The MAGA New Right

Edmund Waldstein

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Pater Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist. (b. 1980)

Austrian Cistercian monk; theologian at Stift Heiligenkreuz (the Cistercian monastery near Vienna); founding editor of The Josias (2014–); the wiki’s principal theological source for contemporary Catholic Integralism — the figure whose sustained recovery of pre-Vatican-II integralist theology supplied Vermeule’s, Pappin’s, and Deneen’s movement with its Catholic doctrinal scaffolding.

Why He Matters Here

Waldstein is the upstream theologian whose thinking the better-known Anglophone integralists (Adrian Vermeule in particular) drew from. The Josias — the integralist online journal Waldstein co-founded in 2014 — is where the contemporary integralist vocabulary (“integralism,” “ralliement,” “the temporal and spiritual powers”) was reintroduced to a New Right Anglophone audience.

Iberian Vistas notes Waldstein as the figure whose theological articulation of Catholic Integralism — that political authority exists to protect not individual rights but “the common good of human life, viewed in terms of worshipping God and promoting the true religion — Roman Catholicism” — is the doctrinal frame Vermeule’s Common Good Constitutionalism and Pappin’s “Corporatism for the Twenty-First Century” both proceed from.

Career and Output

  • Born 1980 to American parents (his father is Michael Waldstein, theologian); raised partly in Austria, partly in the United States.
  • Cistercian monk at Stift Heiligenkreuz; ordained priest 2008.
  • DTheol from the University of Vienna (dissertation on Charles De Koninck and the common good).
  • 2014: co-founded The Josias (named after a passage in Maurras) as the theological-political journal of Anglophone integralism. Other founding editors include Pater Edmund Waldstein himself, Coemgenus, and Petrus Hispanus.
  • Articulated the canonical contemporary statement of integralism in “Integralism in Three Sentences” (The Josias, 2016):

“Catholic Integralism is a tradition of thought that, rejecting the liberal separation of politics from concern with the end of human life, holds that political rule must order man to his final goal. Since, however, man has both a temporal and an eternal end, integralism holds that there are two powers that rule him: a temporal power and a spiritual power. And since man’s temporal end is subordinated to his eternal end, the temporal power must be subordinated to the spiritual power.”

  • Publishes articles regularly in Communio, Nova et Vetera, First Things, and (more rarely) American Affairs.

Doctrinal Position

Waldstein’s integralism is traditional (pre-Vatican-II Catholic; rejecting the Vatican II Dignitatis Humanae declaration on religious liberty as a development requiring careful interpretation) without being sedevacantist (he affirms the legitimacy of the post-Vatican-II popes). The position is intellectually serious within Catholic theology and is the wiki’s most rigorous form of contemporary integralism.

Three doctrinal load-bearings:

  1. The two-powers thesis. Temporal and spiritual powers; temporal subordinated to spiritual; the secular state exists to facilitate the salvation of souls.
  2. Anti-liberalism as Catholic doctrine. Liberalism, in Waldstein’s reading, is metaphysically incompatible with Catholicism; it is not merely strategically problematic but doctrinally erroneous.
  3. Anti-Americanism (in a specific sense). The American founding’s Lockean-individualist elements are, on Waldstein’s reading, what makes the American polity structurally incompatible with Catholic political theology. This sets him apart from American postliberals (Vermeule, Pappin, Deneen) who are seeking to redeem American constitutionalism via integralism rather than declaring it a lost cause.

Waldstein’s Position on the Iberian Question

Per Iberian Vistas: Waldstein has been critical of contemporary American conservative Salazar admiration. He argued that Salazar’s regime was a “prime example of the veneer of Catholic Social Teaching without the reality of solidarity and subsidiarity” — that the Estado Novo gave primacy to the modern state and to the market and “did not let the Kingdom break in, lest it lose its grip on power.” This is the wiki-significant case of integralist critique of American postliberal Salazar admiration: Waldstein’s purist position holds that the Estado Novo did not go far enough toward subordinating temporal to spiritual.

Waldstein’s reservation is itself the wiki’s clearest evidence that the contemporary American postliberal interest in Salazar is political (regime form, administrative state, corporatism) rather than properly theological (subordination of temporal to spiritual).

What the Wiki Inherits

  • Vermeule’s Common Good Constitutionalism is theologically downstream of Waldstein. Vermeule cites him.
  • Pappin’s American Affairs and Postliberal Order output absorbs Waldstein’s integralist frame into political-economic argument.
  • The Josias is the NR-equivalent for the integralist current: institutional venue, doctrinal authority, talent pipeline.
  • The integralist current Waldstein leads is the most theologically serious and most politically marginal part of the wiki’s postliberal coalition. Waldstein’s monastic distance from American politics is part of his authority within it.

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