Re-Thinking "Integralism"

There is a fair amount of debate about the concept of "Integralism" in conservative-leaning Catholic circles.  Those Catholics who are influenced by Libertarian (or not-really-Libertarian Buckley-ism) thoughts oppose it; others, generally intellectual descendants of Fr. Richard Neuhaus or Edmund Burke,  loosely speaking, are in favor of it.

So when a couple of thinkers write a book on the topic, it gets attention.  Here, we'll quote a few grafs from a review of the book which will give you, gentle reader, a flavor for the nature of the discussion.

Integralism, as the cover of this new volume tells us, “is the application to the temporal, political order of the full implications of the revelation of man’s supernatural end in Christ and of the divinely established means by which it is to be attained.” Isn’t that what our personal moral lives are all about as Catholics?...

...Integralism correctly teaches us that we must not segregate Christ and His Church into hermetically sealed domains, one marked “sacred,” and the other marked “secular.” Civil and canon law “should work in concord, while safeguarding the superior rights of the Church: since heavenly beatitude is a greater good than earthly happiness, the temporal power must cede to the spiritual where the latter judges that its goal would otherwise be impeded” (p. 218).

The separation of church and state is, in the common view, a fundamental constitutional principle. Or is it in the Declaration of Independence? Actually, that “principle” is explicitly in neither document,...

...Pope Benedict XV taught in 1914: “Sad experience proves that human authority fails where religion is set aside” (p. 106n). The religion which the liberal order must “set aside” — that is, extirpate — is the Catholic faith, which teaches that we are made in the image and likeness of God, to whom we turn for meaning and destiny.

By contrast, liberalism’s “break with the past,” says Patrick Deneen in Why Liberalism Failed, “was founded on a false anthropology.” Our secularized society worships the image in the mirror and seeks to divinize our appetites and urges. That is why Crean and Fimister write that “secularisation [sic] is death” (pp. 217, 73). The civil order, once separated from the Church, will become an intransigent, and tyrannical, enemy of the Church (p. 270)....

You should buy the book, of course, along with Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed.

By the way, the surprising and very friendly correspondence between President Trump and Abp. Vigano is even more interesting in light of the "integralism" discussion, no?

Yes.