Pope Leo and the Limits of Government

A few decades of teaching at the college level have demonstrated to me that students are increasingly unprepared to study political theory. This is neither an insult nor is it the students’ fault. In some ways, it is a reversion to the mean, given Aristotle’s observation that it is virtually impossible to teach young people the principles of authority and governance before they have participated meaningfully in a particular political community.

Such participation is not achieved by reading the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, but by paying taxes, serving on the local school board, and volunteering to coach youth basketball. More specifically, young people lack phronesis (practical wisdom) – an essential political virtue – simply because they haven’t lived long enough. Another way to put this is to say that engagement in the community beyond one’s family discloses not only the need for an authority beyond one’s family but also the limits of that authority. When we are young and idealistic, we think not only that everything is possible, but that nothing depends on anything but government.

That is why, after having been involved in writing scores of papal addresses for Benedict XVI and Francis, I am impressed with Leo XIV’s emphasis on the limits of government. It’s not that Leo’s predecessors failed to acknowledge such limits, but they were not as salient or nuanced in their run-of-the-mill, day-to-day papal teaching.

Last week, for example, against the backdrop of Saint Augustine’s City of God, Pope Leo encouraged members of the International Catholic Legislators Network “to infuse the earthly society with the values of God’s Kingdom” in order to allow for “authentic human flourishing.”

His predecessors would often leave it at that, but Leo went further, asking, “How can we accomplish this?” After clarifying that human flourishing “depends on which ‘love’ (i.e., of the world or of God) we choose to organize our society around,” he urges lawmakers “to work for a world where power is tamed by conscience, and law is at the service of human dignity.” (emphasis added) One cannot help but hear resonances of “America the Beautiful,” in which, as a nation, we beg God to “confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law.”

Again, this is nothing new to Catholic social teaching. But in the past, too much emphasis had been placed on vague notions of what individual and multilateral governing bodies were capable of.

In other words, the aims of a political entity are not achieved solely by designating some authority to achieve them, but by supporting the “small societies” that the authority is designated to serve in the first place.

Though less prominent in his address to members of the International Inter-Parliamentary Union, the limits of government nonetheless underpinned Leo’s assertion that “an essential reference point is the natural law, written not by human hands, but acknowledged as valid in all times and places, and finding its most plausible and convincing argument in nature itself.”

A concomitant claim – reminiscent of Benedict XVI – that emerged from Leo’s address is that reference to the natural law is a way of ensuring that there is no a priori exclusion of the transcendent in political decision-making processes. In other words, if, as Leo said, “law is at the service of human dignity,” then human dignity can only truly be served when natural law places natural limits on positive law.

It’s clear that, with the help of City of God, Rerum Novarum, and the legacy of both, Leo wants to draw attention to two possible transgressions of governmental limits.

The first receives more attention from those familiar with Catholic social teaching, especially in the West. Namely, totalitarian regimes are an affront to human freedom and an assault on human dignity. But the second, which is basically the flipside of the first, too often gets short shrift. It’s the idea that civil authority does have a certain legitimacy of its own and does not only exist to serve the “small societies” – i.e., families – that are subject to it.

Thus, in Quadragesimo Anno, we read that “government must not be thought a mere guardian of law and of good order, but rather must put forth every effort so that ‘… both public and individual well-being may develop spontaneously out of the very structure and administration of the State’ (Rerum Novarum, 19).” Pius XI goes on to explain that “just freedom of action must, of course, be left both to individual citizens and to families, yet only on condition that the common good be preserved and wrong to any individual be abolished.” (25)

Thus, the State also has a proactive if limited (non-totalitarian) role to play in pursuing the common good and not just a defensive role in ensuring that obstacles don’t get in the way of families pursuing it.

Dr. Alex Plato is an example of a theorist who falls short of respecting this legitimate role of the State. Describing himself as an “anti-state post-liberal distributist,” Dr. Plato acknowledges that the family is a “small society,” but he also calls it a “full society. . .independent of the political community that might develop with it.” This goes too far and does not reflect the above-cited teaching of Quadragesimo Anno.

I’m afraid we live in an age when many young people, including my students in political theory, ascribe to this view of the State and, what is worse, deem it an accurate reflection of Catholic social teaching.

There have been several notes of surprising grace in Pope Leo’s pontificate so far. I hope his acknowledgement of the limits of government will continue to be one of them.

You may also enjoy:

Pope Pius XI On subsidiarity

Robert Royal The Start of a Reckoning 

AUTHOR

Daniel B. Gallagher

Daniel B. Gallagher lectures in philosophy and literature at Ralston College. He previously served as a Latin Secretary to Popes Benedict XVI and Francis.

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