When Cardinal Robert Prevost chose Leo XIV as his papal name, he suggested that his papacy would advance some of the themes of Leo XII's papacy. Those conservative Catholics who argue for Catholic Integralism might infer from this that Leo XIV will revive the Integralism that can be found in some of the encyclicals of Leo XIII.
The integralists argue that in any good social order, the government will coercively enforce belief in the doctrines of the Catholic Church as the one true religion. Against this, I have claimed that since religious pluralism is natural to human beings, integralism's attempt to suppress religious pluralism contradicts human nature. The evolutionary science of religious pluralism support's John Locke's liberal theology of Christianity--that since "everyone is orthodox to themselves," there is no set of universal doctrines binding on all Christians; and therefore, there is no orthodoxy strictly speaking that can be properly enforced by government. For this reason, a Lockean liberal social order that secures religious liberty is the best regime for promoting the pluralistic pursuit of religious happiness. It does this by creating a marketplace of religion in which churches compete for customers, and those churches that best satisfy the desire for religious experience increase their share of the market.
As far as I know, Prevost has never commented on Catholic Integralism. But what I have learned about his life and work as a priest and a cardinal suggests to me that he would agree with me in rejecting Integralism and affirming Lockean religious toleration and religious liberty as securing the conditions for pursuing a religious life. After all, Prevost grew up in Lockean liberal America, where a Catholic community in Chicago cultivated his faith, and where he could enter at age 14 a junior-seminary boarding school in Michigan run by the Augustinian order. He then became an Augustinian missionary in Peru, later the head of the Augustinian order, a cardinal, and finally Pope. In becoming the first American Pope, Prevost shows how America's liberal social order can allow for the flourishing of the Catholic Church without any Integralist enforcement of the Catholic faith.
Moreover, this is compatible with Prevost's respect for the papacy of Leo XIII because the encyclicals of Leo XIII that are often quoted as endorsing Integralism are ambiguous in ways that suggest that he was not fully embracing Integralism. Integralists like to quote from Leo XIII's encyclical Immortale Dei in 1885, which is entitled "On the Christian Constitution of States," where he wrote that
The State, constituted as it is, is clearly bound to act up to the manifold and weighty duties linking it to God, by the public profession of religion. . . . Since, then, no one is allowed to be remiss in the service due to God, and since the chief duty of all men is to cling to religion in both its reaching and practice--not such religion as they may have a preference for, but the religion which God enjoins, and which certain and most clear marks show to be the only true religion--it is a public crime to act as though there wee no God. So, too, is it a sin for the State not to have care for religion as a something beyond its scope, or as of no practical benefit; or out of many forms of religion to adopt that one which chimes in with the fancy; for we are bound absolutely to worship God in that way which He has shown to be His will. All who rule, therefore, would hold in honor the holy name of God, and one of their chief duties must be to favor religion, to protect it, to shield it under the credit and sanction of the laws" (par. 6).
He went on to say that in the Middle Ages, "there was once a time when States were governed by the philosophy of the Gospel," and "Church and State were happily united" (par. 21). But then, in the sixteenth century, the Protestant Reformation, with its "deplorable passion for innovation," threw the Christian religion "into confusion" (par. 23).
This created violent conflicts over religion. And so, to create peace, it was decided that there should be a separation of Church and State, and the State should "grant equal rights to every creed, so that public order may not be disturbed by any particular form of religious belief" (par. 25).
The Church has been ambivalent about this modern separation of Church and State. On the one hand, the Church "deems it unlawful to place the various forms of divine worship on the same footing as the true religion." On the other hand, the Church cannot rightly "condemn those rulers who, for the sake of securing some great good or of hindering some great evil, allow patiently custom or usage to be a kind of sanction for each king of religion having its place in the State" (par. 36).
The Church must condemn as false the principle that all religions are equal, because the Church knows that the Catholic Church is the only true religion, which should be supported by the government. But the Church must also recognize how the separation of Church and State secures the "great good" of religious peace and avoids the "great evil" of religious war.
Leo XIII expressed this same ambivalence in his encyclical Longinqua in 1895 on "Catholicism in the United States." Speaking to American Catholics, he wrote:
. . . thanks are due to the equity of the laws which obtain in America and to the customs of the well-ordered Republic. For the Church amongst you, unopposed by the Constitution and government of your nation, fettered by no hostile legislation, protected against violence by the common laws and the impartiality of the tribunals, is free to live and act without hindrance. Yet, though all this is true, it would be very erroneous to draw the conclusion that in America is to sought the type of the most desirable status of the Church, or that it would be universally lawful or expedient for State and Church to be, as in America, dissevered and divorced. The fact that Catholicity with you is in good condition, nay, is even enjoying a prosperous growth, is by all means to be attributed to the fecundity with which God has endowed His Church, in virtue of which unless men or circumstances interfere, she spontaneously expands and propagates herself; but she would bring forth more abundant fruits if, in addition to liberty, she enjoyed the favor of the laws and the patronage of the public authority (par. 6).
So while the Pope is grateful for the "prosperous growth" of Catholicism in America made possible by its protection of religious liberty, he must also say that "the most desirable status of the Church" would be for the American government to enforce Catholicism as the true religion.
This ambivalence of the Church about the Lockean separation of Church and State was finally overcome in 1965 when the Second Vatican Council issued the "Declaration on Religious Freedom" or Dignitatis Humanae, which endorsed the human right to religious liberty and thus embraced the Lockean argument for religious toleration as the necessary response to the irresolvable problem of religious pluralism.
The wisdom of that decision is now confirmed by the Church's choosing for Pope a man whose Catholic faith was nurtured by the religious liberty secured by America's Lockean liberal social order.
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