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We need to talk about Catholic integralism.
In American politics, it’s usually evangelicals – especially so-called “seven mountains” dominionists – who believe that the Christian church should control and run the state, and that everyone else should be second-class citizens or worse. However, Roman Catholics have their equivalent to this:
The basic position of Catholic Integralism is that there are two areas of human life: the spiritual and the temporal, or worldly. Catholic Integralists argue that the spiritual and temporal should be integrated – with the spiritual being the dominant partner. This means that religious values, specifically Christian ones, should guide government policies.
Like evangelical dominionists, Catholic integralists despise secularism. They want to demolish the wall of separation and replace it with an authoritarian order where the state tells people what to believe. The individual freedom to choose your own beliefs would be heavily discouraged, if not punished.
(The classic problem of theocratic societies is which Christian sect would get to run things and make its particular dogmas into law. Integralists tend to be vague on this point, but it’s not hard to guess who they have in mind.)
This isn’t a new belief – far from it. It’s a medieval idea, literally. It’s the position that Pope Boniface VIII expressed in 1302, in the bull Unam sanctum, which arrogantly proclaimed that the Catholic church should rule the world and all political leaders should bow down to the Pope:
Therefore, both are in the power of the Church, namely, the spiritual sword and the material. But indeed, the latter is to be exercised on behalf of the Church; and truly, the former is to be exercised by the Church. The former is of the priest; the latter is by the hand of kings and soldiers, but at the will and sufferance of the priest.
The philosophy of integralism came up in this post about Edgardo Mortara, a nineteenth-century Jewish boy who was kidnapped from his family by the Inquisition and forcibly indoctrinated into Catholicism because a Christian servant secretly baptized him. First Things, a conservative religious journal, published an article – in 2018! – defending the church’s behavior in the Mortara case as right and proper. It all but said outright that the Vatican should still do this kind of thing today, if not for the regrettable inconvenience that the Pope no longer has an army to do his bidding.
As I wrote at the time, First Things‘ stance on the Mortara case is a symptom of the sharp right turn that the Catholic church has taken. Pope Francis notwithstanding, the Vatican is stuck firmly in the past. It hasn’t changed its dogmatic stance on any of the issues that people care about – no contraception, no divorce, no abortion, no women’s equality, no gay rights. As a result, it’s hemorrhaging members by the millions, as young people who reject these cruel and irrational teachings leave the church or never join in the first place.
This is a good thing, to be sure. But it means that the remaining Catholics, both the laity and the clergy, tend to be the most conservative ones. They’re the hardcore traditionalists who want to turn the clock back seven hundred years. And in a shrinking church, they have more influence without liberal members around to counterbalance them:
They often stand out in the pews, with the men in ties and the women sometimes with the lace head coverings that all but disappeared from American churches more than 50 years ago. Often, at least a couple families will arrive with four, five or even more children, signaling their adherence to the church’s ban on contraception, which most American Catholics have long casually ignored.
They attend confession regularly and adhere strictly to church teachings. Many yearn for Masses that echo with medieval traditions – more Latin, more incense, more Gregorian chants.
These traditionalists don’t stop at bringing back Gregorian chants or Latin, of course. Many of them want to restore the medieval worldview, not just its trappings: medieval views on women’s equality, on human rights, on law, and how society should be run.
On the national level, conservatives increasingly dominate the U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference and the Catholic intellectual world. They include everyone from the philanthropist founder of Domino’s Pizza to six of the nine U.S. Supreme Court justices.
Then there’s the priesthood.
Young priests driven by liberal politics and progressive theology, so common in the 1960s and 70s, have “all but vanished,” said a 2023 report from The Catholic Project at Catholic University, based on a survey of more than 3,500 priests.
You can already see the influence of the integralist right on American bishops. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is far-right-wing, so much so that Pope Francis fired one of them last year for insubordination. (Conservatives are all in favor of hierarchy until they disagree with the guy in charge.)
It’s also influencing American politics. Kevin Roberts, one of the architects of Project 2025, is Catholic and has close ties to the reactionary Catholic group Opus Dei. Roberts’ dream of America as a libertarian theocracy where Christian morality is enforced on everyone is the end goal of integralism. J.D. Vance has also argued for integralist ideas, including at a 2022 conference at Franciscan University of Steubenville.
It’s not likely that these wannabe theocrats will realize their medieval dream. Their numbers are dwindling and their goals are simply too unpopular. In all likelihood, the only thing they’ll achieve is to accelerate the decline of the Catholic church. But they can still do damage in the meantime, with politicians and Supreme Court justices in their back pocket.
That’s why sunlight is still the best disinfectant. When Project 2025 was publicized, the voting public was appalled by its noxious ideas, and even Donald Trump felt pressure to publicly back away from it. The same way, the more that ordinary people know about Catholic integralists and other theocrats, the more prepared they’ll be to stand up against religious encroachment on their rights.
Image credit: Herbert Frank via Flickr; released under CC BY 2.0 license
The big difference I see is that evangelicals’ numbers seem to be growing. BTW, Mitt Romney (a Mormon) is also a believer in the whole Seven Mountains deal. I live in an area with a fairly big Catholic population, but most of them are pretty “meh, whatever” American-style Catholics, and as you noted, Catholics–just like non-crazy Protestants–seem to be walking away from organized Christianity.
It’s a medieval idea, literally. It’s the position that Pope Boniface VIII expressed in 1302, in the bull Unam sanctum, which arrogantly proclaimed that the Catholic church should rule the world and all political leaders should bow down to the Pope…
That idea might have made sense in post-Roman or Feudal Europe, when there really wasn’t much in the way of strong secular states consistently able to enforce peaceful hegemony or a uniform code of laws and ethics; and when the only ideas or principles Europeans could all recognize and agree on were those of the Catholic Church. But that was then, and lots of things have changed since then.
