The excellent journal American Affairs, which from its very first issue has consistently delivered content of the highest quality to its readers, now publishes an essay on The Eclipse of Catholic Fusionism, by Kevin Gallagher. It is an account of the rise and fall of «fusionism», the alliance of convenience between the disciples of right-wing liberalism and those who sought to defend the moral law of the Church. This settlement, through which Catholics sought to make their mark on politics, reached its highest degree of influence in the Bush II era and into the early years of Obama’s first term. Needless to say, it was a complete political failure.

The article is of great interest, so I will not deprive you of the utility and pleasure of reading it. Apart from a certain ambiguity (perhaps deliberate) in the author’s treatment of the role of arguments from natural reason in Catholic political polemics, I second its diagnosis. Go and read it.

There is one aspect of Gallagher’s argument, however, which is not essentially tied to the rest of his piece and which I would like to comment on. He concludes his essay with the following words, which I read as an expression of a hope:

As Catholics become less diffident about the politics their religious commitments imply, they can be more selective in their alliances, seeking allies that not merely pay the Church occasional lip service, but genuinely engage with her ideas. Catholics, of course, hold these ideas to be true. But even nonbelievers may have reason to welcome a more intellectually assertive Catholic politics. In this ideologically unstable era, the tradition of the Church offers an alternative to moribund liberal modes of political thought, an alternative that may avoid many of the errors and illusions that confound contemporary society. As that ideology loses its grip, as liberalism loses credibility, there is less profit than ever in a scheme of fusionist accommodation. To participate in this no-longer-neutral public square, the Catholic tradition must be prepared to speak in its own voice.

(Emphasis added.)

The author seems optimistic about how even non-believers might welcome a more assertive Catholic political voice. I would like to suggest that this wish, as stated, is unrealistic. The issue is not taken up in Gallagher’s piece, so what follows is more in the manner of a gloss than of a critique.

People do not evaluate political arguments as they do mathematical proofs ― at least not since God placed a holy angel armed with a fiery sword barring the gates of paradise. As an authoritative exponent of integralist thought has noted, the coherence of traditional Catholic political doctrine rests, among other things, on its sober acceptance of this central fact.

To see this, consider the following. What does Catholic doctrine end up asking of the members of the community? It demands compliance with a number of moral laws and obligations that, as both Scripture and history show, most men will abide by only through clenched teeth. These laws force them to rein in their desires, to silence their impulses, and to surrender their judgment in the pursuit of the common good of the state, which in this context we can define as the good life, life according to reason, lived in society.

Venal and weak creatures that we are, this is a hard sell for most.

Liberalism, on the other hand, is a doctrine that tends to appeal to what is baser in man. In fine, it is about giving political and juridical cover to the unfiltered desires of the common man: the amassing of wealth, the «right» to vent one’s mind on any and all matters, the drive to sleep with anyone, virtually without any limits. What chains modern man to the liberal «order» is therefore not merely an intellectual conviction about its alleged superiority as a political philosophy, but a servitude to concupiscence, to which this doctrine grants a veneer of juridical form and legitimacy.

Frank discussion of political doctrines in the public square is therefore simply not enough to convince most people that integralism is true and good. Something more is needed, and this fact is indeed an essential aspect of the very political doctrine we defend. Part of the teaching of integralism is that true political order is not possible without a vigorous and clear application and enforcement of the moral law (as prudence requires, for sure). That is, man needs that public authority not only propose to him, but also move him (by force, if necessary) to comply with the moral law. And it is precisely by this act of enforcement and habituation to it that the rightly ordered state makes it possible for man to understand that law and to grasp (even if only inchoately) why it is preferable to license.

The insight is from Aristotle: the student of ethics must have a rightly ordered soul before he can understand the good. Similarly, right political order is a necessary condition for the the citizens’ capacity to understand right political doctrine.

