Tag Archives: Separation of Church and State

On Politicians and Receiving Communion

May 26, 2021Abortion, American Founding, Bioethics, Catholic Social Teaching, Church, Church and State, Church Authority, EucharistAmericanism, Arian Heresy, Arianism, Art of the Possible, Catholic Church in America, Catholic Politicians, Heresy, NARAL, Senator Tim Kaine, Separation of Church and Statetwowingstogod@gmail.com

Last week, Senator Tim Kaine from Virginia wrote an Opinion piece in the National Catholic Reporter weighing in on the debate over Catholic politicians who openly support abortion and the reception of Holy Communion. The Senator clearly articulates the challenges faced by politicians who attempt to adhere to the Catholic faith when Christendom has eroded. Although he does not frame it using the same terms, he speaks of applying the principle of the Art of the Possible when fighting against the Culture of Death. Despite the good beginning, ultimately Senator Kaine’s opinion reveals him not to be Catholic, but an Americanist.

Americanism was first condemned as a heresy in the Church by Pope Leo XIII in a letter to the American Bishops in 1899. The Pope condemned the infection of Catholicism by the American “spirit of independence which passed too easily from the political to the religious sphere.” It attempts to replace the Holy Spirit with the Spirit of `76 and to focus only on areas of agreement with other Americans.

Revealing the Americanist Heresy

Only an Americanist would say that “bishops demanding that Catholics in public life not only live according to church doctrine but additionally shape the law, even to include the threat of criminal prosecution and punishment, to enshrine church doctrine on sexuality as mandatory for all Americans is contrary to our basic liberty.” And only an Americanist would ask, “Why would government require that Catholic sexuality doctrine, or Sharia law, or Orthodox Jewish rules about Sabbath observance, be followed by all?”

A Catholic would never need to ask that question because the answer is simple: Catholicism is true and the others are false. At the very least we can say that “Catholic sexuality doctrine” is binding upon all because it is based on the natural law. He has committed the fallacy of equivocation. As a Catholic he should know and believe that the only protection of our “basic liberty” comes through following the truth, both as revealed in nature and directly by God.

The law most certainly should be shaped according to the truth and not according to the whims of the masses. His job is not “representing a pluralistic society” but of representing God (Romans 13:1) from whom his authority comes. The Americanist always believes there is a separation in Church and State, but the Catholic knows that just as separation of body and soul leads to death, so too a “wall of separation” between Church and State leads to death of a society (and its members).

Americanism Leads to Arianism

Furthermore, the Senator attempts to put up a wall of separation between the man Jesus and the Word adding Arianism to his list of heresies. He says that “a decision by U.S. bishops to elevate issues of human sexuality, however important, above all others seems contrary to the Gospel. No reading of the life of Jesus would suggest these issues as his primary, or even secondary, concern. His towering message is about love of neighbor as oneself with a special focus on the poor, sick, hungry, marginalized.”

First of all, there is a reading “of the life of Jesus” that suggests these issues are of significant concern. That reading would include three mentions of human sexuality in the Sermon on the Mount regarding purity (5:8), lust (5:27) and divorce (5:31-32). Likewise in Chapter 19 of Matthew he speaks of marriage being restored to how is was in the beginning. Given how deeply sexuality concerns human beings, we would be surprised to find the Word becoming Flesh and ignoring those things as the Senator suggests.

Senator Kaine also makes the Arian mistake of not grasping that the Word of God as revealed throughout Scripture is the same Word of God Who took flesh. This is why we must look upon the Scriptures as a whole and not just focus on the “life of Jesus”.

The Senator also treats abortion as an “issue of human sexuality.” Certainly, the child being conceived has something to do with human sexuality, but the fact that they are legally killed is a matter of social justice. His rhetorical bait and switch allows him to speak of Jesus’ “towering message about love of neighbor…with a special focus on the poor…marginalized” and then support legislation that takes the most vulnerable, the most marginalized in the womb and sentences them to death.

