Is Catholic monarchy a common Traditionalist cause?

[AngryAtheist8]

But the seeds of destruction lie not in our system of government per se but in our fallen nature. The reality is that we have bought into the false notion of freedom as license to do whatever we please. **True freedom means freedom to do what is right. **We have been unfaithful, and given ourselves up to vice, and it’s tearing apart the fabric of our society.

Statesmen, my dear Sir, may plan and speculate for Liberty, but it is Religion and Morality alone, which can establish the Principles upon which Freedom can securely stand. The only foundation of a free Constitution is pure Virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People in a greater Measure than they have it now, They may change their Rulers and the forms of Government, but they will not obtain a lasting Liberty. They will only exchange Tyrants and Tyrannies.

John Adams
​

Ah yes, the freedom as servitude argument.

I have heard it before

 

[AngryAtheist8]

Why is curtailing freedom of speech necessarily immoral? Most people admit certain restrictions (shouting fire in a movie theatre, walking into a synagogue dressed like a Nazi, threatening someone). I’m fine with those restrictions, anyway… they seem perfectly moral to me.

In objectively true reality, God exists and is good. Why should we then allow blasphemy? It is objectively wrong, it is bad for people to hear it and it does nothing good for any individual or for the state. Likewise, should a book of pornography or witchcraft be allowed to be owned or sold? Its contents can only hurt people and clearly offer no benefit to any individual or to the state. So let it be committed to the flames.

.

So if something isn’t good it must be bad and therefore needs to be banned?

You would need a very large and powerful police-state to even come close to enforcing that.

A theocratic police state…
That doesn’t really sound like somewhere good to live for anybody but the elite.

 

[josephback]

Personally I don’t like democracy. It might be popular, but it tends toward despotism and immorality. The Old Testament generally had aristocratic leadership. Moses, Samuel, the Judges…-The perfect government is theocracy. When Israel switched to monarchy it was seen as a bad thing. Read about when the people chose Saul.

 

[AngryAtheist8]

Regardless of the type of government, it was the population whose self-restraint and consciences dictated what was acceptable.

Social ostracism used to be a very wide-spread and effective means of enforcing morality within Western culture until the rise of relativistic secularism.

People guilty of everything from profanity to **sexual promiscuity **were avoided and considered low-lifes by society. That type of behavior was deemed immoral and unacceptable and most people simply refused to associate with persons who practiced such behavior. It went a long way to enforce the morality of the entire culture.

If this were suggested today, its proponents would be accused of being “unfair”, “intolerant”, and/or “judgmental”; the three cardinal sins of our liberal American society.

Sexual promiscuity has always been a special case.

Men (particularly rich and powerful men) were frequently forgiven (or not punished socially at all) for sleeping around. The antebellum South (in the U.S.) was notorious for the *virtue *of its male slave owners.

There’s a reason the Black population in the U.S. is so white skinned, and its not interracial marriage.

Old fashioned Southern gentlemen

I would personally prefer an honest whore over that kind of gentleman to be my conscience.

 

[AngryAtheist8]

I will refrain from comment on the Monarchy as a specific form of government but will instead say - from my traditional, Catholic perspective - that any government which attempts to create an artificial separation between Church and state directly interferes with Catholic truth which states precisely the opposite - that the Church has a divine right (because of Christ’s Social Kingship) to be involved in all areas of life which include the governmental sphere. Therefore, measures which attempt to deny this right ought to be rejected and those that affirm it ought to be promoted.

If Catholics learn nothing else from the recent scandals in Ireland, they should at least take note of the fact that Church institutions are also capable of becoming corrupt, self-serving, and oppressive when they are given unrestricted power in a theocratic state.

 

[AngryAtheist8]

Well I think this is terribly naive. A lot of faithful people don’t necessarily know which way is up, philosophically speaking. Think of all the people who get seduced by the likes of Mill or Kant or Marx or Smith or even Hegel. Think of all those taken in by Freud! Many otherwise good Catholics end up holding gravely erroneous viewpoints because they are influenced by clever and persuasive errors.

