Joel Alicea:
Welcome to Ordain and Establish, a podcast of the Center for the Constitution and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition at Catholic University. To learn more, visit our website at cit.catholic.edu.
Welcome, everyone. Welcome to our conference marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. I’m Joel Alicea. I’m the St. Robert Bellarmine Professor of Law here at Catholic University. I’m also the director of the Center for the Constitution and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition, which is one of the sponsors of this conference. I want to begin by thanking our co-sponsors, the Center for Citizenship and Constitutional Government at the University of Notre Dame, directed by Phillip Muñoz, Professor Phillip Muñoz here to my right, and the Carroll Forum on Citizenship and Public Life here at Catholic University directed by Professor Justin Litke.
As you can tell, this is an unusual conference in that it brings together the two premier Catholic universities in the United States in a joint effort, and that is appropriate since our topic is the relationship between Catholicism and the Declaration. It is a topic that has prompted deep reflection ever since those brave men signed the Declaration 250 years ago. Can the principles of the Declaration be reconciled with the teachings of the Church? How do Catholics fit into the American experiment? These are old questions, but on this major anniversary of America’s birth, it’s appropriate to revisit them.
Indeed, they take on a different valence today than they have in the past. A majority of the Supreme Court is composed of Catholics. The Vice President of the United States is Catholic, the Secretary of State, our diplomatic representative to the world is Catholic, and perhaps most surprising of all, his holiness, Pope Leo XIV is American. And the situation for Catholics in the United States today is, therefore, far different than it has been these past 250 years when we have been examining the kinds of questions that we will revisit today.
And we have a truly stellar lineup of jurists, scholars, and public intellectuals to help us think through the relationship between Catholicism and the Declaration, culminating in our dinner this evening with our keynote speaker, Justice Brett Kavanaugh. But we’ll begin appropriately with a panel on the Declaration and the Catholic intellectual tradition. It’s my pleasure to introduce Professor Michael Promisel, an assistant professor of politics here at Catholic University, who has played a key role in planning today’s conference. I’m very grateful to Michael for all his help in planning this. So he’ll be moderating our first panel and I turn it over to you, Michael.
Michael Promisel:
All right. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to CUA and this wonderful conference we have prepared for you all throughout today. My name is Michael Promisel, I am in the Politics Department here, and I am truly honored and completely out of my league at this table of distinguished guests. Our panelists this morning were given no other prompt or provocation other than the title of the panel itself. So we have given them a rather broad bandwidth to roam, and as moderator, my job is to moderate that effort and see if we can make that conversation fruitful. Our order of business is each of our panelists, after I give a brief introduction, is going to give about 10 minutes of remarks, followed by a few questions from me and conversation between themselves, and then we’ll have the final 15 minutes or so for audience Q&A. So I’m now going to introduce our panelists in order of their presentations.
Vincent Phillip Muñoz is the Tocqueville Professor of Political Science and a concurrent Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame. He is the founding director of Notre Dame’s CCCG, the Center for Citizenship and Constitutional Government. Dr. Muñoz writes and teaches across the fields of constitutional law, American politics, and political philosophy, with a focus on religious liberty and the American founding. He has won NEH fellowships to support his most recent book “Religious Liberty and the American Founding: Natural Rights and the Original Meanings of the First Amendment Religion Clauses”, published in 2022 by the University of Chicago Press. He has articles related to that project in the American Political Science Review, the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, Notre Dame Law Review. You get it. Dr. Muñoz is an expert in political philosophy, especially that of James Madison.
Dean Brad Lewis specializes in politics and legal philosophy, especially in classical Greek thought and the theory of natural law. He holds a BA from the University of Maryland and a PhD from Notre Dame. He has published scholarly articles in Polity, The History of Political Thought, The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Communio, many others, and he is currently working on a book project provisionally titled “The Common Good and the Modern State”. He is the Dean of our School of Philosophy here at CUA. Yes, we have a whole school devoted to philosophy. He is a fellow at the Institute for Human Ecology.
Finally, Professor D.C. Schindler, who his work is concerned above all with shedding light on contemporary cultural challenges and philosophical questions by drawing on the resources of the classical tradition. He is a professor in the JPII Institute here at the Catholic University of America. He has published more than a dozen books, including two volumes of a planned trilogy on the nature of freedom with the University of Notre Dame Press and with Oxford University Press. He has more than 70 articles and book chapters appearing in several journals I’ve already mentioned, including Communio. Dr. Schindler studied in Great Books at Notre Dame, so we now have all three at the table united at that place, received a master’s degree in theology at the JPII Institute and completed his PhD here at CUA. So without further ado, Professor Muñoz, we welcome your remarks. Thank you.
Vincent Phillip Muñoz:
Last year we’re thinking America 250, what are we going to do? And I’m like, “Someone should do a conference on Catholicism and the Declaration of Independence.” I said that to Michael and Michael’s like, “Well, you are a professor at the University of Notre Dame. You should do that.” So I did what any good leader would do, I thought, “Joel, I’ll say, is very energetic. I’ll see if he wants to do this conference.” And Michael, and especially Joel, have really shepherded this to bringing us all here today. So a special thank you to Joel. Everything that’s good here about today is really his doing and it’s just delightful to be here at CUA. Gosh, I’m the one with the pagan education on the panel and I’m afraid that’s going to come through.
I thought I might begin to set us off by just bringing up a few topics that would be interesting to discuss at this panel and maybe all day today and as we proceed to celebrate our country’s 250th anniversary, points of agreement and perhaps disagreement between the political philosophy of the Declaration of Independence and the Catholic intellectual tradition, Catholic political thought. And just begin with the obvious. The political philosophy of the Declaration is much contested, and of course, Catholic political thought is a two century project with many voices, not all simply harmonious. And I come at these questions really as a student of the founding and less well-versed, especially with my colleagues, in Catholic political thought. But nonetheless, let me try to set out what I think are a few points of agreement, and then perhaps even most interestingly, points of disagreement. And I’m just going to assert these and we can talk about them if we see fit.
Points of agreement. I think both the Declaration and Catholic political thought agree that nature, or the natural law, is a standard by which political justice can be measured. The Declaration clearly, and I also think Catholic political thought can agree that all human beings are created equal. The Catholic idiom would be, “We are all created in the image of God.”
The Declaration contends that we’re equal and that we have all been endowed by the Creator with certain inalienable rights. Natural rights is not traditionally a theme of Catholic political thought, but I believe rights can be accommodated within the Catholic intellectual tradition. The Church clearly has embraced the idea of human rights since Vatican II. Dignitatis Humanae begins, I’m quoting here, “A sense of the dignity of the human person has been impressing itself more and more deeply on the consciousness of contemporary men, and the demand is increasingly made that men should act on their own judgment, enjoying and making use of reasonable freedom, not driven by coercion, but motivated by a sense of duty.” And I think that’s actually the language of rights, not quite expressed that way, but, of course, Dignitatis Humanae is defending the right of religious freedom.
