Catholicism and the American Civic Order
Since our nation's founding, American Catholics have confronted the question of whether one can be a faithful Catholic and a devoted citizen of the United States.
Most Catholic citizens — and most American Catholic leaders, including bishops and clergy — have affirmed the American republic and endorsed its founding principles and constitutional structures. They have done so despite Protestant — and, more recently, secular progressive — concerns about the ability of faithful Catholics to be loyal Americans, as reflected historically in discrimination against Catholic immigrants, passage of anti-Catholic Blaine amendments, and questions surrounding the allegiance of Catholic politicians like Al Smith and John Kennedy. American Catholics view these actions as rooted in simple bigotry or, more charitably, as evincing a misunderstanding of Catholicism, American ideals and institutions, or both.
But there have always been, and are still today, Catholics who share the belief that good Catholics cannot unreservedly affirm the principles of the American regime — a regime they see as defective from the standpoint of Catholic teaching. These critics view with suspicion certain bedrock principles of the founding, namely the separation of church and state, the freedom of religion, and other freedoms that protect rights of participation in a democratic republic.
We have in America a separation of church and state. The phrase itself does not appear in the Constitution (it derives from Thomas Jefferson's 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists), and the nature of that separation is wildly misunderstood by many people — especially secular progressives. But we do have a regime in which the church and the state are institutionally distinct from one another. As a result, for example, no one in the United States holds political office by virtue of an ecclesiastical appointment, and no one attains ecclesiastical office due to a political appointment.
On the other hand, the Constitution explicitly protects the freedom of religion. The First Amendment states: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." The Constitution also protects religious liberty by banning religious tests for public office. People are free to be — and may not be discriminated against by government officials for being — Catholic; but people are equally free to be, and protected from discrimination for being, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, agnostic, atheist, or anything else.
And, of course, the United States of America is a democratic republic. We resolve our differences of opinion in the broad realm of politics by engaging with one another, by petitioning our elected officials, and by voting, not through coercion by political or religious authorities.
Again, none of this is a problem for most Catholics today, nor has it been a problem for most American Catholics in earlier generations. But there are some Catholics who view the separation of church and state, religious freedom, and other freedoms associated with democracy as, at a minimum, less than ideal. For Catholic skeptics of the American regime, a fully just, ideal state would reject these principles. Instead, it would recognize the Catholic faith as the true faith, and declare Catholicism the nation's established religion. It would prohibit the spreading of religious falsehoods — that is, ideas that conflict with the teachings of the Catholic Church. In such a state, we would not resolve our political disagreements by allowing everyone (or everyone who had attained a certain age) to vote, but by obeying pronouncements from Church leaders.
Catholics holding these views look to 19th-century popes who expressed skepticism (to put it mildly) about the three principles described above. These popes worried that religious liberty and the separation of church and state would encourage religious skepticism and indifferentism, and create an environment inhospitable to the Gospel and the work of evangelization. They were also concerned that democracy would lead people to believe that right and wrong, truth and falsehood, are to be determined — and perhaps even established — at the voting booth, and that democratic peoples would no longer seek the objective, eternal Truth formulated in the Church's trinitarian theology.
Contemporary Catholic critics of American ideals and institutions fear that these popes' concerns have proven justified. They bemoan an American culture in which religious indifferentism and skepticism, as well as moral subjectivism and relativism, are flourishing, all while faith is foundering. And in fact, the Pew Research Center projects that if recent trends continue, less than half the American population could be Christian by 2055.
The contemporary magisterium of the Catholic Church expresses no objections to the separation of church and state as practiced in the United States. It also affirms the right to religious liberty, as well as the legitimacy, and even the desirability, of republican democracy. How do Catholic critics of these principles come to terms with these stances?
Some believe that recent popes, beginning with Pope St. John XXIII in the 1950s and '60s, led the Church down the wrong path. They argue that the great Declaration on Religious Freedom of the Second Vatican Council, Dignitatis Humanae — which embraced individuals' right to promote their beliefs about religious questions even when they are in error — was a grave mistake and should be abrogated. Similarly, they hold that Pope St. John Paul II's global advocacy of democracy, and his endorsement of the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, were misguided.
Are they right to suggest that the pre-conciliar popes condemned ideas like democracy and religious freedom wholesale, that discontinuities exist between older Catholic tradition and the teachings of the Second Vatican Council and the post-conciliar popes, and that the American project is fundamentally irreconcilable with traditional Catholic political and social doctrine? These are not theoretical questions: Catholic parents and Catholic schools, among others, must decide what to teach young people about the American founding and the constitutional order, and about their rights and responsibilities as citizens of this nation.
A closer look at the teachings of the pre-conciliar popes, as well as the teachings of Dignitatis Humanae, can help us find answers.