And how can you say that any man is a law unto himself? Sounds like a Kantian formulation to me. It practically presupposes Liberalism right out of the gate.

Good people with good intentions buy bad books all the time. And if those good people are not also innately brilliant and shrewdly clever (most people are neither), then like as not they will be swayed into serious and potentially very damaging error. Why let vast numbers of people be damaged in this way? Merely on principle?

So most people are too gullible, stupid, and/or immature to know what’s good for them?

But what if the monarch shares these qualities (which is quite likely if you consider them the default setting for humanity). Then you have a ruler who is all powerful, as well as being too stupid, gullible, or immature to know what’s best for the people or himself. Who nevertheless still has the authority to make all the important decisions.

Sounds like a perfect disaster to me.

 

[AngryAtheist8]

I’m sure his excellency is busy. I’ll do it.

But I thought the ideal was good Catholic kings

 

[AngryAtheist8]

Then you must not have read the whole thing. There are authentic threats to your freedom, but they aren’t on this thread.

Yes, fortunately the Franco lovers have little real power.

 

[AngryAtheist8]

I think there is some misunderstanding here. The teaching of the Catholic Church is that the Church and State are two separate powers and that they have responsibilities proper to their own sphere. The matters of criticisms of the NO, V2, as well as the scandals you mentioned are Church matters. So it would not belong to the State to regulate such things.

The State does have the obligation, “to favor religion, to protect it, to shield it under the credit and sanction of the laws, and neither to organize nor enact any measure that may compromise its safety” (Pope Leo XIII, Immortale Dei §6). But the Catholic Church teaches that no one is every to be forced to believe. Nor is the State to intervene to suppress a public expression of a false view unless it demonstrably harms the common good. Something like pornography obviously falls into this category, you standing out on the street corner shouting “There is no God!” does not. Non-Catholics in such a country should be treated with respect, charity, and gentleness, according to the Golden Rule. Definitely not as scary as a government which has no objective moral moorings, no objective means by which to evaluate the common good, which can and does, for example, simply deny the humanity of great numbers of its citizens and allows them to be killed for any or no reason whatsoever. Now that’s scary.

But no Catholic monarchy has ever functioned like that.

 

[AngryAtheist8]

I know Solange Hertz was a proponent of the Catholic Monarchy. She considered herself a monarchist. I think the idea comes from the Kingship of Christ which means that Christ should rule over all nations. In the days of Catholic Kingdoms, the monarchy and the church both worked together for the good of souls. Now, governments and churches work against each other. What has saved this country so far was the body of christian law that was inherited from, ultimately, Catholic Europe. In other words, it’s not democracy that’s so great because this is nothing but mob rule. Over the years, this body of Christian law has been chipped away at by the Supreme Court to the point that lawlessness is coming. When you look at what’s happening today in America, monarchy looks pretty good. What gave the monarchies a bad name was the protestant kings who, like Henry VIII, had absolute power over the government and the church. With a Catholic Monarchy you would have the power of the church as a check and balance. Hope this helps a little.

The recent examples of Franco Spain and Catholic Ireland argue otherwise.

 

[Warrenton]

I would personally prefer an honest whore over that kind of gentleman to be my conscience.

I wonder how much experience you have with either class, or for that matter, with loving someone that you cannot marry. Perhaps this exacerbates your anger?

One must take accusations of sexual predation with a large dose of salt. True, some New England bluestockings such as Harriet Beecher Stowe made them; but to their mid Victorian sensibilities, the Dalai Lama would not pass muster in the morality department.

The skin tone of African Americans is presumably a function of miscegenation, but the question is when the bulk of it occurred. In the mid Atlantic states, under the proprietary lordships, plantations in the 1600 and early 1700s were typically created by sending out an overseer with an assistant or two, often Scots or Irishmen, with a gang of ten to twenty slaves to clear the forest primeval. The women, if any they had, were often African or Irish, and there was a shortage of them. The slaves and the overseers took up with the woman at hand, if she would have him. If the unions the people formed lacked a blessing, it was as much a function of the lack of churches as anything else.

