Is the Acton Institute a Genuine Expression of Catholic Social Thought?

by Thomas Storck

Lord Acton (John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1834-1902) is chiefly remembered today for his remark that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, but it would be well were more generally known about him, for as a leader of liberal Catholicism in the nineteenth century he is a fitting symbol in the conflict between different versions of the Faith which has afflicted the Church since the 1960s. It is interesting, therefore, that Acton has been chosen as the patron of an institute in Grand Rapids, Michigan, an institute that is often considered as part of the orthodox Catholic "movement" in the United States. But as we will see, the institute's name and patron are well chosen, for it continues the tradition of liberal and even dissenting Catholicism that Lord Acton himself partook of and that many of the Acton Institute's supporters would doubtless blush to be identified with, if they knew exactly who Acton was and what he stood for.

The true face of the Acton Institute is clear from statements made, or formerly made, on their web site (www.acton.org), for example, their kind words about Ignaz von Döllinger (theological tutor of Lord Acton), who left the Church rather than accept the definition of papal infallibility by the First Vatican Council, and their opposition to censorship of pornography on the Internet, but in this article I will concentrate on their dissent from the social magisterium of the Catholic Church. I will examine assertions made by the Institute's president, Fr. Robert Sirico, to see whether they can be squared with the explicit teaching of the Church.

First, however, we must look at the underlying difficulty, the root, in fact, of the Acton Institute's dissent from the social doctrine of the Catholic Church. This lies in their unabashed acceptance of liberalism. In discussing liberalism it is imperative to recognize that this term, as used in papal teaching, does not mean the same thing as it does in contemporary political discourse in the United States. We would do well to spend some time discussing exactly what liberal means in order to understand the fundamental disagreement between the Acton Institute and Catholic doctrine.

Liberalism, as that term is used in papal teaching, and indeed in Europe and throughout most of the world, is that movement in Western civilization which arose in opposition to the Christian political and economic order of the Middle Ages, and to the continuation of that order by all or most European governments even after the Middle Ages ended. Thus these governments believed that they had duties toward God, including that of caring for the poor and seeing that the economy fulfilled its function of supplying all citizens with the material things needed for this life. Certainly these governments fulfilled their duties imperfectly, but none of them would have denied that it had such a duty.

Liberalism, however, in effect denies that the state or the human community is a creation of God or has duties toward him. At most, liberalism accepts that the individual has duties toward God. Important liberal theorists such as John Locke, held that society and the state originated in an agreement among men, the so-called social contract, and thus was a purely human creation, and as such, can have no inherent duties toward God. Liberal economic writers, such as Adam Smith, attacked the notion that the state should regulate the economy in the interests of the common good, positing instead that the economy was a self-regulating mechanism, the less interfered with by the state the better.

The Catholic Church confronted liberalism in the eighteenth, and especially the nineteenth, centuries. And against this liberal doctrine Pius IX, and even more clearly his successor, Leo XIII, taught that the state itself was a creation of God and thus had duties to God.

For men living together in society are under the power of God no less than individuals are, and society, not less than individuals, owes gratitude to God, who gave it being and maintains it, and whose ever-bounteous goodness enriches it with countless blessings.(Leo XIII, Encyclical Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885)

Liberals were not only hostile to the concept of the state as created by God and subject to his laws, but they opposed any efforts of the government to intervene in the supposedly self-regulating market. They loudly cried that such economic restraints retarded the progress of humanity. Now economic activity no longer was to need regulation, for the "invisible hand" of Adam Smith was to guarantee that greed and self-interest would work out the best for everyone.

What was the result of this new approach to economics and government? Pope Leo's classic description is worth repeating:

The ancient workmen's Guilds were destroyed in the last century, and no other organization took their place. Public institutions and the laws have repudiated the ancient religion. Hence by degrees it has come to pass that Working Men have been given over, isolated and defenseless, to the callousness of employers and the greed of unrestrained competition. The evil has been increased by a rapacious Usury, which, although more than once condemned by the Church, is nevertheless, under a different form but with the same guilt, still practiced by avaricious and grasping men. And to this must be added the custom of working by contract, and the concentration of so many branches of trade in the hands of a few individuals, so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the masses of the poor a yoke little better than slavery itself.(Encyclical Rerum Novarum, 2;May 15, 1891)

Thus liberalism, as used in papal documents, and as it affects the economic order, means something like what John Paul II has called "rigid capitalism" or "unbridled capitalism," a more or less free-market approach to the economy. It obviously includes important elements of what we in the United States call conservatism. Now let us turn to the Acton Institute's own statements and see how they characterize the relations of liberalism and Catholicism.

In a column in the September/October 1997 issue of Religion & Liberty, Fr. Sirico writes of John Paul II's encyclical Centesimus Annus, and asserts that in that document "two traditions have come together...religious orthodoxy and classical liberal social theory...." Whether Fr. Sirico's claim that Centesimus does indeed accept the liberal tradition is true or not, we will examine later, but it is interesting that Fr. Sirico is not bold enough to claim that the Church has always accepted the free market, for in the same article he writes that

the Church, during certain periods, has strongly criticized what was construed to be the free society, partly because some social thinkers conflated the theories of economic liberalism with moral libertinism, viewing them as one in the same and as mutually reinforcing.

But now, he claims, because "of the courage of John Paul II and his case in favor of the free society... No longer do we feel compelled to speak of classical liberalism and religious orthodoxy as belonging to two separate intellectual worlds."

Thus we have Fr. Sirico's frank admission that he stands in the tradition of liberal thought, so that if we find the Church has always condemned that tradition, then logically Fr. Sirico's entire enterprise will fall. For the popes objected to the tradition of liberalism not merely because they saw it as promoting "moral libertinism," but because their conception of the task of government is entirely at odds with Fr. Sirico's. The government as such is a creation of God, and as such has duties toward God and toward its subjects. It is not a mere enforcer of contracts, but must have an active care for the common good.

In the same article Fr. Sirico has some interesting words about Lord Acton. Speaking of the conflict between the Catholic and liberal traditions, Sirico says,

As the tensions mounted in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the allegiances of men such as Lord Acton were torn as they came to believe that they had to choose between spiritual authority and the dictates of reason, a situation the late scholastics would have seen as a grave departure from teaching of their master, Saint Thomas.

It is not just the late scholastics who would have viewed such a man with alarm, but St. Thomas himself. But the Angelic Doctor's reply would have been that the poor man in question had not reasoned well if he found himself opposed to the teachings of the Church. The necessary agreement between the Catholic faith and human reason does not mean the necessary agreement between the Catholic faith and Lord Acton's reasoning. Since our reasoning can err, but the Church cannot, it is clear which of the two must yield. This is not to denigrate reason, but to point out that no individual is infallible in his own reasoning power.

Before proceeding further we will look at some statements of various popes to see if there has been a consistent tradition of papal condemnation of liberalism, including the liberal tradition in both government and economics. In these selections, which I take from various papal documents, I will show how liberalism, either by name or not, has been explicitly defined as an enemy of Catholic faith and Christian civilization. First two selections from Pope Pius XI:

With regard to the civil power, Leo XIII boldly passed beyond the restrictions imposed by liberalism, and fearlessly proclaimed the doctrine that the civil power is more than the mere guardian of law and order, and that it must strive with all zeal "to make sure that the laws and institutions, the general character and administration of the commonwealth, should be such as of themselves to realize public well-being and private prosperity." (Encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, no. 25, May 15, 1931)

In fact, the Encyclical Rerum Novarum completely overthrew those tottering tenets of liberalism which had long hampered effective intervention by the government. It prevailed upon the peoples themselves to develop their social policy more intensely and on truer lines, and also encouraged outstanding Catholics to give such efficacious help and assistance to rulers of the State that in legislative assemblies they were not infrequently the foremost advocates of the new policy. (Ibid., no. 27)

Next a passage from Pope Pius XII:

And, while the State in the nineteenth century, through excessive exaltation of liberty, considered as its exclusive scope the safe-guarding of liberty by the law, Leo XIII admonished it that it had also the duty to interest itself in social welfare, taking care of the entire people and of all its members, especially the weak and the dispossessed, through a generous social programme and the creation of a labor code.(Address to Italian workers on the Feast of Pentecost, June 1, 1941)

Then a quotation from Pope Paul VI:

On another side, we are witnessing a renewal of the liberal ideology. This current asserts itself both in the name of economic efficiency, and for the defence of the individual against the increasingly overwhelming hold of organizations, and as a reaction against the totalitarian tendencies of political powers. Certainly, personal initiative must be maintained and developed. But do not Christians who take this path tend to idealize liberalism in their turn, making it a proclamation in favor of freedom? They would like a new model, more adapted to present-day conditions, while easily forgetting that at the very root of philosophical liberalism is an erroneous affirmation of the autonomy of the individual in his activity, his motivation and the exercise of his liberty. Hence, the liberal ideology likewise calls for careful discernment on their part.(Octogesima Adveniens, no. 35, May 14, 1971)

These statements alone ought to convince any Catholic who cares to think with the Church, that the Church has always opposed liberalism and its restricted notion of the role of government. But now I will take certain specific statements made by the Acton Institute, statements which reveal its application of liberalism to the economy, and contrast them with the teaching of the Church, including that of Centesimus Annus.

