Given group dynamics and human psychology, it can be helpful when an outsider to your tribe critiques your tribe’s extremes. Outsiders are sometimes taken more seriously than unfashionable tribesmen. Therefore, as a cradle Catholic who is not an integralist, I appreciate what political philosopher Kevin Vallier (Eastern Orthodox) accomplishes in his new book, All the Kingdoms of the World.

This book critiques Catholic integralism from a philosophical standpoint. For those who do not know, integralism affirms two things: 1) the pope has an indirect power to direct civil authorities in a Catholic regime toward spiritual ends, even legitimating punishments against heretics and apostates; and 2) this arrangement is ideal. This is not exactly Vallier’s definition of it, but it will work for my purposes here. Integralism aims for a revival of medieval Christendom, a historical phenomenon worth considering here because understanding its place in history is relevant for appreciating Vallier’s contribution in this book.

The Decline and Fall of Christendom

Christendom was a functional, albeit ultimately unstable, political reality. It featured an informal separation of powers and some checks and balances among monarchs or emperors, feudal lords, and the Church, which gave the Church itself a salutary degree of independence. It also facilitated social cooperation and transnational communication and trade, building what Joseph Henrich calls the “collective brain” of European civilization. This was a world in which toleration and peace were secured by separation of religions, and baptism was a mark of membership in a political community. It made sense within the cultural horizon in which it was situated, and supporters believed that the arrangement supported civil order and provided security for the Church’s own freedom.

Moreover, contrary to popular opinion, overt religious persecution was relatively rare. Noel D. Johnson and Mark Koyama point this out in their fantastic book Persecution & Toleration. The execution of heretics, for instance, was the exception, not the norm. Nonetheless, it is a mark against this type of regime that it could make heresy seem equivalent to treason, thus persuading even virtuous and holy people that such practices were acceptable. Although it is valuable to understand it in its historical context, we can still be grateful to have overcome it.

It was, in fact, inevitable that it would collapse. The capacity of temporal authorities to rule in the Middle Ages was very limited. They lacked the modern territorial state’s ability to promulgate and enforce laws over large geographical areas, or to collect their own taxes. Most authority was delegated. Moreover, medieval leaders relied heavily on the Church’s support for their legitimacy. As they developed power on par with the Church, often mimicking the Church’s own bureaucratic organization, the often rocky subordination of temporal rule to that of the spiritual authority of the Church became even less secure (see Johnson & Koyama). And, more and more, in response to the greater pluralism within political jurisdictions, the ethos of budding modern states became increasingly directed at securing, by any means necessary, the peace of the realm. Ultimately this legitimated such states in the eyes of citizens and taxpayers.

This had some good effects, for instance, laws tended to become more general and fair, and less beholden to the arbitrary whims of local rule, but it also created new problems arising from more concentrated power that were only resolved with the development of modern constitutionalism. This early modern period was also an unhappy time in Church history, politically speaking, because it was difficult to protect the Church’s freedom except by submitting to absolutist and incompetent Catholic monarchs whose rule would also prove to be unstable. This eventually led either to revolution or to prudent modernization (as in the Austro-Hungarian empire). In short, we can be grateful for the blessings of Christendom, but by facilitating the growth of European civilization, it was ultimately bound to fail through its own success.

Implementing Integralism: Improbability, Instability, and Injustice

Vallier is quite good at drawing insights from this history that can be defended philosophically and economically. In the two best chapters of the book, Chapters 4 and 5, he shows just how anachronistic modern integralism is. Vallier argues that all attempts to use state power to transition to an integralist regime are either astronomically improbable or will involve injustices that no faithful Catholic, integralist or otherwise, could endorse. To show this, he constructs a transition model that identifies the various stages integralists would have to pass to achieve their goals, providing generous probabilities of success in each stage, and calculating in the end the compound probability, which is infinitesimally low even with the most generous assumptions. 

In the fifth chapter, Vallier brings his expertise in political theory and his competence in economic modeling to argue that even on conditions very favorable to the integralist, an integralist regime would be highly unstable and could easily devolve into an abhorrent totalitarian regime. This is a devastating argument. It is defeating to know that achieving an ideal is already nearly impossible and that it likely would not last a generation even if achieved. At that point, why would anyone call it an ideal?

