Nineteenth Century French Catholics’ Challenge to Integralism (Jennifer Conner, 2023, Hillsdale Forum)
But not all nineteenth century Catholics felt that liberalism, and the tolerance it brought with it, was getting in the way of the common good. For these Catholics, liberal policies were the guarantors of the Church’s freedom, and a free Church ultimately brought about the common good. Freedom of the Church was a major concern in restoration France. The Concordat signed by Napoleon was still in effect, making Church officials salaried employees of the state and obliging clergy to swear an oath of loyalty to the French state. Historic Church lands were still in the possession of the state and the state monopolized education. The Church and state seemed to be working closely together, but it was hindering the Church.
In the newspaper L’Avenir, Henri Lacordaire argued that the Church needed “to rid itself of all solidarity with a power [the French state] which was not animated by [the Church’s] spirit, and to seek the exercise of the freedoms promised to every citizen.” Lacordaire argued that the French state was not acting in consonance with the Church’s best interests. Critically, his proposed solution is not immediately conforming the state to serve the Church’s interests but rather granting proper freedoms for every citizen. In his view, the state ought to allow the Church to function freely and fulfill its mission. This approach hearkens back to Augustine’s claims in City of God that the task of the state is to maintain peace so that the Church can function. This is very different from Vermeule’s integralist model. Rather than an elite religious group enforcing very particular moral standards from the top of the government, the state would promote tolerance and allow the Church to educate the citizenry and care for their souls. Only then would the people be virtuous, and when their virtuous interests were represented by their government, the laws would become more virtuous in turn, and serve the common good.
In Lacordaire’s view, as long as the state had, in principle, the power to suppress individual rights for the purposes of promoting Catholic ends, it also had the power to oppress the Church. The French state seemed to benefit the Church by bankrolling its officials, but the salaries came with strings attached, including state interference in Catholic education. Lacordaire took umbrage with this particular infringement and, with the help of Lamennais and Montalembert, opened an unsanctioned Catholic school for boys in Paris. Shortly after its opening, state officials came to close the school and seize the building. Lacordaire was forced to send the boys home and he only barely retained the building by claiming it as his residence and pointing to his sleeping mat in the corner of the classroom.
The solution, for Lacordaire, was not a return to an integrated Catholic monarchy, but to promote the separation of Church and state. The Church, he argued, “always had the words reason and liberty on her lips when the inalienable rights of the human race were threatened.” Lacordaire might have been inclined to agree with Joseph Ratzinger’s later explanation of liberty as “having to do with being given a home.” It was through the Church that an individual could reach his true home and true liberty, and in order to fully participate in the Church — to receive a Catholic education, for example — the state ought to adopt a policy of tolerance. Thus there are two kinds of “liberty” at play here: the one is the theological liberty of membership in the Church, and the other is a sort of political tolerance, or willingness to allow a political regime to remain agnostic on certain questions, at least temporarily.
Crucially—here Lacordaire’s liberalism differs from a kind of libertarianism which admits no vision of a common good—the separation of Church and state does not mean that religious values must always remain absent from the law. Ultimately, once individual souls have been gathered into the Church, their moral interests will be represented in popular government and therefore the positive laws of the state will accord more closely with morality. This is a process to be undertaken and it relies upon the conversion of souls; it is not a top-down fix predicated upon an all-knowing religious elite at the top of government foisting their views upon the hoi polloi.
When Lacordaire took Alexander de Tocqueville’s vacant seat in the Académie Francaise, an American reporter remarked that it was strange to see “a man so thoroughly imbued with the worship of the Catholic religion defend, before the world…liberty and equality.” As Lacordaire took the seat dressed in full Dominican habit — he had helped refound the Order of Preachers in France after its abolition during the Revolution — he saw no contradiction. At his induction, he delivered a powerful address affirming the consistency of sincere faith with tolerance, proclaiming his wish to “die a repentant religious and an unrepentant liberal.”