communities in which virtues can be fostered and common goods achieved. Integralists form such communities too. But they form them knowing that they cannot attain to the most complete common good of the natural order, the common good that can only be achieved by a societas perfecta. Moreover, they form them in a way that takes a more realistic attitude toward coercion. Integralists are often to be found in Benedictine monasteries (especially in the Congregation of Solesmes), but Benedictine monasteries include coercive punishments in their way of life—at least the sort of punishments that are possible for a voluntary community. Contrast the strict rule of Benedictine life with the following description of events in a community founded by Dorothy Day:

William Gauchat who headed the house of hospitality, furnished an apartment for single women in need, and a married couple arriving ﬁrst, were sheltered there. But when Bill wanted to put a few single women into the empty bedrooms, the couple announced that they had possession and refused to allow them entrance. Our guests know that we will not call upon the police to evict them, that we are trying to follow the dear Lord’s teachings, “If anyone take your coat, let go your cloak also to him. . . .” When another family came to Maryfarm, we explained that we were trying to open a retreat house and that we did not have room for them. It was the family of one of our own willful leaders who “loved God and did as he pleased.” He did not wish to remain on a farm belonging to his father, where he was forced to work too hard. He and his wife refused to listen and unpacked their things to stay with us. First they took over the lower farmhouse. After a few conﬂicts due to their possessing themselves of retreat house goods (as common goods) they moved to the upper farm to join Victor. For the following year they continued their guerrilla tactics from the upper farm, coming down to make raids on the retreat house food and furnishings, explaining to retreatants that they were true Catholic Workers and that the retreat house was a perversion of the movement.^{^[78]}

Now, I mean no disrespect to Dorothy Day (who was certainly a great saint), but a well-ordered community needs authority with the power to enforce rules, and integralists recognize that fact.

And of course, integralists can participate in democratic politics, trying as much as possible to shape the laws according to the natural law. This was the whole point of Pope Leo XIII’s policy of ralliement. Critics of raillement argue that this policy leads to its practitioners being corrupted by liberalism.^{^[79]} But this can be avoided, as Leo XIII intended, by keeping hold of a thoroughly anti-liberal political philosophy, and never forgetting that the current liberal order of political life is profoundly disordered.

^{^[1]} My thanks especially to Alan Fimister, for his critique of my account of potestas indirecta. I would also like to thank James Bogle, the Rev. Hugh Barbour, O.Praem., and John Milbank for their comments.

^{^[2]} Nicomachean Ethics, 1094a-b.

^{^[3]} Cf. Nichomachean Ethics, 1152b.

^{^[4]} Cf. James Chastek, “Christ’s Pluralism,” Just Thomism (blog), April 22, 2012: https://thomism.wordpress.com/2012/04/22/christs-pluralism/ (accessed February 22, 2016): “Aristotle no doubt thought [this opinion] was logically necessary: if we lack one single court of final appeal, how will we avoid chaos and anarchy? If one person or body is not ultimately in charge, how is anyone in charge? Admitting two ‘final judges’ means that some disputes are unresolvable even in principle—unless we are so polyannic as to assume that they will never come into conflict.”

^{^[5]} Nichomachean Ethics, 1094b.

^{^[6]} Cf. Henri Grenier, “The Dignity of Politics and the End of the Polity,” in: The Josias, June 17, 2015: https://thejosias.com/2015/06/17/the-dignity-of-politics-and-the-end-of-the-polity/ (accessed February 22, 2016); Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., “The Good, the Highest Good, and the Common Good,” in: The Josias, February 3, 2015: https://thejosias.com/2015/02/03/the-good-the-highest-good-and-the-common-good/ (accessed February 22, 2016).

^{^[7]} Cf. Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., “The Politics of Nostalgia,” Sancrucensis (blog), April 29, 2014: https://sancrucensis.wordpress.com/2014/04/29/the-politics-of-nostalgia/ (accessed February 22, 2016).

^{^[8]} Pope St. Gelasius I, Famuli vestrae pietatis [also known as Duo sunt], in: Andreas Thiel (ed.), Epistolae Romanorum Pontificum, Vol. 1 (Braunsberg: Eduard Peter, 1868), pp. 349-358, at p. 350-351; trans. John S. Ott: http://www.web.pdx.edu/~ott/Gelasius/ (accessed February 22, 2016).

^{^[9]} The rest of this paragraph is taken from my essay “Religious Liberty and Tradition,” Part III, in: The Josias, January 2, 2015: https://thejosias.com/2015/01/02/religious-liberty-and-tradition-iii/ (accessed February 22, 2016).

^{^[10]} The Thomist blogger James Chastek once put the problem as follows: “Admitting two “final judges” means that some disputes are unresolvable even in principle—unless we are so polyannic as to assume that they will never come into conflict. And yet this crazy pluralism is exactly what strikes Christians as necessary and reasonable since we recognize the necessity of civil society while at the same time having no religious civil code, even while we claim to make final and definitive pronouncements affecting the civil order. I have usually read Christ’s claim that he “brought not peace, but a sword” as simply another way of his restating that he is a “sign of contradiction”, but I wonder now if there is not a more radical sense to it: Christ insisted in the integrity and even autonomy of civil power and his Church, even though he knew that one need not wait long to hit upon some point upon which they disagree. […] Christ describes the world (before his return) as a “house divided”. This strikes a very ominous note, given that Christ is very clear that such a house cannot stand since it is set in fundamental contradiction with itself.” Chastek, “Christ’s Pluralism.”

^{^[11]} Michael Baxter, “‘Overall, the First Amendment Has Been Very Good for Christianity’ — Not!: A Response to Dyson’s Rebuke,” in: DePaul Law Review 43.2 (1994), pp.425-448, at pp.444-445.

^{^[12]} Dorothy Day, “Sanctuary,” in: The Catholic Worker, February 1969: http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/articles/895.html (accessed February 23, 2016).

^{^[13]} Day, “Sanctuary.”

^{^[14]} Stanley Hauerwas and Michael Baxter, “The Kingship of Christ: Why Freedom of ‘Belief’ Is Not Enough,” in: DePaul Law Review 42.1 (1992), p.126.

^{^[15]} John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 2^nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006 [1996]), p. 410.

^{^[16]} William T. Cavanaugh, “From One City to Two: Christian Reimagining of Political Space,” in: Political Theology 7.3 (2006), pp. 299-321, at p. 309.

^{^[17]} See for example: Stanley Hauerwas, “A Christian Critique of Christian America,” in: The Hauerwas Reader, ed. John Berkman and Michael Cartwright (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), pp. 459-480.

^{^[18]} Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, pp. 410-411.

^{^[19]} Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, p. 411.

^{^[20]} Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, p. 426.

^{^[21]} Cavanaugh, “From One City to Two,” pp. 315-318.

^{^[22]} See: Tracey Rowland, “Augustinian and Thomist Engagements with the World,” in: American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 83.3 (2009), pp. 441-459.

^{^[23]} Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, p. 425. It is not clear whether this is actually Milbank’s own position, since he is merely trying to tease out the implications of Augustine’s position in the text cited. But in any case, my analysis has shown that this is the direction in which Augustinian radicalism tends.

^{^[24]} I have unfolded this point in more detail in the following blog-essays: “Integralism,” Sancrucensis (blog), January 16, 2014: https://sancrucensis.wordpress.com/2014/01/16/integralism/ (accessed March 1, 2016); and “De Lubac and His Critics Make the Same Error,” Sancrucensis (blog), July 20, 2014: https://sancrucensis.wordpress.com/2014/07/20/de-lubac-and-his-critics-make-the-same-error/ (accessed March 1, 2016).

^{^[25]} See: Waldstein, “The Good, the Highest Good, and the Common Good.”

^{^[26]} William T. Cavanaugh, “Killing for the Telephone Company: Why the Nation-State is Not the Keeper of the Common Good,” in: Modern Theology 20.2 (2004): pp. 243-274, at p. 274.

^{^[27]} “Now many of our contemporaries seem to fear that a closer bond between human activity and religion will work against the independence of men, of societies, or of the sciences. If by the autonomy of earthly affairs we mean that created things and societies themselves enjoy their own laws and values which must be gradually deciphered, put to use, and regulated by men, then it is entirely right to demand that autonomy. Such is not merely required by modern man, but harmonizes also with the will of the Creator. For by the very circumstance of their having been created, all things are endowed with their own stability, truth, goodness, proper laws and order.” GS §36.

^{^[28]} Cavanaugh, “Killing for the Telephone Company,” passim.

^{^[29]} Arquillière’s book L’augustinisme politique: Essai sur la formation des théories politiques du Moyen Âge (Paris: Vrin, 1955) argued that the hierocratic political theory of the High Middle Ages was a development out of premises found in Augustine. This notion was vigorously disputed by other writers, who argued that the hierocratic theory is totally irreconcilable with Augustine himself. See: Michael Bruno, Political Augustinianism: Modern Interpretations of Augustine’s Political Thought (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014), ch. 1.

^{^[30]} The extreme version of the theory sees temporal power as being delegated by the spiritual power. I will show the problems with such a theory below.

^{^[31]} For the history of the term in a Catholic context see: Christopher van der Krogt, “Catholic Fundamentalism or Catholic Integralism?” in: To Strive and Not to Yield: Essays in Honour of Colin Brown, ed. James Veitch (Wellington: Victoria University, 1992), pp. 123-35.

^{^[32]} See: Gabriel Sanchez, “Illiberal Catholicism One Year On,” in: The Front Porch Republic, January 26, 2015: http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2015/01/illiberal-catholicism-one-year/(accessed March 1, 2016); idem, “Catholic Integralism and the Social Kingship of Christ,” in: The Josias, January 23, 2015: https://thejosias.com/2015/01/23/catholic-integralism-and-the-social-kingship-of-christ/(accessed March 1, 2016). Note that “integralism” is used in by some authors in quite a different sense. John Milbank, for instance, uses “integralism” to refer to the nouvelle theologie’s integration of nature and grace, and uses the term “integrism” for what I will be calling integralism. See: Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, pp. 206-207.

^{^[33]} Walter Ullmann, The Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages: A Study in the Ideological Relation of Clerical to Lay Power, 2^nd ed. (London: Methuen, 1962), p. 1.

^{^[34]} Ullmann, The Growth of Papal Government, p. 1.

^{^[35]} Ullmann, The Growth of Papal Government, pp. 2-3.

^{^[36]} Ullmann, The Growth of Papal Government, p. 2.

^{^[37]} Ullmann, The Growth of Papal Government, pp. 1-2.

^{^[38]} Ullmann, The Growth of Papal Government, p. 2.

^{^[39]} Ullmann, The Growth of Papal Government, pp. 20-22.

^{^[40]} See, for example: Alan Cotrell, “Auctoritas and Potestas: A Reevaluation of the Correspondence of Gelasius I on Papal-Imperial Relations,” in: Medieval Studies 55 (1993), pp. 95-109.

^{^[41]} Fittingly the Holy Roman Emperor would later serve as a deacon or a subdeacon in certain liturgical celebrations. See: Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France, trans. J.E. Anderson (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015 [1971) p.117.

^{^[42]} Ullmann, The Growth of Papal Government, pp. 24-25. The key passage of Tractate IV that Ullmann is interpreting runs as follows: “For Christ, mindful of human frailty, regulated with an excellent disposition what pertained to the salvation of his people. Thus he distinguished between the ofﬁces of both powers according to their own proper activities and separate dignities, wanting his people to be saved by healthful humility and not carried away again by human pride, so that Christian emperors would need priests for attaining eternal life, and priests would avail themselves of imperial regulations in the conduct of temporal affairs. In this fashion spiritual activity would be set apart from worldly encroachments and the ‘soldier of God’ (2 Tim 2:4) would not be involved in secular affairs, while on the other hand he who was involved in secular affairs would not seem to preside over divine matters. Thus the humility of each order would be preserved, neither being exalted by the subservience of the other, and each profession would be especially ﬁtted for its appropriate functions.” Trans. in: Hugo Rahner, S.J., Church and State in Early Christianity, trans. Leo Donald Davis, S.J., Kindle e-book (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006 [1992]).

^{^[43]} Epist. III,65; translated in: Martin Rhonheimer, The Common Good of Constitutional Democracy: Essays in Political Philosophy and on Catholic Social Teaching, ed. William F. Murphy (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press), p. 7.

