http://distributist.blogspot.com/2007/01/states-obligation-to-recognize-and.html

The State's Obligation to Recognize and Protect the Catholic Church

The prime papal teachings on the subject date chiefly from the 19th and early 20th century, since that was when the Church had to face the issue most acutely. Some, therefore, think that the encyclicals that date from that time are therefore no longer relevant and may be safely ignored.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

It almost seems customary among many modern Catholics to think that any document before Vatican II can be safely ignored. Vatican II itself taught the exact opposite and makes it quite clear that such an attitude is not only not Catholic but not Christian. Indeed, it is scarcely human. How can one ignore one’s own history and traditions? But it is much worse in a Catholic since traditio – the handing on of traditional teachings and practices – is the very essence of Catholicism. We were given a Fidei Depositum (Revelation – the "Deposit of Faith") and told by our Lord Himself to hand it on faithfully. Therefore to ignore Catholic tradition is already to disobey Christ and that radically. Indeed, if we did so fully we would be able to ignore even Christ Himself, since He is, humanly speaking, a figure of the past. Likewise we could ignore the Bible, since it is a document of the past.

Thus is demonstrated the absurdity of the theological position that diminishes the authority of past tradition.

However, such a view is so current today that very few now read the great papal encyclicals of the past, although they form part of the magisterial teaching of the Church and often contain infallible teaching, the denial of which constitutes apostasy.

So what do the former popes teach about the Christian constitution of states? I have listed below just a few of the many encyclicals on the subject considering that most will not have time to read them all. I start with the condemnation by Blessed Pius IX of the idea that the Church and the State should be separate. In short, any Catholic state worthy of the name must first recognise the truth of the Catholic religion. Second, it must give a special, protected place to the Catholic religion. It is a grave error to say that a Catholic state can allow all religions an equal footing before the law with no special position given to the true religion.

If a Catholic state fails to recognise the Catholic religion as true then that state is putting itself above God and God’s truth. That is a reversal of right order. God is above the state not vice versa.

It is not enough to say that all the state need do is recognise the Natural Law. States must also recognise God, truth and the true religion. That is the obligation of all states. Catholic states have a more pressing obligation since they call themselves "Catholic".

Naturally, the realisation of these obligations becomes difficult, or even impossible, the less Catholic a state is. In a non-Catholic state the obligation remains but cannot be realised and circumstances mitigate, as they do in all judgments and laws. Thus Catholics still owe a duty of allegiance to their own state even if it is not Catholic or where the state refuses to recognise the truth of the Catholic religion. They must still "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s", as our Lord Himself expressly taught2, but that does not absolve them from continuing to work for a fully Catholic society.

In short, no Catholic may settle for the "second best" position of saying that there is no obligation to work for a Catholic state and that one may be satisfied with a state that is merely neutral in matters of religion. However, prudence must, as ever, be exercised. Where there is no prospect of the state ever becoming Catholic in the lifetime of an individual Catholic and, indeed, when to proclaim publicly such an intent may actually do harm to the Catholic cause in public life, then it would be imprudent to make such a proclamation or even to speak of it openly. Nevertheless, it remains the ideal that should maintain a place in the breast of every true Catholic.

If any man – be he even a priest or a bishop – tell you otherwise, then he has departed from the Faith and, what is more, is seeking to destroy your faith, too. As even the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC)3 so succinctly puts it, quoting Centesimus Annus of John Paul II:

Moreover, the right to a certain degree of religious freedom is not denied thereby. On the contrary, the Catholic State is better able than any other to grant the proper degree of freedom to practitioners of other religions – a freedom that the secular state is unable and unwilling to do, either by giving too much or not enough.

It is not a coincidence that King James II of Great Britain and Ireland in his Declaration of Indulgence of 16875 gave a freedom to minority religions that the Anglican establishment utterly refused to give and that, together with the fact that James was a Catholic, is the reason why the Anglican Whigs conspired with the Dutch Protestants to overthrow him, their rightful and lawful ruler. Anglicanism was then imposed by force and by one of the most savage penal codes the world had ever seen. Some scholars even have the cheek to suggest that this was a victory for "liberty"! The CCC teaches:

Moreover, the Church gave special pride of place to the Catholic Roman Emperor in its liturgy – including at the Solemn Intercessions on Good Friday and in the Exultet at the Easter Vigil on Holy Saturday – right up until as late as 1955 when the late Archbishop Bugnini rather secretively removed the imperial prayers from the Roman rite of liturgy.

