Column 09/27/2022: The Catholic Church and Coercion

The Catholic Church and Coercion

For the last five years or so, the American Catholic Internet-o-sphere has been awash with discussion and debate over "integralism," or more broadly over the political doctrines of the Catholic Church. I have been following these debates closely, and have a great deal of respect for participants on many "sides." However, I have been consistently annoyed by the failure of many participants to define one key term that comes up again and again in these debates.

This term is "coercion."

If one reads, as I have been doing, D.C. Schindler's recent book on Catholic political theory (based in turn on his father DL Schindler's excellent scholarship), one discovers that his central disagreement with the "integralists" is his insistence, following Dignitatis Humanae and Vatican 2, that certain forms of religious coercion must be excluded. Or, if one reads the "integralist" Thomas Pink's scholarship on Dignitatis Humanae, one finds that the heart of his (polemical) argument, following Leo XIII and the 19th century magisterium, that the Catholic Church is not a voluntary, but a "coercive" society with the right to apply punishments and sanctions to her children to compel them to keep their baptismal promises. Or, again, if one reads the great Pater Edmund Waldstein, the modern originator of the term and base definition of "integralism," one likewise finds an insistence, along with a genuine concern for the dangers of religious coercion, on the necessity of stronger societal and pastoral coercion for the salvation of souls. Or, again, if one reads many of the less interesting enemies and alies of "integralism," one finds on the one hand a visceral disgust at, and on the other hand a gleeful exulting in, the idea of religious coercion as such. From such debates, one could get at times the (absurd) idea that the heart of these disagreements lies in the simple question of whether or not the Catholic Church can ever apply coercion to any people under any circumstances--or the (even more absurd) idea that "coercion" is a simple and univocal concept.

But what is coercion?

Definitions, Maximal and Minimal

In what may be called its base linguistic sense, the Latin coercere means "to enclose" and therefore "to confine," and from there was applied to imprisonment and other forms of restraint. This highlights what may be called the base negative sense: to prevent someone from performing a action. This negative sense can be further subdivided into a minimal negative sense--to fail to facilitate someone's performance of an action--as well as a maximal negative sense--to prevent someone from acting at all.

Most modern discussions of coercion, though, seem to implicitly center not on this original negative definition, but rather on what may be called the base positive sense of coercion: to compel someone to perform an action. This may likewise be subdivided into a minimal positive sense--to facilitate and concur in someone's performance of an action they otherwise want to perform--as well as a maximal positive sense--to cause someone to perform an action that they do not want to perform and that they do not even will to perform.

It is a rather complex philosophical question whether this maximal positive sense of coercion is even possible. Most ancient and medieval philosophers of reason and will would incline towards the negative position: that by the very nature of the will, there is a limit to coercion beyond which the nature of human action as such is fundamentally destroyed. If Shakespeare were to hold your hand with a pencil in it as you protest and struggle and then use that hand to write Hamlet, you would not be the author of Hamlet, nor could you even be said to have been coerced into writing Hamlet except in a highly equivocal sense.

Still, this equivocal sense of coercion is not entirely irrelevant, especially for modern government: for sometimes a person or a state, in applying coercion, is concerned not that a person, any person, will the action as their own action, but merely that an action be performed. In such cases, there is a sense in which the concept of coercion is simply irrelevant, and also a sense in which such an institution is engaged, whether actually or potentially, in wielding coercion in a truly maximal sense. Where coercion is applied on this principle, we may call it mechanical coercion, since persons are treated as mechanisms with no will and self-motivation and are therefore in principle entirely interchangeable with machines. Such mechanical coercion, where the presence of a human person or a human will is treated as irrelevant and coercion with merely the action in mind, represents a distinctive feature of modern governments and institutions. It is also, I would argue, always and everywhere immoral.

The maximal negative sense of coercion is probably similarly impossible, but also far from irrelevant conceptually as a kind of telos or limit of many modern constructions of coercion. The idea of rendering a person entirely incapable of action--at least of all action unapproved by the State, or contrary to the law, or action that has to be taken into account of by economic or political or mechanical or bureaucratic systems--does seem to lie somewhere close to the heart of many American systems of incarceration, solitary confinement, and chemical castration, and is likewise necessarily involved with systems that employ the death penalty. Indeed, the fact that death (under most understandings) renders someone incapable of action is the clearest reason why it has generally been treated in the Catholic tradition as categorically different from other kinds of punishments, for reasons having nothing to do with the degree of pain or suffering or cruelty involved. It also seems to me that--with the possible exception of the death penalty, which, though I emphatically share the position of the modern Magisterium calling for its abolition, has been justified under at least some theoretical and practical circumstances within the tradition--such maximally negative coercion would be always and everywhere immoral.