Pope John Paul II and Benedict XVI embraced the idea of human rights and Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, published in 2004, devotes an entire part of the Compendium to human rights, and this is section 152, again quoting, “The movement towards the identification and proclamation of human rights is one of the most significant attempts to respond effectively to the inescapable demands of human dignity.”
The tension between Catholicism and America on rights, if there is a tension, I think dissipates once we understand that the Founders conceived of the legitimate exercise of natural rights to be bounded by the natural law. Often I think that Catholics who are leery or suspicious of rights talk are suspicious of a certain version of rights talk, not the Founders’ understanding of rights. To have a natural right of free speech, at least in the Founders’ understanding, is to be able to speak one’s own mind within the bounds of reason. The natural law is the law of reason. There’s no natural right to trespass the natural law. That’s not a part of natural rights. Natural rights are bounded by nature. So the natural right to liberty is to have the freedom to direct one’s own life within the bounds of the natural moral law. The Founders believe natural rights have natural limits. And here, I think the Catholic understanding of rights is very similar, if not the same, as the Founders’ understanding. The Founders did not understand rights to be simply as trumps in a libertarian sense of the term.
Okay. So those are points of, I think, agreement that we’ll find out. What about the idea of the right to revolution? I mean, the Declaration of Independence is announcing the American Revolution. Does the Catholic Church accept the idea of a right of revolution? Well, I’m not really sure, to be honest. But last night in that, I thought, “Well, what if we looked at the American Revolution in light of just war theory? Is there a just cause?”
First principle of just war theory. Well, the Americans certainly thought so. They wanted to throw off a king whose long train of abuses and usurpations. The is a designed to reduce us, the American people, under absolute despotism. Now, I say this, my former colleague at Notre Dame, Mark Noll, would always like to needle me. He said, “It wasn’t actually that bad in 1776.” The Founders exaggerated things. I’m not a historian. I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know that Mark Noll is Canadian.
Did the Founders have the right intention? Another criteria of just war. Well, their intention was to institute new government that will most likely affect the safety and happiness of the American people. Is there a reasonable probability of success? Well, I don’t know about in 1776, but it ended up pretty well. Was it a measure of last resort and of proportionality? This would actually require a lot more historical knowledge than I could certainly present, but the Founders certainly thought the long train of abuses. “Look, we are forced into this position.” And I think if you read the pamphlet literature, especially from early 1770s to 1776, they thought it was of last resort and that revolution was a proportional response.
Now, I skipped over one criteria, importantly, which I presume the students in the school of philosophy will know, but was it done by legitimate authority? The revolution is done under the authority of the people themselves. We the people. And here I think things get interesting. In the Founders’ view, the people have a right to revolution because legitimate government is established by consent. The people, therefore, can withdraw their consent and establish new governments to affect their safeness and happiness.
For much of the Catholic intellectual tradition, especially that part of Catholic political thought that takes its bury from Aristotle, consent is not a constituent aspect of political legitimacy. What is essential in this traditional Catholic political thought is that government secures the common good and that government cultivates virtue among its citizens. So it strikes me that the place of consent and the Founders’ assertion of the necessity of consent for legitimate government may be foreign or distant from the Catholic intellectual tradition. That’s just a suspicion, I’m not sure, but if there is this tension, let me make one comment about it.
Catholic political thinkers often start with the individual as embedded within a community, but what, we might ask, gives any particular community authority over any particular individual? Canada is lovely, but the Canadian government has no authority over me. I’m an American, so American officials have authority of me. But let’s say I came to believe that the American regime is unjust. I have a teenage son, this is true, and I’ve often thought I should ship him to Canada. No, no, sorry. I have a teenage son, and let’s say I come to believe that America’s engaged in an unjust war, and I don’t want my son to be subjected to being drafted when he turns 18. Now, let me be clear, this is not my position, but let’s say it is. Would it be illegitimate for me to renounce my citizenship, leave the country, and take my family with me? Can I not withdraw my consent to be subject to American rule and peacefully depart my home country?
Seems to me if you believe that people have a right to immigrate into America, you implicitly believe people can emigrate out of the country. And let’s say these Canadian officials would welcome me and invite my family to immigrate north. Would it not be the consent of the Canadian regime, through their representatives, and my consent in becoming part of the Canadian polity that gives Canada legitimate authority over me? It seems to me consent is all important. It seems to me that unless we are willing to say that individuals do not have a right to peacefully depart their own countries of birth, if we’re not willing to say that, we implicitly accept the idea that people can be held in their own countries against their will.
That’s the cost of saying consent is not necessary to political legitimacy. If we do not accept consent, we implicitly believe that actions like building the Berlin Wall are legitimate, at least if they foster the common good. So regarding consent, I think it would be worth exploring if the Declaration of Independence, in some ways, comprehends the natural law and natural justice more deeply and more profoundly than some of the traditions of Catholic political thought. Thank you.
Michael Promisel:
All right, Dean Lewis.
Brad Lewis:
Okay, this works? Yes. To consider the Declaration of Independence in light of the Catholic tradition of political thought is to consider a public document critically in light of the principles of sound practical reasoning, itself informed, in a case of Catholic political thought, by the gospel and the authoritative teachings of the Roman Catholic magisterium, acknowledging that the magisterium’s teachings concerning political life have, themselves, been circumspectly limited and informed throughout by the political philosophy of the Thomistic Aristotelian tradition applied to the circumstances of modern political life.
The Declaration was written by certain individual men, adopted and promulgated by other men at a particular historical moment, and ever since, been treated as an important public document and therefore understood by reference to the intersubjective meaning that subsequent generations of Americans have attributed to it. To analyze the thought of its authors and ratifiers with the methodology of the history of ideas yields interesting and important information, and one could treat it only that way, simply as a historical document, a part of our historical tradition, and that’s a very interesting way to treat it, it’s a fascinating document, but it’s not decisive in view of the document’s current continuing status as a public object that continues to serve as a normative anchor of our political institutions and practices. If we want to consider it that, then we have to think about it in a more complicated way, I think.
I take the features of that anchor, that is the Declaration to be principally, the commitment to the moral principle of human equality, the existence of certain fundamental natural human rights, and the requirement of political institutions recognize that equality and protect those rights, with the concomitant responsibility of political authorities to justify themselves and their actions before the bar of those moral principles. Taken in that way, the Declaration anchors our political institutions and practices in principles, I would say, altogether congruent with the Catholic tradition of political thought and modern Catholic social doctrine, and has served, historically, as a force for the diffusion of those principles to other countries and led to their embrace by other traditions. Americans, I think, can take this as a just cause for a not inexcusable pride, even while acknowledging the various ways in which our country has failed in its conduct to be equal to those anchoring principles sometimes.
The men who wrote and adopted the Declaration were not, of course, primarily, with very small exceptions, adherence to the Catholic tradition, and the political thought with which they were familiar, while including some important works from classical political philosophy, I think mainly of Cicero, was certainly more informed by thinkers like Montesquieu, Lacombe, Vattel, Burlamaqui, Pufendorf. They were, as Professor Muñoz has written elsewhere, natural law thinkers, and as he said today, they were natural law thinkers.
