July Meinvielle CATHOLIC CONCEPT OF POLICY GENERAL INDEX Introduction ON BLN-I.
Moral Nature of Politics.
1.
Two Wrong Theories 2.
God, author of political society.
3.
Moral and political technique 4.
Politics and theology: 5.
Neither individualism nor statism l1.
The problem of sovereignty... 1.
False doctrine of the Sovereign 2.
Divine Origin of Sovereignty 3.
Democracy and Democracy: 4.
Democracy and Catholics 5.
Human right of political regimes 6.
From Observance to Power......................... 7.
Resistance to abusive power.
8.
Of the illegitimacy of TII power.
Social-statual structuring of political life.
.
Liberalism and Socialism.
.
Corporate Regime...
Professional representation.
.
Universal Suffrage.
.
Political Regimes: Democracy.
Republic and Democracy:.
Modern Republics...
Towards a corpomnvo and authoritarian regime 1V.
Functions of authority......................................... 1.
Wrong doctrines.
2.
Catholic Doctrine 3.
The State and the family................ 4.
The State in education and culture 5.
The State and the economy. 6.
The State and the Community of First Nations 7.
The State and the Church... s 8.
“The Fraternal City” of Marnam 1.
Egalitarianism and the Gospel......... 2.
The three senses of the word democracy: 3.Le0n-XI and Christian lardemocracy.................................to and INTRODUCTION Politics must serve man.
Here is a formula that condenses the present book, a formula that says very little and very confusedly if you do not have a true concept of man; formula that, on the other hand, says everything, and very luminously, if you possess this authentic concept.
Philosopherism and the Revolution before corrupting politics, and the same thing about the economy, corrupted man.
The Church, however, before giving a Christian policy, ordered man and gave us the Christian.
Hence it is essential, on the cover of this book, to indicate what man is.
Because it is clearly clear that the conception of politics cannot be equal if we make man a simple example of the zoological scale that if we make him an enlightened being by the light of reason, with an eternal destiny.
And man is this: a being with material needs, because he has a body, but above all with intellectual, moral and spiritual needs, because he has an immortal soul.
And this does not arise from an aprioristic consideration, but is the verification of what we observe in ourselves by the intimate sense, in others by observation, and by history throughout the course of human existence.
And with this we would have enough to formulate the laws of a human policy, and for the same reason true, and put at the service of man.
And this would not be individualist, liberal, or democrat, I imagine Rousseau; neither organistic nor statist, as philosophers and jurists from Hegel have pretended.
It would be a human policy.
There is no more accurate and precise word to qualify it.
Would it also be a Christian policy?
If, in the sense that all this political order, derived from a proper consideration of human nature, is wanted by God, and as such immutable and valid even in the case of a Christian policy.
But it is clear that a Christian policy, without altering or diminishing the demands of a purely human policy, is conditioned by a higher law, which derives from higher and new principles that Christianity has added to human nature.
Christian politics is then more than human, because it fulfills the demands of it more fully.
Dc the same way that Christian life, while still being human, is more than human.
And knowing what this “something else” means.
Christian life is a supernatural life that transcends all the demands of any created or creative nature, it is a new creature in Christ (St.Paul, II Cor.
5, 17) that is grafted into the nature of man and transforms it into divine, without destroying it, in the same way that, without destroying it, the graft transforms the efficiency of the wild plant.
The supernatural man, or Catholic man, is a man of new life (St.Paul, Rom 6:4), with new operations because all his operations are divinized, as is his nature as a man.
Without the intelligence of this mystery, everything is absolutely absurd in Catholicism, because everything in it receives meaning from this mystery of life that means and operates.
The Visible Church, for example, is an invisible mystery.
Pilgrimage on earth, mixed in a certain way with the things of the earth, operates the invisible union of souls with Christ and by Christ with God.
The Catholic man is not a man and, moreover, a Catholic, as if the Catholic were something separate from his quality as a man or as a father of a family, an artist, an economist or a politician.
The Catholic man is a unity.
How much of man and activity there is in him, he must be Catholic; that is, adapted to the demands of his Christian faith and charity.
The Word assumed all mankind except sin: Catholic life must assume and rise above all human life, except the corruptions of its weakness.
1 Politics is a moral activity that is born naturally from human demands in its earthly life.
Hence, both the political science that legislates the essential conditions of the earthly city, and the political prudence that determines the appropriate actions or certain specific circumstances, for the achievement of certain political purposes, must conform to supernatural life.
From them they unfold in a purely human domain with a autonomy of action regulated by reason; but all that order is exalted, in the present economy, to the supernatural end that God has assigned to man.
This subordination is not purely extrinsic, as if politics were referring to a higher end without renewal within it; it must positively tend to the realization of a supernatural end, since it matters an interior renewal, a new regulation.
Because politics, while remaining in the order of temporal realizations, must have means superior to those of nature in the state of its pure demands.
Christian politics is, therefore, of a new and higher human value than that of politics simply such The Catholic, as a Catholic, must adjust his political life to the demands of his right reason, enlightened by faith.
To do this, he needs to know the demands of his faith in his activity as a member of the collective.
On the other hand, the present conditions of political life call with special urgency for the Catholic to know the Catholic doctrine on politics.
But this knowledge, in addition to being reflective, must penetrate the essence of political reality and its multiple causal links: it must be of a philosophical order.
The pure erudition of theories and political facts, what is called political actuality, is harmful if it is not in possession of the true philosophy of politics; and therefore of the natural metaphysics of human intelligence, what St.Thomas calls common sense, now completely destroyed by almost implausible ideological perversions.
The fact is contingent, individual, tied to the dissolute demands of the matter that divides and individualizes; although it multiplies and systematizes in empirically formulated laws, it is destitute of any ontological explanation.
He may reveal to us what is done but never what must be done.
The facts obtain explanations in the light of the ontological principles; the political facts in the light of the ontological principles of the human being.
In the light of these principles, the observation and interpretation of these facts is necessary to consider the de facto conditions of a particular and determined city.
Metaphysics does not exclude empirical observation, before it demands it; but it demands it sustained in its own bosom.
When we say metaphysics, we do not say something intractable, unattainable to the common human; we refer simply to the wisdom that considers the principles of being.
This wisdom, which spontaneously possesses every man who has not deliberately corrupted his own intelligence, observes the facts, values them and places each of them in the place of the hierarchy that corresponds to him.
The most typical and grave sign of the decomposition of the modern world is precisely this war on wisdom which contemplates the principles of being.
Hence, the modern world is a fair of absolute phenomena, called State, Individual, Freedom, Sovereignty, Revolution, Equality, Fascism, Democracy, Right, Left, Center.
Each of these phenomena sublimated to the absolute, fights disorderly to impose its tyrannical domination.
And the being, the human and the divine, perishes victim of this mad and chimeric struggle of the myths that man unleashed.
And all human values, including politics, also perish in it.
Therefore, humbly submitting ourselves to this wisdom of the first principles, which St.Thomas possessed to a high degree, and under that light, focusing on the facts recorded in the observation, we will attempt this study of politics, which we will consider in four chapters.
First: Nature of political society.
Second: Nature, condition and scope of sovereignty.
Third: Organization of society and the State to make effective the pursuit of the common good.
Fourth: Functions and powers of the State.
In these four chapters we will condense everything that can be demanded so that the city can be politically governed.
So that there will be government without tyranny.
Just so there's government.
Because only to the extent that it defeccionates by default or by excess, is there tyranny.
So that there may be a constant and permanent pursuit of the common good, of that common good, fruit of the public reign of justice, the only one capable of producing, in turn, the divine gift of peace which is, even among all earthly and passenger goods, the most pleasant to speak of, the most desirable of all who may desire, and the best that can be found.
(St. Augustine).
1.
MORAL NATURE OF POLICY If it is always difficult to determine the nature of a thing, greater is the difficulty when it comes to moral realities such as politics.
First of all, it should be noted that, while our task here is exclusively about political science, we do not neglect what is characteristic of political prudence, that is, politics in its genuine sense which considers the formation, structure and governance of so-called political societies.
And here we ask ourselves the following: Is the fact of political societies a natural phenomenon, governed by fixed and invariable laws, such as, for example, the formation of crystals that study crystallography, or is it an artificial product of man's activity, such as a painting, a machine, or any device that man can at his total discretion do or stop doing so, doing so in this or that other way; or is it finally a specifically human fact, of the moral category, such as the acts of the virtue of temperance or of strength that man cannot, without breaking the laws of conduct, stop executing?
The question is whether political science is a natural science such as biology, or whether it investigates the constitution of the living, or a pure art such as manufacturing, of ships, which tends to conveniently build a ship without regard to the moral uprightness of the action of manufacturing, or whether it is actually an ethic that understands and regulates man's specific activity, one that cannot validly evade the field of good and bad.
Assuming, as is evident and no one denies, that only so-called political societies are realized among men, it is necessary to examine what kind of man's tendencies give him existence: whether fixed and invariable as those that lead the bee to create its hive, or a free and arbitrary action such as that that which moves man to make an artifact, or a specifically human action, freely exercised, even though obeying the deep demands of human nature itself.
Because if we look at the actions that man performs, we can classify them into three broad categories.
In the first we can put all the actions that are executed in it, necessarily, regardless of its will; so, for example, its physical-chemical and biological activity: they are occupied by the different sciences that formulate the laws that govern this fixed and invariable activity.
In a second category we can include the actions of man that are directed to the production of things, such as mechanical or artistic works.
These actions are carried out freely, without needing to execute them by any requirement of their rational nature, so that even if it ceased to execute them or to execute them in this or that way, it would not violate the dictates of their rational nature as a man.
Finally, there is a third category of actions which, if it is true that man sets them free, is impelled to do so by virtue of their rational nature, which imperatively dictates to them that this must be done and that they cannot fail to do so.
These actions seek the perfection of man as such.
There are, then, three orders: that of physical nature, that of works of art and that of moral conduct.
Which of the three should we include policy?
Any political theory depends on the answer to this question.
1.
Two erroneous theories Although it may seem anachronistic to set L'Action Francaise here, nothing more convenient to fix a definite position on the present question.
L'action Frangaise, a well-nourished school of vigorous observers, conceives politics as a physical science that verifies phenomena of 5 nature and organizes them into laws, in the same way as botany or crystallography.
Society would not be a free realization of man who updates the social virtualities deposited in his being, but the necessary product of necessary instincts, as in the case of anteaters!.
“Society, ” they say, “(Maurice Pujo, in Comment Rome est Trompée, p.
166, cited by Lallement in Clairvoyance de Rome, p.
166) is founded on the most stable and firm of our nature, on the instinct of conservation, which expresses the elementary needs of life.
This instinct of preservation, inseparable from the family instinct, determines us to defend our life and that of our children, makes us wish that it be assured against misery, and for this it first bases property and then inheritance; moreover, it makes us wish that it be defended against the dangers that surround it, and for this purpose it bases society.
In all this there is no virtuous effort, no intervention of the will in the moral sense of this word.”
Therefore, virtue is removed from the foundation and structure of society, since no self-determination is involved in it.
Excluding virtue, it turns out that political life is alien to justice and evangelical precepts.
Its specific purpose will not be the temporary common good, as Christian morality teaches, but the national interest, that is, the realization, by all possible means, good or bad, of what appears to serve the “monarchical restoration” of France.
The whole policy will be reduced not to achieving the perfectly virtuous life of society, the 1stum bene vivere of the scholastics, but to putting “the material business of the nation in good progress, balancing its budget, securing national defence with a quality artillery ” (ibid., p.
163).
From where it would turn out that politics is as independent of morality as the functioning of the paner.
Although inspired by other philosophical currents, Machiavelism has great affinities with the Maurrasian ideology.
and fascism keep Machiavelli, deprived of Taoda religious intelligence and imbued with the Greco-Roman conceptions of life, sees in the homeland the only spiritual greatness capable of inspiring and begetting glory, heroism, work and creation.
The homeland is a divinity on whose altar everything must be sacrificed.
As much as it is done for it is allowed, and the actions that in private life would be bad, if done for the homeland are magnanimous.
The reason for the State, the famous reason for the State, is in itself fully justified.
Partially continuing this Machiavellian tendency, fascism, led by a will of steel and founded on an understanding of the immediate quality, sc proponc propose to realize the great Italy, full heir of Imperial Rome.
This great Italy, formed not by individuals, but by social bodies all engaged in a harmonious production would be practically superhuman.
The definition of fascism made by Benito Mussolini himself in the Italian Encyclopedia (The Nation, June 30, 1932) reflects in an intergovernmental manner this disorbital exaltation of the State: “Liberalism, ” says the State for the benefit of the individual in particular; fascism reconfirms the State as the true reality of the individual.
And if freedom is to be the attribute of real man and not of the abstract fantoche in which individualist liberalism thought, fascism is pronounced in favor of freedom.
It's for the only freedom that can be one thing!
Positive political science, a political sociology, different from political philosophy, can be admitted to be reduced to considering political facts as facts.
Such a science seeks only what it is, the political reality of a specific society, trying to explain the mutual interaction of elements in social life without explaining the norms of political life and less judging the morality of those actions.
Such science will not be able to explain whether such an association forna is normal or abnormal, good or bad, because such judgments, which involve knowledge of the end of human life, are only possible in political social philosophy.
If L'Action Frangaise's theorizers had been reduced to that, they would not be reprehensible.
But they wanted to build a policy for France, which is not possible without making judgments of value about the good or the bad in politics and without having an end that establishes the formation of the good political society.
Here we do not censor Charles Maurras, but only some of his disciples, for we believe that the thought of Maurras himself is free of all censorship.
(A.N.).
6 serious, the freedom of State and of the individual in the State, since for the fascist everything is within the State and nothing human or spiritual is outside the State, much less has value.
In this sense, fascism is totalitarian, and the fascist state, synthesis and unity of all values, interprets, develops and potentially encloses the whole life of the people.”
There is, however, under the aspect that interests us here, a difference between the ideology of L'Action Francaise and the Machiavellian-Fascist.
The first is amoral; the second is immoral, because it establishes the reason of state as a norm of morality.
But one and the other coincide in exalting the notion of state, reviving pagan statism.
It is called "Statism" any political conception in which man is totally subordinated to the State as the party to the whole.
Just as the roots and behind parts of the tree have no reason to be but as part of the whole, so is man, a member of political society.
The State can sacrifice it all the time as best suited to its interests.
And according to the historical particularities in which it is verified, it bears the names of fascism, absolutism, Bolshevism, Platonic communism, Ceaseism, etc.?
The physicalism of L'Action Frangaise is diametrically opposed to Rousseau's individualism.
For Rousseau man has been born free, with the freedom of the savage in a forest, and so he must remain essentially.
Since men are all free, there exists among them the most absolute arithmetic equality, the least subordination being inconceivable and unjust.
As, on the other hand, political society is inevitable, Rousseau seeks to build it in such a way that no one is violated in his essential freedom and equality.
For this purpose he pretends a social contract by which until then free men are determined to live in society.
The curious thing about this covenant is that it does not nullify the individual freedom of the contracting ones, because they, in giving themselves to all, do not give themselves to any; and secondly, because by submitting to the great common self, to the general will that is engendered, they submit to themselves.
The general will is the will of the sovereign people, that is, of the numerically computed multitude.
From where all rights and obligations are engendered by number.
In Rousseau, patriarch of liberalism, society is an artificial product elaborated by the individual to ensure his intangible individual freedom.
If we look empirically at the political conception of Rousseau and L'Action Francaise, we find them completely opposite.
It makes politics a physics; that, a mere art.
One makes it derive entirely from the free will of man, as if it were any artifact; the other assures that it is the product of a natural function, like that of the pancreas, without connection with the will of man.
L'Action Francaise assigns, as a raison d'être, collective interest; Rousseau, individual freedom.
Artificialism, liberalism, individualism, in Rousseau; physicalism, statism, in L'Action Frangaise.
However, a philosophical consideration shows that both conceptions, although distinct, are not, in fact, irreducible.
One and the other, in the same way as Kantian autonomism, involve the worship of man, with the slight difference that, if in one their individual tendencies are flattered, in the other their social tendencies are exalted.
♪
The analysis and judgment we make here of fascism takes into account only its doctrinal statement.
Considered so, it is not possible, under the aspect of Catholic doctrine, to formulate of it but a strict and strict judgment, since it is an application to the politics of Hegelian pantchism.
But fascism can also be considered in its concrete realization and then it is nothing but an economic-political reaction against demoliberalism, which can not only become healthy, but even Catholic, in agreement.
to the middle where it unfolds.
In this regard I have considered him in other books of mine, particularly in A Catholic Judgment on the New Problems of Politics, to which I refer the reader.
I also recommend the excellent book of Caesar E.
Pico, Letter to Jacques Maritain on the collaboration of Catholics with fascist movements.
With regard to National Socialism, you can see my book Between the Church and the Reich.
(A.N.).
7 Daniel Rops points out, in Le monde sans ame (Plon, 1932), this common derivation of all modern systems, apparently antagonistic: “Human nature, ” he says, “is so made, that it imperatively claims the existence of an absolute; if it does not place it in God, it will glorify it in itself; be it in the individual, be it in the concepts of it derived from it.
like race, nation, state.”
And the absurdity of both conceptions lies precisely in the fact that he becomes a god of the individual or of the State.
In the first case, the State is sacrificed and it leads to anarchy; in the second, the individual is sacrificed and absolutism is enthroned.
It is the everlasting movement from a society that has repudiated God, the Living and True God who pointed out to all nations who ruled them (Eccl 17,14) 2.
God, author of political society For this reason, only Catholicism, which effectively establishes the transcendence of God over all created and the absolute dependence of man on his Creator, can save us from the absurdity of these conceptions.
It is true that the freedom man is endowed with is a specific perfection of his nature, and very excellent, but it is not perfection.
Perfection is the rational fullness, that is, the operation of those actions that are proportionate to reason, the specific principle of its working, whether it is a purely human perfection; or those that are in proportion to divine movements, if it is supernatural perfection, freely agreed to man by the First Cause3.
Man must aspire to his perfection; he is not born with it, but he can possess it; his intelligence and his will have capacities in a certain infinite way*, like the Being who is his proper object.
But concerning this Being it is in a state of pure possibility as a rasa table, in which nothing has been written (S. 7h.
1, q.
79, a.
(2).
He must accomplish it by his actions by tending toward the Being who is outside of him.
With their free acts; but it is not enough that they are free to perfect him; they must be good acts freely exercised.
The possibility of doing evil is not proper to the perfection of his freedom; rather, it is his weakness, as it is the weakness of his intelligence to err and err.
Hence it is an antihuman absurdity to place the perfection of man in the limit of his freedom, as if he were endowed with a pure autonomism.
Man is subject to a law, prior to him, which accompanies him in his existence, and this law, far from lowering him, constitutes his glory, because, intrinsically claimed by the perfection of his being, is the guarantee of his perfection.
Conversely, all pure autonomism, precisely because it does not correspond to the real demands of its internal structure, the violent, degrades and destroys it.
It would be corn to subtract the world from the stars to the laws that condition their movement: in either case, the invitable consequence is chaos.
* In fact, in the present Providence of God with respect to man, he must tend to supernatural perfection which he can obtain only by his incorporation into Christ who lives in the Church; no one can be good or upright without this incorporation, because from the moment that God has manifested it as the imposition of his Divine Will, it would be against natural righteousness to subtract itself from it.
Although outside this reason, it is impossible to observe the same natural precepts, without supernatural grace, as the Church teaches against the pelagiars.
It is necessary to have an exact concept of the supernatural in order not to identify it with the simply divine.
There is a natural divine order and a supernatural one.
The knowledge we have of God by the existence of the creatures who proclaim the glory of their Creator is natural.
The one we have for the same manifestation that God has made of himself, by the Prophets and by Christ who perseveres in the Church, is supernatural.
(A.N.).
* Infinite in power, says St.Thomas (S.7h.
1, q.
86, a.
2) (N. del A.).
There is, therefore, an eternal law in the Creator's Intelligence, which orders the principles of being and action to be adjusted by all beings for creation.
This eternal law, as it is engraved in the very essence of things, is known by the name of natural law.
The natural law, participation of the eternal law, is not, therefore, something external to things, as imposed from the outside.
It is its own internal constitution adjusted to a specific way of acting.
It is received, as the being is received: by the same creative act.
In this sense it is immanent, because it is identified with the nature of the thing.
Among the created beings are some who, deprived of intelligence and freedom, are physically needy in their operation, so that they cannot want to act in any other way than the one who demands their nature.
Following St.Thomas, these beings can be divided into three great hierarchies, comprising gross bodies, plants, animals.
Natural law matters in them a physical need that they cannot break.
Man, endowed with intelligence and, consequently, with freedom, has his specific nature subject also to a normal or natural way of acting; that is, demanded by his nature.
Thus, his nature as a man demands that he love his parents, that he harm no one, that he think uprightly without straying from the truth.
This which his nature demands is in him the natural law; that as soon as it is found in God's computer intelligence, it is called the eternal law.
This law does not subdue him physically, as is the case with other inferior beings; although it requires a certain way of acting, he may want to act otherwise; he may contradict and break it.
It matters only a moral need, which should not, but which may break.
If man, in his doing, conforms to the natural law, he works virtuously; if he does not conform, he works viciously.
To the natural law, says St. Thomas (S. 7h.
1-II, q.
94, a.
3) — belongs all that to which man is inclined by his nature, Now each one is inclined to the operation that is convenient to him according to his form, like the fire to the operation of heating.
Being the rational soul the proper form of man, there is in every man a natural inclination to act according to reason, that is, virtuously.
It is known that not every inclination, but only the inclination to act according to reason can be considered in man as a law imposed by his nature.
And so the evil inclinations, which come from their vitiated nature, far from being considered natural law, must be seen as violating that admirable order which the very essences of beings proclaim.
And in man reason is like a light by which he discerns what is good and what is bad.
And this light is like an impression in man of the divine light that has pointed out its limits to every thing.
St. Thomas has fixed this doctrine with wonderful simplicity, whose beauty cannot be overcome.
Thus it demonstrates the existence of the eternal law: The law, as we have stated in the preceding question, is nothing other than the ruling of the practical reason of the prince who rules a perfect community or society.
Now, it is evident, if one admits — and we have already proved it — that the world is governed by Divine Providence, that the whole community of the universe is governed by divine reason: therefore, that reason for the government and ordination of all things existing in God as in a supreme monarch of the whole universe, has the character of law.
And since divine reason conceives nothing in time, but all its conceptions, as written in the book of Proverbs, are eternal, it must by force be called eternal that law that governs the destinies of the world (I-1I, q.
91, a.
195.
And it immediately shows the Angelic Doctor how this Etena law, as it is imprinted on the rational nature of man, is called natural law.
The law — says (1 - II, q.
91, a.
2) — by virtue of its character as a rule and measure, it can be found in a subject in two ways: as such subject is regulator and measurer, or as such subject is regulated and measured.
Because one thing participates * The Castilian version of this and subsequent transcripts is by Prof.
Constantino Femández Alvar, in the booklet The Law, of the Labor Collection.
9 of a rule or measure as soon as it is regulated or measured.
Now, when all things subject to divine Providence are found and thus regulated and measured by eternal law — thus it consists of what is said in the preceding article — all partake of eternal law in some way, namely: as the impression of this law in its natures prompts them to act and makes them tend to their respective ends.
In this plan of subjection to divine Providence man excels among the other beings because he not only participates like them of that influence, but is able to be his own providence and that of others.
He therefore partakes of eternal reason; it prompts him to act and it forces him to seek and follow the path that leads him to his destiny.
And such participation of eternal law in rational beings is what is called natural law.
Here is why the Psalmist, having sung: “Sacrify God a sacrifice of righteousness,” as if asked what the works of righteousness are, adds: “Many say: Who will show us good?”
And in answer to such a question, he tells us: “The light of your face, Lord, has been imprinted on our minds”; as if the law of the natural reason by which we discern good and bad — such is the object and purpose of natural law — was nothing other than a certain impression of divine law in man.
From where it turns out that natural law is nothing more than a share of eternal law in the rational creature.
By this natural law is engraved in the reason of every man the order of morality, that is, of what is good and of what is bad, of what he must do and of what he must avoid; and of such a sort engraved, that in his most universal statements he cannot be plucked from the human heart.
We transcribe textually the exhibition of Angelico, because his mode of reasoning is highly illustrative and educational for the twisted modern intelligences.
They integrate — he says (S. 7h.
I-II, q.
94, a.
6) — the content of natural law — we have already said — first certain very universal precepts, of all known; then more secondary and particular ones, which are like the immediate conclusions of those first principles.
In order, therefore, to the most universal precepts, the natural law cannot in any way be abolished of the human heart on the purely cognitive ground; it can be so in the field of practice and with respect to something particular, since passions or disordered lust are an impediment to the application of the law of principles to such actions in particular.
In terms of secondary precepts, natural law may disappear from the heart of man because of bad persuasions (as in the theoretical field errors may occur with respect to the very necessary conclusions), or the depravity of customs and perversion of habits, or impulsive natural dispositions toward good, as evidenced by the fact that pra certain peoples theft was not an injustice, and sins against nature — of this the Apostle testifies — were considered lawful.
We cannot go directly into politics if we do not transcribe a very important article, full of light, in which St.Thomas states that natural law contains various precepts that occupy different places in a hierarchy of values.
This article is of paramount importance to our study, not only because it indicates the precise point of union between political society and natural law, but because it compares and relates this point to other natural rights of man.
It says like this: As being, in every order of things, is the first thing that falls under the perceptive action of speculative reason, so good is the first thing that apprehends practical reason, ordered to action.
As he wishes, then, that every agent works for the end, and the end has the nature of good., the first principle of the practical order must be that which is founded, immediately on the branch of good: well is that which every one desires.
Here is the first precept of the law: “good must be done and evil must be avoided”.
On this first precept are founded all the other precepts of natural law, so that everything else that must be done or avoided as long as it has character and nature of natural precept, insofar as practical reason naturally judges it as a human good.
But 10 as, on the other hand, good has a reason for the end, and the evil reason for the contrary, intelligence will perceive as good and, therefore, as necessarily practicable, everything toward which man feels a natural inclination; and as an evil which must be avoided at all costs, that which contradicts and opposes that good.
The order, therefore, of the precepts of natural law will be in every way parallel to the order of natural inclinations.
Let's see this order.
There is, first of all, in man a inclination towards a good, which is that of his nature; a common inclination to all beings, for all desire his own preservation, according to the demands of his own nature.
Correspondingly to this inclination, it is necessary to integrate the natural law with all those precepts that refer to the preservation of man's life, or that come to prevent evils contrary to that life.
There is a second inclination — daughter, too, of human nature, but from the point of view of communicating with other animals — towards a more particular, more concrete good.
According to this inclination, all those prescriptions concerning what nature teaches to all animals will belong to the natural law: the procreation, or perpetuation of the species; the formation and upbringing of children, and others of this kind.
Finally, one finds in man a third, his own, fruit of his peculiar, rational, specific nature, towards a more peculiar and concrete good: the knowledge of divine truths; social coexistence.
Equivalent to this order of natural inclinations, the precepts of natural law will be those who proscribe ignorance and recriminate social injustices, breakers of civic peace, etc. (I-II, q.
94, a.
(2).
Assumed these indispensable preambles, because from the negation of eternal law they take away all modern ravings in the moral order, it is easy to prove that political society is required by the nature of man, that is, it is of natural law.
No one has shown more perfectly than St.Thomas, in the KINGDOM's booklet, that political society is postulated by the very roots of man's life, because without it he cannot achieve his own perfection in the threefold material, intellectual and moral order.
Let us follow in his reasonings to the Angelico Doctor: Man comes into the world in a state of nudity, without providing him with the nature of food, clothing of skin, means of defense, such as teeth, horns, nails, or at least lightness in flight.
It is true that instead of all this it is provided with reason, through which it can be done, with the work of your hands as much as you need; but one alone is not enough for it, but many must unite in society.
In addition, in the other animals there is a natural ability to discern the usefulness of the harmful.
Thus the sheep instinctively recognizes in the wolf one, enemy, and other animals know, thanks to this ability, certain healing plants and what is necessary for them to live.
Man also possesses the natural knowledge of what he needs to live, but only in general; to come to know the particular things necessary to human life he must use his reason on the basis of universal principles.
Now, it is not possible for a single man to attain with his reason all things of this order; then, he needs to live in society with many others in order to help each other and to be able to devote himself to specialized rational research: thus one to medicine, etc.
So true is that man cannot attain his perfection but can benefit from all the material, intellectual and moral goods produced by the other members of the social collectivity, which for this purpose possesses language, with which he can maintain a trade with his fellows much narrower than any other animal of those who live together, such as the crane, the ant and the bee.
This consideration makes Solomon say in Ecclesiastes, 4.9: “It is better that there are two and not one, for each one benefits from the mutual company.”
Nor can it be said that hunger could achieve these goods in domestic society, for while it alone can provide the strictly indispensable for a rudimentary life, it cannot be provided by 11 with the required sufficiency, nor can it be supplied with certain intellectual and moral goods that are the result of long studies and are transmitted by tradition.
Nor is it believed that only in the indigence in which man is born today is the raison d'être of political society founded; it is born of his ingenuous social condition of intelligent and free creation, so that, as St.Thomas explains (S. 77., 1, q.
96, 4, 1), even in the state of innocence men would have lived socially, and there would be those who exercised command over others.
From all this it follows that political society is a natural product, that is to say, demanded by the social impulses that are deposited in every man.
Then God, author of human nature, is the author of political society.
Rousseau's artificialism and Maurras' agnosticism remain radically political science.
excluded from the Observancia, against Maurras, that this social impulse is neither forced nor blind as an instinct.
St.Thomas has employed a luminous formula to explain his nature; he says that there is a inclination to social life corno to virtues (Comn.
in Pol.
1.
1.
That is, just as in the will of man God has put certain requests that give us capacity and impel us to act virtuously — petitions that do not force us, that we can contradict — so also the impulse that moves us to social life.
This observation indicates to us, of course, that political reality is essentially ethical in its own internal constitution, for the movement that underlies it is not the pure free will or a forced instinct, but an intrinsically morally and morally binding movement.
Just as it is obligatory to tend to perfection itself, so life in society is obligatory.
Therefore, it is the moral order that gives existence and governs political life.
We lay down the analysis in the structure of political reality to see how in its very core is a moral reality.
At the same time we will discover the unique fundamental law of any political society: the temporary common good.
Analyzing the profound tendencies of man and the potential indigence with which he comes into the world, we said that it is necessary to incorporate him into a society that assures him of what is indispensable for life, that sunt vite necessaria; this society, whose constitution does not interest us here, is the family, with its triple conjugal, parental and herril ordination.
