Two Leos on Church and State

Editor’s note: This is the revised text of a lecture given at the University of Dallas in October 2025.

The core of my assignment, as I understand it, is to consider whether some aspects of Pope Leo XIII’s teaching about church and state are relevant, and perhaps instructive, on the religious liberty issues facing Leo XIV.

A first glance left me flummoxed. After all, Leo XIII preached in season and out of season about the Church’s indispensable role in holding a society together. By “Church” Leo meant its teaching authority. Of the great social question of his day, he wrote:

No practical solution … will ever be found without the assistance of Religion and the Church. … Doubtless this most serious question demands the efforts of others besides Ourselves—of the rulers of States, of employers of labor, of the wealthy and of the working population themselves. … But We affirm without hesitation that all the striving of men will be vain if they leave out the Church.

Leo XIII was no integralist. He was not even an establishmentarian, at least not dogmatically. He often criticized, it is true, the “separation of church and state.” But what Leo meant by that was, as he wrote in Immortale Dei, the “dissolution” of the “concord between the secular and ecclesiastical authority.” In the very next paragraph Leo affirmed the separation of jurisdictions—the “two swords,” if you will. In questions of what he called “mixed jurisdiction,” Leo called for “complete harmony” between them, “such as suited to the end for which each power exists.”

Leo XIII held to the necessity of Catholic cultural supremacy grounded in its moral authority. The constitutional and legal status of the Church was secondary, contingent, negotiable.

As far as I can tell, Robert Prevost published nothing about public religion. It nonetheless would seem that the Leonine notion that the magisterium is social glue would seem to be beyond his ken. I am confident that Pope Leo XIV will never say, as did Leo XIII in 1900 in Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, that “[w]herever Christianity rules over all without let or hindrance there the order established by Divine Providence is preserved, and both security and prosperity are the happy result.”

The current Pontiff’s only substantial relevant remarks make it clear—no surprise here!—that he embraces the [Second Vatican] Council’s teaching in Dignitatis Humanae about each person’s natural right to religious liberty. He told a group called “Aid to the Church in Need” on October 10th that “religious freedom allows individuals and communities to seek the truth, to live it freely, and to bear witness to it openly. It is therefore a cornerstone of any just society, for it safeguards the moral space in which conscience may be formed and exercised.”

This is true enough. That is a close paraphrase of the key portion of the first part of DH. Although Leo XIV’s DH paraphrase is not inconsistent with Leo XIII’s teaching, I am pretty sure these words never passed Pope Pecci’s lips.

A second glance indicates common ground, maybe even a synthesis of the two Leos’ views. It is libertas ecclesiae, the freedom of the Church. Here is the opening passage of the gravely neglected second part of DH promulgated almost exactly sixty years ago:

Among the things that concern the good of the Church and indeed the welfare of society here on earth, … this certainly is preeminent, namely, that the Church should enjoy that full measure of freedom which her care for the salvation of men requires. … The freedom of the Church is the fundamental principle in what concerns the relations between the Church and governments and the whole civil order.

Leo XIII wrote in 1887 that “[t]he Church cannot renounce this freedom, because it is of the essence of the service which she is bound to render.” DH, again: “This is a sacred freedom, because the only-begotten Son endowed with it the Church which He purchased with His blood. Indeed, it is so much the property of the Church that to act against it is to act against the will of God.”

This liberty of the Church must be Leo XIV’s highest priority. It is surely the biggest challenge to religious liberty that he faces. The obstacles at hand are daunting: first, there’s China, where about 18 percent of the world’s people live and where the Church is compromised by its alliance with an atheistic state. Then there’s missionary activity among Muslims, a full quarter of the world’s population, and with so many Muslims living in countries with Islamic rulers who forbid Christian evangelization. Even in countries where religious liberty is legally protected, Muslims, among many others, think of religion as all about submission, conformity, servility; or as its polar opposite: religion as the expression of one’s unique identity. But not, in any case, as the human individual’s intelligent, free response to the call of truth.

This latter cultural situation—bespoke religion—is Leo XIV’s biggest religious liberty challenge in the West, especially in the secularized formerly Christian countries of Europe and North America, as well as in Oceana.

In the Pope’s May 16 address to the diplomatic corps he said:

[R]eligions and interreligious dialogue can make a fundamental contribution to fostering a climate of peace. This naturally requires full respect for religious freedom in every country, since religious experience is an essential dimension of the human person.

