It would simply depend on which Catholics ran the theocracy. If extremists and the ultra-orthodox ran it, it would resemble the Taliban or Saudi Arabia. If moderates ran it, along the lines of a Constitutional Theocracy, it would be a different story.
Cause, you know, all religions are exactly alike once you brush aside all the unimportant stuff, like what they believe and why they believe it.
Hmmmmmm, interesting…
It seems he’s more asking what the U.S. would look like if Catholicism was the dominate denomination (something like 99%). I do agree that most social things the church teaches against (abortion, contraception, etc) would likely be outlawed.
It also seems reasonable to conclude that canon law would be the law of the land. This would make some people quite happy and others quite angry. Also, what would happen to Catholics who dissent from it?
Not necessarily. Our dominant social creed is basically leftist atheist utilitarianism, even though true leftist atheist utilitarians are extremely rare, probably fewer than 1 in 10. Outside the universities and mass media, most people are ordinary, white, heterosexual, hard-working Christians.
People really overestimate the strength of democracy. Even in democratic nations, the people follow the elites – both in opinion and in the law. Recent history gives us plenty of examples of the state acting against the people’s wishes and the result being not the reformation of the state’s will but the deformation of the people’s wishes. Gay “marriage” is only one example of this.
I can’t help but think i fit was some sort of way Orthodox Catholicism that this would not be something even many Catholics of today would want. But beyond that - the last poster mentioned - what happens to those that dissent? I think that we would wind up having some kind of “Catholic Police” situation “ooh…I think I say my neighbor’s girl go into her boy friends house…this is something that could be an occaision of sin…oooh I didn’t see my next door neighbors at Church and I went by to visit and none of them were sick and no one would tell me why they wern’t there…ooooh I think I say such and such do such and such and that’s against Catholic teaching…” – There’s a reason Thomas Moore’s Utopia never came to be. Even an American Catholic theocracy would have to have humans in it - humans who sin and make mistakes - humans who are going to get some power (be they lay people or Priests or Bishops or whatever) and there are going to be abuses. A theocracy in America or anywhere is a nice thought - but in reality, I could see it becoming like other societies where religion is part of or is the law - and there are going to be a lot of people in America who wouldn’t want anything to do with a Catholic theocracy - I can’t imagine America ever being one don’t know I would ever want to see it. Heaven may be a theocracy but we’re all put through the fires of perfection before getting there - no body down here is perfect.
God Bless
Rye
Of course most Catholics wouldn’t want to live in such a society. Many (perhaps even most) Catholics are heretics and functional apostates. They want to have contraceptive sex with their live-in girlfriends. They want to receive communion unworthily the two masses a year they actually attend. They want to drop $3 in the offertory basket and then criticize churches for not doing more to help the poor. Most Catholics, frankly, suck. Who cares what they want?
Nobody wanted gay marriage ten years ago. There practically weren’t any polls on it because it wasn’t even on people’s radars. I bet if you did one, you’d find support in the mid single-digits range, about the proportion of the population suffering from severe mental illness. Now it’s law in like a dozen and a half states and support is north of 50% in most places. Clearly, what people want doesn’t matter even in our supposedly enlightened and tolerant and democratic times: what the elites want matter.
A confessionally Catholic state would have far lower ambitions than the modern atheist liberal utilitarian one. A Catholic state would simply aim to make it difficult to commit certain sins (like adultery or blasphemy), and to make Catholicism the most respectable religion around. Our modern atheist liberal utilitarian state is
actively trying to re-engineer human nature to accord with some made-up conception of the good.
If the masses of men are sinners we may as well desire a government that actually acknowledges as much and acts accordingly. The idea that we can’t do such without ushering in a benighted age of horrors is simply nonsense. There have been plenty of confessionally Catholic societies that flourished throughout history despite being run by and filled with sinners. Those societies produced thousands of saints, beautiful works of art, soul-stirring music, stunning architecture, etc. etc. – and they did this despite constant foreign invasions from murderous serial-killing Muslims, famines, the plague, etc. Modern society has given us… what, exactly, besides the corpses of 50 million infants unceremoniously flushed down their mothers’ toilets? Soul-destroyingly-ugly buildings? Avril Lavigne? “Artistic” photographs of crucifixes soaked in urine? To Hell, literally, with modern society and all the “freedoms” our cafeteria Catholic brethren desire.
