There are many different kinds of society, and in each one, we apply the general principles from Universal Social Right to the particular facts of the society's organization. Three societies are of particular importance, however, in that they are, in themselves, necessary for the complete organization of humanity, and all other societies have reference to them in some way. The three necessary societies are theocratic, domestic, and civil, and Rosmini begins with the theocratic society, or Church. Rosmini recognizes that people of liberal background get twitchy when the word 'theocratic' shows up, but he notes that it is strictly accurate, and common meanings of 'theocracy' are not what is in view; theocratic society is literally society organized around what is due to God, the society formed by the relationship between God and human beings. And Rosmini holds that without considering this theocratic society, one can never have more than a defective account of rights. Nonetheless, the philosophy of right is not theology; it only considers the matter in its own terms, based on moral duties and what Rosmini calls "humanitarian-religious facts" (p. 22). Applying the principles of universal social right to this particular society, we need to consider three things: seignorial right, governmental right, and communal right.
The first and most obvious fact of any society involving God and man is that God is Lord, and indeed, is the Lord in an absolute sense. "There is no seigniory except God's, which is essential and fully absolute" (p. 24). God, of course, has de facto dominion over everything else, but He also has de jure dominion. De jure dominion, of course, has to have title, and there are several titles under which God has seignorial rights with respect to all other things. First, God is subsistent truth, and truth is that by virtue of which anything can be a title for rights at all. Second, God is the Creator, or the principle of being for all creatures, and thus all creatures are part of the proprietà that he forms by the act of creation. Third, God is absolute good, and thus all intelligent creatures are dependent on God. In other words, God has seignorial title by ideality, reality, and morality; these three notions connect Rosmini's philosophy of right to his moral philosophy. The divine Lordship is reasonable, natural, and beneficial (cf. p. 32) and requires from us morality, worship, and obedience (cf. p. 36). The divine right is also, of course, inalienable. God exercises His rights both immediately and through ministers; greatest of these ministers is Christ, who has six particular features as minister of the divine Lordship: "...he is 1. supreme Lord (God); 2. servant of God; 3. the human being who is Lord over other human beings; 4. God's minister for the salvation of the world; 5. judge of the world; and 6. head of the Church" (p. 41).
Thus seignorial right in theocratic society. With respect to governmental right, we need first to assess the nature and most basic structure of such a society. The first general element of this is the universal society of humanity, a society which exists by nature, and is constituted by the three human goods of truth, virtue, and bliss, which are the common good for us all. On the basis of this, the natural human society has three characteristics: unity, because truth and justice are one; universality, because truth, virtue, and bliss are universal goods; and justice, because the society is structured by its direction toward justice (cf. p. 53). Every other society presupposes this society, and it is theocratic in nature, because of the seignorial right of God. However, it is also just the theocratic society in germ, based on reason alone; its rough outline requires completion and fulfillment, based on actual relationship, which requires communication or revelation between God and man, and this gets greater fulfillment in the Church, which is based on actual grace, but has its greatest completion and fulfillment in the Incarnation, in which God and man are perfectly united, and into which the Church is incorporated. In the Church, the characteristics of natural human society (unity, universality, and justice) take the form of unity, catholicity, and sanctity.
The de facto power of theocratic society is divine, but it is also de jure power, because the de facto power serves as title for divine right, which is exercised in a legitimately social way. This social exercise of divine power is sevenfold:
(1) Constitutive Power. "The first way consists in the aggregation of human creatures to the society, and in the ordained constitution of the society" (p. 78). In the Church, this is exercised through the sacraments of baptism, confirmation, and holy orders.
(2) Liturgical Power. "...[B]ecause aggregation demands unlimited submission of the creature to the Creator, the second branch is concerned with sacrifice" (p. 80). This also is associated with holy orders in the Church.
(3) Eucharistic Power. "The third way in which God exercises theocratic power consists in the manner by which he nourishes the members of the society with himself" (p. 79). Unsurprisingly, in the Church this is associated with the sacrament of the eucharist. "The third branch bestows upon members in the fullest manner the good they are to enjoy as a society of fruition. This enjoyment generates action, that is, the strength to act" (p. 80).
