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Catholic Integralism

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Catholic Integralism

The political-theological doctrine that the Catholic Church’s spiritual authority should be recognized as superior to — and coordinate the ends of — secular political authority; associated with Adrian Vermeule, Gladden Pappin, and Patrick Deneen in the American New Right context

What It Is

Catholic Integralism is a tradition within Catholic political thought holding that Church and state are not separate sovereign spheres but ordered to each other — and that political authority is ultimately subordinate to spiritual authority in matters touching on salvation. The name comes from the idea of “integral” Catholicism: an undivided ordering of all aspects of life, including politics, toward the supernatural end of human beings.

In the medieval tradition (associated with Pope Gelasius I’s “two powers” theory and later Boniface VIII’s Unam Sanctam), this meant the Pope could direct or depose temporal rulers. The modern integralists don’t necessarily call for papal supremacy over states, but they do insist that liberal neutrality between religion and politics is a false ideal — political communities have substantive ends, and those ends should be ordered toward human flourishing as Catholic social teaching understands it.

Kevin Vallier (philosopher), All the Kingdoms of the World (2023): called Vermeule’s integralist faction “the premier radicalism on the New Right” — an ideology that “offers the alienated something positive: an ultimate goal, a vision, a dream.”

Vallier’s definition:

“Catholic integralists say that governments must secure the earthly and heavenly common good. God authorizes two powers to do so, they assert. The state governs in matters temporal, and the church in matters spiritual. Since the church has a nobler purpose than the state (salvation), it may authorize and direct the state to support it with certain policies, such as enforcing church law. At times, the church may need assistance to advance its objectives.”

Jeet Heer: “a state where religion is woven into the fabric of everyday common life, with the sanction of the state, in contrast to secularism’s partitioning of the sacred into private life.”

The practical program (short term): staff the federal bureaucracy with integralists; install them in positions of high executive authority; seat them throughout the judiciary. The longer-term aim: these actors make political decisions with a view to religious ends and “effectuate a deeper transformation of the system — i.e., a deeper integration of religion into civic and political life.”

Historical Lineage

Modern Catholic integralism dates back to the antiliberal and antimodern movements of the eighteenth through twentieth centuries in Europe:

  • Joseph de Maistre — opponent of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution; Catholic theocrat
  • Juan Donoso Cortés — Spanish Catholic who defended monarchy and Church against liberalism and socialism
  • Charles Maurras — ideologue for the far-right French movement Action Française (which collaborated with Vichy)
  • António Salazar — Portuguese dictator and something like an integralist in practice; praised by the New Right
  • L. Brent Bozell Jr. — American representative; friend, then brother-in-law of William F. Buckley; ghostwriter for Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative; eventually moved to Spain and founded Triumph magazine, a small but influential journal that promoted Francoism and Catholic theocracy

Carl Schmitt’s decisionism was also influenced by these same Catholic counterrevolutionaries (de Maistre and Donoso Cortés), creating a deep structural overlap between integralism and Schmittian political theology. See Carl Schmitt.

Neo-Integralism: The Contemporary Movement

The contemporary iteration was initiated by Father Edmund Waldstein, a Cistercian monk in Austria. In the early 2010s, Waldstein became convinced by English theologian Thomas Pink’s conservative, antiliberal reinterpretation of the Second Vatican Council’s declaration on religious liberty, Dignitas humanae (1965) — a way of reading it that recovered integralist commitments without risking schism with Catholic orthodoxy.

Waldstein popularized and developed this vision. The movement grew:

  • 2013: A Facebook group
  • A live Slack chat where Vermeule was a participant
  • The Josias blog, which Vermeule contributed to and which Gladden Pappin supported from its earliest days

The early Waldstein group had a range of political perspectives. The pivotal moment was 2016: Gladden Pappin was critical in “ensuring that the politically ambitious integralists won out.” While writing for Journal of American Greatness, Pappin was simultaneously angling for the integralists to back Trump, “whose disruptive potential he saw so clearly.” Vallier’s interviewees agreed that Pappin “converted a group of friends into a radical political faction dedicated to turning the US government into a Catholic state.”

American Integralism

In the American New Right context, Catholic Integralism emerges primarily through three figures:

Adrian Vermeule is the most theoretically sophisticated. His Integration from Within (2018) and Common Good Constitutionalism (2022) argue for using existing legal and administrative structures to advance integralist ends — not through external revolution but through “swimming the Tiber from within.” His approach is distinctively practical and anti-utopian.

Patrick Deneen provides the diagnostic half: Why Liberalism Failed (2018) shows that liberalism’s contradictions are self-destructive. Deneen’s integralism is more localist and communitarian — subsidiarity and small communities rather than administrative capture.

Gladden Pappin is perhaps the most straightforwardly integralist, teaching Catholic political philosophy and co-founding American Affairs as a venue for these ideas.

The Integralism–Postliberalism Relationship

Integralism is the most extreme wing of Postliberalism. Not all postliberals are integralists: many (including non-Catholics like Sohrab Ahmari and JD Vance) share the critique of liberalism without accepting the specific Catholic doctrinal claims. But integralism provides the theological backbone and most rigorous theoretical framework for the postliberal project.

The two share:

  • Rejection of liberal neutrality and the public/private distinction
  • Affirmation that political communities have substantive goods to promote
  • Willingness to use state power to enforce those goods
  • Critique of procedural liberalism and rights-absolutism

Integralism goes further by grounding these claims in Catholic theology and natural law theory specifically.

Criticisms

  • Sectarian: imposes one religious tradition’s ends on pluralist democracies
  • Politically impossible: even if desirable, no path to implementation in America
  • Instrumentalist about democracy: treats democratic procedures as tools, not values
  • Schmittian problem: decisionism lurks beneath the natural-law surface — who decides what the “common good” requires? (Field)

The Iberian Reference (per Iberian Vistas)

Per Iberian Vistas (Zúquete & Hawley, 2025): the contemporary Anglophone neo-integralist project has retrieved Franco and Salazar as historical reference points for what an integralist political form could look like. The retrieval is selective:

  • The corporatist body (Pappin, “Corporatism for the Twenty-First Century”) draws explicitly on Salazar’s Estado Novo.
  • The administrative-state body (Vermeule, The Josias) cites Salazar’s Portugal as bureaucracy-flourishing-in-illiberal-regime example.
  • The crusading body (Hard-Right adjacent — Charles Haywood, Josh Abbotoy, Joseph Pearce) revives Franco’s Spain as Catholic civilizational defense.
  • The theological purist body (Waldstein himself) is critical of Salazar admiration on doctrinal grounds — that the Estado Novo preserved the form of Catholic Social Teaching while serving the state and market rather than letting “the Kingdom break in.”

The wiki’s structural reading: contemporary American neo-integralism is not uniform on Iberia. The political-strategic faction (Pappin, Vermeule, the Hard-Right adjacent) has retrieved the regime-form analogues; the theological-purist faction has resisted. This split corresponds to the wider tension in postliberalism between political-form and substantive-theological priority — see Postliberalism.

The earlier American attempt — Bozell’s Triumph (1966–1976) — was both: substantively integralist and Iberian-admiring. It failed institutionally. The contemporary version is split into a more institutionally viable political-strategic wing and a more theologically pure but politically marginal wing.

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