I

Recently, I attended the Catholic Prayer Breakfast in Washington, DC, and was struck by the enthusiasm in certain quarters for what the guest speaker— Vice President JD Vance—might portend for improved relations between the American Church and the American State. Of course, in one sense, such enthusiasm can be regarded as almost comically misplaced. Whether it is on such controversial issues as illegal immigration or in vitro fertilization (IVF), the Trump-Vance administration and the American bishops are hardly enjoying any improved relations, despite the welcome presence of a vice president who has been converted to the Church by America’s wonderful Dominicans.

And yet, in another sense, the fact that the first Catholic convert in the American vice presidency should inspire enthusiasm is understandable. After all, Vice President Vance could yet attempt to persuade President Donald Trump to shape his administration’s policies to advance what ought to be the shared interests of the Church and the State. Indeed, one suspects that he is probably already doing as much. Certainly, if he is being guided by the Dominicans, he must know, to quote St. Thomas Aquinas, that “as doctrine is sound when consonant with reason so law is just when consonant with right reason.” He must also know that as children of God we have a natural affinity for reason. “Man as such is a rational animal,” the Angelic Doctor reminds his readers, and “it follows that his good should be a reasonable good. Take him as an artist, then what is good will be found in his work of art. Take him as a citizen, then in the well-being of the commonwealth . . .” Consequently, for St. Thomas, “An artist has to be trained to love works of art, a citizen educated to love political probity.” Is it improbable to imagine that Vance could be himself an agent for such salutary education? We can only hope, but certainly his very decision to enter government might well have come from St. Thomas’ own recognition that “Government is conducted to a scheme directed to an end . . . . Its purpose . . . is what is conceived to be good. There cannot be a ruling sovereignty which seeks evil for its own sake.”

Along similar lines, St. John Henry Newman recognized that the Church, if granted her rightful autonomy, could actually support and complement the State. “I repeat,” Newman argued, “the great principles of the State are those of the Church, and, if the State would but keep within its own province, it would find the Church its truest ally and best benefactor. She upholds obedience to the magistrate; she recognises his office as from God; she is the preacher of peace, the sanction of law, the first element of order, and the safeguard of morality, and that without possible vacillation or failure; she may be fully trusted; she is a sure friend, for she is indefectible and undying.” At the same time, Newman also appreciated that in practice the State nearly always wielded the upper hand when it came to Church and State relations because “it is not enough for the State that things should be done, unless it has the doing of them itself; it abhors a double jurisdiction, and what it calls a divided allegiance . . .” For Newman, “aut Cæsar aut nullus”—Caesar’s way or the highway—tended to be the State’s motto, “nor does it willingly accept of any compromise. All power is founded, as it is often said, on public opinion; for the State to allow the existence of a collateral and rival authority, is to weaken its own . . .” Whether Catholic rulers can influence the State for the good of the Church as well as the common good is, therefore, a nice question.

II

If we look at the instructive life of the Habsburg empress Maria Theresa (1717-80), we can see that she instituted much that was good for both the Church and the 20 million people over whom she ruled in Central Europe. The daughter of Elizabeth Christine of Brunswick (one of the age’s great beauties, who, alas, became an obese alcoholic after her husband, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI, convinced her that throwing back red wine every night would enhance her chances of giving birth to a male heir), Maria Theresa would go on to have sixteen children of her own and to rule her Habsburg lands as she ruled her family, in a spirit of devout maternalism. She encouraged her subjects to prize their Catholic faith at every turn, especially in their devotions to the saints. She saw to it that daily Eucharistic processions impressed upon her people the glory of the Blessed Sacrament. She put an end to the vampirism that enjoyed something of a vogue in eighteenth-century Serbia, Hungary, and Transylvania. She required the parents of the peasantry to have their children educated with at least six years of schooling, a revolutionary reform at a time when the countryside was rife with illiteracy. After the reform, every child was instructed in religion, morals, and the three “Rs”. When a spike in infertility, bred of intermarriage, threatened the survival of the Habsburg dynasty, Maria Theresa became a fierce opponent of abortion. Indeed, family was central to all she did. As the historian Andrew Wheatcroft notes in his book The Habsburgs: Embodying Empire (1995), “Even the palace of Schönbrunn reflected this sense of family.” Despite its 1,441 rooms and opulent galleries, it was less a state than a family residence. Unlike Versailles or Potsdam, it always remained a home—a home where rearing new Habsburgs was a priority, especially Habsburgs who would be expected to turn to account the empress’s gains for the dynasty in the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-48). Before she passed her childbearing years, Maria Theresa had produced no fewer than four archdukes and ten archduchesses.