The encyclopedists and other lunatics of the 18th century had it exactly backwards: it is not political theory that establishes for the people the rightly ordered state, it is the rightly ordered state that reveals to them where truly sound political teaching is to be found. Because integralism makes high demands on the common man, it is necessary for that man to begin historically with order. Because liberalism flatters his desires, it begins historically with theory. The big brains of the Enlightenment were, strictly speaking, seducers, not teachers of mankind. A useful historical parallel: how did the kings of Castile and Aragon create rightly ordered Christian polities in the lands they reconquered from the Moors? It was not by distributing Christian pamphlets and funding subversive cabals.

Public authority, ecclesiastical or civil, is necessary for integralism to have a real chance of clearing a path through which to reach the people. See, for instance, the recent case of the defeat of an abortion law in Argentina. After the bill was passed by the lower house of Congress, the Church moved to act with decision: «[p]riests and bishops spoke forcefully against abortion from the pulpit. As senators debated the bill, the church held a “Mass for life” at the Buenos Aires Cathedral». Bishops invoked their authority and preached about the moral and political pit into which the nation would fall if such a monstrous law were sanctioned. On August 9, the Argentine Senate rejected the bill, thanks be to God. One of the major Argentine dailies summed up the result with this headline: «The Church, the key player that managed to stop the law». Compare this with the also recent case of Ireland, where many bishops acted with can only be described as pusillanimity, to the point of pathetically recognizing their own failure as teachers.

Other examples can be found in the cases of Poland and Hungary, where a more recognizably Christian view of man and society is gaining traction, this time at the hands of the civil power. The remarkably effective results the exercise of ecclesiastical and civil authority has delivered in these places, and the relatively short times involved, are a lesson in political hope.

Speaking sincerely and directly, in what Gallagher calls the Catholic tradition’s «own voice», is thus only a part of it. The public square is contaminated: not only our fallen nature but the flattery that liberalism does to it place a truly Catholic discourse at a clear disadvantage. Sound doctrine must be taught primarily to power, because the use of that power to further political truth is, politically speaking, the vehicle of that truth’s manifestation to the mass of society. Only the corrective and pedagogic arm of public authority can truly and reliably order our epistemological waywardness. This is the meaning of the res publica christiana, of political order at the service of truth.

What must integralists do, then? Throw up our hands in despair as we realize that our power barely goes beyond the few hundred followers that echo our voices on Twitter? Of course not, so long as we have some clarity about what our goals should be. Our principal object today, I would suggest (and this is by no means an original thought), is archeological and pedagogical: rescue sound doctrine from its primary sources, and expound it with renewed freshness and clarity, in current language and in the light of our historical context. A great deal of this work is already well underway in various languages and with a great deal of acuity, sophistication, and brilliance. We need to get more capable people interested in, and ― crucially ― give more structure to, these efforts: this is our political apostolate.

But what about reaching power? What we are doing now is leaving, as an astute friend has quipped, «breadcrumbs for a more propitious time». But let us not scatter them at random. We must make sure to place them deliberately and strategically, so that they may be found on the road to power, or to put it perhaps less jarringly for «intellectual» ears, on the road to authentic restoration. And who knows, as another friend notes, that propitious time, today seemingly unreachable, may well be just around the corner.

1. The words right and law refer to related realities. Their meaning is derived from the Latin ius and lex. The more fundamental of these is ius, as regards both the nature of the virtue of justice generally, and the juridical order specifically. In English, this is obscured by the predominance of the words ‘law’ and ‘legal’ to designate that order and the framework within which ‘rights’ exist.

2. The first and foundational meaning of ius is as the object of justice, which is the habit of giving or rendering to each what is his own: ius suum cuique tribuere. Thus, ius is the suum, that which is owed, referring to the thing or action that is due to someone by virtue of any number of titles that sustain his claim to them.

3. The scope of the virtue of justice is universal, such that one can properly speak of ‘rights’ in any context where human (and indeed more than human) action is involved. Thus, one can properly speak of general or political justice, the ultimate object of which is the common good of the political community, as it refers to the rights that are owed to the community (or to its ruler, as appropriate) by virtue of the demands of that common good. These rights are therefore supreme in the order of justice, subject only to the rights due to God himself (by individuals and by the community as a whole), which are the object of the virtue of religion, a species of the virtue of justice. Below them, we find the rights owed between individual persons. We can therefore classify the orders of justice with regard to the dignity of the creditor: individuals, the political community, and God.

