Roman Catholicism, Politics & Culture: Part 1

As Western society has descended into decadence and flirts with social disintegration and collapse, increasing numbers of people, especially the young, are looking to Christianity and the churches for some kind of answer to the total failure of secularism in our decaying culture. The self-defeating compromise of many of the Protestant churches and their widespread failure to provide a compelling and robust scriptural response to this situation have led some to turn toward Rome and seek a solution within the ancient halls of the papacy and the doctrinal fold of its magisterium. This forces on us the question: Does the dominant church institution of old Christendom have the answers for today? What should we make of the Papists’ approach to culture and politics, and does it have the keys to rescuing our social order?

A Note of Gratitude

In venturing to touch upon elements of the Romanist view of culture and politics, it is important to note first that there are many important things to be grateful for in the history of the Romanist church.  I call it that because in many respects the label ‘Roman Catholicism’ is a contradiction – Rome indicates particularity, whilst Catholic indicates universality. Given that about half of all Christians around the globe reject the authority of the Roman Pontiff and yet affirm the Ecumenical Creeds, the implicit claim of universality for Rome is an unwarranted one. Nonetheless, before the Reformation, the Western Church found its principal center in Rome. And mercifully, the Roman church largely preserved its independence from political control. In addition, the remarkable monastic movements (though misguided in several key respects), which Catholicism nurtured, evangelized, and educated much of Europe. And whilst there were many lamentable doctrinal accretions that had begun to obscure the plain truth of the gospel by the time of the Reformation, the church of Rome maintained its creedal orthodoxy.

All Christians should also be thankful for the excellent work done by many Catholics today within the pro-life movement, as well as their activism in opposing euthanasia and defending the sanctity of marriage. There is much here for confessional evangelicals and faithful Roman Catholics to agree upon, and co-belligerence in addressing these vital issues is a genuine necessity in our time. It is utterly shameful that so many Protestant denominations have either abandoned the biblical view of these issues altogether or, neglecting their own rich heritage, have simply left it up to Roman Catholics to carry the heavy end of the log whilst they repose in pious political agnosticism.

It is true, of course, that the faithful churches born of the Reformation still have many profound and significant theological differences with Rome, which are not the subject of this article. These cannot be airbrushed away amid cultural co-belligerency. Questions of priesthood, sacraments, purgatory, penance, veneration of Mary and images, the rosary, celibacy, and so forth must still be faithfully addressed in the proper context. Nonetheless, John Calvin himself, whilst deeply critical of the Romanist institution and its worship, acknowledged that there were true believers within the Roman fold:

Therefore, while we are unwilling simply to concede the name of Church to the Papists, we do not deny that there are churches among them. The question we raise only relates to the true and legitimate constitution of the Church, implying communion in sacred rites, which are the signs of profession, and especially in doctrine…In one word, I call them churches, inasmuch as the Lord there wondrously preserves some remains of his people…[1]

This being rightly accepted, there are two fundamental concepts underlying Roman Catholic socio-cultural and political philosophy that, I believe, make a return to Romanism a serious wrong turn in seeking a solution to the challenges facing our culture. The first is Rome’s ongoing conflation of the institutional church and the Kingdom of God. The second is closely related to it – Papal infallibility. The first error misconstrues the nature and role of the church. And the second misapprehends the authority of the institutional church. Both distort a truly Christian vision for socio-political and cultural life.

Church and Kingdom

A key watershed in the history of Christendom was known as the Papal Revolution. It was during this period that the institutional Roman church began to seriously overreach itself by conflating its own power and influence with the advancement of God’s Kingdom. By 1090, a great effort was made to assert papal authority and revive the old Roman Empire. It was held that all princes must kiss the foot of the Pope alone, and a new Canon Law was issued to support an enhanced papacy. The Papists began to claim the authority to place people outside the protection of civil law through excommunication, and at times, not just individuals but whole princedoms and kingdoms were placed under a ban. The desire of the Roman Catholic church was that its bishop in Rome be recognized as God’s own representative on earth, the vicar of Christ himself, and as such, should be able to crown and uncrown kings as it pleased him.

This attempt by the Roman clerisy to directly control political life continued for centuries. In England, for example, after the barons’ struggle with King John over the Magna Carta – the foundational text of Anglo-American liberties signed at Runnymede in 1215 – Pope Innocent III declared the Magna Carta null and void. It was this kind of presumption and interference that led the English to steadily dissolve its connection with the Roman church; ties that were finally severed in the 1530’s; the defeat of the Spanish Armada being a key turning point during the reign of Elizabeth I.