HISTORICAL BACKDROP
To determine whether pre-conciliar popes condemned the principles of religious liberty and separation of church and state wholesale, let us consider the words of the pre-conciliar popes themselves — particularly those of Gregory XVI and Blessed Pius IX.
We begin with Pope Gregory XVI's 1832 encyclical letter Mirari Vos, which spoke on the subject of "liberalism and religious indifferentism." In that letter, Pope Gregory decried the "perverse opinion" that "it is possible to obtain the eternal salvation of the soul by the profession of any kind of religion, as long as morality is maintained." He wrote that such a "shameful font of indifferentism gives rise to that absurd and erroneous proposition which claims that liberty of conscience must be maintained for everyone" through means such as freedom of the press and the "license of free speech." These ideas, Pope Gregory argued, were promoted by "shameless lovers of liberty," whose "unbridled lust for freedom" compelled them to "break the mutual concord between temporal authority and the priesthood" — to seek, in other words, state subjugation of the Church.
In a similar vein, Pope Blessed Pius IX, in his 1864 encyclical Quanta Cura, denounced the notion that
liberty of conscience and worship is each man's personal right, which ought to be legally proclaimed and asserted in every rightly constituted society; and that a right resides in the citizens to an absolute liberty, which should be restrained by no authority whether ecclesiastical or civil, whereby they may be able openly and publicly to manifest and declare any of their ideas whatever, either by word of mouth, by the press, or in any other way.
In a document attached to the encyclical — the famous "Syllabus of Errors" — Pope Pius bluntly condemned the proposition that "[t]he Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization."
So there you have it, one might be tempted to say, two pre-conciliar popes denouncing, in no uncertain terms, religious freedom and the separation of church and state.
What these critics overlook, however, is the fact that popes Gregory and Pius did not pen these encyclicals in a vacuum: They wrote them in response to specific events. At the front of their minds at the time — as well as the minds of all Church leaders, who were overwhelmingly European at this point — was the French Revolution.
That uprising, which began in July 1789 with the storming of the Bastille, unleashed a torrent of political, religious, cultural, and social consequences in European countries where the Church's hierarchy had once enjoyed enormous political influence. Following this maelstrom, the Church found itself under attack by several radical ideologies at once, which included religious indifferentism, religious skepticism, moral relativism, moral subjectivism, and extreme anti-clericalism. By the end of the 18th century, suppression and violent subjugation of churches and monasteries was widespread, as was the martyring of priests, consecrated religious individuals, and faithful Catholic lay people who refused to adhere to the revolutionary government's rabidly anti-clerical policies.
The effects of these attacks did not stop with the fall of the revolutionary government in 1799. In the decades that followed, the doctrines of French revolutionary ideology continued to fester, even within the Church. Both Gregory and Pius were forced to contend with prominent French Catholics — among both the clergy and the laity — who publicly and persistently argued that French revolutionary principles and ideology were reconcilable with Catholic doctrine.
The predominant ideology of the French Revolution was Jacobinism — what Fr. John Courtney Murray, the American Jesuit commonly acknowledged to have shaped the development of the Church's teaching on religious freedom at Vatican II, called "sectarian Liberalism." Jacobin revolutionaries were eager students of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and embraced his conception of civil religion — the notion that it is within the state's purview to determine the how, when, where, and what of permissible religious worship and participation for its citizens. Jacobinism's "cardinal thesis," as Father Murray put it, was the primacy of the political — "everything within the state, nothing above the state." For the Jacobins, the only place for the Church was under the state — in other words, the Church was to serve the needs of the state.
That is precisely what the revolutionary government sought to do with the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which created "departments" of church whose clergy owed their ultimate fidelity to the state. In an effort to eliminate the institutional Church altogether, radical Jacobins established other state-sponsored religions — the atheistic Cult of Reason, for example, followed by Maximilien Robespierre's promotion of the deistic Cult of the Supreme Being.
It was Jacobinism and its associated ideologies that 19th-century popes had in mind when they warned against "progress" and "liberalism." It was this revolutionary system, not the religious-freedom tenets later endorsed in Dignitatis Humanae, that the Church's leaders were pushing back against when they denounced religious liberty and the separation of church and state.
Indeed, there's no evidence to suggest that the popes of the 18th and 19th centuries had much knowledge of our Constitution's structure or its protections of various civil liberties. They would not have had much of an understanding of the First Amendment's prohibition of laws "respecting an establishment of religion," its enshrinement of a strictly institutional separation of church and state, or its robust protection of the free exercise of religion for all persons, as distinct from French Revolution-style religious indifferentism, relativism, and state secularism. As Europeans shaped by a particular historical experience (and in many ways shielded from the rest of the world — the first pope in centuries to step foot outside of Europe was Paul VI in 1964), their exposure to the idea of religious freedom came from the radical ideologies of the French Revolution.
