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Rick Santorum and the Kingship of Christ, [Part Two]
Crisis Magazine | William Fahey

Posted on 03/07/2012 11:39:48 AM PST by marshmallow

“Can a free government possibly exist with the Roman Catholic religion?”
John Adams to Thomas Jefferson (May 16, 1821)

In the first part of this essay, we began with an overview of the relations between the Church and the Roman imperial State in late antiquity, since this established for Catholics the practical and theoretical foundations of the Catholic Social Teaching on this matter.

This second part will treat the experience of Roman Catholics during the Founding era, since this period establishes the particular milieu in which American political rhetoric was forged and continues to find its orientation; but first, let us link the two worlds—the rich Catholic traditions worked over centuries and culminating in Bellarmine, and the new revolutionary climate of a zealous Protestantism.

St. Robert Bellarmine, Papist & Patriot?

St. Robert Bellarmine, with whom we concluded the last section, has been identified by early twentieth-century Catholic scholars as influential on the debates concerning the limits of State (or Crown) authority in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Some years ago, I had the great pleasure of visiting several of the ancient libraries of Great Britain looking at anti-Bellarmine pamphlets, most of which had been generated during the reign of King James I (VI). We may safely conclude on the basis of the numerous academic and political enemies that Bellarmine had in the English-speaking world that his works would have been widely-circulated or referenced by both Royalist and Parliamentarian apologists of the early modern period. That a work is oft cited does not mean that its critics understand it, of course. It has long been a common place to assert that because the likes of Johannes Althusius, Algernon Sidney, Robert Filmer, of John Locke read Bellarmine, and because the Founders read Althusius, Sidney, Filmer, and Locke, it is probable that...........


TOPICS: Catholic; Mainline Protestant; Religion & Politics; Theology
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1 posted on 03/07/2012 11:39:51 AM PST by marshmallow
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To: marshmallow
Forgot to include the link to the rest of the article
2 posted on 03/07/2012 11:40:54 AM PST by marshmallow (.)
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To: marshmallow

ping for later reading.


3 posted on 03/07/2012 11:58:33 AM PST by Rich21IE
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