In a culture where every contour of the public life assists in communicating the message of Jesus Christ, the first citizen of the realm will be the Church, she who is both Bride and Body of Christ, the beloved one whom God Himself has chosen and designated to be Mother of all who have been redeemed in Christ. Followed by the Church is the family which, by hallowed and repeated usage, forms the domestic Church, whose actions are meant to model the life of the Holy Family. And, finally, there is the individual.
But this is not the isolated individual, uprooted from the sources that nourish and give life. If it is to be a culture of life, one whose lineaments have been shaped by the event of Jesus Christ, then it will not impede the actions of the true self, averse to all that is best for it; but only the atomized self, the self-determined self, living apart from others in a state of enmity and opposition to anything that tries to thwart its appetites and desires.
Here, then, are the two contrasting styles which currently contend for mastery in the public life, each refusing to settle for anything less than a complete sweep of the culture, however fiercely at variance their views of ultimate reality may be. On the one hand, there is the solipsist, the one who lives for himself alone, whose appetite for pleasure must not be trifled with by appeals to altruism or the common good. While, on the other hand, there is the selfless man, who lives entirely for God and neighbor and whose highest civic ambition is to assist in the creation of a genuinely Christian culture. Now, to be sure, the adherents of each remain rooted in a finite world, anchored therefore to the same contingent state we must all endure, which means neither one can possibly lay claim to being the cause of its own existence.
By that plain and ineluctable fact, therefore, each necessarily stands in relation to an Infinite and Absolute Other. But whereas the solipsist aims to absolutize himself, standing in majestic isolation from God, in defiance of God, while constantly disdaining the company of others, the genuinely selfless man is content to bow down before the true and everlasting Absolute and, thus, to serve others because they bear His image. It is he who, in accepting his creaturely status, his radical dependency upon Another, is free to give himself away and thus find and fulfill himself in doing so. He alone understands that before God or neighbor, the same truth applies: that in order to be at all, one must remain always in relation to another.
The Mexican poet Octavio Paz put it well when he said, “In the North American ethic, the center is the individual; in Hispanic morals, on the other hand, the true protagonist is the family.” Or, to give it a more acerbic spin, there is this from the writer Richard Rodriguez, who writes that while in Mexico “life is tragic and everyone is Catholic and cheerful, in the United States, which is Protestant and optimistic, everyone is depressed.” A variation perhaps on the same paradox might be the comment made by Frank Sheed, the famous Catholic apologist, who would often opine, “I find absolutely no grounds for optimism, and I have every reason for hope.”
Apart from God, then, on what basis will such hope be found? Only a God who is Himself a Holy Family, and thus the ultimate ground and model for a culture rooted in the family—where membership is precisely defined by the relations that both distinguish and define them, to recall the celebrated definition offered by Boethius: “Substance comprehends unity. Relation multiplies Trinity.” Chesterton was able to say the same thing, of course, only more simply: “It is not well for God to be alone.”
Surely this is what accounts for the fact that both the idea and the institution of a Confessional Order—where the Triune God is first, followed by the family of the Church, along with her countless progeny configured to God’s own inner life—emerged not out of the Northern European and Protestant countries but out of Catholic Spain, whose very identity as a nation and a people was forged in the Faith of the Catholic Thing.
And what, finally, is the Confessional State? It is not a juridical theory, although much ink has been spilled by scholars who have often theorized about it. It is, rather, an act and expression of love, in which one gives to one’s neighbor and the society in which they both live the very best thing that one has: namely, the truth about Jesus Christ, and the way of life He has come among us to establish.
Christopher Dawson, the eminent Catholic historian and sociologist, who has left us dozens of books on the subject of religion and culture, insisting that nothing is more natural than that men should seek to integrate the two, called it, quite simply, Christendom, which he defined as “a political society whose principle of unity is the public profession of the Christian faith.” This is not unlike St. Augustine’s description, incidentally, which he set down in the early fifth century in his great work The City of God: “A gathering of reasonable men united by the things for which they have a shared love.”
One could perhaps put it in more epigrammatic form by quoting the last heir to the Roman Catholic Empire of Europe, Archduke Otto von Habsburg, who, speaking of the future of Europe, remarked pithily, “The Cross does not need Europe; Europe needs the Cross.”
What did he mean by that? He meant that for Europe to recover her soul, the meaning and purpose of her existence as a people, she would need to first rediscover her roots in the Christian religion, which is to say, the Roman Catholic Church. It is in Christ’s Church alone that we trace the origins and development of Western Culture, she having both created and sustained the patrimony inherited from Israel, Greece, and Rome, catalyzing so great and far reaching an explosion of mind and spirit that, even now, we continue to draw inspiration from its source.