Now, their enlightenment version of natural law, and in fact, they’re natural law thinkers because in the 18th century, basically everybody was a natural law thinker. I mean, the alternatives to natural law didn’t become particularly dominant in any way until later in the 19th century, and really even in the 20th century. But pretty much that was the whole ballgame. However, they did have a particular version of natural law, an enlightenment version of natural law, and that version was rooted in premises that were, in some key respects, different from those of the Thomistic Aristotelian tradition.
One can debate just how much this should matter to us, but it is a part of the record. The metaphysical and epistemological principles of Locke, for example, were different in important ways from those of Aristotle and St. Thomas. But at the same time, politics is a practical enterprise informed by practical reason, the first principles of which are, as St. Thomas says, per se nota, known in themselves. Nevertheless, those principles can lead to different conclusions, especially when guided by collateral principles of a different sort, and some of the principles embraced by the Founders and their philosophical teachers were at odds with our tradition.
So I will confine myself to the principles that Professor Muñoz has emphasized, human equality, the existence of natural law, and the emphasis on consent as the principle of political legitimacy undergirding the familiar modern notions of the social contract. I take the principles of human equality to be unproblematic and very basic to sound political practice. The Founders certainly understood human equality by reference to a different metaphysical and theological notion than does the Catholic tradition. However, sound practical reasoning holds on the basis of a principle that is as close to self-evident as one can get, and there’s simply no good reason to hold that one human life is intrinsically more valuable than another, and therefore entitled to less respect and concern. That is to be treated as an object rather than as a person. There’s no good practical reason to do that.
Similarly, there are certain universally, rationally knowable, moral truths, and this was affirmed by modern thinkers and the Founders, even if we might disagree about some details. And here it’s important to keep in mind that Catholics disagree among themselves about many of these details, so to say that the disagreement about this is to make a remark that applies to human life, generally. The principles about which I think there could be some disagreement here, and Professor Muñoz has already kind of pointed to this, is the centrality of consent as the basis of political legitimacy.
The Catholic tradition is unanimous that the ultimate basis for coercive political authority is, in fact, divine authority. To root this authority and consent alone is to affirm the basis of government to be the wills of the aggregate of persons who make up the community, which means the wills of the majority. And this is the authority of force, as Locke himself acknowledged, and it is a dubious basis for laws that claim to bind the consciences of citizens and subjects. If all human beings are equal, when’s the authority of any person or group to bind in conscience any other person?
The Catholic tradition has always held that God’s authority alone binds consciences, starting with St. Paul’s letter to the Romans. The notion of the social contract is a fiction that’s meant hypothetically to explain the formation of communities or peoples, and that you leave aside constitutions and political communities in the ordinary sense and just think of a notion like that of a people, which has a certain relevance here where we’re thinking about the American founding. I mean, that process itself is, I think, still shrouded in mystery. And to this day, one of the most under-theorized elements in political life, even among political philosophers, the idea of how it is that a people, a distinct people, comes into being and how to explain that is something that really is still under theorized, I think, in a lot of ways.
How worried should we be about this particular disagreement? How ultimately divine authority comes to be exercised by human officials was a subject of debate by medieval theologians, and by early modernity, the main line of Catholic thinkers narrowed the scope of disagreement considerably, holding that the people communicated an authority invested in it by God to officials through a kind of constituent power, exercised through a constitution, whether it be written or unwritten.
Consent certainly enters into this process at a very high level, but also at the workaday level of legislatures and magistrates subject to the consent through the divisive regular elections and even plebiscite. And even to talk about consent, I’ll just say two things very quickly. One is that part of the problem of consent is a very slippery notion. How do you know when people have consented and what the basis of that is? In many respects, you say, “Well, why did you consent to this or that procedure or this or that judgment?” Because I concluded that it was practically reasonable. I concluded that, on balance, it was the best thing to do, given the most important moral of practical principles in view.
Well, then is it the case that the legitimacy of it is a function of your consent or is the legitimacy of it a function of the fact that it was a practically reasonable thing in and of itself and it’s what a reasonable person would have consented to or should have consented to? So it’s a kind of slippery notion in that way.
Having said that, if we say that we value the notion of consent of the governed, that can be interpreted in a lot of different ways too. I mean, sometimes when we say that, what we mean is that we prefer our politics to be a function of persuasion rather than coercion. Well, that’s a good thing. It should be a function of persuasion rather than coercion whenever possible and to the extent possible. And it also means that we prefer that to hold our political officials responsible through regular elections. By and large, that’s right. I think that’s the right thing to do. So certainly consent plays a role, a very important role, throughout the political system, I just don’t think it can carry the ultimate weight of justifying political authority in the way that I think maybe the Founders did, but that’s a more detailed question.
Now, this plebiscite selection were, altogether, reasonable, and once the majority of citizens have attained a baseline level of education, I think that to build consent into a political system, that becomes, as I think recent popes have taught, a kind of moral necessity. It would be wrong not to seek their consent. One can, therefore, interpret the principle of the Declaration in a way true to our tradition.
How much of a difference does this make? I think it makes a tangible difference in the way politics is practiced, but I acknowledge that it is not the view of the majority of our fellow citizens now, that is the specifically Catholic view, and I’ve mentioned about divine authority and so forth. And that means it’s up to us to argue for that view and to convince people of it, to make the case for it. Now that’s hard work, but it’s the work of any decent politics, I think. And decent politics, however homely the adjective may seem, is vastly superior to the available alternatives.
With those alternatives in mind, I want to make one last point. Professor Muñoz has emphasized the importance in the system of the Declaration, the importance that that system gave to religious freedom. This is a crucial point, I think, albeit one subject to quite a bit of contention among Catholic intellectuals in recent years. Some of those thinkers have held the principles of the Founders, that is the liberal political principles and institutions of the Founders, no reason to call them anything differently, to be responsible for all manner of religious and moral evils. To this, I would simply pose this question. In what country in the world is the Roman Catholic Church better off than it is in this country? The answer seems, to me, at any rate, obvious, and it would seem to explain why the American practice of religious freedom has been appreciated by such Catholic political thinkers as Jacques Maritain, Heinrich Rommen, and Joseph Ratzinger. Thank you.
Michael Promisel:
Yes. Those who are in the back of the room, please come have a seat. You are not interrupting us. Last, Professor Schindler.
D.C. Schindler:
Thank you. First, thank you to the organizers of the conference, Michael, Joel, and everyone involved. I was grateful for the invitation and a bit surprised. I’m an interloper, really, in political philosophy, coming from a perspective of metaphysics and philosophical anthropology, much more theoretical areas. But every once in a while, I enter into some of these questions. And I think maybe the perspective tends to provoke a little bit and there will be some things a bit provocative here, I think. So 10 minute paper, the edges are sharp still. They would be qualified in, if I had to, occasion to lay out the argument with a little more nuance.
