“I am deeply shocked by the Pope's visit with Kim Davis, because he appears to be

taking her side, against settled law in Western countries, which says that public

officials may not, in their official functions, impose their private religious beliefs

on citizens whom those government offices serve. Davis had been convicted of

contempt of court for her behavior in violation of a court order. The Supreme

Court confirmed her conviction. JFK, campaigning for the Presidency, said that as

President he would be obliged to serve the Constitution, not his Pope. Does

Francis disagree with that?”

I. After medieval part:

II. Ward: ““The Church professes to be infallible in her teaching of

morals no less than of faith. If, then, Catholicism be true, and if

Catholics have the fullest ground for knowing it to be true, the

one healthy, desirable, and legitimate state of civil society is that

the Church’s doctrines, principles, and laws should be recognized

without question as its one basis of legislation and administration;

to the Church’s authority.”

III. Summary: Read: Men are political animals, meaning that they are

born into political community of their very nature. Man has an

end that is part of his very nature, eternal happiness, which

includes a natural happiness that is ordered to the supernatural

one. Both natural and supernatural happiness can only be

attained with the help of others in a well-ordered social and

political life of various hierarchical authorities and social

groupings—family, town, city; parish, workplace, school,;guild,

sodality, and confraternity--one ordered by and to the good, both

natural and supernatural, whose laws, practices, and institutions

embody the natural law and aim at the common good, which is

full flourishing of human beings in lives of virtue, love of God and

neighbor, and contemplation of God. The city is a natural

creature, and thus it must be ruled by and ordered to God. Its

authority is a participation in the divine authority of providence,

and it is only legitimate and worthy of obedience and

participation when it is actually ordered by and to the common

good, when its laws reflect and embody the natural law, and

when it accepts its limits, the ordering of temporary affairs for the

sake of heavenly ones. Man does not have a natural end per se,

but only supernatural one with a natural component, and the

city’s ultimate purpose is to help men get to heaven, to care for

their soul, as Socrates was right to claim, to help men attain their

supernatural end. For this purpose, there is a necessary union of

Church and state, and the state, as well as all other non-ecclesial

social and political practices and institutions, are under the

authority of Christ in everything, and so of His Church, in all those

matters that pertain to the Church’s temporal and spiritual

authority, in faith and morals, the sacred, and in declaring and

securing the ultimate purpose of man’s existence. Christ is the

King over both persons and states, and all authority derives from

His universal kingship, and must answer to His will, which has

been made manifest in the teachings and laws of the Catholic

Church.

After Modern:

I. Can political power and unity be derived and justly exercised from a

purely immanent and secular source in separation from the authority

and guidance of the Catholic Church, that is, from a contract made by

humans with humans alone? I think the answer is no, that the liberal,

democratic, rights-based model of the state, and its Lockean conception

of the relation of Church and state, as established in America in 1787, is

fatally flawed, and cannot be redeemed.

II. Four arguments. One from the Magisterial authority, one from theology, one from political philosophy, and one that combines anthropology and recent empirical evidence.

III. This part I need to read, and it will take about 20 minutes.

First from papal authority: Thomist Joseph May in the 1950s stated: “The only

true doctrine is that civil society cannot prescind from the ultimate end [emphasis

mine] both because the temporal welfare implies an ordering to the spiritual and

supernatural, and because the individual citizens are directly and positively bound

to tend to it” The Church’s magisterium has not changed its view on this, and still

affirms it, unequivocally! Dignitatis Humanae of Vatican II insists that it “leaves

untouched the traditional Catholic doctrine about the moral duty of men and

societies toward the true religion and the one Church of Christ" (Sec. 1). The soul-

body model of the confessional state is still the authoritative teaching of the

Roman Catholic Church on the nature of the state and its relation to the Church!

The social-contract model of religious pluralism is tolerated, but it has never been

accepted as the ideal.

Secondly, the theological argument: According to St. Thomas, men cannot

adequately understand in theory, let alone fulfill in practice, the detailed precepts

of the natural law without the help of its author, God, and its divinely appointed

interpreter, the Roman Catholic Church. As Pope St. John Paul II often reiterated,

the face of Jesus Christ is the only true mirror in which man can fully and

accurately contemplate and comprehend his own nature and destiny; thus, only

therein can he discern the moral values and goods most perfective of himself and

the political order.

However, the desacralized, religiously pluralistic, secular state supposes that

authentic political peace is possible without the majority of citizens’ spiritual

rebirth through Baptism and the infusion of sanctifying grace that comes primarily

through the Church’s sacraments—and without the formal guidance of the

Catholic Church on fundamental moral and political issues. For as we have seen

with in St. Augustine, true peace and goodness is just not possible outside the

society of Christian believers, as is suggested in De Civitate Dei in which Augustine

judged the “peace” of Rome, the exemplar of the “city of man,” no peace at all in

comparison to the true social peace that can only come from social obedience to

Christ in the city of God.

