By Matthew Cavedon

Catholicism’s supposed incompatibility with American democracy has gone from an accusation lobbed by anti-Catholic nativists to a boast made by Catholic integralists. Both miss the complex relationships between religion and politics, and in particular, the strands within Catholic intellectualism friendly to modern freedom. To highlight some of them, I have written an article in Politics and Religion examining St. Thomas Aquinas’s thought.

Longstanding debates over Catholicism and American democracy (perhaps temporarily) faded during the second half of the twentieth century. Christian Democracy emerged in Western Europe, the Second Vatican Council endorsed religious liberty, and Pope St. John Paul II championed civil freedom. Ven. Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen and Fr. John Courtney Murray taught Catholics to see the Founding Fathers as heirs of the great Church doctors. The triad of Reagan, Thatcher, and the Pope became icons for a new world order. American freedom reached up, Catholic power bent down, and a consensus worldview enjoyed pride of place for half a century.

Then, critics emerged. Some believers started to recognize mismatches between Church social doctrines and American political-party platforms. Catholic hierarchs rejected the Iraq War and birth control, climate degradation and pornography, immigration bans and secularist education. A new crop of political lay believers reacted to this in different ways. Some founded the American Solidarity Party, paying tribute to the Polish labor union that won democracy from the Soviets. Others dusted off older Catholic approaches to politics, seeking new directions from nineteenth-century European reactionism and Pope Leo XIII.

Energies like these eventually concentrated into a movement known as integralism. A band gathered around a young Austrian monk named Pater Edmund Waldstein and drafted manifestos. Their movement won a prominent American spokesman in Adrian Vermeule, a Catholic convert and professor of administrative law at Harvard. His policy proposals cut across conventional American political lines: he supports universal health care, maximizing immigration by faithful Catholics from Latin America, extensive government power over baptized citizens, and strong authority for government administrators.

Of more significance than any particular policy proposal, though, many integralists oppose core features of American democracy. Prof. Vermeule supports replacing “the original meaning of the Constitution” with “principles of objective natural morality.” Pater Waldstein rejects popular consent as the basis for legitimate government. At the leading integralist site The Josias, contributor “Petrus Hispanus” writes that Catholics should stop “attempting to duke it out in the liberal marketplace of ideas, relying on liberalism’s principles of procedural fairness,” and instead practice “unqualified rejection of liberalism.”

The integralist turn is understandable. Old political assumptions merit fresh scrutiny. The norms forged in the Cold War represented a nation with three major broadcasters, not the internet. They reflected the challenges posed by a totalitarian atheist megalithic state, not military overexpansion and terrorism (alongside a different authoritarian atheist megalith). The previous consensus went stale.

Besides, on a deeper level, its reexamination was always due (especially as it often veered beyond the approaches taken by Archbishop Sheen and Fr. Murray). Rather than setting the terms for politics, American Catholicism often adapted itself to them, in tension with Christian teachings about how the spiritual takes precedence over the secular. Rather than advancing distinctly Catholic perspectives, the American consensus prioritized common ground, in tension with underlying human differences that have now forcefully reasserted themselves throughout society. Rather than building from Catholic resources, the American consensus often prioritized secular arguments, in tension with the idea that Christianity has distinct insights. (I suspect that the abandonment of a distinct prophetic voice contributed to the decline in American Catholic religiosity during the consensus era.) A reckoning was the natural response.

Does integralists’ stand against American democracy offer the right one? No. First, a necessary clarification: many decades ago, political philosopher Heinrich Rommen rightly found that there is no singular Catholic political philosophy. He noted that the application of religious insights to concrete situations has always led to “oscillations” between different general principles that exist in “polar unity”: reason and will, society and the individual, liberalism and conservatism. Politics and religion are two different categories, two different levels of considering social questions. As Pope Benedict XVI said in addressing the British Parliament, “to propose concrete political solutions… would lie altogether outside the competence of religion.” While the Church can “help purify and shed light upon the application of reason to the discovery of objective moral principles,” their translation is the responsibility of human reason. In the words of the Second Vatican Council, it is the lay Catholic’s vocation to “work for the sanctification of the world from within.” There is no magical combination of political commitments comprising the legitimate Catholic agenda, whether gathered from a twentieth-century consensus, a nineteenth-century pope, or a thirteenth-century saint.