So the argument I’d like to present briefly here has three basic points. First, the American founding was essentially anti-Catholic, not only de facto, so historically speaking, which is pretty obvious, I think, but as a matter of the inner logic of its governing ideas. Two, nothing can exclude the Catholic Church in principle, which means that the Church has, nevertheless, been, in some sense, present from the beginning of the founding in America, even if, inevitably, as a kind of outsider looking in, you and perhaps an indispensable outsider, but always something of an outsider looking in. And then three, echoing something like the logic of the happy fault that we’ve recently meditated on in the Church. The Church has the resources to reinterpret the notions that provide a basic frame for the liberal order, which was generated specifically as an alternative to the medieval forms of Christendom.
It’s evident to most, I think, if not to everyone, that liberalism, as a general order, is crumbling. And I would propose, though there’s not sufficient time for full arguing here, that the realities of the things affirmed in the Declaration, things like equality, rights, life, liberty, and happiness, as well as things of just natural law, consent, even, can best be salvaged through a recovery of the Catholic tradition precisely as authoritative.
So first point, according to John’s gospel, through Him, that is Jesus Christ, all things were made. Without Him, not even one thing was made that has been made. So there’s nothing at all in existence. Not just natural things, but man-made things, nothing at all, including institutions, that has not been created in God and for God. God, the Father, placed all things into the hands of the Son. So the whole cosmos belongs to Christ, which is to say the whole Cosmos is under the authority of Christ the King. This is what John Paul II meant when he opened his first encyclical by saying, “The redeemer of man, Jesus Christ, is the center of the universe and of history.”
The Catholic Church, moreover, represents the extension of Christ into the reality of time and space, abiding through the ages. The authority of Christ the King has been communicated to his body in the Church, which means that the whole of reality, including the political order, ultimately lies under the authority of the Catholic Church. It seems to me this has to be the starting point for any Catholic assessment of history and the political realities that we face. And I would suggest that typically when Catholics engage in this discussion, we typically take for granted the reality of the liberal order in general, the American version of the liberal order, and then we ask, to what extent can this be harmonized with Catholic faith? Where’s the overlap? Where’s the agreement? And it seems to me that that’s not the proper way to look at it from a Catholic perspective.
The absolute isn’t the American liberal political order to which the Catholic Church is relative, but the reverse. The Church has to be the starting point and one has to ask from a cap of the perspective about the reality of the American regime.
So the subordination of the political order to the Church that I’ve just presented, mentioned, insisted on, I guess, does not imply theocracy or integralism in its 19th century or its 21st century variations. Authority differs from power in its analogical logic, its tendency towards subsidiarity. Within the authority of the Church, and actually I would want to argue this is a decisive point, because of the authority of the Church, the political order has the relative autonomy and authority of its own, a kind of absoluteness of its own according to its proper responsibility in the temporal order.
The normal expression of this relationship is the Church’s anointing of the King in a quasi-sacramental conferral of autonomy that bears a fascinating analogy to the institution of sacramental marriage. Insofar as such marriages persist within the authority of the Church group without that, in the least, implying that the local priest makes all the family’s decisions. The family has perfect autonomy inside the authority of the Church. I would like to suggest that’s the way we should think of the political order. Some of the analogous.
This normal expression, so the anointed King, does not have to be realized in every political reality. So history can make this call what impossible, perhaps in some sense so contrary to custom as to be more or less absurd. I think that that is not excluded. But the principle cannot be positively rejected without one there, thereby placing oneself outside of the mind of the Church, outside the Church act.
When the first English Catholic settlers came to America, of course, lead to the state of Maryland, what came to be Maryland, they had to sign an oath of loyalty to the King of England that explicitly denied the temple authority of the Pope. Efforts were made to soften the language, but the Church never accepted this oath. Instead, it excommunicated those who signed. But even those who signed and who sincerely desired to be devoted citizens in the new world were held in suspicion by their neighbors, by their various rulers, and so forth.
I want to insist that this suspicion was justified, not because of any devious plotting of any sort, but because of a certain logical incompatibility. When Locke excluded Catholics in his letter on toleration, it wasn’t because he simply didn’t like this brand of Christianity, it’s because Catholicism doesn’t fit within the logic of liberalism. The colonists objected to the presence of Catholics because of what they called “the political monstrosity”. This phrase appears throughout of the early writings of an imperium in imperial. This is what Catholics presented. What is that? A kingdom within a kingdom. Catholics were under the authority of the Pope even when they, in a certain sense, rejected that by signing the oath. And because of this, they could never properly come under the authority of the English king or eventually under the authority like governing bodies of the colony states, eventually the nation.
From the beginning and to this day, Catholics have sought to resolve the problem by effectively renouncing the authority to the Pope, making him a merely spiritual authority, separating him from the temporal order. That appears to have been the only solution that would have been practicable in those particular circumstances. It was not possible to recall, in those conditions, the actual Catholic partisan of relative autonomy of the political order. For Her part, the Church consistently rejected the liberal interpretation of the relation between the spiritual-temporal order to one after another. And even in Dignitatis Humanae, there’s the big question, what kind of development that is. Is it in continuity with the long tradition or is it a break with the tradition? It’s a big question that we could discuss, but I won’t here. So that’s all under point one. Point two and point three are much briefer.
Point two. The church, nevertheless, landed on these shores, and Catholics participated in various ways in the decisive moments of the establishment and the growth of the new nation. The history of the Church in America has been complicated, as we know. Great things have been accomplished by the Church. Catholic individuals have borne witness to the faith, not just privately, but in some cases publicly, for example, through the establishment of hospitals and schools and so forth. On the other hand, there have been moments of exclusion and persecution from the anti-Catholic laws widespread among the original colonies, which were quite brutal, actually, to the violence of the no-nothings, to the Ku Klux Klan, to the discrimination against Catholic immigrants until not so long ago.
It seems to be the case that Catholic figures have begun to become especially large to the contemporary political landscape, perhaps especially because we’re now entering a period in which the traditional liberal convictions, which, again, are both historically and logically anti-Catholic, have become less and less compelling to people, to say the least. But I would like to suggest no matter how significant Catholic figures have become, no matter how deeply they enter into contemporary politics, they, we, will always be, at a fundamental way, on the outside looking in. It has to be this way to the extent that the Catholic Church is not recognized precisely as authoritative. That was point two.
Point three. What would it mean to recognize Catholicism as authoritative? I think quick responses to this question, which either simply recall models from the past, or on the other hand, reject the notion as just absurd, are improved. It seems to me that the matter needs to be approached in a more patient and organic fashion. Founded on the idea, and energized, really, by the idea that because the world has, in fact, been created in the Jesus Christ of actual history, the proposal of this authority can never be simply foreign to anyone at all.
In the present moment, one thing we can and should do is show how some of the notions at the heart of the Founders’ vision, so I mentioned freedom, rights, natural law, consent, equality, some of these things, these realities have been unraveling in dramatic faction in the last decades. So I think we can show that that’s the case, we can demonstrate that this unraveling is substantially due to the severing of these ideas from a living tradition, and we can propose that they can be saved even as they’re fundamentally reinterpreted by being grafted back onto the bind, so to speak, or more directly, by being rooted, once again, in the reality of the Christian tradition. If we have a chance to discuss it, so take some of the examples of what would mean equality or consent, what it would mean from a Catholic perspective and from outside.
