Syllabus

Popular sovereignty and the oath theory

In October 2021, Judge William Pryor of the Eleventh Circuit (not the Fifth) gave a speech to the Heritage Foundation. Judge Pryor is a prominent conservative judge, and he is perpetually on the list of candidates for elevation to the Supreme Court in a Republican administration. His speech, “Politics and the Rule of Law,” is a long argument in favor of originalism. In this speech, in an attempt at Scaliaesque wit, he inveighed against “Living Common Goodism.” Among his assertions was that the oath imposed by Article VI of the Constitution—the oath to “support this Constitution”—creates a binding moral duty in favor of originalism.

Professors Evan Bernick and Christopher Green have conducted a lengthy analysis of the object of the constitutional oath, arguing that, while there might be exceptions, the oath prescribed by Article VI of the Constitution requires originalism in some way. Professor Joel Alicea, author of a recent essay attempting to find another basis to make originalism morally obligatory, recognizes that even Bernick and Green’s argument requires moral evaluation of the Constitution. However, others have found Professors Bernick and Green’s claims about the oath to be just the ticket, including John Ehrett and C’zar Bernstein. (Judge Pryor’s talk cited Bernstein in particular on this point.)

There is, I think, a very understandable desire on the part of originalists to find some binding moral basis for their jurisprudential preferences. The oath seems to be, for some, including Judge Pryor, a mechanism to moralize a certain interpretation of the Constitution. Most stop here, apparently revolting from the consequences of this when applied to judges and federal officers. But for rhetorical-forensic purposes, simply asserting that originalism is a moral duty is sufficient. But to move into a more obvious moral dimension (I would not suggest that law and morality are ever actually distinct) means just that: moving into a moral dimension. And there are of course consequences to this.

For Catholics—and those interested in an Aristotelian-Thomistic moral philosophy—the oath is well understood. Indeed, going back to St. Ambrose and St. Jerome, one can find nuanced understandings of oaths and their consequences. One important theme is that superiors can commute or dispense oaths sworn by their inferiors. This has always included the pope (or the delegates of the pope exercising his power). But the pope is not the only person, in my view, who can commute or dispense an oath. I believe that, on Aquinas’s account of popular sovereignty, the people, legislating through custom, can commute or dispense an oath.

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In the discussions of the Article VI requirement of an “Oath or Affirmation” to support “this Constitution,” the emphasis is often on “this Constitution.” There is not as much emphasis on “Oath or Affirmation.” Professors Bernick and Green recognize that there are situations in which oath-breaking might be not only justifiable but even necessary. But on the whole, the proponents of an originalism required by the oath want to talk about language and the nature of the Constitution. It is assumed, particularly by popularizers like Ehrett and Bernstein, that that oath is generally morally binding except in emergency circumstances. This is enough for their purposes: originalism is morally obligatory because oaths are morally binding.

I want to be clear that I do not share this view, nor do I think a Catholic can safely hold it. Some of the proponents of the view express clearly that they believe that an oath required by Article VI could conceivably bind someone to immoral acts. For example, C’zar Bernstein, writing in National Review, suggests that judges are bound by the Article VI oath to “support and faithfully interpret a written instrument that may or may not conform with the moral law or any particular conception of the ‘common good.’” The problems for a Catholic with this view are too numerous to discuss. (A brief review of the propositions concerning civil society and ethics more generally infallibly condemned by Bl. Pius IX in Quanta cura and Syllabus would highlight at least some of them.) Nevertheless, I will assume for our present purposes that the Article VI oath is not a moral suicide pact, and that the content of the Constitution is at least arguably conformable to the eternal and natural law. Moreover, I will assume that a Catholic can safely hold the oath theory.

It is certainly true that an oath is not binding in emergency circumstances—that is to say, when an oath would require an unjust result in given circumstances—but are there other circumstances when an oath might not bind? The answer Thomas Aquinas gives in the course of his detailed examination of both oaths and vows is yes. Certainly an oath to do something evil must not be sworn or carried out. But that is not every oath. Some oaths might be contrary to greater goods, and Aquinas tells us that we should not swear them, though we may or may not carry them out. A doubtful oath may be dispensed by one in authority, preeminently the bishop.

But there is a fourth category of oath identified by Aquinas: the oath that is manifestly lawful and useful. This oath, Aquinas tells us, does not admit of a dispensation, but a commutation. Aquinas analogizes it to a change in the law: circumstances may transpire that mean something better for the common good might be done. In these circumstances, an oath may be commuted to do that something better. The Pope, having in Aquinas’s account supreme jurisdiction in the Church (and, at least when he wrote his commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, everywhere else), has the authority to commute oaths. But, Aquinas adds, so too does anyone who has authority over someone else.

And here we reach an interesting point, which I discussed previously. As Professor Alicea has demonstrated—incompletely, in my view—there is a theory of popular sovereignty in Aquinas. The Constitution, according to Professor Alicea and indeed Professors Bernick and Green, is the means by which the People of the United States transfer, under certain conditions, to various public persons their sovereignty, just as the Lex Regia was how the Roman people transferred to various public persons their sovereignty. But according to Aquinas, as I demonstrated a little while ago, the people retain a couple of important rights: the right to withdraw from a tyrant their transfer of power and the right to legislate through custom.

The People of the United States have authority over the public persons to whom they have transferred their sovereignty, retaining (crudely) the right to revolt and the right to legislate through custom. On Aquinas’s account, the people, as the superiors of all the Executive Branch officials and federal judges, have the retained jurisdiction to legislate through custom in such a manner as to dispense or commute the oaths of federal officers. This is, I believe, a significant problem for the oath theory on a Thomistic account.

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An oath is fundamentally an invocation of God to witness a statement (ST II-II q.89 a.1 co.). If it is a statement about past or present events, it is a declaratory oath (ibid.). If it is a statement about future events, it is a promissory oath (ibid.). There are limits to what one can swear about in Aquinas’s account. One swears to confirm contingent facts regarding man, and one invokes God, Who sees all and knows all, as a witness because man lies, forgets, and does not have access to distant places (ibid.). There is no need, therefore, to swear regarding speculative propositions, which receive natural and infallible confirmation by reason, and matters subject to scientific investigation (ibid.).

Aquinas tells us that an oath is fundamentally an act of faith—indeed, of religion—insofar as calling God to witness something is an implicit testimony to His omniscience (ST II-II q.89 a.2 co.; II-II q.89 a.4). But the Gospels, St. Paul, and the Fathers warn against swearing frivolous or wicked oaths (ST II-II q.89 a.2 co. & ad 1). An oath therefore must have three components to be lawful: truth, judgment, and justice (e.g., St. Jerome, In Jeremiam Prophetam lib. I, c. IV, PL 24, 706). Aquinas expounds upon these components: “Iudicio autem caret iuramentum incautum; veritate autem iuramentum mendax; iustitia autem iuramentum iniquum sive illicitum.”—“A rash oath lacks judgment, a false oath lacks truth, and a wicked or unlawful oath lacks justice” (ST II-II q.89 a.3 co.).

A declaratory oath—a statement about the past or present—has to be true. But the Article VI oath is manifestly a promissory oath: the officers “shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution” (U.S. Const. art. VI, cl. 3). Luckily, Aquinas explains when promissory oaths are binding, too: “in iuramento quod praestatur de his quae sunt fienda a nobis, obligatio cadit e converso super rem quam aliquis iuramento firmavit. Tenetur enim aliquis ut faciat verum esse id quod iuravit, alioquin deest veritas iuramento”—“in the oath that is made about something to be done by us, the obligation falls on the thing guaranteed by oath. For a man is bound to make true what he has sworn, else his oath lacks truth” (ST II-II q.89 a.7 co.).

But remember truth is only one of the three requirements for a lawful oath: it still must have judgment and justice (ST II-II q.89 a.3 co.). These remain the conditions for a valid oath under the 1983 Code of Canon Law (c. 1199 § 1). Aquinas explains first “Si autem est talis res quae in eius potestate non fuit, deest iuramento discretionis iudicium”—“if this thing be such as not to be in his power, his oath is lacking in judgment of discretion” (ST II-II q.89 a.7 co.). We turn then to judgment: “Si vero sit quidem possibile fieri, sed fieri non debeat, vel quia est per se malum, vel quia est boni impeditivum, tunc iuramento deest iustitia”—“If, on the other hand, it be something that he can do, but ought not to, either because it is essentially evil, or because it is a hindrance to a good, then his oath is lacking in justice” (ibid.). Here, Aquinas is emphatic. An oath that is essentially evil or a hindrance to justice must not be kept (ibid.).

There are a couple of ways that an oath can produce an evil result. First, the oath can be for something intrinsically wicked or something that hinders a greater good (ST II-II q.89 a.7 ad 2). Oaths for intrinsically wicked things are always immoral, both in the swearing and in the doing: “Huiusmodi enim iuramentum a principio est illicitum, differenter tamen. Quia si quis iuret se facturum aliquod peccatum, et peccat iurando, et peccat iuramentum servando”—“For oaths of this kind are unlawful from the outset: yet with a difference: because if a man swear to commit a sin, he sinned in swearing, and sins in keeping his oath” (ibid.). Oaths that hinder a greater good are immoral in the swearing but not the doing (ibid.).

The other way is fundamentally more interesting and perhaps more relevant: “Alio modo vergit in deteriorem exitum propter aliquid quod de novo emerserat, quod fuit impraemeditatum”—“Secondly, an oath leads to an evil result through some new and unforeseen emergency” (ST II-II q.89 a.7 ad 2). Aquinas here cites the example of King Herod. When he promised Salome to give her anything she wanted for her dancing, that was not in and of itself a wicked oath, provided that Salome asked for something Herod could lawfully give her. But when she asked for the head of St. John Baptist and Herod felt constrained to give it to her, that was certainly evil (ST II-II q.89 a.7 ad 2). Here he follows St. Ambrose—who cites not only the case of Herod but also of Jephthah (De officiis lib. I, c.50, no. 255).

A lawful oath that remains lawful—that is, a promise that still has truth, judgment, and justice—has to be followed, right? Maybe. In Aquinas’s treatment of vows, we learn about the concept of dispensation (ST II-II q.88 a.10). In the Treatise on Law, Aquinas explains how laws may be dispensed from (ST I-II q.96 a.6; I-II q.97 a.4). And the reason for dispensations from the law is pretty clear on Aquinas’s account: “lex ponitur respiciendo ad id quod est ut in pluribus bonum, sed quia contingit huiusmodi in aliquo casu non esse bonum, oportuit per aliquem determinari in illo particulari casu legem non esse servandam”—“a law is made with an eye to that which is good in the majority of instances. But since, in certain cases this is not good, there is need for someone to decide that in that particular case the law is not to be observed” (ST II-II q.88 a.10 co.). A person who makes a vow—that is a promise to God to do something (ST II-II q.88 a.1 co.)—becomes a law unto himself (ST II-II q.88 a.10 co.). In most cases, the matter of the vow is good, but in some cases it is evil, useless, or impedes a greater good; therefore, the Church has the power to dispense (or commute) a vow (ibid.).

As with vows, so with oaths: “Quod autem aliquid sit inhonestum vel noxium, repugnat his quae debent attendi in iuramento, nam si sit inhonestum, repugnat iustitiae; si sit noxium, repugnat iudicio. Et ideo, pari ratione, etiam in iuramento dispensari potest”—“Now anything morally evil or hurtful is incompatible with the matter of an oath: for if it be morally evil it is opposed to justice, and if it be hurtful it is contrary to judgment. Therefore an oath likewise admits of dispensation” (ST II-II q.89 a.9 co.).

Dispensations necessarily apply only to promissory oaths (ST II-II q.89 a.9 ad 1). The reason for this is clear: “Sed ad hoc se extendit dispensatio iuramenti ut id quod sub iuramento cadebat, sub iuramento non cadat, quasi non existens debita materia iuramenti, sicut et de voto supra diximus”—a dispensation “implies that what hitherto came under an oath no longer comes under it, as not being due matter for an oath” (ibid.). A declaratory oath covers something past or present, which is to say something that has “a certain necessity,” and therefore a dispensation would cover not merely the matter of the oath but also the act (ibid.). A promissory oath, on the other hand, covers something about the future, which can change (ibid.). A dispensation therefore covers the matter, not the act.

Aquinas considers three conditions for a dispensation (ST II-II q.89 a.9 ad 3). First, when an oath is manifestly contrary to justice; second, when it impedes a greater good; and third, when the matter is doubtfully right or wrong (ibid.). In the first case, such as when a man swears to commit murder, he must not carry out the oath (ibid.). In the second case, while it is immoral to swear an oath impeding a greater good (ST II-II q.89 a.7 ad 2), the man who swears it can carry it out or not (ST II-II q.89 a.9 co.). In the case of a doubtful oath, the authority of a prelate—that is, a bishop—is necessary (ibid.).

Aquinas considers a fourth case: “quandoque vero sub iuramento promittitur aliquid quod est manifeste licitum et utile”—“Sometimes, however, that which is promised under oath is manifestly lawful and beneficial” (ibid.). Here he distinguishes between a dispensation and a commutation. “Et in tali iuramento non videtur habere locum dispensatio, sed commutatio, si aliquid melius faciendum occurrat ad communem utilitatem”—“An oath of this kind seemingly admits not of dispensation but of commutation, when there occurs something better to be done for the common good” (ibid.). Aquinas makes two points following this. First, the power to commute an oath belongs preeminently to the pope, having the chief authority in the Church (see also In II Sent d.44 q.2 a.3 exp. text.). Second, “sicut et ad unumquemque pertinet irritare iuramentum quod a sibi subditis factum est circa ea quae eius potestati subduntur”—“Thus it is competent to any man to cancel an oath made by one of his subjects in matters that come under his authority” (ST II-II q.89 a.9 ad 3).

Here, the analogy to law is pretty clear. Aquinas, discussing the change of human laws, tells us: “Ex parte vero hominum, quorum actus lege regulantur, lex recte mutari potest propter mutationem conditionum hominum, quibus secundum diversas eorum conditiones diversa expediunt”—“On the part of man, whose acts are regulated by law, the law can be rightly changed on account of the changed condition of man, to whom different things are expedient according to the difference of his condition” (ST I-II q.97 a.1 co.). An oath might once been manifeste licitum et utile just like a law might have served the common good. But something that serves the common good better might come along.

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The trivial case for a dispensation or commutation is that the pope (or someone on whom the pope has conferred his own authority) dispenses or commutes it. Remember that the Church holds that all validly baptized Christians are part of the Church (c. 204). Historically the Church has claimed jurisdiction over all validly baptized Christians, though in recent years the Church has not emphasized that claim. The pope, as head of the Church, has preeminent power to dispense or commute an oath.

Under the 1983 Code of Canon Law, the pope has conferred this power in many cases to bishops and pastors (cc. 1203; 1196, 1º). As a rule, the power of prelates and pastors is limited to cases where no one is prejudiced by the commutation or dispensation. But even in such cases, the pope retains jurisdiction to commute or dispense the vow or oath. But the Code identifies, particularly with respect to oaths, situations in which by the law itself the oath is not binding (cc. 1201 § 2; 1202, 2º).

