Writings by Dr. John C.

Rao
ALL BORROWED ARMOR CHOKES US? AMERICANISM AND CHRISTIAN DEMOCRACY

(A chapter of a book on Christian Democracy and the Americas, to be published in Spain)

“The right tactic for us is to be visibly and always what we are, nothing more, nothing less.
We defend a citadel that cannot be taken except when the garrison itself brings in the
enemy. Combating with our own arms, we only receive minor wounds. All borrowed armor
troubles us and often chokes us.” (L. Veuillot, Mélanges, Oeuvres completes, iii series, 1933,
v, 276).
“Americanism”---in its Catholic manifestation---can be defined as a belief that the method for
peaceful coexistence of diverse modern populations that was developed in the United States
out of its Whig Enlightenment and Protestant heritage also provided the sole effective tool for
defending and promoting true religion. While the thinkers who first formulated the tenets of
what amounts to a form of Liberation Theology were already active at the end of the
nineteenth century, it was Fr. John Courtenay Murray, S.J. (1904-1967) who proved to be the
most influential American making them known to the Church at large, by which time they
were better known under the more cosmopolitan name of Pluralism. The Jesuit’s influence
was made all the greater through the prestigious support given to Americanism-Pluralism by
a European layman, Jacques Maritain (1882-1973), who became familiar with it while
Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University from 1948-1952.

Murray’s thesis runs as follows.1 The Catholic Tradition clearly recognizes that the Church’s
mission is the salvation of individual human persons possessing Reason and free will. It
teaches that these individual persons make their pathway to their supernatural end by
means of a natural world whose great riches are channeled to human use through a
complex social order---a social order composed of many different societies, one of which is
the State. Because of nature’s intrinsic limitations, as well as Original Sin and its
consequences, the societies in which individuals develop and perfect themselves need the
teaching and grace offered by the Church, the Body of Christ, to understand and fulfill their
purpose effectively.

Unfortunately, the Church, in practice, has shaped her approach to the complex society of
societies forming the whole of the individual person-friendly social order through her
relationship with the State alone. She has done this by seeking spiritual and juridical ties with
public political authorities that determine how and under what conditions she can engage the
rest of society. This has regularly resulted in her co-option by authoritative political forces in
the service of their own limited, distorted, and sometimes openly anti-Catholic purposes.
Even when she has sought to address the problems of the rest of society---as through the
praiseworthy encyclicals of Leo XIII--- the restoration of all things in Christ has nevertheless,
in practice, ended up being treated as a kind of “second class” activity; a mere “extension” of
her basic sacramental labor rather than a marching order emerging logically from the
meaning of the Incarnation issued to every believer, clerical and lay alike.

Historically, therefore, the Church has found herself in the curious position of being
simultaneously politicized---as the ally of States frequently using her as a cover for their
earth-bound projects ---and not political enough---through her denial of the innate need for
every member of the entire Christian community to be completely free to serve the Incarnate
Word and transform the whole society-rich Creation in Christ’s image. Murray was convinced
that this arrangement unacceptably sacralized the State at the expense of desacralizing the
Church and the rest of society. We might say that he was convinced that it produced one
Cardinal Richelieu after another, ready to work primarily for the glory of his nation, whatever
the nefarious consequences for the Catholic cause in general, and not enough men like St.
Vincent de Paul and his dévot followers in France, burning with zeal to use spiritual tools to
fight evil in every realm of life.2

All this was complicated enough when power lay in the hands of ruling authorities
traditionally tied to the idea of an international Christian order. It grew still more problematic
when the many offshoots of the naturalist Enlightenment sought control over the swollen
powers of the secular, national State. Precisely because all of these offshoots could make
appeal to one or another distorted aspect of that Catholic European past from which they
had confusedly emerged, any liberal, democrat, nationalist, socialist, or Bonapartist faction
willing to seek Catholic help could find some aspect of the Church’s message that his party
seemed to promote and that its enemies ignored. Just like monarchs of the past, partisan
factions of more recent times could thereby press for public Catholic recognition of their
“godly” mission. And, just as in the past, clergy had joined them in what was really an
ungodly enterprise.

