Foundations of a Catholic Political Order

Four Faces Press

ix + 165 pp. $13.95.

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Numerous studies have been written on the social Magisterium of the Church. Mr. Storck’s new book is a welcome and striking addition to this body of literature. In addition to correcting longstanding errors in the field and questioning many assumptions commonly brought to it, Mr. Storck’s book provides a larger framework for exploring the riches of the social Magister ium and a better interpretation of its basic consistency over the past several centuries. At once more philosophical and more practical than other books written with similar aims, Foundations of a Catholic Po litical Order confers the double benefit of profound thought and concrete proposals. In company with Storck’s earlier The Catholic Milieu (Christen dom Press, 1987), Foundations is a book which must be read by everyone who wishes to understand the ultimate sources and ramifications of the Church’s social Magisterium.

Storck’s main concern is announced at the start in a collage of quotations of which Cardinal Pie’s words may be taken as a summary: “So long as Christ does not reign over nations, His influence over individuals remains superficial and precarious.” This book is an extended reflection on the relationship between the way a society is ordered in its cultural-political institutions and the internalization of the Catho lic faith by individual believers. “A full Christian life is one lived out in one’s art, one’s politics, the form one’s city takes, and any check placed on public expression of one’s Christianity is an attack on the possibility of living an integrated life, an attempt to disallow Christian maturation” (Glen Olsen). It is often assumed without further question that religion is strictly a private matter and that the only things which ought to exist in the public domain are the supposedly neutral activities of politics and commerce. Yet this assumption, and the very terms in which it is expressed, are part of a secular dogmatic creed we have inherited. Why do we unquestioningly accept an institutionalized dichotomy between the religious and the secular, the sacred and the profane, when this state of affairs would have been seen as a deeply unnatural contradiction at almost any other time in the history of nations and peoples? Upon closer investigation, “the most basic constituent of a culture, the one that shapes it throughout, is its theological orientation, its religion or its secular substitute for religion” (p. 4).

Foundations approaches from an openly political angle the perennial issue, addressed many times by the Popes, of the extent to which faith and culture should intertwine, mutually supporting one another. “I develop the political and juridical aspects of such a [Catholic] culture, that is, those formal political and juridical institutions, in their most general aspects, which seem to me necessary for the preservation, stability and perfection of a Catholic culture” (vii). Storck’s overall argument thus represents a logical extension of the thought of theologians like Henri de Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar, who so firmly emphasized the intrinsic and expansive social character of the Catholic faith in its lived reality, or Luigi Giussani for whom the Catholic Faith is empty wordplay, a fleeting shadow, if it does not permeate and transform from within every aspect of life and culture. “A faith that does not become culture,” said John Paul II, “would be a faith not fully received, not entirely thought out, and not faithfully lived” (p. 14, n. 3). On the basis of this truth, Storck goes on to show that only a Catholic political order can fully safeguard a Catholic culture (pp. 8-13), thus introducing his plan for the rest of the book: “I will take up what this role of protecting and perfecting a Catholic culture might actually look like. What would be the powers and duties of a Catholic state, what special institutions might it have or foster, what would be the spirit of its approach to governing?” (p. 11).

