In 1864, Pope Pius IX issued the Syllabus of Errors, which condemns modern liberalism. The reasoning behind this, the Pontiff wrote, is that, “for the last few years, a ferocious war on the Church, its institutions and the rights of the Apostolic See has been raging. Venerable Brothers, it is surprising that in our time such a great war is being waged against the Catholic Church.”

Indeed, Europe had seen a horrific antagonism toward the Church in the century preceding the Syllabus and clearly springing from the Enlightenment. As Dr. James Hitchcock wrote in his article Pius IX and the Separation of Church and State, “The French Revolution relentlessly persecuted the Church in the name of freedom, and various 19th-century governments, notably in France itself, proclaimed liberty even as they tightened the screws on the Church—seizing its property or closing its schools, for example.” But even worse, the French Revolution’s concept of liberty meant Catholic clergy had to swear allegiance to the government or be executed, which hundreds were. 

Hitchcock continued, “Thus Pius IX quite accurately saw the liberal governments of his day as sworn enemies of the Church and the rhetoric of religious freedom as a rationalization of persecution.” They waved around flags of libertè when in reality, they were as anti-liberty as you can get. They didn’t want freedom of religion, they wanted freedom from religion. They didn’t want freedom to discover the truth, they wanted freedom from Truth.

Many Catholics today lump libertarianism in with the liberalism that Pope Pius IX condemned. They see it as a “spawn” of the Enlightenment and in direct opposition to the Catholic Church.   

Nothing could be further from the truth. The liberalism that Pope Pius IX condemned was indeed a spawn of the Enlightenment but it was anything but liberal in the true  sense of the word. It was a violent, coercive, atheistic cult of the state and the father of all the democidal totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. 

Libertarianism—the philosophy that all humans have intrinsic Natural Rights to life, liberty, and property and that no one has the authority to violate those rights—on the other hand, traces back to Moses when he told Pharaoh to “Let my people go.” It is infused in the teaching of Jesus Christ, reinforced by the Church Fathers—namely Augustine in City of God, bolstered by the Natural Law philosophy of the Scholastics, and then subsequently backed by the Second Vatican Council in its Decree on Religious Liberty. 

The Church has always promoted liberty and while she also acknowledges the legitimacy of the state, ordained by God, she recognizes that the state must respect the primacy of the Church. The state is there to ensure the freedom to live moral lives, not to impose its twisted sense of morality on society. 

Foundations of Liberty

From the very beginning, the Bible promoted faith and freedom. In Genesis, God gave Adam and Eve free will to choose to eat of the forbidden fruit or not. They chose poorly, but God wanted them to have that choice because it is what allows for divine love. In Exodus, Moses went to Pharaoh and relayed God’s message to, “Let my people go, that they may serve me,” and then subsequently led the Jews out of slavery into the Promised Land. Rights to life and property were then enshrined in the Decalogue.

Hundreds of years later, the people of Israel lived freely without a king or central authority. When the Jews demanded a king of Samuel, saying, “make us a king to judge us like all the nations, “Samuel was disheartened. God told Samuel, “they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not be king over them.” God warned them that a king would be disastrous:

He will take your sons, for his chariots. And he will take your daughters, to be cooks. And he will take your fields, and your olive yards, and give them to his servants. And he will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and of your sheep. And ye shall be his servants. And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen, and the Lord will not hear you in that day.

Unfortunately the Jews ignored God’s warning and demanded a king anyway.

Caesar Versus God

By the time Our Lord was born into the world, God’s warning about the state had been actualized. The Jews not only had to worry about one authoritarian king but two (Herod and Caesar Augustus). As such, Jesus was in a unique position to teach us how to promote faith and freedom in the face of tyranny. 

While Jesus didn’t seek to abolish the state, He certainly was no statist. Yes, He proselytized publicans, but He lumped tax collectors in with prostitutes as sinners (“tax collectors and prostitutes will get into the kingdom of God before you”(Mt 21:31). 