Then in a June 21 address to members of the International Interparliamentary Union:

My second reflection has to do with religious freedom and interreligious dialogue. This area has taken on greater significance in the present time, and political life can achieve much by encouraging the conditions for there to be authentic religious freedom and that a respectful and constructive encounter between different religious communities may develop.

Third, from that talk to “Aid to the Church in Need”:

Every human being carries within his or her heart a profound longing for truth, for meaning, and for communion with others and with God. This yearning rises from the depths of our being. For this reason, the right to religious freedom is not optional but essential.

Omitted from these texts is the precondition of true religious liberty even where public authority leaves religion unmolested. In fact, the texts indicate a mind innocent of that precondition, namely, that libertas ecclesiae as well as the natural right of religious liberty of persons and communities presupposes for its meaningfulness, and requires for its flourishing, a culture that treats religion as a zone of truth, and not an enclave of tradition, custom, identity, projections, emotions, and edifying fables.  Working to build this culture of religious liberty is, in my judgment, the biggest religious liberty challenge facing Pope Leo XIV.

By “zone of truth” I mean that Catholic faith, for example, includes assent to propositions about the way things really are. This is another way of saying that religion is about reality. The different religions include different accounts of that reality, especially including invisible divine realities. The religions are not just so many different, often incompatible stories “known” only by and to the heart. They are more or less true. The many religions are answerable to the truth about the universe and to the requirements of logical coherence with what else we know with certitude to be true.

Pope Leo XIV rightly worries over the “space” that genuine religious liberty needs. But this space is never a vacuum. In any given community, that “space” is defined by cultural architecture, by an overarching narrative that is taken for granted by almost everyone about what the religious quest is for, what the one exercising religious liberty is seeking. In our culture that “space” obscures “truth” with such alluring impostures as the contemporary “right” to establish one’s unique mental universe, thus the path to living “authentically.”

The Pontiff’s emphases upon “interreligious dialogue,” “religious experience,” and a philosophical anthropology that stresses a “profound longing” in the human heart for “meaning” devalue and obscure the truth that is essential to religious liberty. It may be largely true, for example, that the human heart is restless, though it is not clear to human vision that it is until it rests in the true God. What is certain, however, is that the ground of genuine religious liberty as it is articulated in DH is no such longing. The ground is instead a moral duty to investigate the evidence of divine realities, to deliberate and then judge what is in fact the case, and to live in accordance with what one conscientiously judges to be so. One’s “longings” and “yearnings” certainly do not establish anything compelling about religious liberty, though they do contribute something to the full-orbed argument in favor of it.

The contemporary Leonine texts suggest that the Pope’s primary concern is about the downstream political consequences of religious liberty. He told the diplomats in May:

Truth, then, does not create division, but rather enables us to confront all the more resolutely the challenges of our time, such as migration, the ethical use of artificial intelligence and the protection of our beloved planet Earth.

Then, to the “Church in Need” in October:

When [religious] freedom is denied, the human person is deprived of the capacity to respond freely to the call of truth. What follows is a slow disintegration of the ethical and spiritual bonds that sustain communities; trust gives way to fear, suspicion replaces dialogue, and oppression breeds violence.

Here and elsewhere Pope Leo XIV comes perilously close to instrumentalizing the search for the truth about God and reality; if not also to making the search itself (and not the truth) a terminal point of value. As Pope Benedict XVI said in his 2005 Christmas Address to the Roman Curia, “if religious freedom were to be considered an expression of the human inability to discover the truth [it might] thus become a canonization of relativism.”

If you erase truth from any society’s picture of religio, you decapitate religious freedom. You make the duty to make disciples of everyone nearly senseless. One cannot be a “disciple”—as opposed to a member or devotee—save where one cleaves to the faith as true. And you cannot convince people of the truth of Catholicism if their culture convinces them that religion is not the kind of thing that is either true or false. How much of the faith could be embraced on any other basis? No one wants to believe in mortal sin and hell and that “Satan and all the evil spirits prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls.” The only rational basis for any decent person to affirm these and so many other sobering, fateful truths is to be convinced that they are, as a matter of fact, true. 

Public domain image retrieved from Wikimedia Commons