Catholic Republic, page 9
66. Thomas Jefferson to John Trumbull, January 18, 1789, in “The Papers of Thomas Jefferson,” ed. Julian P. Boyd. Princeton University Press, 1950. 14:467. Thomas Jefferson expressed related sentiments in a letter to Mason Locke Weems, on December 13, 1804. in “Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson.”
67. http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2014/03/algernon-sidney-yet-one-beautiful-founding-complication.html.
68. Sidney, Algernon. Discourses Concerning Government, Liberty Fund Edition. ed. Thomas G. West. Indianapolis; Liberty Fund, 1996. Page 19.
69. Because such Natural Law Catholic thinkers most effectively countered Sidney’s own Tory counterparts, like Robert Filmer in the Royalist Patriarcha, Sidney was certainly picking between poisons. Ultimately, it is no surprise that Sidney’s thought was thoroughly infused with a Catholic right of revolution which Sidney would not have found in fellow Protestants like Grotius.
70. Donald Lutz. “The Relative Influence of European writers on late 18th Century American political thought,” in The American Political Science Review, 78/1. March 1984.
71. Kopel, David B. “The Scottish and English Religious Roots of the American Right to Arms.” Bridges; Vol. 12(3/4). Page 291.
72. Feser, Edward. “Classical Natural Law Theory, Property Rights, and Taxation.” Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation, 27. 2010. Pages 21-52.
73. Waldron, Jeremy. God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations in Locke’s Political Thought. Cambridge University Press; November 14, 2002. (See also Elze, M. “Grotius, Hugo,” die religion in geschichte und gegenwart (in German); 3. Auflage, band II, col. 1885-1886. Published 1958.)
74. Ibid.
75. http://www.libertymagazine.org/article/americas-founding-protestant-philosophy. Nicholas Miller, Ph.D., is an attorney and associate professor of church history at Andrews University, Berrien Springs, Michigan.
76. Zuckert, Michael. Natural Rights and the New Republicanism. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994. Page 210: “Locke further shows that the law’s obligatoriness can be no more established on the basis of reformulated Natural Law than it could be on the basis of immanent Natural Law.”
77. All this motivates a new “backdoor apologetics”: instead of debating theology, backdoor apologetics wins converts through political science. Any secular or Protestant fan of limited government should be strongly persuaded by the requirements of republicanism to convert to the point of view which uniquely affirms it…or else, to abandon the position of limited government. And this should happen automatically after they see that a republic can function only upon the corpus of Catholic presuppositions about the universe! It is time that Catholics, Protestants, and secularists in America affirm how republics and natural rights (along with Chapter Two’s subsidiarity, Chapter Three’s popular morality, Chapter Four’s humanism, Chapter Five’s political economy, Chapter Six’s proper science) may only function from a certain point of view. And since proponents of limited government already embrace our conclusion, it is simply a matter of showing them that neither the post-Enlightenment nor the post-Reformation point of view can actually affirm these things with any internal consistency.
Liberty may be endangered by abuses of liberty as well as abuses of power.
—James Madison
The Antifederalists have been called ‘men of little faith’ in that they lacked faith in the safe future that the Federalists foresaw under the Constitution. But in the context of the great mass of ratification documents, the Antifederalists emerge as the ones who kept the faith—the ancient faith so fundamental a part of the ideological origins of the Revolution, from which, they argue, the Constitution departed.
—Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, 331
Chapter 2: Making the New Regime
The Crypto-Catholicism of the Subsidiarity in the U.S. Constitution
If the role of American government has grown dangerously large, as Chapter One showed, it did so with Constitutional permission. Many Constitution-loving conservatives seek to deny this fact (while liberals, of course, celebrate it). But it remains an indisputable fact: American liberals could not possibly have grown the central power of the state unless they had some sort of Constitutional sanction to do so.
To put this in the context of Chapter One: without a written English constitution, natural rights had never been codified for the American Colonials of the early and middle 1700s, as they eventually would be under the American Constitution. Strangest of all is that American liberals were able to replace these codified natural rights entirely with pseudo-rights—notwithstanding their “protection” after the ratification of the Constitution in 1788.
So, our present lack of natural rights in America is even more egregious than the Colonists’ lack thereof. Unlike theirs, which they never quite had a grasp on, our rights were forfeited to the federal government. And that gradual forfeiture shows that our country’s descent into big government by 2016 (established in Chapter One) involved the Prot-Enlight ideas woven into the Constitution itself,1 as conceived by James Madison.
In the American republic, after all, we have a written and ratified Constitution, a Supreme law of the land, to invoke. By definition, all our laws have already passed Constitutional muster. Thus, if the natural rights of life, liberty, and property are presently overlooked, then that means they have been legally and constitutionally overlooked. How could (legally) protected rights be (legally) exposed to perversion and forfeiture? Shouldn’t the people’s Constitution have protected us against this?
