"The Church can never count on peace"

I mentioned before my enthusiasm for Christopher Ferrara's new book Liberty, the God That Failed. Here are the first few paragraphs (sans the footnotes) of my Foreword to the book:

 

The contemporary enthusiasm for democratic regimes that protect “human rights” should not blind us to the deeper lessons of history. The central Western tradition of reflection on the proper constitution of political regimes has rarely purported to identify a uniquely acceptable form of temporal ruling authority. The naturalness of diverse political forms has been widely acknowledged: democracy, monarchy, and aristocracy, among other possibilities, remain candidates for instantiation as time and place dictate, all other things considered. Until recently, however, among the other things to be considered was the supernatural requirement that the holy Catholic Church’s place in the organic unity of political society—whatever its particular form—be given due legal effect. The traditional thesis holds that people were not only allowed, but morally obligated, to institute due political order, most often by accepting and obeying established regimes, and that such order must include legal recognition, first, of the rightful and unique place of the Church and, second, of the obligation of political society—not just of individuals—to offer public worship of the triune God. Such a polity would be a Christian commonwealth.

This ideal was “given the Church’s definitive approval in modern times by Leo XIII in his encyclical Immortale Dei,” as Henri Cardinal De Lubac has explained. In the words of Pope Leo’s restatement of the traditional thesis, “God has divided the human race between two powers. Each of them is supreme in its own field; each is enclosed within the limits perfectly determined and traced out in conformity with its nature and end, and each thus has a sphere in which its own rights and proper activity find exercise.” This, Cardinal De Lubac affirmed, “is the perfect blueprint, and it should be the starting point of all practice. . . . This is, of course, no more than the Gospel requires. But insofar as she persists in reminding the world of the fact,” Cardinal De Lubac continues, “the Church can never count on peace.”

It is of course true that the United States of America was founded on rather different principles and its fundamental law written to give effect to another, very different blueprint. The Constitution of the United States does not so much as mention God (except pro forma in the dating clause: “in the year of our Lord”), and certainly not the blessed Trinity or the Catholic Church, let alone the polity’s obligation to give public worship to the Trinity. The Constitution precludes any hope of a popular transformation of the United States into a Christian commonwealth, moreover, by mandating that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States” (Art. VI). The celebrated First Amendment to that Constitution, furthermore, specifically denies the government the authority either to establish “religion” or otherwise to promote its exercise. The U.S. Constitution, then, is both godless and, for reasons that Christopher Ferrara marshals, not indifferent but actively hostile toward the exercise of religion, as well as agnostic on the question of the true object of religious worship. And all of this declension and derogation from “the blueprint required by the Gospel” was very much the object and boast of most of those who inspired and led the radical revolution against the English Crown and then went on to frame the Constitution and to arrange its ratification—or so Ferrara argues in Liberty, the God That Failed.

This is an uncommon claim, though by no means an unprecedented one, and the reader owes it to himself to judge whether Ferrara has met the relevant burden of proof. Ferrara’s mastery of Catholic doctrine, of Enlightenment philosophy and political theory, and of the facts of history, the clarity and rigor of his argument, and his fairness to counter-evidence combine to make this an account to be reckoned with. To praise Ferrara’s book is easy, but to predict its reception is another matter. Let it be said emphatically, therefore, that it would be a gross injustice to dismiss this powerful counter-narrative on the presumed ground that Ferrara or those who agree with him are unpatriotic or anti-American. . . .