Likewise, in the minimal negative sense discussed above, almost any action or inaction can be counted as coercive: in this sense, I am, in fact, coercing you, dear reader, right now, merely by failing to help you do anything you at this moment want to do. Still, this minimum negative sense, or at least the accusation thereof, has become surprisingly common in contemporary politics and religion, with many people framing the failure of government or Church institutions to actively facilitate, say, their acquiring of an abortion or a wedding in the Catholic Church as a form of coercion. It is difficult to know how to treat such accusations: if I am morally obligated to facilitate your action and fail to do so, I am guilty of injustice, but not, seemingly, of coercion in any useful sense. Still, that people describe such situations as coercion does tell us something about both modernity and contemporary America. In more abstract terms, however, this minimal sense does tell us something fairly important about the nature of human beings as dependent, social, and political creatures who do in fact require the active aid and cooperation and directon and guidance and beneficence and even love both of other individuals and of social and political institutions in order to fulfill even their most basic capacities, faculties, and ends. People do, merely qua people, have claims on us in justice; and if we fail to meet those claims, we are coercing them in at least the basic etymological sense of confining them quite severely. In the most extreme cases, such as that of a small child with its parents, the mere passive failure to provide food and love is coercive in the fairly extreme sense that such a lack of action inevitably leads to trauma, suffering, and finally death. 

Similarly, the minimal positive sense seems at first glance to be entirely non-coercive and in fact entirely positive in nature: for concurring and assisting in an action that you want to perform would often be better called "help" than "coercion." Still, even if someone in fact wants to perform an action, it remains a distinct possibility that they do not, in fact, want you (or the Church, or the State) to assist them in it. This sense of coercion raises questions about liberty, about privacy, about subsidiarity and solidarity and and the proper roles of different powers in ordering human life. In this sense, many debates over the role of Church and State in history have been over questions like this--such as who licenses a marriage, who provides for the poor, who has the authority over different areas of human life, and so on and so forth.

Practical Models of Coercion

These maximal and minimal senses of coercion, while in themselves usually either trivial or impossible or both, nonetheless are relevant for political and religious debates as limits or teloses of ecclesial or governmental action. However, while the modern State would seem to be to be intimately bound up with these extremes, the Catholic tradition, influenced by philosophical and moral strains from Antiquity, has generally avoided them. Almost all the useful and interesting and relevant senses of coercion for specifically inter-Catholic debates fall somewhere between these extremes.

At the outset, it is worth saying that while a bystander might at first glance think that the difference between the integralists and their opponents is centered merely on the question of physical or corporeal versus non-physical punishment, this is almost totally deceptive. Physical coercion does involve certain moral considerations that other forms of coercion do not involve, and so is sometimes prudently avoided, but it is not intrinsically and categorically more coercive than other forms of punishment or restraint. Moral and intellectual and spiritual and psychological methods are in fact quite often far more directly and violently coercive at preventing or requiring action. Nor can the question be resolved simply by appeal to "violence," a moral term based around the concept of "violating" someone or something. There is a sense in which all coercion necessarily involves at least a checking of human will--beyond that, though, the question becomes precisely which forms of coercion in fact violate the integrity and good of justice and/or reason and/or human nature and/or human persons, and which do not, and this cannot be resolved purely a priori.

Most relevant, then, I believe, for recent inter-church debates are what may be called the public order and moral education accounts of coercion. 

In the first case, the idea of a public order of institutions, laws, etc, which are not chosen by people within them but which limit people's choices in both positive and negative ways. Such a public order (accompanied naturally by private orders) is coercive in a primarily negative sense, preventing the performance of certain actions by rendering them inconceivable or impossible or at least adding significantly to the costs and difficulties involved. This is a fundamental role of most systems of law and most governments, and indeed of institutions generally, and looms large in many modern discussions of coercion.

