Bishop Barron and D.C. Schindler on ‘Integralism’

Integralists regularly get accused of being theocrats or worse by those who don't understand the term. Fr Tveit does his best to set them straight.

From The Josias

By Fr John Tveit

Last week, Bishop Robert Barron interviewed D.C. Schindler and integralism was among their topics of conversation. Their discussion of our approach to Catholic political philosophy was revealing in two important ways.

First of all, their interview revealed how much these two formidable thinkers have misunderstood the very terms of the debate. Bishop Barron introduced the topic by noting some might think Schindler “sounds like an integralist,” like someone who “just wants to create one great theocratic society.” These two things are not the same; integralism does not imply theocracy, or the rule of secular society by clerics. While the Vatican City State exists as a theocracy, as did the Papal States when they existed, the hope of the integralist is not to extend such rule throughout the world. In 2024 it should be clearer than it is to some that theocracy is not the only illiberal option for structuring society. Andrew Willard Jones’s Before Church and State, for instance, helps to expand our vision to see that a strict separation of Church and State on the one hand and theocracy on the other are not our only options. The France of Saint Louis which it depicts is an integralist society, not a theocratic one.

Dr. Schindler tries to find a via media between liberalism and integralism. With the integralist, he recognizes that the Church has an authority and a voice in politics and in the structuring of secular society, which liberalism denies. He admits overlap with integralist thinking but finds in it a fundamental problem. Schindler’s version of integralism is one in which the secular society provides “partial human goods,” to be supplemented by the Church’s provision of supernatural goods. He rejects this because as he sees it, spiritual goods are essentially human goods. They are not superadded to the goods which secular society aims to provide. 

At the heart of Schindler’s objection seems to be his view of the interaction between nature and grace, a view he shares with Henri de Lubac and other 20th-century theologians. Dr. Schindler believes that we humans have even on the natural level a desire for the supernatural, a desire for what only grace provides. This subsumes the realm of the natural into that of the supernatural, and so for Schindler it does not make sense when the integralist distinguishes these two realms in terms of different ends. For him, there is only one end of human life, which is our union with God in glory. 

The integralist follows the teaching of Pope Leo XIII on the natural and supernatural societies in Immortale Dei. As the document makes clear, both the society of the Church and the society of the State are given us by God Himself, both are necessary. Leo also teaches that both of these societies are perfect, that is to say, each of them possesses its proper end together with all the means necessary to reach that end. One cannot be subsumed by the other. The Holy Father wrote of the Church: 

This society is made up of men, just as civil society is, and yet is supernatural and spiritual, on account of the end for which it was founded, and of the means by which it aims at attaining that end. Hence, it is distinguished and differs from civil society, and, what is of highest moment, it is a society chartered as of right divine, perfect in its nature and in its title, to possess in itself and by itself, through the will and loving kindness of its Founder, all needful provision for its maintenance and action. And just as the end at which the Church aims is by far the noblest of ends, so is its authority the most exalted of all authority, nor can it be looked upon as inferior to the civil power, or in any manner dependent upon it.1 

Each of these societies, Church and State, has its proper end and all the means necessary to achieve it, the supernatural society of the Church having a supernatural end, the natural society of the State a natural one. For this reason, neither society can be seen to be ordered to merely a partial human good or any set thereof. Each is ordered to human happiness, which is the complete human good. But there exists a twofold end of happiness for man, who exists as it were in two realms, natural and supernatural, to which these societies correspond. 

While our supernatural end is our ultimate end, toward which our temporal end must therefore be ordered, the two cannot be collapsed into one another:

The Almighty, therefore, has given the charge of the human race to two powers, the ecclesiastical and the civil, the one being set over divine, and the other over human, things. Each in its kind is supreme, each has fixed limits within which it is contained, limits which are defined by the nature and special object of the province of each, so that there is, we may say, an orbit traced out within which the action of each is brought into play by its own native right.2

The State “has for its proximate and chief object the well-being of this mortal life,” the Church “the everlasting joys of heaven.”3 This “is the Christian organization of civil society…confirmed by natural reason itself.”4 There ought to exist between these two societies not identity, but harmony:

The Church no less than the State itself is a society perfect in its own nature and its own right, and that those who exercise sovereignty ought not so to act as to compel the Church to become subservient or subject to them, or to hamper her liberty in the management of her own affairs, or to despoil her in any way of the other privileges conferred upon her by Jesus Christ. In matters, however, of mixed jurisdiction, it is in the highest degree consonant to nature, as also to the designs of God, that so far from one of the powers separating itself from the other, or still less coming into conflict with it, complete harmony, such as is suited to the end for which each power exists, should be preserved between them.5

This harmony brings the two necessary societies into quite close cooperation with one another, so close in fact that Leo XIII speaks of their relationship as that of the soul to the body. Not in such a way that one is subsumed by the other, but that both are fully active in their own realms.

