The Church’s involvement in spiritual warfare within a temporal order that is fallen is also fundamental to the nature of the Church herself, and has long determined magisterial teaching about that nature. The Church has been given by Christ himself the authority to protect the supreme good of religion. But locked as she is in a spiritual conflict within a fallen world, the Church is under attack both from without and also from within—from her own sinful and often recalcitrant members. So she must be able to protect the good of her community from those attacks. She must be able to discourage wrongdoing by her members that threatens the spiritual good of the Christian community she serves. And she must also be able to prevent spiritually damaging intrusions into that community by opponents from without. So the Church, just as much as the state, must be a potestas or coercive authority. Just as the state must be able to use law to protect the political community, so the Church must be able to use law to protect the ecclesial community. The Church has been given by Christ the sovereign authority to make laws and to enforce those laws within her jurisdiction by legitimate threats of punishment that to be effective must include temporal as well as spiritual sanctions.
Subjection to the Church’s jurisdiction, the magisterium teaches and as the 1983 Code of Canon Law continues to claim, comes with baptism. So at Trent, as we have already seen, and elsewhere, the magisterium has clearly taught that baptism subjects the baptised to a coercive jurisdiction, that of the Church, with obligations to fidelity on the baptised that may be enforced—where breach of those obligations is genuinely culpable, and where enforcement really is necessary to protect the religious good of the Church’s community. Because the state itself needs to be converted, baptismal obligations can take political and public as well as private form. Officials of a state that is publicly Christian can be bound by their baptism to exercise their office so as to support the mission of the Church. In particular the officials of a publicly Christian state can be bound to assist the Church in the exercise of her jurisdiction, as canon 2198 of the 1917 Code of Canon Law still insisted.[6] Baptism obligates the rulers of a Christian state to act as body to the Church’s soul—to form a single Christian community where, in religious matters, the state helps as secular arm (brachium saeculare) to enforce the law of the Church.
This theory of the Church as potestas for the good of religion and of the need for a soul-body union of Church and state is a long-standing part of the Church’s magisterium. At its heart is teaching that baptism has a juridical character fundamental to the nature of the Church herself. It is baptism that provides the Church as potestas with her coercive jurisdiction, and then obligates officials of a publicly Christian state to support that jurisdiction when called on by the Church to do so. Baptism then is the basis for the legitimacy of a soul-body union of the Church with that of the state, where in matters of religion the state may act as agent or secular arm of the Church as potestas for the good of religion.
Vatican II was careful not to contradict this teaching. According to the official relationes that interpreted Dignitatis Humanae to the council fathers at Vatican II, the declaration does not in any way deny the Church’s status as potestas for religion, and addresses only the authority of the state when detached from any union with the Church, and so acting only as on its own authority as potestas for the civil order.[7] The 1983 Code of Canon Law also still clearly presents the Church as a potestas. The Code clearly asserts that the Church has a jurisdiction over the baptised, with the authority to enforce that jurisdiction with threats of temporal as well as spiritual punishment.[8]
Nevertheless the idea of the Church as a potestas is decreasingly taken seriously in official theology. In practice a model prevails of the Church as, in effect, a voluntary society, and with this comes a conception of canonical obligations as really no more than membership rules. All that culpable breach of them really merits is not some genuine form of punishment, but simple loss of membership. With this comes a view of Church-state separation not as a regrettable evil, as Leo XIII viewed it, but as a positive good.
I have quoted from a three part essay (see part I; Part III), which should be read alongside this critique of John Finnis, by Thomas Pink. These essays are part of an epic struggle over the soul of the church and, crucially for my present purposes, its historical-moral mission. In the passage, Pink rejects what one may call an accommodating stance of the Church toward liberal modernity. This accommodating stance re-invents the Catholic church along Lockean-Kantian lines as (I) a voluntary association that (II) respects Church and State separation and (III) whose source of authority is exclusively moral. While Locke himself had rejected toleration for the Catholic church, the Church's willingness to forego jurisdiction/potestas over its members means that Lockean strictures against the Church have become irrelevant. In what follows I accept Pink's characterization of this re-invention, even though I recognize that he is being polemical and not an impartial bystander.
As an aside, Pink argues that the reinvention occurs not through an explicit rejection of the (infallible) magisterial teachings of the Church, but through the omissions and changed emphasis of what he calls the 'official theology' of the Church. This mechanism is worth some attention (in part because it may be accompanied by a curious historical re-imagination), but that's for another time.
Now, one may imagine that a general skeptical liberal (including rather skeptical about my own liberalism on many days) like myself would be instinctually on the side of the accommodating stance rejected by Pink. For, one may imagine that the Church's willingness to play by liberalism's rules would be welcome. One may be deluded into thinking that less friction is better than church state antagonism. And one may imagine that some opportunistic (let's call them Enlightenment) liberals will be tempted to say to, say, Islamic fundamentalists, look, if the historically powerful Church has learned to play by our rules, so you, too, can learn to do so!*
But liberalism requires for its moral (aesthetic and political) vitality, and its own historical mission (of human flourishing, individual emancipation, rejection of cruelty, etc.) institutions in its midst that wage spiritual war within a temporal order. And the church can only do so if, from a liberal perspective, it remains tempted to overreach politically and legally. As I argued a few weeks ago, the present crisis of liberalism is precisely a consequence of the (moral and intellectual) implosion of social intermediaries, which are both natural bulwarks of social pluralism as well as promote a rich/multidimensional (what I called) 'value space.' That is, of course, an empirical matter, but my underlying assumption is (to simplify and be, perhaps, too succinct) that the liberal morality, which in its common form is merely secularized Christianity, is feeble without access to rich and varied sources of value.
Another reason to welcome spiritual warfare by the Church is that it represents a firm rejection of status quo bias because the status quo of the temporal order is in an important sense (as Pink argues), from the perspective of the Church, diabolical.** Now, unlike in most other worldviews, such criticism of status quo bias is always welcome to liberals because it forces us to critically look at ourselves and existing privileges (which liberals ought to resist). Of course, I realize that this spiritual warfare will bring the church into conflict with many liberal pieties (although perhaps push it away of its one-sided focus on sexual morality). But liberals need not fear this because such spiritual warfare will force us to confront the ways in which contemporary society fails the spiritual needs of mankind and prevents human flourishing.+
That is to say, on my understanding, liberalism needs the Catholic church to believe in its own historical mission of the illiberal, rejectionist sort defended by Pink. This risks, of course, a victory of a world-view inimical towards liberalism and many commitments we hold (ahh) sacred. But the cautious embrace of such uncertainty is our courage, the willingness to have our commitments challenged, our faith.
* In fact, it is tempting to side with the accommodating stance because some of Pink's first order conclusions -- say, about the theological necessity of Jewish conversion (see part III)-- are troubling. I treat Pink as suggesting that there are prudential reasons to avoid mission to the Jews here and now, but that these should not become part of an official theology in which the Church foregoes the aim of Jewish conversion as part of a kind of dual covenant; something that seems to have happened under in the papacy of Joseph Ratzinger. In fact, as I shall argue some other time, while I reject Pink's attitude toward conversion of the Jews, in many ways it's preferable than the special mission assigned to Jews/Israel in the modern official theology rejected by him!
**I am aware that for many the Church can have no authority at all in light of the many scandals of sexual abuse, molestation, and exploitation of the last half century. But all this shows is that the temporal order within the church also involves diabolic dominion.
+As regular readers know, I think radicalized Islamic youth and much of what passes for populism in Europe is a response to the perceived spiritual poverty and hypocrisy of our society.
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