Murray argued---at least to begin with---that his judgment was based on simple historical and
sociological observation. America, due to the ever more diversified waves of immigration
reaching her shores, had become a land of many faiths and cultures: a “pluralist society”. An
application of the political developments inherited from the England of the Glorious
Revolution to her own peculiar pluralist circumstances had led America to realize that the
State’s primary and God-given duty to preserve social peace and quiet required a
governmental retreat from alliance or positive interference with the numerous religious
denominations competing for her population’s faith. She left them all free to pursue their
independent development and fulfillment. Through this general governmental retreat the
Catholic Church had thereby been given the opportunity to engage and potentially
Christianize the entire social order, to which it now finally had direct access.

Yes, the same could also be said for opposing denominations; but Catholicism was strong
enough to face and defeat them on its own two feet alone. Leaving the highly limited
Anglo-American State its secularism in its own narrow sphere---where it could do no harm to
religion, society, and the development of the human person---she now marched out to
conquer the world under the banner of the dignity of man alone. She had nothing to fear in
doing so, because she had given birth to that concept in the first place. Papal elaboration of
its meaning in the recent past demonstrated her conviction that she understood what was
required to develop and perfect it better than anyone else. And armed with a better
ecclesiology underlying the responsibilities of each and every one of her children in the
evangelical enterprise, she was confident that what she had to offer the world gave her an
historical, rational, and grace-backed superiority in a free dialogue with others that no role as
the Established Church and no Concordat could hope to equal in fruitful consequences.

Besides, Murray insisted, anyone with eyes to see could judge the results for himself. Not
only had the Church prospered and grown in the American context, but she had done so
without the divisiveness and bloodshed that had characterized her fight for survival in the
past, both when in alliance with the State as well as when openly opposed by it. The
conclusion was that Catholics were morally bound to maintain a system that so clearly
permitted the State, the Church, and the rest of complex corporate society to carry out all of
their diverse, specific missions so peacefully and so well.

A good case can be made for the argument that Murray’s concerns were also those of many
of the founders of the European Catholic revival movement of the nineteenth century---the
movement that also led to the creation of that varied force that we refer to as Christian
Democracy.3 Such men were convinced that uncritical defenders of the traditional union of
Throne and Altar were putting too much faith in what had repeatedly proven to be a “false
friend”. They also argued that sacred monarchies had controlled rather than protected
Catholicism, subordinating spiritual concerns to secular ones in a manner that led to a
practical secularization of the clergy as well as the Church’s mission as a whole.

Anger over the consequences of this unhappy truth caused such thinkers to pay greater
attention to a definition of the distinct character and primary responsibilities of political and
religious authorities alike. They did so not for the sake of encouraging a separation of
Church and State which, given the joint spiritual-physical nature of the beings ruled over by
each, they deemed to be a theoretical and practical impossibility. Rather, they were eager to
determine exactly how a necessary Catholic influence could be exercised without either
impairing the State's just prerogatives or the Church's own supernatural tasks.

Hence, the growth of a conviction that traditional dilemmas might be resolved by seeking
protection for religion from the political and social action of the mass of the Catholic laity. The
laity, by definition, had different self-interested concerns than the clergy. Precisely because it
was so large in number, it could never be an integral part of the government, nor directly
moved by the more suspicious personal aims of its secular rulers. With political and social
action placed in the hands of lay pressure groups, the clergy could dedicate itself to
improving its dogmatic and spiritual role in guiding the laity. Should clerical and lay
associations operate as planned, true Catholic doctrine and morality would then have an
impact on society in a more proper fashion. At the very least, the scandals perpetrated by
clerical politicians through the ages would be repressed, and lay activists who were tempted
to engage in dubious battles with the government for tainted self-interested reasons would
not compromise the prestige and mission of the Teaching Church as such.

