State Power is Neither Holy Nor Angelic
The Liberation of Saint Peter – Raphael Sanzio – 1516
On news that the FBI has not only been spying on and infiltrating Catholic parishes, but lying about it:
When I studied to be a priest/religious as a Dominican, we were assigned to read through the Constitutions of the Order of Preachers; many of the notions and clauses date back all the way to the time of Dominic himself. The best ones were just that old.
I vividly remember–though this was well before my time as a libertarian, Austrian and an-cap–that the ancient Dominicans made it absolutely clear to secular authorities that, at any time, they were invited and welcomed to join in or just observe common prayer. They could enter and observe Dominican liturgical and communal life; authentic and unredacted.
Even back then, this hit me as weird. Why would the earliest Dominicans–and likely Dominic himself–insist that state rulers and officials be granted what essentially amounted to unabated access into convents, priories, churches, and chapels? Talk about letting, at least a potential fox into the henhouse.
I came quickly to see the genius in it though. Even in a Europe of 10000 Liechtensteins, the idea was that this novelty of a mendicant order, one which needed special permission from the pope to exist at all after a general ban had been enacted on new congregations, needed to avoid developing into a cult in the strict sense of the term. Its life could not be hidden. And as Dominic sent out the earliest Preachers to the far ends of the Earth as Christ once did, two by two, another intended effect played out; namely, governments’ the world over proved their temporal evil by the amount of suspicion, disdain, obstruction and persecution they directed toward these new, Catholic beggars with eggheads, white and black habits (because they were the cheapest colors), and loud mouths for God. What the states could not claim was that Dominican life was secret. The Dominicans would not go the way of the Templars. Per the best scholarship on that group, they more than deserved to be suppressed. Weirdos. Precursors to the Jesuits? Maybe.
Those states were impotent in a relative sense compared to the totalitarian regimes under which we labor and suffer abuse today. Yet, as what I maintain is the real message behind Romans 13, and as those early ‘hounds of the Lord’ found out, the state flexes a lot but has no power ultimately over us. The evil they commit demonstrates the understood existence of the limits and fleeting nature of their power. Conversely, whether it is a sultan or the FBI; a Roman magistrate or (sadly today) a Roman pontiff enthralled with one world governance; a democracy or an oligarchy posing as one–the state’s hostility to us indicates our holiness.
That same Paul wrote earlier in the famous letter (Romans): “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (8:38-39) The Incarnate Word was, of course, even more direct: “If the world hate you, know ye, that it hath hated me before you. If you had been of the world, the world would love its own: but because you are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you. Remember my word that I said to you: The servant is not greater than his master. If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you: if they have kept my word, they will keep yours also.” (John 15:18-20)
I write this on the feast of Lawrence, two days after the feast of that wily Spanish canon from Osma, one day after the feast of the Jewish philosopher who paid the ultimate price at the hands of a regime for believing that Christ was the fulfillment of all of the promises of old afforded to her people.
Tu ne cede malis; sed contra audentior ito.