Rather than by inventing sets of human goods, we have always defined integralism in terms of the ends of human life and the perfect societies which are necessary in achieving those ends. We have had such a clear definition of integralism for many years in the Three Sentences:

Catholic Integralism is a tradition of thought that, rejecting the liberal separation of politics from concern with the end of human life, holds that political rule must order man to his final goal. Since, however, man has both a temporal and an eternal end, integralism holds that there are two powers that rule him: a temporal power and a spiritual power. And since man’s temporal end is subordinated to his eternal end, the temporal power must be subordinated to the spiritual power.

This subordination is not one of domination (and therefore theocracy). It is one of cooperation. It is one in which ideally the membership of a secular society and the membership of the Church in that society are coextensive. In such a circumstance, as we see in St. Louis’s France, while the civil leaders have their requisite autonomy, they are nonetheless subject to the munera docendi, regendi, and sanctificandi exercised by the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The relationship is not one in which the clergy dictate to the civil leaders, but one in which the clergy help to inform them, as the soul in-forms the body. 

Dr. Schindler wants the Church to “allow the integrity of the political sphere” rather than dictating to it. The Church, he says, has no place in making laws for the society of the State, but helps to inform what law ought to be in the secular realm. We do not disagree in the least. The relationship of the ecclesiastical to the secular does not have to be one of power and domination, which again brings us into theocratic territory. Yet the Magisterium and the Code of Canon Law are often quite clear in indicating what the civil law must provide, without dictating it.6 They elaborate the requirements of justice and the rights of Christians, and what the State must legislate in order not to run afoul of such requirements.

Integralism is political Catholicism, it is the faith lived out in the world. Our definition of integralism is purposely broad. As long as one gets right the relationship of the two ends of these two necessary societies, one is an integralist, which is to say, one has the only possible Catholic position.7 But below this level of general principle, integralism may work itself out in practice in an infinite number of ways, because of the infinite variety of practical circumstances. 

There is no science of the infinite.8 It has always been our aim to define the principles, and to let Catholics figure out the practical applications of those principles, much as the Church always does in her social teaching. We may differ on our conclusions at the practical level, but two Catholics in good faith and in good conscience can always differ about such prudential matters. To my mind, if you accept the Three Sentences, you have a place beneath the integralist umbrella. 

It is a wonderful thing that we have many Catholics working to bring about a post-liberal society, an integrally Catholic one. But the theory of any one integralist cannot be equated with integralism as a whole, any more than a particular economic theory espoused by a Catholic could be equated with Catholic economics. 

Second of all, the interview between Bishop Barron and D.C. Schindler reveals the enduring importance of integralism. As His Excellency himself put it, Catholic integralism is “a rising movement today.” That to so many Catholics, liberal and illiberal alike, integralism continues to be such a bête noire, and that so many need to justify their own positions in contraposition to ours (or some imagined version of it), shows that integralism remains a touchstone in this conversation. We thank His Excellency and Dr. Schindler for giving us a place at their table, but ask that they let us speak for ourselves.

1. Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, 10. ↩︎
2. Ibid., 13. ↩︎
3. Ibid., 14. ↩︎
4. Ibid., 16. ↩︎
5. Ibid., 35. ↩︎
6. Take, for example, c. 793 §2 on the State’s duty to help parents provide a true, integrally Catholic education for their children: “Parentibus ius est etiam iis fruendi auxiliis a societate civili praestandis, quibus in catholica educatione filiorum procuranda indigeant.” ↩︎
7. Cf. John Joy, “The Teaching of Quanta cura is Definitive: A Reply to Robert T. Miller.” ↩︎
8. Cf. Boethius, De arithmetica, Book I, ch. 1. ↩︎