4. In the sphere of particular human relationships, the study of the object of justice has traditionally been the province of jurists, who have provided us with the most complete and precise notion of ‘right.’ For this reason, we now turn to their insights.

5. Before getting into the subject-matter itself, a historical point is in order regarding the use of these words. The connection between right and justice outlined above, and particularly between the juridical order and justice, which in classical thought is necessary, is denied by most modern jurists. Justice, for the moderns, is not the virtue of giving what is owed to others; that is, it is not concerned with action and thus with the good, but is at best either an ideal – a political “value” or ideological Omega point of sorts – or a mere procedure. It is telling, for example, to find in the rulings of entities like the International Court of Justice, when referring to the fundamental or non-negotiable aspects of what they call “natural justice,” that this includes little more than a schematic summary of due process.

6. In Roman law, ius classically referred to the (usually physical) object owed to someone. The paradigmatic case is property or ownership, where my right (ius) simply is the thing I claim as mine. There is no distinction between a right and its object, for what I am owed is precisely the object itself and not only a claim over it. In the case of rights less absolute than ownership, such as usufruct or use, my right is also the thing, but only to a certain extent or under certain conditions. The same thing happens with rights over persons, such as any form of debt, where what is owed is an action, such as the action of returning what has been loaned. (To ensure this right over persons did not devolve into servitude, the Romans sagely permitted compensation in case of breach, to be rendered in the form of pecunium – i.e., money.)

7. The basis of rights is found in what can be called the distribution of things. If something is owed to someone as his own, it is only because he first received it from another. The only holder of absolute rights is therefore God, Who alone can claim not to have received what is His from any other. For this reason, ultimately all rights must derive in some fashion from the divine ordinances. However, in the vast majority of cases, this ultimate origin is mediated by secondary causes, which can be summarized in the two categories of (a) nature and (b) human will, from which much of the distribution of things can be discerned.

8. The discernment of the content of these distributions is the primary task of the jurists and is the proper object of jurisprudence. The fruit of this effort is the determination of what the jurists have called the titles of rights. The title of a right is what determines its scope, its content, its measure, and its effects.

9. Thus, some titles are found directly in nature, such as the title that gives a father the right to (claim as what is due to him) the obedience of his family. Others are found in acts of the human will, either as regards the care of private things or the care of the common good. An example of the first is the title by which a man grants someone the right to live in his house in exchange for periodic payments. An example of the second is the title by which the sovereign may exact a fine from a subject for violating a traffic regulation. Further, the titles derived from the human will can also be distilled from more diffuse expressions of that will as exercised over time and space, as in the form of customs or the common practices of the nations.

10. To summarize, we can say that the two sources of rights are nature and human will, which in turn devolve into the two sources of contract and human law. However, the care of private things is subject to the care of the common good, so rights derived from contract are also subject to human law. Therefore, we can say that rights are in reality derived from two basic sources: nature and human law. This is where the traditional distinction between natural and positive rights finds its origin.

11. However, the distinction between natural and positive rights is not helpful when used to mean that the two spheres are unrelated. In fact, many, if not most, positive rights derive their ultimate legitimacy from the order of nature. For example, the right of the sovereign to place a murderer in jail or execute him is not a merely positive right. It is more helpful to say that in most cases, although the existence of a right may be found in nature, its specifications may be due to human ordinance (such as the decision of when murder should be punishable by prison or by death). There are also many natural rights that are simply recognized in human law, such as the father’s right to patria potestas mentioned above.

12. The second meaning of ius refers by analogy to the order (or, as the moderns prefer to say, the system) constituted by the web of rights derived from the titles found in nature and in human law. Thus, according to their source, we can distinguish, as the Romans did, between a ius naturale (natural right), a ius civile or ius quiritum (civil right), and a ius gentium (the right of nations), each referring to the juridical orders constituted by the rights derived from nature, the ordinances of the city, and the common practices of the nations.