Americanism and the Reception of Communion

Animated by the Americanist spirit, we should not be surprised to find the Senator taking exception to the practice withholding Communion from Catholic politicians who obstinately remain in support of grave sins such as abortion and gay marriage. The “wall of separation” between Church and State likewise divides the Americanist’s heart from his political action. It is impossible, according to the Senator, that a bishop or a priest should judge the heart of politician by his action.

A moment’s reflection upon this position shows its absurdity. Saying you are “personally opposed” to something while simultaneously supporting it by voting for and enacting legislation that leads to its spread is a lie. Personal opposition always manifests itself through public opposition. For a politician like Senator Kaine to have a 100% NARAL rating and to claim personal opposition is impossible.

The point is that someone may be in favor of abortion, but not let anyone else know. That is, in a certain sense, a “private” sin and nearly impossible for a bishop or a priest to judge. Therefore, you would not expect them to withhold Communion from that person. However once someone’s view has become public, that is, once they have made their will known, their sin likewise becomes public. Now, there is no longer a question of judging the interior disposition, but the exterior revelation of the interior disposition. In that case, the bishop or priest has an obligation to withhold Communion for the good of the person’s soul (more on this in a moment). Likewise, the bishop or priest would be contributing to the scandal attached to the public sin by not publicly correcting it. Notice that this would apply not just to politicians but to anyone and any public sin.

It might be contended that the politician might be in a state of ignorance regarding the seriousness of their sin. This of course allows for a private discussion in which the bishop or priest lets the person know that they are in an objective state of grave sin so as to remove any ignorance that might be present. This would give the person the opportunity to repent publicly without the appearance of having been chastised.

The Eucharist should be withheld for the person’s own good because to receive unworthily, that is, in a state of mortal sin, is to draw condemnation upon oneself (1 Cor 11:29). That is, they sin further by desecrating the Eucharist and do further harm to themselves. It is analogous to cutting a drug addict off from access to more drugs so they do no further harm to themselves. This is not being “judgmental” but instead is a pastoral act of love.

Before closing, it is worth responding to the concluding statement by Senator Kaine because it is a popular “go to” for people in his situation. “The Eucharist, although it is the fullness of sacramental life, is not a prize for the perfect but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak.” Medicine is not for the dead, but for those who are sick and weak. Those in a state of mortal sin are spiritually dead and incapable of eating—it is St Thomas who says a dead man cannot consume food; he first needs to be spiritually resurrected from the dead through Confession. Instead, the nourishment is for those who are in a state of grace but battling the weakness of concupiscence. The Church has always taught that the Eucharist is a Sacrament of the living and cannot be given to those who are spiritually dead without first going to Confession. Senator Kaine seems to be omitting this important detail from his argument.

Religious Liberty and the Coronavirus Quarantine

April 15, 2020American Founding, Church and State, Church Authority, Vatican IIAmerica, Dignitatis Humanae, Leo XIII, Religious Freedom, Religious Liberty, Separation of Church and State, Thomas Aquinastwowingstogod@gmail.com

One of the more closely related issues to the Coronavirus Quarantine is Religious Liberty. Some have argued that the State demanding the shutdown of Church’s infringes upon the right to religious freedom. Arguments have but put forth, at least from a Constitutional perspective, that in general the demand that churches be shut down is not unconstitutional. We will set the constitutional question aside for the time being and examine it from the Church’s traditional teaching on religious freedom.

From the outset it must be admitted that examining religious freedom from the standpoint of traditional teaching is not without controversy. Ever since the Second Vatican Council this teaching has been contested thanks to what amounts to a document plagued by ambiguity. This despite the fact that the Declaration on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis Humanae, makes it clear 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” (DH 1). This “traditional Catholic doctrine” can be summarized as follows.

The Traditional Teaching on Religious Liberty

Man has an obligation to worship God, not just in any manner that he wishes, but according to the religion that God has revealed. More to the point, man has an obligation to be a member of the Catholic Church. This membership however must be voluntary. No one can be forced to embrace the True Faith against his will. Two corollaries follow from this. First, no one may be forced from acting against his religious conviction in private or in public. Vatican II affirms this teaching when it says that religious “freedom means that all men are to be immune from coercion on the part of individuals or of social groups and of any human power, in such wise that no one is to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his own beliefs, whether privately or publicly, whether alone or in association with others, within due limits.”

