Integralism

Integralism holds that political authority must be ordered to humanity's supernatural end — salvation — and therefore that the state ought to recognize the true religion and stand subordinate to the Church in matters touching that end. Temporal power serves spiritual power, as the body serves the soul.

It rejects the liberal settlement at its root. Religious liberty and the separation of church and state are treated not as prudent arrangements for peace but as errors, because a state that is officially indifferent between religious truth and falsehood is held to fail in its most basic duty to the true common good of its people.

Its classical statements are nineteenth-century papal documents — Pius IX's Syllabus of Errors (1864) condemned the proposition that the Church should reconcile itself with liberalism and modern civilization — and its practical model is the confessional Catholic state, as approximated in parts of pre-modern Europe and, into the twentieth century, in regimes like Franco's Spain and Salazar's Portugal.

It has enjoyed a striking academic revival among a younger cohort of Catholic intellectuals who argue the position anew against liberalism's perceived exhaustion — a debate largely internal to Catholic political theory, since most Church teaching since the Second Vatican Council (1965) affirms religious liberty and stands in tension with it.

Critics, including many Catholics, argue that it is both unrealizable in and unjust to religiously plural societies, and that its own history — inquisitions, forced conversions, established intolerance — is a warning rather than a model.

It is easily dismissed as a medieval curiosity, but it presses a real question at liberalism: whether a political order can truly be neutral about the human good, or whether the claim to neutrality is itself a contestable stance about what matters most.