But since she alone can assure you only the strictly necessary, we said that a broader society is needed where families gather together to achieve a perfect sufficiency of life, vite suficientiam perfectam.
Now, of what nature is this good that man seeks in the social community?
It is, of course, a good that neither the family nor the private societies alone can seek for it; then it is a superindividual and superfamily good, that is, a common good.
Moreover, it is a good demanded at present by man's indigence in his earthly condition; then, it is a temporary common good.
A good; but of what nature?
Material, moral, spiritual, supernatural?
The analysis that revealed to us the natural need of political society also discovers the nature of this good.
Man, we repeat, feels naturally inclined to social life, for only in it can he achieve his perfection.
What is its perfection?
Man attains his perfection in the rational fullness, that is, in the consummation of his whole being, which, if it is body, is also, and above all, intelligent soul, with intellectual and moral abilities.
Then, the good that political society must seek for man is the good of the whole compound: the human good.
Economic and material goods, no doubt; but also intellectual and moral.
Above all these, because it is they who specify man, lifting him up on the whole scale of inferior beings.
And even the economic goods 12 subordinate to the spiritual ones; for in man the body is subordinate to the soul, and vegetative and sensitive operations are required insofar as they are necessary to the exercise of pure intellectual life (S. 77.I, q.
76, a.
5) That is why Leo XIII observes that “if a society seeks only external advantages, the elegance and abundance of the goods of life, if it makes a profession of despising God in the administration of the public thing and of not worrying about moral laws, it is criminally departing from its end and from the prescriptions of nature, and it is in reality not a human society and community, but a lying simulation of society”.
Note that if one neglects this moral end, one sins not only against religion, but against the very end of society.
It sins even in the pure political order.
Because the very end of politics is to secure the totum bene vivere, the full good life, of the social community.
It could even be shown that if politics tended only to procure economic goods, to the detriment of morals, it would thus become corrupt that it would be unable to procure economics.
For, as in these, subordination to morals is essential; deprived of it their essential condition, they become corrupt.
It is precisely the case of modern political societies, so deeply submerged in materialism, that they have made the mere material conditions of life impossible.
More precisely, this temporal common good of the city must meet the three conditions pointed out by St.Thomas in Del Reino, L. 1, chap.
15.
The first is to ensure peace for all who form the community.
To this end, all individuals and all groups must be protected in their rights, so that a community with a stable and harmonious life regime can be achieved, without injustices and irritating dysimetry.
The second is that all individuals and social groups, closely linked by the bond of peace, are committed to the common endeavour to achieve a high level of human and virtuous coexistence.
The third is that by and under the direction of the public power industry, all individuals and social groups reach and have at their disposal an abundance of material, cultural and spiritual goods that ensure the fullness of a virtuous life, worthy of man, to the highest degree that allows for a certain cultural development.
This sum of goods that constitutes the patrimony of a society at a given time is the fruit and effect of the aspiration and tendency of all individuals and social groups towards the immanent common good of society.
This immanent common good exists not only as a reality made, but as a reality to be achieved.
By him, it is true, we move to maintain the real goods that we already possess; but we move also to want their increase, and this indefinitely.
Hence this good has as two faces: one that looks at society and by which it identifies with society itself and with all the goods that it possesses and provides.
This good, although it is common, that is, that it not only perfects one, but all, is also characteristic of each one, and more proper and perfective than the private and particular good that an individual or group can possess.
The other side of the immanent common good looks to God, well-common transcendent, and is attracted to Him.
Soccy, which, as we have said, is something natural to man, salc from God and vucluve God.
Hence, this inclination that ultimately moves man and society towards God, common good, as towards his last and supreme end, is also the cause of all goods, and also of the social, to which man aspires without ever taking rest.
That is why man and society are spurred by an inexhaustible aspiration for progress.
But of progress toward truth and good, whose fullness is reached only in God.
Hence the temporal common good of every society is divine, because it comes from God and to God you lead.
“ See Santiago Ramírez.
O. P. Political Doctrine of St.Thomas, chap.
I, p. 3.
25, Leo XIII Institute; and Theophilus Urdanoz O, P., Theological Suma, of B.
A.C., Volume VIII, Appendix 11 13 3.
Moral and political technique Here it is opportune to go out to meet a narrow and wrong concept that could be forged by someone from the moral nature of politics.
The error could proceed from the fact that for many morals, far from being a deeply human reality, which is confused with the noblest demands of the rational nature of man, is like a narrow mold, forged in advance, which has no function but to strengthen all human aspirations.
Morality is then replaced by a moral one, by a prescription of more or less convenient precepts.
This is a very serious mistake.
Because, as we have seen in reproducing the luminous teachings of Doctor Angelico, the moral order does not conform to man from the outside, but, as it arises by virtue of its own rational demands, it is conditioned by its internal structure.
Moral precepts arise from natural inclinations.
To know what man must do or avoid, we study to what extent a thing responds to human good; and precisely if we maintain that political order is a part of morals, it is because man cannot be conceived in the fullness of his natural inclinations or demands if he does not live with others in political society.
This shows at the same time how true morality is not built a priori, but must start from observation, because only it can teach us what the true inclinations of man are.
And if we analyze the reasoning of St.Thomas, transcribed above, on the moral condition of political society, we verify that this part of the observation.
If observation is necessary to establish the most universal moral precepts, it is greater as we descend to the particular.
Hence, I must not imagine that science and political prudence must be drawn from pure principles, fixed and invariable, which render useless the immense and inexhaustible arsenal of experiences accumulated by human history.
On the contrary, for the same reason that politics is a part of morality, and morality is not forged a priori, but must respond to the postulates of the concrete nature of man, are observation, experience, geography and history, which deal with living man, which, rightly applied, without forgetting their subordination to the guiding principles, must dictate what is most convenient for the regiment of peoples.
There is, then, what might be called a political technique with a certain impropriety, and which must be taken into account to solve specific problems, which vary for each people and for every age, such as the problem of life in the countryside and in the cities, the centralization or decentralization of power, the distribution of positions and public burdens, the forms of government, the organization of popular education, etc. As to resolve what must be done, one must take into account what is most convenient to the true good of man, in these specific and concrete conditions, to man with his complex, hierarchical elements and with his essential destiny of creation made for the supreme Good, one will proceed within the moral order, which is nothing other than to truly serve man by seeking his good.
Hence, political prudence should be more properly called the art of governing peoples.
Political prudence that involves in its concept two essential characteristics: that of the intrinsic subordination to morals with respect to the government of the peoples, and the conditioning of this to the existential conditions of the historical moment.
It cannot be governed by timeless formulas, even if the timeless laws of beings must be respected.
4.
Politics and Theology Politics must serve man.
Here is the great truth, which we are insistently proclaiming.
Hence, in the event that this moral good of man, without being destroyed, was subordinated to a higher good, politics would also have to subordinate itself to that same higher good.
14 Such is the case in the present economy of things in which God, by an effect of his infinite goodness, has deigned to elevate man to a supernatural end, totally not because of any created or creative nature.
The good to be pursued by politics in the present condition of rescued humanity is not purely ethical: it is subordinate to the supernatural end.
Which does not mean that I must rule the citizens to lead them to eternal life.
He has no power, nor is he capable of it.
Their mission is to order the life of the community in its earthly condition.
But in ordering it in its earthly condition, in legislating the conditions of social coexistence, it must bear in mind this supernatural elevation of man, and not only must it dictate anything that opposes the Christian faith, but it must be put at the service of it, as we will explain when referring to the functions of authority.
Politics is not independent of theology; it is intrinsically subordinate to it as is all moral activity.
The truth of this doctrine escapes the mutilated modern intelligence, which neither knows the proper sphere of politics nor of theology, nor possesses the sense of hierarchical subordination.
St. Thomas presents it admirably in his mentioned Kingdom booklet.
Since the end of this life that deserves the name of good life here below is the heavenly beatitude," says St. Thomas, "it is proper of the real function to seek the good life of the multitude as much as it is necessary to make it obtain heavenly happiness; which means that the king must prescribe what leads to that end and, to the extent possible, prohibit what is opposed.
Whatever the path that leads to true beatitude and what its obstacles, be known by the divine law, whose doctrine is reserved for the priest, according to that of Malachi: “The lips of the priest are the depository of knowledge.”
Hence, for the good government of a political soccycity, it is necessary to instruct the magisterium of the Church, which, possessing all human and divine knowledge, knows “the true purpose of political society”.
If secularism is a bloody absurdity in the pure natural order, in the supernatural order to which man is elevated, there is no adequate word to define it.
Only the devil has been able to hallucinate the Christian nations with this spawn of imbecility, convincing them that there are sectors of human activity that are sufficient for themselves, that are endowed with the privilege of Godliness, that need not bow before the Church or before God.
He has even been able to convince a large number of Catholics, who know only Scripture—for reading it in the liberal and socialist authors—that of “Give Caesar what is Caesar’s and God what is God’s,” he has been able to convince them, I say, that Caesar (politics) forms a separate, omnisufficient world.
As if Caesar, with what belongs to Caesar, were not subordinate, like all the contingent, to the One from whom all good things go down.
In short, political society is essentially moral, because moral is the movement that originates it and because moral order is the fundamental law that governs it.
Hence, it must remain intrinsically suspended from theological order.
All this leads us to determine in the essential constitution of political society the four causes: efficient, material, formal and final, which, according to Aristotle, exhaust the essence of every being.
Families and other natural and free associations that gather in social unity are the material cause, the indeterminate element of the political essence.
Thus, it is not the individuals who immediately integrate society, nor in whom it ultimately resolves itself.
This observation is of paramount importance in resolving modern democracy, with universal suffrage and feminism.
the problems posed by the concrete bond, the regime of society by which all families live congregated in the conspiracy of the common good, constitutes the formal cause.
15 The temporary common good, whose realization is sought, is the near end cause of society, and men, driven by natural law to enter into political society, are the efficient cause of it.
5.
Neither individualism nor statism In exposing modern errors in the present question, we said that just as Rousseau's artificialism is individualistic, the physicalism of Maurras is statistical.
At the same time as correcting the two aforementioned errors about the nature of politics—which convulsed the modern world—the Catholic conception avoids its two disastrous corollaries: individualism, which, by unleashing man from all the bonds that protected him in social life, condemns him to perish helpless in the jaws of the strongest, and statism, which, under the pretext of saving the nation deranged by individual anarchy, absorbs in the God-State the intangible rights of every man.
No individualism, no statism.
Not the first, because incorporation into the State is necessary for the individual to achieve his full human formation.
Nor is the second, because its incorporation into the State is one and not the only stage in the series of goods that perfect man.
Catholic doctrine is the summit of a mountain that saves, transcending, how truly individualism and statism contain.
St. Thomas, as always, provides us with the purest Catholic doctrine in a transparent formula.
It is manifest, he says, that all those who live in community are, with respect to the community, as parts of a whole and, as such, ordered for the good of the whole (S. 77.
IT-II, q.
58, a.
5); but man is not commanded to the political community with all his being and all his things (secundum se totum et secundum omnia sua), but only under the aspect of the public temporality of his acts.
This partial ordinability of man to the earthly city is subordinated, on the other hand, to the other aspect that finally has the well Inertado.
(I-II, q.
21, a.
4, ad 3).
The Church, which has always taught the moral obligation to obey civil authority, has not sacrificed before any power of the earth the rights of God, which prevail over those of man.
Martyrs give us the most persuasive lesson in this regard.
The human person who is ordered, with a certain relativity, to the good of the State, as a part of the whole, is also ordained, with a narrower relativity, to the supernatural good that the Church communicates to us, and is ordained, in an absolute and total way, to God, who is the common good of all.
(S. 7., TI-II, q.
26, a.
3).
During his earthly pilgrimage, every human person belongs to two cities: an earthly city, which has at last the temporal common good; and a heavenly city, whose end is eternal life.
Between the same walls and in the same human multitude there are two peoples, and these two peoples give birth to two distinct lives, to two principalities, to a double legal order.
Ancient truth like the Church, which Pope Gelasius taught in the 5th century: “There are two powers by which this sovereignly governed world is: the holy authority of the Pontiff and the royal power”.
Distinction of one life and another, of one power and another, explained masterfully by Leo XIII in the famous Immortale Dei: “God has divided between ecclesiastical power and civil power the care of seeking the good of the human race.
He has proposed the first for divine things and the second for human things.
Each, in his order, is sovereign.
Both are circumscribed within perfectly determined limits and traced in accordance with their nature and principle.”
But distinction is not separation.
They're two different things, but united.
United hierarchically in the primacy of the eternal over the temporal, of the Church over the political society, of God over man.
As the reader can appreciate, we take care to anathemize this error of absolutism or statism, resorting to a fallacious distinction of individual and person that has recently reached 16 popularity, as if the error of statism came from considering man as an individual, devoid of the attributes of person.
a mere Without going in to replicate the inconsistentness of this distinction and its inapplicability to the present case7, we note that the anathematization of state statism or absolutism is as old as the Church, which, already in the time of the Apostle Peter, not many days after the Ascension of Jesus Christ, taught: It is necessary to obey God before men (Acts 2:29), without, then or later, having occurred to invoke this or similar distinction.
Statism is an absurd monstrosity, because it derives from the Fstado all Righteousness, when sound reason teaches that if it is true that the State has certain and certain rights, they also have their own — and as infallible as those of the State — the individual-man, the family-man and the particular society-man.
And precisely divine ordination, manifested by natural ey, says that if the State must order to the common good all these rights of individual man, man family and man-society, it must order them, not devouring them, but defending them and protecting them.
For this is what men live for in society: to protect their legitimate and inalienable rights, which they could not enforce in the jungle, where the law of the strongest would prevail.
So the reason that justifies the existence and necessity of the State condemns statism.
Because the state is not to suppress, but to secure the rights of the units that are subordinated.
Moreover, as we have seen in that luminous article where St.Thomas (I - II, q.
94, a.
2) establishes the order of natural precepts, first of all that social duties and rights are for each man the duties and rights that fall to him in the preservation of his own being and in the perpetuation of the species; that is, his duties and rights as an individual-man and as a family-man, then, if from the natural law arises the necessity of the State, it cannot be constituted in such a way that it breaks and destroys those previous rights that the same natural law has agreed to man.
In short, that is such the condition of man, in attention precisely to his rational nature, to his immortal soul, that it cannot be absorbed by any earthly attachment.
Its end, its eternal destiny, infinitely surpasses the temporal destiny of the earthly sojourn in which it lives ordained under the State.
Now, if the State wanted to order man's eternal destiny, conditioning it to its temporal ends, it would be absurd and monstrous, because it is the temporal that is to be put at the service of the eternal, as In relative must serve the absolute.
Finally, statism or totalitarianism comes from making the State the supreme All, from which the rights of individuals and families are derived as if the individual-man had no other ordination and other destiny than to be a more or less conspicuous part of this All; instead, in sound doctrine, hqmbre is a round, complete, autonomous, that by reason of his destiny is commanded only to God, and from Him derives the State, as a society that is to perfect him.
It follows from this that the orbit of activity of a man, however helpless he may be, cannot be fully understood by political society or by any other society, including the Church.
Elsewhere (A critical judgment of the new problems of politics) this has been strictly stated, which deserves to be remembered here: “...politics is a part of human activity.
It is not the only power that embraces everything and constitutes everything.
It has a limited scope of activity, specified by its own object.
Outside politics there are other activities and other powers that can by no means be merged into politics.
These are: 7 On this question of Christian personalism, defended by Maritain in La personne et le bien commun (Paris, 1947), see my book, Critique of Maritain's Conception on the Human Person, Charles de Koninck, De la Primauté du Bien commun.
(Translated into Spanish, Madrid, 1952) and Theophilus Urdanoz, O. P. Suma Theological, T. VIII, Appendix IL, The Common Good, according to St.Thomas.
(A.N.).
17 Religious power, the ecumenical powers$ individual powers.
In this way, man's activity cannot be ruled entirely by a single power.
To pretend it would be to engage in totalitarianism, which is a brutal and antihuman conception of man.”
This is the error of communism, it is also the error of national-socialism, and it is not less of demoliberalism, “because it, by suppressing spiritual power and economic powers, leaves individuals and society to a devouring materialistic bourgeoisie and everything is totalitarianized in a secular, bourgeois and democratist regime.
(See Ibidem, p.
42).
For this reason, nothing more admirable than Catholic doctrine, which, by bringing down from God — very simple and very rich Unity — makes man descend from him also those societies such as the family, the State and the Church, which, while limiting man, is to become reverent in his service and bring him to the One out of whose hands he has come.
For if man came out of God, he must return to Him, but he must return through the family, the State and the Church, which are the natural channels through which God wants him to return.
But in order for man, through these channels, to reach God, it is necessary that they be kept within their own limits, set by the Creator.
Hence, only a doctrine such as the Catholic one, which places the First Principle as the source and coronation of man, can save him and those societies that refer to him, because the multiple can only be harmonized and unified by the One principle from which he has come.
On the contrary, any doctrine that is ignorant of the First Principle, that departs from an idea or fact, call it individual freedom or nation, state, community, working class or race, will fake an Absolute, which for the same reason cannot be limited by anyone or anything.
Fs easy to guess the monstrous absurdities that derive from here.
For this Absolute, unlimited, is by definition a fact that is subject to a thousand limitations; it is a fact that coexists in the midst of a thousand others that can be glorified like him and from which an infinity of Absolutes or unlimited ones will arise, that ultimately must end with a total and absolute tearing of man.
Who can imagine the fate of this poor human piltrafa that is every man if it is pulled by absolute infinitys?
Only then can a doctrine that puts one Absolute, one, wherever it should be put, save political soccycism, and with a clique to man depending on who it is.
For this Absolute will not then be the spawn of a poor human brain, but the eternal and infinite substance, which in very rich and fruitful simplicity contains everything, and from whom all created derives and to whom all is to return.
For every precious gift and every perfect gift from above comes, as though coming down from the Father of lights, it is he who can neither move nor shadow of variation.
(Sant 1.7).
* By economic powers we do not understand precisely the great financial "trusts" that allusively regulate today's entire economic life but the strength that, in the economic sphere, the various individuals and social groups are endowed and that they constitute a sector and dimension of society irreducible to power properly political, even if it is linked to it.
(A.N.).
18 1I.
THE PROBLEM OF SOVEREIGNTY We have studied the philosophical foundations of politics to conclude that it is an ethic that has as fundamental law to assure the common good of the earth to the families gathered in the social body.
We determine the nature of this public good by highlighting its two characters of moral and theological, as it must respond to the end assigned by God to man in the present economy, namely: the same God possessed in intuitive vision.
This means that the State, in regulating man in social life, must take into account his supernatural elevation, dictating nothing that could hinder this elevation, and at the same time providing him with other human goods, so that they may dispose him, in the natural order, to achieve this elevation.
Political society moved for the human good, as for its specific good, Rousseaunian liberalism, which fakes political society as a means of guaranteeing individual freedoms, and statism, human individuals, is excluded.
that sacrifices in the jaws of the Moloc-State the rights of the But if the political society is a set of units that must aspire to a specific good of its own, which is not the result of the particular goods to which they tend, it is necessary that there is in it an authority that effectively promotes this common good to which it aspires.
Saint Thomas Aquinas expressed this doctrine with his usual luminosity, in the first chapter of his booklet on the Kingdom: If it is natural for man, he says, to live in society with others, it is necessary for someone to rule the crowd.
For if there were many men, and every one seeking that which is good for him, the multitude would be dissolved if there were none to take care of the good of the multitude; just as the body of man and that of any animal would be dissolved if there were not in his body a force of direction that served the good ate of the members.
This thought moved Solomon to say: “Where there is no governor, the people are dissipated.”
(Prov.
11, 3).
This is reasonably the case, for it is not the same as the common.
For as for the very thing, things differ: and as for the common thing, they unite.
Because different things have different causes.
It is therefore necessary that apart from what moves everyone to his own good, there be something that moves him to the good of everyone.
With these terms the Angelico Doctor establishes the necessity of public authority and, therefore, the right of sobcrany, which is nothing other than the power of every society, fully sufficient in the temporal sphere, to seek its own good effectively.
If the social body, which is an institution of natural law, claimed by law that God has inscribed at the bottom of the human being, inevitably demands, for its permanent existence, a sovereign power, it follows that political sovereignty is also of natural law, which means that it has God as author.
Sovereignty, then, comes from God.
Omnis potestas to Deo est, says Saint Paul in harsh language.
If the temporary common good is the specific reason of the social body; and if political sovereignty is claimed in order to ensure its existence, it follows that political sovereignty, in its essence and functions, is limited by this same temporary common good.
The limits of political sovereignty are then precisely set.
Sovereign power, whatever its organization, cannot go beyond its functions, so that it comes out of the realm of its own essence, which is the effective pursuit of the common good.
If we extend the concept of public authority, we bear in mind that it must direct to the common good the individual and social efforts of beings that are freely determined by their reason, we will conclude that sovereignty matters the power to impose upon subjects reasonable ordinations 19 that direct their activity towards the common good, that is to regulate them by law.
And since the law would be completely ineffective without the power to judge its enforcement and infringement and to apply the corresponding sanctions to those who violate it, it follows that sovereignty includes the power to legislate, judge and punish members of the social community to make them realize the collective good.
In short: political sovereignty is, then, in the good doctrine of the Church, which finds its best expression in St.Thomas, the faculty that falls to political society to impose, effectively, laws that ensure the collective good of the assembled multitude.
1.
False doctrine of sovereignty Let us hold this concept firmly in order to appreciate how far apart from Catholic truth and sound reason is the idea of sovereignty forged by modern statesmen.
For them “sovereignty is the source of all the power of the State, with the characters of absolute, unlimited, indivisible, inalienable and imprescriptible”.
And emphasizing these expressions, he adds: “Sovereignty is an absolute concept; any limitation makes it disappear; its essential note is that nothing and no one can limit it.”
(Mariano de Vedia and Mitre “Political Law Course”).
It is explicable that such a concept of sovereignty is not found by the aforementioned professor formulated for the first time but in the sixteenth century, by Bodin, and makes Rousseau the integral theorist of it.
“Neither Aristotle nor St. Thomas was ever concerned about the idea of sovereignty,” he adds.
If sovereignty means such a monstrous thing—an absolute in the phenomenic order—it should not surprise us that St.Thomas and Aristotle have imagined such a spawn.
It is necessary to arrive at the modern age, where intelligence, diverted from its own object, which is the consideration of being, moves vertiginously in the void, in order to find an infinity of absolute entities that manufactures cl man and sc call State, Law, Pucblo, Sobcrania, Democracy, Freedom, Science, Humanity, etc.
So many other myths or idols that fill the mind of a society that is willing to enthrone everything in order to dethrone the One who has the right to reign with absolute sovereignty over all created.
What does cause astonishment is the petulancy of so much modern homunculus that it comes to imagine that in such a way 19th century man has climbed the peak of progress, that only he, thanks to Juan Jacobo Rousseau, has been able to profit from sovereignty.
Man, who has known the most diverse and perfected civilizations in all latitudes, would have lived for tens of centuries without suspecting the existence of something as essential to political society as sovereignty.
But it is not sovereignty that John James invented, but the myth of popular sovereignty.
The people, who, far from being governed and directed to good, are ruler and creator of all morality and law.
It is no longer necessary to resort to an extramundane being, to an Ordaining Intelligence, to know whether man must live in the jungle or in society, whether he must conform to the law or not, whether he must command or obey.
The same man, left to his free and sovereign discretion, will answer these questions.
And it will not be man, precisely, who by the cultivation of his own being has attained the fullness of his perfection, so that he lives constantly and perpetually the law of reason, but man, any man, however commoner he may be, who, grouped in the multitude, will dictate S sobre these transcendental problems.
For this purpose Rousseau imagines that men, free and equal, gathered together in solemn convention, agree to live together; by virtue of this covenant, an all-powerful general will, endowed with absolutism—as it absorbed in its entrails the unbridled freedom of the thousands of associates—and with an impetuous dynamism to create all rights and obligations 20 This General Will is the will of the people, of the majority, of the half plus one.
Sovereignty therefore resides essentially and absolutely in the people, in the mass report of all individual units, and it has as its raison d'être: to ensure maximum freedom for these same units.
Let Rousseau explain to us the clauses of the Social Contract: “These clauses, properly understood, are all reduced to one, namely: the total alienation of each partner, with all its rights, to the whole community; because, first of all, each one being given in full, the condition is the same for all: and being the same condition for all, no one has an interest in making it onerous to others.”
“Finally, given to everyone, it is given to no one; and since there is no associate over whom the same right is not acquired over him, he earns the equivalent of all that is lost and more strength to preserve what sc tennc.”
“Therefore, if what is not of essence is removed from the social covenant, we will find that it is reduced to the following terms: “Each one of us puts in common his person and all his power under the supreme direction of the general will, and we also receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole”“.
(Rousseau, Social Contract, translation by Fernando de los Ríos).
What has to be thought of this spawn has been definitively summed up by an illustrious theologian: “To refer to this fiction, ” he says, “is to have refuted it, because at first glance it appears ungodly in its foundations, contradictory in its concept, monstrous in its consequences, and completely chimeric and absurd.
Impious, I say, in the foundations, because atheism originates, that is, from the radical negation of man's natural subjection to God and his law.
Contradictory in its concept; for if the innate libcrtad of man cannot limit himself before the covenant by any obligation, nor right, it does not appear why it can irrevocably be alienated, in whole or in part, by virtue of the covenant, since, excluding a higher law that gives firmness to the covenants and gifts concluded between men, no stable transfer of dominion from one to another can be conceived.
Monstrous in its consequences, since it bends all things before the idol of the general will; and as far as the facts are concerned, it opposes to the other citizens the unbridled violence and tyranny of the dominant parties.
Finally, completely ridiculous and absurd, because it assigns to society a chimeric origin, which is in contradiction with the intimate sense, with the history of the human race and with the most obvious facts.”
“And while it is not worth insisting more, let us look at two points, to which the whole system is reduced.
The first is that all political power comes from only the people and that it depends on them both in their origin and in their being; the second is that the same popular sovereignty arises from the contract, since each member of the society made voluntary transfer of his own right, and each one surrenders to power, resulting from all those partial rights, that is to say to the power of the community.
Now, of these two principles, the first, by its own natural weight, leads to perfect anarchy,” and the other to a perfect despotism and portentous communism.”19
(Cardenal Billot, De Ecclesia Christi).
♪
The people are sovereign and the government is their employee, less than their employee: their servant.
There is no definite or at least lasting contract between them.
It is against the nature of the political body that the sovereign imposes a law that can never violate.
There should be no consecrated and inviolable letter that enchains a people to pre-established constitutional forms.
The right to change them is the first of all guarantees.
There is, there cannot be, no mandatory fundamental law for the people's body, not even the social contract.
The act by which a people submits itself to chiefs is but a commission, a job, in which, simply officials of the sovereign, exercise in his name the power of which he has made them depositaries, and which he can modify, limit, retake when he pleases... In front of him he has no right.
It is not for them to hire, but to obey.
They have no conditions to impose on him; nor can they claim any commitment from him... By degree or force, they (the magistrates) are the changadores of the State, more miserable than a mucamo or a stowager, since the stowageman 2.
Divine Origin of Sovereignty The Christian thesis on the divine origin of sovereignty is a dogma of faith clearly expressed in Holy Scripture and taught masterfully repeatedly by the Roman Chair.
It is God who has proposed a leader to rule every nation, we read in the book of the Ecclesiastical.
You would have no power over me if it had not been given to you from above, says Jesus Christ to the Roman governor.
And St.Augustine, commenting on this passage, exclaims: Let us learn here from the lips of the Master what he teaches, elsewhere, by the mouth of his Apostle: that there is no power but that which comes from God (omnis potestas a Deo est).
And in the first lines of this chapter we have seen how the concept of sovereignty is necessarily divine; as divine, at its origin, as the same political society that inescapably demands it.
But does not this divine origin imply, perhaps, a limitation that nullifies the concept of sovereignty?
This is how liberal ideologues seem to understand it, without warning that it is precisely this dependence on the First Cause that gives it a solid foundation.
For if the power of the social authority to impose obligations to be carried out by members of the community is not based on the will of God, what is it based on?
In the will of man?
And who is the man to send another man?
He's got the strength for it.
So command with your strength, and all authority is tyranny?
Is it the will of the people?
And what is a people, but a set or sum of men?
And because they join, can they send another man?
The idea of command, of authority, matters a subordination, that is, it involves a superior who commands and a inferior who obeys.
If such subordination is not based on the divine will that intimates every man by the prescriptions of natural law, he cannot base his mind on anything solid.
Either we have to destroy society as baseless, and then we have anarchy, or we have to base it on brute force, and then we have not a human society, but a slave regime.
The fiction of the covenant does not avoid difficulty; for if the covenant depends on my will, I keep it when I please and break it at my whim.
And if it does not depend on my will, who and with what right so binds my will to make me fulfill the covenant?
More insoluble are these difficulties in liberal theory and practice, in which the absolute independence of the human being is presupposed as an indisputable premise.
Don't even imagine that in civil obedience one obeys oneself and not another, because in any way obedience implies subordination; and to admit that so-called self-obedience would be to admit that a being can be at the same time in action and power regarding the same form.
Both the autonomism that Kant works in pre-established conditions and the fired mucamo can claim his eight-day wages.
As soon as the government comes out of that humble attitude, usurps, and the constitutions will proclaim that in that case the insurrection is not only the holiest of rights, but the first of duties", Taine, in The Old Regime, 1-3, e.
4.3, quoting Rousseau, The Social Contract, 1-7 HI-1, 1V-3, ete.
(A.N.).'
"The theory has two sides, and while on the one hand it leads to the perpetual demolition of the government, on the other it leads to the unlimited dictatorship of the state...
Indeed, the clauses of the social conirato are all reduced to one, namely total alienation of coda associated with all its rights to the community.
Each one is made whole, as he now finds himself and all his forces, of which the goods he possesses are part.
There is no exception or restriction; nothing of what was or previously owned belongs to him already in property.
What will henceforth be and will be, will only be awarded to him by the delegation of the social body, universal owner and absolute master.
It was necessary for the State to have all rights and for individuals to have none; otherwise there would be disputes between them and him, and since there was no common superior who could decide between them and him, such disputes would have no end.
On the contrary, by the complete donation that each one of himself makes, the union is as perfect as possible.
For having renounced everything and so on, there is nothing left for him to claim... All these articles are a forced consequence of the social contract.
Since, entering a body, nothing I reserve from myself, I renounce, for that reason alone, my goods, my children, my Church, my opinions.
I cease to be owner, father, Christian, philosopher.
It is the State that replaces me in all these functions.