Nonetheless, Catholics look to wisdom transmitted by a long chain of intellectual ancestors. In theological and ethical matters, one of the very greatest is Saint Thomas Aquinas. Were his lengthy treatments of politics the polar opposite of basic American norms, they would do much to support the integralist critique. Jesse Russell certainly interprets Aquinas this way in a recent Politics and Religion contribution. I don’t know whether Prof. Russell considers himself as an integralist, but he at least echoes that school in condemning the “essentially totalitarian nature” of “Western capitalism” and suggesting that it may be necessary to rebalance order and freedom in the “post-liberal era.” Prof. Russell credits Aquinas with offering “a rich reservoir of conceptual tools”—and characterizes him as a proponent of an “illiberal monarchic and hierarchical” society lacking “public liberty,” where “‘inferiors’ are ruled by ‘betters.’”

Prof. Russell’s reading misses a lot. Hence my response article, where I evaluate primary sources. In them, Aquinas writes much that is friendly to later liberal democracy. He places the rule of moral law above politics and sees human reason as the source of human laws, drawing the distinction between the ultimate and the practical that grounds a healthy secularity. Considering the form of government God gave the ancient Israelites, Aquinas deems it best because it featured popular elections and democratic framing of laws—an analysis political historian James Blythe rightly called “embarrassing to those who think Thomas was an absolute monarchist.” (Pater Waldstein is not among them; at one point, he openly disagreed with Aquinas in favoring hereditary aristocracy over elective.) While Aquinas strongly emphasizes social unity, he envisions a mutual covenant between officials and citizens, not forced conformity. Aquinas is flexible regarding political forms (another mark against those who see nothing good in the Constitution the American people have embraced for centuries), but also idealizes a mixed regime featuring democratic representation. He shows much concern about the possibility of tyranny, proposing constitutional safeguards, disobedience, and even armed resistance as remedies.

The previous American Catholic consensus was not the perfect heir to Aquinas. His situating of human laws within a broader moral framework offers room to criticize politics that the consensus often lacked. His respect for political variety offers an alternative to lamentable global crusades to remake the world in America’s image.

Granted, neither is Aquinas the ready-made answer to modern political problems. He does not set out a theory of personal rights, even though ones can be derived from his understanding of liberty and equality. As Prof. Russell acknowledges, Aquinas endorses religious coercion of baptized Christians in ways that contradict the (binding on Catholics) teaching of the Second Vatican Council. And in one letter to a noblewoman, he approved of seizing Jewish property thought to be derived from usury and noted Church (as well as Jewish) authority requiring Jews to wear garb distinguishing them from Christians. Although Aquinas promoted tolerance of Judaism elsewhere, the letter’s acceptance of anti-Semitism runs contrary to Vatican II (and, of course, to human rights).

But Aquinas himself allows for open-mindedness. He anticipates that future generations will improve on the past and adapt principles to their own preferences and needs. And he insists that this can only happen through reasoned discussion, not the straightjacketing of politics into a strictly predetermined religious model. He offers a way for American Catholics to approach their democracy anew—without destining them to be its integralist enemies.

Matthew Cavedon is Robert Pool Fellow in Law and Religion and Senior Lecturer in Law at Emory University’s Center for the Study of Law and Religion. His work is supported by the McDonald Agape Foundation. His writings can be found on SSRN. He thanks James Patterson of Ave Maria University for helpful comments on a draft of this post.

Note: The images shown were sourced from, in order,

• Thomas Nast cartoon: Catholic Historical Research Center of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia (cover image)
• Pope Leo XIII: Law & Liberty
•  Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Moses on Mount Sinai: Art Renewal Center