And Professor Green, writing at his blog, has characterized this as a “bad conception” of fidelity, pointing toward St. Pius V’s bull, Regnans in excelsis, which, among other things, dispensed Elizabeth Tudor’s subjects from any oaths they had sworn to her. This was not the only dispensation in the context of the English schism (and later heresy). Paul III, when he excommunicated Henry Tudor in the bull, Eius qui, dispensed the oaths of Christian princes to assist Henry (Mag. Bull. Rom. lib. I, sec. 15, pp. 706–07). But it is impossible to see that this is a “bad conception” of fidelity for a Catholic. It is simply the conception of fidelity on the Catholic account: the pope—to this very second—claims the power to dispense oaths, which he has conferred in some cases on bishops and pastors. One might say that this means that Catholics cannot hold the oath theory, and I fully agree: no Catholic can safely hold the oath theory. But I said at the outset that I would make assumptions in favor of the theory, including the assumption that it is not erroneous

But is the pope the only person who can commute or dispense from an oath? Recall that “ad unumquemque pertinet irritare iuramentum quod a sibi subditis factum est circa ea quae eius potestati subduntur”—“it is competent to any man to cancel an oath made by one of his subjects in matters that come under his authority” (ST II-II q.89 a.9 ad 3).

Aquinas articulates a theory of popular sovereignty (cf. ST I-II q.90 a.3). Siding with Azo and the minority opinion in a debate about the Lex Regia and the retained sovereignty of the Roman people, Aquinas holds more or less that the people, having entrusted the care of the commonwealth to a public person, retain some jurisdiction. First, they can throw off the rule of that public person if he becomes tyrannical: “Primo quidem, si ad ius multitudinis alicuius pertineat sibi providere de rege, non iniuste ab eadem rex institutus potest destitui vel refrenari eius potestas, si potestate regia tyrannice abutatur”—“If to provide itself with a king belongs to the right of a given multitude, it is not unjust that the king be deposed or have his power restricted by that same multitude if, becoming a tyrant, he abuses the royal power” (De regno lib. 1 c.7).

Second, the people retain the authority to legislate through custom: “Si enim sit libera multitudo, quae possit sibi legem facere, plus est consensus totius multitudinis ad aliquid observandum, quem consuetudo manifestat, quam auctoritas principis, qui non habet potestatem condendi legem, nisi inquantum gerit personam multitudinis. Unde licet singulae personae non possint condere legem, tamen totus populus legem condere potest”—“For if they are free, and able to make their own laws, the consent of the whole people expressed by a custom counts far more in favor of a particular observance, than does the authority of the sovereign, who has not the power to frame laws, except as representing the people. Wherefore although each individual cannot make laws, yet the whole people can” (ST I-II q.97 a.3 ad 3).

The people, therefore, retain a right to revolt against a tyrant and the right to legislate through custom. Other than that, the public persons to whom they have transferred their sovereignty exercise the public authority: “Ordinare autem aliquid in bonum commune est vel totius multitudinis, vel alicuius gerentis vicem totius multitudinis. Et ideo condere legem vel pertinet ad totam multitudinem, vel pertinet ad personam publicam quae totius multitudinis curam habet”—“Now to order anything to the common good, belongs either to the whole people, or to someone who is the viceregent of the whole people. And therefore the making of a law belongs either to the whole people or to a public personage who has care of the whole people” (ST I-II q.90 a.3 co.). And the reason is clear: you need coercive power to enforce the laws, and only the whole people or their chosen delegate has coercive power (ST I-II q.90 a.3 ad 2).

More than this, the delegate of the people has the power to dispense from the law: “ille qui habet regere multitudinem, habet potestatem dispensandi in lege humana quae suae auctoritati innititur, ut scilicet in personis vel casibus in quibus lex deficit, licentiam tribuat ut praeceptum legis non servetur”—“he who is placed over a community is empowered to dispense in a human law that rests upon his authority, so that, when the law fails in its application to persons or circumstances, he may allow the precept of the law not to be observed” (ST I-II q.97 a.4 co.). And Aquinas later explains reinforces this point (ST II-II q.89 a.9 co. & ad 3). But this is simply because the public person has the care of the whole community and is responsible for ordering the community to the common good. (ST I-II q.90 a.3 co.). Remember, though: the public authority has authority to order the commonwealth to the common good only as vice gerens of the totus multitudinis (ibid.). And that authority is subject to some important limitations, as we have seen, including the power to legislate (and nullify and interpret law) through custom (ST I-II q.97 a.3 ad 3).

Remember, too: as the law goes, so go oaths (ST II-II q.89 a.9 co.). The whole people, therefore, has the authority to commute or dispense oaths. But this must be squared with the two retained powers that the people have: the power to revolt and the power to legislate through custom. Revolution does not seem too compatible with oaths. Certainly a revolt would nullify the oath simply because the matter of the oath would have changed (ST II-II q.89 a.9 ad 1). The matter of the oath “I promise to apply the Constitution a certain way” changes when the people revoke the Constitution through a revolution.

But what about legislation through custom—that is, when the whole people through their actions legislate a certain way? Aquinas tells us: “Sicut autem ratio et voluntas hominis manifestantur verbo in rebus agendis, ita etiam manifestantur facto, hoc enim unusquisque eligere videtur ut bonum, quod opere implet”—“Now just as human reason and will, in practical matters, may be made manifest by speech, so may they be made known by deeds: since seemingly a man chooses as good that which he carries into execution” (ST I-II q.97 a.3 co.). Human speech can change the law because it expresses the judgment of reason, and because deeds can do the same thing, deeds can change the law per exteriores actus multiplicatos (ibid.).

This option seems entirely compatible with oaths. Just as the pope and the public person entrusted with the leadership of the commonwealth can dispense oaths through speech (or writing), the pope and the public person entrusted with the leadership of the commonwealth can dispense oaths through repeated exterior acts that declare their reason or will (ibid.). The whole people can dispense oaths, pursuant to what I might call its reserved jurisdiction, with respect to subordinates of the whole people (cf. ST I-II q.97 a.3 ad 3; II-II q.89 a.9 ad 3). How do they express this? Through custom (ST I-II q.97 a.3 co.).

What does this look like? Custom is nothing more than repeated acts expressing reason and will. (ST I-II q.97 a.3 co.). Acquiescence in a practice over a lengthy period is custom of a kind, just as behavior in a certain way over a similar period is custom. If the people permit a certain practice by their representatives or judges over a lengthy period, this would become a law—or interpret or abolish law—on Aquinas’s account of custom. Nothing in this process seems to exclude the acts that a sovereign may take regarding the oaths of his subordinates. And when the people tolerate again and again certain acts by its subordinates—let us say what we mean: when the people tolerate non-originalist decisions or actions by government employees in the various branches of government—it may be said that the people have commuted or dispensed the oath of their subordinates to “this Constitution.”

In my view, this account of popular sovereignty poses a significant problem for the oath theory. The people give most of their authority to the government through a document like the Constitution, but not all. And they retain the authority to legislate corporately through custom. This means that, even if the oath theory were correct and morally safe, the people can still dispense or commute the oath. The power to dispense or commute the oath throws the whole theory, in my view, into turmoil. The oath theory only works if “this Constitution” means the original public meaning of a given Constitutional provision. If the people can change that through custom, then the edifice falls apart.

If one wants to hold—against Azo and Aquinas—that the people have transferred all their authority to the government, retaining none for themselves, not even revolution or custom, then the oath theory may well be plausible given the assumptions I have made here. (Objectively, it is not plausible on the moral grounds I mentioned above, insofar as it purports to deny perennial teachings of the Church.) One may even reject the idea that the Constitution implicates popular sovereignty at all. But that argument would need to be worked out in some detail, not least since I think Professor Alicea is correct when he connects fundamentally the idea of popular sovereignty and the Constitution.

One could also reject custom as a means of making, interpreting, or abolish law. But here we depart so thoroughly from the Thomistic concept of law—indeed, from the entire understanding of law in the classical tradition—that one is forced to accept such a rejection as a parting of the ways more than a response. The differences are simply too large to be overcome and it must be acknowledged, cheerfully and charitably, that there is nothing really to be said.

Integralism and the right

At City Journal, Park MacDougald has a very interesting piece about Catholic illiberalism in the wake of the French-Ahmari debate. In full disclosure, I spoke with MacDougald and am quoted in the piece. On the whole, MacDougald’s presentation of the status quaestionis is fair. Much fairer, indeed, than some of the sharp critiques leveled at integralists by other Catholics. Part of this, no doubt, is the author: MacDougald has been writing about the intellectual currents on the right for a while. For example, he has been writing interesting pieces about various authors and events on the right for New York magazine for a year or two now. However, part of this has to be the moment.

Indeed, the debates that MacDougald summarizes for a general audience seem to me to be part of a broader moment. I have written a lot here about liberalism generally and the potential crisis of liberalism that is emerging along social and cultural lines. But it must be observed that the debate is, for the most part, a debate taking place on the political right. Sohrab Ahmari and David French are both—at least in terms of how they describe themselves—men of the right. Most people would say that National Review and First Things are both right-wing publications; indeed, both would probably be among the most influential right-wing publications today. The other participants in the debate are also generally men and women of the right.

Even the prominent Catholic critics of integralism, such as Massimo Faggioli, are ultimately not conventional secular progressives. Whatever my disagreements with the Catholic critics of integralism, I have little doubt in my mind that they are no more enthusiastic about the excesses of identity politics, political correctness, intersectionality, or whatever else you want to mention than Sohrab Ahmari. Indeed, some of them, such as Ryan Anderson, boss at the integralism-obsessed Public Discourse, made their names expressing right-wing views on social-cultural issues. And even if a critic like Faggioli wanted to make common cause with the secular left, he would find out that the left gets to define who is a leftist and very few Catholics ever make the cut.

Consequently, the debate over integralism is, in broader terms, a debate on the right. And it cannot be denied that the right generally is ascendant at the moment. The rise of populism since 2008 or so has been, for the most part, a right-wing phenomenon. Even Hillary Clinton, whose campaign against Barack Obama in 2008 was structured along broadly populist lines, abandoned a left-wing populism when confronted with Donald Trump’s right-wing version. Throughout Europe, right-wing populists are achieving significant successes, the most notable of which is the departure of England from the European Union. Nigel Farage’s farewell speech in the European Parliament yesterday, for example, was, in part, a defense of populism against the dominant EU ideology. Enough has been said about Viktor Orban and Matteo Salvini.

Voices on the left recognize that leftists have been increasingly excluded from power. Sam Kriss—the leftist blogger who was sort of cancelled during the height of Me Too, though he has sort of made a comeback except on Twitter—wrote a piece following Jeremy Corbyn’s defeat in the English general election. I think it is worth dwelling on one passage in particular:

The left has a tendency to lapse into a kind of vulgar Kantianism here. Du kannst, denn du sollst: it’s necessary, therefore it must be possible. All we need is enough hope. What if it isn’t? Gramsci attacks ‘the sweet illusion that events could only follow a certain sequence, as we predicted, in which they would inevitably run into the dikes and channels that we constructed’ – but what if the dikes and channels are all working exactly as intended, and they were built by our enemies? We have to win, or it’ll be a disaster – but disaster is already triumphant. The crises of neoliberalism haven’t done much to dull its effects; if anything, they’re strengthened. They’re in our communicative media; they’re in the air we breathe. I thought the financial crash of 2008 would lead to a revitalised left, but the oppositional movements that followed were scattered and useless, reduplicating the worst aspects of neoliberalism under the banner of resistance. I thought the collapse of liberalism in 2016 would leave us poised to inherit the earth, but it’s produced a reactionary paradise in which we struggle to gain a foothold.

(Emphasis supplied.) Now, this is obviously contingent. As I write, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are essentially tied for the lead in the Iowa caucus polls. For many people, including a large (or at least extremely online) contingent of Catholics, Bernie Sanders, the cantankerous democratic socialist from Vermont, represents the old left. That is the left before it became bogged down with identity politics and political correctness and intersectionality. The left in the good old days when Marxist students and UAW members at Buick City in Detroit marched toward a fairer economy.

Even more significantly, Sanders represents a left-populism that is far more vibrant than Hillary Clinton’s politics of resentment from 2008. While it is true, therefore, that right-wing populism has made significant political gains and ushered in the triumph of disaster for the left, it seems to me that there remains a possibility that the left will recover at least some of those losses through Sanders’s candidacy. Now, it may all go wrong: Joe Biden might win Iowa, Sanders might win New Hampshire, Amy Klobuchar might win South Carolina, and the front runner after Super Tuesday might get shellacked by Mike Bloomberg. But until it does go wrong, I think it is necessary to admit that Kriss’s despair, while entirely rational, is contingent.

But it is entirely rational to see the left in disarray and despair even if only for the moment. And it is therefore worth thinking about integralism and the right more generally. Obviously, there can be no compromises with respect to integralism, not least since integralism is simply the perennial doctrine of the Roman Church with respect to its relations with states and the obligations states owe God. But it is worth thinking about what integralists can offer to the right more generally. MacDougald quotes Ross Douthat to the effect that integralism will pull Catholic intellectuals to the left economically and to the right with respect to civil liberties and censorship.

To put it another way, unless and until the left proves that it has any vitality left outside Brooklyn, integralists’ engagement should not be an engagement with leftists. It should be engagement with the right. Certainly, to the extent that leftist thought has unique insights not otherwise contained in the Church’s teaching (a debatable proposition if one believes Pius XI and Paul VI), there may be some sense in engaging with leftist thought. But at the moment, there is not really a political expression of leftist thought with any access to state power. Consequently, such engagement can happen as easily within integralist circles as it can in dialogue with the left, not least since integralists are more likely to realize and grapple with the real limitations of leftist thought, especially from a doctrinal standpoint.

However, this process does not happen in a vacuum and as Catholic intellectuals are drawn into a new posture, it stands to reason that these debates will be noticed. Indeed, MacDougald’s piece, among others, proves that these debates are being noticed. There does not appear to be any reason why this should ultimately be a passive project for integralists. Currently there are exciting discussions on the right about industrial policy, state power, and economic justice, all of which can be informed by integralist views. Likewise other aspects of the right-wing moment, such as populism, have a long history with the Church and can be informed by authentically Catholic teaching.

One should not be overly optimistic. The institutions on the right are, in all probability, as hostile to the Church’s teaching as the institutions on the left are. Politicians, no matter how earnest and high minded they may be at any given point, often make compromises, usually at the expense of true believers. But in a moment where the right is ascendant and the debates among Catholics about integralism and liberalism are attracting broader attention, it would be perverse not to advocate forcefully for integralist positions—prudently, of course, recognizing always the constraints that exist.

