One casualty during the heyday of secularism was the historic
teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. A once virtually-
universal voice, which for centuries had been the dominant
Christian voice on political matters in many nations, was
shunned by secular and atheistic political models. Besides
secularism, there has also been a virtual symbiosis of the
Protestant Reformation and the spread of western democracies;
thus in much of the western world, Roman Catholic political
theology frequently remained unknown. Yet, there is a rich
tradition–not to mention a recent revival–of officially-codified
systematic teaching on matters of state. The following survey of
Roman Catholic teaching, taken from the recent Catechism of the
Catholic Church, is selected to stress many of the themes that
have also been explicated repeatedly in the best Protestant
theologies of the state. Indeed, there is much substantial unity
in this area, although some differences remain. The bulk of
political theology in the Catechism of the Catho