To Build the City of God: Living as Catholics in a Secular Age by Brian M. McCall (review)

THE CATHOLIC ANSWER to Juvenal’s question “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”—”Who guards the guardians?”—has always been “the Church.” She safeguards a transcendent rule or measure of goodness, the eternal law, which perfects human law by ordering it to human beatitude. Since law requires a lawgiver, it follows that Christ’s reign extends to familial and civic society as well as over the Church. If our primary obligations as subjects of this King are to profess true religion and render due worship to Christ (see Pope Pius XI, Quas Primas and the Catechism of the Catholic Church, §2105), good human laws will facilitate this, being “not a law unto themselves but rather the final stage of making concrete and particular the laws of Christ’s kingdom, the eternal, natural, and divine laws” (McCall, 22).

This conclusion has many consequences for modern Catholics. First, it contradicts the liberal doctrine that civil government ought to be, in principle, “neutral” regarding competing visions of the good, whether this is understood as a Jeffersonian “wall of separation” or as Rawlsian procedural “neutrality.” The Church holds that civil and ecclesial jurisdictions are distinct but not independent, being dynamically ordered one to the other as nature is to grace. Second, the social Kingship of Christ requires us to reject the authority of civil laws that cannot be ordered to the eternal law as acts of political violence.

Brian McCall’s new book suggests a further implication: since democratic procedures presuppose liberal political theory, which cannot be ordered either to the common good or to the eternal law, Catholics should reject the authority of ecclesial and civic associations that use such procedures, including the U.S. Constitution and the Second Vatican Council. “The Constitution,” he writes, “is a product of the errors of Enlightenment liberalism just as Dignitatis Humanae can be viewed as product of neo-modernism” (225)—that is, premised on the diabolical notion of popular sovereignty. This third supposed consequence of the social Kingship of Christ is problematic for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that every Church council from Nicea to Vatican II has made use of majoritarian procedures. This would suggest that voting at a Church council is neither a product of neo-modernism nor diabolical.

McCall’s book has many strengths, not least of which is its clear and powerful exegesis of central principles of Thomistic natural law and Catholic social teaching on matters of sexuality and family life, economics, and political authority. However, this exposition is marred in several places by the insertion of procedural objections against Vatican II into McCall’s application of these principles. Consider an example. After setting out the doctrine of the social Kingship of Christ in chapter 1, McCall turns to a discussion of marriage and family from the perspective of natural law in chapter 2. He defends marriage as an indissoluble, complementary union of the sexes for the purpose of begetting, rearing, and educating children and discusses modern challenges to each of these three ends in detail. So far, so good. Yet McCall then argues that “the Second Vatican Council is really the ultimate party to blame” for the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to strike down key sections of the “Defense of Marriage Act” in 2013 “and for Catholic’s confusion over the essence of marriage” (49). His argument for this claim is that, by utilizing majoritarian rather than monarchical procedures, the Council “adopted the idea that reality can become whatever a majority, no matter how nefariously procured, declares it to be” (49). This is so because, “if the majority of votes at a Council of the Church can declare that which has always been wrong to be right”—namely, demoting the primary end of marriage, procreation, to an end equal to or even secondary to the other ends of the marital act (50)—”then the will of the People must...