Weigel commemorates the socio-political dethronement of Christ the King

Do not for a moment mistake what I say here as a brief supporting the regnant imperious administration of Black Messiah. It is but a caveat concerning elements in the Neoconservative Catholic support of the classical liberalism of Republicanism that I find inimical to the traditional Catholic Faith.

There are good reasons why Catholic bishops and Neoconservatives have been re-thinking their traditional alignment with the Democratic Party as the party of the working man and traditional Catholic family values -- namely, because the Party has long-abandoned those values in a history littered with Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), Roe v. Wade (1973), the mainstreaming and celebration of homosexualist values, same-sex "marriage," and opposition to Catholic moral teaching.

By the same token, there are many good reasons why Catholic Neoconservatives have been shifting their support to the Republican Party over the last several decades. Republican opposition to the egregiously overstepping provisions of Obamacare and the HHS Mandate are, certainly, understandable reasons for supporting its candidates. And this is but the most recent history of Catholic support for classic liberal opposition, in the spirit of Ludwig von Mises, to big government. Witness Michael Novak, the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus and William Buckley, Tom Woods, Lew Rockwell, and the ever-loquacious and prolific George Weigel.

At the same time, however, resident within the classical liberalism of the Republican tradition are elements that should give pause to any Catholic who knows and values traditional Catholic social teaching. Without going into detail, let us just say here that that teaching refuses to compartmentalize the reign of Christ, suggesting that He is King and Lord only of our private spiritual lives, but not over our collective social life as confessing Catholics in the public square.

This, however, is precisely what Neoconservative Catholics like George Weigel espouse. Take, for example, his recent essay, "Constantine and Campaign 2012" (National Review Online, November 3, 2012). Here he describes Vatican II as signaling the liberation from a long Constantinian captivity of the Church, which, in his view, was mistaken to get involved in presuming to extend the Kingship of Christ over the secular realm.

Here, again, is a YouTube interview in which Weigel describes Vatican II's document, Dignitatis Humanae, as liberating the Catholic Church from a 1700-year "Babylonian Captivity" since Constantine's Edict of Milan (AD 313). The problem with his view lies not in his criticism of political and spiritual corruption of various political and religious leaders during that nearly two-millennium period, but rather in his dismissal of the very acceptability of the socio-political Lordship of Christ, which popes have consistently emphasized in their official teaching up until Vatican II.

What this amounts to, in practical terms, is the Neoconservative embrace of the classic liberal political tradition of Protestant America, with its particular interpretation of the separation of Church and state and disestablishment cause as a normative and positive development for American Catholics. In our present climate, I'm sorry to say that this is ridiculous. It might have been plausible in the 1940s and 1950s, back when thinkers like Jacques Maritain and Fr. John Courtney Murray, S.J., were cutting their teeth in political philosophy, to have assumed that the American experiment, with it's "naked public square" and privitization of religious values, was a good and viable project. No more so. The spiritual antithesis has been drawn in the sand, and his imperial highness, the Black Messiah, has thrown down the gauntlet. There is no neutral ground. You are either for Christ as King, or against Him.

And, if you are truly FOR Christ as King, you cannot expect Him to restrict His jurisdiction to just the private spiritual domain our our prayer and liturgical life. Rather, as Abraham Kuyper once declared in one of his more prescient moments, "There is not one square inch of the entire creation about which Jesus Christ does not cry out, 'This is mine! This belongs to me!'"