This pattern became less acceptable as civilization spread, but was still common enough that people arranged their home life this way after the revolution. Patrick Henry was one such; after his financial ruin, he went with his African American servant beyond the Blue Ridge to start a new farm with her. They married at that time. Similarly, Sally Hemmings, Thomas Jefferson’s putative mistriss, was certainly part of a relationship that was far more complex than an encounter with a prostitute.

These were Southern men and women of taste and discernment, as can be seen from what remains of their domestic architecture and town planning, of their furniture and implements, of their writings about their love of their native land.

There is no reason to impugn them with a lack of gentility.

 

[Rock_Happy]

So the usual suspect is saying that Catholic monarchy is the ideal form of government…is this a common belief among traditional Catholics? I think I remember John Zmirak once alluding to it. Let’s talk about just within the geographical territory of the United States. Is this a common hope for Traditionalists, the establishment of a Catholic Monarchical state? I didn’t originally see this as a common aspiration.

Agitating for such a thing in our own lifetimes is so…cart before the horse? Sure, our own founding fathers said that our Constitution is only suited for ruling a moral people (and as a whole, we aren’t). Sure, our failure to condemn slavery from the start doomed us to fail to live up to that, etc.

But Catholic monarchy? I’ve heard that the two largest religious groups in the U.S. are Catholics and former Catholics, but that’s a plurality, not a majority! And we all know that even just baptised Catholics have major issues as a whole. Many would say that most Catholics…aren’t Catholic.

So on what planet is this Catholic monarchy supposed to be founded? Because faithful Catholics, accounting for less than 1% of the US population, are not going to push this through, even if we all decided we liked the idea!

Something like 25% of the US population is Catholic. Is your claim that one in 25 Catholics is faithful? How did you arrive at that number?

 

[AngryAtheist8]

I know such Catholics and I agree with them. Monarchy is the best form of government and if the U.S. still had the Crown, it can be argued that the Civil War might never have had to happen.

Alex

What logic (if any) is that based on?

Do you really think the rich planter class in the South (which basically functioned as the aristocracy and ruling elite of the region) wouldn’t have rebelled against a king?

 

[AngryAtheist8]

Personally I don’t like democracy. It might be popular, but it tends toward despotism and immorality. The Old Testament generally had aristocratic leadership. Moses, Samuel, the Judges…-The perfect government is theocracy. When Israel switched to monarchy it was seen as a bad thing. Read about when the people chose Saul.

The Jews of the Old Testament offer no useful example or guide when it comes to being a good and decent person.

They were the kind of people who found it necessary to write laws concerning how to properly beat your slave and sell your daughter into servitude (slavery). The kind of people who thought genocide was a good way to deal with inconvenient neighbors.

Rule by a council of people like that would be rule by savages.

 

[Warrenton]

I know such Catholics and I agree with them. Monarchy is the best form of government and if the U.S. still had the Crown, it can be argued that the Civil War might never have had to happen.

Alex

This is a view that I tend to favor. Naturally, there is a distinction between recognizing a theoretical optimum and advocating for its creation.

I can see no way in which a monarchy could be established without tremendous violence, and it seems that its creation would probably mirror the establishment of the Isrealite monarchy thousands of years ago. No one would desire such circumstances to arise.

Until such events, the system we have is a good one. The American constitutional framework is remarkably flexible, and provides a consistent degree of liberty.

Traditionalist Catholics see certain flaws in its operation, but so do many other factions. Bear in mind that kings, in the Catholic tradition, are the allies of the people and often the Church against the powerful. Cromwell did not chop off Charles’s head because he was an enemy of the people, but because he was an enemy of the oligarchs.

