Thomas Banchoff and Massimo Faggioli argue that Pope Leo XIV faces a difficult challenge in responding to the erosion of democratic norms in the United States and across the West. They rightly observe that the Church’s commitment to political neutrality complicates any direct papal intervention, and they trace the historical evolution by which Catholicism moved from skepticism of democracy to a firm endorsement of democratic institutions. Their analysis is penetrating and timely. But the crisis they describe calls for something more than cautious papal diplomacy.
The international order that emerged from the ashes of the Second World War was built on three pillars: the universal recognition of human rights, the rule of law sustained through international institutions, and multilateral cooperation among sovereign nations. Catholic social teaching helped shape each of these pillars. From the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the founding of the United Nations, Catholic thinkers—Jacques Maritain chief among them—insisted that politics must be grounded in the transcendent dignity of every human person.
Today, that order is fraying. Authoritarian movements exploit polarization, democratic norms erode under waves of disinformation, and religious nationalism distorts the Gospel into an instrument of exclusion. The moment has arrived for a new papal document—a De dignitate humana et democratia—that would offer a comprehensive Catholic condemnation of authoritarianism, a moral defense of liberal democracy, and a renewed call for a just international order.
The Second Vatican Council urged the Church to scrutinize “the signs of the times” and interpret them in light of the Gospel (Gaudium et spes, 4). Current signs are ominous. Across the globe, authoritarian regimes are surging—and with them, devastating assaults on human dignity, human rights, and the social order. Governments deny freedom of conscience, dismantle civil society, and even attack the very Catholic organizations (Caritas, Catholic Relief Services, Jesuit Refugee Service) that serve the world’s most vulnerable. As Banchoff and Faggioli document, even in the United States—long considered a bastion of democratic stability—executive overreach, attacks on the rule of law, and nationalist populism have placed democratic institutions under extraordinary strain. The Church cannot be agnostic or apathetic in the face of this. What is needed is an authoritative Catholic condemnation of authoritarianism, coupled with a genuine political theory rooted in the social magisterium.
Pope Francis made a similar diagnosis in Fratelli tutti, calling for “a better kind of politics” and criticizing both demagogic populism and neoliberal market fundamentalism (154–169). Yet chapter five of that encyclical, for all its moral power, stops short of linking its critique to a concrete political model. The Church has condemned specific authoritarian atrocities—Hitler’s death camps, Stalin’s gulags—but has said remarkably little about authoritarianism as such. While the social magisterium eventually found its voice to decry those regimes’ economic systems and violations of human rights, regarding their actual structures of government—the concentration of unaccountable power—the Church had little to say. A new document could fill that gap.
Catholic teaching provides ample resources for naming the spiritual pathologies of authoritarian rule. John Paul II, writing from the lived experience of totalitarian oppression in Poland, identified the central error of totalitarianism as “the denial of the transcendent dignity of the human person” (Centesimus annus, 44). When a state claims absolute authority, it becomes an idol, denying the foundational truth of Christian anthropology: that every human being is created in the image of God and endowed with freedom and moral responsibility. Authoritarianism is therefore not merely a political distortion but a spiritual disorder—a perversion of authority’s true nature as service.
Three interrelated distortions define the authoritarian spirit. The first is the idolatry of power. Authority, rightly understood, is ordered to the common good. When power is separated from morality, it becomes an instrument of domination. Authoritarian regimes sacralize strength, promising security in exchange for obedience—violating the Christian understanding of power as service modeled by Christ the servant-king.
The second is the systematic erosion of truth and conscience. Benedict XVI insisted that “without truth, charity degenerates into sentimentality” (Caritas in veritate, 3). Authoritarianism feeds on disinformation, dulling the capacity for moral judgment—the seat of conscience that Gaudium et spes called “the most secret core and sanctuary of a man” (16). The Church must reaffirm truth as a public good and conscience as the first sanctuary of freedom.