In place of my will there is henceforth the public will, that is, theoretically, the mutable arbitration of the majority counted by heads; in fact, the rigid arbitration of the assembly, of the faction, of the individual who holds public power", 7aine, 1. e.
$4 and 5.
(A.N.).
22 claims for human reason as Rousseau claims for the social body (see in passing the enormous effort of sentimental dialectics of these ideologues at the end of the autonomism of the social body starting from the moral autonomism of the individual) contains, as we said before, the appalling absurdity of attributing to man, being deciduous, fragile like clay, the character of infinitude privative of God.
What is achieved with this sublimation of the individual and society is to disorbite them, and thereby destroy them.
Liberalism leads to anarchy and this is nothing more than the tyranny of disorder.
In God, Fullness of Good, in whom there is no composition of act and power, there exists pure autonomy without the risk of self-destruction; in Him, the autonomous movement is to be determined ineffably and incessantly by its own Fullness.
Since His Fullness is Goodness, freedom is identified with Full Kindness.
On the other hand, in man the only relative autonomy possible.
It consists precisely in self-determination by rational fullness, without suffering the least strange impulse, contrary to the inner principle of action that specifies its essence; it is, namely, reason.
And even this cannot be realized except by the path of a painful purification, given the divorce that, as a result of sin, separates goodness from freedom in the innermost part of the human being.
Children of sin, with whose stigma we do, our sick will is inclined, many times, to choose what deviates us from our own perfection.
On the other hand, this only possible autonomy in man, the only one that truly frees him because it makes him live his own law which is the law of reason, requires him to subordinate himself to legitimate powers.
For his reason imposes upon him order and order requires that a man obey his parents and submit himself to the supreme procurator of the good of the city.
Here comes about what St.Thomas beautifully teaches in the Suma Contra Gentiles, L. III, c. 128: In two ways man is inclined to observe the righteousness established by divine law: in one way, inwardly; in the other, outwardly.
interiorly, when man is willingly ready to observe what the divine law commands; what is done out of love for God and for man; for he who loves another, spontaneously and willingly, returns to him what he owes, and yet something else gives him liberally; whereon the integral fulfillment of the law depends on love, according to that of the Apostus!
: “the fullness of the law is love” (Rom 13:10): and the Lord says that “in these two commandments” is to be known in the love of God and neighbor, “the whole law is contained” (Mt 22:60).
But as some are not so inwardly willing to do spontaneously for themselves what the law commands, they must be driven outwardly to fulfill the righteousness of the law; what is done when for fear of punishment, and not liberal, but servilely, they fulfill the law; where it is said: “when you do your righteousness on earth,” is to know how to punish the wicked, “the inhabitants of the earth will learn righteousness.”
(7s 26.9).
Others are so willing, that by themselves they do spontaneously what the law commands.
These seconds are for themselves their own law, those who have charity which, instead of the law, inclines them and causes them to act liberally.
The outward law was not necessary, then, for these, but for those who by themselves do not incline to the bicn; from where sc dicc: “the law was not set for the just, but for the unrighteous” (7Tim 1,9); which is not to be understood as if the righteous were not bound by the law, as some perversely understood, but because they move for themselves, even without the law, to practice righteousness.”
3.
Democratism and Democracy The claim of sovereignty in the Rousseaunian sense matters in fact the license of all the anarchic impulses hidden in the low depths of the human heart, and thus the systematic victory of instincts against the law of reason.
Rousseau has found, with his decanted sovereignty of the majority, the practical instrument for raising to the divine category all the rebellions that the pride of a false science had unleashed in 23 man.
The total dissolution of man and society, ever since liberalism, is the documented history of these considerations of Thomist philosophy.
For this reason Catholic doctrine, in asserting the divine character of sovereignty, far from destroying it, bases it and makes it beneficial; for if sovereignty does not come from God, sovereignty does not exist; and if, by an impossible, it could exist without deriving from God, it would contain an impetuous force that would enslave the people or annihilate society.
Because every absolute concept made by man, as it is founded on nothingness, has a frightening strength to reduce to nothing everything it touches.
If during these four centuries which constitute the modern epoch, while modern man was determined to realize his libertarian ideas, the despised Church of Christ had not continued in its secular task of radiating upon souls its supernatural influence, to what unheard-of extremes of savagery and barbarism would we not have reached?
The gloomy age in whose clouds we are becoming, pregnant with deep and fearful convulsions, is ripe fruit of that seed of popular sovereignty that Rousseau cultivated, and that boy we know as the intangible dogma of Democracy.
It is clear that we do not refer here to democracy as a pure form of government.
This is legitimate if, respecting the moral order as emanation of the divine law, it recognizes God as the origin and source of all reason and justice and is reduced to fostering an organization in which the greatest number of citizens are accommodated in the conduct of public business, provided that the common good, which is the supreme and decisive law of every political society, permits it.
We refer, yes, to Democracy, lived and spoken today, to that which cannot be written to it but with a massive capital, because it is presented as a universal solution to all problems and situations.
That Democracy is the Rousseaunian myth of popular sovereignty; it is, namely, that always and everywhere the people must do what they want to do because the people are law; and the people are the egalitarian majority that with their vote decides everything, the same human thing as the divine, what concerns the national order as well as the international, the sanctity of marriage as the education of children, the rights of the State as well as the sacred majesty of the Church.
Maritain highlighted the error Rousseau and the world of which he is the father, by confusing Democracy as a myth and universal doctrine of sovereignty, with democracy as a particular form of government.
It may be discussed whether the form of government is good or bad for such a people and under such conditions, but democratism, the modern spiritual principle of egalitarianism, is indisputably a bloody absurdity.
(Primaute du Spirituel).
What Leo XIII wrote in his encyclical Diuturnum on June 29, 1881, comes, every passing day, surprising fulfillment.
...Modern theories of public power have already caused great evils and it is to be feared that these evils will not reach the worst excesses in the future.
Indeed.
not wanting to refer to God as its author and source the right to command is to take away from public power its splendor and its vigor.
By making it dependent on the will of the people, not only is a mistake made, but authority is given a fragile and inconsistent foundation.
Such opinions are like a perpetual stimulant to popular passions, which increase in audacity every day and threaten to bring to ruin the republics by secret conspiracies or by open seditions.
Already in the past, the movement called the Reformation had as its auxiliaries and chiefs men who, by their doctrines, brought down the two powers, both spiritual and temporal: sudden tumults, bold rebellions, especially in Germany, were the consequences of these novelties and the civil war and crime increased with so much violence that there was no region that was not caught up in agitations and massacres.
From this heresy was born in the last century, what is called “modern law” and “sovereignty of the people” and that unbridled license, with which many identify freedom.
From here it has advanced to the most extreme errors, such as communism, socialism, nihilism, which are fearsome monsters that threaten to bury society... 24 4.
Democracy and Catholics If so, then what do you think of certain Catholics who are called Democrats and who believe that the Church should associate its action with democracy?
These Catholics who often feel their entrails devoured by an incoercible need for action, must first of all put order in their ideas.
To do this, you need to understand that, in terms of terms, democracy or democratic action, they are terms that refer to the exclusively political sector, that is, the political government.
There is no right, then, to call democratic any action in favour of the people's classes.
Only a consensual abuse of language can authorize the use of this word and thus Leo XIII in his encyclical Graves of communi calls Christian democracy the action deployed by social Catholics to remedy the misery of the wage classes.
But in this case the Pontiff takes all care to explain the scope of the terms employed and the unproperty of them!!.
As in spite of this, it has not stopped bringing inconveniences, the Church has given up her employment with this significance.
These Catholics, therefore, must understand that they work within the strictest and healthiest directives of the Church, so wisely stated in the Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno, when they give themselves to this economic-social activity of relief of the popular classes.
But you must understand that this has nothing to do with democracy, which is a political organization of the nation, because whether or not this organization is democratic, that activity must be exercised equally and, in fact, it has been exercised in societies that are not democratically organized, as the history of the Christian ages proves.
If, with this observation in mind, they want to act in politics and want to promote, with preference to others, the democratic form of government, they can do so as long as they take into account the following points: 1* Sovereignty comes from God and not from the people.
2* The moral order is not a human creation.
3 Nor is the legal order a product of human whim.
It starts from the moral order—such as the conclusions of principles or as certain determinations of more common laws (as expressed by Saint Thomas, S. 7h.
I-II.
q.
95, a.
2) — and can never contradict the eternal law inscribed by God in human reason.
47 Nor can the city organize itself at the whim of the crowd.
It is only permissible for the organization to respect the fundamental law of politics, which is the effective pursuit of the common good.
A Catholic, therefore, who wants to make a democratic profession in politics, will have to limit himself to favoring with preference to others the form of government called democracy, and in which more or less a great participation to the multitude in the public thing is agreed.
The next chapter will determine more expressly the conditions under which the form of government called democracy is permissible.
In order to put an end to this issue, note the inappropriateness and ridicule of any democratic confession in solving university, philosophical, and artistic problems.
It is tantamount to transferring a purely political notion to an order independent of the political.
This is a mistake in which a good Catholic can never make; because it implies the adoption, not of a political conception, but of a false theology; the deification of the demos, or of freedom, which would be the source of all truth and justice.
Oh, my God!
Oh, my God!
The passages of the Encyclical Graves of Communi in which Leo XIII exposes the precautions under which the expression "Christian democracy" should be used are reproduced in one of the Appendices at the end of this book.
(A.N.).
25 5.
Human right of political regimes The Christian concept of sovereignty is justified.
Should we then think, with the naivety attributed to us by the ideologists, that in the Catholic conception God has created “monarchies of divine law” and appointed and named the powers of the earth?
If God does not determine the form and subject of sovereignty, who determines it?
A very serious problem that has been the subject of deep research by Catholic theologians, whose solutions we will try to summarize in the shortest and most faithful way possible.
It is a constant doctrine of the Church that God does not fix any particular form of government or point out any subject who is to invest sovereignty.
If we have imposed upon ourselves the reasoning that St.Thomas uses to conclude that sovereignty comes from God, we will fully understand the truth of this doctrine.
Why did we claim that sovereignty comes from God?
Because without sovereignty, political society is not possible.
Without political society, the social virtualities that God has placed within the rational nature are not updated.
Then God, who has deposited these virtualities, has also instituted the political society and sovereignty by which they are updated.
On the other hand, if these social virtualities can be updated equally in this or that other political regime, with that or that other person who stops sovereignty, it follows that natural law (or God, its author), leaves it to the will and will of men to give themselves the political form they like most, and to designate the persons who will govern them.
This is and has been the constant doctrine of the Church, so that the famous Suarez, the author of the Treaty of Laws, could write against James of England, who called himself sovereign of divine law: “There is no king or monarch who has or has immediately had God, or by divine institution, the political principality.
This is an axiom of theology, not ridiculously, as King James said, but truly, because, well understood, it is filled with truth and is much needed to understand the ends and limits of civil power.”
“It is not a supernatural mystery, nor a thing left to opinion, but a common sentence of all doctors,” says the Holy Cardinal Belarmino.
Doctrine, moreover, hinted at by St.Thomas Aquinas in the Theological Suma, when he says that dominion and authority were introduced by the law of men.
(S. Th.
II-I1, q.
10 a.
10).
(l) If natural law does not determine it, it is left to man, who can only impose it by a human law.
Human law which, as St.Thomas teaches (1-II, q.
95, a.
2), is derived from natural law as a determination of things that natural law prescribes with a certain generality; thus, for example, natural law commands that he who sins be punished, but that he be punished with such or such a penalty is a human determination of natural law.
But who will enact this law?
He cannot be a simple private individual or a simple parent, because the law looks “first and foremost to the common good; however, ordering something to the common good belongs to the whole community or to the one that governs the community.”
(I-II, q.
90, a.
3).
But as in this case there is no one who rules it, it must belong to the whole community.
Then, the fundamental political law or constitutional law of a political society that establishes its particular form of government is always dictated by the social body or community of families that constitute themselves in society.
It would be extremely childish to imagine that this Law is drafted and promulgated in a constituent assembly or court, where the entire crowd has been summoned or conventionally anointed by the popular verdict.
The laws, and especially the constitutive first and supreme law of a State, are not, in good societies, artificial products of a convention, however conspicuous the constituents may be.
26 St. Thomas, who has left no truly human problem unsolved, explaining the process of elaborating every human law indicates precisely how this fundamental law has been elaborated.
Every law, he says, is part of the legislator’s reason and will.
Now, since man's reason and will are manifested by words, they are also manifested by deeds; for each one usually appreciates good horn that which he does.
If the law can be established by the human word, as soon as it manifests the inner movement and the thinking of human reason, it can also be instituted by the repetition of acts that originate the custom, since the inner movement of the will and the thought of reason are manifested by the external acts that multiply.
(1-II, q.
97, a.
3).
Then there is no need to pretend that the constitutive law of society is created by the verbal manifestations of political associates.
Governments generally achieve their legal constitution by tacit and constant adherence of the people.
It does not matter how and with what right a regime has been introduced, for since the social crowd tacitly gave them its approval, it has become a legitimate institution.
Let us note — as the occasion arises — that, although this constitutional law may be enacted in an assembly specially convened for this purpose, it does not follow that it must promulgate whatever the constituents please.
Since every law must be an ordination of reason aimed at the common good, it must be honest, just, possible, taking into account nature, national customs and the conveniences of time and place.
(I-II, q.
95, a.
3).
If the social body dictates the law under natural law, it must respect its requirements.
It is demanded by justice, and its convenience goes in it; for evil can be meted out to anyone who violates the law that justifies and protects him.
Nothing more insulting, therefore, to the eternal law of God, and nothing more pernicious to the good of collectivities, than the ungodly constitutions that have been taking place since the nefarious one of the French Revolution.
Nothing as weak and brittle as they are, not only because they contradicted the rights of God and the profound demands of human nature, but because, stereotyped, they have legislated the past moment, the madness of a day, madness that perpetuates itself through several generations and violences the flexibility of human nature, which, despite its essential unity and perseverance, must be rhythmically adjusted to changes of place and time.
The community, with its usual adherence, is the one that gives legal effect to the regime of government and realizes the constitutional law of a country.
This usual adherence is like the testimony that the common good has been achieved in that society.
For a thousand unforeseeable, fortuitous circumstances, regimes and governments are created.
Since the temporary common good is achieved, the form of government and the subject of authority deserve to be punished as legitimate; the social community, with its peaceful compliance, promulgates this sanction.
(Leon XIII, Au Millieu des Sollicitudes).
Is the people sovereign in enacting this law?
Suddenly it is not in the sense of Rousseau, horn if he enjoys unlimited authority, with the power to create all morality and law; he must respect, as we said, the imprescriptible rights of natural law; he must remember that the authority he exercises is a power received from the Supreme Legislator in the very act of man's creation.
But excluding Rousseaunian sovereignty, could you not imagine him sovereign at the moment when he is legislating?
Could you imagine that you have sovereignty as an entity received, and then, by legislating, you transfer it to this or that particular government?
Thus seem to conceive things the wise Cardinal Belarmino (De ZLaicis, L. III, c. 5) and the most erudite Suarez (De Legibus, L. I, c. 6).
But they have used deficient language, according to which they regard moral acts as physical entities.
Even at that moment the social body cannot be sovereign, because sovereignty, as has long been explained, matters the power to impose laws effectively (legislating, judging, implementing and punishing), that secure the collective good of the assembled multitude; however, the social body cannot exercise these functions in a way that ensures the common good of the multitude; then, it does not possess the sovereignty that is identified with the full authority of government.
In order to understand the scope of this reasoning, I will note that the social body cannot constitute a permanent assembly that exercises all governmental functions, such as issuing laws, enforcing them, judging their violations.
In other words, he can't rule.
It is prevented by the same condition as a political society, not only by the breadth of its members and by the complexity of the problems of government, but also because if the social body were to devote itself to this, its components would not be able to serve their own peculiar ends, so that the reason of being that gave birth to the same society would disappear; that is, to achieve happiness, which they cannot achieve outside of society.
For this happiness, which springs from the goods provided by the social body, is precisely the one that the assembled individuals can procure their own and particular goods, without hindrances.
But if everyone has to deal directly with the common good, when and how do they deal with their own goods?
This reasoning shows that in no way can the community govern, or what is the same, exercise sovereignty.
The community must be governed.
If anyone believes he can resolve the issue by claiming that because he cannot govern himself, the community transfers the government to the leaders, he is answered: he cannot transfer what he does not possess, and he does not possess what he cannot exercise.
That is, if the social community is not able to fully exercise sovereignty, there is no reason to attribute to it, under natural law, the possession of that right.
Because precisely the criterion for establishing natural rights is the need for their use or exercise.
Why, for example, is private property said to be natural law?
For without it man could not secure the subsistence and that of his own, and so of a thousand other examples.
But if the community or the people can never exercise sovereignty, which is a complete power to govern, how can they, as agreed by nature, have that right?
How can nature grant them a right they can never exercise?
And if you don't have that right, how can you transfer it?
Moreover, this understanding of the possession of sovereignty undermines the principle underlying the doctrine of the two theologians cited on the human right of any political regime (Billlot, De Ecclesia, p.
513).
Indeed, if on the one hand it is said that the human institution is a determining cause of any form of government, and on the other it is stated that the very power (sovereignty) transferred to the rulers resided, by natural law, in the people, the democratic form turns out to be of natural law and as congenital, and directly instituted by God; conclusion that neither they admit nor allow it the language of the Church, which always attributes equal right and justice to one form or another of government.
Pius X, in his letter of August 23, 1910, condemning the democratist theories of the Catholics of Le Sillon, writes textually: In teaching (Leon XIII) that justice is compatible with the three known forms of government, democracy of special privilege.
He also taught that, on this side, it is not necessary to affirm that even at that moment the people are not sovereign; formally sovereign, with the essential powers that matter the concept.
At most it can be said that it is radically, sovereign, that is, that it has sovereignty at its root, since the ability to determine the subject and form of sovereignty matters in some way an initial possession of the same sovereignty.
If natural law resides in the people, not the public power, but only the power to determine it, “it is not necessary to pretend in the community an imaginary abdication of power; it is not 28 to place by natural law a power in a subject that is generally inept to exercise it; democracy is not established as a primitive form that was later introduced into another, but all are equally human right, because all must also be determined by consensus of the community.”
(ibid.)
Billot).
To appreciate how much it goes from one explanation to another, it is useful the example that the same theologian argues, taken in the way that a property can be acquired.
I can become owner of one object or because another gives it to me, and so Suarez conceives the transmission of sovereignty, or because the legislator determines a way that constitutes me owner: for example, if by virtue of the statute of limitations I began to possess in domain a field that I did not previously own.
I would begin to be propictary, not because public power gives me property, but because it determines one of the ways of acquiring the domain.
Exactly the same as the crowd does: by legislating one regime with preference to another, it does not surrender sovereignty to this regime; it only determines the concrete way in which this sovereignty is to be exercised.
To express this doctrine in the language of the School, we will say that the social community is the near cause that concrete this certain political society and this determined power insofar as it establishes the material cause (what families and how many) and the formal cause (what kind of bond) of this political society, Sovereignty as such is immediately conferred by natural law or, which is the same, by God, insofar as it demands that there be a sovereign power that governs the political community.
It would be naive and ridiculous to imagine sovereignty as a divine entitacula, deposited by God in the rulers.
As it does not exist anywhere, since there are no provisions of natural or civil law, where does the prohibition of killing exist as an entitacular?
Where are the civil law requirements?
That prohibition and those prescriptions exist, the natural laws are intimate to the conscience of every man and engraved in their essence, comma was explained in the previous chapter.
But not as entitaculas that pass from place to place and transfer from hand to hand.
In order not to err, it is necessary to transcend imagination, intelligible and not purely sensitive knowledge.
As St.Thomas says, and to possess From what is said it is clear how absurd it is to speak of popular sovereignty or sovereignty that resides in the people, even if it was only in the fugitive moment in which he uses his constitutional power.
Language that, despite its absurdity, the Church does not proscribe, because, as a Mother, it tolerates great freedom of ideas, while in these essential errors are not systematized.
Not so, by the way, when sovereignty is considered to be inherent to the people, inalienable, who continue to reside in it even after having delegated it to the leaders.
Very common error — despite being proscribed by Leo XIII and Pius X — among Catholic Democrats.
They imagine sovereignty as a “thing of God”, derived from the people, who in turn delegate it to the rulers without alienating it.
Pius X, when condemning this ideology, rejects it not only as false in that it makes sovereignty inalienable, but also in that it brings it from the people to the rulers, from the bottom up.
The paragraph is long, but it deserves to be fully transcribed.
Le Sillon places primarily public authority in the people, from which the rulers are then derived, so that, however, he continues to reside in it.
But Leo XIII formally condemned this doctrine in his Encyclical Diuturnum Illud, on the political Principality, where he says: “Very many modern ones, following the footsteps of those who in the last century were called philosophers, affirm that all power comes from the people, so that those who exercise it in society do not exercise it in their own right, but by delegation of the people and with the express condition of being revocable by the will of the people who conferred it upon them.
The whole opposite is the feeling of Catholics who derive from God the right to command, as from their natural and necessary principle.”
29 "No doubt," continues Pius X, "Le Sillon brings down from God this authority, which he places first in the people; but in such a way that "it is transmitted from the bottom up, while in the organization of the Church power comes from the top down."
(Marc Sangnier, Discours de Rouen, 1907).
But regardless of the anomaly of a delegation that rises when by its condition it is natural to come down, Leon.
XIII refuted in advance this attempt to reconcile Catholic doctrine with the error of philosophism.
For, he continues: «it is important to warn in this place that the supreme rulers can in certain cases be elected by the will and decision of the people, without being contradicted or repudiated by Catholic doctrine.
Well that this election designates the prince, but it does not confer upon him the rights of the principality nor delegates power, but determines by whom it is to be exercised.”
The democrat Catholics, determined to Christianize modern democracy, that is, to reconcile Catholic doctrine with the error of philosophism (Pio X), have no crumb to waste from this precious document, written precisely to condemn its pretensions.
Because the Catholics of Le Sillon, like the democrat Catholics who still abound among us, made a living desire to be sympathetic to the commonwealth, the crowd, 0, as they now say, to the “masses”, for which it seemed convenient to “give hand to what being neither essential nor dogmatic in Catholicism, is less compatible with modern aspirations”.
(Noguer, Reason and Faith, October 1910).
As the social community (in the next chapter we will see that we do not understand by it the amorphous mass of individuals, but the hierarchically constituted multitude of social units) has the right to determine the legitimate political regime of a people and to change it if required by the public good, the infallible criterion of the legitimacy of a government is the tacit and peaceful adherence of the same community.
If one has understood how sovereignty comes from God and in what sense it is possible to say that it is originally in the community and that it is in its service, one cannot incur the intractable confusion of a well-known professor of political law who explains the Tomist policy in this way: “The Doctors of the Church, ” he says, “have set as unquestionable dogma the principle that all power emanates from God, and that the government, which embodies the divine will, is its representative on earth.
St. Thomas reacts against this conception.
For him the fundamental thing in the State is the will of the majority, and in this sense its interpreters and glossers intend to see in it an exhibitor of the doctrine of democracy.”
(Mariano de Vedia y Mitre, Political Law).
In this author's unfortunate explanation, St.Thomas appears as a vulgar democrat Catholic.
Lack of philosophical initiation, it does not warn that it is very different to create sovereignty by a popular contract, according to Rousseau, than to admit its divine origin and leave to the discretion of the social community the determination of the form and subject of its exercise.
Much more regrettable is its confusion when it attributes democratic ideas to the Holy Doctor because it considers the temporal common good, the good of the community, as the supreme law that governs all political life.
If such a thing is understood by democracy, St. Thomas, with the Church, professes democracy, with a right that no one can doubt; but this is the case of repeating that the language of Doctor Angelico does not allow capricious interpretations.
It is true that for him and for all who faithfully follow his teachings there is no sovereignty other than that of the common good, for every political authority has no other reason to be than to realize the good of the community, its true and profound interests; but this good can be so effectively pursued by a real or aristocratic regime as a popular or democratic one.
Although, as we will see in the next chapter, democracy cannot succeed if it is not tempered by aristocratic or oligarchic elements.
30 6.
From Compliance to Power Explained the concept of sovereignty, its origin and the subject in whom it resides, it is only necessary to examine the compliance that is due to the power of the State.
If authority comes from God, as we have shown, nothing more evident than the inescapable obligation to obey legitimate powers, provided they legislate and order within the sphere of their powers.
There is no obstacle to obedience that these powers do not know that they rule by virtue of the authority conferred upon them by God, or that their possessors are unworthy; as long as they are legitimately constituted in power and do not prescribe unjust or perverse things, obedience is obligatory, even in the forum of conscience.
When in Rome the word of St.Paul sounded: There is no power that does not come from God and who resists power, God resists, because the ruler is a minister of God, the tyrannical Nero prevailed.
Then it is not permitted to despise legitimate power, regardless of the person in whom it resides (Leon XIII, Immoriale Dei).
Christians surround with religious respect the notion of power in which, even when residing in an unworthy ruler, they see a reflection and image of divine majesty.
They have the right respect for the laws that is due to them, not because of force and criminal sanctions, but because of a duty of conscience, for God has not given us a spirit of fear.
(Leon XIII, Sapientia Christiana).
The Sacred Letters themselves categorically teach this obligation.
1.
Every person, says St. Paul (Rom 13:1-5), is subject to the higher powers: for there is no power that does not come from God, and God has established what they are.
2.
Therefore, he who disobeys the powers, disobeys the ordination of God.
Consequently, those who do so, themselves bring condemnation.
3.
But princes are not to fear for good works that are done, but for evil.
Do you want to have nothing to fear from him who has the power?
So do well, and you will deserve praise from him.
4.
For the prince is a minister of God, appointed for thy good; but if he do evil, he trembleth; for the sword is not girded in vain: as he is a minister of God, to exercise his righteousness, punishing him that doeth evil.
5.
Therefore, it is necessary that you be subject to him, not only for fear of punishment, but also for conscience.
But if legitimate power deserves obedience and respect, not everything it commands must be fulfilled.
There are cases in which obedience can be denied, such as when an unjust law is imposed that violates a right of the human person or of the family, provided that, as St.Thomas teaches, there is no opposition to the scandal or disturbance that might result from the violation of the law: for which reason man is obliged to abandon even his right, as stated in St.Matthew.
If any man compel thee to do a thousand steps, make with him two thousand; and him that taketh away thy robe, give also the pallium.
(1-11. q.
%, a.
4).
There are cases where obedience must be denied.
“There is only one true cause for refusing obedience: it is the case of a precept manifestly contrary to natural and divine law, because then it would be a matter of violating the natural law, or the will of God; the commandment and execution would be equally criminal.
If, therefore, one were to be found reduced to the alternative of violating the orders of God or those of the rulers, it would be appropriate to follow the precept of Jesus Christ, which “want to give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God”.
(Leon XI Diururnum).
It must be remembered that in these cases it is only lawful to disobey unjust laws and not to deny all obedience to persecutors, as St.Augustine taught beautifully and repeats Leo XIII (Au milieu des sollicitudes): Some powers of the earth are good and fear God: other times they do not fear Him.
Julian was an emperor unfaithful to God, an apostate, a wicked, an idolater.
The Christian soldiers served this unfaithful emperor.
But because it was the cause of Jesus Christ, they recognized only Him who is in heaven.
Did Julian prescribe them to honor idols and burn them down?
They put God above the prince.
But he said to them, “Align to march 31 against this enemy nation.”
At once they obeyed.
They distinguished the Eternal Lord from the rest of the time and, yet, in view of the Eternal Lord, submitted themselves to such a temporary lord.
It will be necessary, at times, to avoid obedience not to a law, but to a set of laws, perhaps to an entire legislation, because all of it contradicted the sacrosanct rights of Jesus Christ and his Church.
Such, for example, the famous secular laws that in France motivated a public declaration by the Cardinals and Archbishops, dated May 10, 1925, some of whose terms deserve to be reproduced here: “The laws of secularism, ” says the Declaration, “are unjust, in the first place, because they are contrary to God’s formal rights.
They come from atheism and lead to it in the individual, family, social, national and international political order.
They imply total ignorance of our Lord Jesus Christ and of his Gospel.
They tend to replace the true God with idols (freedom, solidarity, humanity, science, etc.), to de-Christianize all lives and all institutions.
Those who have inaugurated their kingdom, those who have strengthened it, extended it, imposed it, have had no other object.
In fact, they are the work of ungodliness, which is the expression of the most guilty of injustices, as the Catholic religion is the expression of the highest justice.
“They are also unjust because they are contrary to our spiritual and temporal interests.
Examine yourselves, and you will see how there is not one that does not hurt us at once in our earthly wounds and in our supernatural goods.
The school law deprives the parents of the freedom that belongs to them and obliges them to pay two taxes: the one for official teaching and the other for Christian teaching; at the same time it deceives the intelligence of the children, perverts their will and distorts their conscience.The law of separation deprives us of properties that were not necessary and puts a thousand obstacles to our priestly ministry, without counting that it carries with it the official, public, scandalous rupture of society with the Church, religion and God.
The divorce law separates husbands, gives rise to noisy processes, which humiliate and reduce families, divides and saddens children, renders marriages totally or partially sterile and also legally authorizes adultery.
The secularization of hospitals deprives the sick of selfless and selfless care, which only religion inspires, of supernatural consolations, which would sweeten their sufferings, and expose them to death without sacraments. ”
These considerations could be developed to infinity, adding and demonstrating how secularism, in all spheres, contradicted both the public and the private good.
Therefore, the laws of secularism are not laws.
They have no law but the name, a usurped name.
They are but corruptions of the law, violences rather than laws, says St.Thomas: Magis sunt violtiac quam leges (S. 77.
I-II, q.
96, a.
4).
Even if they only harmed us in the temporal order, they would not in themselves force us in conscience.
7ales leges non obligat in foro conscientie (ibid).
They could force us only if we were to give in to a purely earthly interest in order to avoid disturbances and scandals.
But since the laws of secularism violate the rights of God, as they hurt us in our spiritual interests, as after having ruined the essential principles which rest society, they are enemies of true religion, which commands us to recognize and worship, in all domains, God and Jesus Christ, to adhere to his teachings, to submit to his commandments, to save our souls at all costs, we are not allowed to obey them, we have the right and the obligation to fight them and to demand by all honest means their abrogation.
“Laws can be unjust because they contravened the divine good, like the tyrannical laws that induce idolatry or anything else that is against the divine law: it is in no way lawful to observe such laws, because, as it is said, “we must obey God rather than men.”
(S. Thomas, S. 7.
T-IIL, q.
96, a.
4).
7.
Resistance to Abusive Power The doctrine of the Church, so far exposed, consecrates sovereignty as divine in its origin and commands obedience and reverence to legitimate rulers as ministers of God.