First let us look at a quote from Lord Acton, printed on the cover of a leaflet distributed by the Institute. "Liberty is the highest political end of man..."! This assertion is hardly congruent with the teaching of the Catholic tradition. St. Thomas, for example, says that the end of society is "to live according to virtue" (De Regimine Principum, I, 14). And this truth, that both individual man and man in society are both ordered, not toward freedom, but toward virtue as the ultimate end, is the truth upon which the entire liberal tradition founders. Liberty the highest political end of man? Not justice, not virtue, not the common good? All else flows from this fundamental error, the error, in fact, of Lucifer, who desired liberty above all else. The society that values liberty as its highest political goal, that refuses to safeguard the common good (except by pious exhortations), that allows for complete freedom of contract - this will be the domain of the Devil and his adherents and apologists.

The next statement of Fr. Sirico's that we will look at is this: "So long as individuals avoid forceful or fradulent actions in their dealings with one another, government is to stay out of their business" (Acton Notes, January 1998). Anyone at all acquainted with the tradition of Catholic social thought knows that this can hardly be squared with the teaching of the Magisterium. To take but a few examples, we have Leo XIII's teaching in Rerum Novarum,

The richer population have many ways of protecting themselves, and stand less in need of help from the State; those who are badly off have no resources of their own to fall back upon, and must chiefly rely upon the assistance of the State. And it is for this reason that wage-earners, who are, undoubtedly, among the weak and necessitous should be specially cared for and protected by the commonwealth.(no. 29)

And, in a statement that utterly contradicts what Fr. Sirico says, Leo rejects the theory that free agreement between employer and employee should be the rule in economic affairs when he notes, in connection with the question of a just wage, that

there is a dictate of nature more imperious and more ancient than any bargain between man and man, that the remuneration must be enough to support the wage-earner in reasonable and frugal comfort.(Rerum Novarum, 45)

It is simply false to say that, absent force or fraud, the government should stay out of people's business.

We have already seen how in Quadragesimo Anno Pius XI says that Leo XIII "boldly passed beyond the restrictions imposed by liberalism, and fearlessly proclaimed the doctrine that the civil power is more than the mere guardian of law and order..." (no. 25). In other words, Pius XI explicitly denies the conception of government which Fr. Sirico champions, and like Leo, sees a strong, though not unlimited, role for the state. It is true that the popes have been careful not to call for a statist solution to socio-economic problems, but it should be clear that they definitely see an activist role for government, but within limits. However, these limits are not the limits that Fr. Sirico would like to impose on the state.

John Paul II in Centesimus makes clear that the state has a wider role than merely enforcing laws against force or fraud, but that it must be concerned with the

preservation of common goods such as the natural and human environments, which cannot be safeguarded simply by market forces. Just as in the time of primitive capitalism the State had the duty of defending the basic rights of workers, so now, with the new capitalism, the State and all of society have the duty of defending those collective goods which, among others, constitute the essential framework for the legitimate pursuit of personal goals on the part of each individual.(no. 40)

And immediately he states: "Here we find a new limit on the market: there are collective and qualitative needs which cannot be satisfied by market mechanisms. There are important human needs which escape its logic."

Other statements that John Paul makes in the same encyclical are equally damning to Fr. Sirico's position. First here is a statement from Centesimus, one of the handful that Fr. Sirico and those of like mind often quote:

It would appear that, on the level of individual nations and of international relations, the free market is the most efficient instrument for utilizing resources and effectively responding to needs.(no. 34)

But the Pontiff immediately goes on to say,

But this is true only for those needs which are "solvent," insofar as they are endowed with purchasing power, and for those resources which are "marketable," insofar as they are capable of obtaining a satisfactory price. But there are many human needs which find no place on the market. It is a strict duty of justice and truth not to allow fundamental human needs to remain unsatisfied, and not to allow those burdened by such needs to perish.... Even prior to the logic of a fair exchange of goods and the forms of justice appropriate to it, there exists something which is due to the person because he is a person, by reason of his lofty dignity.

A similar caution on the market may be found in the following statement of John Paul, speaking of the kind of society that we should desire and work toward:

Such a society is not directed against the market, but demands that the market be appropriately controlled by the forces of society and by the State, so as to guarantee that the basic needs of the whole of society are satisfied.(no. 35)

These statements are enough for anyone to see that Fr. Sirico and Catholic teaching are not in agreement, for Fr. Sirico would never admit that the market needed to be "controlled," least of all by the state.

The apparent plausibility of Fr. Sirico's position comes from the fact that he contrasts the free market only with the evils of statism, socialism and communism. Most people think that either capitalism or some form of socialism are the only "live options" in economics. They are hardly aware that the economic arrangements advocated by the popes are neither those of socialism nor of free-market capitalism, and if someone were to tell them about distributism or solidarism, they would likely reply that since they do not presently exist, or perhaps never existed, they need not be taken seriously. This makes as much sense as to say that since there never has been a society in which chastity was entirely observed, we should not bother to promote chastity in our own society. Nor can we ignore the statement of Pope John Paul II in Centesimus that "it is unacceptable to say that the defeat of so-called `Real Socialism' leaves capitalism as the only model of economic organization" (no. 35). ("Real Socialism" means, of course, Marxist socialism or communism.)

I should also raise the issue of how far Fr. Sirico and his colleagues are misrepresenting others' opinions in their effort to promote classical liberalism. For example, on their website they have a section called "In the Liberal Tradition," in which they feature various thinkers whom they assert to be fellow liberals. Let us look at just two of them. First, St. Thomas Aquinas. They represent him as a liberal by quoting some of his words in favor of private ownership of property. By this preposterous method they might as well feature Chesteron and Belloc, both bitter critics of capitalism, but strong defenders of private property. In any case, I think Fr. Sirico knows that to defend private property (as I myself do) by no means places one in the camp of classical liberalism, but simply indicates that one is not a Communist.

Equally ludicrous is C.S. Lewis, whom they claim as one of their own, apparantly on the strength of favorable comments that he made about democracy and against unlimited government. They rather ignore the following words of Lewis from Mere Christianity:

All the same, the New Testament, without going into details, gives us a pretty clear hint of what a fully Christian society would be like. Perhaps it gives us more than we can take. It tells us that there are to be no passengers or parasites: if man does not work, he ought not to eat. Every one is to work with his own hands, and what is more, every one's work is to produce something good: there will be no manufacture of silly luxuries and then of sillier advertisements to persuade us to buy them. And there is to be no "swank" or "side," no putting on airs. To that extent a Christian society would be what we now call Leftist.

And in the next paragraph he says that we "should feel that its economic life was very socialistic...." This part of Lewis's beliefs seems to have been conveniently overlooked.

It is far from clear how Fr. Sirico and other Catholic libertarians can justify their attempt to reconcile Catholic tradition with classical liberalism. Do they really believe that the Church's social teaching and traditon can change so easily as to make obsolete centuries of the papal magisterium? Are they really unaware that such notable Catholic thinkers of the twentieth century who turned their attention to economics, as G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Christopher Dawson and many others, were critics of capitalism? I cannot answer these questions. But what we can know is that the Acton Institute's promotion of liberalism is not something that can be embraced by an orthodox Catholic. Sirico, like Acton and Döllinger, is not a safe guide but rather a dissenter from the fullness of the Faith, a blind guide who will only lead his followers into a pit. Please God, it will not be into the bottomless pit.

Published in Social Justice Review, vol. 93, no. 5-6, May-June 2002

©Thomas Storck
Thomas Storck writes from Maryland.

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Separation of Church and State: Manifest Destiny or Manifest Heresy?

by David Palm

As the last of the formerly Catholic governments of Europe are shedding every vestige of their distinctively Catholic character as rapidly as possible, it seems well worth looking again at the Catholic Church's teaching on the relationship of the Church to the State. Like just about all Americans, I imbibed the twin secular dogmas of religious liberty and the separation of Church and State with my mother's milk. And when I converted to Catholicism over ten years ago, my conversion seemed to pose no great challenges to either. Given the prevailing understanding of the Second Vatican Council, said to be gleaned particularly from certain passages in Gaudium et Spes and Dignitatis Humanae, I would have agreed wholeheartedly with George Sim Johnston who wrote in his recent article "Why Vatican II Was Necessary" that, "The council made it clear that she no longer wanted a confessional state tied to a monarchy; it was high time to make peace with liberal democracy." 1

But now, after some years of reflection and more careful examination not only of Vatican II but of pre-conciliar magisterial teaching on the matter, I find that Johnston's claim just doesn't hold up.

For starters, one will search in vain for the words "monarch", "monarchy", "democracy", "democratic", or the phrase "confessional state" in the conciliar documents. Even the passages that contain the words "government" and "governments" fail to establish the "clear" teaching to which Johnston alludes. Yes, certain passages of Gaudium et Spes indicate a preference for governmental systems that encourage participation by the greater portion of citizens in public life (e.g. Gaudium et Spes §31, 73, 75, echoing John XXIII's Pacem in Terris §26). But such participation can be manifested in any number of governmental systems, including constitutional monarchies. These passages, then, fall far short of a carte blanche endorsement of full-blown democracy, let alone the liberal democracy with which Johnston insists the Church made peace.

