The morning star and Catholic messenger. [volume] (New Orleans [La.]) 1868-1881, 1871-01-08

CHURCH AND STATE.-There is a funda-
mental difference between the Catholic
principle and the Puritan principle. The
old Puritan said, sthe State has no right to
ordain nything against the Word of God"
So also says the Catholic, and so far both
agree. But the Puritan went further, and
said, "the State has the'rlght and is bound
to enforce whatever the law or word of
God enjoins, and to prohibit whatever the
law or word of God prohibits;" the Catho-
lie says, emo, the State has the right and is
bound to enforce only such precepts of the
Divine law as the Church defines to be its
right and duty, and is bound to leave all
the rest of the law, its precepts and prOhi
billions, to spiritual discipline and the spi-
ritual courts. The Church teaches that
not every good thing is to be eujoined by
the civil law, nor every evil or sinful deed
is to be prohibited by the civil law and
punished by the civil magistrate. She
limits the power of the State in regard to
each, and leaves in regard to both large
margin to individual conscience, and to be
taken cognizance of only in the interior
forum. She tells the State what provisions
of the Divine law it is bound to enforce,
and what it must let alone"
1t is easy to see from this that the Catbo-
lie application of the .heocratic principle
secures freedom, while the Puritan appli-
principle as,transformed into the anthropo-
cratic OF democratic principle, inevitably
leads to the destruction of all liberty, both
civil and religious. The Puritan principle
establishes o centralized democracy, where
minOrities and individuals are placed at the
mercy of the majority for the time. 1t was
against this centralized democracy, which
is only Puritanism in its political applica-
ton = downright Jacobinism - that the
South, in the recent civil war, took up
arms, and if they had opposed to it, not
the supremacy of the civil power, but the
Catholic principle of the supremacy of the
spiritual, they would have deserved to
succeed, and not unlikely would have sue
ceeded in preventing the triumph of Puri-
tanism, which in fact they have only
strengthened.
Our Catholic brethren have an instructive
horror of Puritanism, and this horror of
Puritanism made them generally sympa-
thize with the South rather than with the
North but they have duly considered that
the democratic principle itself, whether in
the Republican party or in the Democratic
party, that is, the doctrine that the people
are sovereign and majorities have an inde-
feasible right to govern, is only Puritanism
transformed into socialism? We are loyal
to the Constitution, to which we have
sworn allegiance, to American institutions
as they were founded by the fathers of tie
Republic: but as Catholics and lovers of
liberty, we can have no sympathy with the
Puritanic or Jacobinical Interpretation they
are receiving from the majority of the
American people. We assert, and assert
without any compromise, that God is sover-
eign, and His law supreme in all things,
not the people, not society, not humanity !;
and therefore we repudiate, not the insti-
tutions, but the popular doctrine of the
country, as we do the European Jacobinism
or revOlutionsm that has stripped the Holy
Ether of his temporal dominions, and
holds him prisoner in his own capital
NeU York Tablet.