All the contrary 32 proclaims the doctrine of philosophism and revolution formulated of this kind in the famous Declaration of the Rights of Man: “The insurrection is the most sacred of the rights of man.”
Someone might fear that the doctrine of the Church would also consecrate the worst excesses of tyrants, offering no remedy in cases where a legitimate power, at its origin, would abuse such a public authority as to use it to oppress citizens or even possible cases in cinema an invading power would seize public power.
What should be done in both cases?
Following theologians, we can classify into four the attitudes that can be adopted towards a power that, legitimate in its origin, has then become tyrannical.
Passive resistance, which consists in denying obedience to unjust laws.
Active legal resistance, which consists in requiring, by legitimate means (whether authorized by law or not), the revision of the law.
law.
Active, armed resistance, which consists in forcibly opposing the execution of a rebellion, which consists in taking the offensive against authority, from where the law emanates.
The latter attitude is always forbidden; the former is obligatory in the face of laws that prescribe acts contrary to conscience; the latter is always permitted.
Therefore, the third attitude remains: is it allowed, and when?
The authority of St. Thomas is decisive in the present matter.
The Holy Doctor wonders (II-II, q.
42, a.
2, ad 3) if it would be a sin of sedition to deliver a people from the tyrannical regime, and answer no.
May it be said — it is stated — that the tyrannical regime is not just, because it is not ordered to the common good, but to the private good of the ruler, as the Philosopher teaches.
And for this reason the action against such a regime has no reason for sedition: unless it is so disorderly against such a regime that the crowd comes to suffer greater harm with the disturbance of this regime than it suffered before.
The seditious is rather the tyrant who feeds discords and rebellions in the people subject to him, in order to be able to dominate him more easily.
This doctrine, common in Catholic theologians, has been exposed with singular force by Meyer in his Institutions juris naturalis.
It reads as follows: “There may be circumstances in which active resistance to abuses of authority is not contrary to natural law.”
And it proves in this way: “The same thing that every individual has an innate right to provide for his preservation and, therefore, to defend himself armed against the violence of an unjust aggression, without, however, exceeding the measure that legitimizes the needs of the defence, also a people, which its social unity constitutes in a moral person, must necessarily be provided by the nature of the same essential right.
The natural right of defence extends, without exception, to any rational creature, and therefore to pari, or a fortiori, a collective human personality.
Therefore, every time a tyrannical abuse of power, not transitory, but constant and tyrannically persecuting, will have reduced the people to such extremes that their salvation is manifestly in danger, for example: if it is to conjure an imminent danger to the State, or supreme and essential goods of the nation, and first of all to save from a certain ruin the treasure of true faith: then, by natural law, it is permissible to oppose an active resistance to an oppression of this nature, to the extent that cause and circumstances demand it.
Scripture gives us an illustrious example of this mode of defense in the history of the Maccabees.
“Any group of citizens, even without constituting a complete moral person, nor an organic social unit, by virtue of the inherent personal right of each person, can in this case of extreme necessity pool the forces of all to oppose to a common repression the force of a collective resistance” (Institutions juris naturalis, 1900, T. II, N* 531 and 532) 33 So far Meyer.
Without minimizing the value of Meyer's argument, we believe that armed resistance can be derived from the primary rights of every human individual.
Because natural law, as we have seen in the first chapter (I-II, q.
96, a.
2) gives a man the right to seek the good of his own preservation, of the family and of society.
However, if such assets are agreed upon by natural law and there are cases where a regime or a ruler consistently opposes them, the same natural right gives man the power, and still imposes an obligation, to effectively defend those rights against the abuses of the regime and the tyrant.
Nor do you want to sustain, invoking Christian patience, that it fits better with the evangelical precepts to tolerate the insults of the tyrant and to wait resignedly on God to make amends when he pleases.
For if it is true that the occasion could come when such a tyrannical regime, as we have seen recently in Russia and Mexico, from which citizens can in no way be freed, and in such a case nothing better than to tolerate insults and to direct their hearts to God, placing in Him all hope; until this condition of irremediable is verified, as long as the citizens can prevent it from being fulfilled, as happened with the heroic movement led by the Leader in the Spanish revolution, they must, all who love their own good, that of their own and that of the homeland, meet as new Maccabees and resolve to fight, saying: If we all do as our brothers have done, and we will not fight to defend our lives and our law against the nations, in a short time they will end with us.
(1Mac, 2.40-41).
They must do so not so much for the defense of their own good, because they can renounce it, but for the sake of the family and society; for just as it would not be a good father if he could not use force to prevent the rape or abuse of his daughters, neither would it be a good citizen who could not, by the use of force, safeguard the nation in danger.
8.
Of the illegitimacy of power So far we have considered the right attitude towards legitimate powers, and this attitude, both in cases where such powers are exercised within their powers and when they depart from them.
But is power always legitimate?
What criterion to follow in order to discern legitimacy?
And in the case of an illegitimate power at its source, what position should be taken against it?
Easy is to answer the first question.
Because it does not always possess the legitimacy of origin, even if nothing is more necessary to it, as Balmes writes magnificently: “All power in the first moment of its existence, before acting, before exercising any act, the first thing it does is to proclaim its legitimacy.
It seeks it in divine or human law, it bases it on birth or choice, it leads it to derive from historical titles or the sudden development of extraordinary events, but it always comes to the same thing: to the pretension of legitimacy; the word done does not come out of his lips; the instinct of his own preservation is telling him that he cannot use it and that it would be enough for him to do so to distort his authority, to undermine his prestige, to teach the people the way of insurrection, to commit suicide...” (Protestantism..., 1.
TV, e.v.).
What is the ultimate and definitive criterion for knowing legitimacy?
We have pointed it out above.
The community, with its usual adherence, is the one that gives legal effect to the regime of government and realizes the constitutional law of a country.
This usual adherence is like the testimony that the common good has been achieved in that society.
Writing to the French Cardinals, Leo XIII says: Political forms adopted are replaced by others.
These changes are far from always legitimate at source; it is very difficult for them to be.
However, the supreme criterion of the common good and 34 of public tranquillity requires the acceptance of these new governments established de facto instead of previous governments, which, in fact, do not exist anymore.
What position should be taken against these powers in fact, while they cannot be legitimized by the usual adherence accorded to them by the community?
The answer is clear and strict: you should not obey them, because because they are not legitimate, they have no right to command.
But as, on the other hand, citizens have duties towards the society in which they live, they must fulfill the just things that this illegitimate power commands when it is demanded by the common good of society.
“It happens, ” writes Suarez, the most erudite Jesuit theologian (De Legibus,.
X.)
— that when the republic cannot resist the tyrant, it tolerates him and lets itself be ruled by him, because the being ruled by him is less than lacking all coercion and direction.”
And the celebrated Cardinal esteeming as Mercier, when the occupation of Belgium by the German troops in 1914, a run over not only the invasion, but the constitution of the German government in the Belgian State thus declared the obligation of citizens with de facto power: “I consider it an obligation of my pastoral office to define our duties of conscience in the face of the power that has invaded our soil and that momentarily occupies most of it.
This power is not a legitimate authority.
Therefore, in the depths of your soul you owe him neither esteem, nor adherence, nor obedience.
The only legitimate power in Belgium is that which belongs to our king, to his government, to the representatives of the nation.
He is only for us authority; he is only entitled to the affection of our hearts, to our submission.
The acts of administration of the occupying authority would in themselves lack force, but the legitimate authority tacitly ratifies all that justifies the general interest, and only from this ratification comes their full legal value...”.
But in the face of these illegitimate powers of origin, if you can resist them, you have to do it; and this resistance can go as far as tyranny.
What's there to think about the tyrant?
Is it lawful for a private person, that is, a mere member of the community, to kill the tyrant?
To resolve this question, theologians distinguish between the tyrant of usurpation (1yrannus titori, usurpationis) and the tyrant of government (tyrannus regiminis), that is between the usurper who seizes power by force and the legitimate ruler who exercises a despotic dominion over his subordinates.
And they say that any individual can kill him, according to the doctrine of St. Thomas, who commenting on Cicero's praise of Caesar's murderers, declares: "Tulius speaks of the case in which a man seizes power by force, against the will of the citizens, or forced them violently; and then, when one cannot turn to a superior who works justice, he who, in order to deliver his homeland, kills the tyrant, deserves praise and reward" (In II Sent., d. 44, q.
2, a.
(2).
As far as the tyrant of government is concerned, the theologians only authorize murder when it is done with public power, that is, as the leader of the community according to the doctrine of St. Thomas, which says: “If tyranny has become intolerable, it would be dangerous for society and its leaders for individuals to arrogate to themselves the right to attack the lives of rulers, even if they were tyrants...against the cruelty of tyrants it is not to act the presumptuous initiative of private individuals, but public authority. ” We can end this chapter by saying that Catholic doctrine, by deriving from God, the source of all being, the social impulse that drives man to live politically, justifies sovereignty, points out its limits and directs it towards the good of man as to his own object.
On the contrary, Rousseau, precisely because he pulls away from pure human arbitrage the impulse that determines political life, cannot justify sovereignty, and is forced to conceive it as a pure force without direction and, therefore, with infinite harmfulness.
Sovereignty is not an absolute; but the same constitutes its value and dignity.
For how could an absolute rule soon a finite being, which develops in the contingent?
Because 35 comes from God, it is limited in its perfection and must confine itself to seeking the good of man-individual and of man-family grouped in the collectivity.
This common good reason specifies its raison d'être, hence that a whole Christian policy could be condensed by saying that it is the sovereignty of the common good.
Because on this reason of common good rest the rights and duties of public power as well as those of individuals; the legitimacy of power as the right of insurrection of peoples; it authorizes the various forms or political regimes as it maintains the integrity and inviolability of the rights of the nation through the removals of men and of things; it, in short, sets the limit of all the rights and obligations of those who live in the city so that this good, which is “maius et divinius quam honum unius”, which is greater and more divine than the good of a particular (Saint Thomas, S. Th.
TI-II, p. 39, a.
2), always be healthyly reached.
36 TII.
SOCIAL-STATUAL STRUCTURE OF POLITICAL LIFE So far the fundamental law governing political life has been studied, and it is nothing other than its essential definition: Political society is a set of units grouped by the action of a sovereign power in view of the temporal common good.
Such is the essential ordination that God, supreme legislator, has imposed on political society.
Power, which has as its concrete orientation the temporal common good of the social collectivity, is exclusively at the service of the nation, that is, of the hierarchically constituted people.
The State thus has rights over the social community; rights soon conditioned by the common good temporarily and remotely by the perfection proper to the human person.
In order for these rights to become effective, the State must impose mandates that must be complied with by virtue of justice, which in this case receives the name of legal.
Since the citizen is subordinated to the State in order to achieve his own good, justice, in this distributive case, bases the rights that the citizen claims vis-à-vis the State.
Could not a conflict arise between the rights of the State and the rights of citizens, between legal and distributive justice?
Impossible, because good harmonizes one and the other right, one and the other justice.
The citizen submits himself in order to achieve his good and, in turn, the State cannot impose on him but what leads to this same good.
However, reality tells us that conflicts multiply on a daily basis and there are frequent cases in which the State, represented by the sword of the military, has to come out in its defense against the abuses of the people or the nation itself that evict its government in order to guarantee its cxistance.
How to explain real, theoretically impossible conflicts?
How to nullify or at least reduce such anomalies?
If the conflict sc plantca, one of two: either the State has lost the notion of its functions or the collectivity that of its own good.
As in the next chapter we will determine the functions of authority, here we will limit ourselves to indicating the broad lines of the structure that society and the State must have in order to make conflicts impossible or at least difficult.
1.
Liberalism and Socialism If it is true that many of the conflicts between freedom and authority recorded in history are to be attributed to the foolish arrogance of those who rule, that forgetting their reason as servants and ministers of God placed in the service of the collectivity seek only the satisfaction of their particular or party interests, it is no less true that at present the most of the conflicts provoke them the disarticulation in which the social body finds itself, because they have lost the consciousness of their unity, and the disorbitation of the individual who, governed by their infrarrational instincts, despises everything that is not their selfishness.
Because liberal individualism, after breaking the individual order, has broken the natural order of political life, today it is impossible for any government, no matter how extraordinary we fake its qualities, to govern without it producing conflict and succumbing.
A quick historical synthesis of the libertarian action of the modern age in its desire to destroy the organization carried out by the Church will make us understand it, at the same time showing us the gap between the modern and the traditional conception regarding the state structure of political life.
Christianity realized the ideal type of political society, in which the rights of God and those of Caesar, those of the State and of the nation, those of freedom and authority were harmonized.
Mediaeval political society is a living organism in fullness of life, a natural organism 37 brimming with health, because it was the work of the spiritual society that with its gifts from Heaven inspired and created from within the normal order of human life.
An ideal type that the Church could only realize.
For if political institutions arise from a postulation of the very roots of human life (as has been explained, against L'Action Frangaise, and on the other hand, it is impossible in today's economy to ensure the integrity of moral virtues without supernatural influence, horn teaches Vatican Council I (Sess.
III, chap 2), no human force can realize a political society that, by virtue of the same institutions, is healthy.
The spiritual society is therefore necessary for the integral constitution of a political society.
And so, only the Middle Ages, the denigrated Middle Ages, increasingly known and admired, have realized the normal kind of political society.
But this admirable organism, by the corrupting action nested in the bowels of man, is lost and, as it occurs in the corruptions of all beings, the forms, the principle of being and perfection, disappear on a descending scale.
The selfishness that encouraged Philip Hermoso in his contests with Bonifacio VIII, begins to undermine the foundations of Christian Europe, and man, under the pretext of joining more directly with God, breaks the bond that unites him with the Church and thus atomizes himself in the religious individualism of Protestantism.
Detached from the supernatural gifts that guaranteed his natural integrity, he demands freedom for his intelligence and for his will, and breaks, with the subjectivism of pure reason and the autonomy of practical reason, the bonds that bind him to truth and justice.
Disappeared from God, from truth and justice, Rousseau's liberalism takes its responsibility to free man from political sovereignty, making it a popular creation; from the family, reducing it to the condition of a simple human society, egalitarian and dissoluble; from the profession and from the corporation, leaving to a free agreement between the employer and the worker the determination of working conditions.
Because of this successive rupture of ties, the liberal society that we can define in this way originates: a sum of individuals unleashed from all social ties that, under the action of a power conditioned by them by universal suffrage, are conglomerated in an absolute quantitative equality of all individual freedoms.
Let us look at the characters that give physiognomy to liberal society: a group of individuals without social ties: individualism.
As no direction directs this whole, that is, as there is in reality no popular will, universal suffrage — an arithmetic computation of wills — is excited to give an impulse to this undifferentiated plebe: Democratism.
This impulse, as it is the result of a sum of equal and free wills, illusoryly guarantees the supreme objective of liberal society, namely, that all associates live within the equal and free social whole, that is, free from any ties they hold: Liberalism.
Individualism, democratism and liberalism, here are the three elements that are involved in the formation of liberal society.
Such a disorganized society had to possess an appalling energy of destruction and history tells us that, given men to free competition, the proletarian emerged in the economic order and in the political order “the monarch people, the hardest, the most despotic, the most intolerable of all monarchs”, as Joseph de Maistre wrote (Étude sur la souveraineté, chap.
6).
Liberal society—unlocking man from the bonds that protected him—slaved him religiously to the divinities of Science, Progress, Democracy; intellectually, subjecting him to the myths of evolutionary materialism; morals to romantic sentimentalism; economics, the despotism of money; politicalism, the oligarchy of the rascals.
In the 38th stupid 19th century comes to its culmination romantic so foolish and desolate idols.
the development of that society that worships in posture No one felt more painfully the effects of social disorganization and the glorification of the individual, than the individual himself.
Because in unleashing his family and professional ties, he saw himself given to his own forces and swirled as in a murky by the omnipotent drag of modern capital.
Full of rage in his impotence, the proletarian, who is the normal type that results from the liberal regime, then gathered undifferentiated, as corn grains pile up in a sack, to cry out against this bourgeois regime which, despite its sentimental and egalitarian ideology, gave birth to the most disorbited class antagonism.
War on social inequality!
— was the cry; and according to this new position, the State was assigned the sovereign mission of levelling the stomachs of all citizens.
Since then, the State has been a huge monster in charge of providing equal ration of food, work and instruction to all individuals who live absorbed in their viscera.
Satanic, inconceivable offspring if Russia were not the experiment!
Socialism is a huge machine composed of multiple and tiny shoots, individuals, without at least theoretical hierarchies; all of them totally subordinated to the greater efficiency of the machine.
Whatever is produced is accepted and absorbed; the unproductive, like religion, is eliminated.
Understand that I am not talking about our bourgeois socialism, a copy of Jean Jaurés' French socialism.
In reality, this is nothing more than sentimental liberalism that has been attached in confusing mixes hatred of the Catholic and the thesis on the socialization of the land and of the means of production.
Authentic socialism is anti-individualist, anti-democratic and anti-libctarian.
The pantheistic sobcrany that liberalism attributes to the people, socialism attributes it to the proletarian class.
For him—in Berdiaeff's expression—there exists a chosen class, a class-messiah, pure of the whole so-called bourgeois culture, pure of this original sin which engenders all history, sin which constitutes the exploitation of man by man and of the class by the class.
This class-messiah is the very embryo of true humanity, of future humanity that will not know exploitation But sovereignty does not belong to the real proletarian, but to the ideal proletarian.
Only a privileged minority knows the real mission of the proletariat, and this minority must lead to victory for the effective proletariat, even if it is sometimes subjected to unprecedented violence.
Socialism absorbs the whole man — body and soul — “wants to train the souls in mechanics, to discipline them, so that they feel at ease in the human anthill, that they sc aficionate to the life of barracks, that they renounce freedom of spirit.”
(Berdiaeff, Un Nouveau moyen age).
Is there irreducibility between liberalism and socialism?
None.
Firstly, because liberalism leads to Bolshevism, as we have indicated.
Secondly, because in both ideology the human condition is, in qualitative terms, considered in the same way.
Both deprive individuals of religion: liberalism because, after freedom, the secular idea prevails in it; socialism because, in the name of materialism, it only makes atheistic confession possible.
And both deprive of morals: because liberalism breaks the brakes that stop instincts, and socialism drives all infrarational movements.
They also destroy the family: liberalism because they give it to the regulation of the contracting ones; socialism, because it legislates free love.
They destroy associations and corporations: liberalism, in the name of the freedom it unleashes; socialism in the name of the State that binds only.
Property: Liberalism, because in proclaiming free competition it leaves the hungry crowd enslaved in the hands of a few capitalists; socialism, because, in the name of equality, it is taken away from everyone through the Bolshevik oligarchy, 39 In short: that the inhuman state that decrees socialism with the aim of leveling all the stomachs of the universe, liberalism realizes it by the very logic of the liberal idea.
One imposes disorder by virtue of law; the other, by not legislating order, causes disorder to prevail.
If in liberalism, the state is a boiler filled with molecules that boil in the heat of one's passions, without external pressure, in socialism they boil by the exclusive action of the proletarian dictatorship.
It is not possible to conceive of a more accidental difference.
Read Russia in the nude of Panait Istrati and it will be proven that there is no vice of liberal society that does not produce it Russia re-aggravated.
Liberals and socialists are children of the same father, footman Juan Jacobo.
Those want the free individuals even if they die of hunger; they prefer them fed up (in practice they also kill them of hunger), even if they live slaves.
Unreconcilable brothers, they have breastfed in the revolutionary trilogy, with the difference that one is drunk of freedom and the other of equality.
2.
Corporate Regime Like his parents, who in 1791 destroyed the famous corporations, neither want the existence of a social body — different from and before the state — formed of living cells that differentiate and organize in tissues, organs and apparatuses.
However, the reconstruction of these bodies is of crucial importance for the establishment of a normal regime of political and social life.
The individual does not immediately insert himself into public life, but, first of all, he brings me together in the family, in the municipality, and by the municipality in the province or region, and by the region in the nation.
At the same time, in view of the common interests it has with the co-workers of the same occupation or profession, believe other natural organisms, indispensable at least, so that individuals can achieve sufficient economic and social independence to which their work gives them the right; under this aspect, grow first in the workshop and in the workshop in the corporation, and by the corporation in the professional or trade bodies and by the professional bodies in the nation Double series of organisms whose life, in its essential constituents, is regulated by disposition of the, natural law that no human power can mature at its own discretion, but must obey them religiously because they come from God, author of natural law.
It is necessary to highlight the divine-natural character of these satial groups, precisely because it revolts the pagan instincts of all ideologues.
Once the existence of a differentiated, hierarchical, autonomous social body is reaffirmed, freedom is guaranteed and authority strengthened.
Freedom which is not an exemption from ties as liberalism imagined, but respect for one's own rights, which cannot be guaranteed if there are no bonds to protect it.
As La Tour du Pin has shown, that freedom existed in the Christian city.
“The monarch on his throne, the magistrate on his chair, the merchant in his business, the craftsman in his workshop, the peasant in his plow, as well as the bishop in his pastoral office, each felt protected at the same time that he was bound by the rules of his state, rules born of custom, that is, in the freest and most certain form of consent.
Each moved freely in the social body to which he belonged and not eccentrically as if he had fallen from the moon.
And these same bodies, in turn, moved themselves in their orbits, with the same freedom, one and the other.
Such was the formation of the social body, that freedom was placed in the free play of its functioning and not in the power to create confusion by sowing disorder.”
(See a social ordre Chrétien).
The corporate regime is precisely the one that wants to promote the organization of all social forces; it promotes their vital development and fruitful to the extent that it seeks their concert and harmony.
In the economic order, by means of the corporation replaces the unbridled freedom of capital and labor and the struggle of interests that follows, variable rules dictated by 40 the same professional body that ensure the loyalty and security of the trade.
Against the unbridled freedom proclaimed by liberalism, it invokes the right of association for the worker, in order to defend him against capitalist exploitation.
Against the socialist principle of the struggle between capital and labour, it demands the collaboration of one and the other for the benefit even of the working class itself.
The corporate regime is the organization of work most in accordance with the principles of the Christian social order and the most favorable to general prosperity.
As at the moment it is almost chimerico to think of a corporate organization of society, it can be tended to it through trade unionism and the organization of professions.
3, Professional representation The structure we have outlined when we affirm the constitution of the family, of the commune, of the region, on the one hand; of the workshop and of the corporation, on the other; with inalienable rights that receive their effectiveness from the same natural law, is purely social.
However, since the supreme power that governs the social body will need, for a more efficient and harmonious government, to know what are the impositions to be fixed on the social body, it follows that it is necessary, or at least very convenient, that there be in the State, whatever its organization — monarchical, aristocratic or democratic — an organ that faithfully expresses the desires of the social community and gives its consent to the laws imposed upon it.
Already this body, which will truly represent the country, will have a state or political character, since its mission will be to collaborate, even if only to represent, in the effective government of the nation.
How should this body be constituted?
Being composed of units of the nation, not of individuals but of social groups, it is these social groups that must constitute the body that represents them.
The scope of the political activity of individuals is determined by the social group to which they belong.
A head of the family — only one who has the right to vote — does not have as such the power to determine the provincial government; its power only reaches the commune.
The communes may, in turn, determine central power.
The same process must be followed in the professional series.
The craftsman, the factory worker, the peasant, has reduced his political activity within the corporation; the corporations as such will determine the authority of the professional or trade union bodies, and only these, the national ones.
In this way, in addition to reducing the political interference of the citizens to the right, it does not go beyond what its competence achieves.
A head of household may well know how to organize the communal journey, but it will be difficult to understand the national needs, since this depends on a number of factors that will only understand without distortion the one at the head of the great bodies that immediately make up the nation.
This will achieve the formation of an organ that truly represents the country, since the double line family-community-province and laller-corporation-professional body, encompasses the interests of the nation as a whole.
It should be noted that by promoting this representation of interests, it is generally done, under the aspect of what is essentially claimed by the temporal good, without, therefore, determining its specific conditions, which can only depend on the geographical and historical conditions of each people.
These particularisations offer an abundant task for a political school which, in this study, has to follow a preferably empirical method.
The indubitable fact that must be emphasized is that the people must forge the laws; but we do not call a people a human generation that has broken all the bonds that united it with its maternal generations; that it does not even become a reality, because it lives scattered and dispersed; “the people are a great historical group that comprises all the linked generations, not only the living ones but those of the past, those of our parents and grandparents” (Berdiaeff, Un Nouveau moyen age).
For this reason, we must unite the present generation by organizing it politically by the 41 professional representation, and we must unite it with previous generations, with the traditional forces of the country, making this representative body an organism that gathers the whole village of the past and continues it.
4.
Universal Sufrage Nothing more deplorable, however, and contrary to the common good of the nation, than representation on the basis of universal suffrage.
Because universal suffrage is unjust, incompetent, corrupting.
Injustice, because it denies by its nature the structuring of the nation into social units (family, workshop, corporation); it organizes numerically human vital facts that are subtracted from the law of number; it is based on the equality of rights when the natural law imposes unequal rights: the rights of the father and the son, the teacher and the student, the sage and the ignorant, the honest and the thief cannot be equal.
The same proportion, on the other hand — that is, justice — requires unequal rights to be imposed Incompetent unequal obligations on the part of the elector, since the voter with his vote solves the most important and difficult religious, political, educational and economic problems.
On the part of the anointed with popular verdict, because they are given carte blanche to deal with and solve all possible problems and, secondly, because they have to be elected, usually, the most able to seduce the masses, that is, the most intellectually and morally incapable.
Corruptor, because he creates the political parties with their sequels of committees, that is, offices of exploitation of the vote; where, as one can imagine, the vote is offered to the highest bidder, who can only be the most corrupt and the most corrupt.
Moreover, as the masses cannot vote for what they do not know, universal suffrage demands the assembly of powerful propaganda machines with their enormous expenses.
No one is hidden from it that at the expense of the public treasury commitments are made and propaganda is carried out.
So decisive is the corruption of politics by the effect of universal suffrage, that an honest person cannot devote himself to it but by selling his honesty; made all the more serious if we remember that, according to St. Thomas, a ruler cannot rule society well if he is not “simpliciter bonus, ” absolutely good (S. 771).
I-II, q.
82, a.
2 ad3).
Universal suffrage creates parliaments, which are councils where incompetence solves all possible problems, always giving them the solution that has to have the best effect of electoral conquest.
In the so-called modern democracies (there really is no purely democratic government today, as discussed below), where universal suffrage is the great instrument of action, legislators have the preferred mission of opening and expanding the dikes of popular corruption.
There are those who seek to save universal suffrage, and their corollary, the parliament, imputing to men and not to these institutions the vices that are observed.
But they do not notice that the right vices are inherent to them, and it is in them that the principle of corruption of political customs resides.
Individualism, which is the essence of universal suffrage, starts from matter, marked by quantity, and matter, erected in the expression of discernment, dissolves, destroys, corrupts, because goodness always comes to things by the way of form, according to the great principles of Thomistic metaphysics.
It would be easy to show that the downfalls of modern politics are the consequence of considering any question under the sign of matter.
5.
Political Regimes Supposed the constitution of the Social Body with the power to let its voice be heard through an organ that represents it, let us determine what Catholic doctrine teaches regarding the various political regimes, according to which public authority can be constituted.
The democratic regime will need to be studied with special attention, because it is of particular interest.
42 This matter must be approached in a spirit totally purged of political passions and phobias; if in any matter the serenity of the philosopher is necessary, it is precisely in this.
First of all, the problem of sovereignty must be resolved, in order not to incur the perennial confusion of the democrats, who pretend to justify democracy with arguments taken from the so-called popular sovereignty.
Even if the sovereignty came from or resided in the people, something openly false, it was shown, would not hagitate any privilege in favor of democracy form of government.
For the people, who, like every being, are made for their own good, must prefer that more suitable way to seek it, and there is no special reason to justify democracy in this sense; on the contrary, there are many against them.
This is not intended to invalidate it; it is only intended to make an understanding of the need to distinguish issues that are generally confused with prejudice to a clear knowledge of the problem and its solution.
Entering into matter, and following the Angelico Doctor, whose thought Demongeot has exhibited in his admirable study Ze Meilleur Regimen Politique Selon Saint Thomas, we distinguish four pure types of political regimes.
In the event that one governs, the government tends essentially to unity, cohesion and absolute power: royal regime or monarchy.
If the best rule, the dominant concern is that power be given to each in proportion to his virtue: aristocracy.
Whether it governs the richest or the richest and most powerful, the ideal that determines the structure is wealth: oligarchy.
When power is entrusted to the freely governed multitude, the regime is called democracy.
Any of these regimes, or a combination of clos, is permitted, provided that it can coexist with the temporary common good, the fundamental law of all political life.
This possibility of coexistence should not only be determined in the abstract, in a general way, but also in particular, taking into account the geographical and historical conditions of this particular people, a people determined that is not the people of a particular moment, as if they were isolated in time, but considered in their relationship with past generations and with future generations.
Leo XIII has spread this principle that governs such a very important issue; and when he enunciated it, he seemed to keep in mind the Democrats, who trust to the whim of the crowd the implementation of forms of government.
After remembering that rulers can, in some cases, be elected by the will and judgment of the multitude without opposing Catholic doctrine, since then power is not given, but it is established who is to exercise it, continues: Nothing prevents the Church from approving the government of one or more, provided it is just and applied to the common good.
Therefore, save justice, it is not forbidden for peoples to give themselves that political form that best suits their genius, traditions or customs.
As can be seen from the tenor of the document, it is not the whim of the crowd that, among the possible and lawful forms, chooses the concrete form to govern the city.
It will be necessary to contemplate the genius, traditions, customs of the people themselves in order to determine the one that is truly fit to effectively secure the temporal common good of that particular city.
Nothing more absurd than to establish a monarchist regime in a country of frank republican tradition, and vice versa to establish a republic in a traditionally monarchist country.
Indeed, a regime of false government, without real roots in the traditions of the people, can impose on the country a direction contrary to that of its natural movement, exposing it to a constant imbalance.
43 6.
Democracy Let us apply this principle to the democratic regime and see how far it can coexist with the common good.
But it will be necessary to expose first, following the doctrine of the Angelic Doctor, the essential constitutives of democracy in its simple or pure state.
I have said essential constitutives, because democracy, like every material being, is an essence that can only exist in a concrete reality, individualized by certain accidental determinations, coming from quantitative matter: mareria signata quantitate, says St.Thomas.
For the same reason that these determinations come from quantitative matter, they lack intelligibility, since matter itself is unintelligible.
Then, if they are unintelligible, they are distinct and separable from the essence, which is in every way the necessary and first principle of intelligibility.
The philosopher cannot be interested in studying these accidental determinations.
