Catholic integralism is the position that political authority should be ordered to the spiritual authority of the Catholic Church — that the state’s ends are subordinate to, and should serve, the Church’s. It is a position within political theology with a long history, revived in recent years in American academic and journal writing.
It is an argument in the literature
The reason this page is short is that its subject is a body of published argument rather than a movement that does anything.
Vallier has published both a statement of the strongest argument for the position and a critique of it, and both are cited above. That is the appropriate way to source a contested theoretical position: not by summarizing it in this project’s voice, but by pointing at the argument on both sides, in this case from the same scholar.
Relationship to post-liberal-right
That page covers the wider current this position sits inside. The two overlap heavily and are
recorded as a merge candidate in reports/citations/movements.md.
What was removed
The previous version described this as an “online intellectual movement” founded in 2014, organized
through social media and podcasts, with a chronology and impact claims. None was sourced. The
position is many centuries older than 2014, and the founded field has been removed accordingly.
Sources
- 01.
Vallier, K. (2024). The Justice Argument Against Catholic Integralism. Political Studies, 72(2), 590-611. Peer-reviewed critique of integralism in the political theory literature, and the source for treating the position as a live academic argument rather than an online phenomenon. Published online in 2023 and in print in volume 72, issue 2 (2024); both dates confirmed from the Crossref record. Publisher site (journals.sagepub.com) returns HTTP 403 to automated clients.
- 02.
Vallier, K. (2023). The Symmetry Argument for Catholic Integralism. Journal of Analytic Theology, 11, 67-84. Cited alongside the critique above, by the same author, setting out an argument *for* the position before assessing it. Citing both prevents this page from presenting only one side of an argument the same scholar has published on both sides of. Metadata confirmed against the Crossref record for the DOI.
- 03.
Deneen, P. J. (2018). Why Liberalism Failed. Yale University Press. Cited for the wider post-liberal argument this position sits inside. Metadata confirmed against the Crossref record for the DOI.