As interesting as such questions may be, one might wonder if the Church herself really puts forward the possibility and desirability of a Catholic political order in her official teachings, if she actually embraces the positive interaction of the political and religious domains. Storck’s answer is a firm yes and his supporting evidence is plentiful. The Church does have political principles to teach us, and her doctrine in this area is no less a part of her ordinary Magisterium than teachings on, for example, economic or conjugal moral ity. Combining quotations from political philosophers and official Church documents with his own commentary, Storck unfolds the integral social wisdom of Catho licism. With admirable clarity, Storck brings into focus manifest contradictions between what the Church teaches and what the West ern world—including, alas, many self-appointed authorities on Catho lic social doctrine—condones and practices today. Throughout, Storck rightly opposes the all-too-common reduction of the Church’s social Magisterium to a limited body of suggestions on purely economic matters. We have been trained to equate the social Magisterium with the economic dimension of Rerum Novarum, Quadragesimo Anno, and Centesimus Annus, forgetting first that these magnificent encyclicals contain far more than recommendations for redressing economic injustice, and second that they constitute only a fraction of what the Church has taught about social issues in all their amplitude, such as the solemn responsibilities of secular states towards the true religion, the absolute obligation of the state to uphold mar riage and encourage the family, the right of parents to educate their own children as they see fit, or the essentially public nature of worship and religious profession. As part of our heritage of miseducation, Catho lics have gradually been led to believe that the American situation, where religion and the political sphere have (formally speaking) nothing at all to do with one another, is normative, whereas in fact the Church teaches the opposite. A generation of theologians during this century, led by John Courtney Murray, continued the nineteenth-century attempt to bring the Church’s teaching into line with a peculiar strain of Americanism. In the pro cess, the rich and nuanced teaching of the Church suffered terrible distortion. As a result, most treatments of her social Magisterium to this day reflect with greater accuracy the fantasies of these latter-day American ists than the actual declarations issued by Popes and Councils. In all of this we can see a pattern of deliberately reducing all political issues to economic ones, and a corresponding tendency to pretend that the Church has pronounced on economic matters alone, or worse, that she has renounced the political ideals she once defended.

Americans treasure the rights of freedom of speech, press, and conscience; the constitutional separation of church and state; a free-market system of liberal capitalism based on international banking and interest-levying; and, most sacrosanct of all, the principle of popular sovereignty or the consent of the governed, which grounds political authority and its limits in the will of the people, from whom all secular power is believed to emanate. The philosophy underlying these freedoms, this economic infrastructure, the divorce of spiritual and temporal powers, and above all the social contract theory frequently invoked by the American founding fathers, is condemned by the Supreme Pontiffs of the Church in so clear and authoritative a manner that any reversal of doctrine in this area is rendered impossible. The Church’s statements on modern political theory span from the first warnings of Pius VI in 1775, to the powerful proclamations of Leo XIII and his successors, to our reigning Pope, whose Evangelium Vitae contains a frontal attack on the Enlightenment understanding of man and human society (cf. §§18–23, §§69–70). In the eyes of the Church, the philosophical principles of government enshrined in modern regimes are antithetical to the Faith, contrary to human nature, and destructive of the common good of society. In Aeterni Patris, to take one example among many, Pope Leo XIII wrote: “Whosoever turns his attention to the bitter strifes of these days and seeks a reason for the troubles that vex public and private life must come to the conclusion that a fruitful cause of the evils which now afflict, as well as those which threaten us, lies in this: that false conclusions concerning divine and human things, which originated in the schools of philosophy, have crept into all the orders of the state, and have been accepted by the common consent of the masses” (§2). While not intended as a response to American ism per se, Storck’s book presents a fresh and compelling critique of its philosophical assumptions and a corresponding exposition of the Church’s doctrine concerning the proper conception of the political order.

In presenting an overview of what the Church has taught and what reason approves regarding matters such as religious liberty, economic activity, censorship, family law, and democracy, Storck returns frequently to the notion of the “normative situation,” namely, a Catholic cultural environment fostered and protected by a Catholic political order. According to the mind of the Church, this situation is truly a norm in all senses. It arises naturally when the Faith is not impeded by hostile forces, it is eminently desirable among those who profess the Faith from their hearts, and it is the standard against which existing systems are to be judged. The normative situation comes into being when a Catholic population, guided by the spirit of the Gospel and prompted by the inner logic of the Faith, develops a unified life woven of the separate strands of religion, art, education, government, leisure, recreation, allowing “the full and free expression and flowering of Catholicism” (p. 5). Among such a people, there is no practical schizophrenia, no division between what is professed as eternally true and what is lived from day to day. The small things of daily importance reflect and reinforce the things of supernatural and everlasting importance; the sublime realities of the Faith are given space and freedom to mould the activities of ordinary life, sanctifying them in the process. It is only in this way that human society actually justifies its own existence. Put differently, the worth of society (and of any particular government or political system) can be measured by one standard only, which is at the same time the most truly humanistic or man-perfecting concern: eternal salvation. Does a society and its political structures on the whole advance or retard the gaining of everlasting life in Christ? This alone is the final measure for judging the political structures man has built, and this alone should be the Catholic’s mindset when distinguishing what is praiseworthy from what is merely tolerable.