Irritation with legitimist governments caused early supporters of this new approach to
contemplate cooperation with opponents of the existing system in the liberal camp.
Unfortunately, however, the supporters of continental European liberal constitutional regimes
also proved to be false friends. The "freedom" that they were willing to grant to Catholics to
defend their "rights" turned out to have an Enlightenment-shaped definition involving certain
conditions which were impossible for the faithful both to accept and to fulfill. Activists began
to realize that continental liberal constitutionalism was designed to ensure the victory of an
anti-Catholic faction using the word "freedom" to whitewash and justify its continuation of an
even more effective state repression in new, hypocritical ways. Crises were already visible in
the liberal governments functioning in France and Belgium in the 1830's and 1840's. As the
self-consciousness and resistance to oppression on the part of believers stiffened under the
influence of the general movement of Catholic revival, these crises expanded into full-scale
“culture wars”.
Catholic lay associations seeking not just to overturn anticlerical legislation but also to
replace it with Church-friendly laws often first approached existing "conservative parties" to
serve as their agents. Such parties would be offered what were in essence contracts. The
network of active Catholic associations would do much of the propaganda and legwork for
the election of conservative deputies to parliaments, with the proviso that these, when
winning office, would follow Catholic bidding on state matters touching upon religion. Results
rarely matched expectations. Conservatives were too inclined to negotiate with immovable
enemies of the Catholic cause. Gradually, Catholic activists---and Protestants as well---came
to loathe conservatives as yet another group of "doubtful friends", people who were happy to
have the support of a religious electorate, but only to twist that backing to serve their own
narrow purposes. Although in many places they called themselves Rightists, conservatives
were soon understood to be merely "liberals who had been mugged". Conservatives were
men who actually shared with liberals the same basic Enlightenment principles---especially
with regard to the concept of economic freedom---but who had simply become more
cautious about their implementation in most other realms.

It thus became clear, as the Italian activist, Ruggiero Bonghi, said in 1879, that this
"exchange between Catholics and Conservatives is a great error and is very suspect"; that
"Catholic feeling is not necessarily conservative, and conservative feeling is not necessarily
Catholic"4. Similarly, the Dutch Calvinist leader Kuyper insisted that the battle being fought
by all religious people was also "against conservatism; not conservatism of a specific brand
but against conservatism of every description"5 Hence, one then encounters the activist
temptation to move from contractual agreements to the establishment of consciously
Catholic (or Protestant) parties of their own.6

But “Catholic” parties also showed a propensity to easy acceptance of new "false friends".
Once they had found some way through their initial difficulties and begun to function more
smoothly in a given nation, they all too frequently valued their institutional survival more than
the purposes for which they were created. Despite the quite recent lessons of the dangers of
working with a liberal constitutional system, they also tended to treat the rules of that system
as unalterable givens, accepting limitations upon and modification of central Catholic
expectations. Furthermore, when laboring in a more democratic environment, they began to
praise the desires of "The People"---no matter how rabidly nationalist, racist, Marxist,
libertine, or fraudulently manipulated this “will” might actually be. Criticism began to be met
by insisting that everything the "religious party" accepted and promoted was ipso facto,
Catholic; as though its claim to be the "Catholic Party" protected it from error in its political
defense of Christianity; as though an idea or policy which was notoriously secular and bad
could become sacred and good through waving the party’s magic wand alone. Subsequent
victories by opposing parties might then bring down upon Catholics a persecution for
supporting positions that really had nothing to do with their Faith at all, but merely with
partisan self-interest.7

