WASHINGTON (OSV News) ─ Calls for a "national divorce" from a far-right congressional lawmaker present concerns for American Catholics, theologians told OSV News.
In a Feb. 20 tweet, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., wrote, "We need a national divorce."
"We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government," she added. Greene has made such calls previously, but her recent comments prompted bipartisan criticism as well as praise from some on the right. Fox News host Sean Hannity, in a Feb. 21 segment with Greene on her tweet, addressed her argument with sympathy, arguing she was advocating a "transfer of power," rather than a split.
It is not clear how Greene's home state of Georgia would fare under her argument, as the once reliably red state becomes an increasingly competitive battleground state. In the 2020 presidential election, the state voted Democrat in the 2020 presidential election and in the 2022 midterms elected a Republican governor and a Democratic senator.
The Supreme Court weighed in on secession in Texas v. White in 1869 in the aftermath of the Civil War finding it unconstitutional, and calling the United States "an indestructible union." The 1861-1865 conflict began after Southern state governments, following the surprise election of Republican Abraham Lincoln in a four-way contest, attempted to secede from the United States and form a new nation with a constitution dedicated to slavery's preservation. By the end of the conflict, more than 1.5 million Americans had been killed, wounded, or missing -- equivalent to 6 million Americans with today's population.
Nichole Flores, an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia who studies the relationship between Catholicism and democracy and is the author of "The Aesthetics of Solidarity: Our Lady of Guadalupe and American Democracy," told OSV News that "American history has shown us that we should take calls for this kind of division very seriously."
"The Civil War was a conflict of tremendous proportions, that had significant human consequences for everyone involved, and the damage that was incurred during that conflict is still influencing the country today," Flores said, citing conflicting views of that war among some Americans and lingering civil rights issues facing Black Americans.
Catholics, Flores said, were once viewed with suspicion by those who did not see them as "fully American," and therefore Catholics should be "on guard" for rhetoric that falsely labels others as not fully American.
But it is not only American law that rejects the prospect. Such calls, some Catholic scholars and theologians said, should alarm Catholics in particular, as the tradition of the church holds that "sedition" is a grave sin.
"According to (St. Thomas) Aquinas, sedition is sinful when it is an uprising or rebellion against the just law of a legitimate authority, or against the lawful authority itself, or when a legitimate uprising harms the common good more than it helps," Father Ezra Sullivan, a Dominican professor at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome, told OSV News.
Father Sullivan added Aquinas' teaching was affirmed by Pope Leo XIII in his encyclical "Libertas," (no. 43) in which the pontiff wrote, "Whenever there exists, or there is reason to fear, an unjust oppression of the people on the one hand, or a deprivation of the liberty of the Church on the other, it is lawful to seek for such a change of government as will bring about due liberty of action. In such case, an excessive and vicious liberty is not sought, but only some relief, for the common welfare."
Father Sullivan noted Aquinas wrote during the time of Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor from 1220-1250, who was excommunicated three times. The era prompted "many debates as to what constituted tyranny or political legitimacy."
Aquinas, Father Sullivan said, wrote that sedition is "a sin against the unity of the common good that is provided by just laws, it is therefore against justice and it undermines the charity whereby we are united to our neighbor in Christ."
"However, St. Thomas recognizes that it is lawful to resist 'wicked princes' and 'there is no sedition in disturbing a tyrannical government' -- rather, 'it is the tyrant rather that is guilty of sedition, since he encourages discord and sedition among his subjects, that he may lord over them more securely,'" Father Sullivan added.
Matthew J. Dugandzic, a moral theologian and academic dean of the School of Theology at St. Mary's Seminary and University in Baltimore, told OSV News that the context in which Aquinas wrote was "a very different political structure than present-day America."
"One of the biggest differences between his political climate and ours is that he -- in common with the majority of writers in his day -- would have taken it for granted that the purpose of the state is to order its citizenry toward the good," Dugandzic said. "That is, the purpose of the state is to make its citizens virtuous."
Dugandzic said "the modern mind" might instead see the state's purpose as "not to order people to any one good, but rather to enable people to pursue whatever they happen to see as good."
"This attitude is captured neatly by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who said, 'I always say ... that if my fellow citizens want to go to hell I will help them. It's my job,'" he said.
Dugandzic said that for Aquinas, sedition is always sinful, but not resisting an unjust tyrant.
"I have to distinguish between sedition, which is always unjust, and resisting tyrannical rule, which can be just," he said. "So, when a ruler rules legitimately, it is always unjust to incite sedition against that ruler, since such an action is contrary to the good of the citizens."
But a tyrant, Dugandzic added, "is one who rules unjustly, by preferring his private good over the common good of the citizenry."
Theologian and author Jake Thibault told OSV News that Aquinas identified sedition as a sin against charity.
"Under charity, Thomas Aquinas points out that the fruits of charity are peace, joy and mercy. So he talks about things that are contrary to peace, joy and mercy, and in particular, peace."
Asked how Aquinas might respond to calls for a national divorce in an American political context, Thibault said Aquinas might take a similar approach to Pope Francis, calling for building bridges not walls.
"For Thomas Aquinas, he would have a dialogue," Thibault said. "He wanted to hear what everyone had to say on every topic, and then he debated them on it."
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Kate Scanlon is a national reporter for OSV News covering
Washington. Follow her on Twitter @kgscanlon.
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