As Catholics we are, I should state, supposed to subscribe to the church’s “social teaching”. This tradition stretches back in antiquity to the strong calls for justice and defence of the rights of the oppressed contained in the Torah, the prophetic books of the Old Testament, the Gospels, the Apostolic Fathers and the Church Fathers; and in modernity to Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical, “Rerum Novarum”.
One of the key teachings to emerge in the modern manifestation of this venerable tradition, with its foundation in much earlier traditions, is the fact that a globalized world needs a true “world political authority” to foster solidarity and deal with those problems that need dealt with at the highest levels while fully respecting the principle of subsidiarity (ie “what can be dealt with at a lower level should be”).
The church was born in the Roman Empire. When that Empire became Christian, the church made full use of its world-wide scope and competence to spread the Gospel. Indeed the chief reason that Christianity was able to spread so quickly in the first centuries AD to become a minority but widespread faith was because of the international travel network and relative conditions of peace created by the emperor Augustus in the 20s BC.
In the middle ages, Western Christendom clung to the ideal of the “Holy Roman Empire”. The church has long worked within the framework of multi-ethnic, trans-national authorities and is itself the greatest religious example of such an entity.
Before the creation of “nation states” in the 17th-18th century, and the birth of nationalism, medieval society was composed of great degrees of subsidiarity at the local level - with medieval communes with limited democratic procedures (relative to their time), guilds and city-states or republics dotting the landscape. These existed alongside the universalizing presence of the church as well as higher authorities such as the waning, increasing symbolic, role of the Holy Roman Empire. In this global order in Europe the Catholic Church served as a glue and the Vatican often as a supreme court of arbitration. People saw themselves, not as members of nation-states, but as fellow members of their local communities as well as of an international community of Catholics crossing borders under the Supreme Pontiff.
Modern nation-states are a product of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. This treaty implemented a system of global governance which succeeded the one I have just explained to you (which was broke by the Protestant Reformation) and which has endured in some form to this day.
This system is man-made and not divinely ordained. It therefore does not have to be static.
The church, ever wary of nationalism, has for long called for a “true political authority” of a global nature to manage worldwide affairs that cannot be dealt with at the local level.
As Catholics we should assent to this, no?
The church has not defined what form this “world political authority” should take in any precise manner. This is for the secular sphere too work out. The church’s role in this has been to suggest reforms, provide proposals and procedures as well as the limits or checks on power which would need to be in place for such an “authority” to be created and function effectively, efficiently and morally. The papal encyclical *Caitas en Veritate *in 2009 suggested using the current UN as a structure to reform into something that resembles more the one that the church envisions because of its recognised position globally and heritage. Clearly it should be limited but should it be simply an international organization like the UN (albeit reformed and with “real teeth” to us Pope Benedict XVI’s phrase) or a limited world government formed by common consent?
Catholics are thus not under any obligation to subscribe to “world government” of some sort if we don’t believe in it; however we are expected to assent to the church’s teaching that the world needs a “world political authority” however one understands the nature of this proposed structure of global governance. It will be different for every generation or age. Every generation of humanity must face problems, especially in today’s globalized world, that have a world-wide scope - such as war, financial crises, epidemics or natural disasters. We need, always, to suggest new initiatives for getting nations and individuals comprising them to work together on a global scale. Past examples of this are the foundation of the UN itself and its predecessor the League.
This has been outlined in numerous papal documents with the full weight of the magisterium since Vatican II and before that in numerous other texts such as those by Venerable Pius XII, the works of theologians and even of important Catholic poets such as Dante.
