What role should religion play in public life? Some believe it should be minimal. Even Christians base their reasons on passages in Scripture, such as when the Lord Jesus says before Pilate, My kingdom is not of this world1 (John 18:36), and they further justify the separation of religion and state by saying, Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's.2 (Lk 20:25).

But what belongs to God? The servants of Caesar often remind us of what all belongs to Caesar today, for example, through laws and police. But do we remember what belongs to God?

For we remind ourselves of this at every sacrifice of the Holy Mass:

Priest: Grátias agamus Domino Deo nostro ( Let us give thanks to the Lord our God)

Faithful: Dignum et justum est (It is worthy and right)

Priest: Vere dignum et iustum est, aequum et salutare nos tibi semper et ubique gratias agere (It is indeed right and just, good and salvific , to give thanks always and everywhere...)

It means giving thanks not only at home or in the temple, but also in the public space, not only privately as individuals, but publicly as a community. So writes Pope Leo XIII in his 1885 encyclical Immortale Dei on Christian polity, As a consequence, the State, constituted as it is, is clearly bound to act up to the manifold and weighty duties linking it to God, by the public profession of religion3 . Similarly, in the 1888 encyclical Libertas praestantissimum, in paragraph 21, he writes very clearly Wherefore, civil society must acknowledge God as its Founder and Parent, and must obey and reverence His power and authority. Justice therefore forbids, and reason itself forbids, the State to be godless; or to adopt a line of action which would end in godlessness-namely, to treat the various religions (as they call them) alike, and to bestow upon them promiscuously equal rights and privileges.4

His predecessor, Pope Pius IX, in 1864, in the encyclical Quanta cura, denounced quite unequivocally the list of theses known as Syllabus errorum, declaring Therefore, by our Apostolic authority, we reprobate, proscribe, and condemn all the singular and evil opinions and doctrines severally mentioned in this letter, and will and command that they be thoroughly held by all children of the Catholic Church as reprobated, proscribed and condemned.5 Among the condemned theses6 are those concerning the alleged sovereignty of the State over the Church (paragraphs 19 to 38) and, most relevant for the purposes of this topic, thesis number 55, The Church ought to be separated from the .State, and the State from the Church., which, in the words of the Pope, is reprobated, proscribed and condemned for ever, as is thesis 57: The science of philosophical things and morals and also civil laws may and ought to keep aloof from divine and ecclesiastical authority. The last condemned thesis of the document is the statement The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization. By concluding the list of errors with this thesis, its author clearly asserts that the condemnation of these errors is permanent and immutable, and rejects the idea of any aggiornamento towards the currently reigning Zeitgeist.

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In practice, this means that the order of public life ought not to only be in accordance with the fourth through tenth commandments, but must also respect the first through third commandments. A society that acts contrary to the first commandment will eventually end up in various forms of idolatry. This is so because, in Scott Hahn's words, every type of political order-even and especially the aggressively secular-is based on and propagates some understanding of religion7. As the Spanish philosopher and statesman Juan Donoso Cortés writes, Thus, when Catholic societies prevaricate and fall, paganism immediately invades them, and ideas, customs, institutions, and societies themselves become pagan8. As long as there is no particular transcendental religion, there may be a particular principle or philosophy, or an attempt to achieve some particular indicators, such as GDP growth or carbon neutrality.

C.S. Lewis has described it aptly: The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs9 . In other words, you make an idol of it. English historian Arnold J. Toynbee, in his magnum opus, A Study of History, understands idolatry as a tranference of loyalty from the whole to the part and tranference of worship from the Creator to the creature10 . It can take the form of worship of one's own person, society, a period of development, a technique, or an institution. Examples may be the resting on the laurels of a bygone glory as in the case of ancient Athens, of a no longer functional military technique (the Mamelukes in Egypt), or of a particular political institution - such as the East Roman Empire in the Rhomaic (from graecé Rhomaios) civilisation -as may be very well be the case in contemporary Russia - and of nationalism in our own Frankish civilisation. For let us remember how many dead were sacrificed to the idol of nationalism in the First World War, to the idol of Lebensraum for the pure Aryan race in the killing camps of the Second World War. He cites other examples-the building of the Egyptian pyramids or exaggerated militarism. Ultimately, however, (e)very form of idolatry is inherently catastrophic for the idolater11.