Ryan T. Anderson forgives us and is ready for us to unblock him

On July 5, 2015, Twitter poet Dril tweeted out an all-time classic, “if youre one of the guys who blocked me on here, i Forgive you, and im ready for you to unblock me now.” On September 9, 2019, Ryan T. Anderson, publisher of America’s leading journal of anti-integralism, Public Discourse, expanded at length upon Dril’s tweet. Ostensibly inspired by the debate between Sohrab Ahmari and David French, Anderson delivers such pithy insights as, “This discussion is best understood not as an ‘either-or’ but as a ‘both-and.'” He goes on to assert that, “The essential intellectual work involves thinking through how to understand the ‘and’ at the theoretical level, and then fleshing out how to embody and implement that ‘and’ at a practical level.” In other words, the harmony of pen and sword between Sohrab Ahmari and David French is basically for Ahmari to concede French’s project (which is, more or less, Anderson’s project). Ryan T. Anderson forgives illiberals for their intransigence and is ready for us to stop complaining about things he likes.

You can read the whole thing at Public Discourse, but it’s a lot of churning over the same ground that Anderson has churned over endlessly over the course of his career. He tells us (describing an essay with his colleague Robert P. George), “We argue that, for example, the political institutions and practices surrounding property rights, the free exercise of religion, and the freedom of speech are justified because of—and hence limited by—the demands of justice and the common good.” We also hear about how “Certain rights and liberties should be understood as important substantive aspects of the common good, and others as important procedural constraints that prevent the abuse of governmental authority.” He even comes around to explaining how academic free speech is necessary for the functioning of universities and how this is the proper analogy for good proceduralism. If Ryan Anderson’s vision of good proceduralism is the tenure system, maybe we should ask the fifteen conservative professors left in the United States how they feel about the protections afforded by tenure.

I’m sure Anderson would respond that this is not what he is arguing at all. No doubt, he would object that he is describing how the academy should function, which is a far cry from how the degraded progressive re-education centers popping up at our elite universities do function. But that’s the problem, isn’t it? For one thing, if the argument is that real proceduralism has never been tried, no one’s buying that one any more. And the reason is simple: while elite universities have not always been Democratic Kampuchea cosplay conventions, they have had apprenticeships and the expectation of serious scholarship and tenure. Just like Anderson describes. Those good procedures didn’t stop the slide of the American university into its current state. What basis is there for assuming that good procedures will work when applied in the Republic? Is there any basis?

At any rate it’ll go over great at Anderson’s next after-dinner speech to donors. I even bet some of them will stay awake for it. Now, even if his audience is too sleepy to notice, you might notice that it’s mighty hard to see where the “and” comes in. Indeed, Anderson’s notion seems to be that everyone has to accept liberal proceduralism and a “Civil Rights Uniformity Act” and a “more robust” version of the “First Amendment Defense Act” will protect morality and religion. Trust the system, Anderson tells us, and eventually—and for what would be the first time—the ratchet will have to start turning in the other direction. There’s no reason to abandon Anderson and French’s preferred venues of courts, committee staff counsel offices, and think tanks. And there’s no sense returning to first principles to try to see if a better strategy could be formulated. “We must also avoid supposing that theoretical claims about the purpose of government could, on their own, provide answers to the questions facing us today.”

“Politics is practical,” Anderson tells us. “It’s concerned with how we should order our lives together in the concrete, given all the givens. It’s directed at action, not abstraction. Thus, it must be concerned with practicalities.“ We have to focus on practicalities! Nothing is more practical than producing white papers and draft legislation that won’t be enacted any time soon. Or, in all likelihood, ever. Nothing accepts (cheerfully!) what is given like going to court to win small battles with David French while big wars are lost at One First Street. We cannot be concerned with abstractions, like the realization, expressed perhaps a little inexpertly by Sohrab Ahmari (and Brent Bozell before him), that movement conservatives don’t win. Or the mounting horror as one realizes that the ratchet may not even be able to move in the other direction, however much we might want it to.

Particularly galling is Anderson’s rejection of teams and personality-based politics. “While neither French nor Ahmari is entirely correct, we need not feel forced into cheering for one side or the other, into viewing this as a matter of ‘teams,'” Anderson scolds us. “We conservatives need to keep the main focus on ideas, not personalities. We need to think prudently about practical steps we should take—here and now, given all the givens—that will promote the common good.” This seems to mean, given everything that came before it, that David French should be handed the win, and Sohrab Ahmari (and those who think like him) should have the good taste not to complain about it. But given Public Discourse‘s unstinting hostility to integralist thinkers, one would be excused for thinking that Anderson is, in fact, not really all that opposed to the idea of teams as much as he is opposed to idea that anyone might be on a team other than his.

Now maybe I have been unfair to Anderson—the long-running beef between Public Discourse and integralists has involved me from time to time—but if his project differs meaningfully from David French’s project, it’s not clear how. His arguments seem directed for the most part exclusively to Sohrab Ahmari’s position. The defense of liberal proceduralism, the importance of limiting government’s power to make moral decisions, and the rejection of abstractions all seem aimed squarely at Ahmari. One could, in fact, quite justifiably conclude that Anderson, if he doesn’t think French is entirely correct, thinks French is mostly correct. If this is not the case, then it might be nice to know what Anderson thinks French gets wrong.

I feel great and I support the nation-state

Yoram Hazony’s Edmund Burke Foundation has just sponsored the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C. Broadly, it was a collection of conservative thinkers who are more or less disillusioned with the liberal order. There were some interesting-seeming speakers (Tucker Carlson, Sen. Josh Hawley, Michael Anton, Patrick Deneen) and some much less interesting speakers (Rich Lowry, Richard Reinsch, Rusty Reno) and one appalling speaker (“Amb.” John Bolton). On the whole, it appeared to be a very mixed bag. This sense was confirmed by the Twitter coverage of some of the addresses.

For our part, the conference and the coverage has prompted some thoughts about nationalism or national conservatism or whatever one wants to call it. Broadly we are simply suspicious of the movement. For one thing, Brent Bozell’s Letter to Yourselves and Jean Danielou’s Prayer as a Political Problem seem to be more compelling visions of Christian politics than anything on offer at this conference. Bozell’s clarion cry cannot be repeated too often: “The public life is supposed to help a man be a Christian. It is supposed to help him enter the City of God, and meanwhile it is supposed to help him live tolerably, even happily, in the City of Man.” How a revived nationalism or national conservatism or whatever one wants to call this idea (if it be an idea) fits into this vision is a little foggy to us.

For another thing, there is room for some really serious thought about “the nation” in Catholicism. One can cite Aquinas on piety toward one’s country (ST II-II q.101 a.1 co.) or Pius XII’s Summi Pontificatus or whatever, but it seems to us that there is still room for coherent thought about the modern nation-state in a Catholic context. Not least since the modern nation-state emerged, in many instances, as a part of liberal opposition to Catholic rule. By no means do we claim to have a coherent idea, other than the sense that it would be good if someone engaged in such thought, taking into account not only Aquinas and the medieval examples but also the recent developments under Pius XI and Pius XII. Perhaps someone is doing that kind of thought, though we are far from clear that it was on offer.

In the meantime, turning back to the question of Hazony’s national conservatism conference, we cannot stop thinking about what Dr. William Marshner, writing in Triumph in early 1976, said:

If you assert the existence of a national spirit that gets into the blood and unfolds itself in the whole life of a people, then you cannot arbitrarily lop off vast cultural complexes (TV, movies, books) plus the whole articulate stratum of society (academics, writers, artists) plus the whole dominant class (liberal establishment) plus the great urban centers and call them all “not the real America”

Marshner is responding to a critic of Triumph at National Review—there was, as you no doubt know by now, a long-running feud between Triumph and National Review—but his point has broader resonance. It’s a really difficult point to answer, in fact. One can point to globalists and neoliberal capitalists, loyal to their class above their country, of no fixed abode despite owning multimillion-dollar apartments in New York, London, and Paris, and suggest that these people are alien to the American spirit. But this doesn’t actually answer Marshner’s point, so much as restate the objection to which he is responding.

Marshner provides the answer, though, to the conundrum:

Well, I’ll take money that throughout F.’s argument the talk about “America” is a front. I suspect it has very little to do with the (extramental) country, the people, the ideal or the national Geist. I suspect that F. is as dubious about the world-historical credentials of the real America — the country that tipped the scales against civilization in World War I and has muffed and squandered great-power hegemony since World War II — as I am. I suspect, therefore, that “America” in his text is a stand-in, and that what it stands in for is “the Conservative Movement.”

The answer is a sort of identification between the conservative movement and America the Nation. We suspect that precisely the same sort of thing is going on with the national conservatism moment today. Perhaps it is not a wholesale transformation of movement conservatism into America, but it certainly seems as though aspects of movement conservatism are attempting to put on a little nationalist shine.

Consider how Marshner reached his conclusion in this case:

Think about it: 1) this is the Movement which, if NR defines, Triumph has deserted. In fact, Triumph was never in it, but the fact was not clear to many people until “Letter to Yourselves.” 2) This is the Movement whose gloss on “Duty, Honor, Country” might indeed create problems for a serious Catholic. In fact, in the case of abortion and Countervalue, it already has. 3) This is the Movement, and the only movement, that explicitly excludes all the things F. says are not America from itself and from its constituency. And let me add 4): this is the Movement that claims, in a sense, to be America. It is, simultaneously, the remnant of the patriots, the champion of liberty (hence guardian of the national raison d’être), the true exponent of the Constitution (hence keeper of the national myth).

The logic here is pretty clear. And it seems to be pretty clear in the case of at least some national conservatives. They certainly exclude some things putatively “not America” and claim to represent a Real America. (This of course goes for any number of nationalist types around the world, lest anyone think we’re picking on the national conservatives.)

But it is still difficult to see an answer to Marshner’s original point: how do you exclude the cultural, political, and capital classes from the Real America and contend that there is some national spirit that animates everyone else? Clearly it does not animate everyone else, otherwise the cultural, political, and capital classes would not have been able to achieve their dominance. Unless, as Marshner suggests, what one means when one talks about the Real America is the faction consisting of the members of this or that political tendency. Consequently, there is considerable cause for caution with respect to the national conservative movement.

Marshner went on to point out at length that the movement conservatives did not care very much whether their beliefs were condemned by Pius IX and Leo XIII, who (infallibly, as we never tire of noting) condemned liberalism at great length during their glorious pontificates. And this seems to us to be the fundamental criterion when considering Catholic engagement with any political tendency: is this consistent with the teachings of the Church? There is room for legitimate disagreement about prudential solutions to purely political problems, but there is no room for contradiction of the Church’s teachings in the context of such solutions. And this seems to us to be a serious problem with this new project.

Recall the brief line up we mentioned at the beginning of this piece. Consider individuals like John Bolton, who were keynote speakers at the conference. Is there any doubt that Bolton is simply trying to find some contemporary packaging for the disastrous ideas he has been flogging forever, leading to innumerable human and fiscal catastrophes for the Republic? Consider the ambassadors from National Review at the conference: is there any doubt that, having put out a special issue “Against Trump,” they’re trying to stay current with donors and subscribers, lest their bottom line suffer? Consider Rusty Reno, from First Things: is there any doubt that he is selling what he is always selling, insofar as anyone knows what it is? It is simply true that these people are trying to identify their factions of movement conservatism with the Real America—or simply trying to put new drapes on their very 1980s house.

How many of these speakers are all that interested in conforming to the teachings of the Church of Rome? Even more to the point: how many of these speakers are especially interested in ordering public life in such a way as to make it easier for everyone—especially the poor—to be Christians, to enjoy temporal happiness, and to continue on their way to our heavenly homeland?

The brick through the window

At Public Discourse, the Witherspoon Institute’s online journal of anti-integralist thought, Hillsdale professor Korey Maas warns that, “[i]nsofar as prominent and influential Catholics insist that Catholicism is fundamentally incompatible with the liberal tradition, liberals will feel increasingly justified in reaching the same conclusion.” He goes on to say, “[a]ttempts to convince fellow Catholics that the ‘teaching of the Catholic Church, always and everywhere,’ idealizes the confessional state and sanctions religious coercion will inevitably convince many non-Catholics, liberal and otherwise, that this is indeed the case.” However, Maas’s argument has more to do, we think, with silencing integralists and other Catholics not committed to the Catholic liberalism of the late 20th century than with warning of any impending doom.

This is unfortunate. Instead of coming up with silly arguments for why integralism is dangerous or whatever, liberals like Maas really ought to be doing what illiberal Catholics have been doing: rediscovering their own tradition. And they should cast their gaze on more than the tradition of the United States. The fusion between Catholic liberalism and American conservatism has permanently damaged Catholic liberalism, especially as American conservatism has failed to deliver on its promises. For reasons we will get into in a moment, Maas probably does not care all that much about specifically Catholic liberalism, but that’s neither here nor there. Focusing on policing integralist (or, more broadly, illiberal) rhetoric does not create a compelling case for liberalism. If anything, it reveals that the case for integralism is more compelling than any actually existing case for liberalism.

Maas’s argument goes like this. In the 19th century, America was deeply anti-Catholic. We see today flashes of that old anti-Catholicism in the treatment afforded to Donald Trump’s judicial nominees Amy Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh. Maas contends that the Church blunted some of that old anti-Catholicism by the Second Vatican Council’s openness to liberalism. This is a sort of skewed view, since there were openings to the postwar liberal-democratic order under Pope Pius XII. But to tell that story would be to take some of the focus away from the United States. At any rate, Maas thinks that the Church’s apparent turn toward liberalism—exemplified by John F. Kennedy’s statements during the 1960 presidential campaign—is what made the proud American tradition of anti-Catholicism seem silly.

After the story of anti-Catholicism, we get the customary parade of horribles. A fellow named Philip Primeau was very 19th century when discussing Jacob Rees-Mogg’s denunciation of any scrutiny of one’s religious views. Maas is aghast that Primeau thinks Rees-Mogg should have stood his ground on truth. Maas is also disturbed that Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen has been so gauche to suggest that actually existing American liberalism may in fact be incompatible with orthodox Catholicism. Naturally, there is the stale lament about how First Things got radical for about two minutes. (Why Ryan T. Anderson, editor-in-chief of Public Discourse, has run so many pieces about First Things is a bit baffling, isn’t it?) Maas mentions, among other things, Fr. Romanus Cessario’s piece on the Mortara affair. He graciously declines to mention that R.R. Reno, editor of First Things, disavowed the piece subsequently. He also wrote at least one or two self-flagellating apologies before he disavowed it. No doubt Dr. Maas wanted to spare Reno from any further pain, though it would have been altogether more honest—even if less delicate—to have said that the Mortara exchange marked the end of First Things‘ flirtation with integralism.

We should be, once again, clear that the Church is fundamentally anti-liberal in its doctrine, no matter how unpleasant this may be to those committed to some flavor of liberalism. Maas cites Semiduplex for the proposition that the teachings of Quanta cura and Syllabus are infallible and irreformable, including the 77th, 78th, 79th, and 80th condemnations of Syllabus. Why he didn’t simply cite John Joy’s brilliant essays is beyond us. But behind John Joy stands the great canonist F.X. Wernz, among others, who argue for the infallibility not only of Pius IX’s teachings but also Leo XIII’s explanations of those teachings. One can also read John Henry Newman’s great anti-liberal writings if one needs a literary and philosophical expansion of the Church’s anti-liberalism. Whether or not this is politic, it is true.