Yeah, when I read Project 2025, the first thing I thought was “Wow, these people are really on their last legs.” Meaning, they sound desperate, they’re betting the whole farm on this election. To take us back to theocracy, and then stay there and in total power by jettisoning democracy for authoritarianism, with this one throw of the dice. They seem to know that they have only this one chance to control the government, as in, they know they can’t win future elections.
But if they win, they will carry the Project out, then end democracy so that it’ll stay.
Wasn’t that point settled in the Reformation wars?
After Henry VIII broke away from the Catholic church and then the Protestants of Martin Luther fought bloody wars that killed millions of people. Which the Catholic church lost.
Catholic secular power has been declining ever since.
These are Trad Catholics or at least there is a huge overlap between the two groups.
Trad Catholics only make up 5.6% of the US population. They aren’t even a majority of the Catholics in the USA, and aren’t all that well liked by mainstream Catholics.
I don’t see how they are going to take over a nation of 330 million people.
What Raven said, and also: no matter what faith people like JD Vance choose, they’re going to be at the crazy end of it.
Also, what Raging Bee said; whatever was said in Europe 700 years ago is really not pertinent to today in the USA. There’s a blogger who calls herself Captain Cassidy, who writes a blog called Roll to Disbelieve, that documents the disintegration of fundagelical hold on the USA since she was a fundy in the 1980s.
Back when Project 2025 was first leaked to the public, I noted that it was at odds with the Freedom Caucus, who were at the height of their chaos-making back then. The Freedom Caucus’s apparent plan was to tear down the system, burn it to ashes, and then whoever rebuilds from the ashes would most definitely be on their side and would create a conservative paradise. A real “underpants gnome” plot: clear step 1, vague step 3, no step 2.
Meanwhile Project 2025 requires the system to not be in ashes; the plan is to take over a mostly-intact government and drastically change things from the inside. Their weakest point is step 1, which is basically “a miracle occurs” (they fully control the Presidency, the Senate, and the House after the 2024 elections).
Step 2 is also not a slam-dunk, because replacing federal government employees with loyalists is not a quick or easy thing even with all the sign-ups, and there are people who have already signed on as “loyalists” who are secretly opposed and will slow likely things down further. (Whether there are enough of them to make a big difference is impossible to say, it’s secret, after all. But just knowing that some exist will in itself be a bit disruptive.) This will give time for the courts to get involved and delay things further, because as much as they’ve invested in controlling the courts, that control is still nowhere near complete. There’s even a small chance that the Freedom Caucus will try to “help” only to be more disruptive than helpful.
Step 3 is implement a crap-ton of very unpopular laws and policies, which most people are just going to ignore until the Stosstruppen and/or Fingermen start showing up everywhere, but likely well before that point there will be an organized and powerful resistance, thanks to all the delays during step 2. Or, alternately, they try to do step 2 and step 3 together in pieces over time, which is going to result in in-fighting (whose priorities take precedence?) and just be an ungodly mess in general, leaving weaknesses for any opposition to exploit. The point is that step 2 seems to be banking on the opposition and complications being minimal, which they definitely won’t be.
And in the unlikely chance they do succeed in all 3 steps, they can’t just change people’s hearts and minds by fiat. People are not suddenly going to become true believers in extreme conservative policy and whatever religion becomes dominant just on their say-so. They’re going to need a couple generations of work on that. And to either get rid of internet or cut off US access from the rest of the world. Or “just” conquer the entire world, I guess.
Huh, good point, Snowberry:
I believe they’re Authoritarians believing people will behave exactly the way they do, think exactly the way they think. Also, people who tend to be Authoritarians don’t seem to think very deeply about anything.
It’s the old “silent majority” trope. There are all sort of people who agree with them, but are too scared to say so because of political correctness/wokeness/whatever this week’s new imaginary enemy is. Once they’re in charge all those scared people will come out in the open.
Francis can’t last very much longer, and the Catholic reactionaries surely have their men waiting to vote in a neofascist Pope before the body cools.
The most likely scenario involves an extremist provoking a grassroots backlash, with more middle-class Americans and Europeans sadly walking out and taking the bulk of Church revenues with them. Perhaps a few billionaires will sustain the system for a while, but not many of the petroleum potentates or Silly-Putty Valley big-bucks bros seem to have developed a taste for chants and incense, so how far can that sustain them?
That leaves the RC Church as a Third-World institution, struggling to maintain its base in Latin America and parts of Africa and to expand its narrow foothold in Asia. They already face fierce competition from fundagelicals and Muslims – arguably even worse from a progressive viewpoint – and the prayers for miracles will fill the sky. Interesting times.
Pierce: Another possibility is a schism between Western and Third-World Catholics, with the Western Church being vocal advocates of a (relatively) liberal and progressive Catholicism, against a more backward Third-World Church, which may or may not face serious progressive resistance at home as well as from abroad.
And a much more scary possibility is that backward-looking Catholics everywhere start embracing a resurgent Eastern Orthodoxy, further isolating liberal Christians everywhere.
Oh, and then there’s Islam. Who knows, maybe progressives start embracing Westernized liberal Islam, if that turns out to be the only unifying force in the face of resurgent backwardness and fundamentalism in Christian churches.
This reminds me of something that I read somewhere. In the 1970’s, some 1960’s left-wingers became neoconservatives, and some of them looked for some religious tradition to believe in. Evangelicalism they often found to be almost hopelessly intellectually shallow, and many of these ones settled on Catholicism, with its long history of highbrow theology.
Evangelical Mark Noll noted as much back in 1994 in his book “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scandal_of_the_Evangelical_Mind