Across the Divide: M. Ciftci and Nathaniel Peters on Vatican II, Church–State Relations, and Political Participation 

Readers of Public Discourse will be no strangers to the debates over church–state relations in the past decade, or to their acrimony. It’s rare, then, to see a new book appear that’s been praised by major Catholic and Protestant players on all sides of the issue. 

In Vatican II on Church–State Relations: What Did the Council Teach, and What’s Wrong With It?, M. Ciftci argues that Vatican II views the question too much through a split between nature and grace rather than through the Bible and the early Church’s understanding of political authority and our allegiance to it. In this interview, Ciftci joins Public Discourse contributing editor Nathaniel Peters to expand his critique and propose how Catholics and Protestants might better view their work of evangelization and political participation.

Nathaniel Peters: Few questions have occupied Catholics over the past 150 years more than the right relations between Church and state. Many of those debates have centered on how to understand the teachings of Vatican II and recent popes in light of previous Church teaching and practice. 

To put it more directly, did Vatican II, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI change or correct centuries of previous teaching, or is there direct continuity between them? Should Catholics work toward a society in which the state takes direction from the Church, or in which Church and state are separate? 

What does your book add to the debate? And what are the lessons Christians should learn from Christendom for their own political engagement today? 

M. Ciftci: If we define Christendom as the era when rulers enforced the Church’s internal discipline of her members by backing up ecclesiastical penalties with the threat of temporal penalties (such as fines, imprisonment, or even death), then it was a terrible mistake. And yet, I also argue in the book that Christendom was the womb in which the most precious legacy of the West was nurtured, namely the theory and practice of constitutional government. It was a disaster and a blessing. It was not a Golden Age to which we need to return, nor was it a darkness from which the Enlightenment saved us. 

The debate between Catholic integralists and those who accept the liberal state will be a familiar one for readers of Public Discourse, but in the book I step back from that debate. I am not trying to show that Vatican II is compatible with integralism, nor am I concerned with the problem of finding the continuous thread between Vatican II and what came before. Instead, since the Council’s documents had such a tremendous influence on how Catholics, both ordained and lay, thought of church–state relations, I wanted to look at those documents again. What I found was surprising. 

Liberal Catholics and traditionalists both assume the Council made a dramatic break with what came before it. Conservative Catholics typically assume that much of the malaise of the past few decades would be resolved if we would just return to the text of the documents. I think all three groups are wrong. 

In fact, you need to read the forgotten document on the lay apostolate (Apostolicam actuositatem) to see that the problem with the Council, as I identify it, is not its rejection of what came before. Its mistake was that it took over a disastrous understanding of the laity’s role that had been developing in previous decades and endorsed it even more strongly. Hence, simply returning to the text of documents solves nothing, but neither should we simply return to the neoscholastic theology of the 1930s. 

What do I mean? At the beginning of the twentieth century, faced with aggressive secularism and innumerable pastoral problems, the Popes came to see that the laity had a special role to play in mediating between the Church and the world. The Church would maintain an indirect influence over society by instilling the consciences of individual Christians with Christian ideas and values, which they would bring to bear on secular affairs. 

The lay apostolate, as it came to be called, or “Catholic Action,” had admirable intentions but was doomed to failure from the start. It relied on uncritically accepting some very contestable conceptual distinctions between the spiritual and “religious” domain of the church, and the social and “political” domain of the state. The intention was to ensure the indirect influence of the Church over the political sphere. But, in fact, it meant the effective marginalization of the Church to a private sphere of its own devising. Rather than embracing its communal reality as a social body created by the Eucharist, the Church instead becomes an ethereal reality that dissolves into its individual members once it comes into contact with the political realm of the state. 

The conceptual problems led to real-world disasters. I use William Cavanaugh’s work on the Chilean Catholic Church to show that this conception of the laity under the Pinochet regime (1973–1990) hindered the Church’s ability to resist it, and instead suited the dictatorship’s aim of weakening all social bodies in civil society that bound individuals to anything other than the state.  

I devote the first half of my book to showing the importance of the lay apostolate to Vatican II’s teachings about church–state relations and why it needs a thorough critique not for being a break with past teachings, but rather a continuation of them. 

NP: As you move beyond your critique, you write that you “intend to make up for the meager and inadequate attention given by Vatican II, [Stanley] Hauerwas, and Cavanaugh to what scripture teaches about political authority.” Specifically, you argue that we have forgotten that Christ has defeated “the powers,” including political authority. What is the significance of this?

MC: One of the greatest achievements of Vatican II was to adopt the ressourcement movement’s method of renewing the Church by returning to the sources of the Christian faith in scripture and the Church Fathers. The ressourcement movement did much to transform Catholic thought, except when it came to how Catholics see political affairs and church–state relations. Hence, in Gaudium et Spes, after the dazzling Christological theology of Part I, it sinks back into the usual humdrum language of natural law in Part II, especially in chapter IV on political life. 

My argument is that Vatican II took over, with few alterations, the conception of the lay apostolate from before the Council because there was little effort at the Council to consider how a return to scripture and the Fathers could reshape our understanding of church–state relations. Hence, after devoting the first part to a critique of the Council, in the second part of my book, I show what it would look like to rethink church–state relations using the ressourcement method. 