Because he wants to understand (intelligere), that is, to read within (intus-legeere) things, to grasp the intelligible essences or principles of things.
I also say: democracy in its simple or pure state.
Because there are simple essences and there are others that result from the combination of several simple ones.
So, for example, hydrogen is a simple or pure essence, while water is a combination of hydrogen and oxygen.
Clearly, water is a single new essence.
But it is not simple, in it the qualities of the simple essences of which it is composed are as tempered.
Supposed the intelligence of these observations, to be able to undertake the present study.
What, then, is democracy in its pure or simple state?
It is a regime in which all citizens are and feel free, equal and sovereign.
There are three essential notes of this regime: freedom, equality and sovereignty of each and every citizen.
Of the three notes indicated, the main one, the one that is primarily involved (Pol.
VI, 2), and from which the other two derive, is freedom.
She is the beginning and end of democracy (Pol.
IV, 7), says, in his metaphysical language, St.Thomas.
Hence, in one democracy the citizen is not directed by another or towards the end of another, but by himself is heading towards the end of the city (Pol.
11, 2).
The citizen, in his political activity, is truly free.
If freedom likewise.
All are an essential attribute of all will, then, be pure and simply the same measure of common favors or goods.
citizens, all must enjoy equal rights or participate in the (Pol.
III, 4).
And this, according to strict arithmetic equality, without taking into account differences of dignity, but must involve both the poor and the rich, the wise and the ignorant.
(Pol.
VI, 2).
The political freedom that everyone equally possesses is not only to be governed as free, not even to control the government or to participate in it by equal suffrage, but also to matter the access of all citizens to the highest functions of the city, and that there is no one above another.
(Pol.
IV, 2).
That is, that every citizen should be sovereign.
Democracy can then be defined as “the regime where the whole crowd rules” (Pol.
II, 7).
But how does the whole crowd rule?
First, because staff members are elected from among all, without regard to considerations of dignity or value, at least for the performance of functions that do not require special wisdom or prudence.
(Pol.
VI, 2).
And since the draw is the only procedure capable of ensuring this perfect equality, the law has decided that through it the rulers will be chosen (Pol.
IV, 8), which are short-lived and unable to perform the same function several times.
(Pol.
VI, 2).
Secondly, because the true ruler is the mass of citizens gathered in the Assembly or Consilium?, officials become only executors of the popular will.
'* All citizens are immediately involved in this House; it is very different from the parliaments in which parliamentarians pretend to represent the people.
(A.N.).
44 It is easy to deduce from the characteristics pointed out that democracy, in its pure state, must be the domination of the poor; for if the multitude commands, as in it there are more poor than rich (Pol.
VI, 2), the poor must possess more authority than the rich.
Hence, in democracies the rulers are characterized by their dark birth, poverty and ignorance, or by their miserable office, so that as well as in an aristocratic state those who rule are noble, rich and virtuous, so in the democratic they are dark men, poor and without social reason (Pol.
VI, 2).
What judgment about democracy so defined?
Is it a just government, capable of securing the common good?
It is necessary to distinguish.
If it is a society in which there are no social inequalities because all are equally poor and ignorant, or all equally rich and virtuous, the common good is assured, for it is not to be feared that one class, valid of its greatest number, will oppress the others.(Pol.
VI, 1).
Case, as you see, utopian, only possible in a country of cretins.
Because the inequality of individual natures is something that is imposed on evidence.
Not everyone possesses or can possess the same spiritual or material riches.
In this sense, the experience of the modern world, that is, the world that emerged from the principles of the Protestant Reformation, is very instructive.
He bore in his heart the myth of universal democratic realization; and since he did not find the economic and social equality necessary to political democracy, he wanted to create it.
Not being able to create it by raising everyone to the same measure of virtue and wealth, since not all are capable, in fact, of a high measure, he endeavoured to reduce the conditions of culture of all through the democratization of the school and of comfort.
Thus the standard type of incultura has been created: a multitude obsessed by the same myths, ruled by the same luxuries in the universalization of the automobile and the radio.
Artificial equality, in a certain common participation of the least human in man.
Natural equality, on the other hand, is not forged by a decree (Pol.
VI, 2) nor is it artificially created, says St.Tomas with Aristotle.
Now, if natural equality does not exist, democracy will be unjust, because one class, by virtue of the number, would seize power and dominate the other.
(an openly unjust thing, since power must be exercised in view of the common good of all and of all social classes.
This is precisely the fundamental criticism that St. Thomas makes against the democratic regime in the booklet De Regno (L. 1, 1).
If the wicked government is exercised by many, he says, it is called democracy, that is, domination of the people; when, valid of its number, the plebe oppresses the rich, all the people become, then, like a tynic tyrant.
classify democracy among corrupt forms of government.
Hence St.Thomas Although democracy in its simple or pure state is essentially tyrannical, would it not be possible to choose from it some good elements, which it may contain, and temper them with elements of the other forms of government, also simple, such as the aristocracy (government of the best), and monarchy (government of one), and to give birth to a new form of government in which the democratic element abounds?
St. Thomas has believed it possible, and has proposed the Reptublica as a good form of government, opposing it to democracy.
Because if democracy is bad in its pure state, since it logically ends up in a class government, it is not, however, bad the fundamental tendency that inspires it: to secure the freedom of the social body in its movement towards the common good.
Of course that freedom can also be achieved in a monarchical or aristocratic regime; never, for example, have citizens been determined with greater freedom than in the monarchy of St.Louis, king of France.
But, supposed the psychology reflects of man, this self-determination does not appear to the citizen with as much evidence within the monarchy as in the Republican regime!3%.
This is why the democratic regime had to appear as necessary in the reflective epochs of history, such as the modern age.
Which points to the inferiority of this form before the others.
Because reflexivity is an obvious symptom of illness, since it supposes that man looks more at himself than at the outside being.
Now, the 45th Jr., says St. Thomas in De Regno (L. 1, 4), “that men living under a king do not move to the common good, so effectively because they believe that the pursuit of the common good is not something that interests them, but only the government.
But when they see that the common good is in the power of all, they tend to it as to their own good.
As in the democratic regime all citizens participate in one form or another of power, they love it as their own and want it to continue.
Nothing more convenient for the stability of a regime, such as that the various parts or classes that constitute the city are interested in its conservation.
(Pol.
IL, 14).
With this discrimination, the good and the bad element of the democratic form appears in its pure state.
The participation of all citizens in the government is good; the arithmetic equal participation is bad, because it leads to the government of a class, and precisely of the least qualified.
It will be necessary, then, to temper the democratic regime with the principle of aristocracy (government of the most virtuous) and with that of the oligarchy (government of the most economically efficient), and even with that of the monarchy (government of unity), so that it becomes a regime where all rule in the pursuit of the only common good of the social body.
(Pol.
IV, 7).
This temperation will be achieved by compensating the meagre number of good, wise and rich people with an increase in their political rights, proportional to their social function; in which there will be no injustice, but on the contrary, since the equality of distributive justice consists in the fact that in different ways diverse persons are honored and benefited in accordance with their dignity.
(S. Th.
I-IL, q.
63, a.
1.
For in distributive justice it is not given to each according to an arithmetic equality of thing to thing (so much so), but according to a proportion of things with respect to persons, so that, as one person is supcrior to another, so the thing that is given to a supcrior sca to which it is given to another.
For this reason the Philosopher says that in distributive justice the just means is balanced according to a geometric proportionality, in which equality is not quantitative, but proportional; as if we said that just as six is to four, three is to two because in one and the other there is the same proportion, which is two, although there is no same quantitative equality, because six is greater than four in two units three greater than two in one unit.
(II-IL, p. 61,a.2) So that this proportional compensation of political rights in regard to the economic and social dignity of people is not only suitable for the stability of the social body, but is required by distributive justice, which, according to the teaching of Doctor Angelico, demands that a diversity of dignity respond to a diversity of rights and honors.
Remember, in order to fully understand this doctrine, that it is true that virtue is the only just cause of honor.
But one can be honored not only by his personal virtue, but also by functional virtue, as when honor is given to princes and prelates, even if they are evil, because they are representatives of God and of the community that govern... And so are fathers and lords by the sharing of the dignity of God, who is Father and Lord of all things.
The elders are honored by old age, which is a sign of virtue, even though this sign sometimes fails.
The rich are honored because they occupy a higher place in society (II I, q.
63, a.
3).
It is clear that honour is not given without the corresponding counterweight of duty.
The ruler disposes of the power in service of subjects, and the rich must not have outward things as his own, but as common, so that he can easily give part in it to others when they need it.
For this reason, says the Apostle, (1 Tim 6:17), commands and distributes frankly his goods... (II-II, q.
66, a.
(2).
the rich of this century... that man is not updated and perfected but by the Being, which is outside him; man is in a state of passive power with respect to that his perfection; it is a rasa table, in which there is nothing written, according to the wisdom of St.Thomas and Aristotle.
(A.N.).
46 All this doctrine rests on the natural evidence of the inequality of “individual natures”, evidence that it is dangerous to avoid.
In Catholic doctrine, so wonderfully exposed by St.Thomas in the Theological Sum, the essence of man, that is the necessary and first principle of intelligibility!4, is the same and unique in all men, since there is only one human species.
Not so the individual nature, the essence of man realized in a concrete quantitative matter: it is individual, and therefore incommunicable, different and unequal from one man to another.
The metaphysical doctrine of Angelic is evident from everyday experience, which shows us that there are no two things or equal persons in nature.
Everything is different and hierarchical, as it appears splendidly in the human microcosm, in which each organ has its specific function, its own, hierarchical with the total good of the entire compound.
Society, which is the set of individual natures harmonized in the pursuit of the common good, could not be constituted in a way that contradicted this fact of individual inequalities.
Precisely because it seeks to secure the common good of all, it must attend to the unequal condition of the good of each one.
It is not believed that this implies a reduction of the lower social functions; on the contrary, because the good of the foot is not in commanding the head, but in being led by it.
If the foot commands, it not only destroys the head, but disables itself, for without the direction of the head it will walk to its ruin.
On the other hand, the head cannot boast of its superiority, as if it led without needing the feet, for without them it could not be worthyly sustained nor achieve the execution of many of its designs.
It is true incontrovertible that the natural hierarchy of society has not been able to deny without mortal disorders for human life.
Thus, the modern world, which has politically equalized the lower and the higher, presents two opposite phenomena: on the one hand, the higher classes abandon their leadership function and only want to increase their wealth; and on the other, the exasperated plebe affirms its tyranny, with which the economic slave stands in political divinity.
7.
Republic and Democracy It said earlier that St.Thomas calls a republic or politics a temperate democracy that results in the hierarchical participation of all in the government of the public thing, and reserves the name of democracy to the tyrannical regime of the people's government (De Regno 1, 1).
Not without deep wisdom, because democracy, by virtue of its egalitarian essence, ends in the oppression of one class or one party over another.
We must not imagine the republic, of which St. Thomas speaks, as a attenuated democracy, which would ultimately remain a true democracy.
This would mean that we do not understand the concept of the mixed body of Thomist philosophy.
Water, for example, is not attenuated hydrogen or oxygen.
It is a new essence with new specific properties.
Thus the republic is a new essence, with a new political character, inimitable to the pure juxtaposition of democracy and aristocracy.
Of all the above, it appears how tomist the distinction between republic and democracy, between republican and democrat.
All the more essential distinction, since in these times lived and spoken democracy is not a mere regime of government, more or less preferable to the monarchist or aristocratic, but is assimilated to the myth of popular sovereignty and universal egalitarianism, what Leon Rougier calls “the democratic mystique. ”
The Church, and Leo XIII, her authentic voice, admits only the republican form of government when she writes: To prefer for the State a constitution tempered by the democratic element not "see Maritain, Introduction Générale d la Philosophie, 1930, p.
47 149 et seq.
(A.N.).
is In itself against justice, provided that the Catholic doctrine on the origin and exercise of public power is respected.
(Encyclical Zibertas).
If, however, forgetting the profound wisdom of the Tomist language, the term democracy is to be used to mean the republic or politics, it should be understood that it has not been and is not to be realized in any of the modern republics or democracies.
The most typical case in the history of its realization is the ancient Swiss democracy.
I say the old one, because, as the Swiss philosopher Gonzague de Reynolds has shown in La démocratie et la Suisse, genuine and historic Helvetic democracy has been stifled by the theoretical democracy of modern ones, and now threatens to precipitate into socialist egalitarian chaos.
“Because in Switzerland today there are two conceptions of democracy, ” says the author, “the theoretical conception and the historical conception.
The first is represented by the legal country; the second by the living country.
The legal country is our government, our houses, the political parties, the voters.
The legal country is completely penetrated by democratism; it therefore rests on a false doctrine.
“On the other hand, the living country is the former Switzerland that survives, that wants to live; it is the traditions, the originality, the resistance of the Swiss spirit.
There are the forces of salvation.
And they're in the same town.
People who are not the electoral corps or the proletariat or the present generation alone, but the addition of all Swiss, whatever their social status, not counted by units, by individuals, but grouped in cantons, communes, families, professions, with everything that distinguishes them from each other and makes them different and unequal.
And we see this people in much more depth than in extension, because we add all the dead to the living...
In Switzerland inequality is fertile and sacred, it is the powerful armor of a people.”
(Pág.
19, 2* ed.).
The only legitimate form of political democracy is, therefore, the hierarchy that St. Thomas has described and traditional Switzerland has realized.
8.
Modern Republics It may be advisable to make a brief application of the doctrine exposed to modern republics or democracies.
What kind of political regime do they represent?
Are they acceptable?
Evidently they are not democracies in the pure state, since not all participate in the effective government of the nation, nor are all eligible.
There is an element of privilege, or anti-equalitarian, that regulates the eligibility of citizens: the political party, with its logical sequel, the committee.
There are, therefore, juxtaposed democratic and oligarchic elements in them.
The democratic, represented in the universal egalitarian suffrage that grants everyone a quantitatively equal participation of the public thing.
The oligarchic, in the minority of the boldest who, by dealing with the votes, seize the effective government and use it for the benefit of their personal conveniences.
Hence, modern democracies, although called republics, have nothing to do with the politics of which St.Thomas speaks.
Mixing demagoguery with the oligarchy of the rascals, presenting an unstable and seditious type, because in them the temporal common good is never sought; not good, because it is essentially ethical-theological, well-virtuous, as demonstrated in the first chapter and modern societies think only of the pursuit of economic goods; not the common, because the good of the individual-governor takes precedence over the good of the party, that of the party on the good of the nation, that of the nation on the good of international rights and on the divine good of the Church.
Moreover, that modern societies, shaped perversely within them for having lost the right sense of the human good, are victims of international financial consortia, which, after having corrupted consciences, agreeing prebendas to the 48 influential people of the collectivity, manage, through them, the same public thing, causing to derive for the benefit of the proliferation of gold that they have accumulated, all the productive life of the country.
Hence, in the literal sense more proper, modern societies, which live only with the constant concern of enrichment, to which they subordinate everything madly, drag a miserable existence, loaded with heavy and unliftable burdens.
They are societies of slaves, in which the multitude works for the enjoyment of a few, which use all privileges; but a multitude, on the other hand, without awareness of their true rights and their true good, disorganized, unable to demand or effectively claim anything, haunted and satisfied with some discharges, such as universal suffrage, which provides him with that perpetual political carnival of which we know the sad and ugly consequences.
Then, from the Catholic point of view, which assigns as a fundamental programme of any policy the realization of the common good of the temporal city, the impure form of democracy of modern republics is unacceptable.
The Church tolerates this form as an irremediable fact; it has never expressly legislated on its legitimacy, even though it has well stated in public documents its doctrine on city planning so that we can appreciate that the present organization of the earthly city is not the one propitiated by it.
And how could the Church coincide with the divine postulates a society forged by the ungodly and ridiculous delusions of philosophism and revolution?
However, the Church does not insist that her children make a practical question of this legitimacy because this would aggravate the evils, and Catholics would distract their action from the simply Catholic (Pio X) to which they want to see them dedicated.
But he has never forced them to recognize them in law; if he exhorts them to join the republic as Leo XIII exhorted the rally to the French Catholics, it is because he wants them to work for the extension of God's reign within the current means possible.
The position of the Church and Catholics in the foolish and degraded modern republics is the same as that of Christians in Imperial Rome.
Evidently, the Caesarist regime was perverse; but Christians, accepting it as a forced act that was not in their hands to remedy, used their possibilities to extend Christ's reign.
Let's do a parenthesis to resolve a question raised by the government of modern republics.
Who holds sovereignty in them?
Is it the people who rule through their rulers?
And if it's the government, which of the three powers?
Sovereignty is not an indivisible entity, as explained at length in the previous chapter.
You can basket for various titles in different subjects who must, however, maintain one another's unity of government.
It is not the case here to specify the various ways of realizing this unity or to examine how closely the separation of the three powers, to which modern statesmen attach such great importance, is in harmony with the common good.
The truth is that sovereignty is possessed only as soon as it is exercised.
If you don't rule, it's ridiculous that you assert your sovereignty.
Moral values are not created by fictions, even if they are of the whole multitude; however, the people do not rule and cannot rule in modern nations; then no fiction will be enough to make them sovereign.
If he chooses the presidents, his power is reduced to choosing, that is, to determining who will rule.
This right does not give him any power to impose conditions on the rulers or on them to believe in the obligation to fulfil them, for once elected they must be guided only by the demands of the common good.
9.
Towards a corporate and authoritarian regime If pure democracy and the modern republic are unacceptable, what kind of government can conform to the republican tradition of countries like ours?
49 As far as organization is concerned, we believe that two may be reduced to the characters that must distinguish new states in order to meet the demands of justice demanded by the common good: they must be corporate and authoritarian.
Corporate states.
Because electoralism is suppressed with the sequels of committee, equal suffrage, parliamentaryism, all the political elements of society must be duly coordinated in the State.
These elements are not the individuals, the abstract citizen of the nineteenth century, but the family and other moral units, assimilated to it, such as the various groupings or corporations in which the activity of the grouped multitude is diversified.
In the organization of economic corporations it must be borne in mind that the interests represented by them, or rather, the interests of production must be subordinated not only to those of the national economy as a whole, but also to the spiritual purpose or superior destiny of the nation and of the individuals who constitute it.
On the other hand, for the most perfect realization of our formula of organized nation, we have also taken into account moral corporations, such as those of the arts, sciences, assistance and solidarity, which, due to a proper evolution, must be part of the corporate organization.
For many reasons these entities will be subject to the same spiritual purpose and the same national interest that dominates the former.
Authoritarian state.
Through the world, both in the internal order and in the international order, a stage of obvious weakness of the State; on the other hand, certain reactions, justified but excessive, walk, here and there, towards its omnipotence and divinization.
To both excesses must be contrasted the strong State, but limited by morals, by the principles of the law of peoples, by the guarantees and individual freedoms, which are the supreme requirement of social solidarity...
The State has the right to promote, harmonize and monitor all national activities in the love of the homeland, and in the discipline of vigorous exercises, to prepare and dispose of it for a fruitful activity and for all that may be required of it by honour or national interest.
Above the fractionation of power, — services, autarchies, private and public activities, local life, colonial domains, the thousand manifestations of life in society — without contradicting or hindering them in their action, the State will extend the cloak of its unity, its spirit of coordination and its strength.
The state must be so strong that it doesn't need to be violent.
What I think is important to stress is that, although it may be optional to judge the form that they may take in the concrete application, these two characters cannot be strictly lacking in any way.
The authority of St.Thomas with the reasons he claims pays this proposition, while repudiating, in advance, a society that has pretended to forge itself in violation of the law of the hierarchy of men.
It says literally in the Suma Contra Gentiles, L. III, e.
81: For the same reason, even among men there is hierarchy; for those who excel by understanding rule by natural law; those who are of little understanding, but robust of body, seem destined by nature to serve, as Aristotle teaches in his Politics, with which Solomon's sentence agrees, saying: "The fool shall serve the wise" (Prov 11:29); and it is said:..."Choose from all the people subjects of firmness and fear of God... and establish them tribunes, centurions and corporals of fifty persons and ten, who shall be judges of the people continually" (Ex 18:21-22).
For as in the works of one man, disorder comes from that understanding follows the sensual force, and. sensual force by reason of the indisposition of the body is dragged by the movement of the body, as it appears in those who limp, so, also in the human regime, disorder comes from that someone commands, not by the preeminence of understanding, but because it either snatches power, valid by bodily robustness, or because someone is put to rule by sensual affection; which or disorder reports Solomon, when it says: “Another disorder is that I saw under the sun, caused by error of the prince, the fool placed in high dignity” (Ec!
10.5).
In II-II, q.
183, a.
2, when St. Thomas studies whether there should be diversity of offices or of states in the Church, he proposes the difficulty that such diversity would not be desirable because it would disturb the peace that seems to be caused rather by equality and not by diversity and answers this way: “To this third difficulty one must answer that just as in the natural body diverse members are contained in unity by virtue of the virtue of the life-giving spirit, when the members of the body are absent; so also in the body of the Church the peace of the various members is preserved by virtue of the Holy Spirit who quickens the body of the Church, as taught by St. John VI.
From where the Apostle says: Be eager to preserve the uimity of the spirit in the bond of peace.
Now, someone turns away from the unity of the spirit, when he seeks the things that are his own; just as in the earthly city peace disappears when every citizen seeks what is his own.
Otherwise the distinction of trades and states preserves more both spiritual and social peace; for by them they are the ones who give themselves to public acts.
For this reason also the Apostle (7Cor 12,26) says that “God has tempered us so that there is no dissension in the body but that all the members conspire among themselves to help one another.”
And in the Suma Contra Gentiles, L.I., e.
98 writes: “...From what we have said, we can consider the existence of a double order; one that depends on the First Cause and therefore understands all things; the other that is particular depends on any created cause and understands what is subject to this cause.
This order is multiple, according to the diversity of the causes to be found in the created.
But one is understood under the other, just as we see in the causes that one is under the other.
It is therefore necessary that under that universal order all particular orders, which exist among creatures and which depend on the First Cause, be contained and descended.
We have an example of this in political life: for all the servants of a head of household keep a certain order and hierarchy among them; and in turn, both the head of household and all the others of the same city also keep a certain order and hierarchy among themselves and with respect to the prince of the city, who in turn with all the others in the kingdom keeps a certain order and hierarchy with respect to the king.”
It is not superfluous to note that these two characteristics, which are indispensable for a State to be able to be an effective guarantor of the common good, are not sufficient to constitute the typically Christian State.
The Christian State can only emerge from a profoundly Christian action that renews and sanctifies individuals, families, property, corporation, so that, renewed and Christianized, they may also be renewed the universal dispensation of the common goods that is political society.
But a Christian state is not possible either until there is simply a state, and it cannot in turn exist without the two characters pointed out.
The urgent effort, then, of all those who know how to appreciate the importance of the State to order life and man, must tend to establish this corporate and authoritarian State.
If the concrete conditions of many modern republics, where corruption has entered so deeply into the social being that it is not able to know its own good, prevent the establishment of such a State, the conditions conducive to this must be created.
There are many who imagine that everything is a matter of material force and violence.
This may be necessary and must then be used.
But she alone, without other propitious conditions and, in a particular way, without an indispensable collaboration of men trained and oriented by sound principles of social-political order, with experience of men and things, with a burning and generous passion of the common good, not until and will be terribly nefarious and harmful.
If these conditions are missing, it is better to leave things as they are and wait.
This is not to be understood, however, as a total renunciation of improving the political condition of the societies in which we have lived.
For such a renunciation would be more accurately a lamentable claudication that day by day would make us descend into the tone of our life, which cannot remain static, under pain of weakening and dying.
In politics, as in all other manifestations of life, one must maintain a longing, an aspiration aimed at an ideal of perfection.
But as long as there are no conditions conducive to seeking a healthy political reform, it is preferable to limit itself to an action in the religious and social spheres by intensifying the Christian life of the multitudes, consolidating Christian homes, encouraging groups of workers and professional corporations, stimulating the economic autarchy of the country itself, so that all this improvement that is operating in social life will end up improving the same political life.
And even then — if there were no room for better political action — it is possible to promote a fruitful movement of political studies that will order the minds of citizens and prepare the most capable for the performance of the public function.
At the same time, we must strongly influence, through a constant preaching on all the country's environments, to create a state of general consciousness that yearns for a restoration of the public thing.
It is necessary to be persuaded that, if it is true that the people should not govern, they must nevertheless acquiesce and sanction with their applause the work of government.
Because the people cannot be absent from a task that, even if he does not do it, must be done for their sole benefit.
It is necessary, then, to interest the population in the problem of the new State.
If sc fails to forge this collective consciousness that welcomes the indispensable stage of the reform of the State, it will be necessary to prepare itself for serious and tremendous upheavals, which, by ways that God knows only, will lead peoples to a just social order.
52 1V.
FUNCTIONS OF THE AUTHORITY We emphasized in the previous chapter the theoretical impossibility of a conflict between authority and freedom, between society and the State, since the rights of one and the other are mutually harmonized.
If a conflict arises, it must be: either because society is constituted in such a way that it is unable to achieve its own good, or because the State has become disorbited in the exercise of its functions.
In reality, both causes account for the convulsions that shake contemporary society; so monstrous and diabolical is the liberal ideology that has perverted all political values.
As in the previous chapter the first cause of convulsions was studied, it is now necessary to examine the second and restore the functions of public authority to its just terms.
1.
Mistaken doctrines Let us first examine modern ideologies with regard to the present question.
Forced is to begin with Rousseau, e] Political Copernicus.
Rousseau, to whom the goodness of primitive man — free man — was concerned, imagined the state eating a colossal machine where when man was integrated, he felt free and good.
The State, the only existing reality with regard to the individual who was free from the family and the corporation, could have no other functions than to suppress any conato of limitation to individual freedom. Its primary function was reduced to that of guardian, a very delicate task, because with a very fine psychological touch, it was to be aroused and directed the latent energies in the naive soul of the individual.
In liberal ideology, therefore, the State is a teacher and only a teacher.
If he exercises gendarme functions it is not precisely to impose a regulation on the public activity of man, but to prevent individual spontaneous evolution from being altered.
It is useless to speak, on the other hand, of the duties of the State towards God and the Spiritual Society, since the liberal State is the great All that limits without being limited.Explained the consequences of these ideologies.
Given the wild beasts to the free competition of their instincts, Darwin's theory of the elimination of the lower species came about, and so, in the face of a mass of proletarians, the bourgeois, specifically original type of the century s. XTX Marx, authentic socialist, made such a strong impression on the liberal hosts, that a good portion of them disaggregated to form the bourgeois socialism we know.
The socialists appeared in all the neighborhoods of the big cities and raised tribunes to cry out against the libertines who neglected the specific and supra-economic functions of the state with evident detriment of the working class, handed over to the mercy of capitalist rapacity.
The state, in addition to being a teacher, must be an economist, proclaimed socialism in substance, convinced that man, especially the proletarian, is essentially good.
Certain romantic doctrines, widely propagated among doctors and penalists, in the meantime spread the conviction that there are no criminals but madmen, idiots and other mental degenerates, with which the liberal-socialist thesis on the goodness of man and the convenience of centupling schools (of course, free, secular and mandatory), gained formidable scientific support.
It neglects the primary role of promoting the common good that belongs to the State, the disorder progressed enormously, threatening to undermine the foundations of political life, enough that the reaction was imposed, concretely in the modern totalitarianism in which the State becomes the absolute owner of all private and public life.
53 2.
Catholic Doctrine The Catholic thesis also abhors all these errors which, in reality, are not irreducible, as we have suggested.
Its doctrine is condensed in the often repeated formula that the State is the supreme promoter of the common good.
But the common good of the nation cannot be achieved without the establishment of a regime in which all its component units can achieve their own good.
Because, even if they are two specifically different goods, as the Angelic teaches (II-II, q.
58, a.
7, ad 2) of such a sort are ordered to each other, which are mutually requested.
And the good proper to the individual-man, that is, his right to existence, to dignity, to freedom, and to the good proper to the family-man, that is, the right to constitute a stable home, in which the parents are perpetuated, cannot be achieved, in the concurrence of many, if a central power is not able to assure each one of them the exercise of their respective rights.
It is then the responsibility of the State to ensure that individuals exercise their natural rights.
But this cannot be, however, its specific and primordial function.
Because, strictly speaking, individuals themselves, both individuals and minor societies, must be constituted and harmonized in such a way as to be able, normally, without resorting to a foreign power, to ensure the exercise of rights whose sphere of action does not go beyond the sphere of private property.
The power of the State begins properly and reaches its own place and sphere in the public sector, in the ordinary, that is, when it comes to regulating the acts of individuals, not when they say they relate to each other, but when they say they relate to the community, or they affect or may have an impact on the community, or on social life.
The proper field of action of the State is then the sphere of the public, that is, that which passes the limit of pure private relations.
This is the sense of the bonum commune of antiquity and the Middle Ages, which found its most admirable and finished exhibitor on St.Thomas Aquinas.
Hence the insistence of this Angelic Doctor to carefully distinguish what he calls bonum privatum, or from a singular person, or salus privata (private salvation), you congratulate privata (private happiness), bonum singulare (single good), particulare (private good), bonus particularia (private good), that is, man's ordering with himself or with another singular person, as taught in II-11, q.
58, a.
7, and the bonum commune multorum (common good of many) (De Reg.
Princ.
1, Q), bonum communalis (common good of the crowd) (II-II, q.
58, to 6), bonum crowdinis (1-II, q.
96, a.
3) (good of the crowd), bonum totius (II-II, q.
58, a.
6) the good of the whole, bonum communine civitatis (-II, q.
95, a.
4) (common good of the city), communis utilitas (-IL, q.
97, a.
2) (common utility), communis salus (I-II, q, 97, a, 2) (common health), commodum mobanis (I-IL, q.
97, a.
3) (I take advantage of the crowd), i.e. the ordering of all the activities of individuals to the extent that they say they are related to the public good.
The State is then the universal procurator of the public good and, therefore, the custodian of public law, understanding that in civil matters all men who are part of a community should be considered as one body and the whole community as one man (III q.
81).
St.Thomas has established, with unsurpassed depth, the raison d'être of this mission of the State when in article 1 of the human law treaty he studies the advisability of instituting human laws.
There is in man, he says, a natural disposition to virtue.
However, perfect virtue does not come to man but after an orderly disciplinary work to his attainment...
Well, for the acquisition of this discipline, the author of perfect virtue, every man is not always sufficient for himself.
This virtue calls for a total withdrawal of unhonest pleasures, to which man feels, mostly in the years of his youth — that is when discipline is most effective — a prompt inclination.
It is necessary, therefore, that there be someone who establishes and imposes this discipline which leads to the peak of virtue.