Third, the philosophical argument: In articulating any ideal political order, the

political philosopher and politician and court justice and president and bureaucrat

must deal in some way with the Church’s claim to have the authority to define the

ultimate meaning of goodness and politics and the purpose of man in his personal

and social life, by either recognizing or denying the Church’s public authority to

do so. Practical agnosticism to the very possibility of such an authority is, in effect,

an implicit moral judgment of the injustice of The Church ever becoming an

actual, living authority, and therefore an implicit theological denial of the

authority it indeed has. In other words, the so-called religiously-neutral, secular

state guaranteeing religious liberty is no such thing. It is a confessional state,

which confesses the rejection of the social Kingship of Christ and the supernatural

political authority of the Catholic Church. Davis Schindler writes: “A

nonconfessional state is not logically possible, in the one real order of history. The

state cannot finally avoid affirming, in the matter of religion, a priority of either

“freedom from” or “freedom for”—both of these priorities implying a theology.”

Authority in society, in order to fulfill its basic function of organizing the social

activity of human individuals, must determine, authorize, and implement practical

answers to matters that are inextricably bound up with religious considerations

and commitments: life and death (What is a human being? Whom does the

government have an obligation to protect? Who speaks authoritatively on these

issues?); war (What is the criteria for conscientious objection? For just or unjust

war?); sex (Is fornication or adultery to be socially celebrated, prohibited, or

ignored?); the family (Is marriage an unchanging social and religious institution, or

is its character open to perpetual redefinition by individuals?); rewards and

punishments (What kinds of behaviors should merit societal approbation and

opprobrium?). Social and political authorities must inevitably consider and make

judgments regarding these issues; even the decision to depoliticize and privatize

these matters, leaving these questions to be settled freely by individuals, is

socially and politically significant, for it implies that there is no publicly accessible

and authoritative moral truth or goodness in these matters. Thus, “secular” “non-

theocratic” regimes are de facto religious regimes, in this sense: that even if there

were a way fully to depoliticize these sorts of issues, there could never be

“religious neutrality” on the part of the state with regard to them. If there is a

possibility of a God-ordained answer to any of these questions, and if there is an

institution that claims to articulate authoritatively this answer, then societal and

political authority must respond one way or another to this claim. In conclusion,

what John Courtney Murray and Jacques Maritain were supporting, a religiously-

neutral, secular, natural-law governed nation state, never existed, and doesn’t

exist now. There are only confessional states, and so the question becomes—

what religion is the state going to confess, and if it isn’t Christ and the Catholic

religion, what will it be?

In this final and concluding section of this talk, the anthropological/empirical

argument, I will give my answer to this question, and I am afraid it is not a

pleasant one.

Romano Guardini has written: “The law of the state is more than a set of

rules governing human behavior; behind it exists something untouchable,

and when a law is broken it makes its impact on the conscience of man.

Social order is more than a warrant against friction, than a guarantee for

the free exercise of communal life; behind it stands something which

makes an injury against society a crime. The religious dimension of law

suffuses the entire moral order. It gives to ethical action, that is action

necessary for the very existence of man, its own proper norms, which it

executes from without and without pressure. Only the religious element of

law guarantees the unity and cooperation of the whole order of human

behavior.

Can modern man really live without a publicly authoritative sacred as the

foundation of law and politics? Rémi Brague has warned us that, “Such a contract

(the secular nation state), precisely because it has no external point of reference,

cannot possibly decide whether the very existence on this earth of the species

homo sapiens is a good thing or not.”i

And when he has repudiated the traditional sacred in his personal as well as

political life, or perhaps has just forgotten about it, is man bound to concoct

sacreds of his own, in his own fallen and depraved image?

Thomas Molnar asks: Must the political order be derived from a cosmic

model (or, at any rate, from an external, transcendent reference point), or

are there valid and effective substitutes? Can unaided humanity, through

the mobilization of its faculties, create a sacred, or at least a myth,

powerful enough to convey a model? If the answer to these questions is no,

we must ask then: Can a community exist without the sacred component,

by the mere power of rational decisions and intellectual discourse?ii

No, I say. A community cannot exist without a sacred component, and as we shall

see, when the traditional sacred of monotheism was rejected in modernity with

the rise of the desacralized nation state, the sacred shrine did not remain empty.