A young Catholic writer and friend is fond of saying that every disagreement about tone (or, we might expand his saying, rhetoric) hides a substantive disagreement. And it is clear, given what we believe to be the clear theological notes of the anti-liberal and integralist teachings of Pius IX and Leo XIII, that Maas’s argument, superficially about the danger of illiberal rhetoric, hides a substantive disagreement. Maas clearly does not believe that the teachings of Pius IX and Leo XIII are infallible and irreformable. Indeed, based on a quick Twitter search, it appears that Maas may be some sort of protestant, maybe even a Lutheran. It would surprise us very much, then, if a Lutheran (or any other protestant, for that matter) believed that these—or any other—teachings were infallible and irreformable. One imagines that the only Catholicism pleasing to Maas is a Catholicism that looks basically the same as Lutheranism or whatever. It would also be altogether more honest just to say that and leave it there.

But of course Maas doesn’t. He does, however, eventually come to his punchline: the rising tide of Catholic illiberalism might be taken seriously by liberals. Maas warns, “[t]he ‘last acceptable prejudice,’ instead of an irrational prejudgment, will increasingly be deemed a warranted conviction based on the rational arguments put forward by Catholic intellectuals themselves.” The old anti-Catholicism, flaring up in the Barrett and Kavanaugh hearings, will take root because the liberals will once again see Catholicism as an enemy. We hate to be so blunt, but this is just about the dumbest thing we could imagine. There is also a sort of sinister note to it, isn’t there? The protestant Korey Maas warning Catholics that if they do not do something about the integralists, there will be trouble. A brick through the window in the dead of night or a mural depicting the heroic Orangemen would be more effective, we suppose, but folks do the best they can.

At any rate, Maas cannot really mean that because of some debates among Catholic professors, writers, and WordPress bloggers, liberals will suddenly realize that Church is doctrinally opposed to liberalism. We are flattered by the idea that Dianne Feinstein and Mazie Hirono read Semiduplex and decided to keep our influence out of the federal judiciary. But we are not so silly as to believe that that’s true. Democrats gave Barrett and Kavanaugh a rough time because Democrats achieved a bunch of policy victories in the federal courts—e.g., Roe, Casey, Windsor, Obergefell—and they are not interested in Donald Trump’s judicial nominees taking them away. Stare decisis is, after all, not in the Constitution. What Harry Blackmun and Anthony Kennedy gave, John Roberts and Neil Gorsuch can take away. That’s what the fight over Trump’s judicial nominees is about, not Quanta cura and the confessional state.

Moreover, it is clear that Catholicism is fundamentally incompatible with the trajectory of modern liberalism, not because Catholicism holds that the confessional state is the ideal or that heretics may be punished by the state, but because modern liberalism is fast going off the rails. Media outlets across the political spectrum report daily of cases where deviation from left-liberal consensus is punished severely. College campuses are unrecognizable, with even once-radical figures like Camille Paglia being shouted down for their problematic views. Major corporations are following the money and implementing the left-liberal consensus in various ways. The Masterpiece Cakeshop case shows that left-liberal activists are willing to weaponize state institutions, like the Colorado civil rights commission, in order to coerce individuals into accepting the views of others. Maas may not realize it, but prominent Catholic thinkers like Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule devote a fair bit of time to discussing these trends, too.

In contrast, the spirit of the Second Vatican Council is hopelessly reactionary. Maas might not know this, but even Catholic liberals cannot accept same-sex “marriage” or abortion. (Even Fr. James Martin, SJ, one of the loudest pro-gay voices in the Church today, is a regular, staunch defender of the unborn on social media.) There are no signs that Pope Francis, regularly accused by friend and foe of reinvigorating the spirit of the Council after the perceived setbacks of 1978-2013, intends on retreating in any meaningful way from the Church’s positions on those issues. He also gives few signs of willingness to retreat on the question of women’s ordination—though after the interventions of Paul VI and John Paul II, it is clear that he could not change the Church’s teaching on that, even if he wanted to. Any one of these positions, which are held even by liberals like those at Public Discourse, would be enough to get the Church “canceled” as the kids say. To hold all three? Unforgivable.

And it is simply not clear that defending liberal toleration will achieve even tactical objectives in the current climate. For one thing, the people who are loudest about problematic views on college campuses, on social media, and in various boycott campaigns are simply not all that liberal. They themselves do not recognize a meaningful “right” to profess unacceptable opinions. Indeed, as Professor Paglia recently discovered at the University of the Arts, these unacceptable positions are seen as actual violence. We are simply unconvinced that pleas for liberal toleration will have much success with people who view one’s opinions as actual violence. The anti-Catholicism Maas professes to be worried about is already here, whether it is overt or not, and it is based on issues entirely unrelated to the confessional state and the use of state power to coerce heretics. Just ask the Pennsylvania state legislator who harassed teenagers praying outside a Planned Parenthood. Dollars to donuts, he wouldn’t know integralism from a load of coal.

However, the specter of coming anti-Catholicism is rhetorically useful for Maas. The implicit point of his article is: if things get bad, it will be the integralists’ fault. From here it is only a short step to arguing that integralists must be silenced before they make things get bad. In a sense, Maas’s essay concedes the wild success of integralism in the terms that actually matter (i.e., doctrinal and forensic), and mounts a last-ditch defense by ginning up the specter of anti-Catholicism as a response to Catholic illiberalism. Sure, he cites some of his fellow Public Discourse authors like Robert T. Miller, who have argued gamely and wrongly that integralism does not have the theological note that the integralists think it does. But these pieces have not been all that successful, for a variety of reasons ranging from “They’re not right” to “They’re boring.” There is no sense waiting for the liberals to mass and make a compelling counterattack. Instead, Maas makes the only play available: he retreats to warning about the inherent danger of illiberal Catholicism.

This is a pity! For our part, we believe that the only way liberalism is going to make a comeback among Catholic thinkers is by abandoning the tedious connection with American conservative politics. Instead, it is necessary to argue for the sort of postwar Christian democracy that formed the core of the European project. To be sure, it went wrong like American liberalism. It is awfully hard to see the ideals of the heady days of the 1950s and 1960s in the micromanaging Brussels bureaucracy or the smug condescension of contemporary European leaders like Guy Verhofstadt. Nevertheless, it is in the Christian-democratic project that liberalism’s best hope lays. This will no doubt be a grief to Catholic liberals who have long seen Catholicism and American conservatism as two peas in a pod, but they will be more grieved by far if they continue to see liberalism slide into irrelevance.

Integralism, authority, and inequality

Notre Dame theology student Timothy Troutner has written a Brobdingnagian critique of integralism at Notre Dame’s Church Life Journal. Pater Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., has responded, correctly identifying a desire to baptize anarchism at the heart of Troutner’s critique. Such a plan, however, is contrary to the consistent teaching of the Church from St. Augustine to St. Pius X. Drawing from St. Augustine, we will see that anarchism of any kind is contrary to good order. Indeed, good order in the home and in the state requires inequality, which at a minimum requires rulers and ruled. Additionally, Troutner’s critique ignores important juridical texts, which maintain the Church’s right to coerce the faithful, even with respect to temporal goods. In this dimension, his critique represents the danger of departing completely from the magisterial and juridical statements of the Church in favor of the speculations of modern theologians.

Before turning to the issues, it is interesting to see Troutner’s piece framed in terms of integralism. He could make his argument about Christian anarchism purely in terms of liberalism. Such an argument proceeds trivially: liberalism promises liberation and individualism but, despite its promises, it leaves the way open for various factors to dominate in just the same way they did before liberalism. (One could even, for a little bit of that socialist je ne sais quoi repeat Karl Marx’s arguments from On the Jewish Question, where he distinguishes between political emancipation and human emancipation.) He could get most of his talk about “cruciform power” and the libido dominandi in with reference only to liberalism. Instead, he sets out to show that integralism and liberalism are two sides of the same coin.

He does this because integralism has increasingly come to represent the default anti-liberal position among Catholics. So much is this the case that Troutner’s purpose is to claim that integralism is not as anti-liberal as people think, opening up some space for his preferred Catholic Worker model, which apparently represents true anti-liberalism. In this regard, despite Troutner’s tart critiques of integralist rhetoric, it must be recognized that integralist rhetoric has been hugely successful. Integralists might be insufficiently grieved by the supposed sins of Christendom, whatever on earth that could mean, but they have been effective in advancing integralism as a live idea.

There is, of course, a prehistory of the extremely online integralism that plays out on Twitter, WordPress blogs like this one (recognized by Catholic author Sohrab Ahmari among others), and websites like Church Life Journal and Public Discourse. It is easy to forget that Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre was at least as concerned about Dignitatis humanae and the apparent incompatibilities between that document and the social teachings of Pius IX, Leo XIII, St. Pius X, and Pius XI. His Open Letter to Concerned Catholics addresses these issues at length. The Society of St. Pius X kept the flame alive after Lefebvre’s death. To some extent, therefore, concerns particular to French traditionalists have found their way into the discourse regarding integralism. That is to say, there is a throne-and-altar element to integralism that may or may not be applicable automatically to the political situation in the United States.

The upshot of all of this is that, after decades of patient work by Catholics like Archbishop Lefebvre, integralism has come into its own once more as the primary Catholic answer to liberalism. Troutner’s piece implicitly accepts the prominence of integralism even as it critiques it and attempts to identify another anti-liberal path for Catholics. We shall see, of course, that Troutner’s alternative path is strewn with serious problems.

II.

As noted above, Pater Waldstein correctly identifies the upshot of Troutner’s piece: Christian anarchism. Troutner’s reference to Dorothy Day’s Christian Worker movement gives away the game, and Pater Waldstein knows it. It is not that liberalism and integralism present, to Troutner, bad concepts of authority. One gets the sense that all concepts of authority are bad as far as Troutner is concerned. Pater Waldstein correctly notes that Dorothy Day was inspired by the Sillon, which was condemned by St. Pius X in Notre charge apostolique in large part because of its rejection of authority. He also recounts a couple of anecdotes from Day’s memoir about the problems the Catholic Worker movement encountered as a result of its anarchic philosophy.

Of greater value is Pater Waldstein’s careful analysis of the Rule of St. Benedict and the way it creates a kind of equality through hierarchy. We suspect that Pater Waldstein, a Cistercian monk of Heiligenkreuz in Austria, has had more time to learn and meditate upon Benedict’s rule than most people will ever have in their lifetimes. And his explanation of the Rule is well worth considering. It is also well worth considering Augustine, which both Troutner and Pater Waldstein discuss at some length.

Despite Troutner’s repeated claims about Augustine and the libido dominandi, we find no reference to De civitate Dei XIX:13, where Augustine sets forth the relation between peace, order, and inequality. It might be helpful to consider this argument at some length, as it develops some points made by Pater Waldstein. We will quote it in Latin and English (the freely available English translation is a little inadequate):

Pax itaque corporis est ordinata temperatura partium, pax animae inrationalis ordinata requies appetitionum, pax animae rationalis ordinata cognitionis actionisque consensio, pax corporis et animae ordinata uita et salus animantis, pax hominis mortalis et Dei ordinata in fide sub aeterna lege oboedientia, pax hominum ordinata concordia, pax domus ordinata imperandi atque oboediendi concordia cohabitantium, pax ciuitatis ordinata imperandi atque oboediendi concordia ciuium, pax caelestis ciuitatis ordinatissima et concordissima societas fruendi Deo et inuicem in Deo, pax omnium rerum tranquillitas ordinis. Ordo est parium dispariumque rerum sua cuique loca tribuens dispositio.

And in English:

The peace of the body then consists in the duly proportioned arrangement of its parts. The peace of the irrational soul is the harmonious repose of the appetites, and that of the rational soul the harmony of knowledge and action. The peace of body and soul is the well-ordered and harmonious life and health of the living creature. Peace between man and God is the well-ordered obedience of faith to eternal law. Peace between man and man is well-ordered concord. Domestic peace is the well-ordered concord between those of the family who rule and those who obey. Civil peace is a similar concord among the citizens. The peace of the celestial city is the perfectly ordered and harmonious enjoyment of God, and of one another in God. The peace of all things is the tranquillity of order. Order is the distribution which allots things equal and unequal, each to its own place.

Watch carefully the analogy Augustine draws between the family and civil society (or the state): peace in the household is the concord of those who command and those who obey among the inhabitants; likewise, peace in the city is the concord of those who command and those who obey. Pax omnium rerum tranquillitas ordinis: the peace of all things is the tranquility of order, and order requires inequality.

In Pater Waldstein’s consideration of the Rule of St. Benedict we have a clear example of the tranquility of order. There is a rigid order—one could even say inequality—in monastic life, even to those who arrived in the monastery at different hours of the same day. But, just as Augustine sees the peace of the city in the careful arrangement of things and persons in their places, St. Benedict sees the peace of the monastery in the careful arrangement of monks in their places. The anarchism that Troutner points toward does not accept this careful arrangement, and it is hard to see how it will result in peace instead of a society of thwarted tyrants governed by force by the strongest and cleverest among the tyrants.

Moreover, one might go so far as to say that, without those who command and those who obey, peace within the state is impossible to find. The sort of anarchic equality that Troutner obviously yearns for is not a plan for order. Instead it is a plan for its exact opposite. In the De regno, Aquinas observes,

Nam provinciae vel civitates quae non reguntur ab uno, dissensionibus laborant et absque pace fluctuant, ut videatur adimpleri quod dominus per prophetam conqueritur, dicens: pastores multi demoliti sunt vineam meam. E contrario vero provinciae et civitates quae sub uno rege reguntur, pace gaudent, iustitia florent, et affluentia rerum laetantur. Unde dominus pro magno munere per prophetas populo suo promittit, quod poneret sibi caput unum, et quod princeps unus erit in medio eorum.

In English:

For provinces or cities which are not ruled by one person are torn with dissensions and tossed about without peace, so that the complaint seems to be fulfilled which the Lord uttered through the Prophet [Jer 12:10]: “Many pastors have destroyed my vineyard.” On the other hand, provinces and cities which are ruled under one king enjoy peace, flourish in justice, and delight in prosperity. Hence, the Lord by His prophets promises to His people as a great reward that He will give them one head and that “one Prince will be in the midst of them” [Ez 34:24, Jer 30:21].

One could, if one wanted to, draw some interesting arguments from the citations to Ezekiel and Jeremiah, and their applicability to Christ. (And from Christ, one could, following Ernst Kantorowicz, draw interesting arguments to medieval political theology and the medieval concept of the ruler. More on that in a minute.)

It is enough for our purposes here, however, to observe that, for Augustine, peace depends on order and order depends on inequality. At the very least, for peace in the household and peace in the state, there must be a basic form of inequality: those who command and those who obey. Without those who command, there cannot be the concord that is peace. Leveling—and the implicit rejection of authority contained within leveling—destroys order. This leaves open, of course, important questions. For example, and most relevant to Troutner’s point, it leaves open the question of what rule looks like. Troutner might argue—indeed, a charitable reading of his piece probably is—that he doesn’t reject authority so much as a secular, coercive authority.