For those young people who, through a natural goodness, or through good education, 0, perhaps more truly, a gift from heaven, feel prone to acts of virtue, parental discipline, based on warnings, will suffice.
But for those others — there are such ones — who are of a natural protervo, who are prone to vices, for whom all persuasion and good counsel is ineffective, coercion and the threat of punishment are made altogether necessary to put an end to the practice of evil.
In this way, by giving up their efforts to do evil, they do not disturb the peace of others with whom they live together, and they in turn can act spontaneously, freely, the good that only for fear of sorrow, they have begun to practice, thus achieving finally the conquest of virtue.
This discipline, which is based and based on fear of punishment, is the discipline of the law.
The peaceful coexistence of men, therefore, between themselves and virtue, demands the elaboration and institution of human laws.
In this article St.Thomas points out the profound reason that requires the State to be custodian of public law.
For since the State is the procurator of the common good, this good being essentially a virtuous good, because the State must seek human happiness, which consists in the practice of virtue, it follows that it must impose a public regulation on the customs adjusted to virtue, which contributes, for the same reason, to making the citizens virtuous.
In other words, if the human community lacks a power such as that of the State that has effective external means, coercive means, to impose virtuous regulation, there would be no virtue or public morals and men who, as they are made, cannot conquer their perfection but in this public society, as we have seen before, could not be virtuous either.
Then the State must be first and foremost the custodian of public law, because only it can establish the discipline of the law that is based and based on fear of punishment.
Hujusmodi autem discipline cogens metu poenae this discipline legum.
The need, then, for a virtuous human coexistence, in other words, for a public right to produce this peace of human coexistence requires the existence of public power with the power to impose coercive obligations.
It is therefore not the primary function of the State to protect private rights, as many conspicuous Catholic authors (e.g. Antoine, Cours d'économie sociale) seem to understand, but a positive action to promote the virtuous good, so that there can be peace and public justice.
In what way should the State impose these human laws to create this virtuous public good, the Holy Doctor explains, when he teaches that “the end that the law pursues is the common good — therefore what the law orders, must have that proportion that demands the common good.
And since this common good consists of many things, all of them must attend to human law.
It must bear in mind people, business or affairs, time; because every political community is made up of many people, and its own good is obtained by multiple actions, and its institution does not obey a momentary end, but permanent: it perseveres throughout all times, thanks to the succession of the individuals that compose it, as Saint Augustine expresses.”
From the above, the power of the State appears so broad that we could describe it as totalitarian: totalitarianism of the common good, because the State can prescribe all actions that are orderly to the common good.
This is stated by St. Thomas himself, when he resolves the question of whether human law precepts all acts of all virtues, and answers: “There is a specific diversity of virtues where there are specifically different objects: elsewhere we have demonstrated the truth of this affirmation.
All objects of virtues are referable either to the private good of any particular person, or to the common good of a multitude.
Thus, for example, one can perform acts of strength, either in defense of a city, or in defense of 55 the rights of a friend.
The same applies to other virtues.
If, then, this is so, however the law is commanded to the common good, there will be no virtue whose acts cannot be prescribed by law.
However, human laws give concrete effect to those acts of certain virtues which are referable in themselves to the common good, whether immediately, as when they are performed directly for the common good; pray only mediately, as when they tend to promote discipline, which must exist among citizens and by virtue of which the good demanded by justice and peace is obtained for its preservation.”
And in the question where St.Thomas studies whether justice is a general virtue (II-II, q.
58, a.
5) is expressed more categorically, if possible: I reply by saying that, comma was said (art.
2), justice commands man in relation to another; what can be done in two ways; in one way, with regard to the other singularly considered; otherwise, the other in general, that is, in that he who serves some community also serves all the men who make up that community.
One and the other case can therefore refer to justice by virtue of its nature.
Now, it is evident that all those who live in a community are with respect to the community eat parts of a whole; but, what the part is, belongs to the whole: from where any good of the part is ordered to the good of the whole.
According to this, the good of any virtue, whether it commands man with regard to himself, or ordering him with regard to other singular persons, is relevant to the common good, to which justice commands.
And according to this they may belong to justice, to the extent that it commands man to the common good, the acts of all virtues.
And because it belongs to the law to order the common good, as it was held above (I-II, q.
90, a.
3), hence that such justice is called legal, for by it a man conforms to the law that commands to the common good the acts of all virtues.
It follows from this doctrine that there must not be, within the sphere of a State, anything relating to the common good which cannot be regulated by the State.
The State is a true promoter of the common good.
In this sense, totalitarianism is acceptable, as Pius XI teaches.
“We believe ourselves, ” says the Pope, “that a totalitarianism can be understood as good in the sense that for everyone who is the competence of the State, according to their own ends, the totality of the citizens of a State, according to the direction of the State and of the regime, must be adhered to and defended by it; that it is therefore possible to attribute to the State and the regime a totalitarianism that we can call subjective.
But we cannot say the same of objective totalitarianism in the sense that all citizens must abide by the State and depend on it, and worse still on it alone, or on it mainly, for all that may be necessary for the development of their individual, domestic, spiritual and supernatural life” (Acta Apostolicae Sedis, vol. 23, 1931, p.
147).
These words of the Roman Pontiff specify in what sense a totalitarianism of state power must be admitted.
And everything we have said, from the first page of this book, also precisely establishes the exact meaning of this state totalitarianism.
For if the State must propose itself as the supreme objective of its mission the common good, it must not seek to accomplish it by itself and directly, absorbing all the rights of pre-existing individuals or societies, but through cliques, encircling them, harmonizing them; bearing in mind that it is not the sole owner of that common good, but only its regulator and promoter, since it must be carried out by individuals and particular societies, although under its supreme regulation The State must bear in mind, on the other hand, that it must seek the common human good, or not any goods, but goods that are effectively capable of perfecting the people of the collectivity, who, as we said in the first chapter, are subordinate bodies and souls hierarchically; goods, then, material but above all intellectual and spiritual, and even those, subordinate to the demands of these.
Finally, the State must remember that these goods must not satisfy the demands or whims of a day, but must be integrated into the nation's cultural heritage.
Hence, the formula that the State should serve the nation is so profound, understanding by the State the 56th political regime of one people and by nation the totality of the forces of a given society with that impetus that they bring from past generations and with that longing that moves them to work on the increase of the collective heritage of goods, perpetuated through generations.
It is then that the State is the supreme authority that directs, regulates, promotes, by means of a discipline of wise laws, the efforts of individuals, of families, of particular societies, so that this common pool of goods may grow every day, and thus come to benefit those who participate in that collectivity, who can, in such an environment and environment, find the conditions of their earthly happiness without prejudice to tending also to the celestial so that they have been created.
The role of the State is thus reduced to the fact that the State, without purporting to diminish the rights of the particular units subordinate to it, protects them in the exercise of their legitimate rights and promotes and directs all its efforts to the common good of the nation.
The common good, then, sets out the precise terms of a healthy and necessary totalitarianism Although with so much insistence we have upheld the Thomist doctrine that assigns as the primary function of the State the maintenance of public law, we believe that this way of exposing the doctrine on the functions of authority, although it is more profound and accurate, does not distance in the concrete applications, the way Antoine and the most recent Catholic authors use, when they reduce to two the functions of the State: a first and absolute one that they call protection of the rights or legal tutelage and a second secondary, suppletive, that they call assistance; by which they condense all their exposition in the well-known formula that the State should not do or let do but help to do.
The language used by the Roman Pontiffs, particularly by Pius XI in Quadragessimo Amno, seems inspired by this mode of exposition which, although less philosophical, may prove, in practice, more useful, more legal, and much more convenient, taking into account the present confusion, not only by the metaphysical inability of modern men, but also by the condition of modern States that do not do what they should do and meddle in doing what they should not do; it may, above all, be more convenient to make an understanding of a world that has distracted all the intermediate organs between the individual and the State, the imperative, inescapable need, to restore them, if the State really wants to stop doing what it should not do to limit itself to doing what it should.
What must be repeated at all times, et importune, against the sentimental stupidity of demoliberalism is that the State has no other reason than to impose a public order of human coexistence, based on justice.
To expect this order to be born alone, by the free action of individuals, is not to know man and is above all to pervert the notion of State.
S1 the State ignores public morals, the State loses its raison d'être.
This is precisely the great tragedy of modern society.
Not only does the State not impose public order but it alters and corrupts it.
Public customs and “society” are worse, more immoral and devoid of character than individuals.
Wholeness weighs with its customs upon the morals of its members, and corrupts most of them.
Most of them would be happy to be able to live free according to their conscience; but they succumb to the corrupting power of public morality, because the power to confront it, without prejudice to character, is only characteristic of a few favored by God.
Under this concept, our grandparents lived better.
Not all were holy in those times, too praised at times; but times, as such, were better than ours, and much better.
The cause consisted of the severe power exercised by social customs.
(Le Play, La Reforme Sociale, II1, 6 sec.).
Many individuals were personally living in a worse situation than their current descendants, who lack the strength and strength to surrender to their perverse ambitions.
But if they were shown in public they were excommunicated by morals and customs.
If they tried to go through what they were not 57, they could be sure that they would be expelled from their corporation or class, considered sorcerers and thrown out of society.
Thus required the public character of the latter.
Whoever did not want to lose his honors and advantages must respect it.
This, of course, had to react, by a benefactor, to the personal character.
The opposite is true today.
People who are not personally evil or hostile to religion, in a more restricted, more circumscribed sphere, display, since they appear in public, a lack of principles and a weakness of character such that they often oppress themselves.
Obviously, this happens because we are not protected by solid institutions, by tradition and public esteem, against the seductive influences of the world (Alberto Weiss, O.P., Apology of Christianity, VII, p.
303).
The State, then, alone with a sword, must be the permanent custodian of morals and public law.
In this sense, legal protection, including primarily and above all public law, is the State's own and specific function.
This will be understood when we use this concept in the following pages.
3.
The State and the family Indicating the principle governing the question of state functions, it is appropriate to go down to particularities.
The family is the first natural body of the social body to be protected by government action.
Leo XIII, and more recently Pius XI in the Encyclical Casti Connubii, has fully spelled out the duties of the State towards the family.
Duty of assistance to “remediate the hardship of needy families both when legislating and when it comes to the imposition of taxes”, duty of defense imposing “laws concerning marital fidelity, the mutual assistance of husbands and similar things”.
Defense that will not achieve the character of Catholic if it is not done in harmony with the Church, as highlighted and illustrated by Pius XI himself with the example of the concordat between the Holy See and Italy, where it is established: “The Italian nation, wanting to restore marriage, which is the basis of the family, a dignity that is in harmony with the traditions of its people, recognizes civil effects to marriage that conforms to Christian law”.
Civil marriage, on the other hand, is pernicious, and the State, by legislating it, violates the rights of the Church and the dignity of the family, since in practice civil marriage is the legalization of the concubinate.
The State has rights with respect to the family in terms of the civil effects of the family; but these rights can only be obtained in harmony with the higher religious power, since they concern the very substance of marriage.
4.
The State in education and culture Depending on the family is the whole educational and cultural sector whose task is to improve it.
Therefore, the right to teach and develop culture belongs to the individuals who make up the families, to the same families, or to the intermediate social groups, to the same State and to the Church, all in different proportions.
To families it belongs by an original right agreed by God, author of nature.
As St.Thomas teaches (II-II, q.
102, a.1) The father of the family is the principle of generation, education and discipline, and for this reason he originally and inviolably claims the rights of the formation of man as man, to whom all efforts of education and culture are directed.
What by a natural right belongs to the family, by supernatural law belongs also to the Church.
Indeed, Christ gave the Church every power to teach.
(Mr 28:19).
She is also a Mother, in whose womb Christians are born, on whom she has an inalienable right to form them not only as men but also as Christians.
State 58 may also invoke rights over education and culture, as it is entrusted with the common good of society, to which both contribute effectively.
But the State does not have an original right to create education and culture, because it belongs to families and the Church.
Men and families, with all their activities, predate the State and develop themselves in the private sector of life.
This also involves education and culture.
However, the State has a right to monitor, coordinate and promote all the efforts of individuals in this area.
Therefore, being one and the same subject of education, the three societies must coordinate their efforts so that this task is properly accomplished and the perfect education of the Christian man is achieved, for the benefit of the family, civil society and the Church.
This coordination of efforts must respect the original law of both the family and the supernatural of the Church; and consequently the State, which, by having material force, is more bet on abuses of power, must strictly limit itself to its rights.
The State must first protect and support the educational efforts of families and the Church.
It is up to them, with an earlier right as we have said, to take the initiative and develop an entire educational programme for children and young people.
The State can also supply and complete the action of the Church and the families by opening schools where, always within the norms and spirit of the Church and the families themselves, instruction and education are provided.
In particular, it is up to the State to reserve the institution and direction of the preparatory schools for some of their positions, notably for the militia, so — also here — that they be careful not to violate the rights of the Church and the families as far as they are concerned.
In general, therefore, not only for youth, but for all ages and conditions, the education that can be called civic belongs to the State, which consists in the art of moving conveniently in order to civil coexistence.
What we have said implies the reprobation of any school monopoly, either direct or indirect, as when the State arrogates itself to the exclusive attribution to standardize teaching programmes and methods.
In a particular way, school secularism must be strongly rejected.
This is the strictness that the devil has suggested in order to reconquer the Christian land, and as an enterprise worthy of the devil it could not be more unjust.
Our law 1420 on common education suffers, among others, from this scourge.
It violates the rights of God, who must reign as a teacher of intelligence and in the heart of the child; the rights of Christ, who has bought his soul with his blood; the rights of the Church, who has made him his son in the sacrament of regeneration and nourishes him with his life in the sacrament of consummation; the rights of parents, who have to watch over their total education; and finally, the rights of the child, who, if he urgently needs anything, is precisely God's.
There is no reason to justify secularism in any case, as there is in any case no reason to poison nadic.
That schools are attended by children of various beliefs: respect the right of everyone and provide education according to their beliefs; it is not fair that with secularism or neutrality the rights of everyone are violated And it is not said, — teaches Pius XI in the Divini 1llius Magristri — that it is impossible for the State, in a nation divided into various beliefs, to provide public education if it is not with neutral school or mixed school, the State being more rationally owed and even more easily able to provide the case by leaving free and favoring with fair subsidies the initiative and work of the Church and families.
That this may be possible with the joy of families and with the benefit of instruction and of peace and public tranquility, this is demonstrated by the fact that nations divided into various religious denominations, in which the school plan corresponds to the educational right of families, not only in terms of total education — particularly with the entirely Catholic school for Catholics — but also in terms of distributive justice with financial assistance, even part of the State, to each of the schools chosen by the families.
59 In other countries of mixed religion it is done in a different way, with no slight burden on Catholics, who, under the auspices and guidance of the Episcopate and with the unceasing commitment of the secular and regular clergy, fully support at their expense the Catholic school for their children, which their very serious obligation of conscience requires, and with generosity and laudable perseverance persevere in the purpose of ensuring entirely, as they proclaim in the manner of saint and sign, “Catholic education for all Catholic youth, in Catholic schools”.
Even if it is not subsidized by the public treasury, depending on whether it is required by distributive justice, it cannot be prevented by civil authority, which is aware of the rights of the family and the indispensable conditions of legitimate freedom.
And where even this elementary freedom is prevented or in various difficult ways, Catholics will never work enough, even at the price of great sacrifices, to sustain and defend their schools and to ensure that fair school laws are established.
In addition, the current teaching is not only bad for monopolist and laicist, but also for encyclopedist and purely memoristic.
Children and adolescents do not acquire a formation of intellectual and moral habits.
They are taught purely theoretical knowledge, and they are scattered, which cannot be assimilated by intelligence because they lack an intelligible structure.
On the other hand, the education of the affection and character of the child is totally abandoned.
The various dimensions that make up man do not develop harmoniously.
By not giving the child and the young person the feeling of life, he is unable to fulfill his vocation and fulfill his mission in the family, in the national community, in the world and even in the Universe.
Every child and every young person, even before acting, is already a failure.
And the failure of the generations who turn in life, largely due to our terrible primary and middle school, determines the failure of social life.
And for this reason, we lack the facilities to carry out a mission in the public and political life of the nation.
It does not have well-trained generations that can cope with the problems offered to it in its development.
The university cannot be moderately good in a country if it is not good at primary and secondary school.
First, among us, until recently, the erection of universities has been the exclusive function of the State.
And it is clear that there is no valid reason to justify this monopoly regime, let alone when the penetration of a Marxist ideology has taken over all the cadres of the University, making it a focus of perversion of intelligences and dissemination of social germs.
At the university level, it is the responsibility of the State to encourage and protect the initiative of individuals.
As the governing body of social life, it is not up to individuals to supplant their activities and rights, but only to direct their efforts in pursuit of the common good.
However, it can invoke the control and supervision of the practice of professions that look to public life, such as medicine, architecture, legal profession, etc. as a private matter.
Whether it creates universities, whether it stimulates and strengthens those established by private individuals, the State shall promote, if necessary, a regime where high culture and research in all aspects of scientific knowledge are developed; young people are prepared for the exercise of the most excellent professions; and groups who are to lead national culture and life are trained.
This superior culture, which must inform the first and most influential cadres of national life, in order to descend from there, by ranks, to the middle and lower layers, must be governed by the Catholic conception of life.
It is necessary to be persuaded that in certain knowledges, as in philosophical ones, or dependent on them, there can be no neutrality.
If the culture is not Catholic, it will be enlightening or materialistic.
But you can't stop having a conformation that qualifies you.
This will not prevent, given the current division of spirits, a certain tolerance can be exercised for more or less problematic doctrines, provided that they are sustained with scientific seriousness and are imparted a little outside the central teaching table, which must be truly 60 formative.
Another character that must distinguish this knowledge, especially in the historical branches, must be its national seal, although without phobias or philias.
Connected to the problems of education is the serious problem of popular culture.
It is known that it is broadcast today through literature, the press, radio, cinema and television.
The State must leave all this activity in the private domain, however, exercising its functions of vigilance and encouragement not only in terms of good habits but also in terms of the good taste and education of the people.
5.
The State and the economy The economy does not belong to the public sector but to the private sector of social life.
Consequently, relations between workers and employers in the unity of one enterprise, of one enterprise with another, of one branch of production with another, all this belongs to the private sector, because it is about the relations of one party with another within the social body.
The State may and must intervene, but do not eat a party, but from outside, from another level, as a regulatory factor that establishes the legislation that conditions the scope of justice within which the parties are to move.
Liberalism has denied or restricted any State intervention in the economy.
Socialism, on the contrary, has made the economy an essentially public and state activity.
One position and another position are wrong.
If it is necessary to affirm against socialism the private nature of economic activity, it is also necessary to establish against liberalism the necessary regulation of public power.
This is all the more essential in the context of economic activity, a struggle of interests which makes the survival of the weakest sectors difficult.
If absolute freedom is given to the forces involved in the economic process, the most powerful will devour the inferior ones.
There's not just a problem of justice here.
I love him too, but not only.
There is a problem with the functioning of the economy.
It is known that in the economy some sectors are mutually dependent on others.
Thus, for example, the class that receives wages and salaries depends on the business class, which seeks to increase its profits.
This class, pricked by the increase in its profits, may be tempted to reduce the wages and salaries of workers and employees.
But in the long run, the volume of wages and salaries is compressed, consumption is also increased, as the mass of wage earners is the mass of consumers.
Without regular and continuous sales, companies cannot ensure their functioning, thus deteriorating the regular process of the economy.
And, in the end, it stops.
The famous periodic crises became so violent during liberal capitalism because the imbalance between the various groups that intervene with interdependence in the economic process has become more acute.
The balance and harmonious development of economic forces is not achieved if public power, placed above and beyond the interests of the parties, does not intervene to achieve a fair harmony between them all.
By the mere automatic game you will not get that harmonic balance.
It is true that in the economic process there are some necessary connections of some factors with others.
But not all connections are necessary.
Moreover, although certain consequences may be followed with some necessity from some budgets, the budgets themselves are not always necessary.
There is always the rational governance of factors and of the economic process.
The public power must govern the economy by establishing such regulation in the forces and groups that create the national income, that an equitable distribution of this same income is carried out among all those who contribute to creating it.
To do this, it must subordinate the economic process, with its relative automatic operation, to a balanced and harmonious game in which all those involved get their share.
To that end, the State, placing itself in the perspective of the national economy, must establish appropriate legislation and regulation.
To confirm this doctrine, the precise teachings of Pius XII, of June 3, 1952, in Caria to the president of the Social Weeks of France, come to mind when he says: 61 These few reflections already show the difficulty of a healthy distribution: in order to respond to the demands of social AIDS, she cannot be abandoned to the free play of the blind economic forces, a point that must be considered at the level of the national economy, because it is here that one has a clear vision of the end to be achieved, at the service of the temporary common good.
However, those who consider things in this way are led to question themselves about the normal, albeit restricted, functions of the State in these matters.
First, the duty to increase production and to provide it wisely to the needs and dignity of man places the question of the organization of the economy at the centre of the chapter of production.
However, without substituting its oppressive omnipotence for the legitimate autonomy of private initiatives, the public authorities have an undeniable coordinating role here, which is imposed above all on the current complicated conditions of social life.
In particular, it is not without His help that an overall economic policy can be built that encourages the active cooperation of all and the increase of the production of companies, a direct source of national income.
In the function of governing the economy by ensuring a harmonious development of all parties involved in the process, the State must intervene first by wise legislation, and then also through currency, credit and fiscal policy.
Legislation in this area will be all the less leafy the greater the degree of structuring of social forces.
It will never be stressed enough that there can be no just economic order until the pontifical directives, so magnificently exposed by Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno, on the Corporate Regime are followed.
The management of currency and credit, given its direct connection to the entire life of the community, is a function of the State.
It is known that a greater or lesser volume of currency and credit affects the whole social body, favoring some groups or harming others.
Therefore, their management must belong to the State, to which it is incumbent to care with justice for social welfare In the management of currency and credit, the State must avoid equally the two pitfalls that are deflation and inflation.
The circulation must be so proportionate to the process of goods and services that it favors the harmonious development of the entire national economy.
If there are groups that develop too much to the detriment of others that are submerged, it is the duty of the State, through a wise credit and tax policy, to ensure reciprocity in the changes, which is the great law that must preside over the national economy.'5
The fiscal policy, which will be an instrument to impose the harmonious development of social groups, must avoid the terrible evil of bureaucracy, which threatens to collectivize the present society.
If the State limits itself to its inalienable function of regulating common life and does not want to assume the functions of educator and entrepreneur, it will greatly reduce its current size, with visible benefit for the social body.
The State must also defend the national economy with a wise customs and price policy, so that it achieves its natural unity, which in turn requires the most harmonious development possible of all means of production within the territory inhabited by a people.
Consequently, the State must stimulate international economic relations by taking a positive and necessary role, but subordinated to the development of the national economy.
Finally, in view of the fact that, owing to the progress of science and technology, economic development was highly dynamic, the State should, with the assistance of all private forces, take the lead in developing periodic plans for the development of the national economy so that it would achieve a high level, in line with that of the most advanced countries, for the better well-being of the community.
15 See my book Fundamental Concepts of Economics.
(A.N.).
62 6.
The State and the international community What we have pointed out here concerns the preservation of internal peace, but it is also necessary to ensure peace in the face of external enemies.
In order to ensure external peace, diplomatic relations with other nations will be necessary and full and technically capable armed forces will be available when necessary.
There is no doubt that it is more humane and more Christian to resolve conflicts peacefully, on the basis of law, but law is weak if force does not support it.
Christian theology, which makes charity the queen of virtues, justifies any war undertaken by the vindication of a right, provided that there is no other peaceful way to secure it.
Charity does not destroy justice, but strengthens and overturns it.
As we were saying, the supreme objective to which to aspire the action of the State to strengthen the sense of nationality in the citizens; to this end it must tend to increase the collection of civilization, culture, spiritual values, which bequeathed by the elderly, constitutes for the peoples of a territory, of a language, of a general life, what is called a nation.
“Natural law commands us to love with a love of predilection and to defend the country where we were born and where we were educated, to such an extent that the good citizen does not fear facing death for his homeland.”
(Leon XIII, Sap.
Christ.)
“Love of homeland and soil itself is a powerful source of multiple virtues and acts of heroism when regulated by Christian law.”
(Pio XI, Ubi Arcano).
But love for one's own nation, if it is to be virtuous, must be based on respect for the rights of others.
Hence, the Church anathematicates a “nationalism” that is as enemy of true peace and prosperity as it is full of exaggeration and falsehood.
“Other countries have, like ours, the right to life and prosperity.
It is not permitted, nor is it a good record, to separate the useful from the honest: /to righteousness does the greatness of the nations, sin does the misfortune of the peoples (Prov 14:34).
For if a State has obtained advantages to the detriment of others, this may seem to men a brilliant and high political action; but St. Augustine warns us with wisdom that “it is a happiness that has the brightness and also the fragility of the crystal, by which it is feared that it will suddenly break forever”.
(From Civ.
Dei n.3, Pius XI, Ubi Arcano).
Pius XII has set forth the principles of international law that should govern any Catholic policy in the present circumstances of development of the world.
The path that leads to the community of peoples does not have as its sole and ultimate norm the will of States, but it is God, the author of human nature, who dictates to man this requirement to overcome, without suppressing, national and state life and to unite in a community that embraces all peoples.
Hence, the rights deriving from this first fundamental right are also natural, such as the right to the existence of each State, the right to respect and good name, the right to one's own character and culture, the right to develop, the right to observe international treaties.
It is therefore the moral law derived from natural law that underlies an international law that assures all peoples a just and lasting peace, fruitful of well-being and prosperity.
Hence, it is a mistake to conceive of the sovereignty of a State as the absolute absence of limits.
Sovereignty means supreme and independent power at the national level, in cases falling within its competence, so that it is not subject to another State.
But every State is directly subject to international law.
Sovereignty is not the divinization or omnipotence of the state, as in the sense of Hegel or in the manner of an absolute legal positivism.
The world organization of nations must not be unified into mechanical unitarism, but must be structured as a unit of natural units that respects the diversity and common destiny of peoples.
That is why, prior to and in preparation for the global community of Estarlos, 63 must promote the federation of peoples who, for historical reasons, have a common destiny.
In the field of a world organization founded on natural laws, there is no place for the violation of the freedom, security and integrity of other nations, whatever their territorial extent or defence capacity.
If it is inevitable that the great States, because of their greater possibilities and their might, should chart the way for the formation of economic groups, this should not be done at the expense of the development of the weak countries.
For the sake of international peace and the concord of peoples, the grabbing of economic sources and materials of common use must also be overcome, so that no people are excluded from them.
In the field of a new world organization founded on moral principles, there can be no room for total war or for an unbridled arms race.
The misfortune of a world war, with its economic and social ruins, with its aberrations and social perversions, must not be allowed to fall for the third time upon humanity.
In order to protect it from such a scourge, it is necessary that a progressive and appropriate arms control be carried out with seriousness and honesty.
The imbalance between the exaggerated armament of powerful States and the insufficient armament of the weak creates a danger to the preservation of peace and tranquillity of peoples, and advises reaching a broad and proportionate limitation in the manufacture and possession of defensive weapons.
The Church would also insist that the effective peace of peoples will not be achieved unless the peace of the spirits is achieved.
That is why today we must win victory over hatred and mistrust, renouncing systems and practices that feed each other.
Hence the need to practice, also in the order of world relations, truthfulness, justice, courtesy, cooperation in the good and above all the sublime supernatural ideal of fraternal love brought into the world by Christ.
This is the fault of the international organizations that are leading world life today.
Inspired by the principles ofluminism, far from serving, many times, an effective pacification of the world, within the Christian principles of coexistence, they foster the distrust that arises from every false and misleading establishment.
7.
The State and the Church said before that the defense function to be exercised by the State must be Christian, Catholic.
Because the state must be Catholic.
God must worship everything human, and the State, as we saw in the first chapter, is essentially human.
Moreover, the State, the incarnation of leftovers, is a minister of God, and as such it must worship him because of his ministry.
The profession of Catholic faith will matter the defense and protection of the Catholic Church, the Spiritual Society where the tributes owed to it are fully paid to God.
To understand how this protection is exercised, you must remember that of St.Augustine: How do kings serve the Lord but forbidding and punishing with religious severity what is done against the Lord's commands?
For in one way he serves as a man, as a king: as a man he serves living faithfully, as a king he serves by laying down just laws and forbidding unjust ones.
That is, the profession and protection of the Catholic faith will be verified if the laws are Catholic.
It will therefore be necessary to vigorously suppress all licences.
Liberalism, with its decanted freedoms of thought and of the press, is repudiable in a regime that conforms to Catholic norms.
On the other hand, it makes discreet political regulation impossible.
Because if everyone can think, say and print as much as their appetites demand, a public atmosphere will be created reluctant to all regulation and the subversive theories and practices of the most elementary social order will be legally protected.
With regard to freedom of worship, known are the condemnations fulminated by Gregory XVI in Mirari Vos, Pius IX in Syllabus and Leo XIII in his Encyclicals.
64 If God is to be worshiped, it will certainly have to be a worthy and acceptable worship of His Divine Majesty.
If the Son of God has come to teach us that He is the Way, stupid petulancy would be to want to approach the Father by another way.
Petulance that will take us on our way to the place of Darkness.
The way is Christ, and with Christ we walk if we join as members to his Body which is the Church.
One Christ, one Church.
Christ, head; the Church, body.
Christ, the vine; the Church, the branches.
The profession of Catholic faith is our union with Christ, and by Christ with God.
If the State should not be indifferent, it could, however, be tolerant.
Tolerance that does not spring from the contempt of God, nor is it indifferent to all religions, nor oppresses the truth by equated with error, but tolerates, that is, allows the exercise of false cults when there are reasons that justify this tolerance.
In liberal society, where unity of belief has been broken, it would be disastrous to pursue false cults.
Mistakes have no rights, but the wrong consciences have them.
If in thesis the State must be exclusively Catholic, in the hypothesis of diversity of beliefs it must be tolerant.
The Church, teaches Leo XIII, is aware of human ungodliness in her maternal appreciation: she does not ignore the movements that in our time carry spirits and things.
For this reason, although it does not recognize rights but to the true and good, it does not, however, oppose tolerance, from which it believes power and duty to use public power... God himself, though infinitely good and powerful, allows the existence of evil in the world, and to prevent greater evils, and to prevent more excellent goods.
It is convenient, in the government of States, to imitate the wisdom that governs the Universe.
The protection that the State owes to the Church will, in the thesis, import an economic aid, because the Church must be helped by the faithful for the enormous expenses demanded by their cultural and charitable action; and, as I said before, the State is the first faithful.