13. In all these cases, the foundational reality of ius remains the same: what is owed to each according to the distributions to be discerned in nature and in the ordinances of the human will. The main reason to distinguish between the various orders then is political, for while a Parthian or a Goth may be entitled to his rights derived from nature and from the common practices of the nations, he is certainly not entitled to the rights derived from the laws of the Roman People.

14. Thus, it is not that these are parallel orders, but, as noted above, they express merely the openness of the juridical to not only the product of the human will, but also to nature itself. They are all in fact a single order, having application at the same time in any given case. Only in this sense can the juridical order be a true order. Without reference to a criterion transcending the human will, any juridical system would be little more than a self-referential mechanism. A good illustration of this is that it is simply not possible to make sense of the basic concepts of juridical thought (such as, for example, the doctrine of the capacity of legal subjects, the requirements of valid consent, or the diverse mental states relevant in criminal law) without reference to nature.

15. The third meaning of ius designates the practical science by which the jurists have derived the various rights in question. Thus, the Romans also spoke of ius as the ars boni et aequi (the art of the good and the equitable) and as divinarum atque humanarum rerum notitia, iusti atque iniusti scientia (the knowledge of matters divine and human, and the science of what is just and unjust), referring to the work of the jurists itself and to the scientific synthesis they formulated for it. The science of right – jurisprudence – is the order of definitions, categories, arguments, and methods employed by the jurists to discern, in each particular case, what is owed to the parties involved – that is, their rights. To study ius is, thus, to study this science.

16. As a practical science, jurisprudence is not concerned exclusively with the rigor of formal and logical structure and argument. Its end is action, specifically just action. For this reason, it is dialectical and contingent. The basis for a jurisprudential determination is the contrasted validity and persuasiveness of the juridical arguments posed by the claimant and the respondent in a case, but it is always only probable, relative, and conditional, for the possibility remains ever open that once a determination is made in favor of one person, a third party may arrive with a better claim over the same thing. A juridical absurdity, therefore, is not necessarily only a logical absurdity; rather, it is an unjust determination. The modern confusion of juridical science with its method (as in Kelsen, for example) is thus erroneous, or at least incomplete, in so far as it closes it off from its end as a practical science, the just action.

17. These three meanings of ius or right were known to St. Thomas (II-II, qq. 57, 60), who synthesized them from the various sources the classical tradition had bequeathed, especially the sayings of the Roman jurists contained in the Digest of the Corpus Iuris Civilis.

18. Second, Scholasticism added two new meanings of ius not found in the classics or in St. Thomas, but which are not at odds with them. Francisco de Vitoria taught that a fourth analogical meaning of right is lex, that is, law. The reason is that the law is a primary source of right, for when we speak of natural rights or positive rights, we are in fact speaking of the rights to be derived from the titles found in the natural and positive laws. St. Thomas considered this argument in the context of his discussion of right as the object of justice (II-II, q. 57, a. 1, ad. 2) and taught that law can be called an expression of right, but not a species of it. Vitoria can therefore be considered to be already moving in a more or less legalistic understanding of right, even if he was not a legalist himself.

19. In turn, Francisco Suárez stated that ius also means analogically the faculty or power over something, in the sense that it is owed to someone that the exercise of that faculty or power over an object or person be respected. To have a right in this last sense means that one’s sphere of action over the object must not be violated. This meaning of right is the most widespread today, especially in English, where ‘right’ is hardly intelligible in the first three meanings mentioned above (or in Vitoria’s fourth). Perhaps the reason for this is that Suárez’s work was a principal source for the understanding of natural right in Locke, arguably (and lamentably) one of the most influential natural right thinkers of the modern age.

20. Be that as it may, Suárez’s notion is not incorrect, in so far as we understand (as he did) that it is analogical and derivative. I can only have the right to exercise a power over a thing or person if that thing or person is itself, in the first place, my right. In other words, right as a power or faculty is already virtually contained in the first, principal meaning of right sketched out above.