This chapter will explain how and why such a Constitutional hijacking came to pass: the main idea behind the U.S. Constitution, federalism (often called “states’ rights”), involves local rule and the keeping of power at the community level. This was largely to the good, in early America. But federalism is supposed to yield small government; instead it delivered the exact opposite by 2016. Here’s why: federalism was incorporated incompletely into the Constitution. And this incompleteness stemmed from the Prot-Enlight misunderstanding of the fuller, Catholic version of federalism, called subsidiarity, this book’s second element of American crypto-Catholicism.
Subsidiarity is more robust than federalism because its rendition of local rule operates upon liberty, whereas federalism’s version of local rule operates upon license. Again, the misunderstood nature of American subsidiarity (i.e., federalism) codified within our Constitution (by Prot-Enlight) led to its eventual degradation and forfeiture: only the Catholic Natural Law can sustain a methodical liberty that does not immediately disintegrate, like a counterfeit handbag.
So, this chapter will fix upon how Constitutional liberty and subsidiarity in America were perverted culturally and legally, by the faulty interpretation of its Prot-Enlight framers. In assessing American federalism/subsidiarity, we shall examine the confounded, Prot-Enlight sense of liberty actually guaranteed by the Constitution in 1788. (Recall how Prot-Enlight rejects the concept entirely, but thereafter seeks to benefit from American liberties, through the unjustified and one-sided enjoyment of personal freedoms.) True liberty, unlike license, carries onerous burden as well as enjoyable benefit: i.e., true republics must arrange liberty such that household fathers and mothers shoulder the moral and religious enculturation of their children. This is the one true connection between the Catholic Natural Law’s liberty and subsidiarity.
To explain this concept, we must firstly ask what true constitutions actually accomplish.
By now, the reader should strongly suspect that our confusion about such a basic idea has something to do with the fact that America is the nation wired Catholic, but labeled Protestant, and currently functioning secular.
Just as the act of founding was shown to be crypto-Catholic in Chapter One, we will see in this chapter that the act of framing followed suit. In both acts, crypto-Catholicism kept the Catholic ideas from transferring 100%, causing both to devolve more and more over time, the symptoms of which confronts us even today.
We shall pick up right where Chapter One left off, just as America’s framers, or makers of the Constitution, picked up exactly where the founders, or breakers with the British constitution, left off. Most notable among these younger framers was James Madison, whose confused sense of subsidiarity crowns the Constitutional misunderstandings of liberty discussed in this chapter.
The founders acted, of course, in the late 1770s, whereas the framers acted in the late 1780s. That is, many founders became framers during the first few years after the close of the Revolutionary War. Because there was a continuity of purpose between the acts of founding and framing, one notes a continuity of personnel as well.
What is a Constitution?
The best way to begin a chapter exposing the American Constitution to be a crypto-Catholic document is to ask, “What is a Constitution?” The best way to answer this question is to connect the natural rights of the Constitution with those of the Declaration.
A Constitution is a type of document wherein the natural rights—unrecognized by tyrannical former regimes, e.g., Great Britain—transform into political rights, upon being recognized by a new regime.
Political rights are simply codified natural rights.
After the revolution (from Chapter One), the first order of business lies in codifying natural rights into law. Under our previous regime (e.g., Great Britain), natural rights went uncodified, unnamed, and unrecognized by the British law of the land. Most subjects of Great Britain only noted the chilly sting of their absence. Yet, leaders of the American Revolution, like Thomas Jefferson, managed to claim them as genuinely natural rights—meaning they existed whether the regime recognized them or not. This is precisely what made Jefferson a leader, a founder.
But after recognizing and then fighting for those rights in a revolution, they must be guaranteed, going forward. Hence the drafting and ratifying in 1787 and 1788 of an American Constitution, and a Bill of Rights three years later. In any new republic, things must begin in approximately this fashion.
Constitutions actually accomplish a couple of things: 1) mentioning those few natural rights which were recently fought over and won; 2) laying out the procedures guaranteeing the preservation of those rights, going forward.
The Constitutional watchword is governmental self-limitation. Just as Odysseus ordered his crew to tie him to his ship’s mast to ensure that he’d avoid the alluring song of the Sirens, new legal regimes must limit themselves procedurally in the name of those newly won rights, lest the new government grow as tyrannical as the old. Or even more tyrannical.
To further our maritime analogy, imagine a group of seafarers like the characters from Gilligan’s Island, marooned on a desert isle. One or two years into their new life, such seafarers will have established rules in their small community. If Gilligan were to decide, by the dictates of the Natural Law, that the Skipper had violated Gilligan’s natural rights (i.e., life, liberty, property), he would break with Skipper’s old regime. Gilligan would break away by declaring his independence, à la Jefferson via the Declaration of Independence. He would presumably move to another part of the island.