To do this, we would need to abandon the anachronistic nonsense of thinking that Christ inaugurated the separation of religion and politics. If that is really what he meant by “Render unto Caesar,” then was his crucifixion just a terrible misunderstanding by people failing to see that he was really a “non-political” Messiah? Instead, from the Gospels and Pauline Epistles, I show that the New Testament depicts a confrontation between two reigns. It sees political authorities as being the agents of the demonic “Powers” who orchestrate Christ’s crucifixion, but whose defeat is revealed at the resurrection. 

Thus, between Christ’s first and second comings, we now live in the interval when his Kingdom has come but for a while overlaps with the reign of the Powers, who are permitted to exist provisionally for a specific purpose only: earthly rulers are ordained to punish wrongdoing and maintain some imperfect order of justice. Until the rightful King returns and sweeps them all away, those rulers are still necessary but the Church’s mission should confront them with a challenge. They will either stick to their limited role of judgment, or they rebel and crave a kind of obedience and loyalty from their subjects that only Christ deserves. Think of the persecution of Christians in China caused by the Chinese Communist Party’s suspicion toward anything that competes with the Party’s demand for complete loyalty.

But the seeds of constitutionalism were also found not in the First Amendment (sorry!), but in those key moments when Roman Emperors came to see themselves as being under a greater Emperor, such as when Theodosius I agreed to do penance for the massacre at Thessalonica in 390.  

NP: Your book claims that Vatican II has obscured how Catholics should see their participation in politics. More specifically, you argue that Vatican II’s understanding of Church and state “undercuts the public, political significance of the Christian faith, because it requires the laity to regard the communal identity received by them in the church as something that must not have direct relevance when they engage in politics. They must turn the corporate and sacramental nature of their faith into the motivations and values of a solitary Christian conscience, acting as individuals that belong in a political life first and foremost to the imagined collective of the nation-state.” 

How should a Catholic voter who reads your book act differently? How about a Catholic congressional staffer or judge? Or a Catholic priest preaching on faithful citizenship?

MC: I do not have enough space to give you a satisfying answer, but this is how I would begin to answer it. They should begin by remembering that “our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ” (Philippians 3:20). They are not dual citizens. They ought to see themselves as being like ambassadors from that Kingdom, dwelling here but with their loyalty elsewhere. 

The state, with its sinews of laws and institutions, is ordained by God, and deserves our respect, only insofar as it upholds an imperfect order of justice and peace. That is all it can achieve and should have no other aim. Without law, there is chaos, so of course they should do all they can to uphold order by being intelligent voters or public officials. But they should also look upon their rulers with suspicion; they are all potential Pontius Pilates! 

It is hard to understand the irrationality of politics except by believing that there are Powers acting in and through it. If true, then it would be disastrous to think naively that they can easily reconcile being a Christian active in politics. They must beware of how the gladiatorial spectacle of politics can captivate us and cause us to waste our faith, hope, and love on political campaigns and movements that depend on consuming our attention. 

As Oliver O’Donovan once said: 

The worship that the principalities and powers seek to exact from mankind is a kind of feverish excitement. The first business of the church is to refuse them that worship. There are many times—and surely a major election is one of them—when the most pointed political criticism imaginable is to talk about something else.

NP: You end your book by arguing that we should bear two imperatives in mind in thinking about Church–state relations today. First, the Church should regain a “tense, missional stance” toward the state, rather than maintaining “an irenic differentiation of religious from political affairs.” Second, we must “be attentive to the remnants of Christendom’s positive legacy in Western countries, which can serve an apologetic purpose of pointing to the origin of the political institutions and practices we most cherish in the West in Christ’s triumph over the nations.” 

Wouldn’t Benedict XVI and John Paul II say this as well? Is it not the logical conclusion of Vatican II’s teaching in a more hostile political context? It seems that you have come to the current Catholic magisterial teaching by another way.

MC: I cannot speak for those pontiffs, but I do think that their encyclicals mirror the language of Vatican II. They give the impression that the Church has an important apolitical, “religious” mission, separate from the world of politics, preaching a Gospel that can be easily translated into an idiom of human rights and human dignity, which all people of good will can get behind. (Remember Jacques Maritain’s experience of working on the UN Declaration of Human Rights; many groups of radically different worldviews seemed able, he thought, to support a list of rights, so long as their rationale and justification were left unspoken.) This would mean that we can easily separate the Church’s message from political affairs, but still find some way to translate the Gospel into terms that everyone can accept. 

In fact, the direction that events have taken over the past decades has proven that this strategy failed, and the apparently overlapping consensus was illusory. Christians should always make the best of any pragmatic agreements they can find with non-Christians on any issue. But the evangelical reasons why we support, for instance, constitutional government should be made clear, not veiled in embarrassment by translating them into the idiom of natural law or human dignity out of a misguided concern to avoid blurring the boundaries between political and religious affairs. That boundary has been blurred ever since Thomas said “My Lord and my God!”

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