21. To conclude, a word about the meaning of lex. In Latin, as in most Romance languages, this word refers specifically to the ordinance of reason, issued by he who has care for the common good and promulgated. This refers to the generally binding decrees of those who have the legislative power: in Rome, the Roman People and later the emperors, today, a parliament, congress, or national assembly. A lex, therefore, is technically a specific form of public decree.

22. In English, the word ‘law’ may also be used with this meaning, but more commonly it means ius, understood in the second and third meanings summarized above, that is, as an order and as a science. Thus, one speaks of “obeying” or “applying the law,” and of “studying law,” or making a “legal” argument. As noted by Vitoria, the analogical use of the word lex to mean ius is not incorrect, but it can be confusing at best when it gets out of this limited scope and loses sight of the more foundational meanings. The reason for this is that the use of the word ‘law’ to designate right threatens to place too much emphasis on the voluntaristic and (in a secularized culture) merely positive aspects of the juridical. Ontologically, however, the heart of the juridical is its relationship with the virtue of justice, which is clearly expressed in the primary meaning of ius as that which is owed.

At Opus Publicum, the always suggestive Gabriel Sánchez has posted a brief critique of my own brief reply to E. M. Milco’s essays on liberalism (here and here). Sánchez claims I have proposed a “deviation” from the principles of Catholic Action, and even that I have fundamentally misunderstood traditionalism by placing it in opposition to Catholic Action rather than seeing it as its continuation. He ends by suggesting concrete steps we may take in our daily lives in order to bring about the kingdom of Christ on earth, and which I cannot but wholeheartedly endorse.

From a purely historical point of view, however, it is worthwhile to note that Sánchez’s account of the relationship between traditionalism and Catholic Action is at least incomplete. Not all Catholic traditionalist movements espoused the strategy of Catholic Action. The clearest example is Carlism, possibly the most politically efficacious and doctrinally articulate of these movements in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. This is not to say Carlism rejected the ends for which Catholic Action was created—inasmuch as they were the same ends of traditional Catholic political thought, they differed in nothing. Rather, Carlism rejected the strategic assumptions Catholic Action was based upon, assumptions which, for better or worse, meant transforming traditional Catholic politics into just another political party attempting to win it out in the game of liberal democracy. It is enough to read Juan Vázquez de Mella’s forceful critique of the liberal idea of a political party (e.g. here, pp. 275-282), or Fr. Félix Sardá y Salvani’s Liberalism Is a Sin, to see the Carlist rejection of this strategy, based mostly on the reasons suggested by Milco and which I attempted to re-elaborate in my reply to him. 

Leo XIII and St. Pius X favored the strategy of Catholic Action because they came to believe, as a matter of strategy, that still-dominant Catholic majorities in many countries could be rallied under a single party in order to use democracy as a weapon against liberalism. The faithful majorities, it was hoped, would vote liberalism out of existence under the leadership of Catholic Action parties. From this miscalculation, possibly brought on by the success of German Catholics against Bismarck, would ultimately come that spectacle of progressive alignment of Catholic politicians with liberalism that was “Christian democracy.”

All of this, of course, is not to impugn on the many excellent things done by Catholic Action in many countries, or to judge the motives these saintly and venerable Popes had in favoring it. Indeed, under the circumstances they faced, it is difficult to imagine what alternative they had in most cases, seeing as the political links with the ancien régime had almost entirely vanished and a new way of “doing Catholic politics” needed to be implemented seriously, one to which the example of Germany and others gave true practical plausibility.  

In my brief piece, I wished to suggest that the reasons this strategy failed are similar to those articulated by Milco in his two essays. By reducing all political positions to a plane of procedural neutrality, where they are all forced to play by the same aseptic rules, liberalism tends inevitably to relativize the public significance (and even intelligibility) of those positions, finally leaving the principles those rules embody (fairness, tolerance, etc.) as the only acceptable political creed. There is no reason to believe Catholic political thought and action are not subject to the same rule of liberal self-radicalization, and indeed the story not only of Catholic Action, but of all forms of Christian democracy, amply bear this out.