In contemporary societies, official aid is provided not by this concept, but by restitution of defrauded goods at a time when sectarianism increased.
Perhaps a time has come when an absolute economic independence of the Church from the State should be encouraged.
It does not seem spiritually advantageous for the Immaculate Church of Jesus Christ to be bound by pennies — though they are owed in righteousness — with ungodly and insolent governments, at best in the incomprehensive cases of spiritual rights.
Moreover, this ridiculous aid is used as a pretext for those who seek to prevent the spiritual action of pastors (as if they were public officials) and to spread into the poisoned masses I do not know how many conjures about the wealth of the Church.
Finally, the profession of Catholic faith in a Christian State, as it was known in the Middle Ages, demands from it its collaboration with the Church in order to suppress contumous and public heresies that could disturb the unity and corrupt the faith of the Christian people.
Secular arm placed at the service of the Church to suppress the spread of errors, and never to propagate the truth.
The rights of the Church and those of civil power must be harmonized through a concerted regime between the Holy See and the respective Governments.
There is no doubt that, although power and power operate in different spheres, many serious points of contact exist in both spheres so that conflicts do not occur.
For this reason separation is inadmissible in theses, and in current hypotheses.
Substantial union, as it was known in the Middle Ages, by the full subordination of the temporal to the spiritual, is impossible because of the disquiet that in consciences and institutions has sown the liberal virus.
It is only possible, then, for both powers to agree and try to harmonize their interests in a concordat, Thus, the nations, still dismembered within themselves by deleterious ideologies, will be invigorated by the maternal action of the Church, which patiently but effectively will sanitize the intelligences and hearts of the appalling corruptions that 65 liberalism has engendered in them.
Precisely in this hour when man has lost faith in man because to save Europe thought was given to the East, and the East remains corrupted as Europe; thought was given to America, and America is Babylon that hesitates a moment before falling.
Now there are those who dream of what messianism is reserved for Latin America, when we experience that Latin America suffers identical evils.
When faith in man has been lost, I say, it is necessary to return with penitent humility to the gift of the Mother that we have abandoned.
I return to the soft Mother, so that She, before dressing us with the preseas of the children, cleanses us from the mud that stains us.
The Concordat will make possible the gentle and effective action of this Mother who will bring us back to life.
8.
“The fraternal city” of Maritain Sabido is that Maritain defended the traditional doctrine of the Church and the State in its first epoch, in which Antimoderne and Primauté du Spirituel wrote.
But after 1930 he began to excogitate and to elaborate a “Christian” city for the new era, in which, according to him, humanity enters.
He then wrote Humanisme Intégral and many other works, of inferior value, where he defended what he called “a vitally Christian society”.
In a particular way he explained the guidelines of this society in human rights and natural law and in Christianity and Democracy.
For the elaboration of au city, Maritain begins by separating — separate, I say, and not simply distinguish — the plane of the temporal city from the plane of the Church or spiritual city.
The temporal city is not subordinated, as required by the traditional conception taught by Leo XIII in /mmortale Dei to the Church, but is moved by entirely own and independent principles that seek to satisfy equally the human persons who integrate it, whatever their beliefs or lack of beliefs.
“Those who do not believe in God, Maritain teaches, or do not profess Christianity, can, however, if they believe in the dignity of the human person, in justice, in freedom, in love for others, cooperate in the realization of such a conception of society (vitally Christian) and cooperate with the common good, even if they do not know how to reach the first principles of their practical convictions or try to base them on poor principles.”
In Maritain's argument, there are several extremely serious errors.
First, to call a Christian a society that is not theistic.
It is not theistic because society, as such, does not profess belief in God.
And I couldn't profess it, so I wouldn't put pressure on the possible atheists I'd put in his bosom.
Second, altering the concept of a Christian.
To be a Christian, it is not enough to believe in the dignity of the person and other human values; it is necessary to believe, with supernatural faith, in the mystery of Christ and of the Church.
And a Christian society is that which in its legislation and in its lived life accepts the norms of the natural law and the evangelical law, supported by the Church.
Third, reducing the effort of Catholics working in civic life.
Catholics who work in the civic life of our dechristianized cities should not be content with working for a purely enlightening ideal of a fraternal or humanistic city, but, following Christ's express command, they must seek first the kingdom of God and his justice, which the rest will be given in addition (Mt 6:33).
Catholics, if they love their lost brothers, must tend to the Catholic city, because this alone is a solution to the very serious problems facing modern societies.
Fourth, the fact that there is today a division of beliefs in once totally Christian societies should not prevent the Catholicly conformed city from working.
Prudence should indicate the degree of tolerance to be given to the various errors and errors.
What should not be admitted is the consolidation of an enlightening fraternal city, where all errors have the same rights as truth.
Fifth, the Catholic city demands that not only society be made up of a supernatural conception of life, only one that deserves to be called vitally Christian, but that in a particular way 66 public power be placed at the service of the kingdom of God.
It is an extremely serious error to insinuate, as Maritain does, that political power must remain neutral with regard to God's rights.
Precisely the great dignity of the public power and the effectiveness it possesses force it to promote the common good of the city, it will be such if it does not lead the citizens' ultimate end, God, that it is quality the only common good absolutely such.26 5 On the errors: social-political of Maritain, see my books, From Lomennais to Meritain and Ciftica of Maritain's conception of the human person (N. del A.).
67 V.
CONCLUSION The nature of politics in a Catholic conception has been outlined.
But is it possible to pursue a Christian policy?
As suggested in the previous chapter, wanting to return to a Christian policy without the Christian Spirit that moves souls is not only impossible, but would be the most pernicious thing that could happen to a nation and to the same Christian policy.
It would be to reproduce the grave error of the French Action.
Ideologists who make a policy of commission, without metaphysics, theology or mysticism.
If so, why, then, do these pages of Christian politics?
A fruitful mystery will always be if we succeed in bringing to others the conviction that politics, as the Church wants it, is not possible without Jesus Christ.
He is Life, Truth and Path, and there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that is truly human that can achieve his integrity without Him.
More: everything human that is born and developed without Him will fall under the protection of the devil.
The politics, therefore, the concrete, militant politics of the modern world, which must have been Christian, and by the malice of man it is not, is amassed in ashes of condemnation.
But behold, this world is undone.
The modern man had encoded his ideal in realizing the “homo oeconomicus”, the man governed by his economic needs.
And he thought he had succeeded.
Giant deployment of industries, man's work and man's work.
But we come to a point where the “homo oeconomicus” feels that everything in it is mud.
This stupid world that pretended to be comfortable without Jesus Christ is undone.
Not that Christ makes him comfortable, for the Cross is the opposite of the “comfort” of the bourgeois.
But the madness of the Cross, while restoring man to the supernatural participation of the life of the Trinity, saved him the integrity of his own human condition, made his life of exile possible.
The Church and Christ, her head, have never promised more than present reality allows.
“Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all else shall be given unto you in addition.”
We were promised, indeed, the kingdom of heaven and not the comfort of the earth.
But in addition we were assured the habitability of this valley The pretended philosophers, instead, the theorists of liberal and socialist politics, promised us paradise on earth and gave us a comfortable hell down here and the guarantee of the inexhaustible fire in the coming life.
Fortunately for man, for the true rights of Man, which are none other than the rights of Christ — the Savior of man — this stupid world is undone.
In this his liquidation will save the stones of a new world.
This new world will not be elaborated by economics, politics, science, or even metaphysical wisdom.
Only theology, divine wisdom, in its authentic realization which is the mystic or wisdom of the saints, will be able with its breath to bring death into life.
A powerful breath of holiness is to revive the spoils of the modern world.
What about Catholics?
Will we, meanwhile, be eager to take positions to the right, to the center, or to the left?
To the right, in the center, 0 to whose left?
We're surrounded by rot, and do we pretend to be in the center, or on its sides?
Let us leave these terms to the worldly, and let them take positions in the ranks of the devil.
Will we make an alliance with fascism or democracy?
Will we propitiate the modern conquests of female suffrage?
Will we try to Christianize liberalism, socialism, democracy, feminism?
69 It would be healthier for us to Christianize ourselves.
Let's be Catholics.
And as a Catholic means only holy, let us truly try to be holy.
Holiness is supernatural life.
It is not about talking and thinking about holiness.
It's life.
If it is true that it takes root in faith, that is, in the supernatural knowledge of Jesus Christ, it culminates only in Charity, which is the love of God above all things and of neighbor for God's sake.
Catholic life, fully lived in the exercise of charity, will impose on us, in addition, a Catholic physiognomy in the purely human manifestations of life: in art, science, economics and politics.
The overabundance of charity will lead to Catholic art, science, economics and politics.
This is precisely the program of Catholic action, to which the Vicar of Christ invites us with supreme instances.
Catholic action, not our action, not the action of Catholics as if they were a party group that has to defend itself as sc defends the bourgeois or socialists and communists.
Catholic action: that is, action of the Father through Jesus Christ who lives supernaturally in the Christian soul; holy and sanctifying action; action impossible to perform even if one possesses a very great science and ability of the things of religion, as long as one is not in contact with Jesus Christ; action whose effectiveness is not in proportion to the movement or energy deployed, but to the holiness of which one lives.
Catholic action, which is the apostolate of the laity with the hierarchy.
But it is apostolate, that is, activity of inner holiness which, by its overabundance, is poured out and communicated.
Catholic action: indispensable.
This is the indispensable position of Catholics.
Note well: Will it be necessary, then, for Catholics to abandon the struggles in the same political and economic terrain and to concentrate only on Catholic action?
Catholic action is the indispensable but not exclusive position.
It is the first, so that we cannot engage in any other activity which results in its detriment, and all other activity must be carried out as it tends, directly or indirectly, to aid Catholic action.
This is required by the sense of the hierarchy of works.
Hierarchy is not absorption or denial, but affirmation of autonomous rights in the unity of the Saved whole, so this primacy of Catholic action, Catholics, taking into account the demands of their faith and mission, and the possibilities of their own vocation, can devote themselves especially to forging the Catholic city in our de-Christianized societies.
The Catholic city's program for today's times is already developed.
In public documents, Leo XIII, Saint Pius X, Pius XI, Pius XII and John XXII have laid the foundations of a Christian social order of society.
No fundamental, economic or political problems have been omitted.
It is only necessary for Catholics, with seriousness and honesty, to assimilate that doctrine which constitutes Christian public law.
I say with seriousness and honesty, because, unfortunately, Catholics, instead of listening attentively and faithfully to the Pontiffs, without mixing with what they say their own conceptions, sometimes make a mixture of Christian principles with liberalism, socialism and communism, which is a dangerous explosive.
Once the principles to govern the Catholic city have been assimilated, they must be disseminated in all environments and social strata.
This is, par excellence, the work of the Catholic city.
Referring to this specific task of the construction in our time of the Catholic city, as a mission for Catholic citizens, even if it is not properly an apostolate mission, it is appropriate to keep in mind the relevant words of Pius XII to the Ttalian Civic Committees on April 15, 1953.
The great Pontiff then told them: “Warn well; since humanity has accomplished its progressive apostasy far from Jesus, many teachers have intended to replace it to instruct and guide it; many builders have tried 70 to provide it with the necessary structures; many doctors have undertaken to heal it from its diseases and wounds.
But all, at the end, have found themselves in front of a disoriented, discouraged, powerless humanity.”
“It is therefore necessary, with all the greater commitment, to lead men to the final persuasion that Christ alone is the only Teacher and that in Him alone, one can find the salvation of the world with all its structures and of men with all its problems: Non est in alio aliguo salus”.
“A state of affairs calls for the prompt and courageous intervention, not only — it is evident — of the teaching and hierarchical Church, but also of all Christians engaged in the social body.
It is a question of stressing the need to imbue all fields of human life with a Christian sense.
Such has always been the will of Christ and the waiting for a part of humanity, tired of living in the constructions that fall apart from the world today.”
“Consider therefore, you wicked children, your vocation.
Take your action to all places and environments of all kinds.”
“It cannot be said that you, as such, are called to the apostolate itself.
You are citizens who want to be more directly interested in the formation of better economic, political, legal and social structures...” “As loyal and active citizens, you seek to create in everyone a right civic conscience that leads everyone to look as their own the needs of the collectivity...” “As Christians determined to act, you consider it a duty to watch that nothing harms the interests of true religion, your religion.
You do not form a political party, but no one can deny you the right to unite, to organize you by every lawful means, so that the legislation on the family, the norms for a more equitable distribution of wealth and for the education of youth, in all articles that touch on the field of faith and morality are realized according to the postulates of Christian thought and the teaching of the Church.”
It is also possible for the Catholic to intervene in the management of public business and in taking positions, even of party politics, regarding the pursuit of the common good.
In this concrete task of the pursuit of the common good, the Catholic can find himself faced with two main classes of problems: the ones, who compromise the rights or the good of the Church in the life of the city, and then the Catholic must act with strength as such, knowing that his action also creates a certain responsibility for the Church herself before the community; the others, in which there is no such commitment, must resolve them under his own and exclusive responsibility as a citizen, yet trying to give them the solution that best contemplates the common good, which, in short, will be not only for the good of the nation, but also for the good of the Church.
This difficult and dangerous work of concrete political action, because it unfolds in a plane of extremely variable facts and contingencies, and therefore difficult to reconcile with eternal interests; labor, however, necessary, because even it must to some extent come the influence of Christian action; labor, then, which demands, from those who devote themselves to it, a special vocation, which is the patrimony of few, and in whose defect it is preferable to abstain, or strictly limit the energies that are devoted to it to the possibility of own effort, labor that must be undertaken enthusiastically, yes, but with some modesty, without believing us predestined to reform it or to improve it all, as if it were in our hands the government of events and of men, and it was not God who, by ways that only He knows, disposes all houses to his providential ends, but with some modestness, which for the same reason that he develops in the variable and in a slippery field, handed over to the opinions or disputes of men, should not be God who, by all the ways that he knows, all houses, and in the strictly temporal, must converging of the common activity, that he has to the variable, and in all,
(Saint Paul to the Ephesians).
72 VI.
APPENDIX 1.
Igualitarianism and the Gospel Certain Catholics, imbued with the egalitarian spirit of Rousseau, have sought in the Gospel a foundation for democracy.
For this they have done violence in the passages in which Jesus Christ affirms the preeminence of the poor in the Kingdom of heaven.
These democrat Catholics have naturalized or carnalized the supernatural truth of the Gospel.
1.
The Gospel, and the doctrine of the Church, therefore, have never advocated the arithmetic equality of men in either the natural or the supernatural order.
Not in the natural order, because Christ did not come to destroy, but to perfect the law (Mt 5:17).
However, natural law requires that unequal social and political rights correspond to a natural diversity, as explained by the Angelico Doctor in the passages cited.
Not in the supernatural order, because, as the Apostle Paul wonderfully states, there is diversity of merit in the Church, according to the grace given to each one; for this reason in heaven there are different mansions, as Christ taught (cf.
Jn 14.2).
And one is the clarity of the sun, another is the clarity of the moon, and another is the clarity of the stars; for one star differs from another in clarity (7Cor 15,41).
There is also a diversity of functions in the Church itself, because there is a diversity of ministries, as the Apostle teaches (7Cor 12, 5).
One receives from the Spirit the gift of speaking with wisdom; another receives from the same Spirit the gift of speaking with much knowledge, etc. But all these things cause the same indivisible Spirit, distributing them to each one, as he wishes.
For just as the human body is one and has many members, and all the members, being many, are one body, so also the mystical body of Christ... Neither is the body one member, but many.
If I say the foot, for I am not the hand, I am not of the body, will he stop being of the body?
And if I say the ear, Because I am not an eye, am I not of the body, will he stop being of the body?
If the whole body were an eye, where would the ear be?
If all was the ear, where would the smell be?
But now God has placed many members in the body and placed them in it as it pleased him.
2.
Having affirmed the hierarchical constitution of the natural and supernatural economy, the Gospel teaches that the supernatural economy is governed by a law of appreciation contrary to the natural economy.
In the Kingdom of heaven the poor, the meek, the weeping... those who suffer persecution for righteousness (cf.
Mt 5).
Hence, in Christianity supernatural merit is measured by the folly of the cross and not by the wisdom of the words or by the power of the world, and the ecclesiastical hierarchy demands that the greater be recognized the minor (so the Supreme Pontiff is Servant of the servants of God): because Christ, the Master, did not come to be served, but to serve.
Bossuet has set out this doctrine in his sermon on The Eminent Dignity of the Poor in the Church.
The poor enter in their own right; the rich cannot share in supernatural riches unless they consent to open their treasures and prodigy them to the poor after having humbly kissed their feet.
2.
The three senses of the word democracy Philosophy must, under the penalty of entangle everything, distinguish three senses in the word democracy: 1.
Democracy as a social tendency recommended by the Popes (demophilia, Christian democracy), and that is but the zeal to give to the working classes, today more than ever oppressed in 73 the modern world, human conditions of life, required not only by charity, but above all by justice.
(Continuing in this direction, a radical critique of our economic regime would undoubtedly come, as many Catholic authors have already outlined.)
It can be deplored that the concern of the Catholic mothers in the defense of the social order and the struggle against the revolutionary elements has often coincided with an omission of this essential duty and a lack of attention to the prescriptions of Leo XIII.
2.
Political democracy ToMtE1.
understood in the sense of Aristotle and St. Thomas, and, for example, of ancient Helvetic democracy, and that the Church, like philosophy, have for one of the possible forms of rule of law (and indicated or not in fact, according to historical conditions and forms).
3.
democratism, or democracy in the sense of Rousseau, let us say the religious myth of Democracy, which is very different from the legitimate democratic regime (this myth governs, in the Social Contract, a theory of the three classic, monarchical and aristocratic regimes as well as democratic, equally pernicious false).
Democracy thus understood is confused with the dogma of the Sovereign People, which together with the dogma of the General Will and the Law expression of the Number, constitutes, at its limit, the error of political pantheism (the multitude-God).
It is necessary to note, however, that what makes the condition of the peoples tragic in modern times is that, in fact, in the concrete reality, the religious myth of Democracy has completely invaded and polluted political democracy and even all current forms of government It must be the effort of the intelligence to operate the necessary discriminations and to study (taking into account the factual connections raised by history) the conditions of a practical straightening, which will not succeed if it is not total.
Let us add that in the vocabulary of St. Thomas democracy as a legitimate political form (democracy in the sense of number 2. sc does not call democracy, but Republic, politicia).
It is a form of mixed regime, in which the democratic principle that, in its pure state tends to dominate the number (Democratic, id est potentatus populi, quando scilicet populus plebeiorum per potentiam crowditus opprimit divites: De Regno, 1.
1), is tempered by the aristocratic principle (power from those who are distinguished in value and virtue), and above all by the oligarchic principle (power from those who are distinguished by wealth or power).
(Cf.
Comment, in polit.
Aristotelis, V, VII) — This is a properly improved democracy (Marcel Demongeot, Le meilleur Régime Politique Selon Saint Thomas).
“As for the word democracy, it designates, in St. Thomas, the corrupt form of politicia and the democratic principle in its pure state.”
(Martain, Primauté du spirituel, Annexes, V1).
It is lawful to add that democrat Catholics tend to confuse the three senses indicated by the word democracy; as democratism in the sense of Sovereign People, creator of all morality and law, independent of God, is manifestly heretical, they lower, accommodate and explain it by saying that the People, the depositary of the Sovereignty they receive from God, delegate it to the rulers, who are only vicars of their Will.
There will hardly be a democrat Catholic (Catholics who do not speak of Christ, but of Democracy, or of Christian Democracy, or of Democracy and Christ, or of Democracy and the Church, as if Christ were not enough to save the world); it will hardly be found, I say, that in order to justify democracy he does not turn to this theory of the origin of power.
Meaningful symptom, which reveals a democratic mentality, for it is intended to give a certain preeminence or superiority to democracy to the other forms of government: a thing condemned by Pius X when in his letter to Le Sillon he writes: Likewise, democracy is the only one that, according to him (Le Sillon), will inaugurate the reign of perfect justice; but is it not this to insult the other forms of government, which are reduced, of this kind, to the status of impotent governments, suffering only for lack of better thing?
74 others, Le Sillon also stumbles at this point with the teachings of Leo XIII.
He could have read in the aforementioned Encyclical of the Political Principality that saves justice, it is not forbidden for peoples to give themselves the government that best responds to their character or to the institutions and customs they received from their ancestors.
However, eat the Encyclical refers to the triple form of well-known government, assuming, in the same case, that justice is compatible with each of them.
For the Encyclical on the condition of the workers does not clearly affirm the possibility of restoring justice in the present organizations of society, since it indicates the means?
But as, without a doubt, Leo XIII wanted to speak not of any justice, but of perfect justice, teaching that justice is compatible with the three known forms of government.
He also taught that on this side he does not enjoy democracy of special privilege.
The sillonists, who pretend otherwise, either refuse to hear the Church, or form from justice and equality a concept that is not Catholic.
3.
Leo XIII and Christian Democracy Here we reproduce the paragraphs of the Encyclical Graves De Communi of January 18, 1901, where Leo XIII exposes the precautions under which Christian democracy must be understood.
In this way, says Leo XIII, a community of action and a series of works designed to help the people, exposed to insecurity and dangers, has been established among Catholics under the auspices of the Church.
At first, this kind of popular charity was not distinguished by any special denomination.
The term Christian socialism, introduced by some, and other expressions derived from it, has just fallen into disuse.
It pleased others, and rightly so, to call it popular Christian action.
In other places, those who deal with these issues are called social Christians.
It is not lacking where this action is called Christian democracy, and those who surrender themselves to it Christian democrats; the system, instead, defended by socialists is called social democracy.
Now, of these two expressions, if the first one, “social Christians”, hardly provokes protests, the second, “Christian democracy”, dislikes many honest people, who find it a wrong and dangerous sense, and for more than one reason distrust this denomination, fear that this word is not a bad disguise of the popular government, or does not indicate in its favor a preference over the other forms of government.
As there are often too long and often sour discussions for this purpose, the awareness of our office warns us to put an end to this controversy by defining the ideas of Catholics in this matter.
Christian democracy, just because it is Christian, must be based on the principles of divine faith as on its own basis.
It must provide for the interests of the weak, while still leading to the perfection that suits the souls created for eternal goods.
For her there must be nothing more sacred than justice; she must guard, in the shield of all attacks, the right of ownership and possession: to maintain the distinction of ends, which is certainly necessary for a well-established state; finally, she must foster for the human community a form and character in harmony with those established by God the Creator.
But it is illegal to divert the term Christian democracy into a political sense.
Surely democracy, according to the etymology of the word and the use made of it by philosophers, refers to the popular regime; but in the present circumstances it must not be used but stripped of all political meaning and not attributed to it any other meaning than that of a good Christian action among the people.
Indeed, the precepts of nature and the Gospel, being, by their own authority, above human vicissitudes, need not depend on any form of civil government; they can, however, be accommodated with any of these forms, provided that it does not repulse with honesty or justice.
They are, therefore, and remain 75 completely alien to the passions of the parties and to the various events, so that, whatever the constitution of the state, citizens can and must observe these same precepts that command them to love God above all things and the neighbor to eat themselves.
Such was the constant discipline of the Church; it was the one that the Roman Pontiffs have always applied with the States, whatever their forms of government.
Having established this, the intentions and action of those who work for the good of the proletarians can never tend to prefer one civilian regime to another or serve it as a means of introducing it.
(Graves de communi, 18 January 1901).
4.
Philosophy of modern democracy17 The Roman Pontiff dedicated the address of the last Christmas to the examination of the conditions that democracy must come to be legitimate and healthy.
The comments that this speech has raised have been superficial, and in most cases irreverent partisanism.
The Pope has not been heard, but has been used.
Terrible condition of the times, in which truth cannot reach the ears of men but by means of diffusion vehicles in the hands of the father of lies.
However, it is interesting to note that among all the comments there has been no one decidedly adverse, but only one issued by the observer for international affairs of the Pravda, Moscow, who, among others, formulates this unusual and apparently incomprehensible appreciation: “...The papal message is directed against the great masses of people and their aspirations for genuine democracy...”.
The accusation of Atco communism, now universally triumphant, made in the name of “authentic” democracy against democracy accepted by the Pontiff, must have some meaning.
Let's try to unravel it.
This will force us to take as a starting point the lines of dialectics in which history unfolds, in order to accurately situate the exceptional moment in which we live.
A. History dialectics History does not develop on a horizontal plane, but is also following a vertical line whose density must be measured by the human values contained therein.
Anthropology then points to the law of history, because it is only man projecting himself in time.
This law marks four moments in a civilization: a first moment of fullness, an age of gold, theological, by the primacy of sacred or priestly truth; a second moment, of decadence, an age of silver or aristocratic by the primacy of natural or rational truth, or metaphysics; a third moment, an age of bronze or oligarchic, by the primacy of affective or sentimental life, or sensitive, or animal or economic-bourgeois; a fourth moment, an age of iron or democratic, by the primacy of matter, or of the quantity that is its necessary property, or of the multitude or of the economic-proletarian.
Now, Christian civilization — notice well, we do not say the Church, because it, like the spiritual soul, does not exhaust its vital energies in it — it does not escape this law.
Christian civilization has known a first moment of fullness.
Leo XIII has described medieval splendor with magisterial words that should never be erased from Catholic thinkers.
There was a time, says I/mmortale Dei, when the philosophy of the Gospel ruled the states.
Then that energy proper to Christian wisdom, that divine virtue, had penetrated the laws, institutions, customs of peoples, infiltrating all classes and relations of society: the religion founded by Jesus Christ, firmly placed on the degree of honor and height that corresponded to him, flourished everywhere seconded by pleasure and 77 Regarding the address of the Pope at Christmas 1944 (N of A).
76 adherence of princes and for the protection and legitimate deference of magistrates; and the priesthood and empire, concords with each other, departed with all happiness, into an admirable consortium of wills and interests.
Organised in this way by civil society, it produced goods superior to all hope.
Their memory still remains, and it will be inscribed in countless historical monuments, illustrious and indelible, that no corrupting ability of adversaries will ever be able to pervert or obscure.
But this civilization has been subjected to tremendous and successive attacks that have reduced it to an increasingly decadent condition.
Leo XIII himself describes in this way the first attack, perpetrated by the Protestant Reformation; but the damaging and deplorable novelties promoted in the sixteenth century, having first disrupted the things of the Christian religion, by natural consequence tended to upset philosophy and, for this, the whole order of civil society.
This resulted in a civil society or a public order that was taken away from the influence of the Church or the supernatural order in her incarnated, that is, a society where each of the groups hitherto united under a universal form of life, which was the Church, acquire independence.
Nations, free in every higher way, take positions, one against the other.
Thus, for the first time, exaggerated nationalisms appear; and the monarchs placed at the head of the peoples reject all higher power and rise up in divinities.
Reason is independent of theology, the science of faith, the politics of morality, the nature of supernaturality.
Originally Christian civilization becomes naturalistic, but it remains as civilization, insofar as the principles of natural life that formally constitute it do not suffer corruption.
But as Pius X teaches so magnificently in 7l Fermo purpose, although of a natural nature, civilization cannot fully survive, not even maintain, if not by the influence of the Church.
Destitute, then, of supernatural help, the natural order moves toward its own ruin.
And so we see, in the 17th and 18th centuries, the hasty walk towards the ruin of civilization.
Reason ends in his suicide with Kant, and is supplanted by science, which is a sum of the physical-mathematical checks; the common good, which centered on politics and economics, is replaced by freedom: monarchs are brought to the cassals by the sovereign crowd.
Civilization — without any addition — ends with the French Revolution.
With it begins modern civilization, which, in what has its own peculiarity, is barbarism, armed with the power of industrial force.
The French Revolution, which Leo XIII calls “the great revolution”, then marks the definitive frontier of two essentially diverse ways of life that are fulfilled in Christian civilization.
With it there is an alteration in man's condition of rationality, something that had not been formally done in the 16th century.
Until then, the guiding principles of life had been human, now they began to be subhuman or animal; until then, rational, now purely sentimental; until then, qualitative, now quantitative; until then, attracted by the idea of the good that unites, now by the libcrtad, which disassociates and desunc.
Hence libcraism, individualism and romanticism of this third historical moment.
For a straight interpretation of modern history and, therefore, of current events, this location of the French Revolution is fundamental as the starting point of a new man who begins to be governed by subhuman principles of life, and therefore infracivilized.
The French Revolution is, then, the starting point of a path that must end inexorably in the communist revolution, as this, in turn, is the stage immediately preceding the universal apostasy or reign of the anti-Christ, a reign that does not consist of or be established in a revolution, but is the logical culmination of previous revolutions.
This explains the depth of the thought of De Maistre, who saw something definitive and satanic in the French Revolution.
It is, indeed, as the initiation of the intimate and final state of universal apostasy.
This is why Babeuf, before he died, 77 announced that the French Revolution was the precursor of another major, more solemn revolution, and that this will be the last.
(Appel au peuple Jrancais, 1797).
The subhuman state of civilization, inaugurated by the French Revolution, is to be characterized in substance by a crossing of man the line of intelligence that distinguishes him and separates him from matter and in an already resolutely entering the orbit of attraction of matter itself.
This is why the new age will be governed by materialism or economics.
But as in an economic or materialistic cycle there are two perfectly characterized moments, one of living matter, another of inorganic matter, one of the leading economy, or bourgeois or capitalist, and another of the directed or proletarian economy, in this new civilization, the modern one, which is an infracivilized civilization, we can distinguish two periods: one that is liberalism itself, and another communism; one of domination of the oligarchic bourgeois groups, and the other of domination of the proletarian masses, or truly democratic.
Of these two moments, the bourgeois is exhausted already and definitely finished.
Then comes his turn to the fourth moment, the democratic or communist.
The clergy prevailed in the Middle Ages; the nobility or aristocracy in the 17th and 18th centuries; the rich or bourgeois in the 19th century; and today they are to dominate the proletarian or democratic multitude.
This forces us to study the essence of democracy, seeking to unravel its intimate law.
B.
Democracy.
Domination of the common people No one has analyzed democracy as deeply as St.Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle.
We speak of the pure concept of democracy, so it implies in itself, by virtue of its own internal demands.
The Holy Doctor starts from the premise that the raison d'être and the end of the popular state is freedom, and therefore power or authority is distributed in that State according to the dignity of freedom.
(Politics, TV, 7).
In his mind democracy is linked to a conception of life in which freedom is made the supreme good of man and, for the same reason, the end of the city.
In the popular state, he says in Pol.
TII, 4 — only freedom is sought, and it alone is what is conferred in common by all citizens.
All the other things exist for freedom and I stop freedom.
There is therefore nothing worth the differences that separate one man from another, nothing about natural or historical dependencies, nothing about family or national ties, nothing about the diversity of ingenuity, skills, education, culture or acquired rights.