The root of Rome’s presumption was philosophical rather than biblical. In correctly recognizing that Christ’s claim to universal authority and sovereignty over all the kingdoms of this world is plain in scripture, Romanists sought, through the uncritical adoption of the Greco-Roman view of the state, to realize this universal empire by arrogating to itself the authority and sovereignty belonging to Christ alone. The Greco-Roman world had developed a hierarchical view of reality that vested the institution of the state (polis) with a totalizing authority. The other spheres of life, like the family and business, were seen as lesser parts of a greater political whole through which man realized his earthly good, justice, and perfection. The Roman church revived this hierarchical idea of the state and then sought to place the state itself in subservience to the bishop of Rome.

The Roman Catholic church then began to see its clergy operating almost magically within a hierarchical order, dispensing grace through its liturgy and rites. The liturgy began to be performed and said for and on behalf of the people rather than as a function of the whole body of Christ. The institutional church and its functionaries, with the Roman Pontiff at the top, thus began to regard itself as the Kingdom and empire of Christ, rather than as a called-out people sent on mission in terms of the Kingdom of God – a Kingdom under the direct, not mediated, rule and reign of Jesus Christ.

This, essentially, was the medieval error of the Holy Roman Empire. It pursued a unified ecclesiastical culture within a totalizing papal ecclesiocracy, entailing the centralization of the Western church under a papal monarchy. Here, rulers, princes, kings, and political leaders became removable officials at the discretion of the Vicar of Christ. It was the famous doctor angelicas of the Roman Church, St Thomas Aquinas, who then set to work justifying the feudal order and papal ecclesiocracy as simply an inevitable manifestation of Natural Law. In the same century, both Pope Innocent III and Boniface VIII asserted a papal theory of delegation, in which political leaders and governments were agents of ecclesiastical authority.

Basically, two realms had emerged in the attempt to synthesize Christianity with the pagan political philosophy of the classical world: that of Nature and that of Grace. The church was the supernatural realm of grace that could admit you to eternal salvation, or indeed, keep you out. Only through the church institute could you find eternal happiness and perfection. Church dogma was the order and rule here. The other realm of Nature was that of the socio-cultural order and the state. The state, as the highest merely natural society, brought you to your highest good and perfection on earth and prepared the way for the reception of supernatural grace. Here, human reason was sufficient – so long as it was subject to the dogma of the church and the authority of the Pope. This is because the church, as the supernatural society, had primacy as the spiritual authority. As such, the medieval papacy’s control of life affected legal, marital, educational, and even the economic sphere, including bans on interest. The Third Lateran Council in 1179 actually called for the excommunication of interest-takers. Official relaxation of this rule took until the nineteenth century when the Sacred Penitentiary told confessors not to disturb those charging ‘legal’ rates.

With some irony, given what followed, because the claims of the Roman church had prevented the Roman emperors from centralizing power in the German monarchy, regional princes retained a large degree of autonomy. It was this fact that made the Reformation possible, because regional princes were powerful enough to resist the emperor and protect Martin Luther – in his case, Frederick III, elector of Saxony! Big changes came with the Reformation as various territories and kingdoms came out from under Papal rule, and nation-states emerged. England and Wales, Scotland, Scandinavia, the Northern Netherlands, Switzerland, and much of Northern and Central German territories formed new reformed and Lutheran churches.

Papal rule, however, continued for several centuries as the Roman Catholic political ideal in various regions – especially central Italy. These were known as the Papal States, where the Pope effectively ruled both church and state, exercising temporal power as a monarch with all the attendant authority that went with it. His Cardinals typically served as administrators in these territories, so that church and state were effectively one. This model had endured for over a thousand years, until the campaigns of Garibaldi and the eventual Italian unification in 1870 ended the Papal States, with the capture of Rome and the absorption of these territories into the Kingdom of Italy. Despite living in denial of what had happened, the Popes were reduced to the control of Vatican City, where they were little more than prisoners until the Lateran Treaty of 1929, which was signed by Pope Pius IX. The treaty recognized Vatican City as a tiny sovereign state – a diminutive remnant of the power and prestige of the Papal monarchy – and a symbolic spiritual enclave. And the Roman Catholic church, the ‘Holy See’, accepted that Rome was now Italy’s capital.

