Even in the pages of theocrat-friendly First Things, they’re already pissing on Viktor’s grave…
I mean, dat was fast. Integralism, with its coercive religious state replacing liberal democracy, is not even being afforded a proper funeral, for chrissake, and both its Menchevik and Bolshevik wings are flailing. Orban was their ticket to a gender-adjusted, permapreg USA, and now the Federalist Fertility Clinic is leaking sperm deposits out of every pore. GOING OUT OF WHIZNESS.
Orbán’s illiberal democracy, which he has spent the past sixteen years embedding in the institutions and culture of Hungarian national life, looks set to be dissolved by a successor keen to embrace all the European Union diktats Orbán’s ascendancy was predicated on opposing. On how a postliberal order can be developed into a society organized around material and spiritual virtue, integralism has few convincing answers. On how such an order would be maintained against the vicissitudes of democracy, it has no answers.
And hey look at the dude’s last paragraph. Turns out – wait for it -the secular liberal state is your best bet if you want to be a big ol’ Catholic! Whodathunkit.
Integralists will not like hearing it, but there is already a means by which to live faithfully, extol the doctrines of the Church, and contribute to the forging of a common good society. Their old enemy, liberalism, properly understood, gives the Catholic holder of public office the freedom to live a life integrated to the eternal verities and ordered to virtue, while exercising temporal power under the law with ex officio neutrality, and promoting a culture conducive to religious devotion in which the faithful are secure from coercive state secularism. It is an imperfect model, it does not always deliver victory, and its concepts and mechanisms have been directed to un-Christian and anti-Christian ends and will be again. That is all the more reason to fight for the proper understanding and application of liberalism, and thus the right and ability of the faith to flourish in “enemy” territory, rather than taking the political Catholic tradition out of the mainstream and into the coercive, authoritarian fringe.