Dignatits Humanae: “Therefore it [the Church’s teaching on religious liberty] leaves untouched traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ.”

David Schindler: “A nonconfessional state is not logically possible, in the one real order of history. The state cannot finally avoid affirming, in the matter of religion, a priority of either “freedom from” or “freedom for”—both of these priorities implying a theology.”

David Gallagher: “It would be better, all things considered, to have unanimity among the body politic on the ultimate questions, and if there were such agreement, a number of matters consequent upon the shared comprehensive doctrine could enter political life. Public life would be richer, would produce more good for its citizens, if it included aspects of the transcendent. . . . The point here is that when we accept the unity of reason, then it seems a mistake to take the liberal approach to political life as in principle the best or the only adequate one. It may be the best here and now, but only because we are in a defective situation, that of widespread error concerning ultimate questions.”

MacIntyre: “Either reason is thus impersonal, universal, and disinterested or it is the unwitting representative of particular interests, masking their drive to power by its false pretensions to neutrality and disinterestedness. What this alternative conceals from view is a third possibility, the possibility that reason can only move towards being genuinely universal and impersonal insofar as it is neither neutral nor disinterested, that membership in a particular type of moral community, one from which fundamental dissent has to be excluded, is a condition for genuinely rational enquiry and more especially for moral and theological enquiry.”

MacIntyre: “My claims have been that Thomistic Aristotelianism is the philosophical expression of the rational politics of local community and that the politics of local community is not only very different from, but antagonistic to the politics of the modern state. Yet this puts me at odds with the vast majority of Thomists, past and present. For Thomist political philosophers have in the overwhelming majority understood their own philosophy as one that was capable of informing and guiding the politics of the modern state. Thomism has very rarely appeared as an enemy of the modern state as such.”

Kolnai: “The author [Maritain], then, aims at a compromise, not between the Christian religious position and this or that extra-religious, worldly, though naturally justifiable point of view, (for example, biological welfare, patriotism, or any reasonable demand of political expediency), but between the Christian religious position proper, which he espouses whole-heartedly and is eager to make valid, and another position “religious in nature”: that of “temporal” Christendom, Christianity made into the quasi-religion of progressive democracy, Christianity inverted and secularized into the humanistic self-worship of the “person” and the “body politic” (which he over emphatically distinguishes from the mere “state.”) What he really has in mind is not an agreement, adjusted to what is attainable according to time and place, between Christ and Caesar, but a synthesis, suffused with all the religious afflatus of the soul, between Christ and the idol of the modernity: between Christ and His modern caricature; between the true Christ of the faith and the substitute Christ of humanism; between Christ and Anti-Christ.”

D. Stephen Long: ““Beginning with the flesh of Jesus and its presence in the church, theology alone can give due order to other social formations—family, market, and state. The goodness of God is discovered not in abstract speculation, but in a life oriented toward God that creates particular practices that require the privileging of certain social institutions above others. The goodness of God can be discovered only when the church is the social institution rendering intelligible our lives. . . . For a Christian account of this good, the church is the social formation that orders all others. If the church is not the church, the state, the family, and the market will not know their own true nature.”

Maritain: “There is, therefore, only one science of human conduct which is authentic, complete, and capable of existing as such in gradu scientiae practicae: it is that one which takes into account at once the essence and the state, the order of nature and the order of grace. All the great ethical systems which are ignorant of the ways of grace, however rich in partial truths they may be, are bound to be deficient.”
Maritain: “Man is not in a state of pure nature, he is fallen and redeemed. Consequently, ethics, in the widest sense of the word, that is, in so far as it bears on all practical matters of human action, politics and economics, practical psychology, collective psychology, sociology, as well as individual morality,—ethics in so far as it takes man in his concrete state, in his existential being, is not a purely philosophic discipline. Of itself it has to do with theology, either to become integrated with or at least subalternated to theology. . . . Here is a philosophy which must of necessity be a superelevated philosophy, a philosophy subalternated to theology, if it is not to misrepresent and scientifically distort its object.”

Maritain: “Integral political science . . . is superior in kind to philosophy; to be truly complete it must have a reference to the domain of theology, and it is precisely as a theologian that St. Thomas wrote De regimine principum . . . the knowledge of human actions and of the good conduct of the human State in particular can exist as an integral science, as a complete body of doctrine, only if related to the ultimate end of the human being. . . the rule of conduct governing individual and social life cannot therefore leave the supernatural order out of account.”

William Ward: “The Church professes to be infallible in her teaching of morals no less than of faith. If, then, Catholicism be true, and if Catholics have the fullest ground for knowing it to be true, the one healthy, desirable, and legitimate state of civil society is that the Church’s doctrines, principles, and laws should be recognized without question as its one basis of legislation and administration; to the Church’s authority.”