In its "Collect for the Emperor" the Church used to pray:

The political realisation of "Gospel values" was thus not some hippie-like commune seemingly beloved of some utopian Christian sects, and even of some modern Catholics, nor even of some modern, religiously liberal, Federal Democratic Capitalist Republic as one might be mistaken for thinking from reading the political writings of some American theologians, but rather the Christianised Roman Empire beginning with the Emperors Constantine and Theodosius.

That is simply a matter of historical and theological record.

Even today, the Church enjoys cordial relations with the remaining Catholic monarchies such as Belgium, Spain, Luxemburg and Liechtenstein.

Equally, however, the Church, despite favouring the Roman imperial system, does not rule out other forms of government. Indeed, history gives us the examples of the Florentine and Venetian Republics which, although largely aristocratic republics, nevertheless placed great emphasis upon their parliamentary customs.

We should also remember that it was the Church itself that preserved the democratic ideals of the ancients but without their reliance upon slavery (both the Greek and the Roman republics depended upon slaves who had no votes). Indeed, over the centuries Catholic kings and popes gradually abolished the institution of slavery replacing ancient slavery with the Feudal serf and then replacing the serf and the unfree villeins, bordars and cottars with a free, land-owning peasantry and villeinage.

That happy state of affairs was exploded by the Protestant Reformation which stole the common lands from the free peasants, surreptitiously invaded their rights and, by blood, murder and rapine, enriched the partisans of the Reformation out of the plunder of the monasteries and religious houses which were, in a demonstrably concrete form, the infrastructure of social welfare and the patrimony of the poor.

It was also the Catholic Dioceses and monasteries that had helped to preserve much of the democratic traditions that survive today. The Chapter of Canons elected the bishop and the monks elected their Abbot.

Even the Roman Emperor himself was elected from among suitable candidates by the 7 Prince-Electors of the Empire who, themselves, had the same status as the Cardinals who elect the Pope.

The Roman emperors, moreover, helped to preserve the spirit of democracy by granting charters of, and rights to, self-government and election for districts, groups and institutions. The people of the Tyrol region of the Holy Roman Empire had for long elected their own deputies and had their own Parliament at Innsbruck without whose approval they could not be taxed or conscripted. This was eventually formalised in an Imperial brief of 1342 by the Holy Roman Emperor, Kaiser Maximilian I. Now this was over 300 years before the English Whigs demanded "no taxation without representation" (all the while persecuting Catholics and minority religions in England!) and over 400 years before the American Colonists made their demands at the time of the Boston "Tea Party"!

The Holy Roman Empire itself, whilst under the overall suzerainty of the Emperor, was, in fact, divided into a Distributist patchwork of hundreds of kingdoms, duchies, counties, baronies and lordships, often ruled by abbeys or bishops, and power was diffused and decentralised in a way that we can hardly imagine today with our over-centralised organs of state, Internal Revenue Service, State Departments and heavy-handed, over-centralised government departments and law-enforcement agencies.

This same "Distributism" has been much extolled by more recent Catholic writers notably men like G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc who both founded the "Distributist League". Belloc writes extensively, in his book The Servile State, of the Distributism of Catholic Europe in former times and of the damage caused by the Protestant Reformation and of the gradual return of slavery and servility in Western society as a result.

In business and commerce in the days of Catholic Christendom, careful rules and customs prevailed under the Guild system which had begun back in Roman times and which allowed for a steady progression from Apprentice to Journeyman to Master, ensured full employment for all trades, a fair price for the consumer, a high standard of quality of goods and services, a social welfare system for all guildsmen and their families and the spiritual care of, and suffrages for, the members and their families.

Usury was forbidden as being alien to justice and, as Aristotle had written, "an exceedingly unnatural way to earn one’s living"20. Thus men could not make money simply by having money but had to work to earn their living or, at least, share the risk of any business venture and not simply demand their loan back with interest even if the business failed. Banking was thus run on Christian lines.

This, in turn, was backed up by the largest private system of social welfare and community care that the world has ever seen – the monastic system. Yes, it was a private system not a Socialist system owned by the government like our modern cumbersome, inefficient, corrupt and bureaucratic systems of social welfare and community care. Indeed, unlike so much modern bureaucracy, the monastic system of welfare was entirely founded upon charity in its true sense, that is, of love – love both divine and human.

So much leisure time was there in those days that between ¼ and 1/3 of the year was marked off as "Holy days" when servile work ceased. Compare this with the measly 2 weeks annual vacation which the average worker in the USA gets to spend with his or her family!

Indeed, there was so much leisure time that the people used much of it to build the great Cathedrals as an act of worship, love and homage to God. They laboured out of love and freely to construct these great monuments of love for God. They were not compelled to this task but did it out of love for God.