However, Augustine, as we will see, got there first in De civitate Dei XIX:16. Troutner argues at some length (as with everything else in his piece) that it is secular, coercive authority that is the most serious issue. Augustine, a little bit past what we just discussed, talks about the rule of a good father in the household. From this passage, we will see that Troutner’s horror of coercion is simply not supported by Augustine’s vision of authority. First in Latin:

Qui autem ueri patres familias sunt, omnibus in familia sua tamquam filiis ad colendum et promerendum Deum consulunt, desiderantes atque optantes uenire ad caelestem domum, ubi necessarium non sit officium imperandi mortalibus, quia necessarium non erit officium consulendi iam in illa inmortalitate felicibus; quo donec ueniatur, magis debent patres quod dominantur, quam serui tolerare quod seruiunt. Si quis autem in domo per inoboedientiam domesticae paci aduersatur, corripitur seu uerbo seu uerbere seu quolibet alio genere poenae iusto atque licito quantum societas humana concedit, pro eius qui corripit utilitate, ut paci unde dissiluerat coaptetur. Sicut enim non est beneficentiae adiuuando efficere, ut bonum quod maius est amittatur: ita non est innocentiae parcendo sinere, ut in malum grauius incidatur. Pertinet ergo ad innocentis officium, non solum nemini malum inferre, uerum etiam cohibere a peccato uel punire peccatum, ut aut ipse qui plectitur corrigatur experimento, aut alii terreantur exemplo.

In English:

But those who are true fathers of their households desire and endeavor that all the members of their household, equally with their own children, should worship and win God, and should come to that heavenly home in which the duty of ruling men is no longer necessary, because the duty of caring for their everlasting happiness has also ceased; but, until they reach that home, masters ought to feel their position of authority a greater burden than servants their service. And if any member of the family interrupts the domestic peace by disobedience, he is corrected either by word or blow, or some kind of just and legitimate punishment, such as society permits, that he may himself be the better for it, and be readjusted to the family harmony from which he had dislocated himself. For as it is not benevolent to give a man help at the expense of some greater benefit he might receive, so it is not innocent to spare a man at the risk of his falling into graver sin. To be innocent, we must not only do harm to no man, but also restrain him from sin or punish his sin, so that either the man himself who is punished may profit by his experience, or others be warned by his example.

In other words, for Augustine (but not for Troutner) there is no contradiction between coercion, seu verbo seu verbere, and radical humility. Indeed, for Augustine, coercion is part of the obligation of the good father: erring members of the family must be brought back into the order of the family. The radical suggestion is that a good father must punish sin in his family, either for the benefit of the sinner or as an example for others to benefit from.

Recalling Augustine’s connection between order in the family and order in the state, the consequences of this argument are startling. Just as a father must punish a disobedient member of his household, so too must the leaders of the state punish disobedient citizens. Augustine makes this point manifest when he says:

Quia igitur hominis domus initium siue particula debet esse ciuitatis, omne autem initium ad aliquem sui generis finem et omnis pars ad uniuersi, cuius pars est, integritatem refertur, satis apparet esse consequens, ut ad pacem ciuicam pax domestica referatur, id est, ut ordinata imperandi oboediendique concordia cohabitantium referatur ad ordinatam imperandi obediendique concordiam ciuium. Ita fit, ut ex lege ciuitatis praecepta sumere patrem familias oporteat, quibus domum suam sic regat, ut sit paci adcommoda ciuitatis.

In English:

Since, then, the house ought to be the beginning or element of the city, and every beginning bears reference to some end of its own kind, and every element to the integrity of the whole of which it is an element, it follows plainly enough that domestic peace has a relation to civic peace — in other words, that the well-ordered concord of domestic obedience and domestic rule has a relation to the well-ordered concord of civic obedience and civic rule. And therefore it follows, further, that the father of the family ought to frame his domestic rule in accordance with the law of the city, so that the household may be in harmony with the civic order.

Nowhere in Augustine’s vision does one find the suspicion of authority and coercion that one finds in Troutner’s essay. Indeed, we can say that Augustine’s vision rejects the sort of anarchism that Troutner ultimately finds so appealing.

As for Troutner’s repeated points about service and humility, we have seen that Augustine has an answer for that, too. As it is the desire and work of fathers that the members of their households achieve the bliss of heaven—participation in the life of the Trinity, as Troutner might say—their burden of rule in the household is greater than the burden of service. The coercive or exemplary punishments they administer, aimed at sin, are an integral part of the burden of rule in the household. It is, Augustine reminds us, not innocent to spare punishing a sinner at the risk of the sinner falling into greater sin. And recalling Augustine’s analogy between domestic rule and civil authority, we might say that punishing sin in the state is part of the burden of civil leaders, which they are not at liberty to ignore.

Pater Waldstein makes the point that St. Benedict has a vision of power similar to St. Augustine’s:

The abbot is to be obeyed in everything, and to be called Dominus (Lord) and Abbas (Father), because “he is regarded as the vicar of Christ in the monastery.” The abbot is to rule his monastery with wisdom and gentleness. He is to apply punishments both corporal (beatings) and spiritual (exclusion from common prayer and meals). In administering these punishments the abbot has to be mindful of different dispositions . . . But he must also be mindful not to punish too severely “lest, seeking too vigorously to cleanse off the rust, he may break the vessel” (RB 64).

This is not incompatible with radical service and humility. Indeed, St. Benedict sees the abbot as the vicar of Christ in the monastery, and consequently we may say that Benedict’s vision of the abbot’s power is necessarily Christological. Yet, Benedict sees no contradiction between this and coercive punishments, both corporal and spiritual. Now, there must be justice and mercy in these punishments, but St. Benedict, like St. Augustine, sees no contradiction between Christological power and coercive punishment.

Pater Waldstein goes on to make the point that we cannot help making ourselves:

Is the “form” of the abbot’s power as described by St. Benedict too worldly? Is he a victim of what Troutner calls “cognitive dissonance” in using punishments to help his monks to conform themselves to a crucified Lord? Surely not. The form of abbatial authority is truly Christological. The use of punishment in the Rule is a reaction to violation of the peace, meant to lead monks back to Christ, and the witness of monastic saints throughout the centuries testifies to its wisdom. The goal is to lead sinners to true freedom[.]

Just as the father uses coercion to restore domestic peace, disrupted by disobedience, so too does the abbot use coercion to restore peace in his monastery. Likewise, when the civil authority uses coercion, it is to restore peace in the state. There is no incompatibility between this sort of coercion and Christological authority, despite Troutner’s argument to the contrary.

Indeed, at the height of Christendom, so distasteful to Troutner, the civil authority and all its unpleasant coercion was seen as explicitly Christological. Pater Waldstein cites Ernst Kantorowicz’s monumental volume, The King’s Two Bodies, to make this point. The medieval understanding of kingship was explicitly Christological. One suspects that Troutner’s essay would have been altogether more coherent if, instead of reeling off the usual list of putative crimes of Christendom, he had engaged thoroughly with the medieval understanding of kingship. It is pretty clear that no one from St. Peter and St. Paul to St. Augustine to St. Benedict to St. Thomas Aquinas saw any contradiction between coercive power and Christological authority. Indeed, the best evidence is that they saw exactly the opposite.

It is possible, we admit, that St. Augustine and St. Benedict failed to understand the Christological redefinition of power that Troutner, following his modern doctors of the Church, sees all too clearly. It is possible, if only barely, that St. Peter and St. Paul failed to understand the Christological redefinition of power. And it is possible that the medieval theologians and rulers who saw no contradiction between a Christ-like king and coercion missed the point, too. But such an argument requires infinitely more proof than the proof Troutner brings. Merely sniffing “Formerly all men were mad” from the safety of the faculty lounge won’t cut it. Part of Troutner’s problem is that his vision of Christianity has a “Scene Missing” card from about five minutes before Christ was brought before Pilate until about five minutes before St. John XXIII let Karl Rahner come to the Second Vatican Council. Troutner does not grapple with Christ’s statement in Matthew 28:18 that “All power is given to me in heaven and in earth.” He does not grapple with important texts like Romans 13 or 1 Peter 2 and the extensive commentaries on those texts that developed in the last couple thousand years. In the light of the odd lacunae in Troutner’s discourse on power, it is possible that Augustine simply failed to understand the Christological redefinition of power, but it is more likely that Troutner simply failed to understand the tradition in his haste to baptize anarchism.

It is also possible that Troutner will respond—if he responds at all—that we are merely prooftexting Augustine. (We will see in a minute that Troutner thinks integralists prooftext Pius IX and Leo XIII. Prooftexting holds some unique horror for him.) But that would be disingenuous. Augustine sets forth two related arguments. One deals with the necessity of inequality, the other just rule. Both arguments, quoted largely verbatim, seem to undercut fatally Troutner’s arguments about authority and coercion. The upshot is that either Augustine has it wrong or Troutner does. But we do not think that there’s a way that both of them can be right, given Troutner’s disgust with coercion.

III.

One other point about coercion, which ought not be overlooked, because it is no less devastating to Troutner’s point than the arguments from Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. While a theologian such as Troutner may resent the present prominence of jurists and political theorists, it would have been wise to consult some jurists before holding forth on the Church and coercion. To this very hour, the Church holds that it “has the innate and proper right [nativum et proprium ius] to coerce offending members of the Christian faithful with penal sanctions” (1983 CIC can. 1311). When John Paul II promulgated the 1983 Code of Canon Law, he remarked at some length about how the 1983 Code implements the ecclesiology of Vatican II. In his apostolic constitution Sacrae disciplinae leges, John Paul wrote, “[t]he instrument, which the Code is, fully corresponds to the nature of the Church, especially as it is proposed by the teaching of the Second Vatican Council in general, and in a particular way by its ecclesiological teaching.” “Indeed,” John Paul goes on to say, “in a certain sense, this new Code could be understood as a great effort to translate this same doctrine, that is, the conciliar ecclesiology, into canonical language.” It is not correct to imply, as Troutner does, that the Church awoke from the bad dream that began with Constantine and ended with Leo XIII, and—once more awake as in the days of Augustine—it rejected worldly coercion.

It is not correct, either, to respond that the coercion the Church claims as its “innate and proper right” is somehow purely spiritual. The Code holds that “[t]he law can establish other expiatory penalties which deprive a member of the Christian faithful of some spiritual or temporal good [christifidelem aliquo bono spirituali vel temporali privent] and which are consistent with the supernatural purpose of the Church” (1983 CIC can. 1312 § 2). In other words, not only does the Church claim coercion as its “innate and proper right,” it claims as part of that right the ability to deprive a member of the faithful even of temporal goods. And all of this was promulgated by a pope who stated, as he promulgated such laws, “it is to be hoped that the new canonical legislation will prove to be an efficacious means in order that the Church may progress in conformity with the spirit of the Second Vatican Council, and may every day be ever more suited to carry out its office of salvation in this world.”

It would be difficult to claim that the Church is unaware of the Christological definition of power, with its emphasis on humility and service. Indeed, John Paul II notes,

Among the elements which characterize the true and genuine image of the Church, we should emphasize especially the following: the doctrine in which the Church is presented as the People of God (cf. Lumen gentium, no. 2), and authority as a service (cf. ibid., no. 3); the doctrine in which the Church is seen as a “communion,” and which, therefore, determines the relations which should exist between the particular Churches and the universal Church, and between collegiality and the primacy; the doctrine, moreover, according to which all the members of the People of God, in the way suited to each of them, participate in the threefold office of Christ: priestly, prophetic and kingly. With this teaching there is also linked that which concerns the duties and rights of the faithful, and particularly of the laity; and finally, the Church’s commitment to ecumenism.

Indeed, John Paul finds in Lumen gentium a renewed emphasis on precisely the dimensions that Troutner finds all important for his argument. And John Paul, as we have noted, finds the 1983 Code to be an implementation of precisely these dimensions. Thus, just as St. Augustine and St. Benedict find no contradiction between the Christological definition of power and coercion, neither does John Paul find a contradiction between such a definition and coercion.

Troutner’s appalling, galling assertions that “[i]ntegralists ‘do not notice that they are tempting the Church, just as Satan tempted Christ in the desert'” and “[i]ntegralists demean, even betray, the spiritual realities under consideration with these unbaptized notions of power and subordination,” which are no doubt what passes for clever talk in the seminar rooms and graduate student lounges in South Bend, Indiana, might sit a little better if it appeared that Troutner had the faintest idea what rights the Church claims for herself. But if he does, as we say elsewhere in Indiana, he hides it pretty well. It might—might—be a reasonable critique of integralist discourse that it is too concerned with the juridical and the technical. But Troutner’s screed demonstrates the danger of divorcing oneself wholly from the juridical and the technical. When you skip the details to rhapsodize about “cruciform power,” you miss important points. Like the fact that the Church claims the right to coerce the faithful even with respect to temporal goods, and does so apparently consistently with the Second Vatican Council.

IV.

One could spend hours dissecting Troutner’s other conceptual and theological errors. (From the length and detail of his rebuttal, Pater Waldstein did.) It is enough to say that Troutner, like every other critic of integralism except, bizarrely, Robert Miller, fails utterly to engage with the magisterial status of integralism. Troutner sneers about integralists “prooftexting” from Pius IX and Leo XIII. (No doubt this is a devastating point among young theologians.) However, Troutner never seems to stop and ask whether Pius IX and Leo XIII have spoken the last words on the integralism question. This is not a trivial error, though a theologian may wish to dispense with considering what the popes have taught to get to the really important authors like Francesca Murphy, David Schindler, and Hans Urs von Balthasar. But, if the teaching on integralism is infallible, the discussion looks very different. (Troutner might even have to consider more critically his doctors of the modern Church like Murphy, Von Balthasar, and Schindler!)

It is not as though the argument in support of infallibility is weak. Dr. John Joy has expounded it at great length. Robert Miller and Lawrence King have responded to Joy at Public Discourse, currently the headquarters of anti-integralist liberal Catholic thought. Miller and King argue (based largely on King’s Ph.D. research) that Pius IX’s Quanta cura is not infallible. You can read their argument there. Of course, Miller and King treat Quanta cura (and, implicitly, Leo XIII’s magisterium) as though it happened in a vacuum; that is, they simply apply their own private judgment to it and come up with the conclusion that it is not infallible. There is no meaningful effort to grapple with contemporary commentators, many of whom would be summarized and cited in any number of the standard manuals of the day. However, the point is that the infallibility argument is well developed and the response to it is close enough to well developed for polemical purposes.

For the foregoing reasons, it is safe to say that Troutner’s critique of integralism simply doesn’t cut it. He has problems in just about every dimension, and most of those problems are fatal to his argument. This is not to say that there is not a critique of integralism—or, more precisely, integralist rhetoric—to be made. However, it seems to us that the best critique of integralism is not a critique of integralism at all, but an exploration of different modes of integralist authority. That is, there is a range of integralist models on display today, ranging from the centralized medieval state of St. Louis IX (and, if we are being fair, Frederick II) to states more closely aligned with the modern model. Leo XIII himself observed that the Church did not mandate any particular form of government. Consequently there is some room for creativity in terms of articulating proposals for an integralist state. Building on St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, it seems to us that it is entirely possible to imagine different models of the state that are less centralized. It is also possible to harmonize integralist thought with the doctrinal pronouncements of the Second Vatican Council. Dr. Thomas Pink has done that at some length. Surely there are other ways of considering the interrelation and interaction of the teachings of the Council with the integralist model of the state.