In a discourse in 1953, Pope Pius XII said ‘That which does not correspond to truth or to the norm of morality has objectively no right to exist, to be spread or to be activated.” Because “error has no rights”, the public exercise of religion is another issue. Only the true religion has a right public expression and thus a person may be kept from publicly acting upon their religious convictions. To summarize, a man can’t be forced to act against his conscience but can be kept from acting on it. The second corollary then is that the State, because it is the custodian of the Common Good may prohibit public expression of false religions.

In Catholic countries the State may tolerate some public expression of false religions only for proportionate reasons in order to protect the Common Good. St. Thomas gives two reasons in general—to avoid civil unrest or avoid prejudicing non-Catholics toward the Church. What is clear is that this must be viewed merely as tolerance and not a right. No one has right to be tolerated. Either way a non-Catholic religion must not be given the space to flourish and propagate itself.

In non-Catholic States the obligation to protect and promote the true religion still remains in place, but the level of tolerance of false religions obviously increases because of the Common Good and the threat of civil unrest. This is where Dignitatis Humanae seems to veer from the traditional teaching of the Church saying both that “religious communities…have the right not to be hindered in their public teaching and witness to their faith, whether by the spoken or by the written word”(DH 4). It seems to confuse true rights from mere tolerance. How this can be reconciled with the traditional teaching remains to be seen.

The traditional understanding then differs from the American Model. The American Model treats all religions as equal. This is contrary to justice however. As Leo XIII put it:

“Justice therefore forbids, and reason itself forbids, the State to be godless; or to adopt a line of action which would end in godlessness-namely, to treat the various religions (as they call them) alike, and to bestow upon them promiscuously equal rights and privileges. Since, then, the profession of one religion is necessary in the State, that religion must be professed which alone is true, and which can be recognized without difficulty, especially in Catholic States, because the marks of truth are, as it were, engravers upon it.”
Pope Leo XIII, Libertas 21

This also means that the Church cannot be treated as merely one other social organization. This means that the constitutionality defense, namely that religious congregations have not been singled out, of the religious quarantine does not fly. The Church not only should be treated differently than other religious groups, but also from all social groups. Lumping it in with other “large gatherings” is unjust and does great harm to the Common Good.

Religious Liberty and the Power of the Church

The confusion regarding religious liberty has led to a grave misstep when it comes to the quarantining of the Church’s public worship and Sacraments. To be clear, the issue isn’t about whether Bishops should comply with the order of the State regarding not gathering. That question is best left up to the prudential judgment of the Bishops and their charism as Shepherds. But any compliance must be shown to be voluntary. It must be “we will comply” and not “we must comply”. Very few Bishops (if any) have made it clear that this is a voluntary cooperation, “signal proof of her motherly love by showing the greatest possible kindliness and indulgence” (Leo XIII, Immortale Dei 15) in cooperating with the State.

The Church has an obligation to repeatedly tell the State to stay in its lane and this situation is no different. Leo XIII, always aware of State encroachment upon the Church, said “Whatever, therefore in things human is of a sacred character, whatever belongs either of its own nature or by reason of the end to which it is referred, to the salvation of souls, or to the worship of God, is subject to the power and judgment of the Church. Whatever is to be ranged under the civil and political order is rightly subject to the civil authority” (ibid). This is because the spiritual common good always has precedent over the temporal common good.

When the transition back to normal life happens, the question is who decides when the Church may resume Masses? Is it the State or is it the Church? The way this has played out so far it appears that it will be the State which sets a dangerous precedent and gives the Church’s enemies great leeway in performing a “soft persecution” in the name of public health. The Shepherds of the Church must defend religious freedom and not cede any power over to the State.