Secular liberal culture is founded upon a particular conception of the good,

namely, the sacral good of the privatization and desacralization of all claims to

truth, and a particular doctrine of truth, the irreducible plurality of conceptions of

the good/sacred; and since the publicly authoritative rhetoric of liberal culture

includes a denial of having any substantive sacred conceptions of its own, what

liberalism amounts to is an institutionalized religious sacred—but one that

indoctrinates citizens into disbelieving in its very existence as such. Just as the

puppeteers in Plato’s Cave must ensure that the shadows they cast on the wall in

front of the shackled slaves are never seen by them as shadows, else the cave be

identified as a cave and the prisoners break their chains in revolt, the “secular”

state must never be exposed for what it really is, a sacred power exercising

hegemony over all competing sacreds, which it has effectively privatized and

neutered. Thus, its own sacred dogmas, that is, the dogmas and practices of the

nation-state itself, become unimpeachable, unquestionable, uncontestable, and,

most importantly, invisible. It judges all beliefs and actions in accord with these

dogmas, and executes its definitive judgments through its terrible liturgical

violence and scapegoating, masked by the language of rights, democracy,

freedom, security, diversity, equality, and tolerance. Orwell, eat your heart out.

All political orders require a mechanism for engendering and preserving

unity, and the sacred has always been the source and engine of this unity. It is no

different in our “modern” day. William Cavanaugh writes:

Death in war—what is commonly called the “ultimate sacrifice” for the

nation—is what periodically re-presents the sense of belonging upon which

the imagined nation is built. Such death is then elaborately ceremonialized

in liturgies involving the flag and other ritual objects. Indeed, it is the ritual

itself that retrospectively classifies any particular act of violence as sacrifice.

Ritual gesture and language are crucial for establishing meaning and public

assent to the foundational story being told. The foundational story is one of

both creation and salvation. At the ceremonies marking the fiftieth

anniversary of D-Day in 1994, for example, President Clinton remarked of

the soldiers that died there both that “They gave us our world” and that

“They saved the world.”iii The public shrine has been emptied of any one

particular God or creed, so that the government can never claim divine

sanction and each person may be free to worship as she sees fit . . . . There

is no single visible idol, no golden calf, to make the idolatry obvious . . .

officially the shrine remains empty. . . . The empty shrine, however,

threatens to make a deity not out of God but out of our freedom to

worship God. Our freedom comes to occupy the empty shrine. Worship

becomes worship of our collective self, and civil religion tends to

marginalize the worship of the true God. Our freedom, finally, becomes the

one thing we will die and kill for.iv “You may confess on your lips any god

you like,” Cavanaugh concludes, “provided you are willing to kill for

America”

Consider this description by political philosopher Sheldon Wolin of the

mythology and worship of a new American god, though perhaps not so new:

The mythology created around September 11 was predominantly Christian

in its themes. The day was converted into the political equivalent of a holy

day of crucifixion, of martyrdom, that fulfilled multiple functions: as the

basis of a political theology, as a communion around a mystical body of a

bellicose republic, as a warning against political apostasy, as a sanctification

of the nation’s leader, transforming him from a powerful officeholder of

questionable legitimacy into an instrument of redemption, and at the same

time exhorting the congregants to a wartime militancy, demanding of them

uncritical loyalty and support, summoning them as participants in a

sacrament of unity and in a crusade to “rid the world of evil. v

Fr. Waldstein has written: “The earthly city is always opposed to true

religion. . . . Justice consists in giving each his own, thus no society is just

that does not give God the worship due to Him.vi

The city of man has always been opposed to true religion, to the truly

sacred, and this opposition has only increased in our “secular age,” and

exponentially since 911. At the heart of every culture is always the sacred, and at

the heart of our post-911, pathocratic, imperial culture of death and deception is

a terrible—but entirely vincible—sacred power in mortal conflict with the Logos,

the merciful, loving, and truly sacred Person who protects, guide, and saves those

who are willing to recognize, adore, and trust in Him.

So there are our four arguments. Let me conclude by tying all this back to the

quote I began this talk with, the one disparaging Kim Davis and the Pope:

As Orestes Brownson maintained in the 19th century, the American project or

ordered liberty and religious freedom could not succeed in the absence of a

majority of Catholic citizens. He was correct. But I would go a step further than

Brownson and claim that the American project cannot succeed unless Catholicism

replace the incoherent liberalism we have now and have had ab initio as the

ultimate source of moral and political authority in the state.

Without some sort of integrally implemented confessional state Christian model,

America, cannot be saved from its continual fall into decadence and tyranny. We

can move towards this by establishing some measure of legal and political

autonomy for small-scale tradition-constituted communities, little polises, as it

were, that can be held together by a federal alliance based upon a consensus on

practical, natural-law based norms, something I articulate in more detail at the

end of my book The Political Problem of Religious Pluralism: And Why Philosophy

Can’t Solve It . Any confessional political order would, of course, have to emerge

organically and by steps, and it would, of course, presuppose a widespread

conversion to traditional Christianity. One might call this utopian, but the proper

end must be seen and loved in order for us to act prudently and effectively, not to

mention righteously.

