Should the Catholic Church control governments? Some contemporary Catholic thinkers in the United States think it should. A movement known as Catholic integralism has been enjoying something of a revival in contemporary American political thought, especially among Catholic critics of liberalism and modernity. They are advocating a form of government in which the Catholic Church would provide leadership and direction to the state based on the authority and teaching of the church. Such a political system would create what might legitimately be called a theocracy.
Historically, integralism probably had its fullest expression as a religious and political movement in late 19th and early 20th-century France. However, the Catholic Church has had a much longer experience running a theocracy—its thousand-year rule over the Papal States.
Most Roman Catholics today would have no idea what or where the Papal States were. Yet at their greatest extent, they occupied fully one-third of the Italian peninsula. The last remnants of the Papal States went out of existence only in 1870, when the Kingdom of Italy seized the city of Rome from the pope and made it the capital of a new, unified Italian state.
It is most important, however, to realize that the Papal States were not a state like any other state, nor was the pope their sovereign in the manner of any other king. In international law, a state is usually understood to be a defined territory having a permanent population and a relatively stable form of government, capable of entering into relations with other states. Such a state has a finality that is proper to its secular nature: security, stability, prosperity, rights, etc. The Papal States had none of these finalities. It was the terrestrial expression and support, if you will, of the divine mission of the Holy See, which was religious, spiritual and moral. The finality of the Papal States was therefore transcendent.
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Jeffrey von Arx, S.J., is a visiting scholar in the Boston College Clough School of Theology and Ministry and president emeritus of Fairfield University.
With thanks to America and Jeffrey von Arx SJ, where this article originally appeared.
