Increasing Concern About Government and the Social Order, by Dr. Jeff Mirus

By Dr. Jeff Mirus, Catholic Culture, Aug 25, 2020

I find it both instructive and hopeful that Catholic opinion is experiencing a fresh interest in the nature of society and its appropriate governance. Most readers may already know, for example, that the political philosophy of Integralism is making a comeback. This is the theory, long thought discredited, that the principles of the Catholic faith ought explicitly to guide not only private piety but public affairs. Exactly how this is described, of course, varies with both individual theorists and the relative strength or weakness of the Catholic population in each place.

At its best, Integralism could simply be a restatement of Gelasian dualism (named for Pope Gelasius, the late fifth-century pontiff who articulated it). Gelasius recognized that there were two fundamental authorities in human affairs, the spiritual and the temporal. The spiritual authority was the Church and the temporal authority was the political government in each region. The temporal government is charged with the political ordering of temporal affairs, including all the prudential decisions which that involves. But the Church alone has the spiritual authority to determine the legitimate ends of temporal rule, as well as the morality of the means adopted to achieve those ends.  …

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