On the contrary, as Fr. E. Cahill, S.J. has pointed out, the foundations of liberal democracy are incompatible with Catholicism:

In the theory of the Liberal State, personal human rights are acknowledged, and indeed exaggerated, for they are regarded as paramount, the rights of God and the limitations set by the divine law being disregarded. In actual practice, however, all individual rights are merged in or made subservient to the power of the majority, by which the actual government of the State is set up. Hence the governing authority again becomes omni-competent, although this omni-competence is upheld in virtue of a title different from the title of a deified emperor or a civil body identified with the deity.2

Although, according to the system's chief proponents, individual rights are better upheld in a liberal democracy, in fact this has not held good in any liberal democracy anywhere in the world. Rather, we see a consistent pattern of the erosion of basic human rights-most notably that of life-in preference to the wishes of an ephemeral majority: "Again, although in the Liberal theory of civil organisation, all the members of the social body have civic rights, these rights not being regarded as of divine institution may be over-ridden by a majority." 3

One aspect that remains a rock-solid conviction of every liberal democracy is the secular dogma of the separation of Church and State. And here we must turn from what the Second Vatican Council didn't say to what it did say. The opening section of the declaration on religious liberty, Dignitatis Humanae, insists that the council "leaves untouched traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ." 4 If, then, the Catholic Church taught prior to the council that Church and State ought not to be separated and that the State has an obligation to profess the Catholic religion, then this phrase leaving that teaching "untouched" would seem to undermine Johnston's claim.

Although religious liberty and separation of Church and State are certainly related, it is clear from the passage of DH cited above that they are nevertheless separate issues. I hope to address the much-debated issue of religious liberty in a future essay, but the focus of the present piece will be on the separation of Church and State in the Church's solemn teaching prior to Vatican II. It seems critical to me-especially as our nation's leaders insist that modern liberal democracy in its present incarnation is so superior to any other form of government that it may be spread throughout the world by force of arms-to look again at the "traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of . . . societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ" which the Second Vatican Council left "untouched".

What the Church's Traditional Teaching is Not

Lest we be thwarted by some persistent misconceptions before we even start, I want to look at what the Catholic Church does not teach on the separation of Church and State. Three common misunderstandings stand out.

First, the Catholic Church does not support the notion of a theocracy, that is, that both ecclesiastical and secular authority are vested in the same individuals, so that a priestly class also holds the reins of government. Rather, the Church has always taught that the Church and the State are separate powers and each has its own legitimate sphere of influence, although, as Pope Leo XIII noted, "their subjects are the same, and not infrequently they deal with the same objects, though in different ways." 5 This separation of powers was first enunciated magisterially by Pope St. Gelasius I in the fifth century6, but has been repeated numerous times by Fathers, Doctors, Popes, and Councils. St. Thomas Aquinas summarizes admirably:

Both powers originate in God. Therefore the secular power is subordinate to the spiritual power in matters that concern the salvation of souls. In matters that concern more the civil common good, a person is obliged to obey the secular rather than the spiritual power.7

Another misconception is that the Catholic Church-prior to the Second Vatican Council at least-gave her unqualified support to monarchy as the best form of government. But this, too, is a vast oversimplification. St. Robert Bellarmine (a Doctor of the Church, who wrote in great detail on the subject) does note the intrinsic superiority of monarchy, but only if power is wielded by an ideal monarch:

Monarchy theoretically and in the abstract, monarchy in the hands of God who combines in Himself all the qualifications of an ideal ruler, is indeed a perfect system of government; in the hands of imperfect man, however, it is exposed to many defects and abuses. A government tempered, therefore, by all three basic forms (i.e., monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy), a mixed government, is, on account of the corruption of human nature more useful than simple monarchy.8

The acceptance of a multiplicity of governmental systems is given magisterial force by Pope Leo XIII:

The right to rule is not necessarily, however, bound up with any special mode of government. It may take this or that form, provided only that it be of a nature of the government, rulers must ever bear in mind that God is the paramount ruler of the world, and must set Him before themselves as their exemplar and law in the administration of the State.9

Even democratic governments are not in and of themselves contrary to Catholic teaching: "Again, it is not of itself wrong to prefer a democratic form of government, if only the Catholic doctrine be maintained as to the origin and exercise of power." 10 Pope Pius XI echoes this: ". . . these different forms of government are not of themselves contrary to the principles of the Catholic Faith, which can easily be reconciled with any reasonable and just system of government." 11 Vatican II said the same:

Yet the people who come together in the political community are many and diverse, and they have every right to prefer divergent solutions. . . . It is clear, therefore, that the political community and public authority are founded on human nature and hence belong to the order designed by God, even though the choice of a political regime and the appointment of rulers are left to the free will of citizens.12

Finally, the Church has never taught that she (or the State) may use the power of the State to coerce religious belief. Johnston states that after Vatican II, "Henceforth the Church does not impose but proposes the truth; she will not rely on the coercive machinery of the state." 13 Frankly, this is a disturbing caricature of the Church's teaching before Vatican II, savoring more of stock anti-Catholic propaganda than the reflections of a sober Catholic scholar. One wants to ask Johnston when the Church has ever taught that it was permissible to impose the truth on anyone, through the power of the State or otherwise? For, on the contrary, the Catholic Church has reiterated throughout her history that it is wrong for the Church, the State, or an individual to coerce belief in the Catholic faith. Here is just one example: "And, in fact, the Church is wont to take earnest heed that no one shall be forced to embrace the Catholic faith against his will, for, as St. Augustine wisely reminds us, 'Man cannot believe otherwise than of his own will.'" 14

What is the Church's Traditional Teaching?

Very well. The Church doesn't support a theocracy, she at least allows for (if not unequivocally supports) some form of democracy, and she rejects use of State power to coerce belief. Many Catholics-including many orthodox and learned ones-conclude from those points that, therefore, the State should be entirely separate from the Church and should treat all religions equally.

But to conclude that, because the State is forbidden to coerce belief, it must therefore declare itself entirely separate from the Church or treat all religions equally is not only a non sequitur, it runs contrary to the Church's perennial teaching. To demonstrate this, we should look again at "the traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion" which Vatican II left "untouched".

The fact is that separation of Church and State, of the kind that we have in all of the liberal democracies of the world, has been consistently and repeatedly denounced by the pre-conciliar Popes in no uncertain terms. In the Syllabus of Errors, for example, Pope Pius IX condemned as false the proposition that, "In the present day it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the State, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship." 15

The encyclicals Immortale Dei and Libertas Praestantissimum by his successor, Leo XIII, are devoted almost entirely to the Catholic Church's teaching on the right ordering of state and society. The authority of Immortale Dei is particularly high. While falling short of an ex cathedra definition, Leo XIII intended for it to be definitive, for he summarizes his teaching as follows: "This, then, is the teaching of the Catholic Church concerning the constitution and government of the State." 16

There is no substitute for reading both of these encyclicals in their entirety, but I will present a few pertinent snapshots. In Libertas, the Pontiff insists that the State is not only obligated to protect the temporal and physical well-being of the people, it is obligated to protect their spiritual well-being as well:

There are [those] . . . who affirm that the morality of individuals is to be guided by the divine law, but not the morality of the State, for that in public affairs the commands of God may be passed over, and may be entirely disregarded in the framing of laws. Hence follows the fatal theory of the need of separation between Church and State. But the absurdity of such a position is manifest. Nature herself proclaims the necessity of the State providing means and opportunities whereby the community may be enabled to live properly, that is to say, according to the laws of God. For, since God is the source of all goodness and justice, it is absolutely ridiculous that the State should pay no attention to these laws or render them abortive by contrary enactments. Besides, those who are in authority owe it to the commonwealth not only to provide for its external well-being and the conveniences of life, but still more to consult the welfare of men's souls in the wisdom of their legislation.17

It follows, then, that the protection and promotion of religion is one of the paramount responsibilities of the State. The State may not adopt a stance of indifference toward all religions, treating them all with equality. Rather, the State is obliged to promote that religion that God Himself has established, namely, the Catholic Faith. Again, Leo XIII:

Wherefore, civil society must acknowledge God as its Founder and Parent, and must obey and reverence His power and authority. Justice therefore forbids, and reason itself forbids, the State to be godless; or to adopt a line of action which would end in godlessness-namely, to treat the various religions (as they call them) alike, and to bestow upon them promiscuously equal rights and privileges. Since, then, the profession of one religion is necessary in the State, that religion must be professed which alone is true, and which can be recognized without difficulty, especially in Catholic States, because the marks of truth are, as it were, engraven upon it. This religion, therefore, the rulers of the State must preserve and protect, if they would provide-as they should do-with prudence and usefulness for the good of the community.18

In Immortale Dei, Leo XIII teaches that secular rulers are obligated, as part of their governance, to promote the one true Faith. The Pope, "insists on public acknowledgment of religion by the State as a logical deduction from acceptance of the premise that God is the Author of civil authority. Such acknowledgment has reference to the only true religion-the Catholic Faith . . . " 19 Pope Leo teaches:

As a consequence, the State, constituted as it is, is clearly bound to act up to the manifold and weighty duties linking it to God, by the public profession of religion. . . . 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. All who rule, therefore, would hold in honor the holy name of God, and one of their chief duties must be to favor religion, to protect it, to shield it under the credit and sanction of the laws, and neither to organize nor enact any measure that may compromise its safety. This is the bounden duty of rulers to the people over whom they rule.20

The Pope states unequivocally that "it is not lawful for the State, any more than for the individual, either to disregard all religious duties or to hold in equal favor different kinds of religion." 21 He rejects the sort of separation of Church and State that has been upheld by every Supreme Court decision on the subject in this country:

But this teaching is understood in two ways. Many wish the State to be separated from the Church wholly and entirely, so that with regard to every right of human society, in institutions, customs, and laws, the offices of State, and the education of youth, they would pay no more regard to the Church than if she did not exist; and, at most, would allow the citizens individually to attend to their religion in private if so minded. Against such as these, all the arguments by which We disprove the principle of separation of Church and State are conclusive; with this super-added, that it is absurd the citizen should respect the Church, while the State may hold her in contempt.22

And there is no lack of condemnation of the principle of the separation of Church and State in the writings of Leo XIII's successors. For example, Pope St. Pius X wrote:

That the State must be separated from the Church is a thesis absolutely false, a most pernicious error. . . . Hence the Roman Pontiffs have never ceased, as circumstances required, to refute and condemn the doctrine of the separation of Church and State.23

The claim that the State has nothing to do with the spiritual well-being of its citizens inverts the order of things, wrongfully elevating the natural good of the nation above the supernatural good of its citizens. As St. Pius stated:

Besides, this thesis is an obvious negation of the supernatural order. It limits the action of the State to the pursuit of public prosperity during this life only, which is but the proximate object of political societies; and it occupies itself in no fashion (on the plea that this is foreign to it) with their ultimate object which is man's eternal happiness after this short life shall have run its course. But as the present order of things is temporary and subordinated to the conquest of man's supreme and absolute welfare, it follows that the civil power must not only place no obstacle in the way of this conquest, but must aid us in effecting it.24

And Pope Pius XI wrote this, concerning the separation of Church and State enacted as part of the establishment of liberal democracy in Spain:

We learned with great sorrow that therein, at the beginning, it is openly declared that the State has no official religion, thus reaffirming that separation of State from Church which was, alas, decreed in the new Spanish Constitution. We shall not delay here to repeat that it is a serious error to affirm that this separation is licit and good in itself, especially in a nation almost totally Catholic. Separation, well considered, is only the baneful consequence-as We often have declared, especially in the Encyclical Quas Primas-of laicism, or rather the apostasy of society that today feigns to alienate itself from God and therefore from the Church.25

The repeated teaching of the Popes on a doctrinal matter is, of course, inherently authoritative and demands our assent, as Vatican II taught in Lumen Gentium §25.26 And let us remember, again, that it is precisely this "traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ" that Vatican II explicitly left "untouched", even in her declaration on religious liberty.

Nor has this teaching anywhere been explicitly rescinded by any post-conciliar magisterial document. Vatican II, in Dignitatis Humanae itself, spoke of circumstances in which "special civil recognition is given to one religious community in the constitutional order of society" (DH §6), making it clear that the council did not intend to do away with the notion that Catholicism can (and should) be the official religion of those countries in which the majority of citizens are Catholic.

It is true that in the post-conciliar period the doctrine has not been forcefully reiterated. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, in its discussion of the relationship of Church and State (§2244-46), states rather tamely that, "Only the divinely revealed religion has clearly recognized man's origin and destiny in God, the Creator and Redeemer. The Church invites political authorities to measure their judgments and decisions against this inspired truth about God and man." 27 On the other hand, the CCC elsewhere insists:

The duty of offering God genuine worship concerns man both individually and socially. This is "the traditional Catholic teaching on the moral duty of individuals and societies toward the true religion and the one Church of Christ." By constantly evangelizing men, the Church works toward enabling them "to infuse the Christian spirit into the mentality and mores, laws and structures of the communities in which [they] live." The social duty of Christians is to respect and awaken in each man the love of the true and the good. It requires them to make known the worship of the one true religion which subsists in the Catholic and apostolic Church. Christians are called to be the light of the world. Thus, the Church shows forth the kingship of Christ over all creation and in particular over human societies.28

Fr. Brian Harrison notes that here the CCC has reasserted the ongoing applicability of two of the most prominent pre-conciliar papal documents on the necessity of societies (and hence the State) to uphold Catholicism:

It refers at that point to the two pre-conciliar encyclicals which most emphatically condemned the masonic ideal of the religiously "neutral" state, Leo XIII's Immortale Dei ("On the Christian Constitution of States") and Pius XI's Quas Primas, instituting the Feast of Christ the King. Moreover, the reference is to these two encyclicals in their entirety, not just to a particular passage. (In Dignitatis Humanae only one quite bland passage from Immortale Dei is cited, and there is no reference at all to Quas Primas or the social kingship of Christ.) 29

Statements of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith concerning "the rightful autonomy of the political or civil sphere from that of religion and the Church" 30 and by Pope John Paul II of a "legitimate and healthy secularity" 31 - taken by some to signal a complete about-face on the matter of Church/State relations-are each found in the context of reaffirmations of the rightful (and necessary) separation of powers between Church and State. This, as I have noted above, was firmly taught prior to Vatican II as well and so forms no break with pre-conciliar teaching. And certainly these statements must be read in light of both DH §6 and the Catechism of the Catholic Church, not to mention the solemn teaching of the pre-conciliar Popes.

So, although this post-conciliar content remains somewhat muted from the direct and forceful teachings of the pre-conciliar Popes insisting on the State's obligation to "favor [the Catholic] religion, to protect it, to shield it under the credit and sanction of the laws", it in no way contradicts their teaching. As Fr. Harrison has stated: "From the fact that the Church (wisely or unwisely) decides no longer to ask for a clear-cut implementation of the doctrine of Christ's social kingship in the traditional manner, it by no means follows that she has renounced the doctrine itself as a matter of principle." 32 And lest there be any doubt that the pre-conciliar Popes considered their teachings on this matter to be well within the realm of faith and morals on which they are fully competent to bind the faithful, Pope Pius XI explicitly condemned any fundamental dilution of these papal teachings:

Many believe in or claim that they believe in and hold fast to Catholic doctrine on such questions as social authority, the right of owning private property, on the relations between capital and labor, on the rights of the laboring man, on the relations between Church and State, religion and country, on the relations between the different social classes, on international relations, on the rights of the Holy See and the prerogatives of the Roman Pontiff and the Episcopate, on the social rights of Jesus Christ, Who is the Creator, Redeemer, and Lord not only of individuals but of nations. In spite of these protestations, they speak, write, and, what is more, act as if it were not necessary any longer to follow, or that they did not remain still in full force, the teachings and solemn pronouncements which may be found in so many documents of the Holy See, and particularly in those written by Leo XIII, Pius X, and Benedict XV.

There is a species of moral, legal, and social modernism which We condemn, no less decidedly than We condemn theological modernism.33

Therefore, the traditional teaching of the Church with regard to responsibilities of the State to the Catholic Faith remains in force, even if for prudential reasons this teaching is downplayed by the Magisterium in our modern context.

What Are the Consequences of Abandoning the Church's Teaching?

Far from being something to celebrate, as Johnston would seem to have it, the consequences for nations having abandoned the Church's teaching on the matter of the separation of Church and State have been severe. The pre-conciliar Popes were truly prophetic in this regard.

In 1832, Pope Gregory XVI recalled how greatly the peace of both Church and society was disturbed by various rebellious sects, "the Waldensians, the Beghards, the Wycliffites, and other such sons of Belial, who were the sores and disgrace of the human race." 34 He insisted that the modern clamor for the separation of Church and State would fare no better:

Nor can We predict happier times for religion and government from the plans of those who desire vehemently to separate the Church from the state, and to break the mutual concord between temporal authority and the priesthood. It is certain that that concord which always was favorable and beneficial for the sacred and the civil order is feared by the shameless lovers of liberty.35

Leo XIII taught that the benefits for both Church and State have been great and manifest:

There was once a time when States were governed by the philosophy of the Gospel. Then it was that the power and divine virtue of Christian wisdom had diffused itself throughout the laws, institutions, and morals of the people, permeating all ranks and relations of civil society. Then, too, the religion instituted by Jesus Christ, established firmly in befitting dignity, flourished everywhere, by the favor of princes and the legitimate protection of magistrates; and Church and State were happily united in concord and friendly interchange of good offices. The State, constituted in this wise, bore fruits important beyond all expectation, whose remembrance is still, and always will be, in renown, witnessed to as they are by countless proofs which can never be blotted out or ever obscured by any craft of any enemies. . . . A similar state of things would certainly have continued had the agreement of the two powers been lasting. More important results even might have been justly looked for, had obedience waited upon the authority, teaching, and counsels of the Church, and had this submission been specially marked by greater and more unswerving loyalty. For that should be regarded in the light of an ever-changeless law which Ivo of Chartres wrote to Pope Paschal II: "When kingdom and priesthood are at one, in complete accord, the world is well ruled, and the Church flourishes, and brings forth abundant fruit. But when they are at variance, not only smaller interests prosper not, but even things of greatest moment fall into deplorable decay.36