^{^[44]} Arquillière, L’augustinisme politique, p.40; citation and translation: Bruno, Political Augustinianism, p. 37.

^{^[45]} Douglas Kries, “Political Augustinianism,” in: Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, ed. Allan D. Fritzgerald, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), p. 657, cited in: Bruno, Political Augustinianism, p. 39.

^{^[46]} Innocent III, Sicut universitatis conditor, November 3, 1198, in: Sidney Z. Ehler and John B. Morrall (ed. and trans.), Church and State Through the Centuries: A Collection of Historic Documents with Commentaries (London: Burns and Oats, 1954), p. 73.

^{^[47]} Innocent III, Novit ille, 1204: in: Ehler and Morrall, Church and State Through the Centuries, pp. 69-70.

^{^[48]} Boniface VIII, Licet haec verba, 1302, translation in: Giles of Rome’s on Ecclesiastical Power: A Medieval Theory of World Government, ed. and trans. R.W. Dyson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. xv-xvi.

^{^[49]} S. Th. IaIIae Q.62, A.1, c.

^{^[50]} De Regno ad Regem Cypri, I,15.

^{^[51]} De Regno, I,15.

^{^[52]} Sent. II, Dist. 44, Q. 3, A 4; trans. in: R.W. Dyson (ed. and trans.), Aquinas: Political Writings, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 277-278. Thomas makes an exception, however, for the Pope, whom he sees as has supreme temporal as well as supreme spiritual authority: “Unless perhaps the spiritual and secular powers are conjoined, as in the pope, who holds the summit of both powers: that is, the spiritual and the secular, through the disposition of Him Who is both priest and king.” (Ibid.) But that exception is not necessarily demanded by the popes’ own teachings, as we have already seen. The pope can be seen as holding the summit of the spiritual power only, and having authority over the temporal only insofar as the temporal is subordinated to the spiritual. Even Boniface VIII’s Unam Sanctam, the most extensive claim of authority on the part of the pope is consistent with this view. Boniface writes: “Both, therefore, are in the power of the Church, that is to say, the spiritual and the material sword, but the former is to be administered for the Church but the latter by the Church; the former in the hands of the priest; the latter by the hands of kings and soldiers, but at the will and sufferance of the priest.” (Translation: http://www.americancatholictruthsociety.com/docs/unamsanctum.htm (accessed March 6, 2016). That is, the temporal sword is in the power of the pope, but not in the sense that the pope himself wields that sword.

^{^[53]} I am grateful to Alan Fimister for correcting an earlier version of this essay with regard to this point, as well as with regard to the discussion of Grenier below.

^{^[54]} Henri Grenier, Thomistic Philosophy, vol. III, Moral Philosophy, trans. J.P.E. O’Hanley (Charlottetown: St. Dunstan’s University, 1949), p. 474.

^{^[55]} Grenier, Moral Philosophy, p. 471.

^{^[56]} Moral Philosophy, pp. 472-474.

^{^[57]} Charles de Koninck, “What is Caesar’s,” trans. David Quackenbush: https://www.scribd.com/doc/200567591/What-is-Caesar-s (accessed March 2, 2016).

^{^[58]} Leo XIII, Immortale Dei §§13-14; Cf. Thomas Pink, “Opening Adress,” Pink-Rhonheimer debate on the interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae, University of Notre Dame, November 20, 2015: https://www.academia.edu/19136187/Pink-Rhonheimer_debate_at_Notre_Dame_on_the_interpretation_of_Dignitatis_Humanae_-_opening_address (accessed March 2, 2016), pp. 2-5.

^{^[59]} See: Michael Novak, “The Return of the Catholic Whig,” in: First Things, March 1990: http://www.firstthings.com/article/1990/03/006-the-return-of-the-catholic-whig(accessed March 2, 2016).

^{^[60]} See: Tracey Rowland, Culture and the Thomist Tradition: After Vatican II (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 16.

^{^[61]} John Courtney Murray, S.J., “Contemporary Orientations of Catholic Thought on Church and State in the Light of History,” in: Theological Studies 10 (1949): pp. 177–234, at pp. 188-189.

^{^[62]} Murray, “Contemporary Orientations,” p. 189.

^{^[63]} John Courtney Murray, S.J., “The Issue of Church and State at Vatican Council II,” in: Religious Liberty: Catholic Struggles with Pluralism, ed. J. Leon Hooper (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993): http://www.library.georgetown.edu/woodstock/murray/1966h.

^{^[64]} Waldstein, “Integralism.”

^{^[65]} David Schindler, “Religious Freedom, Truth & American Liberalism: Another Look at John Courtney Murray,” in: Communio 21.4 (1994): pp. 696-741, at p. 722.

^{^[66]} Charles de Koninck, On the Primacy of the Common Good: Against the Personalists, trans. Sean Collins, in: Aquinas Review (1997), pp. 10-71: http://www.thomasaquinas.edu/pdfs/aquinas-review/1997/1997-dekoninck-common-good.pdf (accessed March 2, 2016).

^{^[67]} My account of Murray here is admittedly somewhat simplistic. A fuller account would have to show that Murray’s distinction of civil society and the state is finally incoherent, and thus cannot be the means of allowing him to escape the errors of personalism.

^{^[68]} De Koninck, On the Primacy of the Common Good, p. 69.

^{^[69]} Sadly, de Koninck does not seem to have quite understood this further point. Hence his denial of the right of the Church to use the state as a secular arm. See: De Koninck, “What is Caesar’s.”

^{^[70]} Immortale Dei, §6.

^{^[71]} See my discussion of Pink in: Waldstein, “Religious Liberty and Tradition,” part II: https://thejosias.com/2015/01/01/vatican-ii-and-religious-liberty-ii/ (accessed March 2, 2016).

^{^[72]} Dignitatis Humanae, §1.

^{^[73]} F.J. Connell, “The Theory of the ‘Lay State’,” in: The American Ecclesiastical Review 125.1 (1951), pp. 7-18.

^{^[74]} John Courtney Murray, “For the Freedom and Transcendence of the Church,” in: The American Ecclesiastical Review 126.3 (1952), pp. 28–48, at p. 43.

^{^[75]} Murray, “For the Freedom and Transcendence of the Church,” pp. 37-38.

^{^[76]} One can question whether all of the American founders would have accepted Murray’s liberal reading of the constitution. There was certainly a liberal element in the founding, but there was also an older, classical republican element with a robust account of the common good. See: Felix de St. Vincent, “‘In Dread of Modernity’: Republican Liberty and the Common Good in the American Tradition,” in: The Josias, May 18, 2015: https://thejosias.com/2015/05/18/in-dread-of-modernity-republican-liberty-and-the-common-good-in-the-american-tradition/ (accessed March 3, 2016).

^{^[77]} Diuturnum Illud, §11.

^{^[78]} Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness (San Francisco: Harper, 1997 [1952]), pp. 261-262.

^{^[79]} See: Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., “Catholic Action and Ralliement,” in: The Josias, February 13, 2016: https://thejosias.com/2016/02/13/catholic-action-and-ralliement/ (accessed March 2, 2016).

February 13, 2016March 20, 2018

Catholic Action and Ralliement

by Edmund Waldstein, O. Cist.

In a recent post, Petrus Hispanus criticized what he called the “strategy” of Catholic Action, as a form of Catholic political and social engagement that concedes too much to liberal institutions, and is thus quasi inevitably corrupted by their spirit. Gabriel Sanchez responded at Opus Publicum, arguing that Catholic Action is a core principle of the Church’s social magisterium, and that it is nothing other than social action of Catholics aimed at restoring the sovereignty of Christ in social life. Hispanus then responded to Sanchez, doubling down on his condemnation of Catholic Action. He argues that it was a strategy of using liberal institutions against liberalism, favored by some popes for prudential reasons, but that Catholic’s are not bound to find those reasons actually prudent, and that the results have indeed shown them to be imprudent. The debate is somewhat confused by equivocation on the term “Catholic Action,” but it nevertheless raises an important question. The question could be re-formulated as a question about Pope Leo XIII policy of ralliement— encouraging French Catholics to abandon loyalty to the Ancien Régime, and take part in republican politics, in order to Christianize the Republic. Was ralliement a prudent strategy? There is no agreement about the answer to this question among serious proponents of Catholic Social Teaching, and yet the answer must have far-reaching consequences. I think that both Hispanus and Sanchez would fall on the side of those who argue that it was not prudent, and to some extent I am inclined to agree with them. Continue reading “Catholic Action and Ralliement”

February 3, 2015March 1, 2020

The Good, the Highest Good, and the Common Good

The following thirty-seven theses give a basic overview of the Aristotelian-Thomist account of the good, as interpreted by Laval School Thomists such as Charles De Koninck, Duane Berquist, and Marcus Berquist. A printable version can be found here. A Spanish version can be found here, and a German version here.

Continue reading “The Good, the Highest Good, and the Common Good”

January 5, 2015March 5, 2020

Dubium: Can the State Limit Non-Catholic Religions?

Dubium: Does your interpretation of Dignitatis Humanæ imply that the state cannot, even as the arm of the Church, limit the public profession of non-Catholic religions if the professors are unbaptized (apart, of course, from the considerations of public order)? Put differently, has the church never allowed that exercise to the state?

Responsum: Affirmative. The state cannot, even as arm of the Church, limit the profession of false religions by the unbaptized, except insofar as they disturb public order.

For the most part, the Church has been very careful of the distinction between the baptized and the un-baptized. Even anti-Catholic authors have remarked on this. For example, Thomas Hobbes:

From hence it is, that in all Dominions where the Popes Ecclesiasticall power is entirely received, Jewes, Turkes, and Gentiles, are in the Roman Church tolerated in their Religion, as farre forth, as in the exercise and profession thereof they offend not against the civill power: whereas in a Christian, though a stranger, not to be of the Roman religion, is Capitall; because the Pope pretendeth that all Christians are his Subjects. For otherwise it were as much against the law of Nations to persecute a Christian stranger, for professing the Religion of his owne country, as an Infidell… (Leviathan, ch. 44, Of Spirituall Darknesse from Misinterpretation of Scripture; cf. Thomas Pink, “Suarez and Bellarmine on the Church as Coercive Lawgiver,” p. 188).

January 3, 2015May 5, 2024

Religious Liberty and Tradition IV

This is the last of four parts of an essay on the interpretation of Vatican II’s Declaration on Religious Liberty, Dignitatis Humanæ. Part I considered inadequate interpretations; Part II considered Thomas Pink’s interpretive breakthrough; Part III considered the history of the relation of spiritual and temporal power. A printable version of the whole essay can be found here.

Part IV: The concerns of the conciliar theologians

Dignitatis Humanæ begins with an optimistic reading of one of the signs of the times: “A sense of the dignity of the human person has been impressing itself more and more deeply on the consciousness of contemporary man.”[1] A footnote referring to Pope Pius XII’s famous Christmas Radio Message of 1944 shows that the Council fathers had a very specific development in mind— a change that had came about through the experience of the totalitarian dictatorships of the 20^th century. This experience seemed to make a rapprochement between the Church and modernity possible; suddenly it seemed that the enmity between the Church and modernity that had been so pronounced since the Enlightenment might come to an end. At the beginning of the 20^th century much of public opinion had still considered the Church to be an enemy of progress and freedom, but after the World Wars opinion had shifted, and many saw the Church as a moral beacon that had stood strong against irrational slaughter and destructive ideology. In Western Europe especially the experience of a totalitarianism that had wanted to entirely subordinate the human person to this-worldly goals made many think that it was necessary to recover a sense of the dignity of the human person as a creation of God with a transcendent destiny. Within the Church many thought that this new atmosphere presented a chance to re-convert the world to Christianity.[2]

Although the 1950s did not quite see the mass conversions that some expected, nevertheless the Church enjoyed unusual prestige. In many parts of Western Europe Christian social-democratic parties came to power. Many of these were influenced by the thought of the French philosopher and convert Jacques Maritain.[3] Maritain had recognized the opportunity of an anti-totalitarian reaction quite early. In the 1920s he had been an integralist and a supporter of Action Française,[4] but in the 30s he promoted a democratic philosophy based on respect for the dignity of man as an image of God. In Integral Humanism (1936) he argued for a new form of the relation of Church and state suitable to the modern age. He tried to show that the principle of the distinction between spiritual and worldly power, and the primacy of the former, could be realized in different ways at different times. In the Middle Ages the Church’s exercise of potestas indirecta over the worldly power was appropriate to the stage of development mankind had then reached. But with mankind at its current stage of development it would be better for the Church to give up the exercise of such a potestas, and exert only a moral influence on political life.[5] Maritain’s theory was meant to enable him to propose a new model of Church-state relations without rejecting traditional teaching.