Complaints on the part of the hierarchy regarding the dangers of lay activism---as well as the
reality of a continued and very prominent involvement of the lower clergy therein---were
rejected by many in the Catholic Movement as a sign of the high clergy's tradition of timidity,
outright cowardice, or hypocritical protection of its own unacceptable political conformism.
There are, indeed, a number of cases where all these accusations were all too valid, but this
should not blind us to the fact that the general critique of the Catholic Movement by the late
nineteenth century was the same as that which its very founders had made of the earlier
Catholic political position! Sacred monarchies of the past had bent religious concerns to
parochial secular considerations. Clergy had played too great a role within them, sullying
their spiritual mission along the way. Now, out of an desire to fight precisely such
secularization, the “sacred political party” had emerged, twisting Catholic goals to the
divinized requirements of anticlerical liberal constitutions, willful Peoples, and the charismatic
party leaders and journalists interpreting the "true meaning" of their desires, sometimes
claiming to be the voice of the Holy Spirit while doing so. The Divine Right of the past had
not just reappeared; it had resurfaced compounded, with laymen and secularized clerics
asserting their right to protect a twisted understanding of human freedom and progress and
their own political advantage under the umbrella of a (corrupted) Catholic Faith. And the
self-confident Liberation Theology arriving from the United States at the end of the Second
World War was destined to offer nothing more than another justification for abandoning the
Kingship of Christ to the powers guiding the City of Man.

Many factors contributed to spreading the prestige of the American pluralist system in the
post-1945 world: European exhaustion and questioning of the dangers of all ideological rigor
after two world wars and genocidal butchery, that of the anti-religious Enlightenment
included; admiration of the contrasting stability, power, and wealth of the United States; and,
inevitably, Murray’s comparison of Old World ecclesiastical failures with Church success on
the other side of the Atlantic.

Once again, Jacques Maritain openly drew the consequences of America’s “teaching” for the
instruction of the Catholic world as a whole. Making reference to those “signs of the times”
that indicated both a weakening of hostility to the Church on the part of a previously
antagonistic but chastened liberal world, as well as a recognition of the need for a common
anti-totalitarian front composed of everyone nurtured by a sense of “human dignity” that was
rooted, historically, in Christian teaching, men like Maritain labored for the practical creation
of a universal pluralist environment. They fostered the impression that the outside world was
waiting breathlessly for Christ without really knowing it; that under a pluralist regime, men
could finally open their arms fully to the Church, knowing that they were opening them to
Faith as opposed to political expediency; to Jesus, rather than to Constantine. Hence, the
call to a new gaudium and a new spem.8

As hopeful and tradition-friendly as Murray’s prognosis may have sounded to many people, it
merely offered enslavement to another “false friend”. For it sadly masqueraded two great
dangers that were to lead to the post-conciliar dominance of teachings and actions totally
destructive to any substantive sense of social order whatsoever---non-Christian as well as
Christian. The first was the fact that the embrace of the American pluralist system burdened
the Church with a new set of political and social luggage equipped with a ticking
anti-Catholic and anti-rational “time-bomb”. Secondly, commitment to pluralism facilitated the
progress of that many-headed European personalist movement that was even more
influential at the Council than anything coming from the American experience, and presented
a much more clearly subversive alternative view of the Catholic future to boot. Let us explore
both of these dangers in their common work for the banishment of Faith, Church, and
Reason from all discussion of State and society.9
Murray himself knew that the success of the pluralist system actually depended upon it being
not all that pluralist in reality, since it required a moral consensus ”with regard to the rational
truths and moral precepts that govern the structure of the constitutional state, specify the
substance of the common weal, and determine the ends of public policy”10. America
maintained this consensus, at least for a time, due to any number of factors, including the
powerful influence of ordinary human inertia and the presence of traditional institutions like
the Catholic Church that served as militant counterpoints to logical ideas and practical
behavior working to break down all rational and moral unity.

The destructive developments flowing from these ideas and this behavior were rooted in
Protestantism, developed in conjunction with the so-called “moderate” Enlightenment and its
response to disruptive religious conflict, and taught most completely and confidently from the
time of the Glorious Revolution onwards by men like John Locke and his American disciples.
Founded upon a consideration of the human person as an isolated atomistic being defined
by his many material desires, these first worked primarily to construct a society that was
friendly to the freedom of individual property owners---as well as the theorists defending their
concerns. Constructing a property-friendly society demanded a weakening of coercive
authorities dangerous to the two interests in question.

