Catholic republic, p.10
Catholic Republic, page 10
But even with such Magisterial disclaimers clearly advocating governmental minimalism, there is widespread Catholic misunderstanding today regarding the requirements of subsidiarity.b Many Catholics in America and the West believe wrongly that central government ought to intervene frequently and rigorously in the private life of the family.
The cultural Catholic acceptance of the nanny state is strange because, according to Catholic doctrine, the central government is supposed to be the very last party involved in governing.
Remember from Chapter One how Thomas Aquinas narrowed the sphere of governmental involvement to just taxing, police, and martial powers (which are anything but the only roles ascribed to government in today’s America!).9
Local authority—family, Church, neighborhood, and even city government—should be able to cover almost everything besides taxing, police, and martial powers.10 Why? Because, as we shall see below, the basis for true authority lies in the ability to teach morality and theology.
Family and Church can teach; www.fatherhood.gov cannot.
Local authority—mostly the family—is the only means by which God’s natural authority vested in the Church to impart morality may be closely imitated. In Thomas Aquinas’s philosophy, “the highest form of life is not simply to contemplate [as it was for Aristotle], but to teach what is contemplated.”11 On this basis, almost every aspect of today’s government violates liberty and subsidiarity, since the government mandates obedience without explication of its laws.
By the way, government should not be faulted for its inability to teach! Government legislation is simply not geared to explicate and teach the moral justifications for its laws. It lacks the capacity.
Once more, the moral basis for the Church’s Natural Law fixation on family authority is that family bears the unique capacity to guide as it lets go of developing youngsters. As the child matures morally, the father incrementally relinquishes power. Only this act can be the genuine font of human authority, as modeled after the superhuman teaching voice of the Church. The father rewards or punishes not by coercing the child, but by increasingly appealing to the child’s burgeoning free will and intellect.
Thus, the Catholic Natural Law advances the father, and not the government, as the earthly example of man’s Heavenly Father. Proper motivation for the use of a growing child’s freedom comes from understanding that morality is reasonable; conversely, it cannot stem from the very low, unexplained standards of behavior set by the criminal law. Again, government and laws cannot bring a developing child to a moral understanding of the world. It is for this reason that the child belongs to the father, not to the state.12 In The God of Jesus Christ, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI beautifully expounds upon this topic:
If human existence is to be complete, we need a father, in the true meaning of fatherhood that our faith discloses, namely a responsibility for one’s child that does not dominate him but permits him to become his own self. This fatherhood is a love that avoids two traps: the total subjugation of the child to the father’s own priorities and goals, on the one hand, and the unquestioning acceptance of the child as he is, under the pretext that this is the expression of freedom, on the other.
Responsibility for one’s child means the desire that he realize his own innermost truth, which lies in his Creator.13
By adulthood, the good man need only be restrained by himself. And a society full of such men requires little or no government, as James Madison once famously remarked.14 This is why the family must be conceived as the central unit of society: self-control cannot be taught in any other fashion. This is also why the advocates of big government do not want a society of self-controlled, religious men: it would abolish their only means of acquiring and maintaining power.
Recall now that neither the Prots nor the Enlights even confirm the existence of human free will (i.e., liberty), meaning that subsidiarity is unavailable to them. Liberty is the goal and the object of subsidiarity. Moreover, if human beings are neither moral nor sufficiently intelligent—yet another incapacity posed by Prot-Enlight—then the closest approximation of subsidiarity will be a sort of amoral, mechanistic subsidiarity. In America, this is called federalism.
So, in review: the state cannot cultivate the maturing, liberty-prone human mind. The state bears only the power of rote coercion. From afar, it can only force or dominate. Aristotle wrote that at best, abiding laws engenders only accidental virtue15 since the state cannot motivate the individual with moral understanding or freely electable virtue.
The father guides; the state forces.c True virtue, the goal of our liberty, should therefore be seen as a product of the home, never the state.
Liberty versus License: a Quick Review
Recall from Chapter One the substitution of license for liberty, stemming directly from Prot-Enlight and its rejection of the Catholic Natural Law before and during the American founding and framing periods.16
Recall also the symptoms of widespread license in society: the Constitutional “freedom” to murder babies in all fifty states; the common assumption that our freedom of speech should be unbounded; the invincibility which a politically illiterate electorate is invited to attach to its own uninformed opinions at the ballot box;17 the shameless practice of total sexual license—homosexuality, contraception, pornography, sodomy, fornication, abortion. All these are openly advanced by governmental public service programs (e.g., www.fatherhood.gov seeking to normalize the ill use of human freedom.
In a republic that denies true liberty and the Catholic Natural Law, one sees the omnipresence of the federal government in daily life. This entails the shrinking of the family’s authority over developing its own private land, running its own family business, burning its own firewood, selling its own wheat, or even choosing its own light bulb wattage!
In other words, we have freedoms we should lack, and we lack freedoms we should have!
