The Catholic World, Vol. 05, April 1867 to September 1867

by Various

The rights of the state and of the citizen, alike must be derived from God, and have a theological basis, or be no rights at all, but words without meaning. There is then no such separation between politics and theology as European democracy asserts. Such separation is unphilosophical, and against the truth of things. It has been so held in all ages and nations of the world. All the great theologians, philosophers, and moralists of the human race have always held polities to be a branch of ethics, or morals, and that branch which treats of the application of the catholic principles of theology to society, or the social relations of mankind. The permanent, universal, and invariable principles of civil society are all theological principles, for there are no such principles outside of theology, and the office of the state is to apply these principles only to what is local, temporal, and variable. It is evident then that principles, properly so called, lie in the theological order, and come within the province of the theologian, not of the statesman, and are therefore to be determined by the spiritual society, not by the civil.

It is, then, the spiritual not the temporal, religion not politics, that asserts and maintains these rights, and religion does it in asserting and maintaining the right of conscience, which is the right of God, and the basis of all rights. The right of conscience is exemption from all merely human authority—a right to be held by all civil society as sacred and inviolable; and is the first and impassable barrier to the power of the state. The state cannot pass it without violence, without the most outrageous tyranny. It is then religion, not the state, that asserts and maintains freedom; for the state when it acts, acts as authority, not as liberty. So, on the other hand, is it religion that asserts and maintains the authority, I say, not the force, of the state. The authority of the state is its right to govern. In respect to civil society itself, it is liberty; in respect to citizens, it is authority. Being a right on the part of the state or society, it, like all other rights, lies in the spiritual order, and is equally sacred and inviolable. Religion, then, while it makes it the duty of the state to recognize and protect the rights of the individual citizen, makes it the duty of the individual citizen to recognize, respect, and defend the rights of the state or society. The duty in both cases is a religious duty, because all right is held from God, and only God can enjoin duty, or bind conscience. Deny God, and you deny religion; deny religion, and you deny all duty and all right;—alike the rights and duties of the state and the rights and duties of the individual citizen, and, therefore, alike both liberty and authority, which being correlatives can never exist the one without the other. There is no denying this conclusion without denying reason itself.

But religion, as an abstract theory, is powerless, as are all abstractions, and exists only as concreted, and religion in the concrete is the church. In the state and in the individual, God operates indeed, but mediately, through natural or secondary causes; but in the church immediately, for the church is his body, and her vitality is the Holy Ghost, who dwells in her, and is to her something like what the soul is to the body, forma corporis. Religion without the church is a theory or a vague sentiment; religion concreted in the church is a living reality, a power, and is efficient in vindicating both rights and duties, and affording a solid support to both liberty and authority. The sects, as far as they go, are concrete religion, but not religion in its unity and integrity. They are better than nothing; but lacking the unity and catholicity of truth, and being divided and subdivided among themselves, they can very imperfectly perform the office of religion or the Catholic Church. They are unable to make head against material force, and to maintain with any efficiency the rights of the spiritual against the encroachments of the temporal, or to prevent the state from asserting its own absolute supremacy. They exist not by a recognized right, but by state tolerance; they are suffered to exist and are protected, because they become auxiliaries of the state in its efforts to break the power and influence of the church, whose authority in spirituals is more repugnant to them then is state supremacy. Hence we find that wherever, except in the United States, the spiritual power is broken and divided into a great variety of sects, the state claims to be supreme alike in spirituals and temporals; and it is very doubtful if the freedom and independence of the spiritual order could long be preserved even in our country should our sectarian divisions continue. These divisions are already generating a wide-spread indifference to religion, almost a contempt for it; while there are manifest and growing tendencies to extend the authority of the state beyond its legitimate bounds into the domain of individual liberty. The unity and catholicity of the church, representing the unity and catholicity of the spiritual order, will soon be seen to be necessary to preserve our free institutions.

It was concrete religion, in its unity and catholicity embodied in the church as an institution, that was able during the middle ages to assert the freedom and independence of the spiritual order, which is only another term for the freedom and independence of conscience, against the political order. She was thus constituted a living reality, a concrete power, and the powers of the earth had to reckon with her. Constituted as society then was, she needed and exercised more positive power in the temporal order than was agreeable to her, or than is necessary in a society constituted like ours. The republic, then, was pagan, and sought to be supreme everywhere and in everything, or in other words, to subject the spiritual order to the temporal, as it was in pagan Rome, and for the most part continued to be even in Christian Rome of the East, till its conquest by the Turks. Hence the relation between Peter and Cesar, between the pope and emperor, was ordinarily that of antagonism. It was necessary that the pope should be clothed with a power that could control princes, and force them to respect the rights of conscience, or the independence of the church, which to be sufficient must be positive as well as negative. The temporal authority, or the authority of the church over the temporal, claimed and exercised over secular princes seeking to combine in themselves both the imperial and the pontifical power, was no usurpation, and rested on no grant of civil society, or jus publicum, as has sometimes been asserted, but grew out of the necessity of the case; its justification was in its necessity to maintain her own independence in spirituals, or the freedom of conscience. It was her right as representing the spiritual order, and would be her right still in a similarly constituted society, and the modern world is reaping in its advanced civilization the fruits of her having claimed and exercised it.