In the United States of America a somewhat analogous development was taking place. In the 19^th and early 20^th centuries American Catholics had been considered un-American, since their European political theology seemed irreconcilable with the principles of the American Republic. In the 1950s the Jesuit Fr. John Courtney Murray tried to prove the compatibility of Catholicism and American political philosophy. Murray acted as advisor to the Catholic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy. Kennedy’s election to the presidency in 1960 seemed to Murray and many American Catholics to represent the acceptance of such compatibility on the part of the American public.[6]

Murray argued for an even stricter separation of Church and state than Maritain. Murray founds this separation on a strict distinction of nature and grace— the state as a community rooted in natural law has a different end from the Church, the Church’s end being given by grace. As the Murray scholar Leon Hooper, S.J., put it:

[In] this world there are two sources of moral authority. Early on these were for Murray the state and the church, or, more generally, the natural law and the revealed law. Later they became civil societies and religious communities, or the secular and the sacred. Each of the two orders is differently based (in creation and redemption) and is directed toward different ends (civic friendship and eternal beatitude). Each can legitimately claim its own autonomy.[7]

From these principles Murray argues for a consistent neutrality of the state in religious matters.[8]

Against the background of the developments exemplified by Maritain and Murray one can understand the widespread opinion in the Church in the run-up to the Second Vatican Council that the Church had to re-formulate her teachings in a manner suitable to the modern age in order to take the great opportunity the times offered her. In one of his last speeches as Pope, Pope Benedict XVI recalled the atmosphere at the time of the beginning of the Council with the following words:

There was an incredible sense of expectation. […] we knew that the relationship between the Church and the modern period, right from the outset, had been slightly fraught, beginning with the Church’s error in the case of Galileo Galilei; we were looking to correct this mistaken start and to rediscover the union between the Church and the best forces of the world, so as to open up humanity’s future, to open up true progress.[9]

The question of the Church’s stance towards progress was a central question of the council. The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes addressed this problem with a certain ambivalence. Consider the following passages:

Sacred Scripture teaches the human family what the experience of the ages confirms: that while human progress is a great advantage to man, it brings with it a strong temptation. […] That is why Christ’s Church, trusting in the design of the Creator, acknowledges that human progress can serve man’s true happiness, yet she cannot help echoing the Apostle’s warning: ‘Be not conformed to this world’ (Rom. 12:2). Here by the world is meant that spirit of vanity and malice which transforms into an instrument of sin those human energies intended for the service of God and man. […] While earthly progress must be carefully distinguished from the growth of Christ’s kingdom, to the extent that the former can contribute to the better ordering of human society, it is of vital concern to the Kingdom of God.[10]

Gaudium et Spes was trying to strike a delicate balance. It was trying as it were to subvert the Enlightenment idea of progress, to use the language of progress but give it a new meaning.

The danger here was that the opposite would happen, that Enlightenment ideas would subvert the teachings of the Church, making of them a metaphor for inner-worldly progress. This was the danger of “modernism,” which had been condemned as far back as 1907. In order to avoid this danger it was necessary to give an exact account of the relation of nature and grace. The French conciliar theologian Henri de Lubac, S.J., one of the main authors of Gaudium et Spes, tried to develop the implications of the scholastic principle gratia non destruit naturam, sed eam supponit et perficit et elevat (grace does not destroy nature, but presupposes, perfects, and elevates it). He argued that the relative disregard for natural goods in the Catholic contemptus mundi does not imply a reduction or a poisoning of human culture, but on the contrary allows for a truly noble development of culture in view of the coming elevation and sublation of human nature.[11]

In the aftermath of the Council, in his preface to a German translation of Augustinisme et théologie modern, de Lubac complained of a “rising tide of immanentism,” that was trying to “dissolve the Church into the world,”[12] and against which de Lubac wanted to preserve the distinction between nature and grace. Before and during the Council, however, he saw the danger as coming primarily from the other direction— from those who made that distinction too sharp, separating nature and grace too much.[13] This is the problem that we saw in John Courtney Murray. While de Lubac recognized this problem clearly, recent work by theologians such as Steven Long suggests that he misidentified its roots. De Lubac argued that the problem lay in the idea of “pure nature” ordered to a natural end intelligible in abstraction from grace. But Long has convincingly argued that the real problem lies in a conception of nature that is not theonomic enough, a conception that makes nature appear as a closed system indifferent toward the divine. De Lubac’s misidentification of the root of the problem leads him to postulate a natural desire for a supernatural end, an idea that tends towards a monism of grace.[14]

As we saw in Calvin’s case, a monistic view of the relation of nature and grace leads to an exaggeratedly dualistic view of the relation of Church and state, and so it is no surprise that de Lubac’s slight tendency toward a monism of grace leads him to exaggerate the autonomy of the state. Thus already in 1932 de Lubac denied that the state ought to be juridically subordinated to the Church, arguing that just as grace transforms nature from within, the Church should inspire the state through the hearts of its citizens, but without giving it external commands:

The law of the relations between nature and grace, in its generality, is everywhere the same. It is from within that grace seizes nature, and, far from diminishing nature, raises it up, in order to make it serve its (grace’s) own ends. It is from within that faith transforms reason, that the Church influences the state. As the messenger of Christ, the Church is not the guardian of the state; on the contrary she ennobles the state, inspiring it to be a Christian state and thereby more human.[15]

De Lubac thus went further than Maritain, whose disciple Charles Journet he cites unfavorably, since de Lubac considers a potestas indirecta of the Church over temporal affairs illegitimate at all times.[16]

In the debates on Dignitatis Humanæ old fashioned traditionalists such as Cardinal Siri of Genoa were on one side, and various proponents of a new approach were on the other. But the proponents of a new approach had very different conceptions of what that approach should look like. Jacques Maritain’s approach had many influential proponents including Pope Paul VI himself, who had translated Maritain’s Integral Humanism into Italian,[17] and Charles Cardinal Journet, Maritain’s favorite student.[18] Fr. John Courtney Murray was himself involved in drafting Dignitatis Humanæ as a peritus, and his theory was promoted by the American bishops.[19] Henri de Lubac was also involved as a peritus, and his concerns were shared by several bishops including de Lubac’s friend, the then-Archbishop of Krakow, Karol Wojtyła.[20]

The supporters of Maritain and of de Lubac were united in thinking that an “Americanist” dualism such as that promoted by Murray was inadequate. They wanted the text to argue from the duty of man toward the truth, an approach that Murray thought incoherent.[21] But Maritainians and de Lubacians could agree neither on de Lubac’s rejection of potestas indirecta nor on Maritain’s theory of different epochs. The solution to which they came was simply to bracket the question of the relation of Church and state, and simply to treat of religious liberty in relation to the state’s native powers, showing how such liberty is founded in the dignity of man’s transcendent end. This solution was probably suggested by Cardinal Journet,[22] and it is expressed above all in the following passage of Dignitatis Humanæ § 1 that I have already quoted:

Religious freedom […] which men demand as necessary to fulfill their duty to worship God, has to do with immunity from coercion in civil society. Therefore 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.

This solution enabled the post-conciliar Church to engage in an energetic defense of religious liberty around the globe without giving up the continuity of her teaching. But since Dignitatis Humanæ did not explain its solution clearly enough to avoid the impression of discontinuity, it contributed to a crisis of authority in post-conciliar theology.[23]

Notes

[1] Dignitatis Humanæ § 1.

[2] See: Edmund Waldstein, “The Papacy Against the False Gospel of Progress,” Sancrucensis (blog), February 22, 2013: http://sancrucensis.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/the-papacy-against-the-false-gospel-of-progress/ (accessed December 29, 2014).

[3] See: Alan Fimister, Robert Schuman: Neo Scholastic Humanism and the Reunification of Europe (Brussels 2008).

[4] Fimister, Robert Schuman 106-108.

[5] See: Pink, “Jacques Maritain;” Fimister, Robert Schuman 113-125.

[6] See: Thomas W. O’Brien, John Courtney Murray in a Cold War Context (Lanham, Maryland 2004) 65-66, 100 and passim.

[7] Leon Hooper, General Introduction to John Courtney Murray, Religious Liberty: Catholic Struggles With Pluralism, ed. by Leon Hooper (Louiseville 1993) 25; citation following: David Schindler, Heart of the World, Center of the Church: Communio Ecclesiology, Lieberalism, and Liberation (Grand Rapids 1996) 77.

[8] See: Schindler, Heart of the World, ch. 1.

[9] Pope Benedict XVI, E’ per me un dono, Address to Parish Priests and the Clergy of Rome, 14. Februar 2013: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2013/february/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20130214_clero-roma_en.html (accessed December 29, 2014).

[10] Gaudium et Spes §§ 37, 39.

[11] Cf. Pope Benedict XVI, Address to Representatives from the World of Culture, Collège des Bernardins, Paris, September 12, 2008: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2008/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20080912_parigi-cultura_en.html (accessed November 17, 2014); cf. also idem, Spe Salvi §§ 13-15, note especially the references to de Lubac, §§ 13-14.

[12] Henri de Lubac, Die Erbe Augustins, trans. Hans Urs von Balthasar (Einsiedeln 1971), Vorwort des Verfassers zur deutschen Ausgabe 9-11.

[13] De Lubac, Die Erbe Augustins 7-8.

[14] See: Steven A. Long, Natura Pura: On the Recovery of Nature in the Doctrine of Grace (New York 2010). While I agree with Long’s main thesis, I think that he exaggerates certain points—see: Edmund Waldstein, “De Lubac and His Critics Make the Same Error,” in: Sancrucensis (blog), July 20, 2014: http://sancrucensis.wordpress.com/2014/07/20/de-lubac-and-his-critics-make-the-same-error/ (accessed November 17, 2014).

[15] Henri de Lubac, “Le Pouvoir de l’église en matière temporelle,” Revue de Sciences Religieuses 12 (1932): 329-54, at 343-44, citation and translation following Schindler, Heart of the World 78.

[16] See: Bryan C. Holton, Everything is Sacred: Spiritual Exegesis in the Political Theology of Henri de Lubac (Cambridge 2009) 41-46.

[17] Fimister, Robert Schuman 101.

[18] See: Pink, “Jacques Maritain.”

[19] See: O’Brien, John Courtney Murray 100-104.

[20] See: Massimo Serretti, “I due amici che fecero la ‘rivoluzione’ del Concilio Vaticano II,” in: Illusidario, October 12, 2012: http://www.ilsussidiario.net/News/Cultura/2012/10/12/LA-STORIA-I-due-amici-che-fecero-la-rivoluzione-del-Concilio-Vaticano-II/328529/ (accessed November 17, 2014).

[21] Schindler, Heart of the World 61.

[22] See: Pink, “Jacques Maritain.”

[23] Cf. John Conley, “Religious Freedom as Catholic Crisis,” in: The Human Person and a Culture of Freedom, ed. Peter A. Pagan Aguiar and Terese Auer (Washington 2009) 226-241.

January 2, 2015May 5, 2024

Religious Liberty and Tradition III

This is the third of four parts of an essay on the interpretation of Vatican II’s Declaration on Religious Liberty, Dignitatis Humanæ. Part I considered inadequate interpretations; Part II considered Thomas Pink’s interpretive breakthrough. A printable version of the whole essay can be found here.

