When it comes to developments of political ideas within a Christian, but mostly Catholic, frame, most of them are either reruns of previously elaborated doctrines, or their adaptions to the current social, economic, and geopolitical contingencies. As such, there is little new to offer, but every now and then, some novel schools of political thought tend to arise.

I recently read on the First Things magazines an essay by Ross Douthat called Catholic Ideas and Catholic Realities, where he discussed the main current schools of thought he considers exist in modern Political Catholicism, distinguishing them in four different categories: Populists, Integralists, Benedictines and Tradinistas.

Douthat summarized his thesis with the following words: “Benedictines have the most natural interest in questions of institutional preservation and renewal, but integralists may have a particular role in helping the Church govern itself more effectively, in an era when its relationship to state and society will become more fraught than in the recent past. Tradinistas may be able to instantiate their radicalism on the local level, in new movements and Catholic Worker–style communities, even if Catholic Socialism as a national ideology remains notional. Catholic populists, who are likely to be the most politically influential faction in most imaginable futures, have an obligation to think about how the public policies of the secular state are likely to shape the landscape in which the Church tries to stabilize, recover, and grow.”

As his classification is fairly descriptive, I think it would be more useful to apply each of the labels to different public figures that could be considered as some kind of leaders within each of these movements, and indeed, see how their ideas can be put into practice.

On the Populist side, we have J .D. Vance, a venture capitalist, and recent Catholic convert who, after having been the elites golden boy for a while, decided to oppose them and run for a seat in the US Senate in his native Ohio under a similar platform to that of President Donald Trump back in 2016.

Integralists, on the other hand, have someone whom Douthat did mention: Prof. Adrian Vermeule, another recent convert, who teaches constitutional law in the world-renowned Harvard Law School, and as a legal scholar has worked to re-develop, from integralist ideas, a constitutional interpretation doctrine, called common-good constitutionalism, that resembles the legal scholarship of the Christian Middle Ages.

Benedictinism has Rob Dreher, a senior editor in The American Conservative magazine and is the author of the aptly named book The Benedict Option, in which he discusses ideas and plans for the survival of Catholic Tradition in small, enclosed communities of likeminded families and individuals.

Dreher is a who curious case, since he was raised as a Methodist, then converted to Catholicism, and finally to Eastern Orthodoxy, each time strengthening his political beliefs in a form of illiberal conservatism, similar to the one promoted by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, whom he praises periodically.

Finally, Tradinistas can see themselves projected in John C. Médaille, a theology and business professor at the University of Dallas, whose advocacy of distributism and a social economy, as well as his support for the Democratic Party has made him to be considered left-wing within Catholic circles.

Even if I do consider this categorization useful, as it names some of the clearest directions Political Catholicism can take, I think it is nonetheless incomplete, as it does not account for what I consider is the fifth and final school of modern Catholic Political thought: anarcho-traditionalism.

Now, the name can sound somewhat repulsive and counterproductive, since it reminds the reader of Christian anarchism and other leftist creations in the 20^th century, but anarcho-traditionalism is nowhere near the political left and can be considered as a sui generis organic development that has resulted from different schools and different ideas coming together.

Developed from paleolibertarian approaches and its subsequent reconciliation with religion, anarcho-traditionalism is still an obscure political doctrine, but not for lack of trying: it is primarily inspired by Thomas E. Woods Jr.’s book, How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, as well by Murray Rothbard’s later writings, most particularly his positive outlooks on the Catholic Church expressed in his Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Though, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s magnum opus, Democracy: The God that Failed.

Several other thinkers have been adopted as the intellectual forefathers of anarcho-traditionalism, usually considering some core ideas: the traditional families and faith as voluntary strongholds against the collapse of society, private property as a civilizational foundation, the rejection of the modern State as a creation of the Enlightenment, and the idealization of the Christian Middle ages as an anarchist society founded on property rights, contract bonds and emergent order through tradition.

Anarcho-traditionalists take their name for J. R. R. Tolkien’s own personal political denomination, and have promoted their vision as new kind of fusionism, mending together a radical libertarian approach on economics with the most conservative aspects of political Catholicism, considering the State as a disruptive force that has broken religious faith and the traditional society emanated from it through welfare policies, and restricted trough legislation a naturally free market economy where morality guided all transactions for the flow of goods and services.

Whereas they may be rare in the Anglophone world, anarcho-traditionalists are actually a growing force among international Catholic and libertarian circles, where they have adopted figures like the Brazilian founder of the Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property, Dr. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, or Carlist jurist and Universidad de Navarra’s founder Alvaro D’Ors and Austrian reactionary monarchist and political scholar Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn as part of their intellectual pantheon.

In Spain, where anarcho-traditionalism is best known, the world-famed Austrian School economist Jesús Huerta de Soto and Catholic priest José Ripoll are some of its best exponents, having used the term at least since 2009, where it first appeared in a review of Nicolás Gomez Davila’s Escolios, and from which a number of movements have been spawned, most notably a wing of the right-populist Vox party and a large number of adherents of the right-wing Konfederacja alliance in Poland.

Anarcho-traditionalism is not yet well known in America, but if one considers it as part of the paleo revival promoted by the Mises Institute and Chronicles Magazine, it may take off sooner than one could realize.

The problem, however, with anarcho-traditionalism, as well as with Ross Douthat’s four other categories for Political Catholicism, is that they fall under a nominalist trap: thinkers and scholars tend to think more about the name and distinction of their movement or school, instead of promoting its ideas under a general, universal doctrine that embraces them all.

The nominalist trap refers to William of Ockham’s nominalism, a philosophical doctrine that teaches the particularity of being and the non-existence of universal concepts, meaning that everything that exists and can be rationally understood by the human mind only does within particular categories that contain their meaning.

Nominalism has been denounced by several Christian thinkers, both Catholic and Protestant, as its ultimate consequences lead to the disruption of all rational thought into self-contained patches where nothing can ever be considered as real and only depends on the name assigned to the specific space where an idea is observed or reasoned.

For a larger intellectual development, this is very dangerous, because it separates the universal logos into different areas where participation is difficult and the exchange of ideas is considered unwise, as it creates unnatural competition between individual developments of the same doctrine instead of allowing for its general growth.

In here, we need to consider the etymology of the word ‘Catholic’, from the Greek ‘katolikos’, universal, meaning that any school of thought that follows the Catholic faith and its social and political doctrine should, at least, try to be as universal as the Church itself.

If we keep on dividing and distinguishing the developments of Catholic political though with different names, we will end up atomizing and isolating their ideas and their promoters within intellectual tribes, waging a warfare of ideas among themselves.

Anarcho-traditionalists, as well as Populists, Integralists, Benedictines and Tradinistas, are all part of the same Catholic Church, and as such, must always remember their end goal is to promote the restoration of a Christian Order in society.

We may have different approaches, but our endgame is common, and only unity can achieve it. This is the reason the Middle Ages, considered by some as the realization of a Christian Society, tends to be described with the example of the Holy Roman Empire, where a great deal of different political models, jurisdictions, economic models, and even monarchs and religions in its end, coexisted under the same faith and the same authority, that of the Emperor.

We still can copy that example, but we will begin to see ourselves as part of the same Western and Christian political tradition, overlapping our personal and intellectual developments with those of our fellow Catholics, as all of them will ultimately help us for the same result for the survival and restoration of our civilization.

This may not be easy, but in our current circumstances, unity may be our only hope, as the nominalist trap only helps the desacralization of society undertook by our internal enemies, as well as for the aggressive advances of other civilizations, that have sensed the weakness of a post-Christian West and are coming for us.