My old mentor, Brother Francis Maluf, once encountered a man while publicly evangelizing, who said to him emphatically, “There are two things we don’t talk about here, Brother!”
Playing the naive foreigner, Brother innocently asked, “And what are they?”
“Religion and politics,” came the reply.
Brother’s response brought a chuckle to the bystanders: “What’s wrong with politics?”
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SOMEONE with a lot to say on both religion and politics was Orestes Brownson, arguably the greatest Catholic apologist we Americans have ever produced. And some of the best things he had to say were an essay he wrote in October of 1845 called, “Catholicity Necessary to Sustain Popular Liberty.”
Here is a little gem from the piece: “Religion is more ultimate than politics, and you must conform your politics to your religion, and not your religion to your politics. You must be the veriest infidels to deny this.”
His major argument is that in a system of government that is of, for, and by “the people” cannot itself fully govern the people, so who or what does govern them? What gives them their moral core, the principles that they will apply when they govern? He rules out both the press and educational institutions, giving solid reasons for doing so. He notes that only religion can do this. And while he did not cite them, he was, in this particular, in agreement with both George Washington and John Adams, both of whom famously spoke on this point.
But Brownson goes further. He asks, “But what religion?” Which one will help a democracy secure its “free, orderly, and wholesome action”?
I’ll leave the answer to that as a cliffhanger!
If you would like to read the essay, it is here. If you would like to listen to my Reconquest episode on it — premiering next Wednesday evening — you must be a subscriber to the Crusade Network (highly recommended).
If you read the Brownson piece, you’ll find a lot of hidden treasures there on what he thinks of democracy (hint: he was not so sanguine). His realism and Catholic candor are a welcome reprieve from the unholy hokum in which society is currently drowning.