Something is definitely up. The Constitution has failed to safeguard liberty in the fashion in which it was wired—or should have been—back in 1788. The big question is: Was America truly and soundly wired in 1788 such as to guard true liberty? After all, how could the perversion of liberty have happened on such a large scale, if it was?!
A few of our genius founders and framers possessed astounding prescience (even as they espoused a blinding Prot-Enlight philosophy). Massachusetts’ Son of Liberty and founding firebrand Samuel Adams once noted:
A general dissolution of principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy. While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but when once they lose their virtue they will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader.18
Adams was, without knowing it, espousing the Catholic Natural Law principle of liberty, eerily similar to an idea of James Madison’s quoted at the beginning of this chapter: “Liberty may be endangered by abuses of liberty as well as abuses of power; that there are numerous instances of the former as well as of the latter; and that the former rather than the latter is apparently most to be apprehended by the United States.”19
Think of the connection between these two founders’ quotes: ultimately, it is the connection between the previous chapter and this one. In other words, the two passages together articulate that only by embracing vice and abandoning virtue, will American liberty be surrendered. After all, true liberty must repudiate vice, or else it does not count as true liberty.
Given the opportunity, liberty’s opposite, license, will take up its name and even its form. Liberty renders the individual generally independent of the state; license renders him utterly dependent upon it. This notion is a bit counterintuitive.
Imagine a large family happily and self-sufficiently operating its own land. They mind their own business, literally and figuratively. They work hard. According to the first social principle of the Catholic Natural Law, subsidiarity, the governance of this family farm comes from the head of this household. Thus, the concept of government remains a vague abstraction to this family. Because they use their resources and their freedom to pursue what is natural, or good, they will be happy in their self-reliant liberty. Note how this family goes above and beyond the low moral standard set by the law.
On the other hand, the practice of license entails thorough dependence on the state: individual decisions are systematically transferred to the government. This is the opposite of subsidiarity. Imagine a single woman who has embraced the diabolical message of the government (via the popular culture and the mainstream media): she is sexually “liberated.” Whenever her sexual license eventuates in an unwanted pregnancy, she acts upon what she’s been told: a young woman should not be “punished with a baby,”20 the natural consequence of sex. This single woman believes, as politicians have had her believe, that the taxpayer should subsidize her continuing bacchanalian lifestyle (a “right,” as discussed in Chapter One) in the form of welfare entitlements, “free” contraception, and then taxpayer-funded abortion or—if she doesn’t exercise her pseudo-right to choose death for the baby—taxpayer-funded daycare. Her only goal appears to be material pleasure, which is all her reliance upon government offers her—for a time. But in the end, even her licentious pleasure will fade. All that will remain will be the dominion of the government, which won its power by substituting license for liberty.
As defined above, these two examples show that liberty will sink or swim based on whether it conforms to subsidiarity. Mass liberty must operate upon morally motivated, local self-rule; mass license will always assume the form of dominion by a large, central, faraway government enabling a sin-distracted people to continue to sin.
Recall from Pinocchio Lampwick’s license and eventual servility on Pleasure Island. It is no coincidence that Walt Disney conceived of Lampwick’s licentiousness as eventuating in his transformation into a beast of burden, subject to the yoke of evil.
Big government always begins its takeover by encouraging the popular distraction of sin. (License is actually no form of freedom at all, recall, but is rather complete slavery.) What begins as government subsidy of vice, and governmental shelter from the natural moral consequences of such vice, ends as outright tyranny. Ruminating on the slavish dominion of license, Saint Augustine wrote that “the good man is free even if he is a slave; the wicked man is a slave even if he is king.”21
America retains a weak, crypto-Catholic orientation toward true liberty. But such an orientation is now heavily admixed with Prot-Enlight license. We have seen why this is the case culturally. Let’s now examine why it is the case historically and Constitutionally. The “father of the American Constitution,” Prot-Enlight James Madison, was highly ambivalent (but ultimately dismissive) regarding the writings by the father of modern subsidiarity: Baron de Montesquieu.
Federalism as Prot-Enlight Subsidiarity
In America, as noted above, subsidiarity is far better known in its de-moralized, Prot-Enlight form. Americans call it “federalism” or “states’ rights.” While each of these terms expresses a basically salutary idea about how liberty and authority should be allocated within republics, each term still represents a secularized version of subsidiarity. Whether called federalism or states’ rights, the concept remains incomplete without the moralistic goal of freedom.
And in this purposeless version, “Prot-Enlight subsidiarity” (i.e., federalism) lost most of its potency in America throughout the years. What exactly happened?
In America in 1786 through 1788, statesmen around the thirteen states deliberated getting rid of its original Constitution. As compared to the new Constitution, in retrospect, this original Constitution, called the Articles of Confederation, operated on a truer version of subsidiarity.
The Articles were jettisoned in favor of a more energetic new Constitution, such as to allocate slightly more power to the central government. Not advocates of big government themselves, the framers’ goal was to forfeit to central government only the powers most necessary and none more. Their aim was, famously, “energetic but [still] limited government.”22
Though they didn’t say it, their goal was to preserve their de-moralized, “Prot-Enlight subsidiarity”—local control—won from Great Britain ten years prior in the Revolutionary War, while adding a few limited but (as they saw it) necessary powers to the central government.