If conflicts arose between Maria Theresa and the papacy, they tended to stem from her insistence that the Church, not the Habsburgs, be responsible for Church reform, in circumstances in which pastoral care and catechetical instruction were woefully inadequate, though she never allowed her piety to let the Church forget that she was responsible for matters of state. Her abiding enemy, Frederick II of Prussia, might cynically claim that “The empress is not so pious as to confuse politics with religion and deceive herself about her true interests,” but the fact is that she never lost sight of her eternal interests, even if she occasionally clashed with the papacy.

In keeping with her political maternalism, Maria Theresa was an ardent believer in the Enlightenment’s trust in a natural law that obligated God-appointed rulers not simply to protect but to ensure the well-being of their subjects. For the historian Martyn Rady, author of The Habsburgs: To Rule the World (2020), “Natural law theory rested on two principles, both of which fed into the Central European Enlightenment. The first was that society and sociability were implicit in the human condition. The second was that government existed for the benefit of society—kings did not only rule because God had appointed them: their dominion was for a purpose . . .” and that purpose was the happiness of their subjects. If such happiness dictated that the empress Maria Theresa discountenance abortion in her lands, it also dictated that cripples be removed from public places so as not to discourage young women from childbearing. It dictated that men fond of pipe smoking supply their pipes with lids. It dictated that no candles be ignited in barns. Maria Theresa, in sum, was one of the first proponents of the Nanny State.

Here, again, Prof. Rady is instructive. Cameralism, or “treasury science” as it was known (from the word camera or Kammer meaning a “treasure chamber”), “was the study of how states and institutions might maximize revenues both for their own defense and for the benefit of their citizens, as a way of enlarging their wealth and happiness.” Some administrators might believe that it was enough to create conditions that would give individuals the wherewithal to create happiness for themselves. Most, however, deemed men and women incapable of taking advantage of such conditions and urged government to impose its own requirements for well-being on the citizenry, even if they ran roughshod over individual liberty. Here, in other words, was the fons et origo of the administrative state, against which JD Vance and Donald Trump are doing such valiant battle.

The regulations to which such cameralism gave rise in Maria Theresa’s lands were tentacular. In every sphere of life, regulations ruled. Utilitarianism was the order of the day, not tradition, even though Maria Theresa was naturally partial to tradition. At the university, after the banishment of the Jesuits, literature and philosophy were scorned as insufficiently useful. Two and a half million books were burned in what became the largest bonfire of books before the Third Reich. Maria Theresa also established a penal code expressly designed not only to deter but punish critics. Indeed, as Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger notes in her magisterial biography, Maria Theresa: The Habsburg Empress in Her Times (2021), Maria Theresa even saw to it that “particularly insistent petitioners were thrown into prison.”

