The Right Books

There have lately been a few, if not many, signs of restiveness within the American Catholic community, some of whose members are experiencing doubts about the Church’s place in American society and politics today. James Hitchcock is one of these; his pamphlet On the Present Position of Catholics in America, published in 1978, presents a case that is the bleak inverse of the assessment blithely offered in 1960 by Father John Courtney Murray’s We Hold These Truths. Father Murray argued that America represented something new in the world: a pluralistic consensus of the governed resting upon explicit founding documents to which Catholics could assent. Therefore, he said, the old enmity between church and state had been relieved; America was after all a good place for Catholics to be. It was not as apparent in 1960 as it was in 1978 or 1983 that the greatest danger to Catholicism—indeed to Christianity—was not the state but the society that gave it legitimacy and power: what Thomas Molnar, in Politics and the State: The Catholic View (Franciscan Herald Press, 1434 West 51st Street, Chicago, Ill. 60609; $7.50), calls “not merely a completely secular state but a desacralized, pagan society as well, whose impact on the state desacralizes the latter even more than would otherwise be the case.”

It is Molnar’s thesis that our present “absurdist civilization” is ultimately traceable to faulty political theory, which is in turn attributable to the fact that only three schools of political thought are considered respectable in contemporary American intellectual life: that of the Federalist Papers; that of Leo Strauss; and that of Eric Voegelin. (Marxism, Molnar says, remains “marginal,” “almost un-American.”) Wholly ignored is the Catholic concept of church and state, which, Molnar insists, is a coherent one, valuable for its practicality, and recmmending itself for its ”time-less” and “time-bound” qualities alike and as the framework of a Christian civilization that “should not be regarded as one modest current, paralleling others, but as the only real competitor of the civic religion.” That Christian theory has no myth or ideology of its own, that it recommends no particular political regime, is in truth its greatest merit.

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There have lately been a few, if not many, signs of restiveness within the American Catholic community, some of whose members are experiencing doubts about the Church’s place in American society and politics today. James Hitchcock is one of these; his pamphlet On the Present Position of Catholics in America, published in 1978, presents a case that is the bleak inverse of the assessment blithely offered in 1960 by Father John Courtney Murray’s We Hold These Truths. Father Murray argued that America represented something new in the world: a pluralistic consensus of the governed resting upon explicit founding documents to which Catholics could assent. Therefore, he said, the old enmity between church and state had been relieved; America was after all a good place for Catholics to be. It was not as apparent in 1960 as it was in 1978 or 1983 that the greatest danger to Catholicism—indeed to Christianity—was not the state but the society that gave it legitimacy and power: what Thomas Molnar, in Politics and the State: The Catholic View (Franciscan Herald Press, 1434 West 51st Street, Chicago, Ill. 60609; $7.50), calls “not merely a completely secular state but a desacralized, pagan society as well, whose impact on the state desacralizes the latter even more than would otherwise be the case.”

It is Molnar’s thesis that our present “absurdist civilization” is ultimately traceable to faulty political theory, which is in turn attributable to the fact that only three schools of political thought are considered respectable in contemporary American intellectual life: that of the Federalist Papers; that of Leo Strauss; and that of Eric Voegelin. (Marxism, Molnar says, remains “marginal,” “almost un-American.”) Wholly ignored is the Catholic concept of church and state, which, Molnar insists, is a coherent one, valuable for its practicality, and recmmending itself for its ”time-less” and “time-bound” qualities alike and as the framework of a Christian civilization that “should not be regarded as one modest current, paralleling others, but as the only real competitor of the civic religion.” That Christian theory has no myth or ideology of its own, that it recommends no particular political regime, is in truth its greatest merit.