A movement aimed at politicizing the church in America is gaining ground in conservative Catholic circles. In the past it has flown its flag under a confusing variety of names, including “integralism,” “common-good constitutionalism,” and “post-liberalism.” Now its promoters have attempted to rebrand it as “political Catholicism.” While fuzzy on the details, proponents hope “to order the nation and its state to the natural and divine law, the tranquility of order, precisely because doing so is the best way to protect and shelter the localities in which genuinely human community, imbued with grace, can flourish.”
Such a fantastical reordering of American public life poses lots of problems, and not only because of the proponents’ “lack of street smarts,” as identified recently by Ben Domenech. There is another serious problem: the movement’s incompatibility with the principles of religious freedom. And it is here that opportunistic integralism must face two more reality checks. The first is that their opposition to religious freedom brings them into direct conflict with the teachings of the Catholic Church. The second is that our Constitution specifically protects us from people who think like them.
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