These ideologies differed quite plainly from the conceptions of religious freedom and church-state separation developed largely by Anglophone thinkers and exhibited to a significant degree in the words and deeds of the American founders. It was something much more like the founders' understanding of religious freedom, not the state-imposed secularism of the French Revolution, that would be integrated into the Church's teaching in Vatican II.
DEFENDING RELIGIOUS FREEDOM
In December 1965, at the Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI promulgated Dignitatis Humanae — Of the Dignity of the Human Person. That declaration spelled out Catholic teachings on religious liberty and the rules governing the Church's relationship with secular states.
Dignitatis Humanae rejected understandings of religious freedom based on the view that all religions are equally true (or untrue), and the belief that religious truth is a purely subjective matter. It rebuffed the liberal idea that religious freedom is to be justified as a necessary means for maintaining social peace and stability in the face of entrenched religious pluralism. It also spurned the claim that religious liberty is an abstract right grounded in "personal autonomy" or a concept of "fairness" floating free of any consideration of the human good. These arguments all incline, to varying degrees, toward some form of public and governmental agnosticism concerning the ultimate or integral well-being and fulfillment of human persons — what in academic political theory goes by the label "anti-perfectionism."
Instead, Dignitatis Humanae grounded the importance of and the right to religious freedom in the role it plays in enabling and facilitating the sincere and earnest truth-seeking in spiritual matters that all persons are called to undertake. The declaration paired its acknowledgement of objective religious truth — its affirmation 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" — with the explicit caveat that "[t]he truth cannot impose itself except by virtue of its own truth, as it makes its entrance into the mind at once quietly and with power."
This wise and philosophically sound defense of religious freedom — one that is entirely consistent with the patrimony of Church teaching, never having been condemned by the 18th- and 19th-century popes — did not appeal, explicitly or implicitly, to any form of religious indifferentism, relativism, or subjectivism, or to the appropriation of religion for political purposes. Rather, the right to religious freedom that Dignitatis Humanae recognized stems from the intrinsic value of religion — a good whose realization begins with the sincere quest for truth and the resolution to order one's life in conformity with the truth as best one grasps it. This good cannot be actualized by external coercion, whether by the civil state or any other authority: Again, as Dignitatis Humanae put it, "the truth cannot impose itself except by virtue of its own truth." Any attempt by the state to coerce religious faith and practice, even true faith and practice, will be futile and likely injure people's authentic participation in the good of religion.
Indeed, coercion can only impair or impede the possibility of an authentic religious faith — a fundamental aspect of human flourishing. A faith imposed through intimidation, as Dignitatis Humanae recognized, harms free and sincere religious discernment by hijacking the person's interior truth-seeking deliberations with different concerns, such as the avoidance of suffering, physical harm, mental anguish, material deprivation, and the loss of rights, privileges, or liberties of various sorts.
On the Catholic understanding of faith, finding and maintaining communion with the Lord Jesus Christ, the Saints in Heaven, and His Church on Earth is analogous to communion with our fellow human beings in authentic friendship. Such authentic communion is only possible if it is reflexive — that is, if it represents a free self-giving and is the fruit of a genuine choice to enter into the relationship. This reflexive relationship cannot, by its very nature, be established by coercion.
Religious freedom, however, is not absolute: Dignitatis Humanae recognizes as much, noting that religious communities "rightfully claim freedom" only so long as "the just demands of public order are observed." And in fact, under the Constitution, government may legitimately restrict religious freedom when a failure to restrict it would imperil the common good. If, for instance, a neo-Aztec cult wanted to practice human sacrifice (even if it was supposedly "consensual") to please a sun god, the government could — and surely would — prohibit this practice, and would do so without violating the principles outlined in Dignitatis Humanae.
The same is true even when adherents of the cult assert that their acts are religiously required, and when the state restriction implies that the religious propositions that gave rise to those practices are false. As Dignitatis Humanae teaches, "society has the right to defend itself against possible abuses committed on pretext of freedom of religion."
This principle can help us dispatch other contemporary liberal claims — for example, that certain religions "require" the killing of unborn children via abortion, meaning abortion access is a matter of religious freedom. It also applies to what might appear to be muddier religious-freedom claims. A liberal mainline Protestant denomination could argue, for instance, that its revisionist beliefs about marriage mean that the law must define or redefine marriage to include unions other than those between one man and one woman. But its claim that this would not harm anyone is belied by the fact that it damages the common good by lying about the nature of marriage and undermining the conditions of a healthy marriage culture.
Catholic critics of Vatican II might assert that the understanding of religious freedom outlined above marks a fundamental shift in Catholic thought away from affirming the state's responsibility to promote all aspects of the common good, which undoubtedly includes individual citizens' maintaining right religion and a right relationship with God. But such an objection misses the point. The state, if it is doing what Dignitatis Humanae requires, is promoting the common good; it is creating the conditions of integral human flourishing.
