Less subject?

Living, as we do, under a diminished sense of the ontology of groups, even of the Church, it is all too easy to conclude that groups are not bound by the obligations to God that bind individuals.  In the period leading up to the Council that delivered Dignitatis humanae and its important celebration of the inviolability of individual conscience, good Catholics continued to recognize that the state was no less obligated to honor God than individuals were.  In a lecture at the Pontifical Lateran Universtiy in March of 1953, Cardinal Ottaviani made the point in these terms:  "Men living together in society are not less subject to God than they are as individuals, and civil society, no less than individual human beings, is in debt to God, 'who gave it being and maintains it, and whose ever-bounteous goodness enriches it with countless blessings.'  [Immortale Dei].  Accordingly, as it is not lawful for any individual to neglect his duties to God and to the Religion according to which God wills to be honored, in the same way 'states cannot without serious moral offense conduct themselves as if God were non-existent or cast off the care of religion as something foreign to themselves or of little moment.' [Immortale Dei]."  J.C. Murray, of course, had important things to say by way of criticism of the traditional view espoused by Card. Ottaviani, and E.A. Goerner, in his towering book Peter and Caesar (1965), has some appropriately harsh things to say about how some pursue the Ottaviani (= traditional) line without adequate attention to particulars, among other faults (pp. 153-72).  Goerner, though, goes on to advocate the indispensability of striving "to Christianize politics" (p. 269).  Goerner's argument remains a timely warning against a too-ready embrace of Murray's colonizing historicism.