From a Catholic perspective, equality doesn’t mean the same thing as it was meant and the Founders made. It simply doesn’t. From a Catholic perspective, equality, for instance, is not only compatible with hierarchy, but in a way it depends on hierarchy. You can’t have equality unless there’s hierarchy. That’s certainly not the way we normally think of things. So one could go through all of the fundamental, I think, American values and institutions and show how a Catholic perspective would transform them, but I would argue eventually bring hope to our continuing to maintain these things. So you see it’s a kind of a paradoxical. Maybe the Catholic Church will turn out to be the brother who is cast in the well. That might be a little too much to say, but that’s sort of what I’d like to put on the table here for discussion. Thank you very much.
Michael Promisel:
So I’m sure we are all eager to hear our panelists share some reflections and commentary on one another’s thoughts, so I invite each of you in the questions that I pose, so long as we don’t go too far afield, to offer some reflections to one another’s remarks. But this is, after all, a conference honoring the Declaration, and so I want to start us off by asking each of you this question, what are the primary intellectual sources for the Declaration of Independence? Other than the pen of Jefferson, perhaps, maybe under the guidance of Adams or Franklin. How should we teach this document? Maybe say to students at Notre Dame or CUA? Is it Locke all the way down? Is there more on the table? What is, historically and philosophically, the foundation under which this document comes out? Maybe we can talk a little bit more about the Declaration. Anybody want to take that up?
Vincent Phillip Muñoz:
Well, I’m tempted to say the Foundation is the gospel, just to get a rise out of Professor Schindler. Great to be reminded why Protestants thought Catholics couldn’t be good American citizens. I’m less interested in who, is it Locke or wherever, but in what? In the foundations of the Declaration’s teaching. And I suspect what Professor Schindler is objecting to is the idea that all men are created equal and that no one by nature has authority to rule over others.
Jefferson said in 1826, right before the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, a big celebration, I think it was here in Washington or in Philadelphia, I can’t remember, Jefferson was invited to the celebration, he’s weeks away from dying, and this is the penultimate letter in his life, and he writes to the organizers, paraphrasing here, that he hopes that the Declaration will teach that the mass of mankind were not born with saddles on their back, nor other men born booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately by the grace of God.
And so the foundation the Declaration is teaching is the idea that we have been created by the Creator with the ability to govern ourselves according to the natural law, which is also authored by God. And I suspect the interesting development, I don’t know, I don’t want to put words in Professor Schindler’s mouth, but the response, I think, is going to be something like, “That’s not true, that we were created to be governed by the Church and that the Church has authority to govern all of us.” And that’s a version of divine right that the Founders rejected.
Michael Promisel:
Professor, you were invoked.
D.C. Schindler:
Yeah, may I? I was a little surprised about the idea that I would object to the idea that everyone is born equal. I mean, I think that’s absolutely true. And I guess your comment there, it illustrates the point that I was making. I would want to absolutely insist on that point and then argue that, in fact, that the hierarchical sense, actually, a sense of order, the rejection of hierarchy is a rejection of order, simply one ends up with something like what Professor Lewis was pointing out. The further you get to a pure derivation of power from the people without any sense of a from-above dimension, the more order becomes a matter of force. And that turns out to undermine equality.
So part of my argument is I would want to go further than Professor Muñoz on the importance of equality in a certain sense by rooting it in, I think, something that can actually sustain it in ways that are hard to see today in America, actually. I think anybody can see how faithful have we been to equality here.
The letter from Jefferson that Professor Muñoz cited a couple of lines before he makes that observation about not having saddles on our backs, he says that he looks forward to the day. He thinks that America is beginning a movement that’s going to eventually take over the whole world, and he looks forward to the day when we will finally be rid of monkish ignorance and superstition. In other words, he’s saying, “I can’t wait until the Catholic Church is dead and gone, and we can actually have freedom.”
And it seems to me that that’s precisely this concern that I have, that we tend not to be aware of these elements. We’ve spent so many decades learning this accommodation for all sorts of good reasons, Catholics’ works, Catholics had to show that they… There are all sorts of practical reasons one can offer for it, but it just seems to me now is the moment when we’re starting to see things really fall apart. Now is the moment where we actually have to think through to the real roots of the values that we hold dear as Americans and be willing to think about them in, I think, more radical sorts of ways. The word radical is a dangerous one thing these days, but I mean it just in terms of looking at the actual roots of these notions.
Vincent Phillip Muñoz:
But I think your roots are a straw man. You’re suggesting that the Declaration of Independence stands for Steven Douglas’ position in the Lincoln-Douglas debates. The debate between Lincoln and Douglas was, to put it in Catholic terms, does the natural law limit the people? And the question was slavery in the territories. And Stephen Douglas’s position was, “Well, if people want slavery, they can have slavery.” And he said, “The people decide what’s right and wrong,” so that the people decide whether the Black man is a man or not. But that’s Stephen Douglas’s position.
You’re saying that position is the authentic American position, but that’s just wrong. That’s not America. Lincoln was America. And Lincoln said, “No, the majority can’t say a black man is not a man, because that’s established by nature, and nature must be followed because nature and nature is God. We’re endowed by the Creator with certain inalienable rights.” I understand the Catholic intellectual tradition is complicated, but you can’t criticize America and then not understand what America is. And you’re saying America is Roe versus Wade. America is Stephen Douglas and that’s just wrong. You’ve got to criticize what America actually is to have a valid criticism of America.
Michael Promisel:
Professor Schindler. And then maybe Dean Lewis, and we’ll get to the next question.
D.C. Schindler:
No, no. I guess I’m proposing something, I think it’s more paradoxical. I’m actually trying to recover the authentic America, but recover it on terms that the Founders wouldn’t have recognized, something like that. But you mentioned the significance of nature. I mean, that’s a really interesting question, and I would absolutely agree with your principle, that these things have to be rooted in nature. But I would ask, where is the concept of nature now? How it hasn’t fared? Does anybody recognize any authority to nature? The authority, the language of the natural law disappeared overnight and without a trace and legal reasoning in the mid 19th century, and arguably before. So what’s my point?
It’s kind of interesting. There was a piece that the political philosopher Joshua Mitchell at Georgetown wrote, and he was talking about religion in America and he identified the Roman Catholic, the Eastern Orthodox, and then what he called Hebraic Christianity, and assigned a kind of a concept to each of these. With the Roman Catholic Church, he associated it with nature. So in a way, I think it was too simplistic, but he made that point. And he said that the concept of nature has never really had any play in Hebraic Christianity, and he also argued that Hebraic Christianity was the dominant one in America.
Now, it’s kind of interesting. I mean, if you were to ask, where is the discussion of natural law? And if there’s anyone talking about the natural law, who’s talking about it? Catholics, right? For some reason. And why is that? And here would be my argument. That, in order to have any relative expression of authority, it has to be ultimately rooted in an ultimate principle of authority. And natural law, for it to actually have the authority that Professor Muñoz, quite rightly, is insisting on, I think has to be approached from within the context of an authoritative tradition. And I think if you lose that, then defending natural law in the contemporary context is not much different from saying, “I like natural law, and I hope you like it too,” or, “Let me give you some reasons for it.” But is reason authoritative now? It seems to me all of these fundamental realities need to be rooted in an authoritative tradition. So it’s about defending the original inspiration of America rather than simply dismissing it.