Part III: Spiritual and temporal power: a glance at history

The ancient world did not distinguish between spiritual and worldly power. In the Greek city-states and later in Rome the worship of the gods was an important element of political or imperial life, and was therefore considered to fall under political or imperial authority. Aristotle considers worship to be an essential function of the polis: “Fifthly, or rather first, there must be a care of religion, which is commonly called worship.”[1] Although the Romans distinguished between res divina and res publica this distinction was not a distinction of distinct powers with distinct ends;[2] the function of divine worship was largely to secure political/imperial success.[3] Ancient Israel reversed this order; the worship of God is the primary thing to which all of life is subordinated. But here too there was no distinction between spiritual and temporal power.[4]

The distinction between spiritual and temporal or worldly power was an innovation of Christianity. And, as Rhonheimer argues, it was able to make this distinction because Christianity is a religion of redemption.[5] Christianity did not deny the legitimacy of the existing political order, it recognized therein an authority founded in God’s creation and granted by His providence. But like any part of creation it saw the political as wounded by sin and in need of healing in the present, and the eschatological future of elevation, fulfillment, and transcendence by a higher form of communal life. The order of creation was seen as a good, but temporary and preliminary order— a sign of a yet better order to come. The Lord’s famous dictum according to which one must render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, but unto God the things that are God’s (Mtt 22:21) did not at all conform to expectations about the Messiah. The Messiah was expected to end Roman rule and re-establish the rule of God. But Jesus does not immediately destroy the existing order, instead He plants the Kingdom of God as a seed that is to grow in the midst of the existing order. Only at His triumphant return at the end of time will He replace earthly powers with the New Jerusalem.

In the time between the Ascension and the Second Coming of the Lord Christians have to care both for the “temporal”— that is, passing, preliminary— goods, and for the imperishable eternal goods of the Kingdom of God. Very soon a distinction was made within the Church herself between the Apostles whose responsibility was primarily for the ministry of the word of God, and the deacons who had the duty of caring for temporal matters (see Acts 6).

The early Christians had a somewhat ambivalent attitude toward the power of the Roman emperor. On the one hand his authority is recognized as given by God for the punishment of evildoers (cf. Romans 13:1-8) and the securing of a peace, which makes it easier for Christians to live a pious life and preach the Gospel (cf. 1 Tim 2:1-4).[6] On the other hand, Revelation portrays Rome as a new Babylon that unjustly sheds the blood of the martyrs. The early Church Fathers demanded an end of persecution, a granting of religious freedom to Christians.[7]

After Constantine ended the persecution of Christians, Christianity was at risk of being instrumentalized, of being given the function of securing the safety of the empire that once belonged to the pagan gods. The Church Fathers, especially St Ambrose and St Athanasius protested against this attempt to subordinate the Church to worldly power.[8] They insisted on two principles: first, “the primacy of the spiritual over the earthly/worldly affairs,” and second, “the ordering of all earthly/worldly affairs to the heavenly and eternal.”[9] The Fathers understood these principles to allow for a role of the temporal power in helping to preserve the true faith. Thus the imperial power was used to suppress the Arian heresy.[10] Rhonheimer considers the “enthusiasm” with which the Fathers saw worldly power as an instrument of orthodoxy problematic and “astonishing,” but his astonishment rests on a petitio principii. [11] It is only because Rhonheimer first interprets the direct New Testament derivation of worldly power from God as “sovereignty” and “independence of religious claims to ordering authority”[12] that the patristic willingness to make use of the state as an instrument for the suppression of heresy seems wrong to him. But one should rather take the patristic application of New Testament principles as an authoritative guide to the meaning of those principles.

The sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 seemed to many Romans to be a refutation of Christianity. Clearly Christianity was not able to fulfill the classic function of religion: preserving the city from catastrophe. St Augustine answered this argument in his great work The City of God. The true religion does not exist for the sake of securing the transitory order of this world, but rather for the sake of building up the City of God, which will only be fully realized after the passing of this world. The City of God is founded on a love of God that leads its citizens to contempt for themselves, counting all earthly things as worthless.[13] God allows “temporal” catastrophes to disturb the reign of Christian rulers, thus teaching all not to serve God for the sake of worldly advantages (Civ. Dei V,25). Augustine argues that temporal ought to be ordered to eternal ones (Civ. Dei XIX,17), but that this ordering will never be achieved entirely harmoniously till the second coming of the Lord. For, there is a second city here on earth in addition to the city of God— the civitas terrena, the earthly city. This city is founded on a love of self to the contempt of God (Civ. Dei XIV,28). And these two cities are in conflict. Although both cities are (for different reasons) interested in conserving temporal peace, so that a limited cooperation between them in temporal matters is possible (Civ. Dei XIX,17), nevertheless, this cannot be taken as allowing for a neutral temporal realm, as Rhonheimer would have it;[14] the earthly city is always opposed to true religion.[15] Thus Augustine argues that it is fitting for temporal things to be ordered by Christian rulers.[16] And these rulers ought not to be neutral in religious matters. Rather they should promote the true religion and even punish heretics.[17] Justice consists in giving each his own, thus no society is just that does not give God the worship due to Him (Civ. Dei XIX,21[18]).

Since Christian rulers must see to it that society gives God His due, it might seem that they must of themselves have a certain authority in spiritual matters, that is, an episcopal authority. But this idea was rejected by the Church. In 494 Pope St Gelasius I taught that the royal power and priestly authority are two distinct principles, both instituted by God, and that the subordination of temporal to spiritual good implies that the temporal rulers must be subject to the priestly authority in matters that concern eternal salvation.[19]

But Christian rulers both in the Byzantine Empire, and, after the translatio imperii of 800, in the Holy Roman Empire, did not embrace the Gelasian teaching. In the West a conflict between pope and emperor developed that came to a head in the High Middle Ages in the Investiture Controversy. The popes from St Gregory VII to Boniface VIII developed previous teaching on the relation of the two powers, and taught that the subordination of temporal under the spiritual ought to be preserved by a juridical subordination of worldly under priestly authority. Priestly authority is seen not just as auctoritas, but as a genuine potestas, a coercive power. Rhonheimer argues that calling the priestly authority potestas is contrary to the actual meaning of Gelasian diarchy,[20] but one can also see it as a development of what was implicit in previous teaching. If one considers the very high degree of magisterial authority with which the plenitudo potestas of the pope was taught from St Gregory VII’s Dictatus Papæ (1075) to Boniface VIII’s Unam Sanctam (1302), then it is simply not possible to reject this development as illegitimate.[21]

Unam Sanctam conceives of the potestas of the pope as a direct authority, at least when it is a question of using temporal power for directly spiritual purposes. In such matters the sword is drawn “at the will and sufferance of the priest.”[22] But when it is a question of temporal matters that are only indirectly ordered to the spiritual, it is not clear whether the pope’s power is direct or indirect (potestas indirecta). Giles of Rome, who gave an important theoretical defense of the claims of Unam Sanctam, argued that the pope’s authority was direct even in such matters.[23] But since he goes on to argue that this authority while direct is not “immediate and executory,”[24] his theory is basically indistinguishable from the theory of potestas indirecta, according to which the Church can only intervene in temporal affairs ratione peccati, that is, in order to forbid or punish sin. Giles explains the relation of spiritual to temporal by a number of analogies, including the analogy of soul and body. Just as the body has its own needs (food, drink etc.), but exists finally for the sake of the soul and is thus subject to the soul, so temporal things have their own necessities but are finally for the sake of spiritual things, and temporal rulers must thus be subject to the pope, the supreme spiritual ruler. [25]

The claims of the popes in the High Middle Ages were supported by various reform movements in the Church such as the Cluniacs, Cistercians, Norbertines, and Dominicans. All of these movements were concerned with emphasizing the primacy of the spiritual and combatting worldliness within the Church.[26]

Especially from the 14^th century onwards, new powers opposed themselves to the papal claims— the territorial rulers, who were slowly developing the beginnings of nation-states. With lamentable myopia the popes had at first supported the territorial rulers as a balance to the power of the emperor, but soon these rulers proved themselves more dangerous enemies than the emperor. King Philip the Fair of France, for example, was able to prevail in his struggles with Pope Boniface VIII. After the death of Boniface and his short-lived successor, Pope Clement V began the “Babylonian Captivity” of the popes in Avignon.[27] After the popes returned to Rome, they were politically integrated into the newly revived system of Italian city-states— in a manner practically incompatible with the two sword theory of the High Middle Ages.[28]

While the great Church reform movements of the High Middle Ages, from the Cluniacs to the Dominicans, were supporters of the papacy (excepting the Albigensians and the anti-papal wing of the Franciscans), the reform movements of the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance became increasingly anti-papal.[29] This development reached a climax in the Protestant Reformation. The Reformers turned on the pope and allied themselves with the territorial rulers. The “Magisterial Reformation” of Luther and Calvin gave the Christian “magistrate,” i.e. the territorial ruler, a competence in certain religious matters independent of the clergy. This autonomous competence of the magistracy was based on new theological principles that completely re-conceived the relation of worldly and spiritual power.

Calvin (following Luther) distinguished sharply between an invisible kingdom in consciences of the elect, in which there was complete freedom from coercion and each believer was subjected to Christ, the only king and priest, without any intermediary, on the one hand, and, on the other, a visible external kingdom. The visible kingdom was concerned not only with “worldly” matters in the old sense, but also with external acts of religion. Calvin places both the magistrates and the preachers of the Word in the external kingdom.[30] The preachers are concerned with persuading people, whereas the magistrates are concerned with coercing their external actions, including their religious actions.[31]

The Reformers thus rejected the Catholic teaching defined as early as the Fourth Synod of Toledo according to which the Church has the right to coerce the baptized to keep the faith, since on their account no visible authority whatever can have any authority over conscience. Moreover, they see coercive authority over external acts of religion as belonging not to priests—which they don’t think exist—nor even to preachers, but rather to the magistrates.

The Reformers’ rejection of Catholic teaching on these points is rooted in a new theology of grace, or rather a rejection of the traditional distinction between grace and nature. The Catholic attitude toward “temporal” affairs is rooted in a view of nature as a temporary order of being, due to be perfected and in a sense replaced by a better, permanent order, a super-nature to be established by grace. On the Catholic view the created natures of things are good. By sin they are wounded, but not destroyed. Christ comes to heal and re-establish nature. But not only to re-establish it the way it was before the Fall; Christ elevates nature, granting a better kind of being, a supernatural being. And in fact nature was always intended as a sign and preparation for the supernatural. So, for example, marriage is a communion of persons that flows from nature and is good. But in the second coming of Christ marriage is shown to have been only a temporary reality a sign of the wedding of Christ and His bride the Church. Everything that was good in marriage will be present in a more eminent mode in the union of Christ and His bride, but natural marriage itself will be no more (cf. Mt 22:30). Nature is thus a shadow and image of the reality that is to come through grace. The natures of things are not destroyed by grace, but they are so transformed that much that belonged to them before is transcended and replaced by that of which it was the image. In the present time, though, both realities are present at once; the new reality of grace is present as a seed alongside the old reality of nature. Thus the Wedding of the Lamb is present as a seed in the Church’s union with Christ in the Sacraments, but this union now exists alongside natural marriage. And natural marriage is now elevated by grace to be a sacrament—an effective sign of the perfect union that is to come. But higher than sacramental marriage is consecrated virginity, because virginity is not merely a sign of the coming reality, but an anticipation of that reality—the consecrated virgin already lives the form of life that the blessed will have in Heaven (although she still lacks the perfect union of the beatific vision).

Calvin rejected the Catholic distinction between nature and the supernatural. On Calvin’s account there is only nature. In the beginning nature was so perfect that man had true happiness, beatitude. But this perfection was possessed in an insecure mode; it could still be lost. And it was lost through sin. The grace of Christ restores the original perfection of man. The eschatological fulfillment is nothing more than the restoration in an un-losable mode of the very same beatitude that man already enjoyed in Eden. On Calvin’s account, grace does not elevate nature to a supernatural level, and thus nature is not a temporary reality meant to serve as a sign of a better reality to come.[32] This is the reason for Calvin’s rejection of Catholic teaching on the Evangelical Counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience, which to him must seem an unwarranted rejection of God’s good creation order.[33] And this is the explanation of the (from a Catholic perspective) exaggerated value put on worldly affairs and “ordinary life” in Protestant culture.[34]

One of the main ideals of the reform movements of the High Middle Ages was contemptus mundi (contempt for the world), or fuga sæculi (flight from the world)—understood not only as contempt for the dis-order of the fallen world and for the demonic powers and the civitas terrena over which they rule, but also as a healthy disregard for the passing goods of the preliminary order of things. This relative contempt for the preliminary corresponded to the demand that the temporal power be subject to the spiritual power. Thus St Bernard of Clairvaux’s De Consideratione already contains the two sword theory that Pope Boniface VIII was later to adopt.[35] But since the Reformers of the 16^th century rejected the ideal of contemptus mundi, it makes sense that they demanded the autonomy of worldly rulers.[36] The Catholic dualism of nature and grace corresponds to an integralist vision of the relation of spiritual and worldly power, whereas the Protestant monism of nature corresponds to an independence of worldly power from clerical authority.