Wherever the Faith is preached with full conviction, the ultimate goal can be no other than the conversion of human nature in its totality by the truth of revelation and the power of grace. “The normal practice of the Catholic faith encourages or even requires community among its adherents, and will transform its external environment to reflect that community and its Faith; in other words, it will create a culture” (p. 1). “If it is true that Catholicism in its normal state will flourish in a thousand practices and will thoroughly hallow a culture, and that this is the natural effect of the living Faith, then it follows that the natural state of a Catholic is to live in a Catholic culture, the only place where Catholic life can be lived as it ought to be lived” (p. 3). Storck gives examples of the kind of common practices a Catholic culture would develop: “numerous public and common celebrations and activities, institutions and organizations, in which the Faith is publicly expressed and works carried on to further some object, spiritual or temporal, connected with the Faith.”

In addition to sacramental and other rituals, either in or outside the church building itself, there are numerous sodalities and confraternities, processions, pilgrimages, observances of feast days with popular devotions and other traditions such as dramas, dances, games or sports, not to mention activities to relieve or otherwise aid the poor, including charitable establishments of many kinds, cooperatives and special funds for needs, such as dowries for poor girls. Catholicism has also hallowed many of the everyday pursuits of mankind, with blessings of houses, land, fishing fleets, tools, food and drink and numerous other items and tasks (p. 2).

If unity of faith and life is the positive reason for the desirability of Catholic culture, there is a negative one, too: “the protection of the individual believer from error and sin” (p. 5). Such a culture “helps him to remember to dedicate his whole being and life and work to God.” It is ultimately man’s fallen condition, the hard truth of original sin, that makes it obligatory for a properly constituted civil authority to restrain human beings from doing, or enjoin them to do, certain kinds of things. If human souls are born into the world with a tendency towards evil, they stand in need of as many corrective influences as possible. The family and the state, as the two most potent forces on the individual, are under an obligation to shape the soul in virtue and arm it against vice. If the individual grows up with a non-religious family life and the systematic anti-religious indoctrination typical of most of our modern schools, can there be any humanly reasonable expectation that the effects of original sin will be uprooted or mitigated? It is frightening, then, to ponder this remark by Ernst Cassirer: “The concept of original sin is the common opponent against which all the different trends of the philosophy of the Enlightenment join forces” (The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, p. 141). The widespread attitude that a person should be able to do whatever he or she wants, provided it does not harm anyone else, and that the state has nothing to do with promoting Chris tian morality or belief, is rooted in a dual rejection of man’s fallen condition and his supernatural vocation. Those who profess the Faith, with its promise of liberating the mind as well as the heart, must come to recognize and reject the Enlightenment ideology that has turned the contemporary Western world into a chaos of nihilistic materialism.