In the seventeenth century, these authorities were economy-disrupting Anglican and Puritan
religious forces as well as the Stuart Monarchy, with its demand for taxes to support an
ever-larger standing army and navy. Taming them in a way that did not foster a fearful
Spinoza-like atheism and endanger basic social peace and quiet as well led to the call for
“religious toleration” and the “necessary evil” of a government with “checks and balances”.
Religious toleration allowed freedom for so many different religious denominations to flourish
that no one of them could succeed in dominating social life. While appearing to be
religion-friendly and maintaining commitment to a common moral vision as yet contested by
no one, it nevertheless turned one’s religious faith into a purely “decorative” aspect of life; a
personal consolation with no public significance.11 The tendency was to make government
as “decorative” as possible also. Both forces were shown their limitations by the real powers
in the land---the men of property and their moderate Enlightenment intellectual allies---who
shaped the social order according to their will.

All these developments, especially when translated into the New World environment, could
seem, at first, to offer an opportunity for the Catholic Church and the subsidiary societies of a
corporate order to prosper. After all, the attack on authoritative influence in life was aimed
primarily at two Protestant entities and the power of the State alone. But the deeper teaching
of the Anglo-American experience was its definition of the need for the individual, defined by
Locke as a bundle of passions, to be “free”. And with this principle as a guide, any social
authority that stood in the path of the fulfillment of material “freedom” had to come under
assault---Catholic and subsidiary as well as zealous Protestant and governmental in
character. The use of coercive authority---which so many philosophers, throughout the ages,
had seen to be an absolutely essential rational requirement for any effective social
activity---had to be presented as somehow unnatural in character. What took its place was
the raw power of the strong individual, whose will was thereby unchained to lord it over the
weak.
Moreover, the individual “freedom” promoted could be of any kind whatsoever. Yes, the men
of property and some of their intellectual allies may have wanted to limit “freedom” to
economic concerns, utilizing concepts like “common sense” to try to shame others into
“behaving themselves” for the maintenance of public order. Still, the ideas in play
simultaneously took the call for liberty down different directions than purely economic ones.
Proponents of other, assertive “freedoms” argued that public order was threatened due to a
failure to accommodate the liberties they loved, and that “common sense” therefore
demanded their acceptance.

In the long run, what this meant was that the strongest individual wills would ultimately be
the arbiter of everything. And in America, where the system permitting such a triumph of the
will was shored up by a “civil religion” that divinized the desires of its historical creators, the
strong men found themselves obliged to tie their will together with that of the Founding
Fathers. An ultimatum was thereby issued to Faith, Reason, Common Sense, and all social
institutions---the Church, now reduced to the level of a mere “religious denomination”, the
emasculated State, and other corporate authorities. Either they publically committed
themselves to supporting the will to power of the strongest proponents of particular
“freedoms”, or they had to be paralyzed and relegated to a powerless, “decorative” role in
life.

Gaudium et spes argued that the “split between the faith which many profess and their daily
lives deserves to be counted among the more serious errors of our age. . . . Therefore, let
there be no false opposition between professional and social activities on the one part, and
religious life on the other.”12. American Catholics entering into the social arena to
“Christianize” the world understood from their pluralist historical baggage and environment
just how that “false opposition” could be erased. It was certainly not by bending society to
the Catholic vision as traditionally understood. In order for the “true message” of Christ to
triumph, those responsible for teaching it would have to read the American “signs of the
times” that taught them the game of “Follow the Will” discussed above. And this showed that
a new Catholic order of the ages would only come about by recognizing the catholicity of the
will of the Founders as authoritatively defined by the strongest “freedom fighters” of the
day---and obeying its dictates.