God’s Authority and the Modern State

March 28, 2020American Founding, Church and State, ProtestantismAuthority, Heresy, Leo XIII, Locke, Martin Luther, Marx, Pius X, Rousseau, Separation of Church and Statetwowingstogod@gmail.com

Pope St. Pius X once said that all errors in the practical and social realm were founded upon theological errors. The Saintly Pontiff’s maxim seems almost common-sensical, so much so that, we can easily overlook it. Ideas have consequences and bad ideas, especially bad ideas about Who God is and who man is, have bad consequences. As a corollary then we might say that it is impossible to fix the bad consequences without rectifying the bad thinking. One such bad idea, namely that all authority in the political realm comes from the people, has had the devastating consequence of erecting a “wall of separation between Church and State” leading to the loss of many souls.

The Source of Secular Authority

The properly Christian understanding about the source of secular authority is that it comes from God Himself. This is made clear by Our Lord during His trial in which He tells Pilate that “You would have no power over me if it had not been given to you from above” (John 19:11). In his usually blunt manner, St. Paul echoes the same principle when he reminds the Christians in Rome to “Let every person be subordinate to the higher authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been established by God” (Romans 13:1). God as Creator and Sustainer of all Creation is also its supreme authority. All authority is exercised in His name and flows from Him. Kings, emperors and presidents all derive their power to rule from Him and it is only for that reason that they also have the power to bind consciences for just laws.

Summarizing the Church’s understanding of secular authority, Pope Leo XIII instructs the faithful that “all public power must proceed from God. For God alone is the true and supreme Lord of the world. Everything, without exception, must be subject to Him, and must serve him, so that whosoever holds the right to govern holds it from one sole and single source, namely, God, the sovereign Ruler of all. ‘There is no power but from God’” (Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, 3).

This view of authority flies in the face of countries such as the United States. Rather than authority from above, it is based on authority from below. Known as popular sovereignty, this founding principle is first articulated in the Declaration of Independence where Jefferson told the King that legitimate governments are those ‘‘deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.’’

Luther’s Error and Its Modern Consequences

So ingrained in the modern mind, we might not even realize that it is opposed to the correct understanding of the source of secular authority. It would be easy to blame this on the Enlightenment, but the error pre-dates even the Enlightenment and Social Contract Theory. Instead the error is rooted in Luther’s revolution in which he rejected the authority of the Church. Leo XIII points this out in his encyclical Diuturnum by drawing a line from the so-called Reformation to Communism and nihilism: “…sudden uprisings and the boldest rebellions immediately followed in Germany the so-called Reformation, the authors and leaders of which, by their new doctrines, attacked at the very foundation religious and civil authority; and this with so fearful an outburst of civil war and with such slaughter that there was scarcely any place free from tumult and bloodshed. From this heresy there arose in the last century a false philosophy – a new right as it is called, and a popular authority, together with an unbridled license which many regard as the only true liberty. Hence we have reached the limit of horrors, to wit, communism, socialism, nihilism, hideous deformities of the civil society of men and almost its ruin” (Leo XIII, Diuturnum, 23).

If we follow the logic we will see why this is a necessary consequence. Animated by a Protestant mentality, each person treats directly with God without any intermediary. Each person becomes an authority in himself and therefore any authority that is to found in a social body is by his consent. In essence then it eliminates the Kingship of Christ in the temporal realm and completely privatizes religion.

This helps to explain why most Protestants see no problem in the current belief in a “Wall of Separation” between Church and State. It was Luther himself that was the intellectual predecessor: “[B]etween the Christian and the ruler, a profound separation must be made. Assuredly, a prince can be a Christian, but it is not as a Christian that he ought to govern. As a ruler, he is not called a Christian but a prince. The man is a Christian, but his function does not concern his religion. Though they are found in the same man, the two states or functions are perfectly marked off one from the other, and really opposed.” Both the Christian Prince and the Christian citizen were to live their lives in two separate realms and, ironically enough, not submitting to God in either since they also rejected His Kingship in the Catholic Church. Once the divorce is complete, all types of political errors begin to take hold. Luther’s insistence on individual and private judgement leads directly to Locke, Rousseau, and Marx. One theological error leads to many political errors.

The Church then will always find conflict with the modern state until this error is corrected. The modern State hates the Catholic Church because it is an existential threat because it seeks, or at least ought to seek, to acknowledge God’s authority in the temporal realm. It is also the reason that Catholics ought to make the best citizens. They see no conflict between Church and State because both have their authority rooted in God Himself and to obey either is to obey God.