Vincent Phillip Muñoz:
But our authoritative tradition or our ancient faith, as Lincoln said, is the Declaration of Independence. And you’re trying to teach young Catholics that it’s anti-Catholic. If you were actually true to tradition, your own tradition, you’d embrace the Declaration and a proper understanding, but you’re trying to undermine it.
D.C. Schindler:
Dean Lewis.
Brad Lewis:
Sitting here in the middle like an innocent civilian trying to evade collateral damage that incendiary devices always create. So let me just make two quick points. One is I think, and I can’t remember if maybe it was one of the questions that you wanted to answer, Professor Promisel, that you wanted to ask at some point about what in some ways the Founders, and there’s lots of thinkers, that was the original question, because they relied on Locke as one of them, not the only one. There’s lots of other ones. And then there’s lots of Founders, too, Jefferson penned the Declaration, but he was the only one. But what it was that they were reacting against. And I don’t think it does, quite to say, they were reacting against the Catholic Church in some ways.
Now it would be more accurate, I would think, to say that they’re reacting against France. And what’s behind that is the fact that, in France, you had an arrangement where the political institutions had interwoven themselves with the Church in a way that made it difficult to separate one from the other, and the worst practices of the state became associated with Catholicism in such a way as to make people think that it was inherently oppressive and so forth. And that old regime is violently overthrown, again, largely in reaction to a lot of that, and they’re also reacting to the regime of the Stuart Kings. Some of whom were sympathetic to Catholicism because they want to have a kind of absolute regime in England that existed in France and so forth. None of these things are intrinsically related to the Catholic faith, and I think it’s important to kind of separate them out.
The other thing is people may not talk about natural law, but if they’re making moral arguments to one another and if they’re disagreeing about morality and making rational arguments about morality, they’re talking about the natural law, whether they call it that or not. I mean, natural law just means morality as we understand it on the basis of natural reason. Say Thomas Aquinas were here in this room right now and I handed him my copy of John Stewart Mills Utilitarianism and I asked him to read it and then, “What do you think of it, Friar?” He would say, “Well, it’s a very interesting, although fundamentally erroneous book about natural law because it’s…” So whether people want to use that terminology or not is kind of aside the point. If we’re quarreling with one another about morality or we’re doing it on the basis of reasons, we’re talking about natural law, and there really isn’t anything else to talk about.
Michael Promisel:
All right, here’s my next question. Here’s the question. I’ll substantiate it with an example. To what extent do we get a single or coherent political philosophy from the founding? I mean, sure, the Declaration is a text which was signed by many Founders, but is it appropriate to speak of a single American political philosophy? And the example is we here in the Carroll Forum have taken Charles Carroll of Carrollton as our namesake, the only Catholic signer of the Declaration. Charles Carroll was classically educated, steeped in St. Thomas, in Cicero. He actually, sorry, Professor Muñoz, hated Locke. Maybe you’ll excuse him for that.
But Carroll was actually asked in letters by his fellow Catholics why he didn’t just defect to France, actually. And Carroll says, basically, “Because I want to live and be free,” and even under the religious persecution of England, “This is my choice and I am proud to be a patriotic American.” So I bring up the example of Carroll. He’s not often talked about. I’m not sure that he was fully on board with Jefferson all the way down. Is it more true to say that we get a pluralistic sort of political philosophy from the Declaration of the founding era where, if we make it all one thing or all something else, we’re doing a disservice. Any responses?
Vincent Phillip Muñoz:
So the way I would explain it is you could look at America kind of like the natural law itself. There are core principles which all the Founders agreed to, and those would be expressed in the state constitutions, especially the bill of rights and the state constitutions, and the Declaration of Independence. All men are created equal. Rights are endowed by the Creator. Government is via consent. So I think those core principles are the same. A right of religious freedom.
The further you move away from those principles, you have differences. Really, their differences not in principle, but in policy. Does religious freedom mean that to what extent can the state nurture religion? Well, everyone can agree that the state can’t make you go to church or prohibit you from going to church, but disagree on the extent to which the state can support religious education or not. But that policy difference doesn’t imply a difference in principle. So I think the core principles of natural rights, government by consent are shared universally. And that’s not too hard to document. But when you get to the business of how do we protect those core principles in institutions and governmental forums, there you’re going to get difference. Because the differences are differences on the means to achieve the ends, but not the ends themselves.
Michael Promisel:
Other responses?
D.C. Schindler:
Do you want to go?
Brad Lewis:
Go ahead.
D.C. Schindler:
I agree about the fundamental principles being shared, but then diversity as you move away from those, and I think you’ve identified a key shared view. And the right to religious freedom, a lot of people have pointed to that as being the heart of the matter. I think there’s some truth to that. And that’s why the one thing that basically everybody in the founding agreed on is that Catholics were dangerous. The anecdote that Professor Muñoz mentioned about how bad were things that provoked the revolutionary war. Some people were saying, “Well, things weren’t really that bad.”
And some of the Founders who wanted the Revolutionary War were worried about that, that there wasn’t enough outrage. And historically, this is something I’ve learned from non-Catholic historians like Gordon Wood. I think he’s a really fascinating figure. But one of the ways that the Revolutionary War was provoked was precisely … Patrick Henry had a lot to do with this, but suggesting that King George was sympathetic to Catholics. It was precisely calling to sort of setting into relief that the threat that Catholics pose, especially. So it is kind of interesting, more than I think we tend to realize, again, that that’s something that was sort of largely a common enemy. Yeah, I’ll just say that.
Michael Promisel:
One more question from me and then we’ll open it up, so start preparing your questions for our panelists. I’ll call on those in a moment. It is the 250th. 250th is our anniversary, so I’m going to invite one final reflection from each of our panelists on how we ought to honor the Declaration in this year, and especially at Catholic universities, how this ought to be done and how this document should be taught. So any final reflections from the 250th before we turn it over to the audience? Dean Lewis, you want to start us off?
Brad Lewis:
Well, we’re here at the Catholic University of America and Founders Day is this week. We always like to think of our Founder as Leo XIII. And Leo XIII wrote two encyclical letters on the United States, one in 1895 called “Longinqua”, which was not terribly long, but not terribly short either, and another very short one in 1902, I think, just about a year before he died. And in both of those letters, he effusively remarked on the vitality of the Church in the United States and how lively it was and celebrated that fact. And in part, he attributed it to the fact that the laws and the political system in the United States allowed for this, specifically, that they didn’t oppress the Church.
Of course, he’s writing the 19th century when a lot of political oppression of the Church was going on in Europe precisely as a reaction to the kind of untoward system of the Church’s relationship to political authority that had existed before that time. You don’t have anticlericalism in places that you didn’t have clericalism. So I think Catholics can be very grateful for the way that the Church has flourished in a place where it began as a very tiny minority of people, and I think the Declaration of Independence has important things to do with that.