The fact is that as a political strategy to save Christian civilization, the well-meaning attempt that was Catholic Action did not manage to recognize the threat involved in buying into the praxis of liberalism, even when done with a clear rejection of its theory. Obviously, this danger is much graver when the attempt does not even involve a clear rejection of the theory of liberalism, as has happened in the post-Vatican II Church, but the point is that the reason why both these strategies fail is the same: they subject Catholic politics and life to the pernicious liberal praxis, and in so far as they do, they manifest only the continuation and radicalization of the same error.

 In his critique of my brief note, Sánchez’s seems to commit a bit of the same miscalculation. One thing are the political principles of traditionalism; another, the particular political strategy Catholic Action and Vatican II used to attain them. I admit the use of the term “neo-Catholic” in reference to both may have been misleading, because the Vatican II mistake is not only practical, but theoretical, but inasmuch as they both espouse the practical delusion that traditionalism can defeat liberalism from within, their failures may be analyzed together. 

The two essays recently published here by E. M. Milco—one on liberalism in government and one on liberalism in education—are both excellent. I think they are good prolegomena for posing the biggest political question of them all, about the relation between truth and politics (Strauss’s “natural right and history” obsession). Milco hints at this question in both posts when he talks about how Humean balancing tecnhiques are good (as far as they go) and how it’s good for us to understand and be conversant with the many divergent intellectual systems out there. Granting both of these claims (and I do, more or less), the question remains: How must a Catholic traditionalist (or, if you want to refer to him with the aseptic terminology of liberalism: a person making truth-claims) face liberalism?

It seems that the neo-Catholic strategy (that is, the “Catholic Action” and “Vatican II” strategy) of attempting to duke it out in the liberal marketplace of ideas, relying on liberalism’s principles of procedural fairness to ensure we have a place at the table, is proving to be a failure. (The only difference between Catholic Action and the Vatican II strategy is that the former is based on the creation of an official Catholic face in practical politics, while the latter is based on the more difficult idea of Catholic laity soaking the social structure with Christian values from within. All of this, however, accepting the liberal procedural principles as a fair playing ground.)

I think Milco is right: there is a self-radicalizing principle in liberalism that explains why and how these strategies are doomed to fail. The procedural principles liberal strategies are based on, being the only common ground, the only language anyone can use in public, quickly become the only acceptable creed. I think this is evident, though it hasn’t stopped many good and knowledgeable Catholics from thinking that a kind of even more covert strategy is the way to go, one that is still based on the delusion that, if we are good liberals and don’t “force” ourselves onto others (i.e., speak clearly in terms of truth), we can still evangelize them from within.

This suggests that a traditionalist’s political strategy should be even more radical than that of something like Catholic Action: it should begin with an unqualified rejection of liberalism from its very principles, with the sole and clear objective of evangelization (including political evangelization). In this endeavor, both an acceptance of Hume’s fairness principles and a working understanding of today’s cultural and intellectual fads (i.e., a good grasp and a good practice in how liberalism works and speaks) are good instruments to count on, so that our words are intelligible.

The Carlist movement in Spain is based on this kind of idea (their analysis of the liberal predicament is very similar). But they add the necessity of an explicitly political principle (in their case, the legitimist cause), because they fear that without it, we will lose our link to Christendom, making our labors and our thoughts into a purely intellectual project. I think the reason for this, ultimately, is the importance they give to the virtue of piety in traditionalism. It is piety to our ancient fatherlands, forebears, even our ancient kings, that provides the political justification for traditionalism as a movement with the explicit objective of bringing for the real, down-to-earth, factual reign of Christ the King. Thus, their commitments to monarchy, to old customs, etc.

In a country like the United States, this may not be so easily done, or even thought (and the same is true, though perhaps to a lesser degree, in Latin America). The point, in any case, is that in order to be a true alternative to liberalism that is capable of escaping its self-radicalizing ideologization, traditionalism must also have a working alternative to the liberal state, a political “incarnation”, if you will, even if it is only in aspirational form. Without this, it is almost impossible to prevent traditionalism from becoming, as time passes, another fad within the vacuum of liberal ideology.