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Religious liberty and citizenship
The nation-state is never the final arbiter or authority for the Catholic on what is moral.
— Bishop John-Michael (Botean)
Eparchy of Canton (Ohio)
Romanian Catholic Church
‘My country right or
wrong’, first said by the American naval officer Stephen Decatur, is not Catholic teaching.
The United States always
has presented a problem for Catholicism, it seems, until Vatican II tried to
balance the absolute claims of the faith on truth (which is right) with ‘the
dignity of the human person’ allowing religious liberty, American-style.
I believe we can hold two
views on this and still be faithful.
The first and older one has
the Church as the state religion: Byzantine-style symphonia like in Orthodox tsarist Russia. The
British system, even though it is now Protestant, is a shell of such a system.
(I am happy that Canadians still have the Queen as their sovereign.)
Fine: ideally the government supports the true faith. But what if, as in
‘Reformation’-era England, the sovereign goes into schism or heresy? (Ideally, in
such cases, the subjects’ allegiance to the monarch would be abrogated, but
that’s really hard to enforce when the king has the army, etc. to enforce his
will.)
The second, accepting the
system pioneered in the US and now used by most Western countries, can allow
religious liberty as a relative good.
The same radical freedom that allows some of our fellow citizens to be wrong
also allows the true faith to flourish. The Society of St Pius X, et al., are right to oppose
indifferentism (‘one religion is as good as another’), but now it seems to me
that Vatican II wasn’t promoting indifferentism at all, but rather the kind of
liberty described above. Interestingly enough, the liberal dissenters in the Roman Catholic Church seem to agree with the SSPX that Vatican II taught
indifferentism, in which case they are wrong.
One thing that’s wrong with
US culture today is that the officially agnostic state has itself become a kind
of substitute for religion: witness the Greek-temple-style monuments in
Washington. (Reflecting symphonia with the faith, I’d rather have a
kremlin or the Gothic medieval-style architecture of Westminster!) This seems
to be backed up by Protestantism, which most Americans nominally belong to,
which makes sense since Protestantism and the secularism of the founding
fathers are sequential, logical errors moving away from the faith. The
Protestant religious right seems particularly prone to confuse the two (witness
Jerry Falwell’s ‘Liberty University’). They either don’t seem to realize that
uncritical acceptance of the American way inevitably leads to the secular
humanism they’re against, or they try to rewrite history and paint the founding
fathers as good evangelicals, rolling back the Enlightenment-style liberty the
framers of the American government envisioned. Some want to go back to Cotton
Mather’s New England, with their heresy as the state-backed faith. (In the
unlikely event they took over the US, we’d all be persecuted as
idol-worshippers in a few years. Just like in Elizabethan England.)
For all their failings, the
18th-century founders of the United States based their new system on natural
law, and it has worked pretty well.
My view as a citizen is that God wants loyalty in terms of protecting one’s family and
community (echoing Catholic teaching about subsidiarity and libertarian beliefs
about states’ rights), not necessarily the increasingly secular,
hostile-to-our-freedoms abstraction that is the federal government (a largely
modern invention, not intended by the founding fathers). (America should have stayed
out of World Wars I and II, neither of which threatened people in the US.)
Conscientious-objector status isn’t just for Amish and Quakers. More on World War II.
At the end of the day, in
our fallen world only the faith lived out can give some semblance of ‘liberty
and justice for all’ (to quote the problematic 1930s US pledge to the flag), not any
government.