The third is the cult of the nation. Catholic social thought affirms legitimate patriotism but rejects what Francis calls a “myopic” nationalism that excludes and despises others (Fratelli tutti, 11). The Church, being universal, stands as the most enduring witness that the human family transcends every border. A healthy love of country must open outward in solidarity with all peoples—a principle rooted in the Beatitudes’ call to peacemaking.
Any honest Catholic case for liberal democracy must begin by acknowledging that the Church’s relationship with democratic governance has been long and complicated. Historically, the Church has been deeply skeptical of liberal democracy. The nineteenth-century popes viewed the French Revolution’s ideals—popular sovereignty, universal rights, the separation of church and state—as threats to the social order and the faith itself. Gregory XVI’s Mirari vos (1832) condemned religious liberty as “insanity,” and Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors (1864) rejected the proposition that the pope should reconcile himself with liberalism and progress. It was not until Leo XIII, at the turn of the twentieth century, that the Church cautiously began to accommodate democratic forms of government—though even he insisted on the ideal of a confessional state. The decisive turning point came with Pius XI, whose condemnation of Action Française in 1926 marked a break with antidemocratic Catholic nationalism, and especially with Pius XII, who in his 1944 Christmas address threw the Church’s moral authority behind democracy in the wake of fascism and war. Since John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council, the Church has spoken with increasing clarity in support of human rights, constitutional governance, and the participation of citizens in political life. This trajectory matters. It means that the Church’s endorsement of democracy is not a naïve enthusiasm but a considered judgment, forged through painful experience with the alternatives.
The Church has never canonized a particular political system. Yet the ethical architecture of liberal democracy corresponds more closely than any alternative to the Church’s teaching on human dignity, participation, and the moral limits of power.
Consider the four essential elements of liberal democracy: the rule of law, individual rights prior to government, constitutionalism with separation of powers, and popular sovereignty. Catholic social doctrine already affirms each of them, though in scattered references across many documents.
The rule of law is upheld in Pacem in terris and Sollicitudo rei socialis—though the Church Fathers and Thomas Aquinas also argued the point. A priori individual rights are defended from Rerum novarum through Dignitatis humanae, Caritas in veritate, and Fratelli tutti. The separation of powers is implicit in the principle of subsidiarity, central to Catholic social thought since Quadragesimo anno, and nearly every social encyclical identifies critical moral limits on the power of the state. And popular sovereignty, rooted in Thomistic thought, finds its latest expression in Francis’s promotion of synodality—a vision of the Church herself as a community of participatory discernment.
Yet liberal democracy requires something more—a fifth element that secular accounts too often neglect. Liberal democracy requires a foundation in civic virtue and solidarity around a shared common good to avoid devolving into the libertarian excess that ultimately undermines liberal democracy itself. The waning of liberal democracy (trumpeted lately by “postliberals” and Catholic integralists) is arguably the result of a flawed application of liberalism itself: the celebration of individual freedom detached from the formation of citizens in solidarity. Here, Fratelli tutti’s vision of “social friendship” and “political charity” provides exactly the moral architecture that secular liberalism lacks. Its Gospel-centered interpretation of the common good in light of the preferential option for the poor is itself a powerful rejoinder to authoritarianism, inasmuch as authoritarian regimes inevitably privilege the leader or a coven of oligarchs—and never the poor.
John XXIII’s Pacem in terris declared that every person possesses rights that “flow as a direct consequence from his nature” (9). Democracy institutionalizes this theological truth. The recognition of rights is not a concession of the state but a moral acknowledgment of what humanity already possesses by divine gift. And Octogesima adveniens reminds us that participation in civic life is a moral obligation, for through it a person exercises God-given freedom and collaborates in building the common good (24). John Paul II’s warning in Centesimus annus remains essential: “A democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism.” The Church’s contribution to democracy is not uncritical endorsement but prophetic insistence that liberty must be sustained by virtue. Against Catholic integralists who argue that authoritarian regimes can be perfectly compatible with the faith, a new papal document would offer the definitive rebuttal—drawing together the scattered threads of the social magisterium into a coherent political theology.