That, in itself, is an astonishing fact against which there is nothing to compare in our secularist age.

The laws and the courts were all founded upon principles of biblical and Natural Law from which developed the whole system of both Roman and Common law which, even today in our secularist world, are still the foundation of our legal systems.

Education was carefully organised and run with Diocesan, monastic, local, municipal, City, Guild and Royal foundations of all sizes and each carefully seeking out worthy and deserving candidates for schooling with a particular eye on future priests and clergy. There was a widespread system for detecting the brighter sons of the poor to benefit from the very considerable range of sources of funding to educate them. It was during the Christian centuries that the great educational foundations were established, most notably the great universities of Europe like Paris, Bologna, Oxford, Cambridge, Salamanca, Coimbra, Heidelberg, Cracow’s Jagiellionian, Vienna and so many others, not least in Rome itself.

Modern science itself has its origins in the Christian centuries among Catholic scholars. The law of impetus, discovered and named by John Philoponus (John the Grammarian or John of Alexandria) at the 6th century University of Alexandria, and later expanded by the post-Lateran IV scholars at the Sorbonne, like Jean Buridan, is almost identical to Newton’s law of inertia. Indeed, Newton "borrowed" the idea from these earlier Catholic scholars. Scientists recognise that Newton’s law is the foundation of most modern science. Yet it was discovered by Roman Catholic scholars during the Christian centuries at a time when Church and State worked closely together.

Indeed, the condemnations of the false Aristotelianism of the Cathars and Albigensians by the 4th Lateran Council of the Church ensured that time was not wasted on such false ideas but was re-focussed upon more fruitful areas. The result was Buridan’s re-discovery of the principle of impetus and a huge leap forward in scientific understanding - and this not from an academic "free-for-all" but rather following an actual condemnation of false ideas by an Ecumenical Council of the Catholic Church! Yet modern secularist scientists will tell you that the Catholic Church is opposed to science. On the contrary, the Catholic Church founded modern science!

It is during the Christian centuries of the Middle Ages that the first parliaments of Europe have their foundation. Count Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, laid the foundations for the modern English parliament in 1265. He and his father, with a tiny army of only 750 Catholic knights, had defeated a huge army of some 50,000 Albigensians at the Battle of Muret in 1213, 2 years before the end of the 4th Lateran Council.

The Spanish Cortes, the Polish Sejm, the French Parlement and the Imperial Diet or Reichstag and the local Landtag and Landschaft of the German lands begin to take their modern shape over this period when Catholic Christendom is the unchallenged system of government in Europe. Parliamentary democracy has its beginnings then and not in the English Civil War or the American Revolution, still less the French Revolution. Parliamentary representation is an idea devised by Roman Catholic Christendom. That is merely an historical fact. Doubters need only look up the historical sources.

In those days, even wars were carefully regulated by laws, rules and customs in a manner designed greatly to mitigate their savagery. This set of rules formed part of the Christian Code of Chivalry by which knights were enjoined to exercise the virtues of compassion, gentleness, mercy and forbearance toward others even, nay especially, their enemies. They were to treat women with especial care and respect and their first task was to defend and extend, by lawful means, the boundaries of Christendom – the kingdom of Christ upon the earth. In this respect, the Roman Emperor was the First Knight of Christendom and his primary duty was to protect Christendom, the Church and the Pope.

Here, indeed, then, was a system designed entirely upon "Gospel values".

All of this was shattered at the Protestant Reformation.

Moreover, the Protestant governments, in stark contrast to the Catholic governments, actually re-introduced slavery and it was as a direct result of the Protestant Reformation that laws forbidding the enslaving of human beings were over-turned. Thus the infamous slave trade began once again to flourish, with Europeans daring to call themselves "Christians" making themselves fabulously rich by forcibly enslaving their fellow man.

Those who doubt this need only read the Recopilacion de las Leyes de Indias (‘the Compilation of the Laws of the Indies’)21 of the Spanish Habsburg kings and emperors, proclaimed almost immediately after the discovery of the New World which absolutely forbade the enslaving of the native Indians and demanded their fair and equitable treatment so as to persuade them, by the equity of Christian laws, that they should themselves consider converting to Christianity.

Then read the laws of the thoroughly Protestant State of Massachusetts regarding slavery and you will see a very different view of things.

Massachusetts was the first slave-holding colony in New England. Slavery there is said to have predated the settlement of Massachusetts Bay colony in 1629.

Samuel Maverick, apparently New England’s first slaveholder, arrived in Massachusetts in 1624 and, according to John Gorham Palfrey, owned two Negroes before John Winthrop, who later became governor of the colony, arrived in 163022.

