Comments on Benedict XVI and the Future of the WestTypePad2011-07-28T19:58:26ZRick Garnetthttps://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/tag:typepad.com,2003:https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2011/07/benedict-xvi-and-the-future-of-the-west/comments/atom.xml/Patrick Brennan commented on 'Benedict XVI and the Future of the West'tag:typepad.com,2003:6a00d834515a9a69e201543412abfa970c2011-07-29T01:44:17Z2011-07-29T01:44:17ZPatrick BrennanRick generously asks what I think about George Weigel's discerning a line of development of "Evangelical Catholicism" that runs from...<p>Rick generously asks what I think about George Weigel's discerning a line of development of "Evangelical Catholicism" that runs from Leo XIII through Benedict XVI and that, above all, "declines the embrace of state power as incompatible with the proclamation of the Gospel." I just happen to have Leo's 1885 encyclical Immortale Dei, "On the Christian Constitution of States" on my desk, and in it one can read that "there must, accordingly, exist between these two powers [the ecclesiastical and the civil] a certain orderly connection, which may be compared to the union of the soul and body in man" (no. 14). One can also read there that "the civic order of the commonwealth should be maintained as sacred" (no. 18) and that "to exclude the Church, founded by God himself, from life, from laws, from the education of youth, from domestic society is a grave and fatal error. A State from which religion is banished can never be well regulated" (no. 32). Leo argued in favor of a cooperative concordia between the Church and the civil authority, and he certainly defended the Church's -- not just individuals' -- power to judge the actions of the civil ruling authority in an exercise of the so-called "indirect power." But even more, how about this from Tametsi futura (1900): "As with individuals, so with nations. These, too, must necessarily tend to ruin if they go astray from 'The Way'." What I hear in Weigel is a version of J.C. Murray's revised Leo, and of that I think E.A. Goerner's indictment is sufficient for the moment: "historicism as antidote." As I said in a recent post here, I don't see how individuals lose their obligations to God when they unite in civil society, designate a civil authority, and act corporately. The stubborn fact of religious pluralism may prevent civil society through its ruling authority from offering God what is God's right, but that is not because society is under less obligation to God than individuals are. NONE of this, of course, is to say that Leo defends the proposition that the civil authority should compel non-believers to "profess" the faith (cf. Immortale no. 36), only that Leo sought the "Christian organization of civil society" (id. at no. 16). </p>