A Kingdom Divided?

February 22, 2020Catholic Social Teaching, Church and State, Church Authority, Culture, Culture of Life, Evangelization, HeavenKingship of Christ, Pius XI, Quas Primas, Separation of Church and State, Social Justice, Tower of Babeltwowingstogod@gmail.com

When he instituted the Feast of Christ the King, Pope Pius XI went to great lengths to remind Christians of the fact that Christ not only reigns in the hearts and minds of individual men, but He is also ruler of all temporal kingdoms as well. As the Pope put it, “it would be a grave error, on the other hand, to say that Christ has no authority whatever in civil affairs, since, by virtue of the absolute empire over all creatures committed to him by the Father, all things are in his power” (Quas Primas). Writing nearly a century ago, the Pope’s words remain especially forceful today when we find many Christians trapped by this “grave error.” Many prefer to disengage from civil affairs completely or treat them as if they are wholly divorced from religion. It is this attitude that has gotten us into this mess and it is only through a renewed awareness of our duties toward Christ the King that things will get better.

In an age where almost all the cultural chatter focuses on individual rights, we would be well served to recall that Christ too has rights especially since “all power in Heaven and Earth has been given by His Father”. No society will be just without rendering to Christ His due. As Pope Leo XIII put it, “the people have heard quite enough about what are called the ‘rights of man’. Let them hear about the rights of God for once” (Tamesti). So while we might agree that Christ is King of Heaven and Earth, it is difficult to grasp what that might look like here and now.

Christ’s Kingship Explained

The Church’s understanding of Christ’s Kingship is just an extension of what Our Lord said to Pilate when the Roman Governor tried to pull rank on Him: “My kingdom does not belong to this world. If my kingdom did belong to this world, my attendants [would] be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not here” (John 18:36).

A cursory reading of Our Lord’s words leads towards two opposite errors. The first is to see His kingdom as completely other worldly, merely spiritual if you will. They read it as “My kingdom does not belong in this world.” This is the “what happens on earth, stays on earth” type mentality that Christians are often accused of by which they show little concern or engagement in civil affairs and simply try to avoid getting caught up in the cultural claptrap so as to remain as unsullied as possible. It is also the mistake that leads us to willingly go along with the model of “Separation of Church and State” that animates most Western societies.

The second error adds to Christ’s words and says, “although my Kingdom is not here, we must bring it here.” These are the Christians who fall into the “Social Justice trap” and ultimately substitute humanitarianism for the Gospel. This approach flattens out Christ’s Kingdom and robs it of its supernatural content. Christ was no utopist nor was He instructing His followers to create some earthly bliss. Even Eden was not the Kingdom of Christ. Men remain fallen and any attempts to build God’s Kingdom on Earth ultimately go the way of the Tower of Babel. His Kingdom must come to us.

If both of these viewpoints twist Christ’s words, then what is the properly Catholic way of viewing the kingship of Christ?

Obviously, Christ’s Kingship is total and found in its full integrity only in the Kingdom that is to come. Still it is a spiritual kingdom that is in, not of, this world that derives its principles from heaven. Its exercise in the here and now is split, a point that Pope Gelasius made in his 4^th Treatise to the Emperor Anastasius on the roles of Church and State: “He, indeed because of human weakness, separated the two ministries for the following reason, so that no one might become proud.” Because of man’s fallen nature, Christ has divided His kingdom between the spiritual and temporal.

We might think of the two realms as two concentric circles. The outer circle that pertains to His spiritual kingship is exercised in the Church through the Pope and Bishops who are in union with him. The inner circle represents His temporal kingship that is shared by the rulers of nations. The inner circle, while always with us in essence, grows or shrinks in size according to how much the leaven of the Gospel permeates it. It will always be lacking in some way but its fullest integrity is found when its laws and institutions make it easiest for the Church to fulfill her mission of saving souls. In other words, the best secular regime is that in which both Church and State, while remaining wholly distinct from each other, are pulling in the same direction. Historically we find this as the basis of Christendom and see it most operative in the 13^th Century.