Always the Same

Today’s Roman Catholics, especially those living in the Anglosphere, can easily overlook how much they owe to Protestantism for the liberties, freedoms, and economic prosperity they enjoy in the Protestant world, including the separation of powers, the jurisdictional distinction of church and state, and free markets. Yet formally, nothing has changed in the Romanist political ideal regarding the relationship between the church and the Kingdom of God, between church and state, between political and clerical authority, between natural and supernatural, and between nature and grace. Vatican City, the sovereign state where the Pope reigns supreme, remains the model, the ideal Roman Catholic political order.

The ongoing political influence wielded today by the Pope, as head of church and state in the Vatican, is felt through special treaties called Concordats, which seek to introduce elements of Papal Canon Law into the legal structures of various nations, giving the Pope and the Roman church direct political influence. Since the 1965 Vatican II (which many Catholics reject), these concordats usually offer a little more religious freedom than in the past. Outside of Italy, the Popes have exercised most influence in Spain, but the ‘Holy See’ has ‘Concordats’ with many other countries as well, including France, Austria, Germany, Poland, Portugal, Brazil, Slovakia, Croatia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and more.

As such, it is important to notice that the Roman Catholic institution remains both a church and a formal political system.  There is no sense of genuine Sphere Sovereignty as understood in the reformational tradition. The Vatican is a global diplomatic and political center; an independent sovereign state ruled by a church cleric with a Papal Secretary of State. It is therefore a church-state hybrid that asserts all the prerogatives of a state, but not the responsibilities of a state, because it is at the same time a church. This clericalism continues to conflate the kingdom and rule of Christ in the world with one institution, its progress and expansion. Instead of recognizing the institutional church and the civil authority as distinct spheres of life, both subject to Christ and his Word, with distinct jurisdiction and authority that should not be conflated, the Roman church institution sees itself as the embodiment of the kingdom of God and of Christ’s reign and authority. And no change of dogma has ever rescinded the claim of Papal supremacy; that the Pope, a mere man and office holder in the Roman church, is the vicar of Christ and thus God’s representative on earth with authority to command all the faithful and political leaders. The Holy Spirit, as Christ’s direct mediatorial representative (John 15:26) in advancing the kingdom of God, is replaced by a cleric.

In 1864, the Syllabus of Errors was propagated under Pope Pius IX. Catholic theologians agree that whilst the document is not strictly infallible, it is an authoritative act that requires assent as it largely indexes errors already previously condemned. All Roman Catholics are bound to accept this syllabus as an authoritative warning. It is also worth noting that when this Syllabus was issued, the United States, Britain, and Canada had the same form of government they have today. Amongst other things, the Syllabus of Errors includes the statements that:

• The church can employ force and exercise direct and indirect temporal power (24)
• No national church can be instituted in a state of division from and separation from the authority of the Roman Pontiff (37)
• Kings, princes, and presidents are subordinate to the church in litigated questions of jurisdiction (54)
• The church ought to be in union with the state and the state with the church; philosophical principles, moral science, and civil laws may and must be made to bend to divine AND ecclesiastical authority (57)
• Divorce cannot be pronounced by a civil authority (67)
• Christian marriage cannot be constituted by any civil contract; it must always be a sacrament; the contract is null and void if the sacrament does not exist (73)
• It is necessary, even in the present day, that the catholic religion shall be held as the only religion of the State, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship.

These statements issued from the same Pope who, six years later, established the doctrine of Papal infallibility, which will be the subject of part II of my short series of articles on Roman Catholicism and culture. These teachings of the Papists, which have never been repudiated, overtly reject fundamental liberties basic to the Protestant and reformational view of political life in relation to the church institute. It denies the jurisdictional separation of church and state and asserts the Pope’s authority over the state and civil rulers. This remains official doctrine.

For this and other reasons, neither Great Britain, the United States, Canada, nor Australia has had Concordats with the Vatican because of their Protestant heritage and functional jurisdictional separation of church (not religion) and the state. So suspicious have the Protestant nations historically remained of Romanism that Britain only restored diplomatic ties to the Papacy in 1914 (Canada in 1969 and Australia in 1973). It wasn’t until 1984 that the United States established full diplomatic relations with an embassy.

The nature and role of the church as an institute, with its officers and order, must not be identified simply with the Kingdom of God – to do so is to court disaster. The organic and living body of Christ is called to advance the gospel of the Kingdom, the rule of reign of Christ, and the authority of his word in every domain and department of life, of which the instituted church is only one. The faithful church should always be found advancing the Kingdom of God, whilst recognizing that Christ’s Kingdom is cosmic in scope and ruled by Christ alone.

 

[1] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Chapter 2, Section 12; https://www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/institutes.vi.iii.html, accessed February 2026.