Ultimately, the Pope argued, the State that sets aside religion altogether or treats different religions as equals will inevitably work against all religion, a prediction that we see coming to fruition all around us:

To hold, therefore, that there is no difference in matters of religion between forms that are unlike each other, and even contrary to each other, most clearly leads in the end to the rejection of all religion in both theory and practice. And this is the same thing as atheism, however it may differ from it in name.37

Pope St. Pius X taught that no society would long remain stable and free if the Catholic Church was not acknowledged by the State and her teachings given their due place in the life of the State:

The same thesis also upsets the order providentially established by God in the world, which demands a harmonious agreement between the two societies. . . . Remove the agreement between Church and State, and the result will be that from these common matters will spring the seeds of disputes which will become acute on both sides; it will become more difficult to see where the truth lies, and great confusion is certain to arise. Finally, this thesis inflicts great injury on society itself, for it cannot either prosper or last long when due place is not left for religion, which is the supreme rule and the sovereign mistress in all questions touching the rights and the duties of men.38

Pope Pius XI insists that such a separation is fatal to the State, undermining the very basis for its own authority:

But if the pretension of excluding from public life God the Creator and Provident Ruler of that same society is impious and absurd for any people whatsoever, it is particularly repugnant to find this exclusion of God and Church from the life of the Spanish Nation, where the Church always and rightly has held the most important and most beneficially active part in legislation, in schools, and in all other private and public institutions. If such an attempt results in irreparable harm to the Christian conscience of the country, especially to its youth, whom they would educate without religion, and to families, profaned in the most sacred principles, no less harm befalls that same civil authority. When this loses the support that recommends it, nay sustains it, in the conscience of the people, namely the persuasion of its Divine origin, dependence and sanction, it loses at the same time its greatest power to obligate, and its highest title to be respected.39

Elsewhere he reiterates this axiom, that the State that rejects the authority of Jesus Christ will inevitably find its own authority rejected:

If, therefore, the rulers of nations wish to preserve their authority, to promote and increase the prosperity of their countries, they will not neglect the public duty of reverence and obedience to the rule of Christ. What We said at the beginning of Our Pontificate concerning the decline of public authority, and the lack of respect for the same, is equally true at the present day. "With God and Jesus Christ," we said, "excluded from political life, with authority derived not from God but from man, the very basis of that authority has been taken away, because the chief reason of the distinction between ruler and subject has been eliminated. The result is that human society is tottering to its fall, because it has no longer a secure and solid foundation.40

If we see an erosion of civility, piety, morals, and good order in every liberal democracy ever established, we should not find this particularly surprising. We have had ample warning.

These frequent warnings and their vindication through subsequent events keep me from following Johnston in heaping unqualified praise on the separation of Church and State as we have it here in the United States. Johnston claims that by (allegedly) doing away with a confessional State and making peace with liberal democracy in the documents of Vatican II, "the Americans, especially the Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray, made their contribution to the council. The Constitution of the United States, which keeps the government out of the chancery, had served the Church well." 41

He is correct that non-interference of the State in the affairs of the Church does indeed serve the Church well. This is upheld by Pope Leo XIII in his encyclical letter to the hierarchy of the United States:

[T]hanks are due to the equity of the laws which obtain in America and to the customs of the well-ordered Republic. For the Church amongst you, unopposed by the Constitution and government of your nation, fettered by no hostile legislation, protected against violence by the common laws and the impartiality of the tribunals, is free to live and act without hindrance.42

But this is only part-and certainly not the most important part-of the story. The Pontiff continues:

Yet, though all this is true, it would be very erroneous to draw the conclusion that in America is to be sought the type of the most desirable status of the Church, or that it would be universally lawful or expedient for State and Church to be, as in America, dissevered and divorced. The fact that Catholicity with you is in good condition, nay, is even enjoying a prosperous growth, is by all means to be attributed to the fecundity with which God has endowed His Church, in virtue of which unless men or circumstances interfere, she spontaneously expands and propagates herself; but she would bring forth more abundant fruits if, in addition to liberty, she enjoyed the favor of the laws and the patronage of the public authority.43

Pope St. Pius X insists that to have the Church and the State separated, with the State failing to acknowledge the Catholic Faith as the true religion-as it is in the United States-amounts to a grave injustice to God:

[By adopting] the principle that the State must not recognize any religious cult, it is in the first place guilty of a great injustice to God; for the Creator of man is also the Founder of human societies, and preserves their existence as He preserves our own. We owe Him, therefore, not only a private cult, but a public and social worship to honor Him.44

Pope Pius XI noted that this refusal on the part of the State to give Jesus Christ and the Church He founded due public recognition is very far from a matter of indifference:

[N]ot only private individuals but also rulers and princes are bound to give public honor and obedience to Christ. . . . Christ, who has been cast out of public life, despised, neglected and ignored, will most severely avenge these insults; for his kingly dignity demands that the State should take account of the commandments of God and of Christian principles, both in making laws and in administering justice, and also in providing for the young a sound moral education.45

Certainly, by virtue of its repetition and the authority with which it has been advanced, the condemnation of the separation of Church and State and the affirmation of its positive corollary-that the state is obligated to uphold and advance the Catholic Faith-is every bit as explicit and solid as the Church's teaching on, say, contraception. And it is, through history, a great deal more explicit than the Church's prohibition of female priests, which Card. Ratzinger recently declared to be infallible (i.e. irreformable) by virtue of its constant repetition by the ordinary Magisterium. Surely it would be reasonable to argue that the matter of the State's obligation publicly to profess, protect, and promote the Catholic Faith has also been taught infallibly through her ordinary Magisterium.

We should reflect carefully on what the Catholic Church has solemnly taught concerning the right ordering of civil government. This is especially true as our nation continues to advance, often by force of arms, a particular variety of liberal democracy as the only system of government worthy of any nation. For some, my insistence that the present position of the government of the United States with respect to the separation of Church and State is not rightly ordered will seem a sort of blasphemy, albeit a secular one. But as Catholics, our first obligation is to the teaching of the Church and not to the founding documents of our country.

Obviously the United States is not a Catholic country. A great many American Catholics have become so inured to that fact that they seem to place the authority of our Constitution above that of the Popes. For example, Mr. Thomas Scott wrote recently to The New Oxford Review that, "Our presidents have sworn to uphold the Constitution of the U.S., not the teachings of the Catholic Church. One writer was upset because neither [political] party reflects Catholic values. Guess what! They never will. Not in this country." 46

But surely our Constitution can not be endowed with such authority that it stands above authentic Catholic criticism; it is not, after all, a part of the Deposit of Faith. And should we really be satisfied with this status quo, especially in light of the doctrinal teachings of the Sovereign Pontiffs concerning the right ordering of the State? After all, there was a time when all Catholic countries were not Catholic countries. The change took place the old-fashioned way, through evangelism which had as its goal the conversion of all men to the one true Faith.

For my part, based on the solemnly declared faith of the Catholic Church which Vatican II left untouched, I pray for the day in which my countrymen are converted to the Catholic Faith in sufficient numbers that we will elect Catholic leaders and amend our Constitution to give Jesus Christ and the Church He established rightful place in our government. Then and only then, as Pope Pius XI predicted, "When once men recognize, both in private and in public life, that Christ is King, society will at last receive the great blessings of real liberty, well-ordered discipline, peace and harmony." 47

Seattle Catholic

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Exposing the Bogus Democracies

by Joseph Pearce

In the United States the progressive erosion of the rights of individual states and the consequent rise in the power of the federal government in Washington has caused widespread concern. It is a classic example of the usurpation of democratic function by the larger institution to the detriment of the democratic functions of the smaller. James Buchanan, the American Nobel Prize-winning economist, suggested at a conference on constitutional issues in Paris in 1989 that the United States had evolved into a single state not much different from other centralized states, and that the Founding Fathers could never have believed that the concept of federalism would degenerate to produce such a centralized leviathan.

In similar fashion, Europe in its movement towards federalism is proceeding along the same centralist lines as America. The changing role of the European Union is reflected in the changing of its name over the years. It began as the Common Market, then became the European Economic Community, then simply the European Community, and now it calls itself the European Union. The tendency towards tighter control from the centre is obvious and has been disguised over the years by what looks suspiciously like the artful and deceptive employment of Orwellian newspeak.

When Britons were asked to vote in a referendum on whether the United Kingdom should sign up to the Treaty of Rome they were told that they were simply joining a `common market’. Questions of sovereignty or political interference in domestic affairs were not an issue because, according to the pro-marketeers, they were voting only to join a free trade agreement that would have economic benefits. It is very likely that the electorate would not have voted to join if they were told that they would be signing away sovereignty and political power to a supra-national body based in Brussels. Since there have been no subsequent referenda, there is no democratic mandate for many of the developments in the quarter of a century since Britain joined.

When the Guardian lodged a case before the European Court of Justice in August 1994 complaining of the secrecy in which European decisions were taken, lawyers for the European Council of Ministers responded by stating to the judges that `there is no principle of community law which gives citizens the right to EU documents’. The lawyers went on to claim that the heads of national governments also had no right to insist on more openness in EU affairs because their declarations were `not binding on the community institutions’.