The Reformation led at first to the formation of so-called “confessional states.” Calvinist confessional states were famed for moral rigorism. Since they did not recognize life according to the Evangelical Counsels as a status perfectionis, they expected moral perfection from everyone. The great success of Calvinist discipline in forming prosperous and militarily powerful societies led to their imitation in Catholic countries. The confessional states quickly developed into the first sovereign territorial states in the modern sense. Often religion was practically degraded to a means of civil discipline.[37] Paradoxically this contributed to the secularization of the Western world.[38] At first in the Netherlands, and then at the end of the 18^th century in North America, states were formed that claimed to be neutral in religious matters. They wanted to limit themselves to the preservation of outward peace, leaving each person to worship whatsoever he pleased so long as he could agree on common rules of commercial life and public security with everyone else.[39]

The complete secularization of the state was not at all the intention of the Reformers. But it would not have been possible without their distinction between the visible and the invisible Kingdom, their exaltation of the freedom of conscience, and their exaggerated regard for natural goods. These positions were conditions for the development of the European Enlightenment. The Enlightenment began in the 16^th Century with a new ideal of progress through scientific/technological domination of nature. As Pope Benedict XVI has emphasized, this ideal was from the beginning a secularization of Christian hope:

Up to that time, the recovery of what man had lost through the expulsion from Paradise was expected from faith in Jesus Christ: herein lay “redemption”. Now, this “redemption”, the restoration of the lost “Paradise” is no longer expected from faith, but from the newly discovered link between science and praxis. It is not that faith is simply denied; rather it is displaced onto another level—that of purely private and other-worldly affairs—and at the same time it becomes somehow irrelevant for the world.[40]

This ideology came to see nature as an inert mechanistic mass without inner teleology, a mere object for arbitrary manipulation by human power. In the political realm it lead to a thorough secularization of public life. In Protestant countries this development was relatively peaceful. But in Catholic countries it involved a passionate struggle between the “enlightened” and the forces of “ignorance and superstition.” The philosophes considered the Catholic Church to be an enemy of material progress because of her commitment to asceticism and contemptus mundi, and an enemy of freedom because she punished heretics and censored books. Thus in Catholic countries a passionate anticlericalism developed which had its first political success in the violent persecution of the Church in the French Revolution. In the 19^th century anti-clerical liberals and reactionary restorationists alternated in the governments of Europe. In the 20^th century totalitarian, anti-clerical regimes developed whether communist and officially atheist as in Russia, or nationalist and neo-pagan as in Germany.[41]

In the Catholic Counter-Reformation theologians such as Francisco Suarez and St Robert Bellarmine had responded to the claims of the confessional state with detailed expositions of the Catholic teaching, according to which the worldly power can act in religious matters only as an organ of the spiritual power.[42] But in the following centuries, in which the nation states consolidated their monopoly on coercive power, this teaching came to be less and less understood. Although Pope Leo XIII returned to this teaching in the 19^th century, teaching it authoritatively in the encyclical Immortale Dei,[43] his teaching was often misunderstood, so that many 19^th century Catholics— including such luminaries as Bishop Ketteler of Mainz— did not think that the Church had true coercive authority of her own.[44] Thus Thomas Pink summarizes the situation immediately before Vatican II as follows:

And so we arrive at the view of religious coercion current before the Second Vatican Council, one that still shapes much post-conciliar “traditionalist” opinion. Religious coercion is really the business of the state. There is no question of the state coercing belief or private practice. But the state must publicly recognize the Catholic faith as true and restrict the public presence of other religions. That behind all this state activity lay another authority, the Church, truly coercive in her own right—whose authority in the case of the baptized extended to coercing even private religious belief and practice—tended to be forgotten.[45]

Part IV will consider the concerns of theologians at the Council. A printable version of the whole essay can be found here.

Notes

[1] Aristotle, Politics VII,8 1328b 13; trans. Benjamin Jowett (Oxford 1905).

[2] See: Itai Gradel, Emperor Worship and Roman Religion (Oxford 2002) 4-6.

[3] See Numa Denis Fustel de Coulange’s enduring 19^th century classic, The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome, trans. Willard Small (Boston 1877).

[4] See: Rémy Brague, The Law of God: The Philosophical History of an Idea, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago 2007) ch. 4.

[5] Rhonheimer, Christentum und säkularer Staat 36-44.

[6] Cf. Rhonheimer, Christentum und säkularer Staat 40-44.

[7] See: Rhonheimer, Christentum und säkularer Staat 42-43.

[8] See: Rhonheimer, Christentum und säkularer Staat 49.

[9] Rhonheimer, Christentum und säkularer Staat 46: “der Primat des Spirituellen über das Irdisch-Weltliche […] die Hinordnung alles Irdisch-Weltliche auf das Himmlische und Ewige.”

[10] See: Rhonheimer, Christentum und säkularer Staat 49, 51.

[11] Rhonheimer, Christentum und säkularer Staat 49.

[12] Rhonheimer, Christentum und säkularer Staat 41.

[13] Cf. De Civitate Dei XIV, 28; hereafter cited parenthetically as Civ. Dei.

[14] Rhonheimer, Christentum und säkularer Staat 55.

[15] See: Tracey Rowland, “Augustinian and Thomist Engagements with the World,” in: American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 83,3 (2009): 441-459, especially at 446-449; E.J. Hutchinson, “Whose Augustine? Which Augustinianism?” in: The Calvinist International (August 2014): http://calvinistinternational.com/2014/08/14/whose-augustine-augustinianism/ (accessed October 31, 2014); Donald X. Burt, Friendship and Society: An Introduction to Augustine’s Practical Philosophy (Grand Rapids 2009) 200-227.

[16] See: Rowland, “Augustinian and Thomist Engagements” 448.

[17] Rowland, “Augustinian and Thomist Engagements” 448-449; Burt, Friendship and Society 200-227.

[18] “Hence, when a man does not serve God, what justice can we ascribe to him […]? And if there is no justice in such an individual, certainly there can be none in a community composed of such persons.” trans. Marcus Dods (Buffallo 1987).

[19] Gelasius I, Famuli vestrae pietatis, in: Internet Medieval Sourcebook: http://legacy.fordham.edu/halsall/source/gelasius1.asp (accessed December 12, 2014).

[20] Rhonheimer, Christentum und säkularer Staat 75.

[21] On the theological note of the teaching of Unam Sanctam see: Steven Wedgeworth, “Happy Anniversary Unam Sanctam,” in: The Calvinist International (November 2013): http://calvinistinternational.com/2013/11/18/happy-anniversary-unam-sanctam/ (accessed November 9, 2014).

[22] Boniface VIII, Unam Sanctam, in: Internet Medieval Sourcebook: http://legacy.fordham.edu/Halsall/source/B8-unam.asp (accessed December 18, 2014).

[23] See for example: De ecclesiastica potestate, II,6: „terrena … potestas et secundum se et secundum sua, potestati ecclesiastice subdatur.“ Giles of Rome’s On Ecclesiastical Power: A Medieval Theory of World Government: A Critical Edition and Translation, ed. R.W. Dyson (New York 2004).

[24] De ecclesiastica potestate, III.

[25] De ecclesiastica potestate, I,7.

[26] See: Christopher Dawson, The Formation of Christendom (San Francisco 2008 [1965]) 216-227; The Dividing of Christendom (San Francisco 2008 [1965]) 30, 38.

[27] Dawson, The Dividing 41-43.

[28] Dawson, The Dividing 53-56.

[29] See: Dawson, The Dividing 30, 42-43.

[30] See: Steven Wedgeworth and Peter Escalante, “John Calvin and the Two Kingdoms,” Part 2, in: The Cavinist International (May 2012): http://calvinistinternational.com/2012/05/29/calvin-2k-2/ (accessed November 9, 2014).

[31] Wedgeworth and Escalante, “John Calvin” 2.

[32] See: Peter Escalante, “Two Ends or Two Kingdoms?” in: The Calvinist International (April 2013): http://calvinistinternational.com/2013/04/08/two-ends-or-two-kingdoms/ (accessed November 10, 2014).

[33] See: Escalante, “Two Ends.”

[34] See: Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, Massachusetts 1989) Part III: “The Affirmation of Ordinary Life.”

[35] See: Rhonheimer, Christentum und säkularer Staat 76-78.

[36] See: Escalante, “Two Ends.”

[37] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge/Massachusetts 2007) chapter 2: “The Rise of the Disciplinary Society.”

[38] See: Brad Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge/Massachusetts 2012).

[39] Gregory, The Unintended Reformation 160-172.

[40] Pope Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi (Rome 2007) § 17.

[41] See: Michael Burleigh, Earthly Powers: Religion and Politics in Europe from the Enlightenment to the Great War (London 2005); Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, from the Great War to the War on Terror (London 2006).

[42] See: Pink, “Suarez and Bellarmine;” cf. Part II above.

[43] See: Part II above.

[44] See: Pink, “Conscience and Coercion.”

[45] Pink, “Conscience and Coercion.”

January 1, 2015May 5, 2024

Religious Liberty and Tradition II

This is the second of four parts of an essay on the interpretation of Vatican II’s Declaration on Religious Liberty, Dignitatis Humanæ. Part I considered inadequate interpretations. A printable version of the whole essay can be found here.

The English philosopher Thomas Pink has recently developed a new account of the continuity and discontinuity with previous teaching in Dignitatis Humanæ.[1] Pink is an expert on the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), and it was Hobbes that led him to a new approach to the problem, since one of Hobbes’s main concerns in Leviathan was to refute the Catholic claim according to which the Church has its own coercive authority independent of the state.[2] The two main defenders of the Catholic position in Hobbes’s time were Robert Bellarmine and Francisco Suarez, and so Pink studied their arguments. He noticed that they pose the question of coercion in religious matters in terms quite different from those usual today. Today it is usual to see the question of freedom and coercion in religion as a question of the competence of the state: does the state have the authority to use coercion in religious matters or not? Moreover, the coercion in question is thought of as coercion of public actions, not of the interior act of faith itself.[3] But Bellarmine and Suarez do not treat the question of religious coercion in the first place as a question of the competence of the state; they treat it as a question of the competence of the Church, since they see the Church as a societas perfecta (a complete community) with its own coercive authority— an authority to promulgate binding laws and enforce them with sanctions. The Church, the Mystical Body of Christ and Communion of Saints, is of course much more than a juridical societas perfecta, but this juridical character is essential to her as well. Church laws are therefore not merely rules of a voluntary society, which would only bind so long as one wished to remain within the society. Rather, Church law is genuine coercive law, binding on all her members.[4]

Everyone who has become a member of the Body of Christ through Baptism is thereby forever subject to the law of the Church. Baptism does not “expire” when someone apostatizes or falls into heresy or schism. The Church can therefore continue to demand that the baptized keep their baptismal vows and the other duties flowing from baptism. And the Church can back this demand up with sanctions.[5] The Council of Trent explicitly taught that the Church as a genuine coercive authority can impose not only spiritual sanctions (such as excommunication), but also temporal sanctions. Against a thesis of Erasmus, who thought that baptized children ought not to be forced to keep their vows when grown up, Trent promulgated the following canon:

If anyone says that when they grow up, those baptized as little children should be asked whether they wish to affirm what their godparents promised in their name when they were baptized; and that, when they reply that they have no such wish, they should be left to their own decision and not, in the meantime, be coerced by any penalty into the Christian life, except that they be barred from the reception of the Eucharist and the other sacraments, until they have a change of heart: let him be anathema.[6]

One of the main obligations that flows from Baptism is the obligation to believe. According to the traditional teaching it belongs to the essence of faith that it be free, and no one can therefore be coerced into Baptism; the Church has always condemned forced Baptisms.[7] But once a person has received the supernatural virtue of faith through Baptism that person is obliged to keep the faith. For this reason St Thomas Aquinas, to take one prominent example, teaches that although the unbaptized can never be forced to accept the Christian faith, heretics who have fallen away from the true faith can and ought to be coerced back into accepting it.[8] Pope Pius VI confirmed this view, explicitly citing St. Thomas, in the Brief Quod Aliquantulum (1791):

We must distinguish between those who have always been outside the Church, namely infidels and Jews, and those who have subjected themselves to her through Baptism. The former ought not to be compelled to profess the Catholic Faith, the latter however are to be coerced (sunt cogendi). St. Thomas proves this with his usual solidity.[9]

During the Counter Reformation such teachings were used to justify coercing Protestants to accept the Catholic faith. Since there is only one Baptism, baptized Protestants are subject to the jurisdiction of the Catholic Church.[10] As Pink points out, one can of course question the prudence and morality of the inquisitorial methods of applying this teaching, but such questioning need not necessarily entail a rejection of the teaching itself.[11]

The idea that persons should be coerced not only in their external actions, but even in the very act of faith itself is unusual today. Pink shows that the influence of the philosophies of Hobbes and Locke have had an important role in making such an idea seem strange. Hobbes and Locke argue that such coercion ought to be forbidden de jure because it is impossible de facto.[12] But according to scholastic philosophy legal coercion has a pedagogical function,[13] and therefore it can help persons to accept the truth. Since Baptism infuses the virtue of faith, coercion need not necessarily lead to hypocrisy. Coercion can force the baptized to examine the evidence of the faith.

