Chapter 13 - FILL IN HERE
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Is There a Public Law
of the Church?
“The Church without the State is a soul without a body. The State without the Church is a body without a soul.”
Leo XIII, Libertas
What is the status of the Church with regard to civil society? The answer to this question is the object of a special ecclesiastical science: the public law of the Church. You can consult the excellent treatises on the Church’s public law by Cardinal Ottaviani and Silvio Romani, as well as the sources presented by Lo Grasso.1
I wish to show you how much Liberalism is opposed to the public law of the Church, how it destroys it, and thus how contrary Liberalism is to the Faith, upon which rests entirely the public law of the Church.
The Principles of the Public Law of the Church
The principles of the public law of the Church are indeed truths of faith or deduced from the Faith. They are:
- Independence of the Church. The Church, which has as its purpose the supernatural salvation of souls, is a perfect society, supplied by its divine Founder with all the means to subsist by itself in a stable and independent fashion. The Syllabus condemns the following contrary proposition:
The Church is not a true and perfect society fully free; it does not possess the proper and constant rights conferred on it by its divine founder, but it belongs to the civil power to define the rights of the Church as well as the limits within which it can exercise them.2
Such is indeed the state of subjection to which the Liberals want to reduce the Church in reference to the State! The Syllabus also radically condemns the plunderings of which the Church is periodically the victim on the part of the civil power, in its goods and its other rights. Never will the Church accept the principle of common law, never will it allow itself to be reduced to the simple common law of all legal associations in civil society, which must receive from the State both their approval and their limits. The Church therefore has the natural right to acquire, to possess, and to administer, freely and independently of the civil power, the temporal goods necessary to its mission (Code of Canon Law of 1917, canon 1495): churches, seminaries, chancery offices, monasteries, benefices (canons 1409-1410), and to be exempt from all civil taxes.3 It has the right to run its schools and its hospitals, independent in themselves of all interference from the State. It has its own ecclesiastical tribunals to judge matters concerning the persons of clerics and the goods of the Church (canon 1552), to the exclusion of the civil tribunals in themselves (privilege of the forum). Clerics themselves are exempt from military service (privilege of exemption) (canon 121), etc…
On the whole, the Church claims sovereignty and independence by the very right of its mission: “All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go then, teach all nations” (Mt. 28:19).
- Distinction between the Church and the State. The State, which has the temporal common good as its direct goal, is also a perfect society, distinct from the Church and sovereign in its domain. This distinction is what Pius XII calls the legitimate and healthy secularity of the State4 which has nothing to do with the laicism that is a condemned error. Be careful then not to pass from one to the other. Leo XIII well expresses the necessary distinction between the two societies:
God has divided the government of mankind between two powers: the ecclesiastical power and the civil power; the first one in charge of divine things, the second one charged with human things. Each of them is sovereign in its class; each is self-contained within limits perfectly determined and traced in conformity with its nature and to its special purpose. There is thus a sort of circumscribed sphere, in which each one exercises its action jure proprio.5
- Union between the Church and the State. Yet, distinction
does not mean separation! How could the two powers ignore each other, since they are exercised over the same
subjects and often also legislate on the same matters: marriage, family, school, etc.? It would be inconceivable that they could be opposed, when on the contrary their unanimity of action is required for the good of men. Leo XIII explains:
The conflict, at this juncture, would be absurd, and would be openly repugnant to the infinite wisdom of the divine counsels; it is absolutely necessary then that there be a means, a process for making the causes of disputes and of fights disappear and for establishing accord in practice. This accord, it is not without reason that it has been compared to the union that exists between body and soul, and that to greater advantage than to the two married people; for the separation is particularly deadly to the body since it deprives it of life.6
- Indirect jurisdiction of the Church over the temporal. This
is to say that, in mixed questions, the Church, with regard to the superiority of its end, will have precedence: “Thus, everything which, in human things, is sacred by any claim, everything that concerns the salvation of souls and the worship of God, either by its nature, or because of its purpose, all that is in the province of the Church’s authority.“7 In other words, the rules of union and of harmony between Church and State suppose an order, a hierarchy: that is to say, an indirect jurisdiction of the Church over the temporal, an indirect right of intervention of the Church in the temporal things which are normally in the jurisdiction of the State. The Church intervenes there “ratione peccati,” by reason of sin and of souls to save, to revive the expression
of Pope Boniface VIII.8
Indirect subordination. Conversely, the temporal is directly subordinate to the spiritual: such is the fifth principle, a principle of faith, or at least of a theological certitude, which justifies the public law of the Church. Man is indeed destined to eternal beatitude, and the goods of the present life, temporal goods, are there to help him attain this end: even if they are not proportioned to that, they are indirectly ordered to it. The temporal common good itself, which is the end of the State, is regulated to facilitate for the citizens access to heavenly beatitude. Otherwise, it would be only an apparent and illusory good.