D.C. Schindler:
Professor, shall I? I agree with all of that. And I don’t want to be misunderstood. I believe we all need to love our country and be patriots. I think to be human is to love your family and to love your country, and that’s an extension of the family. I simply think that kind of love, first of all, as we all know, love that excludes criticism isn’t love. So to love our country is not to exclude criticism, but it does mean, I think, that while I completely agree we need to cultivate a gratitude and deepen our love, I think for Catholics, it’s always going to be more painful than for others. And if it’s not painful at all, I think we don’t love our country enough or we’re not Catholic enough, that it’s a painful love, but let’s celebrate.
Vincent Phillip Muñoz:
Yeah. I can hear my dean whispering in the back of my ear saying, “Well, the best way to celebrate America at the Catholic University, of course, is to give to those sinners support.” I’m sort of programmed to say things like this, shamefully. No, doing exactly what we’re doing here today, actually, looking at the Catholic intellectual tradition and scrutinizing our own tradition, political tradition in light of it, and saying what we think. The remarkable thing is this conversation that we’re having, as fruitful and interesting as it is, it’s not going to happen anywhere else. And that’s one of the great virtues of CUA and Notre Dame, and for that, I’m very, very thankful.
Michael Promisel:
All right. We are now going to have a moderated Q&A from the audience, and what that means is I will select a question, a questioner. You will receive the microphone. Please ask a question. Don’t give a comment. Leave your comments for coffee afterwards. If you can ask a question, we will have the microphone come to you. You could target your question at one of the panelists or the whole panel, and then they’re welcome to respond. First question, this gentleman right here.
Vincent Phillip Muñoz:
Why don’t you have them say who they are?
Michael Promisel:
Yeah. Please say who you are when you get the microphone.
J.P. Hogan:
JP Hogan, Villanova class of ‘87, 10 years after Pope Leo XIV. But in some ways, I want to start… The question I’ll get to the revolution question, but it’s like what was in print is the first question. It was the Protestant Bible that was available for people to take into the wilderness and study their own religion that way. So I think there might’ve had to be a different Declaration of Independence to be declared independent from Catholicism since the revolution was for separating to a more perfect union would be notifying right of a king. So I’m getting to the revolution thing.
But if the natural law is you’re under God naturally before under government, the Catholicism, where is it with you’re under God before under government? But to revolution, Jefferson in his Bible kept the parable of the tares, and he also suggested revolution might be needed every 30 years maybe. But with tares, people of the bad people are supposed to be round up. So where is revolution justified by the buildup of bad people exists within the Catholic tradition, within the New Testament. Other than that, I guess the Catholics wouldn’t have seen it as in blasphemy.
I think the one thing, which reminds me, in your book, Muñoz, you seem to have a paragraph saying you don’t see the Constitution as a moral document. You were studying the Founders and I was reading through it and I think you get to the point where you said that the constitution isn’t a moral document. And I’m not sure that’s for now, but the idea of Catholicism with tares, if we still have tares, people of the bad people building up in society, does that then become incarceration, and slavery as possible because you have a subclass?
Michael Promisel:
Any responses?
Vincent Phillip Muñoz:
I’ll be honest, I’m not sure that I fully understand the question, but I think there is one thing to say about Jefferson, and I think here, Professor Schindler and I would agree. Look, with Jefferson in particular, you could throw Franklin in here, there’s what Jefferson says in his public documents and then what he hopes will happen. In many ways, Jefferson was anti-Catholic. That doesn’t mean the natural rights articulated in the Declaration of Independence are anti-Catholic. I mean, Jefferson was a real progressive. We think we’re progressive when it comes to technology. No one would buy a 2005 TV, right? A 2026 TV is going to be better. We just assume that. Jefferson thought that about moral and political matters too, that the world was going to be progressive, and the only reason we’re being held back is because of monkish superstition.
Well, he was wrong about that, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have natural rights, we’re not equal. So I think those distinctions are important to keep in mind. Jefferson was an outlier in this, Franklin, maybe, to some extent. But Jefferson knew in his public documents, like the Declaration of Independence, it’s not right to say he’s the author of the Declaration of Independence, he’s the drafter and he was drafting a public document of the American people. So I think it’s a mistake to say Jefferson had these private suspect beliefs and therefore the Declaration of Independence is suspect. That’s just a methodological failure in how to read texts.
Michael Promisel:
Any other responses to questions?
Vincent Phillip Muñoz:
We should get as many as possible. Yeah.
Michael Promisel:
All right.
Vincent Phillip Muñoz:
And please keep your questions short so we can get to many of them.
Michael Promisel:
This gentleman right here.
Ken Masugi:
Hi, Ken Masugi. Maybe this helps Phil out. I’m not sure. If it sinks him, that’s fine too. Two ways of stating life, political and civic life in America. One is, “Every man owns himself.” More or less a quote from John Locke. The other is, “Every man is a child of God.” And the problem in American politics is to see which proposition prevails at which moment. And the Catholics have to be snuck in here as a part of Christianity.
Vincent Phillip Muñoz:
Yeah. I don’t think it’s true that… Well, Locke doesn’t quite say every man owns himself. And actually he says explicitly the opposite. He says, “Every man owns his own labor,” which is to say no one else owns your labor. If someone else owns your labor, you’re a slave. If Michael owns my labor, that means I’m a slave to Michael. So the self-ownership of labor, I think, is non-controversial. Locke says, “We don’t own our own lies because we’re not the author of our own lives. The Creator is,” and this is why he has a prohibition against suicide.
And I think that, in that sense, the proper way to understand the Declaration is that you could say that we have been entrusted with our own lives, but not to do whatever we want. We’ve been given the gift of reason our capacities. We have the gift of reason. We have the gift of freedom. And what it means to have our own lives or to be entrusted with our own lives is our dignity lies in directing our own lives with our reason in accordance with the natural moral law. That is the teleological foundation of rights. That is the underlying order or teleology of the American founding. You have been created by God to live freely according to the natural moral law in your political life, and then to fulfill your obligations to God through your churches who have authority that’s outside of the political community.
In fact, we limit the political community because that more important religious authority is superior to the political community. So limited government means there’s certain things that governing officials can’t do. Why not? Because those higher authorities over the soul are the possession of the Church. And here, I think this is the essential way that the American experiment is perfectly compatible with Catholicism.
Michael Promisel:
Maybe a question from a student, I think??
D.C. Schindler:
Can I just say one sentence?
Michael Promisel:
Yeah, yeah.
D.C. Schindler:
It’s a longish sentence, but one sentence. Locke actually derives the ownership of labor from the absolute ownership of one’s own body, which is quite explicitly contrary to Christian teaching, to the Bible, to the cannon tradition, and that was always understood and I think are defensively a condition for freedom, true freedom, and the opposite of slavery.
Michael Promisel:
A student question. In the back there.
Carl:
Hi. Thank you all. So I’m Carl. I’m a PhD student here in the Politics Department. So my question is, liberalism seems to be specifically formulated to balance the vices of men against each other. So if we consider Machiavelli’s observation that there are two humors in every city, those who wish to oppress and those who don’t want to be oppressed. When the Founders say that all men are created equal, what precisely does that equality mean in light of these two seemingly different humors that exist in different people in society? And then how does the Catholic understanding of political equality differ from, perhaps, original intent of the Founders?