Not one to dodge a challenge, Storck devotes the second chapter, and a more detailed appendix, to a consideration of what might seem an insuperable objection to his enterprise: the purported teaching of Dignitatis Humanae, the decree on religious liberty of the Second Vatican Council. It does not take much familiarity with the world to discover that there are Catholics for whom the mere title of this conciliar document functions as a decisive refutation of everything Storck’s book seeks to establish. Storck demonstrates that Dignitatis Humanae, far from contradicting earlier Church teaching on the right relationship of civil society to the true religion, becomes intelligible and defensible only in light of that traditional teaching. The conciliar document expressly places itself in a larger interpretive tradition which provides the full context for the document’s more limited statements. By reading the document as the Church intends, we are then able to grasp what a Catholic understanding of religious freedom must be. Adopting the time-honored hermeneutic principle that ecclesiastical documents are to be interpreted in accordance with earlier and later authoritative teachings on the same matters, Storck leads us to see that the supposed Promethean novelty of this declaration disappears when its statements are endowed with their just weight and proportioned to their place within Catholic social teaching. Storck defends his reading not only by selections from papal writings prior to the Second Vatican Council (e.g., pp. 21-29), but by passages in the new Catechism as well (pp. 29-31). In the second appendix (pp. 147-165), Storck revisits the issue in order to critique two recent books on the subject, Fr. Brian Harrison’s Religious Liberty and Contraception (1988) and Michael Davies’ The Second Vatican Council and Religious Liberty (1992). His assessment of the thesis of each book is quite fair, and his disagreement with the content of both is closely argued. Whether or not one agrees in the end with his solution of the difficulties, the position he lays out ought to be the point of departure for future treatments of the subject. With thirty-four years of energetic misreadings behind us since the promulgation of this document, we are more in need than ever of the judicious reading Storck here furnishes. Much the same could be said of many conciliar documents, of course; one need only think of Sac ro sanctum Concilium, rudely pressed into slavery by cretan warlords dancing on the ruins of a once-glorious liturgy. The chapter in Foundations on Dignitatis Humanae serves, therefore, not only as a close study of a narrow issue, but also as a model of how one should approach apparent contradictions between any document of the Second Vatican Council and the Church’s prior teachings.

A brief summary of the other chapters will give a sense of the breadth and depth of Storck’s book. Chapter 3, “The Framework of Eco nomic Activity” (pp. 43-86), is in many ways the high-point of Foun dations. The author places the limited theories and activities of economics in a much larger context, the common good to be achieved in the political community as a whole, showing that the common good is certainly far more than the acquisition of wealth, gross national product, low unemployment, or equal distribution of material goods. Eco nomics as a whole must be subordinated to the common good as Catho lic social teaching understands it. Storck delves into the nature of free enterprise, the parameters of commerce and advertising, the necessity of a structure of subsidiary economic groups, the evils associated with banking based on the levying of interest, and alternatives to the dominant economic models of the West. In chapter 4, “Censorship” (pp. 87-97), Storck briefly considers how and why the Catholic state must wisely use means of restricting and channeling the various media of information with a view to fostering the common good. In chapter 5, “Fa mily Law and Other Legal Matters” (pp. 99-114), Storck displays his grasp of concrete detail and his solid common sense. Using the Charter of Family Rights from Familiaris Con sortio, Storck explains how these rights are under siege not only by the laws and policies of current re gimes but by the very philosophy on which the modern state is based. He then outlines ways in which a society ruled in accordance with Catholic social teaching could successfully meet the difficulties of our times in regard, for instance, to marriage, welfare, housing, ecology, la bor laws, education, and technology. Storck’s indictment of the serious evils engendered by certain forms of technology and capitalist models of production offers a healthy corrective to the blind veneration of our age’s industrial-economic accomplishments. Chapter 6, “Democ ra cy” (pp. 115-123), sketches the kind of social structures most supportive of a genuine culture, such as the blending of democratic and aristocratic modes of rulership and the necessity of intermediate entities, like occupational groups and cooperatives, endowed with political representation. The last chapter, “The Ul timate Preservatives of Catholic Life” (pp. 125-134), takes up the question of “what, in the long run, must be counted on to preserve a Catholic culture in all its vitality and vibrant orthodoxy” (p. 125). No Chris tian culture has, of itself, the capacity for perpetual life; the resplendent Catholic culture of Europe has tragically declined until it is now barely a memory. Sounding a note at once of hope and melancholy, he writes: “But it is certainly also right for us to learn from what happened before and, as much as we can, provide effective safeguards for the future—if there is any future for a Catholic state and Catholic culture.” Storck focuses the question: “Is there anything which can protect a Catholic culture from within, as it were, anything which we can foster which will make it more probable that a particular Christian civilization will stand against the decline in faith and fervor and charity that too often afflicts Catholics?” His answer: we must renew serious Catho lic intellectual formation and cultivate a strong interior life of faith, hope, and charity. Only in these two ways can we slowly restore the Catho lic culture so desperately needed for the full flowering of our holy religion.