Under the guidelines presented by Dignitatis Humanae, the state, recognizing the value of religion as a fundamental aspect of human flourishing, and favoring and fostering the common good, actively works to promote religion, religious practice, and the place of religious values in the public square. It does this in part, and perhaps above all, by respecting and protecting religious freedom, as well as by providing for the protection and accommodation of its free exercise. The same, of course, is true of the Constitution.
CATHOLIC TEACHING AND AMERICAN FREEDOMS
A fair reading of our founding documents makes clear that they are not grounded in relativistic or subjectivist principles, or in modern progressive innovations such as abstract right or anti-perfectionism. The Declaration of Independence famously proclaimed the "self-evident" truth that all men are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights." The Constitution, while admittedly not citing a precise philosophical basis for the free exercise of religion it defends, does not found or sustain its free-exercise protections in the French revolutionary doctrines condemned by magisterial authority in the 19th century.
Indeed, a responsible and charitable interpretation of our Constitution would not result in the conclusion that the rights it protects are somehow incompatible or irreconcilable with Catholic doctrine. The pronouncements of Gregory XVI and Pius IX were well considered, and they represented a forceful attempt to confront the challenges the largely European Church was facing at the time. But they included no condemnations fairly applicable to our Constitution or our nation's founding principles.
We should note again that since the conclusion of Vatican II, there have been many papal endorsements of the principles of American civic life and our system of republican democracy. The papacy has certainly not pronounced that, for example, the free exercise of religion protected under the First Amendment is in conflict with the Church's teaching on religious freedom and the civil state's duty to protect it. Pope St. John Paul II was particularly effusive in his praise for what he described as the "American democratic experiment." He noted that in
[r]eading the founding documents of the United States, one has to be impressed by the concept of freedom they enshrine: a freedom designed to enable people to fulfill their duties and responsibilities toward the family and toward the common good of the community.
He commended our founding fathers for asserting their claims to freedom and independence on the basis of "'self-evident' truths about the human person" — not on the grounds of any "unbridled lust for freedom," to quote Gregory XVI.
John Paul recognized that the concept of freedom affirmed by our Constitution is not freedom for freedom's sake (i.e., "if it feels good, do it") — to the contrary, he noted that our founding fathers "clearly understood that there could be no true freedom without moral responsibility and accountability." And in fact, true freedom is not freedom understood as liberation from supposedly outdated and oppressive moral constraints: It is the freedom to choose the good — to engage in morally worthy choosing and pursue human goods in the particular ways God calls us to seek them.
Freedom of religion is among the necessary conditions enabling us to participate in the good of religion and pursue religious truth. With God's grace, we can arrive at its fullness.
LIGHT THE WORLD
With the breadth of Catholic history and teaching in mind, let us return to the underlying question with which we began: What should Catholic parents and teachers be imparting to children about our country and their role as citizens of this nation?
The answer is clear: American Catholics must teach our children to understand our country's history, cherish and maintain its founding principles, and recognize that when we have gone wrong as a nation, it has been on those occasions when we have acted in defiance of those principles or failed to honor them.
We should teach young Catholic men and women to value our Constitution because the freedoms it protects allow us to pursue truth and goodness; they nurture and sustain our families, our communities, and our country's civic order. And we must affirm to our children and our students that there is no reason to feel they must choose between being faithful Catholics and being patriotic Americans.
The Church does not teach that democracy is always required, or that it is the highest or best form of government. In fact, it does not pronounce any single best form of government, though it emphatically rejects certain types of government, especially totalitarian political systems such as fascism and communism. But democracy at its best does give expression — perhaps unique expression — to the principle of equal human dignity that the Church always and everywhere proclaims. Pope St. John Paul II referred to this inviolable human dignity during his visit to the United States in 1995:
Catholics of America! Always be guided by the truth — by the truth about God who created and redeemed us, and by the truth about the human person, made in the image and likeness of God and destined for a glorious fulfillment in the Kingdom to come. Always be convincing witnesses to the truth. "Stir into a flame the gift of God" that has been bestowed upon you in Baptism. Light your nation — light the world — with the power of that flame!
As John Paul also noted, "the continuing success of American democracy depends on the degree to which each new generation, native-born and immigrant, makes its own the moral truths on which the Founding Fathers staked the future of your Republic." If this nation "under God," as Abraham Lincoln put it in his Gettysburg Address, is to endure, we must continuously pray and work to ensure that our laws and our leaders truly honor that North Star principle — the ur-principle, as I sometimes describe it — of all sound morality: that of the profound, inherent, and equal dignity of each and every member of the human family.
