Render, Don't Surrender

Reviewing a book by Archbishop Charles Chaput, John Zmirak (who manages what are now the two very rare feats of being sensible about being an American and being sensible about being a Croat) writes:

"the heresy of Americanism"

"He offers a lucid reading of John Courtney Murray and the Vatican II document Dignitatis Humanae, giving rather too much credence to Murray's own later writings. As Rev. Brian Harrison has pointed out, after the Council ended, Murray displayed a distressing habit of overlooking the key qualifications inserted by the Council fathers into the document he helped to write -- provisos that tried to harmonize aspects of the American experiment with classical Catholic teaching on Church and State. Viewed one way, Render Unto Caesar seems to imply that the Church's embrace of religious liberty and willingness to live with a secular state is a judgment on every previous Church-State relationship. We are tempted to "read back" the history of every Catholic confessional state and see it as an imperfect approximation of the ideal -- which is the American system, canonized at Vatican II.

Ironically -- as a subsequent chapter in the book, "What Went Wrong," points out -- less than decade after Murray wrote, the delicate balance between a secular state and a Christian people in America was hopelessly disrupted. And no correction is yet in sight."

"Certainly, the recent American experience with secularity is unlikely to inspire statesmen in future contexts, in overwhelmingly Catholic countries, that their states should shrug off any official relationship with the Church. While they'll never again have Church support for persecution of non-believers, in other matters they will more likely look to Constantine than Courtney Murray; the "honeymoon" of Constantinian Christianity lasted for more than a millennium. For all its flaws, it built Christendom."

Like so many of the paleocons, if Zmirak has anywhere endorsed McCain, then I have certainly missed it. And if, like so many of the paleocons, he has endorsed Obama, then I would be nowhere near as surprised.