Perhaps no distortion among contemporary authoritarianisms is more dangerous than the fusion of religious identity with nationalist ideology. Religious nationalism instrumentalizes faith, turning the Gospel into a tribal marker rather than a universal call to love. The Second Vatican Council’s Dignitatis humanae established that religious freedom is an inviolable right rooted in the dignity of the person—not a privilege granted by states to favored confessions (2). Gaudium et spes affirmed that human dignity demands that persons act “according to a knowing and free choice” (17), rejecting all coercion that suppresses conscience. When governments wrap authoritarian policies in religious language, they commit a double offense: they violate both political liberty and religious integrity.
Francis’s Evangelii gaudium reminds us that “true faith in the incarnate Son of God is inseparable from self-giving, from membership in the community, from service” (88). Faith that serves power rather than the poor is not faith at all. And Benedict XVI’s Spe salvi taught that hope is itself a political virtue, giving citizens the moral energy to build institutions of justice even amid historical disappointment (35). Banchoff and Faggioli remind us that nationalist populists in both the United States and Europe have sought to claim the mantle of Christian civilization for exclusionary political projects. A new document could well name religious nationalism as a heresy of practice—a betrayal of the Gospel’s universality.
The Holy See has been among the most consistent advocates of international cooperation grounded in law. From Benedict XV’s peace efforts during the First World War to John XXIII’s call for a “public authority of the world community” (Pacem in terris, 139), the popes have viewed multilateral governance as an expression of the unity of the human family. In Laudato si’, Francis urged the creation of international institutions with “real authority” to address planetary crises beyond any single nation’s reach (175). Paul VI’s Populorum progressio insisted that economic systems must serve integral human development, not the accumulation of wealth by the few. Economic exclusion, in this vision, is the modern analogue of political disenfranchisement.
Beyond critiquing authoritarianism and defending liberal democracy, the new papal document proposed here could also renew the call for a reformed international order oriented not by hegemony but by solidarity, subsidiarity, and stewardship. The Church’s vision of political community recognizes legitimate national autonomy yet rejects absolute sovereignty. Global interdependence entails shared moral responsibility. Francis’s notion of “a politics of love” invites nations to exercise power as stewardship, not possession. And it would resist the myopic nationalisms that seek to dismantle the very institutions—however imperfect—that restrain the law of the strongest. Where law is absent, only force prevails.
Pacem in terris spoke to a world trembling under nuclear threat. Centesimus annus addressed the collapse of totalitarian communism. Fratelli tutti called for fraternity amid fragmentation. Each of these documents met its historical moment with moral clarity and theological depth. The present moment demands nothing less.
Banchoff and Faggioli are right that Pope Leo XIV must navigate the tension between prophetic witness and institutional prudence. But the very caution they describe—the desire to avoid partisan entanglement, the fear of deepening internal Church divisions—itself argues for the kind of document proposed here: one that speaks not to a particular government or election but to the enduring moral principles at stake. A De dignitate humana et democratia would draw together the scattered wisdom of the social magisterium—from Leo XIII to Francis—into a coherent teaching that condemns authoritarianism as incompatible with Christian anthropology, affirms liberal democracy as the political form most consonant with human dignity, and renews the Church’s historic commitment to an international order grounded in law, rights, and solidarity. Catholic thinkers as diverse as Jacques Maritain and John Courtney Murray have laid the intellectual foundations for such a teaching. What is needed now is an authoritative voice to bring those foundations together. As Maritain and Murray labored to show, democratic governance is not a concession to secularism but a political expression of the truth that every person bears the divine image. The authority worthy of humanity is that which mirrors the authority of God—an authority that governs not by coercion but by mercy, not by fear but by freedom. The Church has spoken before at moments of global crisis. She must speak again now to warn of the moral danger of authoritarianism and to endorse liberal democracy.
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