Reporting of Federici Studies Center
Against every form of secularism and anticlericalism, we republish a text by Monsignor Umberto Benigni on the role that the Catholic Church has had and must have in society.
The empire of the Church
The Church and civilization have, without a doubt, their own element, indifferent to the other: the dogmatic question of whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from or through the Son, it is alien to civilization; the establishment of the international telephone is foreign to the Church. This happens because there is a dogmatic element in this, absolute and transcendent; and a simply technical element enters civilization.
However, all this does not take away or diminish the great principle at all: true religion is the basis and defense of true civilization, because true religion is true morality without which civilization can only be partial and material, therefore lacking in the most and best of social life.
True and perfect civilization results from an organic set of principles and moral and material facts: together extremely complex and multiple, which ranges from the correct functioning of political and domestic authority to the public communications network and the good sanitation service. But how much would it be worth to deserve the title of civilian to a people, that in it hygiene and comfort reached the perfection existing in the palace of a North American millionaire, if morality was lacking in that people; so are its institutions, laws and customs were immoral or even amoral, that is, they made or allowed immorality to triumph? Such a people would give the spectacle of one of those stately stables, where you can admire the cleanliness, convenience, the luxury in which elegant and expensive draft and racing beasts live.
Therefore the noblest part of civilization, which is the moral life of peoples and individuals, so that it is logical and stable, it must be based on a principle superior to human development and will, in the assiduous place of parties and systems that succeed one another in the government of a civil society. And this can only be achieved by religion whose morality starts directly from God, absolute truth and justice, immanent, immutable, to which every man, every people, at all times they must bow and submit.
The natural sentiment of the people was always unanimous in recognizing this fundamental truth of civilization; hence the very ancient age, the ancient one, the average they solemnly recognized it and practiced it stably; and the modern age itself, who wanted to eliminate religion as a basis from his social system, and so he often fights it, yet it cannot in fact exempt itself from all tradition and all human conscience; so even today sovereigns find it indispensable to base their principle of authority not only on the will - often so wavering and jerky - of the nations, but also, and before, on the grace of God.
This is why religion is the soul of civilization, and all the rest is but the body. And if this generally applies to religion, even more so for Christianity and its historical organization, the Church.
The Church — in a space that lasts at least, from Constantine to the French Revolution, fifteen centuries — she was officially and truly the mother, the nurse, the guardian of European civilization, that is, of the highest human civilization.
And today, after more than a century of fierce struggle driven by paganism (already dead and buried in its historical form, neither dead nor buried in its essence) of the last form, “secularism”, - Today, despite the anti-Christian crisis in our society, the soul of Christianity (it bears repeating) it survives indomitable in a hundred criteria, in a hundred social facts, and not only in the official formulas we were just mentioning.
Today, the great struggle lies, precisely, between the Christian principle and the pagan principle that divide minds and hearts, and they agitate the advice of politicians, the studies of philosophers, the tendencies of the crowds. We Catholics have before us the radiant program so appropriately recalled by Pius: restore all in Christ, the whole of society, all of civilization. This means the effective recovery of the ancient Christian intuition, which he made the ancient author of the letter to Diognetus brilliantly say: “what in the body is the soul, Christians are like that in the world"; it means the hope of raising the triumphal cry again in the fullness of truth: Christ wins, Christ reigns, Christ reigns. This means that the social life of the Church must return to being the moral foundation of society, the fundamental criterion of civilization.
To obtain this Christian restoration, undoubtedly a double restoration is indispensable: — of religious life among the faithful, which constitutes internal and spiritual life, the kingdom of the Church — and of the social influence of the Church itself, which forms its external life, social proper, his empire.
Today there is so much talk and action about imperialism, it is good to agree on the question that the words "kingdom" and "empire" of the Church seem to us to express exactly.
The expression "empire of the Church" or "empire of Christ" has been used for some time now.; but in a completely relative sense in which it was understood that Christ and his Church reign over various people, scattered throughout the world.
But the very sense of empire indicates domination (command: imperium) about “other people”, not the total number of "citizens" however scattered throughout the world, which together forms the civitas, and when this civitas is monarchical as in the Catholic Church, form the kingdom. The Chinese Catholics, the Catholic Eskimos, Catholic Zulus do not form, literally, the empire of the Church, but they are only part of his kingdom, neither more nor less than the Latins, of the Germans, of the Catholic Anglo-Saxons: for the strangest people of ethnology are not differentiated from others in the kingdom of the Church. In a word, Catholics, any, form the “city”, the “kingdom”, of the Church.