The nobility were particularly aggrieved by Maria Theresa’s regulations, because they encroached so on their traditional prerogatives, though, eventually they fell in line. Why? Here we see the perennial upshot of sovereigns avid to make their authority impregnable: They turn their courtiers into toadies. “Because all parties had an interest in upholding the sovereign’s authority,” Stollberg-Rilinger nicely observes of Maria Theresa’s court, “visible communication rarely deviated from protestations of devotion, consensus, and harmony. There simply was no legitimate, generally recognized avenue for open dissent. Furthermore, finding ways of expressing disagreement with the sovereign was not easy, since the rules of protecting her authority ensured that communications always ran along tightly controlled channels.” While loyalty was always welcome in courtiers, the sovereign naturally did not wish to see loyalty descend into blatant toadyism, even though, as Stollberg-Rilinger notes, the two could be rather indistinguishable. If the empress was the source of all power and material goods, courtiers would necessarily compete for their acquisition by persuading her of their reliable fealty, and if doing so required protestations of dubious disinterestedness and incorruptibility, well, they would protest as best they could. The upshot of this cotillion of dissimulation is nicely encapsulated by Maria Theresa’s biographer. “With its logic of personal patronage, the court was . . . inevitably marked by structural hypocrisy.” Whether the loyalty on which Trump insists will result in Vance mitigating what ought to be his ethical opposition to his chief’s policy regarding IVF is a lively question.

III

What of Maria Theresa’s celebrated faith? By a long chalk, it was profound. Like Newman, she was a great believer in the power of personal influence, convinced that practicing the faith we profess was an essential obligation not only of duty but of love of neighbor. When her daughter Maria Carolina, for example, became Queen of Naples in 1768, her mother gave her advice that Newman would have entirely approved. Maria Carolina, her mother urged, should discharge her religious obligations diligently “in private as well as in public.” Moreover, Since the dear Lord has predestined you to rule, you must lead by example, especially in this perverse age, when our holy religion is practiced and loved so little. It seems that the great are ashamed to profess their faith, while the people are mostly mired in superstition, which ought not to be confronted directly with the truth. Their minds should rather be guided home step by step through the appointment of dedicated priests and good schoolmasters . . . Unceasing attention to such matters is a central duty of any sovereign. The example set by the sovereign is all important.

Maria Theresa’s biographer also quotes her heroine’s letter to her daughter Marie Antoinette, in which she stresses how important it is that Marie exercise her personal influence to edify her French subjects. “Stay on your knees for as long as possible, that is the seemliest position for setting a good example,” she writes, though she also counsels her daughter against overdoing her piety, which would savor of sanctimony. Certainly, Maria Theresa’s good counsel stood Marie in good stead when her life ended at the Jacobins’ guillotine, where she acquitted herself with such faithful aplomb.

Was there too much policy in Maria Theresa’s piety? For the tough-minded empress, genuine piety and the most calculating policy were never incompatible. The historian Richard Bassett, in his recent book Maria Theresa: Empress (2025), goes so far as to argue that “in the Austrian crown lands an awareness quickly grew that cameralist statist ideas could work hand in glove with reform Catholicism to benefit both Church and State.” Indeed, he is convinced that “nowhere in Continental Europe was reasoning exploited with such vigour to advance the cause of a state’s progress, including degrees of religious tolerance unknown even in Whiggish England.” One sees the indissoluble connection between Maria Theresa’s piety and policy in a letter the empress wrote in 1778 to her son Ferdinand defending the Habsburg devotion to the communion of saints. “How many kindnesses have we not shown undeserving subjects simply to attain our political objectives,” she asked her son, who was skeptical of the supernatural sanctity of saints.

Why should the saints, of all people, be left out and put us to shame? A Potemkin, Orlov, Brůhl, and others [foreign ministers on whom the emperor had lavished favors for political considerations] were and are feted by the greatest rulers. Not to mention subalterns, even we reward handsomely with gifts and honors for the sake of a treaty or concession . . . You rightly point out that God almighty cannot be compared with us poor creatures. This is undoubtedly true. But God allows us to worship His saints and approach Him through their merits and intercession, and He looks down on us with loving kindness when we confess our own wretchedness in a spirit of self-abasement, and He will give us credit if we do so with humility and resignation.

IV

When the state regulations of Maria Theresa’s cameralist reforms resulted in the virtual state takeover of the Church in her son’s reign (Joseph II had previously been co-emperor with Maria Theresa from 1741 until his mother’s death in 1780, after which he became sole ruler for the next ten years), culminating in what became known as Josephism, the empress might very well have had occasion to confess her own “wretchedness in a spirit of self abasement.”