As to each and every one gave the identical nature freedom, it will be necessary that each and every one anywhere be equal.
But what does the notion of freedom imply for St. Thomas?
Declare it on several occasions; but here we will limit ourselves to the commentary he makes to book IV, 1 of Aristotle's Policy, where, after insisting that freedom is the sole and principal basis of the popular state, he adds:...by freedom one is understood to be self-determined and to an end that one proposes oneself.
It is a free one, he says, when it is cause of itself, both in moving, as it moves of its own will and following one's own reason, as it moves or works in attention to one Jin of its own and not at the end of another.
The word freedom is also taken by the same operation or by the act by which it is said that one moves or works at one's own end.
But, says the Holy Doctor, “in one sense it is in the other, freedom has it one or by a natural disposition, and these are the naturally free ones, or by the constitution of the republic, which establishes that it is not one governed by another but by itself, nor by the end of others, but by itself and at the end of the republic.
And so the authors of the People's State understand freedom.
Thomas understands that there is a natural freedom, which one possesses when he is able to govern himself, in that he is able to fix the right and convenient norm of what he must act and is also able to comply with that norm.
That is to say, this freedom is possessed by perfect men who, ordered by the right sense of their reason, determine themselves in the practice of the order that their reason indicates to them.
This is true freedom.
The other freedom, which serves as the basis for the democratic regime, and which has nothing but a legal reality because it arises from decree 78 constitutive of the republic, ex constitutione reipublicae, consists of a pure and simple self-determination; that is, that each and every one of those who make up that regime does not suffer any impairment or violence in wanting this or that, according to his own pleasure.
And as for this self-determination or freedom all are equal, popular or democratic justice demands that everyone participate in public honors and favors according to a quantitative unity, and not, instead, according to the dignity of the person or equality of proportion, but that both the poor and the rich, I perceive the ignorant as the educated (...sed tantum pauper quantum dives, tantum idiot quantum studious).
On the other hand, as there must be one who establishes and preserves this popular justice...it follows that the end and justice of the democratic state is the opinion of the crowd.
(...manifestunt ass quad necesse est illud ese finem populari statusi, et justum, quod videtur crowdini).
(Pol.
VI, 2).
The opinion and will of the crowd is then law in the democratic regime.
What is the result of a regime based on these premises?
The result will depend on the moral condition of those who constitute that city.
Because as the political regime of the same rests on the freedom or self-determination of the citizens, its nature — just or unjust, good or perverse — will depend on the moral condition of the crowd.
If the city, for the most part, is virtuous, the city will be virtuous; if it is perverse, the city will be perverse.
But Doctor Angelico immediately concludes that such a city, in which the multitude sets the standard of justice, will have to be perverse, because there they command viles et pauperes et inordinati (the vile, the poor and the disordered), Pol.
VI, 2.
Hence the constant placing of democracy among the forms of tyrannical government and the famous definition of the democracy of The Kingdom, 1, 1: Democracy, that is, the government of the people is, namely, when the number of plebeians, by the power of number, oppresses the rich.
Democratic, id est potentatus populi, quando scilicit populus prebeiorum per potentiam crowdinis opprimit divites.
The conclusion of St. Thomas is determined by his pessimistic view of the crowd.
Dates and quotations could be accumulated in which it teaches that the crowd, in most cases, is carried away by their bad inclinations, violating the right order of reason.See S.7h 1, q.
63, to 9. ad.
1; 1, q.
49. a.
3 ad.
5; Contra Gentiles, I1.
e.
VI.
But a single quotation will suffice to clearly establish the thought of the Holy Doctor... in man, he says, there is a double nature, namely the rational and the sensitive.
And as man comes to the act of reason by the operation of meaning, most follow the inclinations of the sensitive nature instead of the order of reason... Hence come the vices and sins in which men follow the inclinations of the sensitive nature instead of the order of reason.
(S. 7h.
1-II, q.
71 a.
2 ad.3).
The people turn away from reason most of the time, says the Saint in Pol 1V.
13, Populus enim deficit a ratione, ut in pluribus.
In substance, that the people, by reacting only affectionately, are exposed to error and error; they need others — the least — to tell them what is in their interest and to make them want, if a virtuous minority does not confer virtue upon them, any other bold minority will impose on them the yoke of money or collective labour.
5.
Democracy and Bolshevik Communism The analysis of the essence of democracy leads us to the conclusion that democracy, based on the idea of freedom, which is its main and indispensable budget, ends inexorably in the tyranny, or dictatorship of the multitude, of the number, of the quantity, and by the same reason and disorder.
The fundamental principle that moves it is absolute universal egalitarianism.
Now, as men — without a special intervention of God — cannot be equalized or leveled by the highest in them, it is, that is, science and virtue, only the possibility of attempting absolute universal leveling, by the lowest in them, that is, by their 79 material condition.
Such is the attempt of Soviet communism, as Pius XI teaches in his masterly and most current encyclical Divini Redemproris.
Hence, it is in atheistic and materialistic communism that the intrinsic demands of absolute democracy are fully verified; because it consists of an absolute universal leveling or equalization, and cannot be fulfilled “upward”, towards “the Self, the principle of all being”, to which one comes by hierarchical assistance, which always come from above and below, there remains but the possibility of an absolute leveling in the most common thing in all men, which is matter.
In materialism, that is, in a conception of life in which matter is made the only reality, from which everything proceeds and to which everything is ordered, consists the essence of communism.
And as on the real scale of values — which cannot be destroyed by any theory or system — matter occupies the last place, after the other more levados (God or the supernatural or the priesthood — the human or the natural or the virtue or the nobility the animal or the bourgeois economic), a conception of life around matter is linked by connection in necessary metaphysics with the purely quantitative, which is a necessary property of matter; with the number, which says relation to quantity; with direct universal suffrage, which is linked to the miner; with freedom, the budget of democracy; with liberalism, which is the deification of such freedom; with democracy, which rests on the quantitative equality of pure freedom or self-determination; on the other hand, as pure matter is the only reality that, being such, is nothing, in the famous Aristotelic-tomist definition of the primal matter, is likewise the most opposite to God of all realities; and as, on the other hand, the most opposite to God is the devil, which is the human God, the matter has necessary connections with the devil, and for the same reason, that it is the anti-Christ, which is the most contrary to God of all of all realities; and
At the extreme limit to where they are driven by their own demands all these realities are in deep solidarity.
These equalitys, then, are very exact: communism - materialism - liberalism - democracy - dictatorship of the plebe - tyranny of Satanism - antichrist - Masonry - Revolution.
The final result of the efforts and tendencies of each of them is the universal establishment in the land of that society described by Pius XI in the Divini Redemptoris.
What, then, would it be — the Pontiff wonders — the human society based on such materialistic foundations?
It would be a collective without more hierarchy than that of the economic system.
He would have as his sole mission the production of goods through collective labor, and as an end the enjoyment of the goods of the earth in a paradise in which everyone would “give according to his strength and receive according to his needs”...
In that society, both morality and the legal order would be nothing more than an emanation of the contemporary economic system, that is, of land origin, changeable and obsolete.
In a word, it is intended to introduce a new epoch and a new civilization, the exclusive fruit of blind evolution: a humanity without God.
Note, by the way, that this final outcome can be reached both on a revolutionary path — Bolshevik communism — and on a democratic path: American materialist democracy.
6.
The Present Moment Both historical dialectics and the metaphysical demands of democracy today demand that the universe be given over to communist domination.
Bolshevik communism is the only one of the existing systems of life that realizes the longings for freedom and democracy that lies in the bowels of the modern world.
The United States, which represents for many the ideal of freedom and democracy, is, on the other hand, a plutocratic regime, that is, where liberty legally paired 80 for all becomes a freedom with much greater reason England—historical, and that if they do not want to mock proclaim, they must evolve truly implanted.
real for a privileged few.
The United States — and it is now representing anachronistic types of life, with no effect on the profound demands of freedom and democracy which towards a universal egalitarian type, which Russia alone has for this reason that the reason for communist propaganda in the name of freedom and democracy is not simply tactical.
The reason is metaphysics.
Russia has brought to its most logical consequences the development of egalitarianism, nested in the concepts of freedom and democracy.
And it would not be worth arglir, as it pleases the retarded bourgeois, who in Russia freedom and democracy are stifled by the dictatorship of the Soviet state.
For this is answered: first, that in the plutocratic states freedom and democracy are mocked by the omnipotent dictatorship of international consortia; and second, that, as Pius XI so cleverly teaches in the Divini Redemptoris, when all have acquired the collective qualities, in that utopian condition of society without any class difference, the political state, which is now conceived as an instrument of capitalist domination over the proletariat, will lose all its raison d'être and dissolve; but until this happy condition is fulfilled, the state and state power is for communism the most effective and universal means to achieve its end.
That is, communist society, where religious, state and bourgeois differences and privileges have been totally destroyed, is the only society where the universal equalization of freedom and democracy is brought to its fullness.
In the name of freedom and democracy, then, the scepter of the universe belongs to Soviet communism.
If so, then should the fate of the earth be determined and be prepared to take the most comfortable place possible in the paradise of the Godless?
If the Church were but a human institution, fully identified with Christian civilization, it would certainly be all over and there would be no alternative but to prepare for the last days of universal apostasy.
But the Church, like the spiritual soul, that although it is the principle of being and action of the human body does not exhaust in it all its possibilities of essence and operation, but that even without the body it maintains a powerful vitality of its own and independent, possesses a being and an activity that has suffered nothing in the successive degradations into which the Christian civilization has fallen.
The Church, the wife of Jesus Christ, today maintains a prodigiously fresh vitality and feels with strength to turn the stones into Abraham's children.
Communism knows that.
Because communism, a harsh yoke imposed by men...who have considered Russia as the most suitable ground to put into practice a system developed for decades, and from there continue to spread it all over the world (Pio XI, in the Divini Redemptoris), is in connection with terrestrial diabolical agents operating on a theological plane, with science and methods also theological, referred to by Leo XI in the Humanum Genus.
Communism, the direct work of these theological forces of the devil, knows perfectly well the significance of the Catholic Church.
So, on the verge of boasting of his definitive world victory, a helpless old man trembles and lc has arched the word “democracy” to say “urbi er orbi”: “Peoples!”
Don't be deceived; the good you hallucinated seek in that seductive word you will find only in the traditional teaching of the Church.
7, Traditional democracy So that no one — but those who, by their boasting, do not want to know the truth, have eyes and do not see, hear and hear — is called into deception, the Pontiff begins his speech by affirming the traditional character of healthy democracy, that if it was always optional for peoples, today it seems to be imperative.
He hardly needs to remember — he says — that according to the Church’s teachings it is not forbidden to moderately prefer popular forms of government, without prejudice, however, to Catholic teachings on the origin and use of authority; and that the Church “does not disapprove 81 among forms of government, provided that they are conducive to the common good of citizens. ”
(Leon XIII, encyclical Libertas, June 20, 1888).
And in these traditional words, expressly recalled, is the whole doctrine that the Pontiff does nothing but clarify.
The democracy that Pius XII considers acceptable, first, is not pure democracy — towards which the modern world tends — but a moderate popular form; secondly, it does not proclaim it the best or the only good; thirdly, it must not be conditioned by the idea of liberation, but by that of the common good; fourthly, it presupposes the constitution, not of an egalitarian mass, but of a hierarchically structured people; fifthly, it demands a real and effective authority, derived and submitted to God; sixthly, it includes a legislative body composed of select, spiritually superior and integrity men who consider themselves representatives of the whole people and not presidents of a Chusma; seventhly, it does not incur absolutism of the State.
That is, that the Holy Father, starting, as a base, from the idea that democracy matters a self-government or participation of the crowd in government, establishes the conditions or precautions that, tempering and moderating this self-government or participation of the crowd in government, can give rise to a legitimate and healthy form of democracy.
Exactly the same as Aristotle and St. Thomas did, who, after analyzing the ultimate nature of democracy, came to the conclusion of injustice and perversity if it was brought to the ultimate consequences implied by its concept; but recognized that this tendency to the self-government of the multitude, if or were allowed to reach the ultimate consequences, was tempered and moderated with elements of other pure forms such as the unity of the monarchy, the virtue of the aristocracy, and even the wealth of the oligarch, could be a legitimate and acceptable regime, which they called “politicia” or republic.
Conditions, strictly undemocratic, which, by tempering and moderating the expansive perversity of absolute universal egalitarianism, give rise to a certain and convenient participation of the multitude in power.
It follows from this that the traditional democracy accepted by the Pontiff implies the reprobation of modern democracy, both in the liberal and socialist form and in the absurdity of the democrat Catholics.
Because these democracies rely on a concept of a new civilization; they deny or diminish the divine origin of authority; they make the people an idol or a myth; they cannot avoid the tyranny of quantity and number; they identify the notion of justice with the popular regime; they are driven by absolute universal egalitarianism, etc. 8.
Possibility of traditional democracy The address of the sovereign Pontiff, in advocating traditional democracy, has been enslaved again...Now, the problem is to put the possibilities of this democracy in the current conditions of modern life, in which man is atomized for 400 years of progressive de-Christianization.
How to structure society so that it is people and not mass?
How can the idea of common good be infused into a mass that has lost the foundational notions of moral values?
What procedures should be used to ensure that, without altering the aspirations for equality, the assembly of select persons of which the Pontiff speaks is achieved?
How to ensure a government-expression of the nation, when it is divided by so many bandits and dissents?
On what basis will the unity of peoples be realized?
The extent of these tremendous questions is appreciated when the words of Pius XII in Summi Pontificatus, concerning the process of de-Christianization, perfectly valid for the universal crowds Many, perhaps, as they departed from the doctrine of Christ did not have full knowledge that they were deceived by false mirage... they spoke of progress when they were going back; of elevation when they were degrading; of ascension to maturity when it was very serious.
Because there is no doubt that it is very certain what the Pope says, that taught by bitter experiences, the peoples are opposed today with greater aggression against all concentration 82 dictatorial, but it is no less true that after four centuries of systematic de-Christianization of the peoples they find themselves in a human, intellectual and moral prostration, appalling; the peoples are devoured by profound dissensions that do not come only from the impetuousness of rebellious passions, but from a profound spiritual crisis, that has disrupted the healthy principles of private and public morality and has caused to shipwreck that consciousness of the just and the unjust, of the lawful and the illicit that makes possible the agreements, while it refrains from the unleashing of passions and leaves open the way to an honest intelligence.
9.
The feeling of the papal message This is the meaning of the papal message.
Do you want democracy, and a better democracy? says the Pope to the peoples.
It takes, as long as it is such that it respects the essential laws of political societies, which must be governed by the common good.
The Church is not opposed to it; and although she considers political regimes to be accessory and indifferent, she believes that, today more than ever, certain participation of peoples in her own government is desirable.
But know that the greater this democracy or participation, the more necessary it will be for my influence to be felt deeply and universally.
She will demand from you a humble and total acceptance of all the teachings of the Roman Pontiffs, from Gregory XVI in the Mirari Vos, Pius 1X in the Syllabus, to Leo XIII, Pius X, Pius XI, where the pestilious modern errors are condemned and the authentic foundations of the Christian city are established.
The words of the Pope are heard at a time of exceptional solemnity.
Because the peoples, on a crazy slope, are amazed by false progress, and are about to fall into the abyss of atheistic communism.
Democracy, of which they are intoxicated, leads inexorably to that abyss.
No human power can free them from having them rush into it without remedy.
The material power of the State, in which many had placed their trust and which with a strong and totalitarian hand had tried to stop the avalanche, must confess its failure.
So what?
Then the Church speaks from the mouth of her Supreme Shepherd and says: Only I can liberate you.
Not with democracy, which is an accessory and indifferent political form, but in spite of democracy, which by its metaphysic demands tends to lose you.
I can overcome the dialectic of history, and if humanly the world belongs to Moscow today, by divine disposition it truly corresponds to me, because I have been set up to save humanity, yesterday, today and always, until the completion of the centuries.
And only Rome can elevate the multitudes to virtue so that then without danger the city can be virtuous.
Because it is a sanctifying power, it can transform from within man, and from the materialistic condition in which it is itself dragged can lift him up to true virtue and true freedom, which is only attained in holiness, when one, full of order and virtue, self-determines to order and to virtue.
For this reason, it is becoming clearer every day than humanity, torn today in the bowels of its being, which calls for freedom and democracy, without knowing what it asks or how it is to be achieved, can only be saved by the outpouring of the Spirit of God, who dwells only in the Catholic Church.
Efusion that reaches individual souls and reaches social structures as well.
If he does not want to fall into slavery in Moscow, mankind must submit to the supernatural discipline of Rome.
(Our time, N* 26, March 16, 1945).
10.
Charles Maurras’ “political physics” and Christian politics!s Charles Maurras has been a great magnet of politics, a teacher only comparable to Aristotle.
He has seen politics in its concrete connections: the general interest, that St.Thomas "* Unpublished article written in 1972.
(E.N.).
83 refers to the common good, concerning the particular property of groups and individuals.
This general interest, which constitutes the essential law of politics, is not based on the contract, comma has sought Rousseau, and after it, liberalism.
The essence of politics is given in nature.
Charles Maurras calls this nature physical!9.
And it contains: The structure of the families, the regime of the marriages, the belonging of the child; the education, the instruction, the school; the structure of the commune and the province, that of the country and that of the trade; the structure of the Nation, of the central State, of the decentralized states; the relationship of the temporal and the spiritual??.
In this classification of social elements, which do not depend on the contract but are based on nature, Charles Maurras follows the steps of Aristotle, who, at the beginning of his famous Politics, establishes the golden law that must govern all political coexistence among men: that the good to which the city is ordered must be the most important among all human goods.
If every community is ordained to the good, it is necessary that that community which is the most important is the one that seeks the good my principal among all the goods.21 It could be argued to Charles Maurras if this nature is to be called physical as he intends, or rather moral, as St.Thomas teaches with Aristotle.
But what is certainly to be recognized is that before the free will of men is made to intervene in the arrangement of human societies, there exists a structure, determined by the very nature of man and of society, which requires that society be oriented towards the common good and that it be conditioned in a precise way.
Among these conditions, the family must be monogamous and indissoluble, it must be responsible for the education of children: only in this way can society count on responsible citizens.
The economy must be based on the structuring of the intermediate bodies: only in this way will justice be ensured in the economic exchange, which will determine the interest of all to maintain the corporate bond.
The authority of society must be firm and lasting and cannot be left to the whim of the groups or individuals that make it up.
This conception of a policy based on the stability of natural institutions offers a guarantee against liberalism and against socialism.
The political school of Charles Maurras constituted in France the great bulwark against the Revolution in the first quarter of the century in which we live.
This was understood by the great Pontiff St.Pius X and, consequently, he did not fail to give him his generous support against the attempts of socialism, disguised at that time as a Christian dye.
Not only did Rome support him, but it became an unrelenting enemy of sillonism, its enemy.
Marc Sangnier, in fact, with his movement “Le Sillon” (El Surco), exerted a morbid influence on the young French, inflaming their hearts in the love of seductive but fatal causes??
St. Pius X condemned them in Notre Charge Apostolique, where at the same time he establishes the real danger of democratism and socialism.
There, the Holy Pontiff denounces class leveling, a false exaltation of the human person, popular sovereignty.
Warning that the true traditionalists.3 friends of the people are neither revolutionaries nor innovators, but However, the enemies of Maurras did not cease to intrigue both in the French Episcopate and in Rome itself, and had managed to get the Congregation of the Index to prepare a document condemning Maurras.
Because it should be noted that, although the political school of L'Action Francaise was unquestionable in its political doctrine, yet its undisputed founder and director, Charles Maurras, was a man of perverse and anti-Christian ideas.
However, element 19 Le Bienheureux Pie X, Sauveur de la France, Plon.
1953, Paris, p. 3.
219.
(N of A.).
♪
Ibid.
P. XVIIT(N. del A).
♪
St. Thomas /n Politicorum, Marietti, 1951, N”.
11 (A.N.).
2 Notre Charge Apostolique, Encyclicals Pontificas, Guadalupe, 1965, T. 1, p. 2271 * Ibid., p. 2285 (N del A.)
84 (N. del A.).
more preclaro of L'Action Francaise they constituted exemplary Catholics.
Not only this, but L'Action Francaise served as a bridge for many unbelievers to agree and enter the Church.
But St. Pius X shrewdly warned that the condemnation of L'Action Frangaise was intended not for the ungodly ideas of its founder and director, but for its healthy and anti-democratic conception of politics.
For this reason he opposed his condemnation and kept in his particular drawer the decree of the Holy Office and stated that as long as he lived, L'Action Frangaise would not be condemned.
It came to even more.
To the mother of Maurras, who in 1911 knelt before him, asking him for his son's blessing, he said to him, "I bless her work: she will succeed."
During Benedict XV's Pontificate, the attacks against Charles Maurras and his Action Francaise were again intensified, but Benedict XV followed at this point the norms of his illustrious predecessor.
Things were to change in the Pontificate of Pius XI.
The matter would be a long one to explain because the maneuver was cleverly contrived.
Cardinal Andricu, Archbishop of Bordeaux, began the campaign with a “shameful requirement,” in Cardinal Billot’s opinion.
There the leaders of L'Action Francaise were accused of professing errors about God, the divinity of Jesus Christ and the Church.
But the machination would have had no effect if Aristides Briand had not retaken the direction of relations with the Vatican at the Quai d'Orsay, and from there had not maneuvered using the Nuncio in Paris.
The maneuver was so well designed that it was made and brought to Pius XI for daily reading an Action Francaise “of fantasy”, made with great expenses to irritate him and fill him with horror”24 All that followed was the effect of the maneuver.
Pius XI, when reading perverse copies, specially prepared to indispose him to L'Action Francaise, condemned her, imposing severe penalties on those who belonged to her to be devoted to reading her publications As the Maurras himself later acknowledged, L'Acrian Francaise had to avoid formal conflict with the spiritual authorities and thus cover himself from any appearance of insubordination.
This must have been done at all costs.
But not only did it not, but it sparked a poisonous and poisonous controversy that should tear them apart and that, poisoned, should poison our evils.26 The affair of L'Action Frangaise was a noisy matter that should radically upset the positions of the Church in France and consequently in the world.
The effects had to be felt over the years.
The typical example was the Maritain case.
This philosopher who came from Bergsonism was then dedicated with singular devotion to Thomism.
He had written at that time a book defining his state of spirit, Antimodern.
But the drama L'Action Francaise acted as a powerful revulsion that moved him out of position.
Since then he began to follow another intellectual line in political doctrine and in the valorization of civilization to end up in vulgar democrat, follower of Lamennais and Marc Sangnier.27 What happened with Maritain happened equally with French Catholicism and even with the world.
Behind Maritain came a young driver, restless and inflamed, Emmanuel Mounier, who guided the new generations by personalism, a name given to the new socialism for the use of Christians.
Mounier and his magazine Esprit dragged behind themselves and his fatal company to Chenu and Congar, who were to carry out the liquidation of traditional Catholicism and replace it with a deliquescent and solvent progressism.
All this was to end in the positions * Le Bienheureux Pie X, Sauveur de la France, p. 13 (N. del A..) * Ibid., p. 140 (N. del A.).
* Ibid., p. 140 (N. del A.).
?7 See my De Lamennais a Maritain, Theory, Buenos Aires 1967 (N. del A.).
85 secularists and Marxists of today.
The fact is that the condemnation of L'Action Francaise in 1926 radically disrupted the fate of French Catholicism and the world.
Meanwhile, L'Action Frangaise's relations with the Vatican were entering an increasingly benevolent situation.
Here the prayers and recommendations of the holy sisters of Lisieux intervened, who took advantage above all of the visit made to them by Cardinal Pacelli, then the great Pius XII, to ask as a special favor the lifting of the sanctions against L'Action Francaise.
These were raised by Pius XII on July 13, 1939.
Charles Maurras, sentenced to life imprisonment, became totally Catholic.
by a court accusing him of what to think of the doctrine of L'Action Francaise in the light of Catholic teaching?
We limit ourselves exclusively to this point, without going into the analysis of the pcligros that a Catholic can run for following an unbelieving teacher even if he does it only in his political doctrine that in this case would be unobjectible.
To answer this question, we will follow the points expressed by Maritain himself in his post Une apinion sur Charles Maurras et le detour des Catholiques, Plon, Paris 1926.
1.
The organizing empiricism.
It is known that the method that follows in his elucebrations Charles Maurras qualifies him as organizing empiricism.
It follows that his political ideas do not derive from an ethics and much less from a metaphysics, but from historical observation aimed at a specific situation.
It studies the immediate causes that explain the health of a political situation, or, on the contrary, its corruption and decline.
Although he does not participate in the philosophical positivism of a Comte, he follows his observations regarding the government of thought, customs and even the city itself.
His political ideas sc present as a set of conclusions acquired by inductive means and as immediate verifications of reason.
Proceeding in an empirical and inductive manner, he asks observation and history to answer the following question: are there general and constant conditions, and what are they, that determine the decay and corruption of the social body?
What is there to think of this organizing empiricism?
As long as it merely draws the consequences involved in the premises, there is nothing to censor.
It is the method that Le Play so wisely followed to determine the moral conditions of society's life.
If history is a teacher of life, studying it with this dedication cannot be more legitimate and instructive.
2.
Democracy, — One thing is democracy understood in the sense of Aristotle’s policy and another in the modern sense, infied with the myth of popular sovereignty of Rousseau’s Social Contract.
And it is clear that Boy's democracy, although theoretically it can be a legitimate form of government, in practice it has ceased to be so because the Roussean myth has contaminated it.
Maurras' criticisms are then legitimate.
3.
First, politics, i.e. politics d'abord.
— L'Action Frangaise has been accused of giving priority to politics over all other moral values.
But here it must be noted that one or the other primacy is imposed according to the point of view from which things are considered It is clear that in an appreciation of the importance of values the primary corresponds to the religious value; but if things are considered from the point of view of necessity and the validity of public morality, then politics must be given primacy.
Because it is the enforcement of laws that ensure good morals that provides a guarantee of safety and moral health.
For this reason, Maritain himself maintains that politics first—if “first” refers thus, not to the purpose pursued and the order of intention (which would be to divinize the State) but to the conditions that must be assumed in the order of execution, is a truth of common sense.
?8 * Une opinion sur Charles Maurras, ibid., p. 32 (N. del A.).
86 Has Maurras himself explained in My political ideas??
when it says: “When we say “first of all, politics”, we mean: politics first, first in the order of time, in no way in the order of dignity.
It is equivalent to saying that the route must be taken before reaching its terminal point; the arrow and bow must be held before hitting the target; the means of action shall precede the centre to which it is intended.”
4.
Christian politics and politics.
— The merits of Charles Maurras's political doctrine must be recognized in that he has used a realistic method and principles that have led him to defend fundamental values of political realism and have freed him from falling into the errors of Rousseaunian liberalism.
Its policy has been a healthy policy, which is a great demand in a time of crime and degradation of public life.
But, however, we must recognize that if we take into account that politics must govern Christian men and societies who are not to accommodate their lives to a purely natural module but to the supernatural of eternal life; then, there is an insufficiency in Maurras.
Its policy, however insufficient, may be qualified as naturalistic or naturalistic.
There is no doubt that it is somewhat abnormal for an unbeliever to mentor a Christian policy.
This inadequacy, if somehow not repaired, was going to make crises within L'Action Frangaise itself.
However — and this was sagaciously seen by the great Pius X — the attacks on L'Action Francaise were not carried away against this lack in a noble desire to remedy it, but on the contrary, so L'Action Francaise represented as valuable and in accordance with natural law It was attacked because it was a policy of authority and order.
Here lies the difference between a holy Pontiff and another who is not, although it may be very virtuous.
The saint is endowed with supernatural prudence that discerns the malice of the enemy in seemingly innocent things.
For this reason St.Pius X has been able to tell a French bishop that he was trying to achieve the condemnation of L'Action Francaise: We have here, dear son, everything that Jalta does to condemn him.
But we are sure that the people who have documented us so well have acted less out of love and zeal for the holy religion than out of hatred for the doctrines supported by L'Action Francaise.
Then, closing the desk drawer with a dry blow, Pius X added: “So, as long as I live, I will never be the A.F. condemned.
She's doing well.
She defends the principle of authority.
She defends the order”30 Saint Pius X became the defender of Charles Maurras.
Pius XI condemned Maurras.
But another pontiff who, without a doubt, must be exalted to the altars, Pius XII, lifted the condemnation of Maurras, and this without demanding from those of L'Action Frangaise the least retraction of any particular error.
There was only one change of letters in gencral terms.
How do you explain everything?
By the discernment of the spirits that illuminates the saints.
A saint and only a saint, Pius XII, understands and interprets another saint, Saint Pius X.
This was expressed by Pius XII himself in the dissent he pronounced on 3 June 1951 in St Peter's Square on the occasion of the beatification of the great Pontiff.
Now, he said, that the most thorough examination has thoroughly discovered all the acts and vicissitudes of his pontificate, now that the consequences of those vicissitudes are known, no doubt, no reservation is already possible, and it must be recognized that, even in the most difficult, rougher, more serious and more responsible periods, Pius X, assisted by the great soul of his Secretary of State, Cardinal Merry del Val, gave proof of that enlightened prudence that never lacks in the saints, although in its applications it is in painful, but inevitable contrast, with the deceptive postulates of human and purely earthly prudence.
And then, he added: With his eagle look, my insightful and more certain than the short sight of myopic reasoners, he saw the world as it was, he saw the Church's mission in the world, he saw?
Editorial Huemul, Buenos Aires, p. 3.
139 (N. del A.).
* Charle Maurras, Le Bienheureux Pie X, Sauveur de la France, p. 72 (N. del A.).
87 with the eyes of the Holy Shepherd what was his duty within the dechristianized society, of a contaminated Christianity, 0, at least, stalked by the errors of the time and by the perversion of the century.51 The eagle's gaze of St.Pius X was clear in the matter of L'Action Frangaise and Charles Maurras.
True, the religious disbelief of Maurras, who had lost faith in his youth, has reached a degree of unholy sacrilege and blasphemy in such works as Anthinea and Le Chemin of Paradis.
But the political action programme against the democraticism of the Revolution forged by Maurras offered guarantees for a firm political social restoration on the Catholic line.
His Action Francaise was, at the political level, a defense of the Church against the Revolution.
To Camille Bellaigne, asking for a blessing for Maurras, St. Pius X replied: “Our blessing!
But all our blessings!
And tell him that he is a good defender of the Faith."3 ** * Ecclesia, from Madrid, June 9, 1951 (N. del A.).
* Harry Mitchell, Pie X et la France, Les Editions du Cédre, Paris, 1954.
(A.N.).
88