About 30 years ago, I thought a lot about different forms of government and which would be best. I came to the conclusion that none of them are really any good in the end, although some of them work given the right conditions--but the conditions never remain the same. I think it's result of the Fall.

I don't really believe in separation of Church and State (gasp) and I guess that's because I am much more Catholic than American. I don't really have any problem with a Catholic confessional state or a King for that matter.

More than anything, though, I think about how for the greatest part of history, people had to live under a government over which they had no control. They just had to figure out how to live a Catholic life (or whatever kind of life they wanted to live) as best they could. I'm pretty sure that whenever we think we control the government it's 90% illusion anyway.

AMDG

Jesus was human, wasn't he? It isn't because we are human that we do this. It is because our humanity is itself fallen apart. We are most human when we bring it back together.

AMDG

The reason I say that is that so often people use that as an excuse--I'm only human--for doing stuff. Not you, of course ;-). But that's why I think it's important to make that distinction.

AMDG

We've talked before about the confessional state and I won't go over that again. I certainly agree with you that when the state is formally Catholic, that any abuses of power, which are inevitable in a fallen world, do reflect badly on the Gospel, or at least the Church. That is the best argument against such a thing.

"Well, it's not working out. It seemed to be for a while, but it's collapsing before our eyes. Whether it's intellectually and historically justifiable or not, the grounding of the American constitution in something like natural law--the "Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" so admired by the Founders--has been discarded by the authorities whose understanding of the Constitution is law."

I have been re-reading Belloc's essay, "The Catholic Church and the Modern State". There are lots of pertinent passages. Here is one:

"The Modern Electoral State does indeed always and inevitably support one general religious attitude and oppress its opposite very strongly, but by implication only, and indirectly; it would be shocked if it were accused of doing even that; and a defined and named religion it does not and, consistently, cannot openly adopt."

When he says "religious attitude" he does not mean only formally recognised religions. "Secularism" or whatever we want to call it, would fit, I think.

"Perhaps Archbishop Lefebvre was right all along about Dignitatis Humanae."

I'd be inclined to think so.

I've been reading Everlasting Man with a group and last night we discussed a passage that talks about the people who were at the death of Christ. The part about the mob is very like the phenomenon surrounding Trump.

He also says something about the hermaphrodite monstrosities of Greece that made me think I would like to get him into the 21st century for 15 minutes to hear what he had to say.

I've had The Great Heresies on my shelf for years, but never read it. I would like to say I will, but I doubt I will.

AMDG

It might be worth your while to read just that last section. "The Modern Challenge," I think it's called. I think it would stand on its own pretty well and it's not that long.

Chesterton might just blow a fuse or something if suddenly picked up and set down in our time.

Thanks, Louise! Things are looking up.

AMDG

Part Protestant, part Enlightenment rationalism, I'd say.

I've come to the conclusion that our government at it's best was based on a Protestant mindset and has flaws that proceed from that mindset and won't ever be compatible with Catholic culture.

That got me to wondering if Flannery O'Connor ever wrote anything about that incompatibility. Anyone here know?

One thing I found in searching the question is this from an essay in her book Mystery and Manners:

At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily. The fiction which celebrates this last state will be the least likely to transcend its limitations, for when the religious need is banished successfully, it usually atrophies, even in the novelist. The sense of mystery vanishes. A kind of reverse evolution takes place, and the whole range of feeling is dulled.

And considering O'Connor's essay was published in 1963, that "an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily" sort of surprised me -- didn't realize we were so far gone so long ago.

I think there were others who had seen the problem then and earlier though I can't think of an example right now. That line about the range of feeling being dulled really strikes me as true.

Thanks, Rob. I'll check that out at lunch.

AMDG

This is not directly related, but I think it's an instance of what you're talking about, Janet. It's an agnostic-atheist Brit with obvious traditional British anti-Catholic sympathies (obvious if you've read much of his stuff, maybe not so much from this piece). The implication of "no outside (i.e. papist) interference" is also "no higher law than the state."

I wonder if the theoretical problems with religious freedom made it in some sense inevitable that there would be practical problems down the road. Seems like the two sides of the thing couldn't ride in tandem forever.

I think that's true. In the end, every government is its own little Tower of Babel. That's why I like that Sandburg poem.

I see a lot of what's going on with Catholics in the US as a sort of correction to what happened in WWII, which was when Catholics really became assimilated into the American culture. Before, they were outsiders, but fighting in the war, men got to know each other and the Catholics went out of their way to be accepted. (This is, of course, way oversimplified.) They went too far to appear to be just like everybody else. Because we aren't. We aren't supposed to be.

Back then, since the society at large had a similar morality to that of Catholics, it worked. Now, if we are going to be Catholic, we can't just keep our mouths shut. I'm not sure this is a bad place to be in. It's going to hurt, but it's pretty much where we're called to be.

I know this is not very coherent, but I ought to be working, so it's very much off the top of my head.

AMDG

"I wonder if the theoretical problems with religious freedom made it in some sense inevitable that there would be practical problems down the road. Seems like the two sides of the thing couldn't ride in tandem forever."

I would think so. Just look at marriage and divorce. Religion A says there should never be divorce. Religion B says divorce is fine. What exactly can the state do while being fair to both religions?

Yes, thats how the game goes. It's sick. But even if hardly anyone did divorce, in principle the state is coming down on the side of Religion B. In practice, the *state* is imposing Religion B on Religion A!

Exactly, Mac. And what's exasperating for the conservative/traditionalist is that most liberals seem to be completely blind to the dogmatic nature of that dynamic, which makes debate extremely difficult.

Well, that looks interesting. I've been thinking about subscribing, maybe I will now.

"most liberals seem to be completely blind to the dogmatic nature of that dynamic"

Indeed! Not only is it frustrating for us, as you say, but it gives them great moral confidence. They think their dogmas are self-evidently true.

I figure I would probably agree with much or most of it. But I wouldn't figure it would be a lot of fun to read.

I was a bit shocked when I saw that this comment is on a May 2016 post. I just wrote about this a month ago, not remembering that I had mentioned it two years ago. Well, I guess if you do a minimum of one blog post a week for years on end it's not a sign of senility that you forget a lot of it.

http://www.lightondarkwater.com/2018/05/sunday-night-journal-may-13-2018.html

Grr. Crummy search. But at least it found something relevant.