The Pequot War in 1637 provided and opportunity for slaving. The Pequot Indians of central Connecticut, pressed hard by encroaching European settlements attacked the town of Wetherfield. Later the Massachusetts and Connecticut militias raided the Pequot village near Mystic, Connecticut with much slaughter and the women and children were enslaved in New England. Roger Williams of Rhode Island wrote to Winthrop congratulating him saying that God had placed in his hands ‘another drove of Adam’s degenerate seed.’

In 1645, Emanuel Downing, brother-in-law of John Winthrop, wrote to him of his desire for a "juste warre" with the Pequots, to enable the capture of enough Indian men, women, and chiddren to exchange in Barbados for black slaves, saying the colony would never thrive "until we get ... a stock of slaves sufficient to doe all our business."23

By 1676, Boston ships had pioneered a slave trade to Madagascar, and they were selling black human beings to Virginians by 1678. At home, the Puritans generally took black African slaves to the West Indies and exchanged them for experienced slaves to bring back to New England. Massachusetts merchants and ships were supplying slaves to Connecticut by 1680 and Rhode Island by 1696.

The principal families of New England were tied up in the slave trade. Cornelius Waldo, maternal great-grandfather of Ralph Waldo Emerson, was a large scale slave merchant.

Massachusetts, like many American colonies, had roots in a very fundamentalist Protestantism. This did not prevent them from becoming slave-owners, however – far from it. All Puritans considered themselves to be God’s Elect, but they seemed to believe that the slave-trade was not forbidden by the God of Israel’s Law. The Calvinist Puritans seem to have considered that blacks were a people required by God to serve whites. Cotton Mather, the New England Puritan, even told black slaves because they were the "miserable children of Adam and Noah" and that slavery was their punishment.

A 1642 Massachusetts law of 1641 established rules for slaves "which the law of God, established in Israel concerning such people, doth morally require"24 expressly claiming a Scriptural basis for their slavery laws.

The fact that English-speaking people tend to live in English-speaking countries, not least those former British colonies like Canada, the USA and so on, has tended to permit a certain blindness to these facts and to result in comparisons with the Catholic monarchies odious to the latter and favourable to the former. The reality is rather different. It has been largely the legislation of the Catholic monarchs which, under the guidance of the Church, has been more favourable to true human freedom and dignity. Protestant legislation has varied from the thoroughly oppressive – like the penal codes introduced after the Dutch invasion of England in 1688 and the expulsion of King James II – to the downright bizarre in Calvin’s Geneva or in the form of some of the early Puritan legislation in the American colonies.

Once these historical facts are appreciated it soon can be seen that the teachings of the popes about the need to retain a strong relationship between Church and State are not the fruit of some obscurantist, dark, self-serving, oppressive "Popish Plot" designed to reduce mankind to slavery and servitude, as the Puritan Protestants and Secular Humanists would have us believe, but rather the very opposite.

There is a much stronger case for arguing that Puritanism and its bastard offspring, Secular Humanism, have conspired to return much of mankind to servitude and misery.

The strong influence of Catholic teaching on the political life of a nation is the best way to guarantee freedom, security, wealth, the happiness and holiness of any people and, ultimately, their salvation in the next life. Since Catholicism is the true religion this should not surprise us! How could truth have the opposite effect? If it did, it could hardly be called truth.

Moreover, despite the further false propaganda of the Church’s enemies, history testifies to this. Institutions founded in the Christian Middle Ages when Church and State worked in harmony, survive to this day.

Let us then see what the popes have to teach us about the relationship between Church and State.

Syllabus Errorum (The Syllabus of Errors) (Bl Pius IX) –

"On Modern Errors"

Condemned proposition: ’55.
The Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church.
— Allocution "Acerbissimum," Sept. 27, 1852.’

Quas Primas (Pius XI) –

"On the Kingship of Christ"

Une Fois Encore (St Pius X) –

"On the separation of Church and State"


Vehementer Nos (St Pius X) –

"On the French law of separation of Church and State"

Iamdudum (St Pius X) –

"On the law of separation of Church and State in Portugal"

In these three encyclicals, St. Pius X expressly rejects the laws for separating the Church from the State brought in by anti-clericals and secularists in France and Portugal. These laws were designed not only to de-couple the Church from any part of government but were designed to allow the state to interfere with the institutions of the Church and to attack them and the Church generally. Under similar laws the children-seers of Fatima were persecuted by the anti-clericals of Portugal.

Notre Charge Apostolique (Our Apostolic Mandate) (St Pius X) –

"Condemnation of the Sillon"

Immortale Dei (Leo XIII) –

"On the Christian constitution of states"