With so much closed government and high-level secrecy it was almost inevitable that the European Commission would eventually be rocked by financial scandal. In March 1999 the entire Commission was forced to resign after widespread fraud and corruption were exposed. Perhaps, with the timely reminder of Lord Acton’s words that `power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely’, one might have expected calls for the decentralization of power away from the Commission. Instead, less than six months later, there was a call for a massive extension of EU powers into the sphere of criminal law so that `EU offences’ such as multi-billion-dollar fraud could be tackled more efficiently. The extension of EU powers into the field of criminal law will inevitably entail harmonization of national legal procedures, signifying another step towards the European superstate. Thankfully the rejection of the centralist EU Constitution by France and the Netherlands in May and June 2005 illustrates a popular backlash against the EU macro-monster.

Similarly, a European single currency will obviously have effects far beyond the sphere of the economy. It will have to be managed centrally, which will necessitate the principal economic strategy for each member state being determined centrally. Consequently, the ability of national governments to direct economic policy in tune with the wishes of their electorates will be weakened considerably, if not actually eliminated. Although leading members of the Confederation of British Industry, which principally represents big business, called for early entry into the single currency at its annual conference in October 1999, it is significant that the Federation of Small Businesses is much less enthusiastic. The FSB has come out unequivocally against European monetary union, as its manifesto makes clear: ” The FSB is opposed to monetary union and a single currency and believes that such a move would strip the UK of a fundamental aspect of its national sovereignty.”

The fact that the CBI, the representative of big business, is far happier with developments within the European Union than is the Federation of Small Businesses is highly illuminating. It seems that big business is able to establish a modus vivendi with big government, whereas small business sees largescale government as intrusive and uncaring. Macro-economics and macro-politics can work in partnership, steamrollering the needs and aspirations of small businesses in the process. This was evident from the section on `Small Businesses and Europe’ in the FSB’s manifesto, which stressed that `the mounting burden of EU regulation has hit the small firms sector very badly’.

Clearly the macro-democracy envisaged by the European Union is diametrically opposed to any true or meaningful notion of what is democratic. The enlarged European Union of thirty states will have a population of half a billion, twice as many as the United States. It will be governed in practice, as it is now, by an unelected Commission which, if the EU’s recommendations are accepted, will be given even greater powers. Members of the European Parliament, the `democratic’ institution intended to oversee the Commission, already represent huge constituencies. Under the new proposals these constituencies will be made even larger so that a single MEP will `represent’ more than a million voters. Can such a system be called `democratic’ in any meaningful or practical sense? Is it not merely a `Democratic’ Dictatorship?

Far from relinquishing more power to an increasingly remote centre, true subsidiarity and democracy requires that many functions of society be devolved to local and regional authorities. A robust and healthy society consists of families and local communities. These are the real building blocks, the micro-models upon which wider society is built. As such, it is vital that local communities not only survive but prosper. If they are not to be swept up into ever larger conurbations, they must have access to, and control of, local amenities. For example, there should be a proliferation of small and medium-sized community hospitals capable of treating commonplace illnesses. Centralization should only be necessary for highly sophisticated and specialized medical services.

Similarly, with regard to education, there should be a proliferation of small and medium-sized schools. These should be at the heart of local communities and largely administered by them. Subsidiarity in the field of education must mean that families enjoy a large measure of control over the running of schools. Government of the education system by nationally controlled `experts’ should be replaced by government by a combination of local authorities, teachers and parents. Where the education of children is concerned parents and teachers are the real experts, not politicians or civil servants.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, politicians and civil servants beg to differ. In March 2001, the Belgian finance minister, Didier Reynders, called for an extension of power to the twelve finance ministers within the EU so that they could centrally `coordinate’ education and health spending within the euro-bloc.

These examples have been given to illustrate the genuine democratic choice facing society. On one hand there is the move towards the centrally controlled democracy of large areas. On the other there is the alternative offered by decentralized democracy. It is a choice between macro-democracies where power is distant and often serves powerful vested interests, and micro-democracies where human affairs are dealt with on a human scale. In this, as in so much else, it is a struggle between big is best and small is beautiful.

Small is Still Beautiful

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Founding Fathers vs. Church Fathers

by Dr. John Rao

Each time someone sings to me of the glories of the Founding Fathers—namely, every single day of the year-- I think of the Luca Signorelli cycle of paintings of the Antichrist in the cathedral of Orvieto. There, in Umbria, he is: posing as the Savior in front of a crowd of duped believers while his minions massacre the rest of the faithful in the background. Here, in the United States, for the punishment of our sins, they are: protestants, philosophes, a few befuddled or Enlightenment-drugged papists, and many anxious plantation owners and proto-capitalists--all idolized as architects of the "last, best hope of mankind".

Oh, but there is, admittedly, this one twist to my Signorelli analogy. The Antichrist of Orvieto clearly worked on his own steam. In contrast, the Founding Fathers did not themselves labor to convince believers that they were the last, best hope of the faithful in particular. We have to thank subsequent generations of Catholics for undertaking such a task on these demigods’ behalf. Perhaps this is a perversion only of my own little corner of the New Jerusalem, but it seems to me that in these latter days American Catholics are shouting hosannas to the Founders in sermons, in Good Friday meditations, and in calls for a return to their infallible, constitutional principles more regularly than ever before. And all with a panache that would have left the jaws of those hard-headed Anglo-Saxons dropping in amazement.

I can just imagine what George Washington, a Freemason whose library at Mount Vernon was filled with works on cement-making and other such devotional topics, would really have thought if he had known that he would one day be incensed as a Catholic icon; a new Constantine; and even a Marian visionary to boot. The belly-laugh he would have enjoyed with his buddies at the Arlington Lodge! And what about Benjamin Franklin, fresh from an illuminist workshop in Paris? Did he realize that he was laboring alongside Augustine to build up a Catholic City of God? Or consider the musings of the "liberal " (and non-Mason) Thomas Jefferson with the "conservative" John Adams, recently cited in The New York Sunday Times: "And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away {with} all this artificial scaffolding…" (11 April, 1823, Adams-Jefferson Letters, ed. Lester J. Cappon, II, 594). How astonished would they have been to learn that Founder-intoxicated Americanists would not permit such dreams to interfere with their identification as card-carrying Catholic intellectuals: in fact, more reliable ones than men who actually had the temerity to believe in the Trinity, Original Sin, Redemption, and the Resurrection?

Let’s face it. If any of these Founder characters had lived outside of the United States, American Catholics would send them to hell in a hand basket. Too bad poor Robespierre could not have built a career on our side of the Atlantic. Given his own repeated deist references to God, he would have found himself qualifying as a Catholic candidate for canonization rather than for an eternal roasting as a terrorist Frog.

In any case, each time those sweet hosannas to the Founding Fathers ring, my mind turns to a different fatherly fraternity, this one truly worthy of the name—that of the Church Fathers. How many American Catholics can name them? Or, perhaps more fairly, how many American Catholics honestly take them and their works seriously? I mean, really seriously? Oh, they may be piously remembered for miracles associated with their lives, or for one or two anti-Arian citations, or even a couple of passages from their writings, rendered noteworthy through repeated quotation on EWTN. Nevertheless, insofar as daily practical life are concerned, they are dead, buried, and forgotten, consigned to the doctrinal rubbish bin. There is simply no contest in this battle of the ancestors, fraudulent and echt. The score is always the same: Founding Fathers "666"; Church Fathers "0".

American Catholics thinkers, liberal and conservative alike, are ever more confidently inciting the faithful to desert the army of their true spiritual forebears in order to embrace the "let’s-get-real" Founders of the last, best hope of mankind. They are so flush with Founderology that they promote it as though it were the only valid, practical Patrology. This has made a deeper interest in the old Church Fathers not only superfluous, but even harmful and downright impious. Hasn’t everything really valuable that the Fathers could teach us regarding social life been taught more suitably, and in English, by the American Founders? Some narrow patristic arguments, plucked from out of their overarching spiritual vision, may, of course, still be tolerated--if, that is to say, they can support the truly salvific constitutional and economic dogmas of Founderology. But all else is political and social trash, part of that human side of the Church’s Tradition which can easily be shed when reason and science and the inspired eighteenth century American aristocracy has spoken.

What does doctrine-soaked Cappadocia have to do with common sense Philadelphia anyway? What did Basil the Great, Gregory Nazianzen, and Gregory of Nyssa have to say about states’ rights? Where were Augustine’s comments on checks and balances? Cyril’s meditations on the pre-Civil War perfection of the dance of the sugar plum executives, legislators, and judges? Or Cyprian’s concerns about the right to bear catapults? What about that unconscionable collectivist John Chrysostom, whose neglect of the scientific laws of free enterprise helped disrupt the imperial GNP? Away with them! And the same worship of the Founder-friendly patristic phrase, accompanied by a dismissal of the Founder-phobic patristic spirit is employed to butcher the global vision of Thomas Aquinas, the late Scholastics, and the Church’s whole counterrevolutionary tradition as well.