In exercising coercion the Church has historically made use of the right to use the temporal power as an instrument or organ (secular arm). This does not however imply that the temporal power was seen as having a native jurisdiction in religious matters. Insofar as the temporal power acts as an instrument of the Church it is precisely not acting on its native authority. In the 19^th century this distinction was very emphatically taught by Pope Leo XIII:

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. […] Whatever, therefore in things human is of a sacred character, whatever belongs either of its own nature or by reason of the end to which it is referred, to the salvation of souls, or to the worship of God, is subject to the power and judgment of the Church. Whatever is to be ranged under the civil and political order is rightly subject to the civil authority.[14]

Thus the temporal power has no authority whatsoever in religious matters. Nevertheless, this does not exclude the temporal power acting as an agent of the Church in such matters.

In the light of this distinction Pink can show the continuity of Dignitatis Humanæ with previous teaching. For previous teaching would agree that in religion everyone should be “immune from coercion on the part of individuals or of social groups and of any human power,” (Dignitatis Humanæ § 2) if “human power” is taken to mean worldly or temporal power. Thus Dignitatis Humanæ § 3 is entirely traditional when it teaches that “religious acts” “transcend by their very nature the order of terrestrial and temporal affairs,” and that the state would “transgress the limits set to its power,” were it to command or forbid such acts.[15]

But such a statement about the limits of the authority of the temporal power in no way restricts the authority of the Church. For Dignitatis Humanæ explicitly states that it is treating of “immunity from coercion in civil society” and leaving untouched traditional teaching on duties toward the Church, and therefore by implication the rights of the Church.[16] So on Pink’s reading Dignitatis Humanæ is treating only of the state’s own task and authority derived from natural law, not on any additional task that it might receive as agent of the Church. It is simply not treating of the authority of the Church to coerce the baptized even with the assistance of the secular arm. Pink sees this reading confirmed in the fact that a number of council fathers wanted a passage inserted affirming “as compatible with religious liberty that the Church use sanctions to impose her doctrine and discipline on those subject to her,”[17] but the Conciliar Commission rejected this request for the following reason: “This (proposal) is not admitted, since ecclesial obligation or right are not treated here, nor is the question of freedom within the Church herself.”[18]

But, Pink argues, by not mentioning the right of the Church to make use of the state as secular arm Dignitatis Humanæ changes Church policy. That is, the Church no longer makes use of that right; she no longer authorizes the temporal power to act as her agent:

the Church’s present and evident refusal to license such coercion by states on her authority […] is […] made evident by Dignitatis Humanae in itself; by the Church’s subsequent diplomatic policy toward states, which now excludes state coercion to support Catholicism; and by the absence from the 1983 Code of Canon Law of the requirement on the state to act as a coercive agent that the 1917 Code had contained. […] Dignitatis Humanae constitutes a great reform in the policy of the Catholic Church. For the first time since late antiquity, the state is no longer directed to act as the Church’s agent to enforce and defend her jurisdiction.[19]

This is a change not in doctrinal principles, but in their disciplinary application to particular historical circumstances. Thus Pink’s reading does indeed use a “hermeneutic of reform”—he shows continuity at the level of principles, but discontinuity at the level of application to circumstances.

Pink’s postition can thus be summarized as follows:

There is a right to religious liberty.
This right means that no worldly power has the authority to coerce persons to religious acts, or to prevent them from practicing religion within the limits of public order.
The Church as the spiritual power has the authority to coerce the baptized (and only the baptized) to keep their baptismal vows.
For this purpose the Church can make use of temporal power as an instrument or agent.
Dignitatis Humanæ treats of religious freedom only in relation to the temporal power.
Practically Dignitatis Humanæ represents a change in Church policy, since the Church no longer makes use of her right to use the temporal power as an instrument.

I consider Pink’s case very strong indeed, but it is to be expected that there will be opposition to it from those who have expounded other interpretations. Thus Martin Rhonheimer has defended his own interpretation against Pink. According to Rhonheimer the traditional teaching, according to which the Church can make use of the temporal power as its instrument for coercing the baptized in religious matters has “no roots in Scripture, nor in the Apostolic Tradition or in the Fathers,”[20] and was therefore reformable, and was in fact “definitively and with sound theological reasons abandoned by Vatican II.”[21] Rhonheimer tries to establish this by an appeal to the history of Church-state relations, which he claims Pink “disregards.”[22] In order to defend Pink against Rhonheimer I will now give a brief summary of the relations between the Church and the temporal power. I will base this summary in large part on Rhonheimer’s own research,[23] but will draw very different conclusions from Rhonheimer.

Part III will consider the history of the relation of spiritual and temporal power; Part IV will consider the concerns of theologians at the Council. A printable version of the whole essay can be found here.

Notes

[1] See: Thomas Pink, “What is the Catholic doctrine of religious liberty?” (Lecture, Trumau, June 2012): https://www.academia.edu/639061/What_is_the_Catholic_doctrine_of_religious_liberty (accessed November 22, 2014); idem, “The Right to Religious Liberty and the Coercion of Belief: A Note on Dignitatis Humanae,” in: John Keown and Robert P. George (ed.), Reason, Morality, and Law: The Philosophy of John Finnis (Oxford 2013) 427-442; idem, “Conscience and Coercion: Vatican II’s Teaching on Religious Freedom Changed Policy, not Doctrine,” in: First Things 225 (2012): 45-51; idem, “The Interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae: A Reply to Martin Rhonheimer,” in: Nova et Vetera, English Edition 11,1 (2013): 77–121; idem, “Jacques Maritain and the Problem of Church and State” (Lecture, Mundelein, October 2013): https://www.academia.edu/8576510/Jacques_Maritain_and_the_problem_of_Church_and_State (accessed October 21, 2014); idem, “Suarez and Bellarmine on the Church as Coercive Lawgiver” (Lecture, Bologna, December 2013): https://www.academia.edu/8577465/Suarez_and_Bellarmine_on_the_Church_as_Coercive_Lawgiver (accessed October 21, 2014).

[2] See: Pink, “Suarez and Bellarmine” 187.

[3] Pink, “What is the Catholic Doctrine” 1-2.

[4] Pink, “Suarez and Bellarmine” 187-188.

[5] Pink, “Suarez and Bellarmine” 188.

[6] Council of Trent, Session VII, Decree on Baptism, canon 14, 3 March 1547; citation following: Pink, “What is the Catholic Doctrine” 16; for the Latin text see: Denzinger/Hünermann 1627.

[7] Cf. Dignitatis Humanæ §§ 11-12 with many citations of patristic and magisterial texts.

[8] See: Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ IIa-IIæ, q10, a8.

[9] Pius VI, Quod Aliquantulum, in: Brefs et instructions de notre Saint Père le Pape Pie VI, Vol. 1 (Rome 1797) 132; cf. Rhonheimer, “Benedict XVI’s Hermeneutic” 1036.

[10] See: Pink, “Pink, Suarez and Bellarmine” 188.

[11] Pink, “What is the Catholic Doctrine” 26; cf. Edmund Waldstein, “Tarnishing the Splendor of Truth,” Sancrucensis (blog), January 2, 2014: http://sancrucensis.wordpress.com/2014/01/02/tarnishing-the-splendor-of-truth/ (accessed November 24, 2014).

[12] Pink, “What is the Catholic Doctrine” 6.

[13] See: Pink, “What is the Catholic Doctrine” 6-9; cf. Michel Therrien, Law, Liberty & Virtue: A Thomistic Defense for the Pedagogical Character of Law (Dissertation, Fribourg, 2007).

[14] Pope Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, in: Acta Sancta Sedis 18 (1885) §§ 11, 14; translation: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_01111885_immortale-dei_en.html (accessed November 14, 2014).

[15] See: Pink, “What is the Catholic Doctrine” 45 and passim.

[16] Dignitatis Humanæ § 1.

[17] Pink, “What is the Catholic Doctrine” 34.

[18] Acta Synodalia Sacrosancti Concilii Oecumenici Vaticani II (Rome 1970-1980), Vol. 4, Pars 6, 763; trans. following Pink, “What is the Catholic Doctrine” 34.

[19] Pink, “Conscience and Coercion.”

[20] Rhonheimer, “Dignitatis Humanae—Not a Mere Question” 447.

[21] Rhonheimer, “Dignitatis Humanae—Not a Mere Question” 447.

[22] Rhonheimer, “Dignitatis Humanae—Not a Mere Question” 447.

[23] As presented above all in the first part of Christentum und säkularer Staat.

December 31, 2014May 5, 2024

Religious Liberty and Tradition I

This is the first of four parts of an essay on the interpretation of Vatican II’s Declaration on Religious Liberty. A printable version of the whole essay can be found here.[1]

Introduction

Of all the documents of the Second Vatican Council the one that has most determined the official relations of the post-conciliar Church with the world is the Declaration on Religious Liberty Dignitatis Humanæ. The official diplomacy of the Holy See in the decades since Vatican II has largely been concerned with the defense of religious liberty. In the years immediately following the Council the defense was mounted against atheistic communism in Central Europe, and later it was taken up against militant Islam in the Near East, and “the dictatorship of relativism” in the West.

Moreover, no other document marks the transition between the “pre-conciliar” and the “post-conciliar” Church more than Dignitatis Humanæ. For while the post-conciliar Church presents herself as the passionate defender of religious liberty, the pre-conciliar Church of the “Pian Age” (1789-1962) seemed to be the implacable enemy of such liberty. A chief concern of Vatican II was to overcome the antagonism between the Church and modernity, an antagonism symbolized at the dawn of modernity by the Galileo affair, and which had taken violent political form in the French Revolution. Instead of merely condemning the errors of modern liberalism, Vatican II wished to uncover the positive elements and authentic human concerns expressed therein. The Council wanted to show how the Church could make these positive elements her own, purifying and elevating them through the influence of grace.[2] Religious liberty was seen as a key point in this transition, because freedom of conscience and therefore of religion was an important concern of the Enlightenment and of the bourgeois liberalism of the 19^th century, and the opposition of the 19^th century popes to this freedom was one of the sources of liberal anti-clericalism. [3]

The change in the Church’s attitude toward modernity seems especially clear in the matter of religious liberty. In fact, there seems to be a direct contradiction between the teaching of the Council and the teachings of the popes of the 19^th century on this point. If one compares the central affirmation of Dignitatis Humanæ with, for example, the section on religious freedom in Bl. Pius IX’s Quanta Cura the contradiction seems obvious.