(Happily, Gilligan might be able to dispense with bloody revolution in this unique, desert isle context, where land is plentiful!)
All those acts in our Gilligan analogy constitute the Natural Law act of founding a new republic, as described in Chapter One.
But imagine further that Gilligan does not act alone. Several of the S.S. Minnow’s other seafarers agree that the Skipper’s regime has grown tyrannical. So they follow Gilligan. The very first thing Gilligan and his followers would tend to would be the drafting of a new document framing their violated rights. Most importantly, Gilligan’s constitution must list the specific procedures needed to guarantee those rights to inhabitants of his new republic (i.e., his new area of the island).a
And the procedural aspect of the Constitution is precisely what this chapter will show to be the relevant subsidiarian part.
So you see, founding involves the Natural Law because it requires the discernment of invisible, God-given, and politically overlooked rights. Founding is, as the prior chapter showed, step one in the life cycle of any republic: breaking with the old regime. But framing accomplishes something further. Framing, step two, involves the procedure of textually preserving recently won rights in a new regime. And most importantly, it sets out procedures for maintaining them.
Founding and framing go together like a wink and a smile.
By the very role they play, both founders and framers require Catholic thought by uniting the Natural Law with the governing apparatus of the new regime.2
The Catholic Position on Liberty: Subsidiarity
Remember from the Introduction and Chapter One that Catholicism, unlike Reformation or Enlightenment thought, embraces genuine human liberty. Liberty within a political community operates in a more delicate way than the hermit’s liberty. In a community, liberty works only through the social principle the Catholic Church calls subsidiarity.
What is subsidiarity? It is a relatively new term for a very old Catholic concept: “What individuals are able to do under their own power, society should not take over; similarly, what small societies can accomplish, larger societies should not take over.” Besides being the Catholic social teaching par excellence, it is the only possible vehicle of true liberty within the political community.
The original U.S. Constitution, by a process called “federalism,” left the overwhelming majority of governing functions to the individual states, whose laws would differ from one another. By our day, of course, this federalism (and its corresponding local rule) has broken down.
In America, subsidiarity was the principle at which the 1788 Constitution was aimed (in spite of the Prot-Enlight incapacities of the Constitution’s framers). This much was true even though the term subsidiarity had not yet been used—not even within Catholicism—by the time of the American founding and framing. During the framing period, the term “federalism” was used instead. The Catholic concept, i.e., subsidiarity, was nevertheless there almost in full.
This chapter will show how the concept was operative long before the name.
Whatever you call it, the idea of subsidiarity entails forfeiting to government only those few powers which cannot be accomplished by individuals. The rest of the powers should be left for individuals in the form of family decision-making and local rule. (Not coincidentally, this was the central purported motive of the American framers.)
Pope Pius XI formally coined the term in 1931 in the encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, subsidiarity’s debut In that encyclical, Pius expresses that
just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do.3
Although it was Pope Pius XI who gave the concept of subsidiarity its name, it was Pope Leo XIII who had forty years earlier (Pius’s Quadragesimo Anno actually means “forty years after” Leo’s teaching) distilled Thomas Aquinas’s political philosophy into the concept later known as subsidiarity. In fact, Pope Pius heavily quoted Pope Leo’s earlier encyclical Rerum Novarum, which itself just paraphrased Thomas Aquinas: “The child belongs to the father,”4 not to the state. Upon those five short words rests the entire basis of Catholic subsidiarity. It establishes the duty of the parent to look after, provide for, educate, and nurture the child.
(One has liberties, according to the Catholic Natural Law, in order that he may discharge his duties. Benefits, or rights, always link back to burdens. Prot-Enlight “liberty” reduces to license precisely because it misses this major point.)
In yet another helpful paraphrasing of subsidiarity, the Oxford English Dictionary puts it a bit more tersely: “Central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only [emphasis added] tasks which cannot be performed effectively at a more immediate or local level.”5
The current American “nanny state” exemplifies the exact opposite of subsidiarity. The welfare state seeks to surrogate for fathers by providing sustenance for their families. For one shocking American example, note that www.fatherhood.gov is an actual website! This alone makes the point. If it weren’t so sad, it would be hilarious!6
The Catholic Natural Law dictates that government should stay out of the way of the natural authority of the family (or of the neighborhood, one step up, or of local government, two steps up). The Church describes the family as the “original cell”7 of society, which explains why the family finds itself at the center of true republics. Conversely, those who advocate big government attempt to place the bureaucracy as the cell of society. This does not work out.
As will be shown below, the Catholic outlook does not and cannot simultaneously embrace these two competing cellular conceptions of society. Either one is true, but not both.
And the Catechism of the Catholic Church has posed Pope Pius XI’s words even more starkly against big government:
Excessive intervention by the state can threaten personal freedom and initiative. The teaching of the Church has elaborated the principle of subsidiarity, according to which a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to co-ordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good.8
