I do not believe that the Guardian of your faith is referring to the Catholic Church as a religious body above, since the Catholic Church never started out as theocracy. Church and State only began to mix in a theocratic style say in the Middle Ages, when you had the Papal States which were clearly man-made. The early Catholic Church was completely separate from the Roman state, and indeed Christ mandated this separation between ecclesial and secular authority in the Gospels.
Otherwise, this would impute error to the Guardian of your faith, since it is well-known that the Catholic Church is a religious body and not a theocracy.
The theocracy element, to an extent, happened over a thousand years after Jesus with the Papal States
At the time Shoghi Effendi wrote this, neither the caliphate nor the papacy had theocratic power in any state. I think the word is not used in the political-science sense.
Here’s the quote again, from a 1949 letter written on behalf of the Guardian:
- What the Guardian was referring to was the Theocratic systems, such as the Catholic Church and the Caliphate, which are not divinely given as systems, but man-made and yet, having partly derived from the teachings of Christ and Muhammad are, in a sense, theocracies. The Baha’i theocracy, on the contrary, is both divinely ordained as a system and, of course, based on the teachings of the Prophet Himself… Theophany is used in the sense of Dispensation…”
It is evident that the secretary is replying to a question, and is explaining a reference in a text written by Shoghi Effendi himself. To understand the answer, we need to locate the text being discussed. But even before we locate that, we can see that the definition of ‘theocracy’ here is ‘a system derived from the teachings of a prophet.’ It is not stated that it is a system of governing a country. While both the Catholic Church and the Caliphate have at times exercised the power of civil government, this was not the case when Shoghi Effendi was writing. The last of the several ‘caliphates’ that could be referred to is the caliphate claimed in the late Ottoman empire by the Sultan, according to which he would be the spiritual leader – not ruler – of the world’s Muslims. On the several occasions when Shoghi Effendi refers to the end of the Caliphate in his writings, he is referring to this spiritual caliphate. Its abolition, two years after the abolition of the Sultanate, was a renunciation of the idea of a pan-Islamic union that the Sultans had fostered. So the theocracies, including the ‘Bahai theocracy,’ that the Guardian’s secretary is referring to here are all systems of leading and guiding a religious community, they are not systems of government.
Code:
If we try to locate the earlier passage from Shoghi Effendi that the secretary is explaining, two possibilities present themselves. The earlier is in his 1934 letter, ‘The Dispensation of Baha’u’llah,’ a letter that is entirely devoted to explaining the principles underlying the Bahai Administrative Order, and in particular the relationship between the hereditary guardianship and the elected Houses of Justice. He says:
The Baha’i Commonwealth of the future, … can find no parallel in the annals of any of the world’s recognized religious systems. No form of democratic government; no system of autocracy or of dictatorship, whether monarchical or republican; no intermediary scheme of a purely aristocratic order; nor even any of the recognized types of theocracy, whether it be the Hebrew Commonwealth, or the various Christian ecclesiastical organizations, or the Imamate or the Caliphate in Islam …
The letter continues in this vein for some time, comparing and contrasting the Bahai Administrative Order to democracy, autocracy, ecclesiastical government (with the examples of the Papacy and the Imamate), and aristocratic and hereditary government. It is not describing a system of governing a country or a world, but the system of “the Baha’i Commonwealth,” a commonwealth in the sense Gibbon refers to the Christian commonwealth, operating and growing within the pagan Roman Empire. This section of the letter refers repeatedly to ‘The Administrative Order’ and cannot be made to apply to the institutions of the world political order envisioned by Baha’u’llah.
Code:
The second possible reference is to Shoghi Effendi’s review of the first century of the Babi and Bahai history, God Passes By (1944). In it he says that:
The Administrative Order … is … unique in the annals of the world’s religious systems. … Nor is the principle governing its operation similar to that which underlies any system, whether theocratic or otherwise, which the minds of men have devised for the government of human institutions. Neither in theory nor in practice can the Administrative Order of the Faith of Baha’u’llah be said to conform to any type of democratic government, to any system of autocracy, to any purely aristocratic order, or to any of the various theocracies, whether Jewish, Christian or Islamic which mankind has witnessed in the past.
This echoes his earlier statement, more briefly. These are the only two instances in which Shoghi Effendi uses the word theocracy in connection with the Bahai Faith, and both refer to its internal organisation as a religious community, not to its theories about the organisation of the state.
Therefore I think he is also referring to the Catholic church as an example of a theocratic form of church government, not to the claims of the papacy (briefly, for example under Hildebrand and Boniface VIII) of suzerainty over the kings of Europe, or to the papal states, which actually were theocracies (defined as the rule of the state by the religious order).