This basic sense of adding to the costs of negative action is very closely related to the moral education account of coercion, which has been very influential going back to Plato and Aristotle, law exists principally as a system of clear, knoweable rewards and punishments educate the will and the character, not by simply overriding his will, but by training it to desire and will the right things habitually. Knowledge and experience of a punishment attached to a certain action, or a reward attached to another action, changes the calculus of the reason and causes it to not perform actions it otherwise would not have chosen and avoid actions it otherwise would have chosen. Such systems are in a relevant sense coercive inasmuch as they override the choice and will and desires of the individual, but they are also in a highly relevant sense free inasmuch as they rely on the person making a calculus or choice for himself and performing the action as his own. Indeed, without such free, chosen, rational action emerging from within, it would be impossible for these coercive systems to achieve their goals. 

Ambiguities and Conflicts

Both of these accounts, though, possess basic ambiguities and problems of application within which most battles over coercion in Catholic theology and jurisprudence have been fought. 

In regards to the first account, that of public order, some fundamental points of conflict are (1) how such public orders are established, (2) who authorizes them, (3) who decides what they contain and what choices they encourage and which they restrain, and (4) how they are to be maintained and preserved. Most modern accounts of (3) are in essence oligarchical--reflecting the highly oligarchical nature of the American professional classes where such things are debated--and often seem to harbor the assumption that the one's particular group, however construed, would or should somehow play the role of deciding from scratch the content of the public order. There are also, however, various competing models, such as democratic, liberal/contractual, clericalist or integralist in a strong sense, racialist, folk nationalist, and so on and so forth. 

(2) is of course highly relevant for arguments over the role of Church institutions and the clergy, and I think crucial for any properly Catholic politics. (1) and (4) are in practice highly connected, though rarely answered with as much specificity as they should be. In particular, haunting many such debates, I believe, is a highly and uniquely modern belief that, in the interests of establishing a better public order and/or preserving the basic monopolistic existence of the current one, any degree of coercion, force, and even violence are allowable or even required. This assumption seems extremely difficult to reconcile with Catholic political thought. 

If the second account, that of moral education, is accepted as the fundamental one, still debates can and do arise about allowable and prudent methods to use in educating people's wills toward virtue, as well as the intrinsic scope of this power in regards to different institutions and societies. These are made even more complex by the existence of the Catholic Church as a public institution in addition to the State. Behind a certain strand of modern Nouvelle-Theologie treatment of coercion, I would argue, lies a particular emphasis on the necessary interiority and freedom of true human action and therefore of salvation, and a strong suspicion of harsher and more painful and more imposing and more external methods of coercion as useless or even counterproductive for producing the kind of action required. Behind a certain strand of contemporary Integralist treatment of coercion, I would likewise argues, lies a somewhat more external and minimal account of human agency and human salvation, as well as a concomitant sense of the fewness of the saved and the holy and therefore the need for harsher, more imposing, more external, more public, and more all-encompassing methods to help most people meet more minimal and more external requirements. Both emphases, I should say, find at least some echo in some strands of Catholic Tradition.

Retribution

Finally, the last relevant topic I wish to discuss, which often lurks around the edges of such debates, is the concept of retribution. In the strictest possible sense, retribution, paying someone back what he is owed, has no necessary relationship with any of the kinds of coercion discussed above, except insofar as the action of paying back must in practice be compelled or restrained in some way. The two are, however, often linked, especially insofar as coercion is carried out through a system of laws, rewards, and punishments, which necessarily involve retribution in at least a basic sense. The relationship between the idea of paying someone back for their negative actions and the idea of preventing or compelling action can be construed in very different ways, and debates within punitive systems often center on the question of which goal is more fundamental, and which is rightly pursued as a means for the other.

The Platonic account of retribution, for instance, subsumes it almost entirely into the moral-education account given above through the transcendent good of justice, making the goal of retribution at one and the same time the paying back of what is owed and also the education of the person punished into the positive moral virtue of justice. Likewise, some modern religious and philosophical construals of retribution have largely come to fold coercion into retribution, framing it as a bare "paying back" to the will of either what it wants or what it does not want according to the value of its actions, and therefore independent of any proper educational goal of training the will to proper action. Some secular modern accounts, on the other hand, have come to define retribution solely in terms of restraint, and therefore in terms of a quite maximally negative sense of coercion--while others have folded it in with moral-education models of coercion in a medicalized or "rehabilitative" sense much more heedless of abstract justice than Plato.

This is, I think, one of the stranger facets of current debates, lying under the surface but rarely, at least that I have seen, making its presence felt explicitly. Whether we view coercion to action as subject to a more fundamental abstract and absolute zone of retribution, or whether we view the application of retribution as essentially a means to the proper training of the will to action, or whether we have embraced a truly Platonic (and, I think, Catholic) unity between the two goals through the invocation of transcendent divine justice (and mercy), would seem to make quite a difference to the practical and prudential management of systems of reward and punishment.