Therefore, if anything in pre-existing Catholic theology and the rational philosophy

traditionally utilized in union with it stood in opposition to the will of the “Strong
Men—Founding Fathers”, then it was these discordant theological and philosophical
elements that had to disappear. To make matters worse, the Council’s “clearer
understanding of ecclesiology” was also called upon to justify such a surrender. The
Council’s grant of “full citizenship” to the laity was said to be a sign that the Church was
finally “catching up” to the spirit of that American democratic and pluralist environment which
had proven to be so beneficial to Catholics in the United States. What was now needed was
to carry a “pilgrim Church’s” learning process to its obvious conclusions, as, bit by bit, the
deeper spirit of the American experience taught her what Christ really expected from her: a
structural democratization favorable to baptizing as Catholic the dictates of individual “free
consciences”; and a condemnation of the use of coercive social authority of any sort---even
that of purely internal impact and devoid of physical penalties----as offensive to human
dignity and the dignity of Sons of God. Both the Catholic Church and her Christianization of
the world at large would thus be guided by supposedly Christ-like, but actually John Locke
shaped individual consciences; individual consciousnesses whose “liberation” was
demonstrated by their slavish repetition of the demands of the latest willful interpretation of
the willful Founding Fathers.

Did Murray expect or want this result? Given John F. Kennedy’s insistence during the 1960
campaign that his Church, so respectful of Faith and Reason, would have no influence in
shaping his individual conscience and behavior as president (What then would? Reading
omens? Investigating tea leaves? Or simply playing the game of Follow the Will?) it hardly
seems that such a development would have been surprising to him. A number of Murray’s
colleagues from Fordham University known to me personally (like Fr. Francis Canavan and
the late Dr. William Marra) insisted that he was aware of the exaggerated emphasis upon
individual freedom troubling the American experience and disturbed by its post-conciliar
application to Church teachings and structure, both doctrinal and moral. But others create a
different picture; that of a Murray arguing for a coercion-free development of the human
conscience:13

Murray had assiduously avoided joining the debate on religious freedom in society with the
question of freedom in the Church. He did this for both theological and tactical reasons,
contending that the conciliar text did not have the theological foundation to argue the internal
issues, and that any attempt to revise the text in that direction would be a fatal mistake. After
Vatican II had stated the Catholic position on religious liberty as a human and civil right,
however, Murray commented: “Inevitably, a second great argument will be set afoot—now on
the theological meaning of Christian freedom. The children of God, who receive this freedom
as a gift from their Father through Christ in the Holy Spirit, assert it within the Church as well
as within the world, always for the sake of the world and the Church. The issues are
many—the dignity of the Christian, the foundations of Christian freedom, its object or
content, its limits and their criterion, the measure of its responsible use, its relation to the
legitimate reaches of authority and to the saving counsels of prudence, the perils that lurk in
it, and the forms of corruption to which it is prone. All these issues must be considered in a
spirit of sober and informed reflection.”

Any hope for “transformation of all things in Christ” through the agency of Christian
Democracy, Catholic political parties, and Catholic Action in general was devastated by the
influence of this American Liberation Theology. Pluralism’s innate tendency to treat social
authority as dangerously suspect worked first of all to break down the authority and morale
of the old guard at the Roman Curia. This permitted real power to implement conciliar
decrees to be turned over to commissions, study groups, and journals dominated by the
cabal that subverted the Council in the first place. Pluralist adulation of diversity also helped
to inspire Paul VI’s Octogesima adveniens (1971), which argued that local churches would
be better able than the Papacy to understand the natural Seeds of the Logos offered by their
own lands, through their peculiar corporate social institutions. But the authority of these
institutions was equally undermined. Removal of traditional authorities then allowed the
willful strong to “evangelize” the entire social order as they understood the term.
“Evangelizing the social order” then took shape differently, depending upon what the
strongest willful force defining “Catholicism” in a given country. Under the strong, willful
guidance of the naturalist (and generally personalist) forces active in the Council and its
aftermath, the Catholic movements of Europe and Latin America were told to continue their
labors only on the basis of “vital natural values” that could be shared by believers and
non-believers alike. All that was distinctly Catholic in their mentality had to be jettisoned as
divisive and dangerous.