As the Nietzschean Stanley Fish has demonstrated, the proper separation of

Church and state is, in a word, impossible—if it is to be accomplished within and

according to liberalism and the liberal nation state, and this includes, as Michael

Hanby has shown, the classical liberalism of the American Founders, however

much better this form of liberalism was than what we have now. And if this is

true, it would explain why there is no good and rationally coherent solution to the

Kim Davis issue, that is, when obedience to God conflicts with obedience to the

State, a insufferable comment about which in the NY Times, if you remember, I

began my talk. Within the intellectual, moral, legal, and political constraints of the

contemporary American regime, a regime that is and cannot help not being

utterly incoherent on the relations of Church and state, the just separation of

Church and state is, as it were, mission impossible. Either Davis goes to jail, or she

is permitted to abstain from signing the licenses with her name, or some

compromise is made. But whichever is determined by official coercive power, it is

not, and cannot be, a rational determination.

Insofar as the American regime, both on the federal and local levels,

constitutionally and legally prescinds in its legal and political deliberations from

any consideration of the moral and political and theological claims of the Catholic

Church, as well as of the authority of the natural law, of which she is the unique

and authoritative custodian; and precludes other citizens from considering these

authorities in those arguments and debates in the public square, in Congress, in

the Senate, in the Supreme Court, and in any other forum where argument and

debate can ensue in law, it renders itself incapable of resolving fundamental

political issues, let alone ones that bear upon the supernatural realm, the

Church’s rights and privileges, and the authority of God.

And this is so because, ultimately, only Jesus Christ has the authority to settle the

just bounds between Church and state—because he is the author of both. By the

fact of his Incarnation, he brought together Church and state, heaven and earth,

divinity and humanity for the first time. And after bringing them together, he

commanded their proper separation: "Render to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to

God what is God's." Therefore, in order to know we owe Caesar and God today,

we must listen to his authentic and infallible mouthpiece—which isn’t the

Supreme Court or conservative court sophists. Unless we have access to the voice

of Christ, Fish is right—there is no way of solving the problem. It is mission

impossible.

Yet, there must be a solution because Christ commanded us to solve the problem.

In short, Christ must have given us a sure and "from the outside" way of

determining his will regarding the proper ordering of Church and state. Anything

but a living, visible, unified, universal, hierarchical, concrete, corporal institution

whose unity, holiness, universality, and apostolicity is recognizable by all "from

the outside" cannot afford humans the clear determination of Christ's will in

matters of political, as well as any other matter. Anything less would inevitably

perpetuate both the denial of access, and the subjective uncertainty of that

access to the definitive truth regarding Christ's will for the proper ordering of the

political order vis-à-vis religion in general, and the Church in particular, a denial

and uncertainty that would make the just separation of the prerogatives of

Church and state impossible, and would thus make a just resolution to particular

conflicts between Church and state impossible, as in the Kim Davis conflict. What

we would have is either outright civil war, or what we have now, the Procrustean

attempt to make the message of the Gospel fit into the arbitrary will of whoever

happens to be ruling in the state. In short, chaos or a hopelessly compromised

Christianity, or both. And this is indeed what we have.

No one but God can define his Church and her relationship with the state; no man

is God but Christ; and no one can authoritatively speak for Christ other than his

One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. Only she has absolute freedom of

conscience and religion; only she has been authorized to speak for God on what

belongs to him, but all baptized Christians in communion with her participate in

this right. Kim Davis doesn’t know any of this, but she does know that what

belongs to God—and not the state—is her immortal soul, and she has acted

accordingly. Would that those who know better than she about matters

theological and spiritual would do the same.

i Rémi Brague, “Are Non-Theocratic Regimes Possible?” Intercollegiate Review (Spring, 2006), 11, available at http://www.mmisi.org/ir/41_01/brague.pdf.

ii Thomas Molnar, Twin Powers: Politics and the Sacred (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1988), 137. iii William T. Cavanaugh, “The Liturgies of Church and State” Liturgy 20, No. 1 (2005): 25-30.iv William T. Cavanaugh, “The Empire of the Empty Shrine: American Imperialism and the Church,” Cultural

Encounters 2, no. 2 (Summer, 2006), 15. v Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 9. vi Edmund Waldstein, “Religious Liberty and Tradition” (January, 2015), available at

http://thejosias.com/2015/01/02/religious-liberty-and-tradition-iii/.