Kingship
by modestinus
The Remnant has posted an English translation of the opening chapter of Jean Ousset’s That He May Reign. Entitled “The Alpha and the Omega: Christ the King, Author and End of Creation,” the excerpt does little to advance our understanding of what “the social reign of Christ the King” means; rather, it represents another in a long line of lamentations that we live in an era of the post-confessional state (or, more accurately, post-Christian confessional state) without attempting to map how we got there or bothering to think about what it could even mean in our present historical context. This, sadly, is typical of contemporary traditionalist rhetoric when it comes to the Kingship of Christ: dissatisfaction with (post)modernity gives way to fanciful rhetoric and undirected longing for an era which, in all likelihood, never existed. (I say this not to deny that there was, at one time, centuries-old confessional states in Europe and Latin America; however, those states were not the utopian Christian polities of 100% Sunday Mass attendance that some traditionalists seem to imagine.) It’s all the more strange from an “American perspective.” For while we once held fast to a conception of religious freedom which allowed Catholicism to thrive in these lands, the United States was never a confessional state. And were it to have been a confessional state, it most decidedly would not have been a Catholic confessional state.
I sometimes worry that the resurgence of “Christ the King” rhetoric is a white flag from traditionalists, particularly in the U.S. “We have no political voice; we can’t reach anything close to a consensus on which candidates/parties/issues ought to be supported; and so instead we’re going to throw in the towel and say that Jesus should be in the White House.” Right. It’s always easier to say an entire system of governance is “illegitimate” than attempt to negotiate it.
But perhaps I’m being too hard on some of the traditionalists. If one goes back to the Papal encyclicals which gave rise to the doctrine of Christ’s Kingship, what one really finds is a reaffirmation that states, no less than the Church, ought to be governed by the moral law. Where the modern traditionalist “pitch” falls apart is at the pragmatic level. Given that we live in a “second best” world where no state is truly Catholic and the Church has no legally designated role in governance, then how useful is it to rally to a “first best” doctrine like Christ’s Kingship to illumine the way? The answer is that it’s not. But as I noted, when one has effectively given up on the world as it is constituted in favor of a retreatist mentality justified through general doctrinal appeals, such questions are unnecessary.
“the United States was never a confessional state.”
It’s a confessional state now. Of course the US isn’t a state, but leaving that small detail aside, it’s rather apparent that the US has become what it was destined to become because man by nature orders his life according to some kind of religious understanding.
I don’t follow. How is the U.S. a “confessional state” now? Which confession? Secularism?
Also, how is the U.S. not “a state” by all post-Westphalian standards? Even though we have a federal system, it doesn’t mean we lack unified statehood as a matter of international relations and law.
Yes, Some form of secularism.
“doesn’t mean we lack unified statehood as a matter of international relations and law.”
That’s a convention used by the States, not a natural State.
Of course if someone wants to argue that the States no longer exist, I won’t argue with that, but that doesn’t in turn prove the federal government or the land from sea to shining sea is a state.
But more to the point, all laws at federal and state level are now understood for all practical purposes from a secular understanding of man.
This is just semantic silliness. There’s no such thing as a “natural state.” God didn’t make the world with pre-drawn borders and color coding like your atlas at home.
“There’s no such thing as a “natural state.””
That certainly is the modernist view of it. But being a Catholic, I consider man to be by nature social, from which the natural state follows.
Oh Heavens…
Nothing from that proposition (which neither I nor my pagan mentor Aristotle would dispute) gives rise to your claim that there are “natural states.” Moreover, you haven’t shown that the U.S. isn’t a state, so keep at it.
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