Furthermore, Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule has articulated a strategy—the “long march through the institutions”—that doesn’t really require, for the moment, the resolution of questions about coercion and state power. Such a pragmatic approach acknowledges that, while debates on Church Life Journal and WordPress blogs are edifying and stimulating, they are a long way from moving the levers of power. Meanwhile liberalism’s domination is unchecked. It must be admitted, even by integralists, that integralists are not in a position to implement their views, even if their views are gaining wider acceptance. The important task, Prof. Vermeule might argue, is getting serious Catholics closer to the levers power by following the cursus honorum of liberalism. Only when Catholics are in a position to move the civil authority closer to the Church’s teachings will the debates over coercion be relevant. Other strategic postures might also mean that there is time to resolve the questions of state power.

All of this is to say that there is no real need to critique integralism per se in order to make various arguments about integralist rhetoric. There are other options that address Troutner’s complaints about rhetoric without touching upon the serious theological and doctrinal issues that Troutner raises. Given the problems with his argument, these other approaches may be much stronger “critiques” than the critique Troutner makes.

The direction of integralism in 2019

We are not living in an integralist moment. Rocked by new revelations in the ongoing abuse crisis, the Church’s public standing is not especially high in the United States and elsewhere. Indeed, it seems as though the liberties for the Church defended by St. Gregory VII against Emperor Henry IV are in jeopardy with numerous state and federal investigations into the Church ongoing. However, we are living in a moment when liberalism seems weaker than usual.

For a brief moment, the electric uncertainty in the air in 2008 returned when the stock market took a precipitous pre-Christmas plunge and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin took the unusual step of announcing that he had spoken with the heads of major U.S. banks and was sure that the banks were liquid and ready to lend. This had the same unhappy feeling as sitting on an airplane and hearing the pilot announce that he had checked with the flight crew and the plane had plenty of fuel and was ready to land safely. The pre-Christmas jolt was followed by a stupendous rally after the Christmas holiday and the crisis did not materialize.

However, the evident weakness of liberalism has led to wider acceptance of anti-liberal thought of all kinds—including Catholic anti-liberalism. As the year winds down, it is worth thinking about what 2019 holds for Catholic anti-liberalism, especially what Catholic anti-liberals ought to do to cement progress made. And there has been significant progress made. What was, not too long ago, a doctrine held by traditionalists and discussed in primarily traditionalist circles is getting wide press. Ross Douthat of the New York Times has addressed it in several columns, and high-profile conferences at Harvard and Notre Dame have gotten coverage at outlets like Public Discourse and Rod Dreher’s blog at The American Conservative. There has been all year a lively debate in Catholic circles about integralism. Joseph Trabbic’s defense of the doctrinal status of the Catholic confessional state at Public Discourse was a response to Robert T. Miller’s critique of the same concept.

On the other hand, anti-liberal Catholicism still encounters significant resistance, particularly in the American Catholic right. We have already said enough about the debacle at First Things over Fr. Romanus Cessario’s review of Fr. Pio Edgardo Mortara’s memoir. While that affair implicated more than mere anti-liberal Catholicism, it was certainly a significant component of the debate. First Things, the vanguard of the fusionist project, has been slow to welcome the return—a return ad fontes—to anti-liberal teaching. They are not alone: the reason why there has been a lively debate all year is because people disagree.

Of course, the disagreements get narrower and narrower. Dr. John Joy’s argument that Quanta cura and Syllabus are infallible is basically unanswerable, and we have not seen anyone try very hard to answer it. The arguments, it seems to us, have fallen along predictable lines. On one hand, you have the argument that Vatican II changed the teaching of Pius IX and Leo XIII with Dignitatis humanae and Gaudium et spes. On the other hand, you have the argument that integralism is somehow impractical or poorly suited for the political problems of 2018. As to the first argument, this is broadly the debate over several issues associated with the Council, and the arguments on both sides are well known.

One would be excused for being of two minds about the progress of the debate into the well worn grooves of the debates over the Second Vatican Council. On one hand, it is always nice to know all the moves of the game before they are played. On the other hand, it seems unlikely to result in any real progress. Everyone knows the various narratives—hermeneutics of rupture and continuity—about the Council and how those narratives incorporate the prior teachings of the Church. Indeed, given how fixed everyone’s positions are, one would be excused for thinking of the descriptions of the tedium of the trenches punctuated with cataclysmic assaults in the great First World War authors like David Jones, Robert Graves, or Wilfred Owen.

It seems to us that the collapse of Catholic fusionism in recent years is necessarily tied up with the dispute over the Council, since most of the fusionists’ arguments are drawn from the Council’s purported outreach (or openness or whatever you want to call it) to non-Catholics. One might even trace the collapse of fusionism to Benedict XVI’s 2005 Christmas address to the Roman Curia, where the “hermeneutic of continuity” was given its most important presentation. Indeed, the erosion of the post-Conciliar consensus embodied by John Paul II seems to have included both the belief that the Council constituted a restart for the Church and the belief that fusionism represents a meaningful political strategy for the Church. Given the significant controversy over other parts of John Paul’s legacy today, it seems unlikely that anyone will pick up the banner and attempt to reconstruct John Paul’s consensus.

II.

A more detailed response to the second point is in order, as it here that we think the central project for anti-liberal Catholicism in 2019 lies. There has been, we think, significant confusion as to what integralism is—or is not. Everyone works off the definition offered by Pater Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., in his famous “Integralism in Three Sentences,” so we will too. At bottom, integralism concerns the right relationship between the temporal power (the state, let us say) and the Church. Integralism is not a general prescription for Catholic political action, and it definitely is not a plan for individual Catholics. (Except, perhaps, in the rare case when the individual is a monarch or something like that.) That people have latched on to “integralism” as a label for what would have been called Catholic Action once upon a time is hardly surprising. The American bishops have limited their political interventions to a narrow range of issues.

Certainly no one could complain that the American bishops have chosen to emphasize the Church’s teaching on abortion over any number of other questions. Not every moral issue is equivalently weighty. However, at a moment when liberalism is being questioned pretty vigorously, it is unfortunate that there is not really a satisfactory response from the bishops. This is doubly unfortunate when one considers that Pope Francis is an astute critic of modern liberalism and the spiritual sicknesses it cause. There are, of course, voices in the Church that have long upheld the Church’s condemnations of liberalism and supported integralism—here we are thinking most notably of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and the Society of St. Pius X. In a very real way, the resurgence of Catholic anti-liberal thought would not have been possible without Lefebvre and the SSPX. (Gabriel Sanchez, at Opus Publicum, has written several posts emphasizing the historical role of Archbishop Lefebvre and the Society of St. Pius X in keeping the anti-liberal flame alive, including a very recent note.)

However, the point is not to litigate the history of integralism since 1965. Instead, we mean to say only that it is understandable that people have transformed the concept of integralism into a broader Catholic anti-liberalism or a new sort of Catholic Action. However, while it is understandable, it leads to all sorts of unwelcome consequences. Notably, there is a tendency to draw integralism’s dogmatic mantle over various political proposals that have very little to do with the strict definition of integralism. A careful reading of Leo XIII’s encyclicals, notably Diuturnum illud and Immortale Dei, would show that the Church has generally refrained from insisting on this or that arrangement, much less the sorts of arrangements that are offered.

III.

On the other hand, what is modern-day integralism if not a part of broader attempt to recover the Church’s political thought? It would be strange to insist that the anti-liberalism of Quanta cura, Syllabus, and Leo’s encyclicals are infallible and irreformable, but then leave the matter at the fairly narrow question of the indirect subordination of the state to the Church. Indeed, the natural consequence of the recovery of integralism in its strict sense is to turn to the other treasures of the Church’s political teaching for guidance. However, it is counterproductive to reduce the entirety of the Church’s political teaching to the concept of integralism, even if only as a convenient shorthand. Integralism, one could say, is not the end of the Church’s perennial political teaching but the beginning.

Of course, turning to the Church’s perennial historical teaching for guidance does not necessarily mean a mere repetition of the content of the teaching documents. Some application of the Church’s teachings to modern problems ought to be done. This is why we say that, in 2019, anti-liberal Catholics ought to start thinking about specific policy proposals. One need not even consider policies specifically in terms of anti-liberal Catholicism. Laws against blasphemy and heresy are, of course, excellent and are well supported historically (after all, Justinian’s Codex begins with a condemnation of heresy). However, there are more political questions to be answered than free speech, blasphemy, and heresy, and it will be necessary to approach at least some of these questions.

It is necessary to emphasize that these questions are separate from the scholarly, technical questions addressed at The Josias. This is not to say that the work done at The Josias is not necessary. However, the philosophical, theological, and historical questions answered there are altogether different than, say, questions of concrete public policy. And it is precisely those questions that anti-liberal Catholics need to start addressing if they are going to continue to stake out a clear position in 2019.

One important contribution in this vein was Mehrsa Baradaran’s piece in support of postal banking at American Affairs. Baradaran, a law professor at the University of Georgia, makes the case that America’s banks prefer to serve the middle class and the wealthy, leaving America’s working poor in the hands of usurers. The response Baradaran offers is postal banking; that is, having the United States Postal Service make available retail financial services like savings accounts and small loans. Baradaran argues that, while America’s retail banks have deserted many communities, the Post Office has not. Additionally, as a public enterprise, the Postal Service could offer these services at a discount compared to the big banks and the usurers. Postal banking is widely used in western countries, and there is a history of it in the United States—that is to say: it is not a reckless, extreme idea.

The argument in support of postal banking can be made without reference to the Church; however, it is not hard to imagine a Catholic twist on this proposal. To be sure, the usurious interest charged by payday lenders is bad for the economy. However, the Church condemns usury. One could argue—we would say that one must argue—that an integralist regime would not tolerate usury. Postal banking, therefore, could represent one important step toward the sorts of institutions one could find in an integralist regime. One could also turn to the arguments about work advanced by the popes, notably John Paul II in Laborem exercens, when he sketches a connection between work, wages, and the universal destination of goods. It is trivial—though it does need to be said—that you cannot share in the universal destination of goods as fully as you ought to if a significant portion of your wages are eaten up by usurious interest payments or excessive fees.One can imagine similar, similarly detailed arguments on any of a whole host of issues.

One can also engage in detailed strategic arguments like Adrian Vermeule’s “Integration from Within,” also published by American Affairs. Maybe you agree with Vermeule—maybe you don’t. However, it seems to us that strategic arguments like Vermeule’s are implicitly at least as strong an answer to the charge of irrelevance as policy proposals like Baradaran. If one disagrees with Vermeule, setting forth in detail the bases of the disagreement and an alternate strategy would be an excellent contribution to the discussion.

Perhaps another way of putting all of this is to say that Catholic anti-liberalism has made its doctrinal case. It is now time to start making a practical case. After all, politics is eminently the exercise of practical reason.

The legends of liberalism

The Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture had its fall conference not too long ago. This year, the conference explored the relationship between Church and state. It closed with a panel discussion between Harvard Law’s Adrian Vermeule, Gladden Pappin of the University of Dallas, Patrick Deneen, and V. Philip Muñoz, both of Notre Dame. Rod Dreher basically liveblogged the proceedings and offered a characteristically behemoth post summarizing his thoughts. In the coverage of the final panel discussion, it occurred to us that much of the resistance to liberalism is premised upon some legends about liberalism. However, upon closer inspection, some of these legends bear little resemblance to the facts as they are.

In this, we are reminded of the Black Legend—the set of stories told about the Spanish Empire, usually by English, intended to present Spanish rule as incomparably cruel. The Black Legend relies on exaggerations and misrepresentations of existing facts about Spanish rule, along with a certain economy with the truth about events and persons who might contradict the overarching narrative of bigoted, vicious Spaniards subduing and tormenting across several continents. Such legends, it seems to us, exist about liberalism. However, liberalism’s legends may properly be called White Legends. That is, they are the inverse of the misrepresentations and omissions of the Black Legend. Liberalism does not, as a rule, directly misrepresent illiberal doctrines or omit key facts about them. Instead, liberalism misrepresents itself as the sole defense against the implicit wickedness of illiberal doctrines.

In a certain sense, none of this matters in the broader debate about integralism. John Joy has convincingly argued that Quanta cura and Syllabus are infallible and irreformable. Moreover, as we have noted (following Pappin’s lead), the canonical authority F.X. Wernz held that Leo XIII’s encyclicals have an intimate relationship with the infallible declarations of Quanta cura and Syllabus. Finally, Thomas Pink has shown at great length, whether you find it altogether convincing or not, that Dignitatis humanae does not contradict the Pio-Leonine magisterium. In other words, from a doctrinal standpoint, the onus probandi is clearly on the liberals. And given the careful arguments advanced by Joy and Pink, it is unclear that liberal urgency about tyranny or statism is much of an answer to the definitive status of integralism as Church teaching.

On the other hand, the recent agony on Twitter about whether integralism is “Catholic fascism” or totalitarianism or any of a whole parade of horribles shows that, from a forensic standpoint, the white legends of liberalism are hard to avoid. And there is a temptation to decline to do other people’s homework. However, given some of the horrible advanced by Muñoz and Dreher, it is clear even public figures are invested in liberalism’s white legends. Thus, integralists have some obligation, we think, to rebut these legends. For our part, we will address two of them here. Nothing we say will be particularly groundbreaking—and we suspect that this may be repetitive of earlier posts—there is some value to the exercise of outlining integralist teaching in the context of some of liberalism’s white legends.

The first white legend of liberalism is that liberalism alone is concerned with preventing the state from falling into tyranny. To reject liberalism, the liberals claim, is to start down the road to totalitarianism and tyranny. Adrian Vermeule and Gladden Pappin have both written about liberalism’s bad habit of taking credit for procedural safeguards that it did not introduce. This perhaps the most pernicious aspect of this white legend: liberalism takes credit for the Church’s ideas, and then deploys them against the Church. However, the problem goes well beyond specific procedural safeguards. Catholic thinkers—illiberal Catholic thinkers—have considered the problem of tyranny at great length and well before the rise of liberalism. To suggest that liberalism is preeminently concerned with preserving liberty is, therefore, to misrepresent the fact that Catholic philosophers and theologians, St. Thomas Aquinas preeminent among them, were considering the same problem and coming to sound answers.

Aquinas thought at length about how to keep a ruler from going sour, as it were, and becoming a tyrant. Not quite a year ago, we wrote about a seeming development in Aquinas’s thought regarding the mixed constitution (partly monarchy, partly aristocracy, partly democracy). While Aquinas argues strongly in favor of monarchy in the De regno, by the time he wrote the Prima Secundae of the Summa Theologiae, he implies that a mixed constitution would serve as a strong bulwark against tyranny. Additionally, he argued against the idea that the ruler is totally free from his laws. It is true that the sovereign is not bound by the law, Aquinas admits, in the sense that the coercive power of law comes from the sovereign and no man is bound by himself (ST I-II q.96 a.5 ad 3). More to the point, if the sovereign violates the law, there is no one who can pass sentence on him. However, Aquinas insists on the directive force of the law on the sovereign. That is, before God, the sovereign is morally responsible for keeping his own laws, and he should do so by his own free will. In other words, the sovereign is morally bound to follow his own laws, even if he is free from their coercive power.

