In the latest Theopolis conversation, I respond to Pater Edmund Waldstein’s article in which he criticizes the new nationalism of Yoram Hazony and others from a Roman Catholic integralist perspective.

The imperial ambitions of the papacy have long been criticized as hostile to the integrity and the peace of peoples—Marsilius of Padua was making this argument two hundred years before the Reformation. Reformation support for nationalism arose in part from the recognition that a people’s ordering to the ultimate good required the creative, imaginative, and pragmatic task of orienting the specific forms of their actual peoplehood and place to the reign of Christ, to which distinct national identities were contextually more conducive. This differed significantly from subjecting them to the quasi-imperial authority of a distant yet meddlesome Rome. Nationalism was in large measure a reassertion of the dignity of the lay estate and the laity against the tyrannical clericalism of the papacy. One of the most immediate achievements of this vision was the translation and dissemination of the Bible in the vernacular.

Read the whole piece here.