Austria's last emperor nears sainthood

Pope John Paul II on Sunday put the last Austro-Hungarian emperor, Charles I, on the road to sainthood in a solemn beatification ceremony in St. Peter's Square, prompting angry reactions in Austria and splitting the Roman Catholic community there.

I prefer the Founder's sensible solution; diffuse the power, spread it out, distribute it into as many hands as possible.

You really think you have any power in this society?

Well, be that as it may...

The theoretical principal was an idea they actually got from Christendom, it's called the principle of subsidiarity and it's still the guiding principle of Catholic political thought.

I think modern people think of the current power of the state in the hands of one individual but that's a totalitarian dictatorship, not a monarchy. That's the Third Reich, not the first one. (the Holy Roman Empire was called "heiliges Reich or Römisches Reich" in German )

For the vast majority of people (like 90%+) in Christendom the King, much less the Emperor or even the Pope was someone they heard about a few times around the marketplace and the dinner table. He had pretty much 0 impact on their daily lives - can you say that about our President? I don't think so

The centralization of power in the apparatus of the state is a Protestant idea, or rather the resurrection of a pagan idea. It was a necessary result of the dissolution of the authority of the Church. Ever since Martin Luther taught everyone to reject the authority of the Vicar of Christ in matters of faith and morals. The great balance of power in Christendom was between the Kings and the Church - the Church saw Herself as the moral check on the power of the state and it was a very effective check for longer than there has been a place called America

Its so funny, we Americans think our little experiment over here is so great, but the actual experiment - a union of independent states, lasted barely 60 years. What grew out of that has been degenerating along the lines predicted by Plato ever since [read The Republic, Book VII (I think)]

A good page here on the political structure of the Holy Roman Empire, which of course was not all of Christendom, just the heart of it.

The Holy Roman Empire

http://www.heraldica.org/topics/national/hre.htm

And how has that worked out so far? Do you really think this is a uopian society we are living in? I am ever amazed by the people who 'state' that the republic is the be all and end all of every form of government ever devised, all supposedly based on the popular will, yet no two of them can ever say they are satisfied with what they have.

The fact is, as others here have mentioned, life during the height of Christian civilization, when the Western world was united by one faith, disregarding technological conveniences, people lived better then than they do now. They had more free time since the Church forbid work on all holy days; they worked more for themselves than their feudal lord (yes, I'm saying even as a peasant here), taxes rarely ever existed as the government dealt almost totally with defense and foreign relations, nothing more. Tithes to the Church covered social issues like hospitals, poor houses, orphans etc. The Holy Roman Emperor in particular, while having the first place among all monarchs, had less actual power than any of them.

Compared to the High Middle Ages, the modern democratic governments of the world are absolutely totalitarian, forcing more tribute from us than the most oppressed peasants of Medieval Europe, dividing us, indoctrinating us and ruling every tiny aspect of our lives. If you own land and don't pay your tribute to "King Republic" they can take your land from you. If you have children and don't raise them as the government sees fit, they can take your family away from you. If you go to a church that the government doesn't like, they can roll tanks on you and burn you alive. They can even tell YOU how fast YOU can drive in YOUR car on roads YOU paid to have built.

The only reason they can get away with any of this is because of the great lie of the "failed god" known as democratic republicanism. Do you know where checks and balances came from? Imperial Rome! In the past, Church, Crown, Peasantry and Aristocracy kept each other in check. Today, there is an agenda being pushed and if the executive branch can't do it, the legislative branch happily rubber stamps it. If they can't do it, the judicial branch simply "reinterprets" the Constitution to advance the same agenda.

All of the real, old fashioned Catholic monarchists have always been against big government centralization. The Holy Roman Empire didn't have it, the Austrians certainlt didn't have it, and groups like the Jacobites and Carlistos fought tooth and nail against it. You say the beloved "Founders" diffused power, yet the very system they established has put us where we are now, on the way to the logical conclusion of any liberal/secular/republic/revolutionary movement - down.

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