The Traditionalist point is that under democracy, the commons have no ally against the rich and powerful. They make us fight, they take the wealth, they dictate how we will live, what we do, and our only avenue for redress is the courts. An increasingly, they have those also.

Would it be possible to reform the republic in a way that would satisfy Traditionalists? Of course. We just don’t think it likely to occur, and think that it is more probable that the republic will cease to function in reality as a democracy prior to its reformation. Contrasting it with monarchy is a useful tool for illustrating the problems that attend democratic decay.

 

[Warrenton]

The kind of people who thought genocide was a good way to deal with inconvenient neighbors.

How then would you characterize nuclear war? It is an example of the democratic tendency to justify everything so long as it has arguable plurality support, over against all objections, including morality and common sense.

 

[Warrenton]

Do you really think the rich planter class in the South (which basically functioned as the aristocracy and ruling elite of the region) wouldn’t have rebelled against a king?

Clearly you are correct. The great planters did, in fact, rebel. It was the small holders that were loyalist. E.g., Swamp Fox, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, Ogethorpe.

 

[AngryAtheist8]

I wonder how much experience you have with either class, or for that matter, with loving someone that you cannot marry. Perhaps this exacerbates your anger?

One must take accusations of sexual predation with a large dose of salt. True, some New England bluestockings such as Harriet Beecher Stowe made them; but to their mid Victorian sensibilities, the Dalai Lama would not pass muster in the morality department.

The skin tone of African Americans is presumably a function of miscegenation, but the question is when the bulk of it occurred. In the mid Atlantic states, under the proprietary lordships, plantations in the 1600 and early 1700s were typically created by sending out an overseer with an assistant or two, often Scots or Irishmen, with a gang of ten to twenty slaves to clear the forest primeval. The women, if any they had, were often African or Irish, and there was a shortage of them. The slaves and the overseers took up with the woman at hand, if she would have him. If the unions the people formed lacked a blessing, it was as much a function of the lack of churches as anything else.

This pattern became less acceptable as civilization spread, but was still common enough that people arranged their home life this way after the revolution. Patrick Henry was one such; after his financial ruin, he went with his African American servant beyond the Blue Ridge to start a new farm with her. They married at that time. Similarly, Sally Hemmings, Thomas Jefferson’s putative mistriss, was certainly part of a relationship that was far more complex than an encounter with a prostitute.

These were Southern men and women of taste and discernment, as can be seen from what remains of their domestic architecture and town planning, of their furniture and implements, of their writings about their love of their native land.

There is no reason to impugn them with a lack of gentility.

Gentility?

I am outright accusing them of being corrupt rapists who used the people they held in bondage for profit and the satisfaction of their sexual urges. As many people (including former slaves) have done before.

Do you deny that the rape of Black women was common in the antebellum and Jim Crow Southern United States?

-AngryAtheist8

P.S. I will admit judging the consent of slave women when it comes to sexual relations between male masters and female slaves is often complicated. Even if violence was not used and the slave woman didn’t say no, was denying a master really an option?

How many bondwomen consented because they legitimately feared something bad would happen to them if they didn’t?

However, believing that human men wouldn’t sexually abuse women under their complete control (that were not even legally considered people) and that most such relationships were consensual, seems the height of naivete.

 

[AngryAtheist8]

Clearly you are correct. The great planters did, in fact, rebel. It was the small holders that were loyalist. E.g., Swamp Fox, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, Ogethorpe.

If you’re trying to be sarcastic in text form use emoticons.
No one can hear your tone of voice online.

Moreover, that was my point.
If they rebelled against a king over taxes, why wouldn’t they rebel over the issue of slaves?

 

[AngryAtheist8]

Most of the schools and hospitals in Ireland are under the control of the Catholic Church, and Catholicism is the official religion of the Irish state. Moreover, up until the late 20th century Catholic officials were able to ensure that Irish laws over things like birth control and marriage reflected Roman Catholic rules.

Sounds like theocracy to me.