Thus Dignitatis Humanæ:

This Vatican Council declares that the human person has a right to religious freedom. This freedom means that all men are to be immune from coercion on the part of individuals or of social groups and of any human power, in such wise that no one is to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his own beliefs, whether privately or publicly, whether alone or in association with others, within due limits.[4]

And thus Quanta Cura:

From which totally false idea of social government they do not fear to foster that erroneous opinion, most fatal in its effects on the Catholic Church and the salvation of souls, called by Our Predecessor, Gregory XVI, an ‘insanity,’ [deliramentum] viz., that ‘liberty of conscience and worship is each man’s personal right, which ought to be legally proclaimed and asserted in every rightly constituted society; and that a right resides in the citizens to an absolute liberty, which should be restrained by no authority whether ecclesiastical or civil, whereby they may be able openly and publicly to manifest and declare any of their ideas whatever, either by word of mouth, by the press, or in any other way.’[5]

Does not Vatican II here affirm precisely that which Pius IX, citing Gregory XVI, calls a deliramentum? This ostensible contradiction made Dignitatis Humanæ the most controversial document at the Council. So many doubts were raised about the first three schemata that Bl. Pope Paul VI decided to delay voting on it, moving the vote from the third to the fourth and final session of the Council.[6] At this a large group of council fathers protested, begging the Pope with the very greatest urgency (“instanter, instantius, instantissimus”) to reverse his decision, lest public opinion turn against the Council.[7] Nevertheless, the vote did not take place till the very end of the last session.[8]

After the Council the question of the relation of Dignitatis Humanæ to previous teachings remained controversial.[9] Any interpretation of Dignitatis Humanæ has to deal with this question, and interpreters have proposed various approaches that all give different answers to the question—from the assertion of a radical break with tradition to that of complete continuity with tradition. I shall now consider several answers that I consider inadequate before turning to an explanation and defense of the answer proposed by the English philosopher Thomas Pink. According to Pink there is continuity at the level of principles, but discontinuity at the level of Church policy toward the state. He shows this first by giving a new interpretation of the condemnation of religious freedom on the part of the popes of the Pian Age, showing its roots in counter-Reformation political theology. And then he applies key distinctions taken from that analysis to Dignitatis Humanæ.

After explaining Pink’s thesis, I shall further explicate it by a brief glance at the history of the relation of temporal and spiritual power in Church history. I shall then conclude by examining the theological concerns of some of the conciliar theologians who influenced Dignitatis Humanæ.

Part I: Inadequate Interpretations of Dignitatis Humanæ

Hermeneutics

In his Christmas address to the Roman Curia in 2005, Pope Benedict XVI spoke of a “hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture” which led to a misunderstanding of Vatican II.[10] Since the Council did indeed wish to reform the Church’s relations to the modern world, the impression could easily be formed that a break had been made with tradition—as though the Church could simply abandon what she had previously authoritatively taught. Pope Benedict contrasts this with a correct hermeneutic, a “hermeneutic of reform, of renewal in the continuity of the one subject-Church.”[11] This hermeneutic starts with the principle of the Church’s continuity through time, but allows for discontinuities at the level of policy, discipline, and the mode of expressing certain teachings.[12] For the explication of this hermeneutic Pope Benedict cites Pope St. John XXIII’s address at the opening of Vatican II, in which Pope John defined the task of the Council as formulating the “unchanging” doctrine in a new historical situation, without changing its meaning.[13]

The hermeneutic of rupture

The hermeneutic of rupture has often been applied to Dignitatis Humanæ. Non-theologians, such as legal scholars and political scientists, have had no scruples in seeing a contradiction between Dignitatis Humanæ and previous teachings.[14] But even many theologians have taken this route as well, and have come up with different explanations as to how such a rupture might be possible. “Progressive” theologians have often defended the idea of rupture by a minimalist view of the authority of Church teaching. According to them the condemnation of religious freedom, for example in Quanta Cura, was not an infallible exercise of the Petrine Office, and was therefore reformable. They argue that only the most solemn definitions of the Magisterium are infallible, and that many “authentic” teachings of the Church are not finally binding. Thus Reinhold Sebott, S.J., argues as follows:

If we do not consider Quanta Cura infallible, then of course we will not consider a great many other magisterial decisions infallible. Only very few teachings can be described as dogmas in the strict sense.[15]

Such positions have been used not only to justify a hermeneutic of rupture in the reading of Vatican II, but also to put into question much of the Church’s teaching with regard to faith and morals. Thus many theologians used this position to question the condemnation of artificial contraception in Bl. Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanæ Vitæ. Pope Paul clearly wanted his teaching to be binding on the faithful, but many theologians denied that it could have binding character.[16] Sebott himself brings up the example of Pope St John Paul II’s apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis (1994). Pope John Paul wished to definitively end the discussion on the ordination of women in that letter, but according to Sebott the letter was not infallible, and therefore the discussion cannot be considered closed.[17] Such an exaggerated minimalism with regard to Church teaching cannot be reconciled with the teachings of numerous popes and councils on the binding character of the ordinary and universal Magisterium of the Church.[18] Supporters of minimalism often give apparent examples of discontinuity in Church teaching to support their views, but none of the examples are un-controversial.[19]

“Traditionalists” such as the French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, on the other hand, were convinced that the condemnation of religious liberty by the popes of the 19^th century was forever binding, and that therefore the teaching of the Council was wrong. Lefebvre submitted his argument to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the form of dubia,[20] and his dissatisfaction with the Congregation’s response[21] was a decisive factor in his decision, carried out on June 30, 1988, to consecrate four bishops without papal mandate, thus incurring excommunication latæ sententiæ.[22] Lefebvre’s position was somewhat paradoxical, as the then prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, pointed out: by putting his own private interpretation of previous Church teachings above the Church’s official interpretation of her teaching he was giving up precisely the principle of fidelity to Church doctrine that he wanted to defend.[23]

But Lefebvre was surely right about this much: the question of religious liberty is not a merely disciplinary question; it is a moral question on which the Church has taught authoritatively. Klaus Obenauer, a theologian sympathetic to traditionalism, recently pointed out that the teaching of the Council of Constance, according to which the Church has the right to hand heretics over to the “secular arm” for punishment, was solemnly confirmed by Pope Martin V. He is unable to see how that teaching can be consistent with Dignitatis Humanæ and concludes:

The question is raised as to how DH can stand with respect to centuries of authoritative teaching, and of canonically prescribed practice, according to which there is no right to the practice (especially the public practice) of dissent. I say the question is raised, and to the present hour the question has not been answered.[24]

The hermeneutic of continuity at all levels

At the opposite extreme from the hermeneutic of rupture is a hermeneutic of continuity at all levels. Thomas Storck, an expert on Catholic Social Teaching, uses such a hermeneutic of continuity.[25] Storck bases his reading on the explicit assertion in the preamble of Dignitatis Humanæ that it does not mean to change traditional Catholic teaching on the duties of societies toward the true religion:

Religious freedom, in turn, which men demand as necessary to fulfill their duty to worship God, has to do with immunity from coercion in civil society. Therefore 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.[26]

Among the duties of societies toward true religion Storck includes the limiting of the spread of false religions by way of censorship and such measures, as called for by the 19^th century popes.[27] Thus Storck moves the apparent contradiction into Dignitatis Humanæ itself. But he finds a key to understanding why the contradiction is only apparent by his interpretation of the “due limits” on religious freedom mentioned in the central statement of Dignitatis Humanæ 2: “no one is to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his own beliefs, whether privately or publicly, whether alone or in association with others, within due limits.” Dignitatis Humanæ 7 further explicates these limits. The exercise of religious liberty must include “respect both for the rights of others and for their own duties toward others and for the common welfare [bonum commune] of all.” The state is required to preserve “genuine public peace, which comes about when men live together in good order and in true justice” and “public morality.” Storck argues that preservation of the bonum commune of a Christian society would in practice allow for very heavy restrictions on religious freedom:

the “just requirements of public order,” the “due limits,” and considerations of the rights of others and of the common good vary considerably from society to society, and . . . in a society overwhelmingly and traditionally Catholic they could easily include restrictions, and even an outright prohibition, on the public activities of non-Catholic sects, particularly on their proselytizing activities.[28]

According to Storck, the condemnation of religious freedom in earlier ages of the Church was not the complete denial of any such right, but rather the denial of an unlimited right. [29] On his interpretation previous teachings were not concerned with the private right of persons to believe what they thought to be true, but rather precisely with the necessity for public order of limiting the spread of false religion:

A non-Catholic has the real right, even in a Catholic state, to privately profess his own religion and privately meet with his co-religionists; in a liberal regime he has a right to considerably more freedom. In both cases the freedom is real; it is simply that the “requirements of public order” and of the common good differ.[30]

I do not think that Storck’s thesis can be maintained. First because I think it does not do justice to the full scope of pre-conciliar teaching on coercion in religious matters. As Thomas Pink has shown, and as I will explain in section 3 below, previous teaching justified not only restrictions on the public activity of false religion, but also coercing heretics to return to the true faith. A second problem with Storck’s thesis is that it doesn’t do justice to the decisiveness with which Dignitatis Humanæ denies the state any native authority in matters of religion. It grounds this lack of authority in the transcendence of religious matters over the temporal order:

The religious acts whereby men, in private and in public and out of a sense of personal conviction, direct their lives to God transcend by their very nature the order of terrestrial and temporal affairs. Government therefore ought indeed to take account of the religious life of the citizenry and show it favor, since the function of government is to make provision for the common welfare. However, it would clearly transgress the limits set to its power, were it to presume to command or inhibit acts that are religious.[31]

This seems to exclude precisely the sort of limitation of false religion for the sake of the temporal common good that Storck wants to uphold.

The hermeneutic of reform in continuity

On Pope Benedict’s hermeneutic principle one ought not to expect a contradiction between the documents of Vatican II and previous teaching, but neither ought one to expect complete continuity. One ought rather to expect reform. “Basic decisions, therefore, continue to be well-grounded, whereas the way they are applied to new contexts can change.”[32] Pope Benedict explicitly applies this hermeneutic principle to Dignitatis Humanæ:

Thus, for example, if religious freedom were to be considered an expression of the human inability to discover the truth and thus become a canonization of relativism, then this social and historical necessity is raised inappropriately to the metaphysical level and thus stripped of its true meaning. Consequently, it cannot be accepted by those who believe that the human person is capable of knowing the truth about God and, on the basis of the inner dignity of the truth, is bound to this knowledge. It is quite different, on the other hand, to perceive religious freedom as a need that derives from human coexistence, or indeed, as an intrinsic consequence of the truth that cannot be externally imposed but that the person must adopt only through the process of conviction.[33]

Pope Benedict thus shows that there is no direct contradiction between Dignitatis Humanæ and (e.g.) Quanta Cura, since “religious freedom” means something quite different in those two documents.[34]

Nevertheless, Pope Benedict’s interpretation leaves some open questions, since it does not explain the continuity at the level of “basic decisions” and the discontinuity at the level of application to “new contexts” in detail.

A number of theologians have tried to apply Pope Benedict’s principles to a detailed interpretation of Dignitatis Humanæ. It turns out that distinguishing the two levels is not so easy as it might appear at first. I shall now examine two attempts that I find inadequate before turning (in the next section) to Thomas Pink’s solution.

Eberhard Schockenhoff explicitly invokes Pope Benedict XVI’s address in his interpretation. But I claim that in the end his reading in the end falls back into a hermeneutic of rupture. Schockenhoff does see “lines of continuity” between Dignitatis Humanæ and previous teaching on the relation of freedom and truth, but he does not limit discontinuity to the application to a new context:

The truth does not lie simply at the mean between continuity and discontinuity. Even at the hermeneutic deep-level, the level at which the Council tries to come to a fitting understanding of truth and freedom, there is an unmistakable change of perspective. […] At any rate, it does not suffice to assert a continuity in the development of Church teaching at theological or philosophical/ethical level, and only admit discontinuity at the level of application to new historical situations.[35]

According to Schockenhoff the Church in Dignitatis Humanæ adopted the “hard core” of modern liberal rights as her own.[36] He sees this as a paradigm shift in the Church’s understanding of the relation of truth and freedom, and the relation of human subjectivity and truth.[37] Moreover, he argues that this paradigm shift has implications for the relation of truth and freedom in the Church herself—the pastors of the Church should eschew the coercive use of teaching authority, and should use a more dialogical mode of teaching. As we shall see below, this position is hard to square with the solemn teaching of the Council of Trent, according to which the Church ought to impose sanctions on the baptized to help preserve them in the faith.