Brad Lewis:
The use of the word “liberalism” is a vexed thing, I think. I think, again, one can say there are certain historical thinkers we associate with liberalism and they have certain views. I don’t think that there’s any kind of one-to-one correspondence, in many cases, between the work of certain political philosophers and the character of political institutions. I think the causality involved in the formation of political institutions and practices is always pretty complicated. And so you have to take each of those things on its own.
And whenever anybody says, “Well, liberalism says this or liberalism is this,” you always have to ask what’s meant by liberalism. And I think the safe ground here is that there’s a large tradition of political practice and political institutions that exist in the modern world that is under the umbrella of liberalism that has to do, basically, with limited government, the protection of fundamental rights, responsibility of political officials by means of regular elections. And I find it hard to quarrel with any of that, even though I might well want to quarrel with Locke or Machiavelli or any number of other modern political philosophers. I don’t know why anybody would want to live in a modern state which is defined by a monopoly on the means of the legitimate use of violence through technologically very sophisticated and sweeping means where we didn’t have those elements of the liberal political tradition that limit that authority. And a lot of that goes back to thinkers like the Founders who did directly create a lot of these institutions. So I just want to make that point.
Michael Promisel:
I saw another question over here.
Joseph Mott:
Hi, Joseph Mott. I’m also a doctoral student in theology. My question is similar to the previous one, it is basically, to what extent are we bound by the ideas of the 18th century when interpreting the Declaration of Independence for the present? And to give some concrete examples, all the concepts invoked in the Declaration are from Roman law. Even the idea of consent by the governed. I was surprised to hear that people thought that that was brand new. I mean, Nicholas of Cusa writes a whole book about decentrality of consensus in church and state, but he grounds that in the Trinity and the marriage between Christ and the Church. And in Roman law, consensus pertains to marriage, principally. So lex naturalis, equalitas, libertas, all these things are already in Roman law and they’re reflected on throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and I think much more robustly dealt with than in the 18th century. So for the present, to what extent are we really bound by the limits of the 18th century?
Vincent Phillip Muñoz:
Well, I don’t feel limited by the 18th century, and I think Professor Schindler wants to put us back in the 12th century. Look, these things, we have a certain deference or respect or engagement with the Declaration because it’s our tradition, but what makes America worthwhile is not simply because it’s ours, it’s because it’s a good tradition. Ultimately, because it’s justifiable, it does what a government is supposed to do, certainly imperfectly from the beginning. Lincoln said what makes America so interesting is, in the midst of a political revolution, Jefferson and the Founders put timeless truths in a revolutionary political document.
So the real question is, and this is a question I appreciate, I know I’ve been a little bit sharp, but I very much appreciate Professor Schindler and Professor Lewis’s reservations because America is good if the principles of the regime are true, but they’re not true for the 18th century. They’re either true or not true. So to the extent you see it, these principles were echoed in Roman law, maybe even more deeply investigated in Roman law, well, if that helps show that they’re true, all the better. If it shows that they’re not fully true, we should have that conversation as well. Look, we’re bound by the truth, and this panel and all our efforts today at universities are to understand the truth, right?
Michael Promisel:
Professor?
D.C. Schindler:
That is well said, Professor, and agree a thousand percent, as people say these days. But it’s not the 12th century. I think we need to root the principles of the Declaration in the fullness of time, yesterday, today, and forever, that the 12th century is not adequate. So it’s a matter of recovering the whole tradition rather than… Part of the problem is there’s a break. There is a wound, there is a break, and that’s what we need to think about and find some way to heal, that there’s a radical division that transforms everything. So it’s not a matter of, just ad hoc, “Is this principle okay or is that principle okay?”
It seems to me that the larger question, and we’re getting to the moment where we really need to think in a really profound sort of way, along the lines, one of my favorite political philosophers is Hannah Arendt, who argues that there’s a trinity of notions, tradition, authority, and religion. And she says, “This is a trinity of things that stand or fall together. If one disappears, all three disappear.” And she says it’s the unity of the three that actually makes political politics possible. And it seems to me that the break in authority, and in a certain sense in tradition, which transforms the meaning, religion, it doesn’t mean what it used to mean, a religion now means faith, which is a totally different sort of thing, totally different sort of thing, that somehow we need to reconnect with that whole that preceded the break. And it’s not just in the 12th century, it’s in eternity, really.
Michael Promisel:
Professor Alicea.
Joel Alicea:
We only have a few minutes here, but this question is for Professor Schindler. I really appreciated his remarks, and I thought they were very provocative and appropriately so for this panel. I thought that your remarks spent a lot of time making the affirmative case for a Catholic conception of political authority, government, and then kind of took for granted that what you were laying out was incompatible with what the Declaration says, but I don’t think you actually showed that.
And just to give one example, your understanding of political authority is ultimately deriving from God, a divine source. The Declaration is silent as to what the ultimate source of political authority is, it says that the government derive their just powers from the consent of the government, but that, it simply means that there’s a transmission of authority from the people to the government, which is exactly the same notion that you would find in Bellarmine, Kajet, and Suárez, a whole lot of natural law thinkers that long predate the Declaration. So it seems to me that pretty much nothing that you said is incompatible with the Declaration on its face, and I was hoping you’d say a little bit more as to why you think there’s an actual conflict, like an incompatibility, between the two. And unfortunately, I’m only giving you 3 minutes to do that.
D.C. Schindler:
Yeah. In a certain sense, there’s absolutely. In a way, I kept saying there’s nothing in the Declaration that’s not compatible with the Church, but I would just want to say that we tend to think of that in exactly the wrong way. We tend to take it as an absolute and then see how we can accommodate the Church to it. I think the thing is we need to accommodate the American founding to the Catholic Church, which is a very different kind of thing. And there’s no incompatibility.
The thing that I think is a little more provocative than we normally are used to is it seems to me that the divine origin of authority needs to be mediated through the Church. And that’s a little more complicated. This is why the divine right of kings is not at all a Catholic idea. It was a Protestant idea. It was a very modern idea. It’s not a Catholic idea. That’s that the king somehow is absolute because he has a direct line to God, that doesn’t pass through the Church, and therefore the whole Western tradition, you see what I mean? That this is why we’re talking about the whole tradition that has to be the root of these things.
Now, as I’ve said over and over again, it doesn’t mean that we can’t do anything unless we have a anointed king, but it does seem to me that if we take for granted that the concept of anointed king implies slavery, that the very notion of a king is incompatible with freedom, that that means that we are fundamentally rejecting an ultimate principle of authority, which is going to then get spelled out through all of these sorts of things that we’re undergoing, in fact, now.
Michael Promisel:
Well, if this panel is any sign of what is to come for the rest of the day, we are in for quite a ride, folks. Please join me in thanking our wonderful panel.
Joel Alicea:
Thank you for listening to Ordain and Establish. Subscribe to our podcast, and if you’d like to learn more, visit our website at cit.catholic.edu.