A Kingdom Divided Will Not Stand

One immediately grasps why a “Wall of Separation of Church and State” can never be acceptable for Catholics. You can no more separate Church and State than you can separate soul and body. The latter leads to individual death, while the former clears the way for a Culture of Death. You literally cannot separate them because the State will always take the place of the Church when the Church is absent, demanding religious obedience to all its precepts. Absent the Church, Caesar will always demand his pinches of incense, a phenomenon we are witnessing first hand in our own day as political correctness demands more and more religious obedience from both individuals and corporations.

It is not enough then to seek freedom to operate. The Church must be free to inform the State so that all of its moral precepts work toward the salvation of souls. As Pope Leo XIII said, “…it would be very erroneous to draw the conclusion that in America is to be sought the type of the most desirable status of the Church, or that it would be universally lawful or expedient for State and Church to be, as in America, dissevered and divorced. The fact that Catholicity with you is in good condition, nay, is even enjoying a prosperous growth, is by all means to be attributed to the fecundity with which God has endowed His Church, in virtue of which unless men or circumstances interfere, she spontaneously expands and propagates herself; but she would bring forth more abundant fruits if, in addition to liberty, she enjoyed the favor of the laws and the patronage of the public authority”(On Catholicity in America, 26).

This is ultimately why Catholics cannot stand idly by and watch the political realm from a disinterested perspective. There must be active engagement in order that men and women would recognize Christ on His throne. But not only that, souls are being lost specifically because of the laws and institutions in our country. This will not change without us.

We can do no better to summarize the urgency with which we ought to act than to echo the words of Cardinal Pie, the 19^th Century prelate who fought so judiciously for the rights of Christ the King:

“If we suppose Catholic social institutions, with Our Lord no longer living in the hearts of the individual members of society, then religion is merely a signboard which will soon disappear. But, on the other hand, try to convert individuals without Catholicizing the social institutions and your work is without stability. The structure you erect in the morning others will tear down in the evening. Is not the strategy of the enemies of God there to teach us a lesson? They want to destroy the faith in the hearts of individuals, it is true, but they direct still more vigorous efforts to the extirpation of religion from social institutions. Even one defeat of God in this domain means the weakening, if not the ruin, of the faith in the souls of many.”

Separation of Church and State?

February 15, 2017Church, Church and State, Church AuthorityHugo Black, Paganism, Render Unto Caesar, Separation of Church and State, Thomas Jeffersontwowingstogod@gmail.com

In a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association written on New Year’s Day in 1802, President Jefferson wrote what, especially in recent times, has become his most often quoted words. In offering an interpretation of the First Amendment he said,

“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church and State” (emphasis added).

The Catholic Church invents the Separation of Church and State

Jefferson was offering nothing novel. Christians have been preaching the separation of Church and State for millennia. If we look at the great cultures throughout history, the idea of a separation between the State and Religious powers was anathema. Whether it was Egypt or Rome, the Emperors were believed to be gods themselves and religious veneration was due to them. When Christ uttered His famous “render unto Caesar,” He did so in a culture in which Caesar thought himself divine and the High Priest or Pontifex Maximus of the official Roman pagan religion. This was the norm throughout the ancient world, except for a single country—Israel. In Israel, the role of king was distinct from either the priests or the prophets. The first king, Saul, was anointed by the Prophet Samuel (1Samuel 10) and even King David himself was beholden to the Prophet Nathan who accused him of murder.

Christians have always interpreted Christ’s admonition to “render unto Caesar” as a call to keep this Jewish tradition of separating the governance of the State from the governance of the Church. On the one hand, we can see why Our Lord thought this necessary simply by looking at man’s nature as both spirit and body. We live two distinct, although related lives—temporal and eternal. His utterance baptizes these two distinct powers to govern each of the lives. Like the body and soul, there is a certain precedence of the spiritual governance over the temporal governance, but still the two should work in a complementary fashion.