Give me a determination to make all things jive with the Constitutional Convention, the Federalist Papers, and Adam Smith and I’ll give you back a scriptural exegesis which will reveal the Incarnation to have been a humdrum prelude to the real excitement caused by 1776, 1787, and the daily figures from the New York Stock Exchange. Mutatis mutandis, what shows its face in Founderology is the same methodology familiar to us from the modernists of the turn of the twentieth century: that of restraining Christ’s message within a secular strait jacket. Christianity means the mundane as interpreted by this specific band of exegetes and nothing more. Take it or leave it. Live free according to these secular rules or die.

What most intrigues me as an historian is the sustained assault on Catholic History which such Patricide reflects. War on history has, of course, been declared everywhere in Christendom today. Rome has reduced the world before the1960’s to a house of horrors useful only in providing topics for self-deprecating addresses before frenzied anti-Catholic audiences out for blood. Local dioceses bulldoze their past with a passion matched only by Nicolae Ceausescu in pre-1989 Romania. Many elderly Catholics whom I know will deny on a stack of bibles all memory of doctrines and customs which I heard them piously repeat and saw them fervently practice in my childhood in the 1950’s.

None of this history killing, however, has the long term effect of that which is perpetrated on the school front. Anti-historical warmongering is rampant in Catholic education, and this, sad to say, is as true in conservative and even some traditionalist circles as in liberal centers. Wollt ihr den totalen Krieg? Don’t look to Goebbels for the handbook. He was a piker compared to the propagandists at the Sportpalasts of conservative American Catholic instruction. One can easily take stock of the damage by examining certain home schooling programs, whose record of human civilization begins with Virginia and Massachusetts rather than with Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Hebrews, Greece and Rome. Another proof of it is the outright prohibition by some "alternative" Catholic academies or colleges of any substantive presentation of our historical tradition, with its inevitable revelation of radical differences with the pottage served up by the American Dream. Talk about the sin against the Holy Ghost! Disclosure of Catholic History, for all too many conservatives, is the only thing that truly fits the bill. The equation Founders=Fathers=Catholic has more clout in our supposedly countercultural educational camp of the saints than any canon of the Council of Nicaea. Woe to the orthodox teacher who might threaten to weaken it! Would that he had never lived! Would, instead, that a twenty-first century Luca Signorelli might emerge to portray the way this mentality works to smooth the road down which the Antichrist will eventually happily sashay, with our fellow believers pulling his carriage. Once again, Founder Fathers, "666", Church Fathers--along with the rest of Catholic History-- "0".

But why would a believer voluntarily enlist in the ranks of the Catholic heritage killers and happily throw the game to the Founderologists? I have spent my whole adult life trying to explain the answer to that question, and have made my local wine merchant rich while trying to do so. Right now, I should like to approach the issue from the standpoint of one factor alone: the seemingly irresistible influence upon many well-intentioned Catholics of the concept of "American Values". As guides to Catholic morality go, this one is a pure gem. Build your moral life on the foundation of American Values and you will never lack for arguments justifying detours from the Church’s real Tradition again.

What, exactly, are these "American Values"? Presumably, values associated with America or accepted by Americans. Grasping what such values entail is not a terribly difficult enterprise. It merely involves a basic knowledge of the nature and interaction of the two different elements that have gone into forming them: ideas and men.

Ideas are real things, possessing a life and logic of their own, separate from the intentions of those who create or utilize them. No matter what the formulators of ideas might "will" regarding the meaning and development of their principles, these still enjoy their own innate character and direction. The Iron Law of Ideas applies to the labors of the Founders as much as to ordinary human beings who do not inhabit their special Olympus. And no matter how much the assertion may disturb a Founderologist’s breakfast, the Protestant and Enlightenment ideas which have shaped the Founders and America work with relentless logic to destroy all aspects of Catholic culture.

Individual men on their own, however, do not always think and act coherently or completely. They do not necessarily understand all the consequences of what they say and do. Many of the individual heretics and philosophes who created or promoted the ideas informing the United States of America are perfect examples of this phenomenon. There is much that they happily accepted as part of the obvious, unchanging "common sense" structure of the world around them, while nevertheless espousing subversive ideas undermining the very positions they cherished and thought to be unassailable.

The original Protestants and Enlightenment thinkers grew up in an environment that was either dominated by Catholicism or still nurtured numerous residual Catholic influences. Many thus took for granted and worked with familiar Catholic words and themes, even as they gave to them new anti-Catholic meanings. Many also presupposed the continued practice of Catholic ways of behavior even as their own ideas began to create a New Adam who would eventually act in a decidedly anti-Catholic manner. Thus, to note but one example, while using the concepts "freedom" and "nature", both of them themes familiar and friendly to Catholic ears, they brutally perverted their orthodox significance. While assuming that human beings would always act freely and naturally in a Catholic way, they destabilized the support system encouraging such traditional behavior. Doors were opened to the gradual construction of a new style of life for a new kind of man reflecting their changed ideas more accurately. What, exactly, their own New Adam would be like they could not even themselves imagine, precisely because they had no practical experience of him yet. In fact, if they had had a clear picture of this Frankenstein they might have quickly jettisoned him and returned to the bosom of Holy Church.

I am reminded in this regard of the instructive tale about Jeremy Bentham, who sought "the greatest good for the greatest number" on the basis of a materialist definition of what was "useful". Someone supposedly once asked him what would happen if 51% of Englishmen found that their greater good would be achieved by killing the other 49% of their countrymen. "Don’t be ridiculous", he is said to have responded, incredulously, "Englishmen do not act that way". Apocryphal or not, this would have been a valid comment, so long as they continued to behave as Christians, and in gross contradiction to the utilitarian ideas that he was teaching. But once men really understood what the full logic of his vision was; once they started to act in harmony with its precepts, they would begin to pursue what was useful in less scrupulous ways. The Twentieth and budding Twenty-First Centuries are filled with examples of utilitarians of many nations ready to "choose" their version of the good through actions that even Bentham would have had to call murder.

Proponents of so-called "American Values" are in a similar position to Jeremy, the Founders, and the original Protestants and philosophes behind them. These men of values enthusiastically repeat the fundamentally erroneous and radical ideas of the Reformation and the Enlightenment on such matters as freedom and nature, but are often held back from recognizing and accepting the wicked consequences of their false teachings due to the impact upon them of residual traditional presuppositions and "gut feelings". Here are men who are repeatedly horrified by the behavior of people who actually do draw the logical consequences from their formative ideas and radicalize their comportment accordingly. In short, supporters of so-called American Values are a house divided against itself. They wish to maintain a traditional behavior to which they are both non-rationally and irrationally committed, together with rational, radical principles that will make the survival of this traditional behavior absolutely impossible. In the long run, the only honest-to-goodness American Value is actually the incoherent willful desire to have one’s cake and eat it too. A banner should be flown over the American Values camp depicting a whining child banging its head on the floor to protest the nausea caused by the lollipop which it furiously persists in sucking.

Further, rather bizarre complications for the American Values camp emerge from the press of the myriad of different groups seeking to squeeze inside. For, despite paleo-conservative claims to be the sole legitimate representative of the real thing, many others have insisted upon pitching their tents within its precincts. Each faction really has the right to do so, since all can be shown to share the same Protestant and philosophe background, and to differ merely in their various applications of Reformation and Enlightenment ideas regarding freedom and nature with diverging degrees of logic. Each sect arbitrarily limits the import of its ideas to one or two realms, willfully cutting off concern for their effects in all others. Each finds a gaggle of Founders who shared its views or can at least be used as a starting point for promoting them. Liberal proponents of American Values praise the freedom that opens the floodgates to gay marriage and pornography; conservatives, the liberty unleashing that locust plague called unrestrained capitalism; neo-conservatives the license for lying, murderous Machtpolitik. Each then expresses shock at the unnatural distortion of American Values and the will of the Founders perpetrated by the other, just as Luther proclaimed his outrage at the manipulation of his ideas by Anabaptists or Rousseau by atheists. Fists are shaken and tongues stuck out. An incongruous War Between the Heirs erupts.

None of these monotonous battles and mutual recriminations, treated oh so seriously by the earnest warriors of American Values, reflect anything other than the desperate attempts of the members of one big, unhappy libertine family to hide their common spiritual and intellectual bloodline; to escape the inescapable curse that descends with birth into the whole blasted clan. Hiding the family history in order to deny and flee from the family curse has literally become second nature to its members. They have written more glosses on the subject of the differences among them than the most pedantic of late medieval nitpickers, and almost all of these at some point drag in the question of their relationship with the Founders.

Perhaps this is as good a time as any to note that the "argument by appeal to the Founders", used by all supporters of American Values, has a long history of rhetorical effectiveness behind it, and one that is much older than the United States. Isocrates used it to batter Plato, who was accused of betraying the will of the Founders of Athens with his non pragmatic pursuit of truth. Ancient Roman patricians defended senatorial prerogatives with reference to the desires of their own ancestors. This same theme was valuable to secularized bishops of the 1300’s and 1400’s, who appealed to an imagined will of Apostles in their efforts to subject the Papacy to General Councils. Venetian statists divinized the passions of those who first waded into the waters of the lagoons when trying to fend off the advance of the Catholic Reformation. The recipe is always the same. Clarify your narrow self-interested goals of wealth, power, and fame. Incense them as the obvious, God-given or Newtonian pillars of order and freedom. Distinguish them from the grubby desires of competitors. Repeat unceasingly the unbreakable connection of your particular longings with those of the most ancient, prestigious dead men who can no longer contradict you, and whose true dicta can be revealed, suppressed, or rehashed ad infinitum. Ridicule your opponents claims to Founder friendship, and, with it, all their ties to the past. So much will you hit the jackpot with this con game, that, after a short while, you will begin to believe your own mythological propaganda yourself.