Her "empire" must therefore concern non-Catholics, and society and civilization in general; as the imperium of classical Rome was made up of non-Romans.
The empire of Christian Rome, of Catholic and Papal Rome, it has expressed itself and continues to express itself in all the radiation of its external life. His strength and his intellectual and moral prestige, its direct and indirect influence in the world, its weight pressing, whether they want it or not, in the balance of his own enemies: ecco, properly, the empire of the Church.
This empire has been recovering since the beginning of the Constantinian triumph. The bishops of the Byzantine Empire who pleaded with the government for the alleviation of the unbearable taxes, and they averted or at least condemned imperial revenge on the insurgents of Antioch and Thessalonica (IV sec), – Chrysostom who, while the cowardly Byzantium trembled in the face of the threats of the Gothic Gainas, he met like a Christian Attilio Regulus, to the barbarian whose anger he had given rise to (fine del IV sec:9, – Alaric's ferocious soldiers, what masters and robbers of Rome, terrified by the apostolic majesty, they bring his treasures back to St. Peter's in procession (410) – Augustine of Hippo, the last patriot of Roman Africa, who raises his voice towards the vengeful Boniface so that he forgives the court and defends Africa invaded by barbarians (429), – Leo the Great stopping Attila at the Mincio (452), – here is the empire of the Church already founded, and the empire founded by Augustus has not yet fallen.
And when, in the final ruin of this (476), the civilized West ran the supreme risk of being shipwrecked in the barbaric storm, the empire of the Church was established and extended to the point of true political hegemony. In the anarchic barbaric-Byzantine period that ran between Augustulus (476) and Charlemagne (800), a truly imperial great figure dominated his time: Gregory the Great, the “last Roman”, how it was, rightfully so, called. He is the emperor of civilization: by the continuous insistent complaints to Byzantium and the Lombard court for the defense of miserable Italy, to the Christian civilization of distant England and its new conquerors, from the rescue of the jus and the mos in the clash of the false Byzantine civilization and Germanic barbarism, to that of letters and the arts, in the fearful boundless flood he appears the providential Noah who in the ark of the Church saves Roman civilization.
What can I say, Then, of the entire early Middle Ages, when the pope, the bishop, l’abate, expanding the civil tradition of Leo and Gregory, they first save civilization; then they impose it on the barbarians, and with these they form the new Europe, the new civilization that reaches unexpected heights in all forms of social life?
Through the annals of the Church that we learn to scrutinize, we will see clearly, insistently, dominate a historical law by which the successes and disasters of the Church's empire mark the successes and disasters of its kingdom; that is, its greater or lesser external vitality goes hand in hand with its internal one: and this is natural, because there is one force that acts within and without, and one is the humanity in which it expresses itself.
Modern times give us highly suggestive confirmation of this. The extreme decline of the "imperial" influence of the Church in the 18th century (when Europe was reorganizing itself, Poland was falling apart, political centers shifted, and Rome no longer had a hand in it, no more voice; thus Clement XIV had to suffer the Freemason ministers in the Bourbon courts, and Joseph II attempted with impunity the final debasement of the Church and the papacy), it was a prelude to the spiritual collapse that loomed in the imminent French Revolution; while the resurgence of the religious life of Catholicism under Pius IX and Leo XIII was marked by the resumption of "imperial" action, in the return to the Guelph tradition and the "pope and people", in the interest of the Roman pontificate in the movement of ideas and facts.
From such solemn lessons of history, a practical consequence is indisputable: to accommodate, strengthen and spread religious restoration, spiritual, of the company, that is, the kingdom of the Church, its external action must be strengthened and spread, his social life, his empire. Which is to say: so we need to instill courage in our people, and with respect to enemies, in the common ground of social life; Catholics must, clergy and people, do not allow themselves to be overtaken, as a whole, from the complex of adversaries in the multifaceted manifestations of civilization, from abstract sciences to local administrations.
It is necessary that we become strong even beyond the walls of our temples, if we want these to be safe and respected; — that the clergy is also esteemed as learned, practical, diligent, civil, if we want his religious ministry to be freer and more effective; - That, under the new form of the new times, let's go back to convincing our adversaries how, in social life, without us Christians they are of little use, and against us even less. The restoration of this social “empire” is a practical necessity for restoring the spiritual realm of religion: such an “empire” — like armor and a crown, defense and glory of the ancient heroes - must surround the mystical body of Christ, his Church.
This is the teaching that ecclesiastical history gives us, doubly “teacher of life”, because history, and why of the Church.
And: Social History of the Church, vol. I, The preparation. From the beginning to Constantine, Vallardi Publishing House, Milano 1906, pages. XIII-XVIII
