What is the Catholic Church's view on the seperation of church and state?

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What is the Catholic Church’s view on the seperation of church and state? I am simply looking for clarification. There was another interesting thread where others gave two different sources that seemed to say different things on this subject.

One source was the The Syllabus Of Errors Pope BI. Pius IX - 1864. It gave the following as an error…
  1. The Church ought to be separated from the .State, and the State from the Church. — Allocution “Acerbissimum,” Sept. 27, 1852.
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Another source from the online magazine the US Catholic said that Vatican II had taken a another look at this…
But in 1965 the second Vatican Council took a fresh look at the church’s posture toward civil governments and implicitly affirmed the separation of church and state in the Declaration on Religious Liberty.
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…so what am I missing here?
 
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FYI…the Vatican II Declaration on Religious Freedom which is cited by the second source as implicitly affirming the separation of church and state…

http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_...t-ii_decl_19651207_dignitatis-humanae_en.html

Under point 6…
The protection and promotion of the inviolable rights of man ranks among the essential duties of government.(5) Therefore government is to assume the safeguard of the religious freedom of all its citizens, in an effective manner, by just laws and by other appropriate means.
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One more thing…my goal is not to find a contradiction between Vatican II and a previous Pope.

Certainly the term “separation of church and state” is not used in the Vatican II document. Another implied question is what does separation of church and state mean to the Catholic Church?
 
I’m reading before Church and State from Ignatius press. It actually suggests otherwise concerning the Middle Ages but it is probably a minority view. Regardless the author makes a case against reading our modern society back into the Middle Ages.

Not to argue just thought I’d share the resource of a different perspective shared by a Catholic Scholar.
 
It’s a book published by Ignatius Press and has the support of Scott Hahn

(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)
 
In a wholly Catholic social order (what some call “the social reign of Christ the King”), the Church informs the state, and all laws are in conformity with the teachings of the Church. That is not to say that all sins become civil crimes as well, but there is no contradiction, and the monarch and/or constitution of the state explicitly acknowledge the One True Church.

Sadly, there is not a country in the world anymore that is remotely like this. The preamble to the Irish constitution acknowledges Our Lord and the Holy Trinity, and the Polish constitution makes reference to God, but that’s about it.
 
HomeschoolDad said:
In a wholly Catholic social order (what some call “the social reign of Christ the King”), the Church informs the state, and all laws are in conformity with the teachings of the Church.
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The Declaration on Religious Freedom emphasizes several times that a government should not be coercing people to accept Christianity.

I can see that it may be possible for a church to inform the state without the state coercing people to accept Christianity (The UK could be considered a model). However, if a state were to make all laws in conformity with the teachings of the Church, I do not see how that would not end up coercing people to accept Christianity.

I was not able to find a good link describing a Catholic social order on Google.
 
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