What was Josephism? In many ways it was anathema to everything Maria Theresa had sought to exemplify in her own Catholic rule, even though her cameralism, designed chiefly by her ministers Friedrich Wilhelm von Haugwitz and Prince Ernst Christoph Kaunitz, had largely instigated it. Josephism refers to the wide-ranging reforms that Joseph II (1741-90) imposed on the Church, which included barring Austrian bishops from having any formal contact with the pope or international Catholic organizations; mutilating the Catholic liturgy; cutting the number of feast days; abolishing religious brotherhoods; regulating religious processions and burial practices; and regulating marriage as a civil contract. “Marriage among Christians,” Pieter Judson writes in The Habsburg Empire: A New History with strenuous even-handedness, “remained a religious sacrament celebrated by a priest or pastor, but now the state stepped in to regulate an institution that had previously been regulated solely by the Church. This legislation did not create a form of civil marriage but it appeared to lead in that direction.” To appreciate the extent to which such state usurpations of the Church’s authority rankled the emperor’s mother, we can return to something Stollberg-Rilinger says in her brilliant treatment of the matter.

If there was one constant among all the contradictions that characterized the empress’ attitude towards religion and the church, one conviction from which she never wavered, then it was surely her assurance that God had given her a direct mandate to rule on the basis of dynastic succession. It followed from this, first, that the defense of the true Catholic faith, the honor of the dynasty, and the welfare of the hereditary lands were inseparably linked; and second, that she was responsible before God for the orthodoxy of her subjects.

When her son’s Austrian Gallicanism made mincemeat of that orthodoxy, Maria Theresa would have recognized, what JD Vance will someday recognize, if he has not already, that Catholic rulers cannot do the work of Church and State without encountering formidable difficulties. Certainly, St. Thomas Aquinas knew as much when he said, speaking of the difference between the two:

Bear in mind that human and divine law differ in their immediate aim. Human law, the purpose of which is the tranquility of the State, operates by policing external acts which could break the public peace. The purpose of divine law, on the other hand, is to lead us through to eternal happiness, the obstacles to which are sins, internal as well as external. The effective putting down of crime and the enforcement of sanctions suffices for human law, but not for divine law, which would adapt the whole of man to everlasting joy.

Another figure whom we can cite here to make a related point is Robert Grosseteste (c. 1175-1253), the first teacher of theology in the Franciscan school at Oxford, who later became bishop of Lincoln before being excommunicated for refusing to elevate Pope Innocent IV’s Italian nephew to a canonry. Like Maria Theresa, Grosseteste was adamant that he would not allow the world to compromise his faith, until he found, as she found, that the world had other plans. According to the great mediaevalist R.W. Southern, Grosseteste lived at a time when “all serious people were conscious of the threat of a breakdown in the ordering of the Christian society of the West,” and they sought to protect themselves against the threat in various ways. Some took refuge in theology, hammering home the divide between the orthodox and the heretical. Some sojourned to the Crusades. Some dedicated themselves to serving both the Church and the State in an attempt to keep the Church, as they thought, strong and sustainable. “Grosseteste’s adherence to these measures varied,” Southern writes.

He had no quarrel with established doctrines and he had no tenderness for heretics or sin in any shape or form. But he had no use for the secular-ecclesiastical alliance which was the practical basis of later mediaeval order. He wanted the spiritual power to be supreme, but he wanted it first to be spiritual. There was a contradiction here which could never be resolved. The spiritual could never continue to be spiritual and yet rule the world, for it could not rule without resorting to the compromises which make it possible to rule. Grosseteste wanted it to rule without compromise, and this was impossible.

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Original Bio:

Edward Short is the author, most recently, of Newman and his Critics, the final volume of his trilogy on St. John Henry Cardinal Newman, and What the Bells Sang: Essays and Reviews.