Integralism: A Manual of Political Philosophy

This book is for Catholics who have begun to seriously question the dominant political ideologies of our times, in particular the supremacy of liberal representative democracy, secularism, and separation of Church and State (among others). These ideologies, conceived in the Enlightenment, are so much a part of the modern mentality that most people don't even question them.As we enter the third decade of the 21st century, more and more Catholics are seeing the obvious: that liberal democracy is degenerating into a dystopia with widespread religious persecution, tech censorship, mass illegal immigration, sexual perversion, abortion, a growing acceptance of socialism and communism, and even violence (BLM, Antifa, Covid restrictions, etc.) all sanctioned by the government in the name of "democracy."In Integralism: A Manual of Political Philosophy, Father Thomas Crean, O.P. and Dr. Alan Fimister present the traditional Catholic teachings on a series of topics such as the source of authority, the nature of the state, the family, the doctrine of the two swords, the union of Church and States, the common good, international relations, and many others.The book is excatly what the title says, a manual regarding the nature of the State and its relation to the Church and man's final end. In that sense, the book is not presenting any new doctrines but is simply a summary of what the Church has always taught right up to and including the 20th century.In a nutshell, man's primary end is spiritual: to know, love, and serve God in this world and be happy with Him in the next. Temporal society has a role in helping man obtain this end, and therefore the ends of temporal society should be aligned with the ends of the spiritual society, the Catholic Church. Spiritual and temporal ends should be "integrated," so to speak, with the latter submitting to (but not subsumed by) the former. Church (that is, the One True Church, which is the Catholic Church) should be united with the State, both serving to aid man to obtain his final end, albeit in different spheres. This happy concord between the two spheres existed in the past, and we can call it Christendom.The authors base themselves mostly on the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, especially Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Robert Bellarmine, but there are many citations of other popes and theologians such as Saint Gregory VII, Innocent III, Boniface VIII, Francisco Suarez, and others.The book is very politically incorrect. Nearly all but the most radical Catholics have swallowed the Enlightenment ideas of Rousseau, Hobbes, Locke, and Montesquieu (especially the clergy), so some readers might have difficulty accepting the Church's traditional, perennial teachings on these matters. Truth, of course, doesn't change no matter what the modern world thinks.I found it interesting that they even attack Jacques Maritain's "secular Christendom" which is must beloved by many "conservative" and even traditional Catholics in the 20th and 21st centuries, Maritain being somewhat of a celebrity in his day and still admired today.I was also hoping that they would explain why they chose the term "Integralism." The word "integralism" means different things to different people. It has been used by very good and very bad movements over the past 200 years or so. It would have been helpful for there to be a chapter on the origins of the word, what integralism is, what it is not, and why the authors chose the term.The objective of the book was to make a manual of Catholic political philosophy, not necessarily to explain the crisis of the modern world. Most readers, however, are going to see it like that. Knowing the abstract doctrine of the Church on politics is only part of the solution. The other part is knowing the nature and cause of the crisis of contemporary society. Those are two related but distinct things.Take, for example, a person dying of cancer. It is very important to know what a healthy body looks like and how it functions. We have to have a biology manual that shows this. Also necessary is a manual on cancer: what it is, how it spreads, and how to defeat it.Western society today is like a person dying of cancer. Father Crean and Professor Fimister wrote an excellent manual explaining what a healthy society should look like. Although they don't say it, the closest that mankind ever got to this ideal society was the Middle Ages, when saint kings and popes ruled over Christendom. Their book is very important, but its scope was describing the body, not the cancer. They do address and refute many bad philosophers in the text, such as Hobbes and Locke, but that was not the focus of the book. Their book, though excellent, is not sufficient in itself to restore temporal society to good health. It is not just a matter of replacing the current system with another one in line with the principles of the book. We need to fight and destroy the cancer itself before any restoration can occur. Our Lady of Fatima came to explain the crisis and present a solution. It was also masterfully described in the 1959 book Revolution and Counter-Revolution by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira (and his many other books and articles).If Catholics by the 20th century finally embraced the political ideologies of liberal democracy, then the 21st century is seeing a growing reversal of this trend. As Western governments persecute the Church and even work to destroy the societies they govern in the name of "democracy," many Catholics are coming to the conclusion that something is seriously wrong. This book will help Catholics learn the true Catholic political philosophy and give a good foundation for the future restoration of Christendom.

7/10This is an excellent manual of Catholic political philosophy, but as with Domning in <i>Original Selfishness</i> locating all that is valuable in religion in evolution and all that is despicable in religion in the religion itself, Crean in a few places locates virtue in atheism and vice in religion. These places I cannot follow.In a few places Crean makes unfounded criticisms of capitalism, but even as an anarchocapitalist, I'm open to critique of capitalism: there are things more important than economy. What follows makes this abundantly clear.Loc 4680: "Therefore, while it may be fitting it is not in itself necessary that all groups sharing common descent [i.e. of one race] form a single commonwealth whether singly or in combination with other such groups."Okay. A little twinge here, but it can be agreed that natural reason doesn't demand the ethnostate; natural reason can just as easily lead to the idea of empire due to the noetic effects of sin. However, following:Loc 4709: "Again, since the goods of the earth are given to the human race [false assumption of unity] as a whole, richer nations have obligations of justice to nations marked by material privation analogous to the obligations of the rich to the poor within the same land."Let's unpack this from the end. The rich have obligations to the poor of the same land insofar as that land is exclusively peopled by a group of common descent, a notion already rejected above. Generalising this to heterogeneous states amounts to a redistribution from the best and most capable individuals and groups to inferior and incapable groups en mass, lowering the status of mankind as a whole, squandering our patrimony (and contravening the creation ordinances to multiply and to be good stewards). Returning to the prior clause, Crean is advocating for redistribution from successful ethnic groups to unsuccessful ones of low innate capacity, given that geography and ethnicity are strongly correlated (see Cavalli-Sforza, <i>The History and Geography of the Human Genome</i>, passim), and amounts to direct national and racial suicide, a dispossession that he urges the dispossessed to fund. No.4720: "Just as the individual and the family, so also the temporal commonwealth has a duty to harbor the outcast and must offer refuge... to those in mortal need."The footnote to this at location 4910 states this applies to economic migrants: 'those who have been forced by revolutions in their own countries [when is an African state not in revolution? People bring the problems of their native lands with them, such as the Jewish communists we previously admitted in such number and rotted our politics and culture], or by unemployment and hunger [to emigrate]... The natural law itself... urges that ways of migration be made open to these people'. Citation is to apostolic constitution Exsul familia of Pius XII in 1952. At this point either Pius had entered in on his final illness and was of unsound mind, or this was being written by the cabal of leftist heretics who managed him in his dotage: either way, we have a canonical example of papal fallibility when speaking of matters not of faith and morals here.For these reasons, with such insidious poison being lightly sprinkled amongst such disarming and generally based truth, the book must be read with greater than normal discernment.

If I am ever faced with a situation where I will be stranded on a deserted island and I am only allowed to bring a handful of books, then this will be one of them. The book is extremely pithy for such a large undertaking, and it seems to demand to be re-read after you've finished. There are so many great insights and practical wisdom from past ages that certain sections can leave you staring off into the distance in reflection for extended periods. The footnotes themselves are almost worth the price of the book due to the breadth of source material. This book is just a masterwork of Catholic political thought. It should be used as a Political Science textbook at every Catholic school on the planet.

Just a brief note to say Catholics must study our ancient venerable traditions so that we are equipped for the radical reforming of the world around us building the new Christendom to come

Not only one of the best books on political philosophy in decades, but also an important work of Catholic ecclesiology.