Moreover, Aquinas imposes limits on the power of the sovereign’s laws. On one hand, unjust laws do not bind subjects in conscience (ST I-II q.96 a.4 co.). Aquinas identifies several kinds of unjust law. First, a law beyond the competence of the prince is unjust. Second, a law that is not aimed at the common good, instead being ordered toward the ruler’s cupidity or vainglory is unjust. Third, a law that may well be aimed at the common good yet still be unjust if it inflicts disproportionate burdens. Finally, a law contrary to the divine or natural law is no law at all. Aquinas goes so far as to call these unjust laws acts of violence rather than laws. The moral law which imposes upon the ruler the obligation to obey his laws can also free the ruler’s subjects from the obligation to obey his laws.

We might also discuss Aquinas’s notion that human law should not try to repress all vices (ST I-II q.96 a.2). His argument turns basically on the idea that law should forbid only the more grievous vices, which tend to destabilize society altogether (ST I-II q.96 a.2 co.). He lists murder and theft, but it may be possible to come up with a longer list. The upshot of Aquinas’s argument is that law is a rule for human action designed to lead men to virtue, but this process is gradual (ST I-II q.96 a.2 ad 2). Forcing all men, including the less virtuous, into the life of the virtuous, who avoid all vice, would cause greater evils than permitting some vices.

This is, by the way, a really difficult point in discourse about integralism and Aquinas. The purpose of law, especially for Aquinas, is not to create some baseline condition of liberty suitable for maximum flourishing. It is to order people to virtue (ST I-II q.95 a.1 co.). To be sure, some people are naturally sort of virtuous and avoid vice through wise paternal teaching. However, other people, Aquinas argues, are depraved and inclined to vice. Law teaches these people to be virtuous by forbidding by force certain vices. Over time, the vicious, thus forbidden by force, might become virtuous. At the very least, they might leave others in peace. This is a more active and more energetic role for the regime that some like to imagine. It also requires certain choices to be made at the outset that are generally seen as choices regimes ought not to make. Put another way: one cannot be neutral about virtue and expect to frame laws designed to lead the vicious to virtue.

Changing gears a little, as Alasdair MacIntyre has discussed, criticizing the (purportedly) absolutizing and centralizing tendencies of King Louis IX of France and the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, Aquinas recognized the value of custom as an interpreter and source of law (ST I-II q.97 a.3). Aquinas’s argument is interesting. He argues that all law proceeds from the reason and will of the lawgiver. However, the reason and will of the lawgiver can be made known through action just as through speech (ST I-II q.97 a.3 co.). And custom is nothing more than repeated actions, so custom makes known the reason and will of those participating in the custom. Thus, custom can make and interpret law. Responding to an objection, Aquinas holds that custom obtains the force of law both for a people free and capable of giving itself laws and for a people under authority of another, insofar as those in authority tolerate the customs (ST I-II q.97 a.3 ad 3).

This sketch, which could profitably be expanded into a lengthy treatment, shows, we think, that Aquinas was acutely concerned with ensuring that the ruler does not become a tyrant and the regime does not become a centralizing, totalizing entity (Whether he goes as far as MacIntyre would have him go is another question.) It is no answer to claim Thomas for liberalism, either. One has only to read Aquinas’s treatment in the Secunda Secundae of coercion of heretics or the limited toleration to be afforded to nonbelievers to see that Aquinas’s vision of good government is far removed from modern liberal ideals such as freedom of religion or separation of Church and state. Instead, it must be recognized that even an illiberal Catholic like Thomas Aquinas can be concerned with tyranny and propose means of avoiding tyranny without endorsing modern concepts of liberty.

To the extent that liberalism advances its white legend that only liberalism is especially interested in preventing tyranny and totalitarianism, that is plainly false. Integralism no less than liberalism is concerned with preventing the well ordered state from decaying into tyranny (or dissension, though this is a matter for another time). Moreover, Aquinas’s thought on the limits of state power—both in terms of when it ceases to bind in conscience and in terms of the implicit decentralization represented by custom—shows that integralism is, in fact, far removed from an all-embracing totalitarianism.

The problem, of course, is that Aquinas’s thought permits a broader range of action for the regime than most American conservatives would like to tolerate. This demonstrates not a limitation or risk of integralism so much as a limitation or risk of trying to wedge Catholic political thought into an American left-right context. Vermeule discusses a little bit of this in his piece we linked above. The risks of applying American politics to Catholic economic thought are well known. The risks of applying American politics to Catholic political thought are no less acute. More on this in a minute.

The second white legend is the idea that liberalism prevents corrupt prelates from exercising too much authority. Dreher gets at this when he says, “integralism looks like Blaise [sic] Cupich and Ted McCarrick putting their loafers on your neck forever.” In other words, integralism means that morally compromised prelates will gain significant temporal authority; liberalism, on the other hand, ensures that these prelates will be kept far from the levers of power. (Perhaps this is a black legend after all!) Such an approach shows an admirable naïveté regarding secular politicians, especially in Dreher’s home state of Louisiana or Cupich’s state of Illinois. The realities of secular politicians alone explode any idea that integralism is a change for the worse. However, Dreher’s anxiety—naïve or not—gets to back to a more obviously white legend: liberalism is all that prevents theocracy.

Is this not really what Dreher is anxious about? Under integralism, prelates of the Church would have, so he implies, significant power that could be implemented by the civil authorities. The prelates become theocrats, which is worrying if they are unworthy. Of course, this ignores the history of actually existing integralist regimes. Frederick II’s Sicily was formally as integralist as Louis IX’s France, and Frederick spent much of his adult life locked in battles of varying intensity with Gregory IX and Innocent IV. This is especially noteworthy when one remembers that Sicily was a papal fief and Gregory IX and Innocent IV both claimed the power to depose the king of Sicily. And Andrew Willard Jones’s magisterial study of Louis IX’s France, Before Church and State, does not depict a theocratic state. The presumption that civil authorities will be entirely passive with respect to the Church does not appear to have strong support in historical fact.

Moreover, Leo XIII’s explanation of integralism in Immortale Dei states that the state and the Church are supreme in their separate spheres. It is when the spheres overlap that the subordination of state to Church comes into play. And Leo makes the salient point that, without such subordination, these instances of joint jurisdiction (so to speak) would result in conflict. Now, given the Church’s teaching on morality, which includes economic relations, perhaps these subjects of joint jurisdiction are particularly important. However, nothing in Immortale Dei suggests that integralism results in the Church obtaining plenary jurisdiction over the state. Moreover, in Cum multa, after condemning the error of separating Church and state, Leo XIII condemned the opposite error: confounding the Church and a given political party.

The bottom line is that liberalism’s claim to be a defense against theocracy has no more merit than its claim that it defends against tyranny and totalitarianism. Historically, integralist regimes have been far from theocracies, and Leo XIII’s teaching on integralism (teaching that is, after all, infallible and irreformable) rejects the notion of priests or prelates becoming dictators. Dreher’s (no doubt carefully chosen) image of “Blaise [sic] Cupich and Ted McCarrick putting their loafers on your neck forever” under integralism is mere hyperbole.

To a certain extent, these debates are unnecessary. No one really thinks integralists support fascism or totalitarianism or theocracy, whatever those terms may mean (and in the case of totalitarianism, it is the Catholic thinker Charles De Koninck who provides the most coherent and intelligent definition). The problem at Notre Dame and on Twitter and elsewhere is that integralism does not square nicely with American right-left politics. And, while integralism would hand culture warriors big wins, it would hand big losses to small-government conservatives who drone on (and on and on and on) about the virtues of personal liberty and personal virtue. Whether they would, in fact, prefer to have liberty over morality is another question for another time.

Evangelicals & Catholics in the age of integralism

At The American Conservative, Rod Dreher has a very lengthy post critiquing Matthew Walther’s recent column at The Week arguing that the Catholic alliance with evangelicals has not worked out to the benefit of Catholics. We note by way of parenthesis at the outset that Walther’s column for The Week is consistently one of the most entertaining and provocative columns out there. Anyway, in the context of the imbroglio over Paul Ryan firing and unfiring the House chaplain, Jesuit Fr. Patrick Conroy (hired by John Boehner, a longtime friend of the Jesuits), Walther makes some very pointed remarks about the effects on Catholics of their political alliance with evangelical protestants. We agree with Walther, for the most part, but Dreher doesn’t. Dreher’s point is basically this: so what if American Catholics have gone wobbly on the Church’s social teaching because of this alliance with evangelicals?

It is worth thinking about this exchange because it provides a perfect example of what we have talked about before, and that is what Jake Meador (a protestant) has rightly called a parting of the ways between Catholics and protestants. Both Catholics and protestants are engaged at the moment in a project of ressourcement. Catholics in particular are presently engaged in rediscovering the Church’s anti-liberal, integralist tradition and thinking about how best to implement the anti-liberal, integralist teaching of the Church in American political life. This makes the consensus that made projects like Evangelicals and Catholics Together to name but one less tenable than ever before. Indeed, we have seen in recent regrettable incidents that institutions devoted to the consensus typified by Evangelicals and Catholics Together are hostile to expressions of, for example, the anti-liberal, integralist Catholic tradition. It will be clearer, we think, in short order that Dreher (among others) does not understand this moment in American Christianity as well as he thinks.

Here’s the problem. As Dreher eventually gets around to arguing, the forces of secular liberalism—implacable in their opposition to Christianity—don’t actually see much of a difference between faithful Catholics and faithful evangelicals. Moreover, it is clear that Dreher doesn’t actually see much of a difference, either. Whatever drift there has been in American Catholics’ views, he thinks it was baked in from the beginning. In support of this proposition, he argues (1) that Americans are simply protestantized at a baseline level and (2) that Americans are basically indifferentist. In any event, he does not think it’s all that big of a deal to suggest that Catholics and evangelicals should cooperate on certain issues. What is needed, Dreher concludes, is for Christians to downplay their differences and present a united front in defense of religious liberty.

Even if indifferentism isn’t baked into American religious expression, Americans should adopt it, Joe Carter of the Acton Institute tells us as he weighs in, arguing, based on the thought of 19th-century Dutch protestant and household name around the world Abraham Kuyper. Kuyper, Carter tells us, believed that Catholics and protestants have creedal confession and morals in common. More than that, on the points where secular society is most hostile to Christians, Kuyper argued that Catholics and protestants were in agreement. This is a funny assertion, not least because Catholics and protestants disagree pretty vehemently on articles of all of the creeds of undivided Christendom. Moreover, it is only by equivocation that a Catholic and a protestant can profess belief in One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, since it is clear that a Catholic means one thing and a protestant another. On this point, one wonders what response Carter would get from his Southern Baptist brethren if he told them that when they pray the Nicene Creed, they confess the same creed in the same way as St. Pius V or St. Pius X. Levity aside, it seems odd to us that Dreher or Carter would offer what amounts to indifferentism as a way forward.

Part of the reason why indifferentism seems like a strange solution is because it has been what Acton and other institutions have been advancing for some time now, without any appreciable success. In this, we are reminded of Brent Bozell’s “Letter to Yourselves” from an early issue of Triumph. The splendid site Incudi Reddere reprinted the essay yesterday in the context of a Twitter discussion along these lines. Bozell was writing to an audience of conservatives in 1969 in the wake of Richard Nixon’s victory in 1968. After discussing the decision by conservatives to support Nixon despite the fact that Nixon really did not represent the conservative position by 1968, Bozell makes this devastating point:

I think this experience can be described even more sharply. Secular liberalism has lost its war for historical existence, but it has not lost any of the battles it has had with you. On every front where your program has confronted secular liberalism’s, you have been beaten. Consider (against the background of one of Nixon’s press conferences) your campaigns against big government, against Keynesian economics, against compulsory welfare; your defense of states’ rights and the constitutional prerogatives of Congress; your struggle for a vigorous anti-Soviet foreign policy; your once passionate stand for the country’s flag and her honor. Is there a single field which the secular liberals have had to yield to the secular conservatives? That is one side of the coin. The other is that secular liberalism has, nevertheless, died—and for causes apparently unconnected with your ministrations. Some say it succumbed from existential wounds, an inability to cope with reality. Do you deem yourselves sufficiently close students of reality to have helped significantly to inflict the wounds? Others lay the failure to an organic weakness or “sickness,” a self-contained fault of the system. Has your criticism of secular liberalism persuasively diagnosed this sickness? Still others say the basic cause is in the order of ideas. Do you claim to have located the fundamental errors, or to have corrected them? I do not mean, with these questions, to chide you; I concede that men are hard to find in our time who ought to feel any more comfortable with them. The point is simply that, taking both sides of this coin together, it is not surprising you should neither be called, nor offering yourselves, as secular liberalism’s heir—that it is not surprising you are disillusioned.

(Emphasis supplied.) What was true in 1969 remains true in 2018. One might cavil with this assessment and say that Bozell was writing to secular conservatives, not religious conservatives. Okay. How many battles have the religious conservatives won? The most recent major defeat—dealt by the Supreme Court in Obergefell—was so devastating to Dreher that he now proposes anything a sort of strategic regrouping (in its weakest form) to a retreat to the bayou (in its stronger form) for Christians.

This is a painful point for many, not least Dreher. However, when one says that Catholics and evangelicals should put aside their “small differences” to fight the liberal order, one has to point out that they’ve been doing that for a while—and losing. Perhaps this time will be different. It is true that the liberal order is seen to be struggling at this moment, even if the reasons are not always so clear. Christian conservatives have, unlike the secular conservatives, a real ethical and metaphysical critique of liberalism that, in the case of the critique advanced by the Church, carries divine authority. One sees this even today, in Francis’s great anti-liberal encyclical, Laudato si’, which is clearly an authoritative critique of modern liberalism. That counts for something, to be sure. Nevertheless, when a united Christian front for religious liberty is discussed, one ought to hear Bozell intoning, “Secular liberalism has lost its war for historical existence, but it has not lost any of the battles it has had with you.”

This is, we think, Walther’s point. Catholics have made accommodations for the sake of presenting a united front with other Christians on other issues, only to be defeated in each fight. Walther writes,

What has been the result of this abandonment of principles? Forty years of infanticide, economic exploitation, and spoliation of the Earth as the forces of capital and technology disrupt all our settled customs, habits, convictions, and affections, at an increasingly rapid pace. Think tanks have been founded, fellowships have been granted, journals have been founded, and symposiums held. A whole new conception of politics has emerged out of what ought to have been a limited prudential alliance — but the clock has not been turned back a minute. “All that is solid melts into air,” as Marx put it, and Catholics and evangelicals stand together with their paper cups trying to catch a few drops of the precious liquid to put back in their broken refrigerators.

(Emphasis supplied.) One is justified in asking, then: was it worth it? Was it worth setting about half of Centesimus annus and about six paragraphs of Rerum novarum against the rest of Rerum novarum, Quadragesimo anno, Mater et Magistra, Pacem in terris, Gaudium et spes, Populorum progressio, Laborem exercens, Sollicitudo rei socialis, the other half of Centesimus annus, Caritas in veritate, and so on? (To say nothing of the social magisterium beginning with the apostles and the fathers down to Leo XIII!) Was it worth deciding that Dignitatis humanae, Unitatis redintegratio, and Nostra aetate blotted out the Church’s entire thought on its relationship with the state and other faiths?