“Evangelization” under these circumstances became a code word for a conscious,

determined burial in fallen natural desires and perceptions which might have been lifted up
to God, had the tools for accomplishing that goal not been rejected, and an opening not
been given instead to all the gross, banal and frequently inane fantasies to which human
beings always feel their deepest pull. The result, in practice, is that a pluralist-personalist
minded Church and State have never been more united than ever before in history---in a
common commitment to allow fallen nature to have its way with society, against the dictates
of both Faith and Reason. And, ironically, as so often in the past, it is renegade clergy,
proclaiming the liberation of the laity and then preventing it from exercising its Faith and
Reason in its proper spheres of political and social action who have been most guilty in
cementing this new union of Throne and Altar. The Church is still a “sign of contradiction”,
but, unfortunately, contradiction of her own divine character and mission, which has become
nothing other than subservient to the voice of “the Promethean lust for material power that
serves as the deepest common drive behind all modern Western cultures”.14

In short, the dreams of the vigorous Catholic revival movement lying at the basis of Christian
Democracy have been hopelessly shattered. It is the enemy that defines what
“transformation in Christ” can and cannot mean. Many well-meaning Catholics still continue
to take this definition seriously as the sole basis for any political and social action in the
world at large. They are riding on the back of monster when they do so. For once again, as
Louis Veuillot tells us, “all borrowed armor” can do nothing but “choke us”.

1 Murray’s work is mostly in article form, including We Hold These Truths. For Murray and
the Council, see J. Bryan Hehir, “Church-State and Church-World: The Ecclesiological
Implications”, Proceedings of the 41st Annual Convention of the Catholic Theological Society
of America (1986), pp. 54-74; http://ejournals.bc.edu/ojs/index.php/ctsa/issue/view/278;
Francis Canavan, S.J., “Religious Freedom: John Courtney Murray, S.J. and Vatican II”,
Faith & Reason (Summer, 1986), https://www.ewtn.com/library/HUMANITY/FR87203.TXT.

2 See my article, “Can Anything Good Come From France?”, (The Remnant, December
31st, 2004, http://jcrao.freeshell.org/GoodFromFrance.html).

3 For the whole of the following argument, see J. Rao, Removing the Blindfold (Angelus
Press, 2014); also, “All Borrowed Armor Chokes Us” (Seattle Catholic, July, 2005),
http://www.seattlecatholic.com/a050709.html

4 S.N. Kalyvas, The Rise of Christian Democracy in Europe (Cornell, 1966), p. 225.

5 Kalyvas, Op. cit., p. 225.

6 Ibid., pp. 258-259.

7 Ibid., pp. 232, 248.

8 See Meinvieille, J., 1949. De Lamennais a Maritain (La Cité Catholique, 1956).
9 See J. Rao, Black Legends and the Light of the World (Remnant Press, 2012), pp.
491-643.

10 John Courtney Murray, S.J., We Hold These Truths (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1960),
pp. 72-73.

11 See Blanford Parker, The Triumph of Augustan Poetics (Cambridge University Press,
1998) for the concerted effort to reduce religion to a personal, decorative element rather than
a public force shaping society; also, J. Rao, Americanism and the Collapse of the Church in
the United States (Tan, 1994).

12 Gaudium et Spes, 43.

13 .J. Bryan Hehir, “Church-State and Church-World: The Ecclesiological Implications”,

Proceedings of the 41st Annual Convention of the Catholic Theological Society of America
(1986), pp. 72-73, citing Murray in Walter Abbot, ed., The Documents of Vatican II (New
York: Guild Press, 1966) 673.).

14 Gawthrop, R., Pietism and the Making of Eighteenth Century Prussia (Cambridge, 1993),
p. 284.

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