It’s always fun to watch dueling religious fanatics. In this corner, impressively featured in a new University of Manchester book, HaH and his followers preach death to apostates, the removal of female genitalia, the right of husbands to beat their wives, and of course the necessity of replacing godless states with caliphates. In this corner, Edmund Waldstein and his followers also preach death to the godless liberal state and the necessity of replacing it with a … cathophate and if people don’t like that idea there’s always burning at the stake. “Rather than enter the fray to persuade citizens, they instead wish to put their citizens under the control of a Catholic administrative state that degrades free association of citizens into the solemn submission of subjects to their spiritual and temporal superiors.”

Because the Church is not a “human power” but a supernatural one, it is permitted to use coercion. And Catholic doctrine on the duty of societies toward Catholicism, as formulated by Pius IX, Leo XIII, and others, is that they must recognize it as the one true religion.

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[The dominant theologian of integralism] is a monarchist who argues that the Church has the right to punish baptized heretics (Protestants), including by burning them at the stake... “[We must] recognize the truth of the revealed religion not only as individuals but also corporately, as societies.“

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It is an internet aesthetic of mostly young men alienated from the public life and consumed with the libido dominandi.

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Er let’s see which was that last one? Right, the integralists… And they may be young, but they have a Big Daddy – Harvard’s Adrian Vermeule.

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So… you go, girls! Put on your Sunday or Friday best and (pant pant) submit…

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. 

Well, that last question at least has an answer. Duce Waldstein will burn at the stake as many heretics as it takes to maintain God’s kingdom.

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. 

Quebec’s secularizing like mad, adding further restrictions on religious activity/symbols in public settings.

… Bill 21, which was passed in 2019 […] placed a prohibition on ostentatious religious symbols being worn by certain government employees, including teachers, judges, police officers, effectively banning kippahs, turbans, and hijabs. Bill 94, [which is about to pass], extended that ban throughout the entire school system, throughout the entire public education network, extending to cafeteria workers, parent volunteers, daycare personnel, janitors. […] It also imposed a ban on face coverings in the elementary and high school network, as well as banning the use of school property for religious purposes, meaning facilities couldn’t be rented out in the evenings and weekends for religious purposes by local mosques, churches or synagogues. And the Quebec government was very clear that there was more coming. 

… [There will be] a total ban on face coverings from daycare through to university. That means no kneecaps or burkas… Parents coming in will not be allowed to have a face covering. That’s being banned. What’s also going to be banned are halal-only food menus for daycares, the subsidized daycares, so that toddlers have a choice in what they’re eating.

As well, another ban on using the property, prayer rooms in colleges and universities: out.

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Nothing scandalous here, if the separation of church and state means a lot to you, as it does to Quebec.

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‘There has been some pushback from the Quebec bishops to the prayer ban. Bishop Martin Laliberté, president of the Quebec Bishops’ Assembly, published an open letter asserting that the “secular nature of the State does not require the secular nature of society.” In an opinion piece for La Presse, Montreal Archbishop Christian Lépine wrote that state secularism does “not require the public erasure of faith in society.”

But in a province where only 2 percent of the Catholic population attend weekly Mass, and the political class is tone-deaf if not outright hostile toward religion, the Church is a weak voice in the “common culture” wilderness. One can hope that the saints of New France are interceding on behalf of the new, secular Quebec.‘

This is from the notorious First Things, vehicle of Vermeuleism, so whaddaya expect? Why, given high-profile nutbags running around calling for burning people at the stake, are you surprised that lots of people feel outright hostility toward religion?

And uh actually yes a secular state is overwhelmingly likely to want a shared public life (call it “society”) as free as possible from overtly religious prayers and parades and meetings and proselytizing and all. I wasn’t terribly happy, as a secular person walking around Salt Lake City, to be repeatedly approached by groups of Mormons inviting me to join their church. But I recognize Utah as a very religious state, and okay. Quebec on the other hand is a very secular province, and religious people there should extend the same sort of courtesy.

Even with the new laws, you are apparently going to be able in Quebec to apply for local permission to hold outdoor religious events. Particular municipalities will probably make their own decisions. ‘Short public events with prior approval are exempt.’

The Capitol-Trasher cult; the ultraorthodox cult; the integralist Catholic cult. Their leaders: Marjorie Taylor Greene; primitive authoritarian rabbis; Pater Edmund Waldstein. These groups are violent; they don’t recognize laws and institutions; they are irrational; they are primitive.

Everyone is so surprised that it turns out a significant minority of the Cap-Trash cult didn’t even vote in a presidential election whose result caused them to try to overthrow the government of the United States. They didn’t vote for Trump.

Why are you surprised? Cultists don’t vote. Or if they vote, it’s in robotic blocks, obeying commands from the cult leader.

Get with the program and perceive their world long enough to defend yourself.

They are trying to kill you and kill your world, and you totally need to defend yourself against them.

They’re not cute. Okay? Waldstein thinks burning non-cultists at the stake is a good idea. Greene wants to put a bullet through the head of Nancy Pelosi. Israeli haredim teach fifteen year old boys to burn down city buses and attack police. Why do you cling to the idea that because these people present themselves as god-fearing they deserve your respect?

Read Don DeLillo’s Mao II, his novel about cults, if you’d like to pause and understand the deep reasons people join cults. Or don’t bother learning the deep reasons. The imperative is to fight them with all you’ve got. With all we’ve got.

The author of “Integralism in Three Sentences” is a man who, according to the integralists I spoke with, has done more than anyone to revive both the term and the philosophy: Pater Edmund Waldstein, a 35-year-old Cistercian monk who lives in Heiligenkreuz Abbey, a twelfth-century monastery a few miles south of Vienna. The son of two theologians, one American and one Austrian, Pater Edmund was raised in an intellectual Catholic household and educated at California’s Thomas Aquinas College. By any conventional standard, his views are extreme: in addition to rejecting the separation of church and state, he is a monarchist who argues that the Church has the right to punish baptized heretics (Protestants), including by burning them at the stake. Yet he’s gracious and warm …