There is, however, one more modern and perverse way in which retribution is often invoked in contemporary discussions of coercion: to justify sweeping or extreme or violent conceptualizations and applications of coercion. One might say that modernity in general and American modernity in particular frequently operate on the base (Protestant) assumption that everyone at all times is guilty of something and that anyone guilty of something (at least something sufficiently bad) may be coerced and punished to any extent without violence. This strikes me as largely perverse and generally a dead end, but is still important enough to be mentioned.

Is the Church Necessarily Coercive?

Certainly, in the minimal negative and positive senses the Catholic Church is a necessarily coercive institution, merely by concurring in the actions of its members and having rules, definitions, requirements, offices, buildings, walls, and other restrictions on action. Nor, despite my whimsical examples above, is this always a trivial or gentle reality. Most of the attacks on the Church in the modern world, and many of the most sympathetic, come from the sense of confinement created by her structures and laws and requirements and definitions and denials: that if one wishes to be Catholic, one must do this, that if one wishes to receive Communion, one must do that, that if one wishes to be a priest, one must be a man, submit to rigorous testing, attend seminary, etc, etc. Many people throughout history have wanted the Church to give them things or do things for them, or have simply wanted the Church to leave them alone in living their own lives, and have been stymied. 

Likewise, Thomas Pink et al are of course absolutely right to point out that the Catholic Church has always and always will possess a code of law with a system of restraints, rewards, and punishments only understandable in terms of at least some genuine sense of coercion, and specifically religious coercion at that. 

And yes, on the other hand, many opponents of integralism are right to point to historical Catholic denunciations of certain methods of coercion (such as the death penalty, bloodshed, certain forms and degrees of physical force, etc) as non-Christian and inappropriate at least for clerics and sometimes for all Catholics--and likewise right to point out that in Vatican 2, the Catholic Magisterium endorsed a position on the necessary freedom and interiority of human action for salvation and therefore the intrinsic (and not merely practical) limits of coercion for compelling religious belief and adherence. 

And yes, both the integralists and the Schindlers are right in insisting that none of this bears on the basic point that the State and the public order are necessarily coercive in at least some minimal sense, and that this State and public order must reflect and be subject to reason and truth--which, in a universe where the Catholic Church is in fact the true Church, means some degree of subordination to the power of God and to the authority of the Church.

Properly understood, the above discussion of coercion indicates to me that, fundamentally, the differences between many interlocutors in these debates are not as great as might be imagined--and also that most of the interesting, prudential debates over exactly what types of coercion a Catholic society, or a Catholic state, or a secular State, or the Church in the secular modern world, or the Church in a theoretical future Catholic world, can and should apply and to whom, have yet to be properly discussed and debated. There are rich veins of Catholic tradition and Catholic sanctity dedicated to the how one ought to go about restraining and compelling action in oneself and in one's monks and in one's priests and in one's spiritual directees and in one's diocese and in one's children and in criminals and in sinners doomed to die--and I suspect that what debates over integralism should, but often do not, lead us to do is simply to get to work on mining them.

There are few people, I think, even in the modern world who really mean for the Church to abandon all coercion in even a minimal sense; and there are few who would ever desire any Catholic state, let alone the Church itself, to embrace all forms of coercion or coercion in any maximal sense. Yet for all that much of the Church's practical actions and operations in the world will involve restraining or causing action in her members, so these are questions that it is very good to ponder, especially for Catholics in positions of authority.

Still, a word of caution: if debates within Catholicism over these questions have grown fiercer of late, it is in part, I think, due to a perceived sense of inferiority and envy by laymen in the Church for the success of the modern state in wielding methods of coercion that are, frequently, base and violent to the extreme and absolutely inappropriate for Catholics, let alone clerics. On the other hand, as the modern world continues to spiral downward into collapse, more and more people, invested fundamentally in the supremacy of the modern secular State and modern secular institutions, are perceiving the urgent need of some kind of authorizing, legitimizing moral force to help in propping up failing institutions and moral beliefs. The dangers that come from such use of the Church as a prop without real authority or methods of action of its own are also not small. 

There are dangers that come with these debates; and the answer, I think, is for everyone to be very careful in defining their terms and goals. This is a boring point to make, but I nonetheless believe it is true.