The necessity for claiming and exercising that power in a society constituted as is the American does not exist, because in our society the state frankly concedes all that she was in those ages struggling for. There was nothing which Gregory VII., Innocent III., Boniface VIII., and other great popes struggled for against the German emperors, the kings of France, Aragon, and England, and the Italian republics, that is not recognized here by our republic to be the right of the spiritual order. Here the old antagonism between church and state does not exist. There is here a certain antagonism, no doubt, between the church and the sects, but none between the church and the state or civil society. Here the church has, so far as civil society is concerned, all that she has ever claimed, all that she has ever struggled for. Here she is perfectly free. She summons her prelates to meet in council when she pleases, and promulgates her decrees for the spiritual government of her children without leave asked or obtained. The placet of the civil power is not needed, is neither solicited nor accepted. She erects and fills sees as she judges proper, founds and conducts schools, colleges, and seminaries in her own way, without let or hindrance; she manages her own temporalities, not by virtue of a grant or concession of the state, but as her acknowledged right, held as the right of conscience, independently of the state. Here she has nothing to conquer from the state, for the civil law affords her the same protection for her property that it does to the citizen for his; and therefore all that she can seek in relation to the constitution of our civil society, is that it should remain unaltered.

True, the sects have before civil society the same freedom that she has, but the state protects her from any violence they might be disposed to offer her. They are not permitted to rob her of her churches, desecrate her altars, molest her worship, or interfere with her management of her own affairs. Their freedom in no respect whatever abridges hers, and whatever controversy she may have with them, it is entirely on questions with which civil society has nothing to do, which are wholly within the spiritual order, and which could not be settled by physical force, if she had it at her command, and was disposed to use it. Lying in the spiritual order, they are independent of the state, and it has no right to interfere with them. There is nothing, then, in the freedom of the sects to interfere with the fullest liberty of the church, so long as the state recognizes and protect her freedom and independence as well as theirs. There is nothing, then, that the church can receive from civil society, that she has not in the United States, and guaranteed to her by the whole force of the civil constitution.

It is one of the mysteries of Providence that what the popes for ages struggled for and still struggle for in the old world, and in all parts of the new world originally colonized by Catholic states, should for the first time in history be fully realized in a society founded by the most anti-papal people on earth, who held the church to be the Scarlet Lady of the Apocalypse. Surely, they builded better than they knew. But explain it as you will, such is the fact. The United States is the only country in the world where the church is really free. It would seem that both state and church had to emigrate to the new world to escape the antagonisms of the old, and to find a field for the free and untrammeled development of each. It is idle to fear that the church will ever seek to disturb the order established here, for she supports no principle and has no interest that would lead her to do it. Individual Catholics, affected by the relations that have subsisted between church and state in the old world, and not aware that the church has here all that she has ever struggled for against kings and princes, may think that the church lacks here some advantages which she ought to have, or may think it desirable to reproduce here the order of things which they have been accustomed to elsewhere, and which in fact the church has submitted to as the best she could get, but has never fully approved. These, however, are few, and are soon corrected by experience, soon convinced that the real solution of the questions which have so long and often so fearfully agitated the nations of Europe, has been providentially obtained by the American people. The church has no wish to alter the relation that exists with us between her and the state.

But there is a very important question for the American people to ask themselves. With the multiplicity of sects, the growing indifference to religion, and the political atheism consciously or unconsciously fostered by a large portion of the secular press and but feebly resisted by the religious press, will they be able to reserve the freedom and independence of the spiritual order, or protect the equal rights on which our political institutions are founded? Instead of asking, as some do, are the presence and extension of the church dangerous to our institutions, should they not rather ask, is she not necessary to their safety? The higher question to be addressed to the sects undoubtedly is, can men save their souls without the church? but in addressing politicians and patriots, it is not beneath the Catholic even to ask if the republic, the authority of the state, and the liberty of the citizen, both of which rest on the freedom and authority of conscience, can be saved or preserved without her? Are not the unity and catholicity which she asserts and represents, and which the sects break and discard, necessary to maintain the freedom and independence of the spiritual order against the constant tendency of the political order and material interests to invade and subject it?

This is the great question for American patriots and statesman, and I have written in vain, if this article does not at least suggest the answer. Hitherto almost everywhere Catholics have found themselves obliged to contend against the civil power to gain the freedom and independence of their church, and at the same time, in these later centuries, to sustain that power, even though hostile to liberty, in order to save society from dissolution. Here they have to do neither, for here church and state, liberty and authority, are in harmonious relation, and form really, as they should, but two distinct parts of one whole; distinct, I say, not separate parts. There is here a true union, not unity, of church and state—a union without which neither the liberty of the citizen nor the authority of the state has any solid basis or support. The duty of the Catholic on this question is, it seems to me, to do his best to preserve this union as it is, and to combat every influence or tendency hostile to it.