What is Catholic Integralism?

By Jason Scott – Pope Leo XIV became the first pope in modern history to visit  Monaco over the weekend, arriving by helicopter from the Vatican and being welcomed by Prince Albert and Princess Charlene at the Prince’s  Palace. The last pope to set foot in the principality was Paul III in  1538. But the most significant moment of the visit had nothing to do with ceremony. 

The Holy Father told Monaco  that its Catholic faith “places us before the sovereignty of Jesus, who  calls Christians to become in the world a kingdom of brothers and  sisters.” He entrusted the principality with deepening its commitment to  the Social Doctrine of the Church, and warned against “secularism,  which risks reducing humanity to individualism.”

In other words, the Pope stood before a sovereign nation and told it that its public acknowledgement of the Catholic faith is a vocation, not an inheritance to be quietly maintained, but a task to be actively deepened.

That raises a question worth taking seriously: Does the Church actually teach that whole nations, and not just individuals, owe something to God? The tradition that answers that question is called integralism. And it is considerably closer to mainstream Catholic teaching than most people realise.

From Person To Polity

The logic starts with something no practising Catholic would deny. Your faith is supposed to shape your whole life,  your marriage, your work,  the way you treat people, the way you spend your money. Any priest worth his salt will tell you that a faith confined to one hour on a Sunday is not really faith at all, but a kind of spiritual hobby.

But notice what happens when you press the question a step further. If the faith shapes the whole life of an individual, what about the communities  those individuals form? Their laws, their institutions, the shared life of a nation? Is there some invisible boundary where the Gospel applies to you as a person but has nothing to say to you as a citizen?

The Church has always said no. The Catechism puts it plainly:

“The duty of offering God genuine worship concerns man both individually and socially” (CCC 2105).

Not just privately. Not just on Sunday. Individually and socially.

Catholic integralism is what you get when you follow that logic to its conclusion. It holds that the spiritual and temporal orders are genuinely distinct but not sealed off from one another, and that political life must ultimately be ordered toward man’s highest good,  which is God.

Two Powers, One End

The key idea goes back to 494 AD, when Pope Gelasius I wrote to the Emperor Anastasius:

“Two  there are, august Emperor, by which this world is ruled on title of  original and sovereign right, the consecrated authority of the  priesthood and the royal power.”

Two authorities. The Church governs spiritual things; the state governs temporal things. They are genuinely distinct; the Pope does not levy taxes, and the Emperor does not absolve sins. But they are not independent of one another, because they serve the same human beings.

Because the spiritual order deals with eternal things, like the salvation of souls, which the Code of Canon Law calls “the supreme law” — it holds a primacy of ends, not of jurisdiction. The state exists to serve the common good. And the common good cannot be properly understood apart from man’s ultimate destiny.

This is exactly where integralism separates itself from theocracy. In a theocracy, the religious authority governs the state directly. The Church proposes nothing of the sort. But it does insist that the state is not a closed system, answerable only to itself. It exists for human beings who are,  whether any government acknowledges it or not, made for God. A state that pretends otherwise has not achieved neutrality, it has adopted a different set of metaphysical commitments, and a rather impoverished set at that.

The same logic applies to economic life. Man was not made for the economy; the economy was made for man. It is the same principle Our Lord taught when He said the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath (Mk 2:27). The Church has consistently taught that the economy, like the state, is a servant. And a servant needs to know whom it serves.

What the Popes Have Said

Pope Leo XIII, in his 1885 encyclical Immortale Dei, did not hedge:

“Since,  then, no one is allowed to be remiss in the service due to God… it is  a public crime to act as though there were no God.”

A  public crime. Leo was asserting that the state, precisely as a state,  has duties toward God — not as a concession to the piety of its citizens, but as a demand of the moral order itself. He compared the two  powers to soul and body:

“There must,  accordingly, exist between these two powers a certain orderly  connection, which may be compared to the union of the soul and body in  man.”

A body without a soul is a corpse.

Forty years later, Pius XI could see where things were heading. Europe in  1925 was busy replacing the altars of God with the altars of the nation-state. He responded by instituting the Feast of Christ the King  and declaring in Quas Primas:

“He must reign in the State… It would be a grave error to say that Christ has no authority whatever in civil affairs.”

The  20th century’s great ideological experiments,  each built on the premise that a just society could be constructed without reference to  God, went on to produce the most staggering catalogue of human suffering in recorded history. Nazism. Communism. Fascism. The lesson was not subtle.

Monaco And the Principle

None of this is a call to reconstruct the 13th century. The Church thinks in centuries and adapts to circumstances. Monaco is a small country, with roughly 38,000 people on a sliver of Mediterranean coastline. But it is also the last nation in Europe where Catholicism remains the state religion. In November last year, Prince Albert declined to promulgate an abortion law passed by the National Council.

When  Pope Leo XIV stood on the balcony of the Prince’s Palace this weekend and praised the principality for maintaining that public commitment to  the faith, he was not indulging in nostalgia. He was articulating a principle that Gelasius taught in the fifth century, Leo XIII  systematised in the nineteenth, and Pius XI defended against the totalitarianisms of the twentieth.

Every priest who has ever told a parishioner not to be a Sunday Catholic has been making, whether he knew it or not, an integralist argument. Catholic integralism simply follows that conviction to its social and political conclusions.

The faith is either true and therefore public, or it is merely private and therefore optional. There is no third position. As St Thomas Aquinas taught: “Grace does not  destroy nature, but perfects it.”