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Pius XI was simply a beast of a pontiff. (That’s a highly laudatory term in my book.) I am just now looking again at Divini illius magistri - there are so many great lines in there, and he lectures the State up and down, really tells the State what is and what is not its business. I loved this quotation towards the end:
This fact is proved by the whole history of Christianity and its institutions, which is nothing else but the history of true civilization and progress up to the present day.
None of this nonsense from Pius about the “Western tradition” and “Western civilization” - there was no other civilization, period.
I rather wonder what Pius XI and Silvio Cardinal Antoniano would have made of Benedict’s cozying up with the pluralist State. (I love Benedict to death, but there remain questions to be answered about religious liberty and the relation of Church and State.) Pius XI makes it abundantly clear - and, indeed, Reason herself makes it clear - that a State which rejects Christ as her king cannot flourish.
While treating of education, it is not out of place to show here how an ecclesiastical writer, who flourished in more recent times, during the Renaissance, the holy and learned Cardinal Silvio Antoniano, to whom the cause of Christian education is greatly indebted, has set forth most clearly this well established point of Catholic doctrine. He had been a disciple of that wonderful educator of youth, St. Philip Neri; he was teacher and Latin secretary to St. Charles Borromeo, and it was at the latter’s suggestion and under his inspiration that he wrote his splendid treatise on The Christian Education of Youth. In it he argues as follows:
“The more closely the temporal power of a nation aligns itself with the spiritual, and the more it fosters and promotes the latter, by so much the more it contributes to the conservation of the commonwealth. For it is the aim of the ecclesiastical authority by the use of spiritual means, to form good Christians in accordance with its own particular end and object; and in doing this it helps at the same time to form good citizens, and prepares them to meet their obligations as members of a civil society. This follows of necessity because in the City of God, the Holy Roman Catholic Church, a good citizen and an upright man are absolutely one and the same thing. How grave therefore is the error of those who separate things so closely united, and who think that they can produce good citizens by ways and methods other than those which make for the formation of good Christians. For, let human prudence say what it likes and reason as it pleases, it is impossible to produce true temporal peace and tranquillity by things repugnant or opposed to the peace and happiness of eternity.”
St. Louis-Marie de Montfort,
Pope St. Pius X,
St. Joseph,
St. Ambrose of Milan,
St. Thomas Aquinas,
St. Francis (and St. Clare),
St. Catherine of Siena,
St. Alphonsus Ligouri,
St. John Chrysostom,
Interestingly, Iosephe, I myself have just been working on a post that touches on some of these same questions you have about the secular state. Perhaps I’ll post it tomorrow… but don’t get too excited; I have more questions than answers. The way I see it, the problem comes most obviously to a head in Dignitatis Humanae, which really is a very troubling encyclical. Although it begins by insisting that it does not alter the tradition of the Church… well, let’s just say, to the casual (or not so casual) reader, it certainly SEEMS to be in tension with the sort of position you outline above. As I say, these are troubling questions.
I think that Bishop Williamson’s recent remarks on this point are interesting. In fact, he strikes a rather pragmatic note: we must recognize the principle and then also recognize that we won’t be re-expelling the Jews from Spain anytime soon:
One cannot help but be struck by the historical reality that the union of church and state has typically done the Church little good. Joseph II regulated the times of Masses in the eighteenth century, the Emperor Henry’s humiliation at Canossa was undone a few years later, and the not wholly inaccurate perception that the nineteenth-century Church was willing to shill for the rich and powerful contributed more than a bit to the blood-stained, secular history of twentieth century in Europe.
In the East, of course, the story is far worse. The legacy of Byzantium is a tragic one: the story of the resistance to the tyranny of secular rulers–most notably in Russia from Peter the Great to Gorbachev–by the Churches of the East is neither long nor particularly edifying.
While I am far from confident of my conclusion, the notion of a Christian social order imposed by a secular state does not appear to have much to back it up historically: even in the age of faith, the kings who took seriously the command to rule as God’s stewards were rare enough that they are remembered today as saints.
Today, it would seem to have no more to do with reality than would sumptuary laws; the advocacy of a Christian state by an excommunicated bishop whose past statements can reasonably be interpreted to suggest that an imperfect but acceptable Christian state could be found in National Socialist Germany hardly strengthens any argument to the contrary.
…and of course, post-Vatican II secularized Catholic societes have been ringing success stories, right Susan?
Well, obviously Williamson’s not much help with the delicate question of how to reconcile the idea of a Christian social order with the statements of the Church as expressed in recent encyclicals and the CCC. We know his solution — effectively, schism — but it’s not an acceptable one. But even forgetting the pragmatic question and focusing only on the principle, there are plenty of complexities to work out. Even in the Middle Ages, I think the Church’s position on this was fairly nuanced. Of course they didn’t suffer in the same way from ubiquitous indifferentism, but religious minorities were tolerated to a certain degree and even recognized to have something like rights. I’m not an expert on the subject, but I remember a passage from the Summa, for example, addressing the question of whether the infants of Jewish or pagan parents ought to be baptized on the sly. So, if you work in a daycare center, and have unbaptized infants in your care, should you baptize them and just not tell their parents?
St. Thomas says no. For one thing, they won’t get a proper Christian upbringing, so you wouldn’t really be doing them any favors. But also, he actually says that it would violate the rights of the parents to baptize their children against their will. An interesting comment, no? Anyway, as I say, it’s a difficult question; if we’re to be good Aristotelians (which of course we should!), it seems plain that a virtuous society will have to be ordered around the the truth. Unlike Aristotle, we know that the truth will have to be Catholic truth, and it seems unlikely that a society could order itself around Catholic truth in any way other than consciously. It doesn’t clearly follow, however, that the public practice of all other religions would need to be banned. Nobody that I know of has proposed that virtuous societies should ban all vice and everything that leads to it. Or, well, possibly that’s Williamson’s position, but that surely is not the consensus of great Catholic thinkers over the centuries.
Despite the copious examples cited by my anonymous critic, I’m hard-pressed to blame the secularization of Europe on Vatican II, despite my very strong tendency to blame absolutely everything on the council.
In France, the tension dates back to the Revolution of 1789 (the fact that the SSPX is obsessed with this does not mean that they got their history lesson wrong) and it practically speaking resolved to no one’s real satisfaction late in the pontificate of Leo XIII.
The loss of the papal states was resolved in the twenties,although Italy and the public influence of religion there is always a special case.
Catholic Germany is subsumed into a Lutheran-to-secular, depending on who was in charge at the moment, by the 1870s.
I rather fear that original sin, not the effort to turn the state into an instrument of Church policy (which alomst always ended up working in reverse) is the explanation for the secular West.
Susan, I don’t know who wrote the above comment, but I don’t think the point is so much about Vatican II. The point is that this comment:
“One cannot help but be struck by the historical reality that the union of church and state has typically done the Church little good.”
is rather silly. Backing it up with one or two highly localized examples only makes it that much more absurd. The question of correct relationship between Church and state is a highly complicated one, but certainly these two things were more closely unified throughout the Middle Ages than they are today… with a wide variety of ramifications. Your one-paragraph analysis is hardly illuminating when the question is so vast. This last post makes your position even stranger. Whether or not you think Vatican II is to blame for the secular West, surely secularism can partially be blamed for the secular West?