Authoritarian?

"The Catholic Church is sometimes reproached with being an 'authoritarian Church," as if the authority -- that is, the right to be listened to -- that she exercises on her faithful in seeing to the preservation of revealed truth and Christian morality were to result in fostering authoritarian trends in the sphere of civil life and activities.  May I be allowed to say that those who make such reproaches lack both in theological and historical insight.

"They lack in historical insight because . . .

"They lack in theological insight, for they do not see that the authority of the Church in her own spiritual sphere is nothing else than her bondage to God and to her mission . . . ."

"Be it noted, furthermore, that, as a matter of fact, no government is less authoritarian than the government of the Catholic Church.  It governs without police force and physical coercion . . . "

Thus Jacques Maritain (Man and the State [1951], 184-85): Surely a voice to be studied in any serious pursuit of CST. I commend the entire passage to your attention, just in case you're done with your Christmas shopping.  As almost every reader of this blog knows, no (lay) mind was more influential than Maritain's in the shaping of the Second Vatican Council's social teaching.  Maritain was a major intellectual and spiritual force at work in the Council.  Why, then, does Maritain's respect for the Church and her authority sound so alien to so many of us? 

The general repudiation of the *concept* of the natural law (and its demands) would occasion a deep sorrow for Maritain who, more than any other (I'm aware of), taught the Church (and others) that the body politic should be lay (not sacral) but bound by (inter alia) the natural law.  No scare-quotes around natural law -- not for the pope, the Council, or the faithful. 

Can the "Cathlolic legal theory" project survive the scare-quoting of "natural law" that one so often encounters even on this blog?  I doubt it.  "Human dignity" and confected "natural rights" are, I fear, too weak a fallback reed, at least for purposes of resisting the real evils that Maritain and the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council were clear-sighted about.  But if one comes to the discussion table sure -- or even able to be "sure" -- that the Church's definiton of, say, marriage  is wrong . . .

The Church proposes.