Still, to emphasize a phrase popular with one of the most prominent representatives of American Values in politics today, the varied supporters of this scam "can run but they can’t hide". Ultimately, they all voluntarily line up together, liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats, neo-cons and libertarians, to beat their heads on the immovable brick wall called reality. Bit by bit, each faction begins to radicalize its behavior and slips, easily, into an appeal to the natural freedoms of the kind of morality and sort of New Adam praised by its competitors. They badly need one another. Each supplies a gap in the other’s logic and progress. Capitalists have to resort, eventually, to pornographers’ arguments, pornographers to the positions of unrestrained capitalism.

Internationalist warmongers can easily become enthusiasts for a temporary isolation of the Western Paradise from corrupting outside influences; isolationists, when necessary, for temporary warmongering. When you board the heretical Protestant-Enlightenment express, you arrive at the same drab and pointless destination, jazzed up though it might be with glitzy banners, and baptized with the patriotic-sounding name of American Values. The American Values train is headed straight to perdition. No dose of Founderology will fend off the day of reckoning with God and with the rest of the world.

The fact that that day of reckoning seems to be rapidly approaching makes Catholic participation in the losing game of Founderology all the more tragic. A strengthening of the Catholic presence in the United States ought to have served not only as an obstacle to the construction of a new morality and a New Adam, but also as an aid for the correction of the rotten teachings shaping them.

Unfortunately, Catholics failed to pick through the confusions of homeland culture. They were seduced into accepting the benefits of American Values. Catholics saw that supporters of "American morality" were horrified by varied types of perverse behavior which offended them as well. They heard wickedness attacked and goodness defended in familiar, Catholic-like language. They were taught that the Founders lay behind this homely fight for the right. Liberals assured them that the Enlightenment and Reformation on which those Founders fed were really quite conducive to social justice; conservatives, that they were perfectly tradition-friendly, offering no stimulus whatsoever for the sort of madcap Revolution that silly France had experienced.

Eager to accommodate their new land, Catholics then quite happily drew the conclusion that American Values and the Founders responsible for them could legitimately be cheered on as if they were as Catholic as St. Irenaeus; that the philosophes behind them must all be budding catechists at the school of Alexandria; that their Protestant ancestors would surely have been welcome at the table of St. Hilary of Poitiers. Yes, Protestantism and the Enlightenment were wicked in 1517 and 1750, back in Geneva and Paris, but their effects could definitely be transmuted and become good through the magic of America and the Founders’ Touch. Doctrines foul enough to raise generations of Europeans ready to risk martyrdom to oppose them were perfectly suitable for serving as the unalterable foundations for the good life on the other side of the Atlantic. Ignatius of Antioch might be used to thunder versus Lutheranism in the Old World, but in America he would doubtless have been the bosom buddy of Calvin, John Locke, and James Madison. Fight Protestantism, the Enlightenment, and the Founders? Why, you might as well fight the ante- and post-Nicaean Fathers and Catholicism itself.

Catholics also gradually embraced the notion that Founderology required their active participation in building a new morality and a New Adam. They understood that, radically changed though these would be, they must still be labelled traditional and Catholic. Great progress has been made in recent years in declaring the new morality and the New Adam to be as papist as penance and indulgences. Conservatives supporting the American Empire have completely stripped Catholic ideas involving just wars of any kind of practical clout, dismissing the moral revulsion of people who know that they have been lied to as mere "opinions" that must bend to the will of the omnipotent secular Leader. Torture has come to be taken for granted as the appropriate method for dealing with "terrorists" who would have been labeled freedom fighters and praised for their unorthodox fighting styles if only they had been insurgents in 1776 at Lexington and Concord. Doing good has more and more come to be equated with making big time bucks in capitalist cultural killing and environmental devastation. And even the appropriate kind of ancient Christian leader matching their adulation of George W. as a new Constantine has been located: Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, Arian imperial apologist, patron "saint" of Catholic political boot licking.

Finally, Catholics grasped the reality that the society shaped by Founderology rewards its idolators as heroes and punishes its principled enemies as losers, most effectively by economically emarginating them and depriving them of the ever-increasing incomes that basic survival within the Western Paradise demands. They understood that there was no salvation outside the Founderology world, temporal as well as spiritual; that having been baptized into it, they could pick up the works of the real Fathers for information regarding the character of a Christian society only at the risk of kissing influence in the world at large goodbye. Such social and economic suicide they could not bring themselves to commit. Hence, their further support for a recognition of the dicta of the Founders as the sole guide to daily living worth calling Catholic.

In 1989, as the last of the East Bloc regimes tumbled onto the rubbish heap of history, I sat together with an older Catholic friend in a café near my apartment in the Village. "All that I have fought for has triumphed", he mused; "and yet my enemies are stronger than ever". Though obviously troubled by this truth, he made his comment with a certain justified spirit of hope. He was, after all, a sadder but wiser man. He had recognized what I have noted above. That his "friends" were actually his enemies as well, men who shared the same parents and who relied on the same arbitrary willfulness to refuse connecting the dots that would lead them to temporal and divine wisdom.

This, I think, will be my last article for The Remnant directly dealing with the Founders. There is no point saying anything more about them. It simply does not matter. I believe that many American Catholics would continue to appreciate and love them even if all of us were lined up and shot by the whole crew to the tune of Yankee Doodle Dandy. Belief in the Founders, along with the Enlightenment and Protestantism that stand behind them, as the source of all that is good is too strongly rooted in our culture to topple with rational arguments. Catholics have become New Adams themselves and would never accept Catholic History and the teachings of the Church Fathers on face value, if for nothing else, because you cannot make a buck out of them. Antichrist, here we come.

©2006 The Remnant

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Ave Maria Lecture

by Dale Ahlquist

The fictional fantasy in The Club of Queer Trades reflects Chesterton’s genuine hope for a just society. He spent his life arguing that such a society was really possible. Argumentation is about persuasion. Chesterton wanted to convince the world that there was a better social structure than either Socialism or Capitalism. But it was not a system that could be imposed on a society; it was something a society had to learn about and then choose. Distributism, he argued, is not something “done to people,” but “done by people.”56 Like Christianity, Distributism has not been an ideal tried and found wanting, but found difficult and left untried.

Fundamental to the Distributist philosophy is the idea of property, that each family should own its own land, which is not only a family’s haven, but also its tool, its means of support. Small, local government is better than big government. Small, local business is better than big business. The law must protect private property and the family not only against intrusion from the state, but against intrusion from huge companies, which are not accountable to anybody. The family should not be dependent on either the government or mega-corporations. The ideal is independence— liberty.

The whole point of liberty, and only point of democracy, is expressed in the word self-government. The word implies that a man should not be governed by another than himself; but it also implies that a man should be governed by himself. It implies that there is a moral authority in man, because there is a moral authority above man; and that the divine part of human nature has legitimate rule over the bestial. But it also implies that over large parts of his life at least, he must exercise this moral authority himself, and if it is taken from him he becomes a slave.57

Democracy can work only if it recognizes that the basic unit of society is the family. The family is itself a tiny kingdom. The family has greater authority than the state. It should make the basic decisions about life. In a broken society, that is, a society of broken families, individual rights trump family rights and the family is undermined. That is how we have come to see the rise of homosexual rights, abortion rights, and a myriad of other little bizarre special interests that were once unimaginable in a normal society. The State has replaced the natural authority of the family and has become, in turn, a very unnatural authority over the family, doing by coercion what was previously accomplished by a much greater force—love. The force in the family is not a hammer, it is a magnet. But when the State is the authority, the force is a hammer.

We have forgotten the first principles. We have forgotten the first things. Chesterton still reminds us that “the first things must be the very fountains of life, love and birth and babyhood; and these are always covered fountains, flowing in the quiet courts of the home.”58 Chesterton’s Distributist philosophy is centered on the first things of home and family. Property, of course, is a necessary component in creating “the quiet courts of the home.”

Property, however, is not an entitlement. It is an ideal, something that must be achieved, and a just society should try to achieve it for everyone, distributing property as widely as possible. It is a matter of justice. But how can it be done? This is the giant question when it comes to Distributism. Let the arguments begin. It can only be accomplished by persuasion and not by coercion. But at some point, it involves the rich helping the poor, which must be done directly, without government programs or private foundations. “The obligation of wealth,” says Chesterton, “is to chuck it.”59 The beggar is a man “who offers you [the opportunity] to fulfil your own ideals.”60

It is supposed that charity makes a man dependent; though in fact charity makes him independent, as compared with the dreary dependence usually produced by organisation. Charity gives property, and therefore liberty. There is manifestly much more emancipation in giving a beggar a shilling to spend, than in sending an official after him to spend it for him.61

www.chesterton.org

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