The Spanish thinker Francisco Elías de Tejada writes similarly in ¿Qué es el carlismo? (What is Carlism?) , he stresses the importance of recognizing a hierarchy of values, putting God and the good of Christianity first, with the common good of the homeland below, and other elements following.If the natural order of these values is disturbed, then although they may all seem to be preserved, in reality they will all be destroyed12

The public dimension of the proclamation of Christianity and is quite evident at the conclusion of Matthew's Gospel: Go therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit13. Notice that the word nations was used. The disciples are not to baptize individuals or families, but they are to baptize nations. Just as the Franks were baptized during the period of the Migration Era , and later the Poles were baptized, the Hungarians under St. Stephen, or the Russians under Vladimir Svyatoslavich.

The reader may well object as to why the author insists that Christianity should have quite visible pervasions in public life. Well, he insists on it because he knows that the opposite approach has already been tested and failed disastrously. The Church of the East, sometimes called Nestorian, was larger than the Catholic and Orthodox combined at the end of the twelfth century14, stretching from Syria in the west to Mongolia and Indonesia in the east. Syriac missionaries traveled the entire length of the Silk Road with caravans, and in the time of Marco Polo and in the late thirteenth century the Ongud or Uighur monk Rabban bar Salma traveled its entire length in the opposite direction from the vicinity of Peking to Rome.

But what went wrong? Why is Asia not Christian? We can look for various explanations, from the decimating Black Death to the cruelty of the wars there, which have equally devastated the entire region. Although some tribes such as the Naiman, Keraiti, and Ongud embraced Christianity, and even one of the khans of the Golden Horde and two rulers of the Ilkhanate embraced Christianity, none of the then successor states of the Mongol Empire became Christian for a long enough period of time. On the contrary, most of western Asia was devastated by the extremely cruel Tamerlane, which dealt such a blow to Nestorian Christians that, except for a few remote mountainous areas, they disappeared altogether. Only crumbs remained of the largest church in the world at that time, for it failed to baptize the nations, but only the individuals within them. This may be contrasted with the perseverance of the Oriental Christians from Armenia through Egypt to Ethiopia, where the baptism of nations eventually translated into the formation of their own national churches.

The second objection which the reader will raise is the contrast between the social doctrine of the Church and Christian thinkers quoted above, on the one hand, and the facts on the ground, on the other. How is it possible to have a state religion in any particular territory if there is a plurality of religions? Well, by analogy, as in the question of the state language: the existence of a Hungarian, Ruthenian or Roma community and the recognition of the language of a national minority does not prevent the definition of Slovak as the official language in the current constitution. Similarly, the existence of an Evangelical, Reformed or Orthodox Church, as well as of Jewish religious communities in Slovakia, cannot, in the words of Pope Leo VIII, prevent civil society from fulfilling its duties to God. Different ecclesial traditions within Christianity and Judaism have different views on the specific way of fulfilling them (e.g. whether the day of rest be on Saturday or Sunday), but there is agreement on the essentials. In this sense, attempting to fulfill them, even if in a different way than their tradition prescribes, is considerably closer than the complete disregard of them that secular society assumes.

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And just as modern states have a state language and recognized regional or minority languages, it is possible to imagine the existence of a state religion and recognized minority churches , in the case of a traditional monarchy through the recognition of privileges or freedoms (fueros in the Spanish Carlist tradition), in a sense similar to the millet system as it existed in the Ottoman Empire. The argumentum ad minoritatem is, in short, not a valid argument in this case.

The social doctrine of the Church, as well as the great Catholic thinkers Juan Donoso Cortés, C. S. Lewis, Francisco Elías de Tejada, and Scott Hahn, all agree unequivocally that not only the individual, but also society, needs to be brought into conformity with the First Commandment. This is precisely what the Church of the East, also known as Nestorian, has never permanently succeeded in doing, which is why only remnants of it remain, unlike, for example, Orthodox or Oriental Christians. The natural objection in this context - the existence of numerous other churches and religious societies - proves to be solvable in this context as well - whether by analogy to the recognition of the languages of national communities or by inspiration from thet traditional systems of privileges and freedoms of the past.

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