“Great Minds think Alike”

Just joking! But I saw Bruce Frohnen’s great essay after I discussed some of the same points here.

Rather than rehearse the long list of abuses arising from state actors, many of them convinced of their own moral rectitude, it might be best to end with a brief reference to what administrative centralization and the ideology of sovereignty have done within the Church herself. The First Vatican Council, convened from 1869-70, was an attempt by the Church hierarchy to respond to the rise of sovereign states by instituting state-like centralization in the Church.  Observers like Saint Cardinal John Newman feared such motives but took solace in the fact that the “Universal Church” could never act as a concrete, localized state. Unfortunately, administrative and canon law changes over the succeeding century and a half have proved more successful than he predicted. Bishops have become unquestioned rulers of the laity in their jurisdictions, and the hierarchy in the Vatican has become utterly divorced from, and immune to, attempts from clerics and laymen alike to stem corruption, abuse, and ideological fads—all of them trending left. Consider that in the Catholic Church today we have priests giving the Eucharist to radically pro-abortion politicians; parish schools being shut down (over loud lay opposition) in order to pay settlements to victims of pederast priests; a Pope who bemoans global warming but will not mention the massacre of Christians in China or the Middle East; and a hierarchy that continues to cover for active homosexuals while simultaneously working to stamp out the Latin Mass. One would think such events might give traditionalist Catholics pause in their support for the integralist pursuit of centralization. Constitutionalism, both within and outside the Church, grew out of opposition to abuses like these. Its demise, whether at the hands of liberals or anti-liberals, will benefit only tyrants and their hangers-on.

Frohnen, Bruce P., “The Lure of Integralism,” Chronicles: a Magazine of American Culture ( February 2022)