Moreover, can we say that it was worth it as Catholics are actively engaged in recovering this tradition? As we say, the real problem is that Dreher does not understand this moment in American Christianity. He suggests that the vision of Evangelicals and Catholics Together is dead, right before making basically the argument advanced by that project. Jake Meador, as we have mentioned before, recognizes that both Catholics and protestants are recovering substantial aspects of their respective traditions that make it less and less possible to engage in the sort of ecumenism represented by Evangelicals and Catholics Together. Consider, for example, the ongoing recovery of the Church’s anti-liberal tradition. There is an increasing realization—at least on the Catholic side of the line—that the sense that the Church threw open the doors to liberalism at Vatican II is not quite correct. To be sure, Dignitatis humanae and Gaudium et spes show more openness to liberalism than, say, Syllabus or Leo XIII’s Libertas praestantissimum. But one must be careful not to read more into the documents than is actually there. At The Public Discourse, for example, Professor Joseph Trabbic has a lengthy essay arguing basically that. He demonstrates convincingly that the Church’s normative political position—even today—is that of a Catholic confessional state. We could go on, though we won’t, about the revival of integralism going on today.

The point is this: Catholics and protestants are recovering their traditions. The Church’s tradition is integralist and anti-liberal. Protestants are working on their own traditions, and they are finding their own reasons to be suspicious of the ecumenism Dreher advances. One might say that the only interesting work being done by Christians on the right—which is very nearly the same thing as saying the only interesting work being done by Christians—is being done in this area. This work makes the sort of cooperation that Dreher urges less and less possible. An integralist Catholic is not going to see the political goals advanced by Dreher as all that worthwhile, except as potentially an intermediate step toward a Catholic confessional state, and he is certainly not going to want to make the compromises—even rhetorical—necessary to work with evangelicals toward such a goal. Likewise, the protestants engaged in their own ressourcement are not going to be excited about coalitions with integralist Catholics.

Today, Incudi Reddere posted another piece from Triumph by Brent Bozell. It concludes, in part:

The something else we must do, then, is to be Christians. The first words of Genesis establish the precedence of being over doing: fiat lux. The goal of the Christian tribe, like that of the city which Christians could once hope to build, is to establish temporal conditions hospitable to the Gospel life. But first the tribe must be. It is a matter of consciousness. Am I an American? a Spaniard? an Englishman? Or am I a Christian? It is also a matter of presence. Here and on every other continent Christians must be visible, not in any city disguise, but openly in their apostolic role as teachers sent to the ends of the earth.

We submit that part, a large part, of being a Christian is being an orthodox Christian—that is, a Catholic. We would not deny, however, that protestants are acting in good faith when they say that being an orthodox Christian means being orthodox by the lights of their sect. However, the point is this: there is an emerging sense Bozell is right and the first step toward a political solution is being an orthodox Christian. As this sense emerges, the idea, advanced by Dreher and Carter, that Christians should gloss over significant differences in theology, ecclesiology, metaphysics, and ethics so that they can fight one more losing battle against secular liberalism becomes less and less tenable.

Before a parting of the ways

At Mere Orthodoxy last week, Jake Meador wrote a piece about “The Parting of Ways Among Younger Christians.” Despite being a protestant, Meador has followed Catholics’ discussions of integralism and liberalism fairly closely and is, unlike some other protestants, a fairly sympathetic observer. Meador is commenting upon a note by Alan Jacobs about the recent blowup over the Mortara case—particularly Fr. Romanus Cessario’s First Things essay defending Bl. Pius IX. Meador’s piece is well worth reading—Jacobs’s is not: it’s another entry in the genre of essays wondering how First Things could be so unecumenical as to publish a Catholic priest defending Catholic doctrine—not least because Meador sees this as the end (or nearly the end) of the ecumenical project of Catholics and some protestants working together. That is, as Catholics and various kinds of protestants explore their own traditions, there will be fewer and fewer ecumenical projects. Meador is not (at least he does not seem) brokenhearted by this. However, others may be.

We won’t waste your time by quoting from Jacobs’s piece at length. However, he is clearly hysterical at the prospect of a First Things in the hands of Roman Catholics who believe what the Church of Rome teaches. His overheated reaction is very understandable. For a long time, First Things represented one of the places where Catholics and some protestants met on grounds of broad agreement to defend a vision of liberalism against the encroachments of another vision of liberalism. What Jacobs does not understand—and what Meador understands very well—is that young Catholics, including young Catholics who write for First Things, have begun the laborious process of recovering the Church’s anti-liberal tradition. What this means is that some writers are less committed to any vision of liberalism, which has serious implications for the project altogether. However, other regular contributors, like George Weigel, remain as committed as ever, as near as we can tell, to the old First Things vision. Meador understands that, as the Church’s anti-liberal tradition is recovered, as it must be, the ecumenism made possible by the Church’s engagement with liberalism at the Second Vatican Council and its reception, especially by American conservatives under the guidance of St. John Paul II, becomes less possible.

Meador is not wrong to call this a parting of the ways. But before this parting of the ways, it is necessary, we think, to consider where we are and what the possible paths forward are. In short, Catholics are grappling with liberalism, the disastrous effects of which are on display in almost every walk of life, and the debate over liberalism is directly effecting the ability of Catholics to participate in ecumenical projects. There are two modes of engaging with liberalism in the Church today. One, inspired broadly by the Second Vatican Council, seeks to preserve the liberalism of the years immediately following the Second World War. This group has historically found much in common with protestants and those of non-Christian faiths, and it has historically sought to form broad coalitions aimed at preserving the “good liberalism” of the 1950s and 1960s. The other, inspired broadly by the Church’s preconciliar teaching, seeks to look beyond liberalism. Therefore, these Catholics tend to be more suspicious of ecumenical projects, especially, as Meador notes, the indifferentist aspects of ecumenical projects. Moreover, they are not nearly so interested in reestablishing the liberal consensus of the 1950s and 1960s. The fundamental tension between the two groups, we think, comes from the ongoing debate within the Church about the Second Vatican Council.

Fifty-two years and counting after the close of the Council, Catholics can question whether the Church’s engagement with liberalism worked. The enthusiastic opening to the postwar order contained, more or less, in Gaudium et spes, Dignitatis humanae, and Nostra aetate, among other documents, did not deepen the dialogue between the Church and the world. It resulted in liberalism receiving dogmatic status in the Church. Perhaps this would not have been the worst thing, if liberalism had remained what it was in the 1950s and early 1960s. Certainly we see in sources as disparate as Ross Douthat and the Paris Statement, signed by such luminaries as Ryszard Legutko, Pierre Manent, Roger Scruton, and Robert Spaemann, a desire to return to that initial postwar liberalism. In other words, for these thinkers, there was a moment before—let us call it the Moment Before—liberalism went wrong. If the slide can be arrested and the order reset to that moment, then the faults of liberalism will disappear. It follows, we think, that under such a notion, the Church’s engagement with liberalism is only contingently imprudent.

As we say, the Council and the major documents of the Council are at the very center of this discussion. Here, the Villanova Church historian and social-media genius Massimo Faggioli’s Twitter feed is essential reading. He argues, we think, that various Council documents, especially Dignitatis humanae, are clearly corrections of the Church’s prior illiberal teachings. In his view, the Council plainly brought the Church in line with postwar liberal democracy. To insist upon a more traditionalist reading of the Council documents, a reading that begins but does not end with Benedict XVI’s hermeneutic of continuity, in Faggioli’s mind, is to challenge the Church’s commitment to liberal democracy. Indeed, to insist that Pius IX’s Quanta cura and Syllabus remain valid teachings, along with Leo XIII’s Immortale Dei, Libertas, and Diuturnum, and Pius XI’s Quadragesimo anno, is to come very near to what Faggioli somewhat breathlessly calls “Catholic fascism.” (That Pius XI also issued Non abbiamo bisogno and Mit brennender Sorge does not seem to figure much in Faggioli’s calculations.) In other words, the more political pronouncements of the Council and liberalism are inextricably linked, pull at one thread and the whole seamless garment, if you’ll excuse the joke, comes apart.

Now, there are problems with the anti-liberal argument that has Faggioli so panicked, which both traditionalists and alarmed liberals need to consider carefully. Notably, they need to consider what Leo XIII’s ralliement policy, as outlined in Au milieu des sollicitudes, means for the Church’s anti-liberal posture in the 19th and early 20th century. Obviously, the ralliement policy came off the rails during St. Pius X’s pontificate, as Vehementer nos shows. But it is not enough to say that practically Leo’s initiative failed. The implications for ralliement in the context of Leo’s anti-liberal thought ought to be considered carefully. The pope of Immortale Dei is the pope of Au milieu des sollicitudes, and the nature of the French Third Republic was well known to Leo. Yet Leo urged Catholics to support the Third Republic. Whether ralliement is enough to complicate the Church’s anti-liberal doctrine significantly is an open question. We have our doubts, but we are also not hugely interested in avoiding the Church’s anti-liberal doctrine.

At any rate, a great debate could be had about Faggioli’s point, though Bishop Bernard Fellay of the SSPX is no doubt pleased to hear a prominent progressive theologian concede Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre’s point. Nevertheless, this is another reason why the furor over Fr. Romanus Cessario’s First Things article about the Mortara case reached such a fever pitch. Cessario’s argument is clearly drawn from the tradition of the Church and—despite Nathaniel Peters’s valiant effort to mention only about half of the essential Thomistic sources—is essentially unanswerable. As such, it serves as a sort of confirmation of liberals’ deep fear that the openness to liberalism that Catholics have shown is not much older than 1965 and is not broadly supported in the tradition of the Church. In other words, there is a sense that if the Catholics start poking around too much in their tradition, if they start looking behind the copy of the documents of Vatican II on their bookshelves, they will find teachings incompatible with liberalism. Indeed, they will find that the Church, within living memory, was squarely opposed to liberalism. It will be impossible to articulate a Catholic vision of the search for the Moment Before when Catholics figure out that the Church taught, until fairly recently, that there was no Moment Before.

A couple of observations. First, the idea of the Moment Before has profited Catholics almost nothing. Despite fifty years of explanations of how Catholicism and the Bill of Rights in the federal Constitution are entirely reconcilable, every major social decision has gone against the Church. From Roe to Obergefell, the engagement of Catholics with the liberal American order has resulted in defeat after defeat. The American bishops have, in the face of increasingly draconian “anti-discrimination” laws, mounted a last stand on “religious liberty,” but it is unclear whether this battle will result in some breathing room for the Church. The idea of a Moment Before seems to involve resetting the clock, so to speak, to right before Catholics started losing all these important political and legal contests. However, it is only infrequently mentioned that these political and legal contests were fought and lost during a period when the Church was enthusiastically engaged in the liberal American order. In other words, the Church, inspired by the approach mapped out at the Second Vatican Council, was actively participating in and, more important, supporting American political life—and it still lost the debates. To put it another way, the idea of a Moment Before involves returning to the conditions that produced the current state of affairs.

Second, the tension between Catholic liberals searching for a liberalism that is truly liberalism and Catholic integralists delving into the Church’s anti-liberal tradition is inevitable. We have seen that everyone agrees, more or less, that liberalism and the Council are inextricably linked. Everyone also agrees that we are in the process of receiving, as they say, the teachings, such as they are, of the Council. The debates over the Council within the Church are going to inevitably implicate the posture of Catholics toward liberalism. Catholics seeking a deeper understanding of tradition, particularly on the social question, have begun to look back beyond the Council into the teachings of Pius XII, Pius XI, St. Pius X, and Leo XIII in particular. And in those teachings, as we say, they have found the Church’s anti-liberal doctrine. Things get extremely sticky from that point.

II.

Things get stickiest along the lines Meador and Jacobs identify. If Catholics start receiving the political thought of the Church, it will turn out that the broad consensus represented by Evangelicals & Catholics Together was illusory. Or, more precisely, it was based entirely on the Church’s posture at the Council and in the wake of the Council, which was not the Church’s historical posture. What do we mean? Well, before the Council, the Church was opposed to liberalism, root and branch. There was no Moment Before when there was a good liberalism. There might be pragmatic reasons to temper active opposition to liberal regimes, such as the mortal peril of Marxism-Leninism in Europe. But in terms of liberalism simpliciter, the Church’s judgment was clear. The Council then did something—some might say it made a pragmatic judgment due to the mortal peril of Marxism-Leninism in Europe, some might say it corrected the earlier extremism of the popes—and opened itself up to liberalism. The agenda sketched out in Evangelicals & Catholics Together relies entirely on that openness insofar as the enthusiastic cooperation with the American order outlined in that document is enthusiastic cooperation with liberalism.

Other thinkers are challenging the idea of a Moment Before. Patrick Deneen’s book, Why Liberalism Failed, presents the idea—not a new one, necessarily—that the problems we see in the liberal order today are essentially baked into liberalism. Deneen’s book has brought out numerous responses, including an insightful review from Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule at American Affairs. Building on an essay in First Things some time ago, Vermeule argues essentially that integralist Catholics ought to consider populating elite institutions and, occupying positions of power, use their authority “to further human dignity and the common good, defined entirely in substantive rather than procedural-technical terms.” Where Douthat and others would say that Christians must engage with the liberal order to return to the Moment Before, Vermeule seems to argue that, first, there is no Moment Before to return to, and, second, integralist Catholics must engage with the liberal order to supersede it.

There are superficial similarities between the two approaches. Neither Douthat nor Vermeule retreats into gated communities or enclaves of Holy (Russian) Orthodoxy in the bayou, as Rod Dreher sometimes suggests and sometimes denies suggesting. Indeed, in both men’s visions, you will see intelligent Christians educated at elite schools entering the service of the regime. Some will go into government, some will go into the institutions the government serves, like finance, and others will go back into elite schools to prepare the next wave. In time, perhaps not a very long time, you will see the regime get better. But this is where Vermeule and Douthat’s visions diverge sharply. At a certain point, Douthat and the signatories to the Paris Statement and those who agree with them will recognize their Moment Before. Liberalism is itself again, they will say. Vermeule will say, simply, that we are well on our way to our goal.

To a certain extent, evangelicals like Meador, concerned by the rise of integralism among intelligent Catholics, should cheer Vermeule’s strategy. For the moment, it provides a way that integralists can remain part of the broader Christian conversation in the United States. Vermeule urges integralist Catholics to engage and populate liberal institutions and—and this bit is important—simply discharge their duties according to human dignity and the common good. There is, at least at the outset, little for Meador to be concerned about with respect to the intolerant integralist Catholics. The Catholic confessional state that he spends as much time as anyone worrying about would not emerge overnight. It might not emerge for a long time. Until that point, it would be exactly the sort of activity that the signatories of Evangelicals & Catholics Together would want to see. However, we would be surprised if Meador—or, for that matter, Alan Jacobs—would cheer Vermeule’s strategy all that enthusiastically.

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