by Vinicius

At Fatima, the triumph of Our Lady’s Immaculate Heart was promised. These words followed a description of the world’s turning away from God, persecutions of the Church, and global disasters. When considering what this triumph would mean for human societies, it is clear that secularism will disappear and the reign of Christ the King over societies will return in this Marian age. This is something that we have historical precedents for; Fatima does not refer to the end of the world or what will immediately precede it, but to the end of the modern West’s Renaissance and Enlightenment secularism, and a worldwide embrace of Christianity.

Since the Enlightenment, the West has been defined by secularism; civil societies and their governments no longer recognise Christ and His Church. This ended the Christian West as it had existed since Emperor Theodosius the Great first made Catholicism the official religion of the Roman Empire in AD 380, which became the first Catholic society.

Theodosius not only recognised the Church; the state favoured the Church in every way, discouraging paganism and helping to drive the Arian heresy out. This was decisive, as the Eastern Empire, including the Constantinople, mostly followed Arianism, and paganism was still influential.

The modern West’s return to this state of affairs would completely reverse centuries of secularism (which was predicted at Fatima to reach a paroxysm with the spread of errors by Russia). Some might wonder how today’s Russia, where the Orthodox Church is sponsored by the state (along with Buddhism, Islam and Judaism) could lead this secularist onslaught against the Catholic Church and the Christian West.

The answer is that there are different kinds of secularism. During its first three centuries, the Church was persecuted, not by atheists, but by a divinised Roman civil society that understood religion merely as an aspect of itself. Paganism’s finality was secular; as Saint Thomas Aquinas noted in De regimine principum, pagan religion was properly subject to civil authorities, who often doubled as priests. The pagan state would have been happy to include the Church among the many religions it recognised as long as it reimagined itself as a facet of civil society, was not overly dogmatic and did not denounce other cults, effectively accepting state control. That is the current position of the Orthodox Church and other religions recognised in Russia today.

In eighteenth-century Britain, a similar situation applied. Edmund Burke defended civil society’s regularisation of religion, asserting Parliament’s right to alter the beliefs of the established Church. For the Catholic Church, which no state has ever been able to put in its pocket, Burke was scathing. He advocated tolerance, but only because he believed the Catholic Church was no longer a danger; Catholicism’s “opinions… are dying away of themselves”. But Burke declared that, had he lived150 years earlier, “I should have been as… anxious as anybody for… [Catholics’] abjuration [of their faith]”.¹ He supported previous persecutions of Catholics and, potentially, more in the future if “public feeling” warranted it.²

The merging of religion and society: the end of the Church.

It’s worth remembering that these long-lasting persecutions almost eradicated the Catholic faith from England. Yet Burke, while sceptical about Christian dogmas in general, thought religion might be of social utility if it existed merely as a facet of civil society. Various Enlightenment currents of thought viewed religion as either a private piety which should not disturb society, or as an aspect of civil society to be defined and regulated by the state. This form of persecution of the Church, by assimilating it to secular society, could be just as fatal to it as that of atheists who declare that all religion was false.

Indeed, the Arian crisis was perhaps the worst persecution of the Church because it was led by an Imperial state (which between Constantine and Theodosius at times espoused Arianism) which tried to run the Church and dictate its beliefs. This attempted co-option of the Church led to orthodox Catholic bishops being persecuted by the state and replaced by Arians. The Popes, and bishops like Saint Athanasius, led the resistance. In AD 353, Saint Hosius, bishop of Cordoba, who had led the Council of Nicaea and was Constantine the Great’s religious adviser, warned Constantine’s semi-Arian successor, Constantius II, who had called several unrecognised Church councils in order to impose Arianism on the Church: “Intrude not yourself into Ecclesiastical matters… but learn them from us”; Church-state collaboration did not mean the Church’s absorption into civil society. As a centenarian, Hosius later endured imprisonment rather than submit to the state’s Arianism.

Strikingly, this semi-pagan error of merging the Church with secular society is making a come-back, sometimes under the guise of Catholic traditionalism. For example, Charles Coulombe, a North American occultist who defends Tomberg’s Meditations on the Tarot, and consults tarot cards himself, also preaches the merging of Church and secular society, claiming that Emperor Theodosius made Baptism the entry into political citizenship as well as membership in the Church. This claim is not only untrue – many of the baptised, slaves for example, were not citizens – it is also impossible; Church and civil society are two different societies. Civil society concerns only the living; it is not the Mystical Body of Christ.

A model for the future

The first centuries of the Church offer a good view of what the Church and civil society may be like after the end of the modern West’s secularism. Society would confess Christianity, its governments recognising Christ and His Church. Governments would fully respect the Church’s independence. They would also accept the Church’s authority over spiritual matters, and as the final arbiter of natural law.³ This corporate recognition of Christ’s Kingship, as in the thousand-year Christian West, is what Pope Pius XI had in mind in Quas Primas; the reign of Christ over society was not the same thing as the individual’s profession of faith, for this exists on a large scale even in today’s deeply secular society. Indeed, a society composed mostly of fairly devout Christians cannot yet be said to embody the social reign of Christ if it does not recognise Him corporately. On the other hand, the Roman Empire of Theodosius, and many Catholic countries after him, by recognising Christ at all levels of government, did embody His social reign, even if less than half the population were actually Catholics. Of course, as Pius XI emphasised, Christ’s reign over hearts and families – at least over a determinant number, is also necessary.

The participation of Christians in politics is necessary but ought not include temporising with secularism in any form; the most tempting form of secularism is the kind that reduces the faith to an aspect of civil society and puts the “traditionalism” of all religions on a similar plane. We will hear much more about this. Fatima’s message is uncompromising. The secular West is not given options or time when it comes to God’s prerogatives. The Church itself indicates how to act in such circumstances by praising and sometimes canonising political authorities who long ago led unbelieving civil societies to kneel down alongside them in recognition of Christ, and of another society, His Church.

by Vinicius. Vinicius is a Melbourne-based historian-researcher  focussing on early modernity as the Christian Western alternative to ideological, Enlightenment modernity.  

ENDNOTES

1. Edmund Burke, Second Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe on Catholic Emancipation, 1792. ↩︎
2. Edmund Burke, Speech on a Petition of the Unitarian Society, 1773. ↩︎
3. This was the so-called indirect power of the Popes over society. At times of crisis where moral principles were seriously infringed by civil authorities, the Church might intervene authoritatively. ↩︎