Many claim that Jesus was a socialist because he often spoke about helping the poor, but this is a misnomer of socialism. Socialism isn’t “wanting to help people;” socialism is using the coercive force of the government to help people. Jesus never hinted that it was the role of the state or some third party to act as our moral proxy. On multiple occasions Jesus said that wealthy people should sell what they have and give to the poor but he never told people to vote for politicians to take money from other people to help the poor. 

Jesus acknowledged a role for the state but made clear it was distinct from that of the Church. As Pope Leo XIII wrote in Arcanum: 

Jesus Christ, the Founder of the Church, willed her sacred power to be distinct from the civil power, and each power to be free and unshackled in its own sphere… 

Jesus promoted individual charity, not the coercive redistribution of the state. In Luke 12, Jesus is confronted by a man who wants Him to redistribute wealth to him. But Jesus rejects the request, saying, “Man, who made me a judge or a divider over you?” and instead calls out the man for his covetousness (a sin of modern socialists everywhere).

Finally, when Our Lord was tempted by Satan in the desert, the Devil offered Him “all the kingdoms of the world and their glory”(Mt 4:8) if He would bow down and worship him. Jesus mirrored Moses and rebuked Satan, saying, “Begone, Satan: for it is written, The Lord thy God shalt thou adore, and him only shalt thou serve.”

Augustine’s Two Cities

Hundreds of years later, during an empire-wide existential crisis that followed the Visigoths’ sack of Rome in 410, St. Augustine wrote City of God, which laid out his two-cities doctrine. While he allowed that the state’s divinely appointed existence is to assist and bless humankind, he strongly asserted that it always fails in that regard. He resigned us to the reality that political jurisdictions of this world will never be anything different than what they were during his time: corrupt thieves. In Book IV he wrote:

Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms? The band itself is made up of men; it is ruled by the authority of a prince, it is knit together by the pact of the confederacy; the booty is divided by the law agreed on. If, by the admittance of abandoned men, this evil increases to such a degree that it holds places, fixes abodes, takes possession of cities, and subdues peoples, it assumes the more plainly the name of a kingdom, because the reality is now manifestly conferred on it, not by the removal of covetousness, but by the addition of impunity.

It should be made clear that Augustine does see a legitimate role for government, or the Earthly City as he calls it, but that it will always be distinct from the City of God:

It has come to pass that the two cities could not have common laws of religion, and that the heavenly city has been compelled in this matter to dissent, and to become obnoxious to those who think differently, and to stand the brunt of their anger and hatred and persecutions.

He makes the case that even if the civil authority (Roman emperor) and the Church authority (Pontiff) were one in the same, that the Earthly City would still not become the City of God because citizenship is determined on the individual level.

Our Lord said, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would certainly strive that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now my kingdom is not from hence,” (Jn 18:36) and Augustine understood that we Christians are of this world but meant for another. We should respect the Earthly City, but realize that is not our ultimate goal. We are called to evangelize but not to force our faith on others through the strong arm of the state.

Aquinas and Salamanca

Hundreds of years later still, the Scholastics formalized much of libertarianism in the theory of Natural Law. The great doctor of the Church St. Thomas Aquinas built on his predecessors Aristotle, Augustine, and Ambrose, and distilled a theory of Natural Rights. He asserted that everyone has rights, or that which is due him, and “the proper act of justice is nothing else than to render to each one his own.” (Summa Theologiae II-II:58:11) He agreed with Isidore that, “a man is said to be just because he respects the rights [jus] of others.”

Aquinas wrote that justice is foremost among the virtues because, “Although the liberal man gives of his own, yet he does so in so far as he takes into consideration the good of his own virtue, while the just man gives to another what is his, through consideration of the common good.”

This extended to all of the Natural Rights that later philosophers expounded on: LIFE: “it is in no way lawful to slay the innocent” (ST II-II:64:6), LIBERTY: “though unbelievers sin in their rites, they may be tolerated, either on account of some good that ensues therefrom, or because of some evil avoided.” (ST II-II:10:11), and PROPERTY: “when a man gives so much that he may receive equal value in return.” (ST II-II:57:2)

Aquinas was by no means a pure libertarian in the modern sense, but he laid a philosophical foundation on which his successors, most notably the School of Salamanca, built.