The sixth chapter closes out Vallier’s argument against integralism. There he considers the logic of the Church’s traditional prohibition against forced conversion and argues that state coercion against the baptized for heresy and apostasy should also be forbidden under the same principles—unless integralists are right to see baptism as a “moral transformer” sufficient to make state coercion acceptable. Vallier argues it is not. Although his argument is strong, it does not leave integralists without possible responses. Vallier will likely have to respond in the future to objections to strengthen his own case.

The Historical Argument for Integralism

The earlier chapters are particularly crucial because Vallier introduces the reader to modern integralism and provides a historical account of the relationship between the Catholic Church and temporal authorities, as well as the teachings of popes, councils, and theologians regarding this relationship. He does this to assess the historical argument for integralism as representing Catholic doctrine. 

This involves a comparison between the positions of two groups of Catholics: 1) integralists like Thomas Pink, who argue that the popes and councils before Vatican II affirmed integralism, and that we should therefore interpret the latter council’s Declaration on Religious Liberty, Dignitatis Humanae, as merely a shift in policy and not doctrine; and 2) those Catholics who also apply a “hermeneutic of continuity” to Dignitatis Humanae, but affirm that it is nonetheless opposed to integralism. Vallier ultimately finds the first group’s account more consistent with history and this conclusion will certainly make non-integralist Catholics—like myself—uneasy.

It may be that given what we now know about the possibilities for securing peace, justice, and the freedom of the Church without need for something like Christendom, integralism can no longer be justified.

It is important to note, however, that he mostly leaves aside consideration of the position of Catholics who have a standard interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae but realize it was a change from what nineteenth-century popes affirmed about politics. That is, although Vallier briefly mentions Pope Benedict XVI’s “hermeneutic of reform” (defended by Martin Rhonheimer), it is not his primary focus. In my opinion, the case for the traditional interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae would be stronger if we followed the path of Pope Benedict, which I will discuss shortly. 

Still, I do not find convincing Thomas Pink’s claim that Dignitatis Humanae is merely a shift in the Church’s policy. For Pope Benedict XVI, it was an abandonment of the older political theological ideal because it posited a new understanding of the relationship between the Church and State. Moreover, by affirming the importance of religious liberty for “civil coexistence” and “as an intrinsic consequence of the truth that cannot be externally imposed,” the Church is, Pope Benedict elaborates, “making its own an essential principle of the modern State,” and by doing so, it “has recovered the deepest patrimony of the Church.”

Pink and other traditionalists make much out of the Dignitatis Humanae’s statement that “it leaves untouched traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ.” But this statement needs to be read together with the adjacent sentence:

Religious freedom, in turn, which men demand as necessary to fulfill their duty to worship God, has to do with immunity from coercion in civil society. Therefore it leaves untouched traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ (emphasis mine).

Whatever this document means by “traditional Catholic doctrine” concerning the “moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion,” it surely cannot include doctrines about coercion in civil society, or else this qualification would not make sense. Therefore, we might ask, what are those traditional Catholic doctrines it leaves intact? A straightforward interpretation is that it is referring to the duty, mentioned a few sentences prior, that “all men are bound to seek the truth, especially in what concerns God and His Church, and to embrace the truth they come to know, and to hold fast to it.” But what about the duty of “society”? An authoritative interpretation of this appears in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2105:

The duty of offering God genuine worship concerns man both individually and socially. This is “the traditional Catholic teaching on the moral duty of individuals and societies toward the true religion and the one Church of Christ” [DH 1, 3]. By constantly evangelizing men, the Church works toward enabling them “to infuse the Christian spirit into the mentality and mores, laws and structures of the communities in which [they] live” [Apostolicam Actuositatem 13, no. 1]. The social duty of Christians is to respect and awaken in each man the love of the true and the good. It requires them to make known the worship of the one true religion which subsists in the Catholic and apostolic Church [cf. DH 1]. Christians are called to be the light of the world. Thus, the Church shows forth the kingship of Christ over all creation and in particular over human societies.

Based on this passage, Vallier may have granted the traditionalists too much when he assumes that the duty of “society” in Dignitatis Humanae 1 refers to a duty of a state run by Catholics to become confessional, even only symbolically. Although the document certainly does not oppose toothless confessional states, it is silent about whether they are ideal.

To respond more fully to Pink, moreover, all of this should be read in light of what is said at the end of Dignitatis Humanae, no. 1:

the council intends to develop (evolvere) the doctrine of recent popes on the inviolable rights of the human person and the constitutional order of society” (emphasis mine).