Why We Need the Separation

Why the Church and State should remain distinct is not entirely clear until we add into the mix man’s fallen nature. As an effect of man’s prodigious fall, the body tends to drag the soul down and corrupt it. When the Church and the State are essentially one, it is the Church bears the brunt of it. History reveals this repeatedly, especially if we look to the Middle Ages, culminating in Henry VIII’s foundation of the Church of England. The circumstances may change but the Church always becomes corrupt when it gets too closely tied to the temporal power.

To use an American parlance, the Church/State distinction is a form of checks and balances. The temporal authority, because he is first and foremost is trying to save his own soul in addition to his subjects, is always subservient to the Church. The Church would, in turn, make itself the servant of the Imperium in her conduct of temporal affairs. Each serves to keep the other in line—when the Church oversteps her bounds and gets too caught up in temporal affairs, the State is there to remind her of her mission to souls. When the State oversteps its bounds and puts the souls of its residents at stake, the Church is there to remind it of its proper place. While this practice may have been abused, the power of the Pope to excommunicate a rogue Christian King was very effective in bringing about conditions that were good for the soul.

When the two function in this way the citizens of the State thrive and are holy. The culture becomes Christian, rather than a mere State that happens to have a majority of Christians in it. The Church recognized the importance of building a Christian society—one in which being a Christian is made easier by the culture—and therefore worked out her understanding of Church/State relations shortly after the time of Constantine. Pope St. Gelasius I (492-496) who is often credited with “inventing” the separation of Church and State said:

“Christ, mindful of human fragility had discerned between the functions of each power… His reason for so doing was twofold. On the one hand, it is written that no one warring for God should be entangled with secular things. The raison d’être of the royal power was to relieve the clerics of the burden of having to care for their carnal and material wants. For the temporal necessities the pontiffs indeed need the emperors, so that they can devote themselves to their functions properly and are not distracted by the pursuit of these carnal matters, but the emperors, Christian as they are, need the pontiffs for the achievement of eternal salvation.”

The Jefersonian Distinction

Even if Jefferson did not invent the notion of the Separation of Church and State, he did endorse an important twist to it. What was new about Jefferson’s position—which was subsequently read into the Constitution by Justice Hugo Black—was his belief that a wall of separation had to be erected. In other words, he thought Church and State should remain completely separate.

Returning to the analogy of the human person, you can no more put a wall of separation between the Church and State than you can between the soul and the body. To sever the one from the other leads to death—be it the death of the person or of society as a whole.

When the complementary role of Church and State is denied, the State will go unchecked in its power. When the State finds no authority above it then it simply does as it sees fit without any regard to the moral law or the eternal salvation of its citizens. In order to pull this off though the State needs to promote “bread and circuses” to keep the populace from focusing on their souls. The “bread and circuses” can take various forms, but the form of choice today is sexual license. It is not as if the Church merely disappears in this setting. The State sets up a new Church, one that is merged with the State. In other words, when you set up a “wall of separation” it will always end up merging the two.

Return of the Church-State of Paganism

Much of the West is returning to paganism in the form of liberalism, worshipping the god of freedom. Like all pagan gods, it demands child sacrifice, even if is cleaner this time because it is done in utero. Its churches are universities (really all public schools) and its high priests are the judges. The State will “tolerate” other religions and grant “freedom of worship” but any public expression, especially when it comes in conflict with the State Religion, will not be tolerated. The Little Sisters of the Poor may have ultimately won their lawsuit, but that is only a harbinger of things to come. The next battle will likely come for not complying with the demands of the law for gay marriage. You must be willing to profess the new pagan creed which many Catholics, even bishops and priests, have shown themselves willing to do.

This is really a project of the Enlightenment, it simply took a few centuries for the Christian roots of Western society to actually die out. Those roots are now, for all intents and purposes, dead. We are living in Rome in reverse and the only way we can act redemptively is the way of the Church—martyrdom or an appearance by Our Lady. Throughout history those are the only two ways that a society has been saved from the clutches of paganism. Let us pray that as we ready ourselves for the 100^th Anniversary of Our Lady of Fatima that it is the latter.

Two Wings to God

"Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth"Pope St. John Paul II