Martin Rhonheimer’s interpretation is similar to Schockenhoff’s, but he sees slightly more continuity and slightly less discontinuity. He does see continuity at the level of principles in the relation of truth and freedom. He even admits that the Church can coerce her members with sanctions (even ones that have “temporal” consequences),[38] but he denies that the Church can make use of the state as brachium sæculare for such coercion. He thinks that Dignitatis Humanæ corrects previous teaching on “the mission and function of the state.”[39] While certain previous popes taught that the state must subordinate itself to the Church, Dignitatis Humanæ denies this and demands a legitimate secularity for the state. This is not a break with principles derived from Sacred Scripture or the Apostolic tradition, which according to Rhonheimer “suggest a separation between the political and religious spheres.”[40] But it is a break with earlier and less perfect applications of those principles. Rhonheimer argues that Dignitatis Humanæ stands at the end of a long process through which the Church re-discovers the original meaning of Jesus’s distinction between the things that are Caesar’s and the things that are God’s, and for the first time sees its full implications.[41] I will return to Rhonheimer’s subtle argumentation below when I consider the history of the relations of spiritual and temporal power. At this point it suffices to indicate that the teaching according to which the Church can make use of the state as secular arm has a great deal more authority than Rhonheimer is willing to admit. Think for example of Pope Martin V’s confirmation of the Council of Constance’s teaching on the secular arm mentioned above.[42]

Part II will consider Thomas Pink’s interpretive breakthrough; Part III will consider the history of the relation of spiritual and temporal power; Part IV will consider the concerns of theologians at the Council. A printable version of the whole essay can be found here.

Notes

[1] A German version of this paper is to appear in a forthcoming volume edited by Felix Mayrhofer. An earlier version was presented to Una Voce Austria, Vienna, November 18, 2013; my thanks to Stephan Csernohorszky and Benedikt Hensellek of Una Voce for the invitation. I also thank Gregor Hochreiter and Felix Mayrhofer for their comments on the German version, and Alan Fimister, Thomas Pink, the Rev. Thomas Crean, O.P., Peter Escalante, Matthew J. Peterson, John Ruplinger, Gabriel Sanchez, Andrew Strain, Christopher Zehnder, Peter Kwasniewski, and the backroom of The Josias for helpful discussions.

[2] See: Pope Benedict XVI, “Expergiscere Homo: Address to the College of Cardinals and the Roman Curia,” December 22, 2005, in: Acta Apostolicæ Sedis 95,1 (2006) 40-53; translation: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2005/december/documents/hf_ben_xvi_spe_20051222_roman-curia_en.html (accessed November 19, 2014).

[3] See: Martin Rhonheimer, Christentum und säkularer Staat (Freiburg ³2012) 134-139, 143; Eberhard Schockenhoff, „Das Recht, ungehindert die Wahrheit zu suchen: Die Erklärung über die Religionsfreiheit Dignitatis humanae,“ in: Jan-Heiner Tück (ed.), Erinnerung an die Zukunft: Das zweite vatikanische Konzil, 2^nd ed. (Freiburg 2013) 702.

[4] Dignitatis Humanae, § 2, in: Acta Apostolicæ Sedis 58 (1966) 929-946, at 930; translation: http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651207_dignitatis-humanae_en.html (accessed November 19, 2014).

[5] Pope Pius IX, Quanta Cura, in: Herbert Vaughan (ed.), The Year of Preparation for the Vatican Council: Including the Original and English of the Encyclical and Syllabus, and of the Papal Documents Connected with its Convocation (London 1869) iv-xx, at viii.

[6] See: Pietro Pavan, “Einleitung zur Erklärung über die Religionsfreiheit,” in: Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche , 2^nd ed., Ergänzungsband II (Freiburg 1967) 706-707.

[7] See: Pavan, “Einleitung” 706.

[8] See: Pavan, “Einleitung” 709-711.

[9] See: Schockenhoff, “Das Recht” 703.

[10] Benedict XVI, Expergiscere Homo 46.

[11] Benedict XVI, Expergiscere Homo 46.

[12] See: Chad C. Pecknold, “Pope Benedict’s Hermeneutic of Continuity: Very Theological Reflections on Theological Method,” presentation at Reform and Renewal: Vatican II After 50 Years, Symposium at The Catholic University of America, Washington DC, September 26-29, 2012: http://youtu.be/YiI_6JZebVA (accessed on November 18, 2014).

[13] Benedict XVI, Expergiscere Homo 47.

[14] See: Schockenhoff, “Das Recht” 623-625. Schockenhoff mentions Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, Klaus Schatz, Franz Xaver Bischof, and Josef Insensee as examples.

[15] “Wenn man QC (Quanta cura) nicht als unfehlbar qualifiziert, dann wird man natürlich auch eine Menge anderer Lehrentscheidungen nicht als unfehlbar qualifizieren dürfen. Der Kreis des Dogmas muss also sehr eng gezogen werden.” Reinhold Sebott, „Dignitatis humanæ“ und „Quanta cura“: Die Verurteilung der Religionsfreiheit vor dem Zweiten Vatikanischen Konzil, in: P. Boekholt and I. Riedel-Spangenberger (ed.), Iustitia et Modestia (Munich 1998) 183-192; at 192.

[16] See: Janet E. Smith, Humanæ Vitæ, a Generation Later (Washington 1998) especially 155-169.

[17] Sebott, “Dignitatis humanæ” 192.

[18] See: Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, “Doctrinal Commentary on the Concluding Formula of the Professio Fidei,” online access: http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_1998_professio-fidei_en.html (accessed 21 November, 2014).

[19] See: Avery Cardinal Dulles, “Development Or Reversal?” in: First Things (October 2005) 53-61.

[20] Marcel Lefebvre, “Dubia sur la Déclaration conciliaire sur la liberté religieuse, présentés à la S.C.R. pour la Doctrine de la Foi,” Ecône, Novemeber 6, 1985: http://lacriseintegriste.typepad.fr/dubia.pdf (accessed on October 18, 2014); English translation: Religious Liberty Questioned (Kansas City 2001).

[21] Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, “Liberté religieuse: Réponse aux Dubia présentés par S.E. Mgr Lefebvre,” Rome, March 9, 1987: http://lacriseintegriste.typepad.fr/weblog/1987/03/r%C3%A9ponses-de-la-congr%C3%A9gation-pour-la-doctrine-de-la-foi-aux-dubia-pr%C3%A9sent%C3%A9s-par-mgr-lefebvre.html (accessed November 21, 2014).

[22] See the documentation collected at the website La crise intégriste: http://lacriseintegriste.typepad.fr/weblog/le-dialogue-avec-jeanpaul-ii-19781987.html and http://lacriseintegriste.typepad.fr/weblog/le-schisme-19882000.html (both accessed November 21, 2014).

[23] “En fournissant une interprétation personnelle des textes du Magistère, vous feriez paradoxalement preuve de ce libéralisme que vous combattez si fortement, et agiriez contre le but que vous poursuivez.” Letter of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger to Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, July 28, 1987: http://lacriseintegriste.typepad.fr/weblog/1987/07/lettre-du-car.html (accessed November 21, 2014).

[24] “Es stellt sich eben die Frage, wie DH [Dignitatis humanæ] ankommen soll gegen die über Jahrhunderte verbindlich vorgetragene Lehre, und zwar vor dem Hintergrund kirchenamtlich gestützter Praxis, wonach es gerade kein natürliches Recht gibt, (zumal öffentlich) unbehelligt von der staatlichen Gewalt das Dissidententum zu praktizieren. Ich sage: „es stellt sich die Frage, wie“. Und beantwortet ist die bis zur Stunde nicht.” Klaus Obenauer, “Piusbruderschaft: Der angehaltene Zug – oder: Wie bekommt man das Signal wieder auf Grün?” http://www.katholisches.info/2012/11/21/piusbruderschaft-der-angehaltene-zug-oder-wie-bekommt-man-das-signal-wieder-auf-grun/ (accessed on October 18, 2014).

[25] Some other examples are mentioned by Schockenhoff (“Das Recht” 727-728), including Arthur Utz, Robert Spaemann, Basil Valuet, and Betrand de Margerie.

[26] Dignitatis Humanæ § 1; cf. Thomas Storck, Foundations of a Catholic Political Order (Beltsville 1998) 27.

[27] Storck, Foundations 21-26.

[28] Storck, Foundations 28-29.

[29] Storck, Foundations 29: “Man’s religious liberty is real and the Council’s Declaration is not false or heretical; simply that the right to exercise such freedom is not the same in every place and time.”

[30] Storck, Foundations 29.

[31] Dignitatis Humanæ § 3; emphasis added.

[32] Expergiscere Homo 50.

[33] Expergiscere Homo 50.

[34] Cf. Schockenhoff, “Das Recht” 729.

[35] “Dennoch liegt die Wahrheit nicht einfach in der Mitte zwischen Kontinuität und Diskontinuität. Denn auch auf der hermeneutischen Tiefenebene, auf der das Konzil sich um eine angemessene Vermittlung von Wahrheit und Freiheit bemüht, ist ein Perspektivenwechsel unverkennbar […]. Jedenfalls reicht es nicht aus, auf einer theologischen oder philosophisch-ethischen Prinzipienebene eine ungebrochene Kontinuität kirchlicher Lehrentwicklung zu behaupten und nur hinsichtlich der Anwendung dieser Prinzipien auf veränderte geschichtliche Situationen einen Wandel zuzugeben.” Schockenhoff, “Das Recht” 734.

[36] Eberhard Schockenhoff, Erlöste Freiheit: Worauf es im Christentum ankommt (Freiburg 2012) 15.

[37] Schockenhoff, Erlöste Freiheit 42-45, idem, “Das Recht” 733-734.

[38] Martin Rhonheimer, “Dignitatis Humanae—Not a Mere Question of Church Policy: A Response to Thomas Pink,” in: Nova et Vetera, English Edition, 12,2 (2014): 445-470, at 454-455.

[39] Martin Rhonheimer, “Benedict XVI’s ‘Hermeneutic of Reform’ and Religious Freedom,” in: Nova et Vetera, English Edition, 9,4 (2011): 1029-1054; idem, Christentum und säkularer Staat, especially 156-163; cf. also idem, “Dignitatis Humanae—Not a Mere Question.”

[40] Rhonheimer, “Benedict XVI’s ‘Hermeneutic of Reform’” 1032.

[41] See especially: Rhonheimer, Christentum und säkularer Staat 33-191.

[42] See: Klaus Obenauer, “Piusbruderschaft: Der angehaltene Zug.” Obenauer cites Denzinger/Hünermann (42^nd ed.) 1272: “Item, utrum credat, quod inoboedientia sive contumacia excommunicatorum crescente, praelati vel eorum vicarii in spiritualibus habeant potestatem aggravandi et reaggravandi, interdictum ponendi et brachium saeculare invocandi; et quod illis censuris per inferiores sit oboediendum.”

November 1, 2014March 19, 2018

A Catholic Political Party in Wilhelmine Germany

In order to understand modern Catholic Social Teaching it is helpful to understand the context in which it was developed. The teachings of Pope Leo XIII were informed by the experience of 19th century Catholic political action. One of the first countries to have a modern, Catholic parliamentary party was Imperial Germany. The following description the Zentrumspartei is taken from the non-Catholic historian Golo Mann’s The History of Germany Since 1789, trans. Marian Jackson (London, Chatto and Windus: 1996 [orig. 1958]), pp. 212-214, the translation has been slightly modified.

The Zentrumspartei [Party of the Centre] was a strange product of German history and also of conditions in Europe around 1870. There was no other great European country in which the Catholics were a minority but at the same time such a very strong minority. This, in the middle of the enlightened nineteenth century, was result of decisions taken in the sixteenth. As Protestantism appeared to have won great victory recently—it was the Protestant Prussian state that had set up the national state, and, what is more, it had done so in league with the un-Catholic intellectual strength of liberalism—it was felt that the German Catholics too must take up the new weapons of party politics so as not to lose their heritage to an estranged world. The church must remain independent of the ever more powerful state. It must be able to teach freely in churches and schools, it must preserve its influence over men’s souls by using the old methods, and strengthen it by founding modern institutions, newspapers and clubs, for the welfare of the working masses. To do all this it was necessary to enter the political arena. The Catholic Church felt that constitutions served a purpose if they were utilised properly; if the invention of liberalism was used to restrict liberalism. Religious freedom was one of the basic rights of the citizen listed in the Prussian constitution, and hitherto the Prussian state had treated all great religious communities with exemplary fairness. But there was reason to believe that things would not continue so smoothly in the ‘Protestant empire’.

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