Therefore, to “develop” its doctrine on these two points seems to imply that it is not simply presenting a pragmatic policy statement but a development of the Church’s own theology regarding “inviolable rights of the human person” and the “constitutional order of society.”

Finally, it should be noted that most of my fellow non-integralist Catholics disagree with integralists like Pink in their claim that Dignitatis Humanae is consistent with affirming an integralist regime as ideal. Whether it leaves intact the hypothetical authority of the pope to exercise an indirect power within certain regimes is a secondary question, and inconsequential if the document treats regimes that secure religious liberty for all citizens as superior. Another question, overlooked by integralists, is whether our knowledge of political possibilities today now precludes a return to the earlier arrangement: it may be that given what we now know about the possibilities for securing peace, justice, and the freedom of the Church without need for something like Christendom, it can no longer be justified. Pope Benedict XVI provided conceptual tools for making just such a claim.

The Hermeneutic of Reform

When Vallier shows that some popes affirmed integralism, he is probably right. The more interesting question, however, is how we understand the opinions of these popes in relation to the deposit of faith, the big “T” Tradition of the Church. As mentioned above, one thinker who provided us with tools for making sense of this relationship was Pope Benedict XVI (or as a theologian, Joseph Ratzinger). In addition to his Christmas address to the Curia in 2005, Pope Benedict discussed the nature of Catholic social doctrine in Jesus of Nazareth, volume 1.

In the former, Benedict provides a useful interpretive lens for reading old papal and conciliar documents about Catholic social teaching, especially as regards religious liberty, when he says that “the Church’s decisions on contingent matters—for example, certain practical forms of liberalism or a free interpretation of the Bible—should necessarily be contingent themselves.” He contextualizes, moreover, the papal teachings about religious liberty, or opposition to it, in the nineteenth century as contingent reactions to the extremes of European secularism. In that earlier debate, the argument for religious liberty was based on a claim of religious relativism, which the Church surely must reject.

In Jesus of Nazareth, moreover, speaking as a theologian and not as pope, Benedict XVI draws certain conclusions about Catholic social doctrine by reflecting on a distinction others have noted in the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) between what are called apodictic law and casuistic law, between the perennial moral norms and principles affirmed by the Mosaic Law, and those applications that he says “emerged from practice and [which] form a practically oriented legal corpus that serves to build up a realistic social order, corresponding to the concrete possibilities of a society in a particular historical and cultural situation” (emphasis mine). These concrete applications of general principles, he adds, were even critiqued by the Prophets and by Jesus when they contradicted the higher, perennial principles. This distinction has significance beyond the Torah: 

Consequently, Christianity constantly has to reshape and reformulate social structures and “Christian social teaching.” There will always be new developments to correct what has gone before. In the inner structure of the Torah, in its further development under the critique of the Prophets, and in Jesus’ message, which takes up both elements, Christianity finds the wide scope for necessary historical evolution.

Pink makes too much of a particular canon of Trent, which, on its face, only condemns a very specific proposal of Erasmus, a proposal almost all Catholics would reject. Setting that aside, it may be that all papal doctrines about concrete implementation of social order that go beyond the few beliefs about politics that come from Scripture and Apostolic Tradition (e.g., the importance of obedience to political authorities [Romans 13]), and those that go beyond perennial natural law principles and norms, are open to revision. What we need to be clear about is the relationship between natural law principles and norms, on one hand, and political prudence, which is highly relevant to Catholic social doctrine. We see in the modern history of social doctrine, in fact, that what is secure and consistent are those general principles and norms of natural law and natural law social ethics—e.g., the common good, justice, solidarity, subsidiarity, the sanctity of life, and even more remote secondary precepts of natural law like the norm against polygamy or that affirming the indissolubility of marriage, etc. These principles and norms remain unchallenged as various popes come to sometimes radically different conclusions about their application in the realm of politics. (Compare, for instance, the political economies of Pius XI and John Paul II.) 

I hope that Vallier’s treatment of these matters nonetheless awakens non-integralist Catholics to the fact that these historical issues need to be addressed if people are to find the standard interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae credible. The “hermeneutic of continuity” is too simple: there was reform at a level of reformable political doctrine, and continuity at the level of the deposit of faith and of natural-law principles and norms. The fact that a good-faith critic of integralism outside the Church, Kevin Vallier, has concluded that the integralists make a stronger case for integralism representing Catholic doctrine should also alert bishops and theologians that it is time to enter these discussions and make some clarifications.