In the tradition of the Catholic Scholastics, the School of Salamanca was a group of intellectuals based in the University of Salamanca in Renaissance Spain who developed what would become the principles of Natural Law and what we consider libertarianism today. They based their philosophy on Aquinas as well as Holy Scripture and laid the foundation for a more just society.

From the beginning of the 16th century the traditional Catholic conception of man and of his relation to God and to the world had been assaulted by the rise of humanism, by the Protestant Reformation, and by the Age of Exploration, which brought on mistreatment of humans on a massive scale. These new philosophical problems were addressed by the School of Salamanca.

The leading figures of the school, theologians and jurists Francisco de Vitoria, Domingo de Soto, Martín de Azpilcueta (or Azpilicueta), Tomás de Mercado, and Francisco Suárez, were all scholars of Natural Law and of morality, who undertook the reconciliation of the new political-economic order and the teachings of the Church. The themes of study centered on man and his practical problems: morality, economics, and jurisprudence.

The discovery of America led to the formulation of ius gentium (or human rights) by Salamancan Francisco de Vitoria. While some people rejected the Natural Rights of American Indians, de Vitoria wrote that they were free people by nature with legitimate rights to life, liberty, and property. He stated that the Indians had the right to voluntarily refuse conversion but that they could not impede the right of the Spanish to proselytize. Even if they did, it would not be just to cause war against them because of any resulting death and destruction.

He and others developed what would become the just war theory stating that just wars are:

• in self-defense, as long as there is a reasonable possibility of success. If failure is a foregone conclusion, then it is just a wasteful spilling of blood, 
• preventive war against a tyrant who is about to attack, 
• or war to punish a guilty enemy.

In addition:

• It is necessary that the response be commensurate with the evil; use of more violence than is strictly necessary would constitute an unjust war.
• Governing authorities declare war, but their decision is not a sufficient cause to begin a war. If the people oppose a war, then it is illegitimate. The people have a right to depose a government that is waging, or is about to wage, an unjust war.
• Once war has begun, there remain moral limits to action. For example, one may not attack innocents or kill hostages.
• It is obligatory to take advantage of all options for dialogue and negotiations before undertaking a war; war is only legitimate as a last resort.

The Church Declares Religious Freedom

Decades after Pope Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors, the Magisterium reinforced Augustine’s view of religion in the public realm in the Decree on Religious Liberty, which states:

This Vatican Council declares that the human person has a right to religious freedom. This freedom means that all men are to be immune from coercion on the part of individuals or of social groups and of any human power, in such wise that no one is to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his own beliefs, whether privately or publicly, whether alone or in association with others, within due limits.

The council further declares that the right to religious freedom has its foundation in the very dignity of the human person as this dignity is known through the revealed word of God and by reason itself. This right of the human person to religious freedom is to be recognized in the constitutional law whereby society is governed and thus it is to become a civil right.

And

It is in accordance with their dignity as persons—that is, beings endowed with reason and free will and therefore privileged to bear personal responsibility—that all men should be at once impelled by nature and also bound by a moral obligation to seek the truth, especially religious truth. They are also bound to adhere to the truth, once it is known, and to order their whole lives in accord with the demands of truth. However, men cannot discharge these obligations in a manner in keeping with their own nature unless they enjoy immunity from external coercion as well as psychological freedom. Therefore the right to religious freedom has its foundation not in the subjective disposition of the person, but in his very nature. In consequence, the right to this immunity continues to exist even in those who do not live up to their obligation of seeking the truth and adhering to it and the exercise of this right is not to be impeded, provided that just public order be observed.

With this declaration, the Church condemned the atheistic false liberalism that persecuted Catholics after the French Revolution, but also rejected the idea that the Church must impose its morality on others. Faith is a gift from God and a result of free will. It’s impossible to force someone to profess Christ.