Earlier I mentioned a possible objection to Storck’s project stemming from misinterpretations of Dignitatis Humanae. Storck is well aware of other objections that might be raised against Foundations, all of which he answers fairly and convincingly. There are two common ones which will no doubt occur to almost any reader. First, there may be some who would find in Storck’s position an anachronistic revival of what has often been passionately denounced as “integralism,” the thesis that church and state should be hand-in-glove, united in goals, methods, and offices, one socio-political juggernaut pushing forward a common agenda. Nothing could be further from the Church’s teaching or Storck’s proposal. Unfortunately, the mere word “integralism,” with its intimidating sound, has for many become a magic spell intended to disperse all discussion of Catholic izing the economic or political orders. If people considered with an open mind what the Church has to say, they would see that her teachings force us to re-evaluate and in many cases reject some basic “truths” we have come to accept without question. Second, there may be readers who, while open in principle to the thesis Storck advances, find it utterly unrealistic, even comical, as a matter for discussion right now. Why bother to raise the question of a Catholic culture, much less a Catholic state, when the creation of neither one seems to be a possibility in the near or distant future? Storck is prepared for this much-too-common objection, which stems from the prejudice that only immediately practicable things are worth thinking about. As Catholics we have a duty, he explains, (1) to correct our errors about and ignorance of Catholic social teaching, (2) to refine, and often overturn, our accustomed way of looking at the relationship of church, culture, and state; (3) to provide a framework for our activism, our prayer, teaching, and evangelizing; and (4) to undo some of the damage done by anti-Catholics and liberal Catholics who, hating the integral Christian life preached by the Church, work tirelessly for its dismantling or neutralizing in the world. We are responsible for knowing what is true, what is optimal, what is normative; we need to know, in general and in particular, the ways in which our societies and regimes fail to meet up to the demands of the Gospel and the teachings of the Church.

In a review it is not possible to do justice to a book as brilliant as Foun dations of a Catholic Political Order. The author’s style is limpid and conversational, but at the same time concise. His apt examples and concrete scenarios confirm the book’s larger and more theoretical claims. In addition, Storck utilizes an array of classic authors—among them Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle, Daw son, Belloc, Tawney, Fanfani, Pieper, Ratzinger, and Giussani—and provides footnote references to specialized studies in economics and political science. Most importantly, Storck has an impressive command of the most relevant passages, including many lamentably neglected gems, from papal and conciliar documents relating to the social Magis ter ium. It is, in short, impossible to ignore this provocative challenge to the conventional soft-pedaling of Catholic political teaching.

Foundations of a Catholic Political Order will therefore be a very great disappointment, and possibly a cause of apoplexy, to those who, whether ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative,’ cherish the belief that Catholic social teaching is compatible with modern political philosophy or modern political systems. In point of fact, it is probably impossible to find two visions of reality that are more opposed than these, and if one wishes to be consistent with oneself, one must ultimately choose between them. Storck has written a book that bears witness to the maximizing demands of the Faith in relation to the world. Christ came to save not just individuals but societies as well; everything natural is included within the scope of His salvific power, everything human is intended, by divine Providence, to be sanctified and ordered to our final home, the City of God in heaven. May Storck’s book help to renew a discussion too long silenced and a Christian way of life too long dormant.