The Kingship of

ACCORDING TO
THE PRINCIPLES OF ST. THOMAS AQUINAS

BY
REV. DENIS FAHEY, C.S.SP., B.A., D.Pa., D.D.
Professor of Philosophy and Church History, Senior Scholasticate, Blackrock College,
Dublin 1931
With Nihil Obstat and Imprimi Potest

States or Nations. Here below we see the Church and States, Spiritual and Temporal Kingship, in Heaven. Our Lord shall be the One Ruler, Priest and King. But God, Subsistent Being, in Whose Intelligence is infinitely perfect order, wants order in the works of His hands. So the world is meant to mirror forth, however imperfectly, the unity of the Mystical Body in Heaven, for the social life of which we are meant to prepare here on earth. Accordingly, the history of the world, viewed from the highest standpoint, to which everything else is subordinate, turns around the social acceptance and rejection of the Kingship of Christ, and thus the attitude of States to the one supernatural society and to the Indirect Power of the Catholic Church is the keystone of the arch of the world's social order.

This point may be expressed in another way. By their natural life men are destined to attain perfection in societies, States and Nations; by their supernatural life they are members of the Mystical Body of Our Lord, the Catholic Church, with God in Three Divine Persons present within them, seen here on earth, it is true, only as "in a glass, darkly," but one day to be seen "face to face" in Heaven. Our adoption as Sons of God is by our being conformed to the likeness of the Eternal Son of God by nature. This conformity is twofold: the one imperfect, by Divine grace in this life; the other perfect, in the glory of our heavenly native land, as we read in I John iii. 2: Dearly beloved, we are now the sons of God; and it hath not yet appeared what we shall be. We know, that, when He shall appear, we shalt be like to Him: because we shall see Him as He is (III. P. Q. 45 a. 4 c.). Now, in order to safeguard and favour their ordered tendency to that clear vision of the Blessed Trinity, in perfect likeness to Our Lord, men have a right to exact that the natural societies of which they form part observe their due subordination to the one Supernatural Society. This means the acknowledgment by these societies of that supernatural society and thus of the Indirect Power of the Catholic Church. Thus it is again clear that the attitude of States to the Indirect Power of the Catholic Church is the true test of the world's social progress. The full development of human personality cannot be harmoniously striven for, unless there be order in the relations between the authority in the State or society, whose business is the cultivation of that natural social perfection termed civilization, and the Catholic Church. The attitude, therefore, of the authority in the State towards the Kingship of Our Lord and the Catholic Church may be spoken of as the spiritual principle or soul of the civilization and is the real touchstone of the value of a culture, namely, its capacity to aid in forming true personality, resemblance to Our Lord Jesus Christ (cf. St. Thomas, De Regimine Princip.  Lib. I., c. 15).There is only one God, one world and one objective order for redeemed man in that world, the return to God through the One Lord and Master Jesus Christ, Who is the Way, the Truth and the Life, in the manner He Himself has laid down.

Has that order ever been realized in the world to any great extent? Yes. The thirteenth century, the high-water mark in man's acceptance of the order established by God, saw Catholic Europe organized in the way we may attempt to represent diagrammatically as follows:

GOD
(As He Is In Himself).

OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST
(Invisible Head Of His Mystical Body

The Catholic Church).

Each Nation aiming at the Temporal Prosperity of its subjects so
as to not hinder but favour the attaining their final end

the Catholic Religion. When Catholics are answering the objections of non-Catholics to the Inquisition, they sometimes seem to lose sight of the formal principle of order animating the civilization of the Middle Ages. They speak of heresy being then considered a crime, because the State recognized the Catholic Religion for what it objectively is, the One True Religion established by God. The phrases employed are liable to leave the reader under the impression that the order then acknowledged was a mere temporary arrangement and that at the present day another arrangement has arisen, also in order. The truth is that the State then grasped the formal principle of ordered social organization in the actual world and that the Inquisition was set up to defend the hold of the world on order against the fomenters of disorder. Of course the particular manner according to which that formal principle was concretely realized in the States of the Middle Ages has passed away; but that same principle is meant by God to mould the new matter and the new circumstances of all succeeding ages. Socially organized, man in the world redeemed by Our Lord is not as God wants him to be unless he accepts the supernatural, supra-national Catholic Church. The modern world has turned aside from order and is suffering for its apostasy and disorder. This great truth needs to be proclaimed unequivocally, so that the interior life with which we celebrate the Feast of the Kingship of Christ may be deepened. It is infinitely better to go down struggling for the integral truth, than to win a seeming victory by whittling it down.

But, from the thirteenth century onwards, there has been steady decay. When once we have understood that, for Luther, Divine Grace, which is our Real Life, remains outside of us, since it is nothing else than the external favour of God, it is easy to represent diagrammatically the Lutheran tendency of
life:

?

OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST
(No Longer, However, as Source or Intrinsic
Principle of Life of the Mystical Body).
 
Each individual, by a human act of blind confidence, is certain that the
justice of Christ is imputed to him, the one True Visible Church
through which alone (in re or in voto) one becomes a member
of the Mystical Body being done away with.

The note of interrogation at the head of this diagram and of those that follow is meant to emphasize the fact that those who are not in the order laid down by God for return to Him are objectively in a state of aimless disorder. Those who deliberately reject that order come under the leadership of Satan in his struggle against the Mystical Body of Christ (IIIa. P. Q. 8. a. 7).

The resultant Protestant State-organization may be depicted as follows:

?

Each Protestant State organizes its particular form of religion,
mixture of supernatural and natural, as a State Department.

This Lutheran ideal received international recognition at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, at the end of the Thirty Years War. That "Peace" has been well termed the funeral of the Catholic order of the world. Luther's separation of the Christian from the Citizen prepared the way for the deification of the State, realized in modern times, and the social influence of Protestant society thus made easy the advent of the modern public man who may, as a private citizen, be a Catholic, but as a public man will get himself represented at Protestant worship or even on occasion assist there at. "You are a prince or judge," said Luther, " . . . you have people under you and you wish to know what to do. It is not Christ you are to question concerning the matter, but the law of your country. . . . Between the Christian and the ruler, a profound separation must be made. . . . Assuredly, a prince can be a Christian, but it is not as a Christian that he ought to govern. As ruler, he is not called a Christian but a prince. The man is Christian, but his function does not concern his religion. . . . Though they are found in the same man, the two states or functions are perfectly marked off, one from the other, and really opposed" (Weimar Edition of Luther's Works xxxii., pp. 391, 439, 440).

The French Revolution marks another stage in the process of decay. It aimed at the violent overthrow of the ordered grasp of life still prevailing in Catholic countries. The tendency of social life in States which have gradually accepted "The Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789," during this post-revolutionary era of the world in which we are living, may be thus expressed:

?

PROGRESS OF HUMANITY TO FELICITY HERE BELOW.

The State has no religion of any kind, natural or supernatural.
Religion is an individual concern.

The State or Nation falsely holding that it is not obliged to make public profession of any religion tends henceforth to stand supreme over all the various forms of religion professed by its subjects. The State, as the natural development of human life, is, however, bound to favour the order established by God for man's return to Him. "Civil society, established for the common welfare, should not only safeguard the well-being of the community, but have also at heart the interests of its individual members, in such wise as not in any way to hinder but in every manner to render as easy as possible, the possession of that highest and unchange- able good for which all should seek." In spite of that, it proclaims itself equally satisfied with God not being worshipped in the way He said that He wanted to be, nay even with God not being recognized at all, and with Catholic worship. This is what has erroneously been termed, allowing freedom of conscience.

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