Technically, from 1776 until the Constitution’s ratification in 1788, the thirteen states operated as their own separate countries, meaning that they enjoyed local rule in the fullest sense!
In the next sections, we will examine what the framers, particularly the lead framer, James Madison, had in mind. In spite of Madison’s frequent dalliances with subsidiarity through his enthusiasm for the philosophy of Montesquieu, fans of small government should nevertheless expect to be disappointed: Madison was a notorious ditherer.
By today, after all, we know how the story plays out: the American Constitution of 1788 was fated eventually to forfeit all semblance of American subsidiarity to the central government. On the basis of his unfaithful discipleship to Montesquieu, Madison’s innovations overwhelmed the formerly subsidiarian spirit of the Articles leaving us with a new Constitution.
We’ve already seen how the American substitution of license for liberty stemmed from the Prot-Enlight founding in the Declaration. We are about to see specifically how the influence of Prot-Enlight pervaded the framing era, and the ensuing Constitution. Under Madison’s watch, subsidiarity was to devolve into its secularized version, mere federalism (which would further devolve by our day).
Whatever moderate dose of license was substituted for liberty during the founding and framing, by our day license has come to be the primary Constitutional right, on the popular view.
However imperfectly the secular concept of states’ rights originally resembled the fuller, Catholic concept of subsidiarity, by our day even the secular version of local rule has died completely away. Again, recall www.fatherhood.gov, supreme testimony of all!
One might be tempted to wring one’s hands over this sad fact. But in any republic not founded upon the Catholic Natural Law, things are fated to shake out that way.d
In a Prot-Enlight republic like America, we should expect to see precisely the sort of Constitutional problems with liberty and subsidiarity that we do. These problems arise from an all-consuming American ambivalence with regard to such Catholic doctrines. We have spent much time in these first two chapters demonstrating that freedom is the Prot-Enlight Achilles heel, rendering true subsidiarity impossible.
James Madison as Prot-Enlight Framer
What Jefferson was to the Declaration, Madison was to the Constitution. Thomas Jefferson, the primary author of the Declaration, was the most illuminating American founder, for the purpose of analyzing Prot-Enlight in the 1770s. Similarly, James Madison, the “father of the Constitution,” is the most instructive American framer for analyzing Prot-Enlight in the 1780s. And just as we looked at Jefferson’s philosophical influences in drafting the Declaration in Chapter One, so also shall we look at Madison’s philosophical influences in drafting the Constitution here in Chapter Two.
In Chapter One, we saw that founder Jefferson truly imported into the Declaration a pseudo-Natural Law thinker, John Locke (and Locke’s fellow Whigs). Here in Chapter Two, we will see that framer Madison did just the opposite: he pseudo-imported into the Constitution a true Natural Law thinker, Montesquieu. Inverse as Jefferson’s and Madison’s influences may have been, the effect was the exact same. Each respective thinker’s final document took on a pseudo-Natural Law characteristic, a germ which grew more and more potent over time.e
American poet Robert Frost once wrote this of James Madison: “Now I know … what Madison’s dream was. It was just a dream of a new land to fulfill with people in self-control [emphasis added]. That is all through his thinking…to fulfill this new land…with people in self-control.”23
In fact, “self-control” is perhaps the best word yet for distinguishing liberty from license. Liberty requires internal control, whereas license requires no control exerted whatsoever. While it is easy to agree with Frost’s apt redefinition of liberty, it is far less easy to agree, ultimately, that Madison’s true aim was to enshrine such a concept within the Constitution.
The remainder of this chapter will show that during the framing period, James Madison proved to be a thoroughly Prot-Enlight thinker. True liberty, as derived from the Catholic Natural Law, cannot have been at the center of his work, the Constitution. Ultimately, Madison’s Prot-Enlight versions of liberty and subsidiarity were pragmatic instead of moral principles. This unhappy exchange features as Madison’s secret modifications of the Catholic Natural Law philosophy of Montesquieu.
Thus, American subsidiarity was only incompletely wired into the Constitution. This means that the document’s crypto-Catholic wiring for Natural Law was partial at best. Madison, we will see, attempted to set up the American system to be able to function on the basis of de-moralized freedom.
But the Baron de Montesquieu, Madison’s most frequent citation, described human freedom and locally ruled republics in a fashion far more consistent with Catholic Natural Law.f During the great Constitutional ratification contest of the late 1780s, only true Montesquieuians were faithful proponents of the Natural Law.
Montesquieu admonished clearly, as we shall see, that de-moralized versions of liberty and subsidiarity would not work in republics. He articulated three cardinal rules for framing republics,24 stemming from the Catholic Natural Law. Quite explicitly, Madison rejected each of these three rules of classical subsidiarity for true republics (remember that Robert Frost would re-brand liberty “self-control”):
subsidiarity as restraint against religious diversity in republics;
subsidiarity as restraint against geographical expansion of republics;