Ministerial function of the State vis-à-vis the Church. “Civil society,” teaches Leo XIII, “must, by favoring public prosperity, provide for the good of the citizens in a way that not only does not place any obstacle, but assures all the facilities possible for the pursuit and the acquisition of that supreme and immutable good to which they aspire.“9 St. Thomas says:
“The royal function [we would say the State] must procure the good life of the multitude according to what is necessary to help it obtain heavenly beatitude; that is to say that it must enjoin [in its order, which is the temporal] that which leads to this and, to the extent possible, prohibit what is contrary to it.“10
The State therefore has vis-à-vis the Church a ministerial function, a role as servant: all in pursuing its end, the State must positively, although indirectly, help the Church attain its end, that is to say, saving souls!
This constant doctrine of the Church across the centuries deserves the note of doctrina catholica, and it requires all the bad faith of the Liberals to relegate it to the obscurantism of a bygone era.
According to them, it had value for “the sacral monarchies” of the Middle Ages, but no longer for the modern “constitutional democratic States.“11 This is truly nonsense, for our doctrine, deduced from Revelation and from the principles of natural order, proves as immutable and timeless as the nature of the common good and the divine constitution of the Church.
To support their deadly thesis of the separation of Church and State, the Liberals of yesterday and of today readily quote this sentence of Our Lord: “Render to Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s, and to God the things that are God’s"12; they simply omit to say what Cæsar owes to God!
- Social reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ. The last principle, which sums up from the top the public law of the Church, is a truth of faith: Jesus Christ, true God and true man, King of Kings, and Lord of Lords, must reign over societies no less than over individuals: the Redemption of souls is extended of necessity by the submission of States and of their laws to the sweet and light yoke of the law of Christ.
Not only, as Leo XIII says, must the State “have the holy and inviolable observances of religion respected, the duties of which unite man to God"13; but civil legislation must be allowed to be impregnated with the law of God (Ten Commandments) and with the law of the Gospel, in such a manner as to be, in its domain, which is the temporal order, an instrument of the work of Redemption brought about by Our Lord Jesus Christ. That is, essentially, the realization of the social Reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
Just read the magnificent Encyclical of Pius XI, Quas primas, of December 11, 1925, on the social reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ! This doctrine is laid out there with an admirable clarity and authority! I still remember the moment when, as a young seminarian in Rome, I received with my colleagues that teaching of the pope; with what joy, what enthusiasm our teachers commented on it to us! Re-read this sentence, which definitively crushes the laicism of the State:
The States, in their turn, will learn from the annual celebration of this feast that the governors and the magistrates, as well as individuals, have the obligation to render to Christ a public worship and to obey His laws. The heads of civil society, for their part, will recall the Last Judgment, when Christ will accuse those who have expelled Him from public life, but also those who have scornfully set Him aside or ignored Him, and will have the most terrible vengeance from such outrages. For His royal dignity demands that the entire State be regulated by the commandments of God and Christian principles in the establishment of laws, in the administration of justice, in the intellectual and moral formation of youth, which must respect sound doctrine and the purity of morals.14
Henceforth, by its liturgy, the Church chants and proclaims the reign of Jesus Christ over civil laws. What a beautiful dogmatic proclamation, even if it is not yet ex cathedra!
It had to take all the frenzy of the enemies of Jesus Christ to bring them to the point of tearing away his crown, when, in application of the Council of 1962, the innovators suppressed or truncated these three strophes of the hymn from the Vespers of the Feast of Christ the King:
Scelesta turba clamitat:
Regnare Christum nolumus;
Te nos ovantes omnium
Regem supremum dicimus.
(Stanza 2.)
The wicked mob screams out,
“We don’t want Christ as King,”
While we, with shouts of joy,
hail Thee as the world’s supreme King.
Te nationum præsides
Honore tollant publico,
Colant magistri, iudices,
Leges et artes exprimant.
(Stanza 6.)
May the rulers of the world
Publicly honor and extol Thee;
May the teachers and judges reverence Thee.
May the laws express Thy order and the arts reflect Thy beauty.
Submissa regum fulgeant
Tibi dicata insignia:
Mitique sceptro patriam
Domosque subde civium.
(Stanza 7.)
May kings find renown
In their submission and dedication to Thee.
Bring under Thy gentle rule
Our country and our homes.
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1 See Bibliography.
2 Proposition 19, Denz. 1719.
3 Mt. 17:25.
4 Allocution to the inhabitants of the Marches, March 23, 1958, PIN. 1284.
5 Encyclical Immortale Dei, PIN. 136; cf. Denz. 1866.
6 Encyclical Libertas, PIN. 200. Yves de Chartres was already writing to the King, Robert the Pious, “As much as the body is worth if it is not ruled by the soul, so much is the temporal power worth if it is not modeled on ecclesiastical discipline.”
7 Immortale Dei, PIN. 137.
8 Cf., Denz. 468, note.
9 Ibid. PIN. 131.
10 De regimine principum, L 1, ch. XV.
11 Cf. John Courtney Murray, Towards an Understanding of the Development of the Church’s Doctrine on Religious Liberty, pp. 128-129 (see bibliography).
12 Mt. 22:21.
13 lmmortale Dei, PIN. 131.
14 PIN. 569.