(4) Medicinal Power. "The fourth way consists in removing obstacles to participation in the common good that spring form the sins of the members" (p. 79). This is associated in the Church with the sacraments of penance and extreme unction.
(5) Hierogenetic Power. "The fifth branch fuses the natural longings of humanity with the longing of theocratic society by consecrating to theocratic society not only the individual human being, but the human species" (p. 80). "The fifth way consists in the grace by which God disposes the natural society between spouses to the service due to theocratic society" (p. 79). In the Church, of course, this is exercised through the sacrament of matrimony.
(6) Didactic Power. "The sixth way consists in an infallible treaching of supernatural truths" (p. 79) and "has various modes of activity such as defining the truths to be believed, interpreting holy Scripture, preaching, teaching, and so on" (p. 80). This is the ministry of the divine word.
(7) Ordinative Power. "Finally, the seventh way consists in the prudential, disciplinary and external order amongst members living here on earth" (p. 79) and "regulates external means wisely so that the attainment of the end may not be harmed by outward disorder" (p. 80). It is associated with the episcopal power of jurisdiction, and has several "modes of activity", "such as legislative, judicial, executive, and penal or sanctioning power" (p. 80).
It's important in all of this to keep in mind that we are considering the Church entirely socially here, looking at its organization as a society so as to understand how governmental right would be exercised within it. Christ is God and minister of God, and organizes the Church, exercising all seven branches of social power noted above, and at His Ascension invested the Apostles with the same social power, in such a way that He is still the principal agent. This establishes the hierarchy, which is the principal way in which the Church as theocratic society is juridically organized, and this is the reason why apostolicity is also a Note of the Church, alongside unity, sanctity, and universality. All governance in the Church has to be consistent with these four Notes.
Having the outlines of the structure of the Church as a society, we can then look at its connatural and acquired rights. The connatural rights of the Church are either those with respect to all human beings or with respect to the members of the Church itself. With respect to all human beings, the Church as a morally licit human society consistent with justice has the connatural rights of a human society, that is, individual right applied to the society. "The rights of the Church relative to all human beings ar ethose which bring her into existence and maintain her power to act" (p. 94). There are many, but there are five principal rights: "the right: 1. to existence; 2. to recognition; 3. to freedom; 4. to propagation; 5. to ownership [proprietà]" (p. 83). Note that all five of these require only rational right; they do not require making any ecclesiological assumption beyond the Church being a human society consistent with regard for truth, virtue, and bliss. (They are also, it should be noted, rights that were regularly violated by states in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.) The Church has an acquired divine right to exist, for instance, in the sense that it has positive authorization from God, but it also has a connatural human right to exist just by being an actual human society capable of contributing to humanitarian ends. And so on with the other rights. The Church being the Church cannot make it have fewer or more limited rights than other societies. In terms of governmental right, all of these are primarily exercised and protected by the Church through its didactic and ordinative power, although in some cases (like the right of the Church to be accommodated in preserving the secret of the confessional, which, as a necessary duty intrinsic to the Church falls under its right to be recognized) other social powers may also be involved. From these connatural rights, of course, the Church also has the secondary modifications of these rights, like the right of sanction or defense. Human beings in general also have rights with respect to the Church, arising from these connatural rights (the right to know the Church, so that it can be recognized properly; the right to join the Church under its relevant conditions; the right to protect the rights of the Church, which follows from our more general right to protect the connatural right of others).
With respect to its own members, the Church also has the right to exercise any of its seven social powers, and this is the foundation of many of the offices (each of which is a particular alienable right) and procedures by which the Church is governed. Since sanction is a function of every right (cf. p. 93), each of the social powers has a form of sanction appropriate to it, by which the rights connected with that social power are protected. These can be combined with each other and interact with each other in various ways. These include powers to impose penance, powers to exclude from actions and benefits of the Church, power to exercise coercive force where someone is actively interfering with its functions, and so forth.
The fact that the Church has a right of relative freedom and a right of proprietà guarantees that it also has acquired rights. Every morally licit human society capable of contributing to humanitarian ends has the right to make things its own, as long as it does so by means of appropriate and recognizable titles, and the Church is no different. This gives the Church a right to temporalities, i.e., temporal goods appropriate to the work of the hierarchy or to pious works of the faithful; the clergy in the hierarchy, and occasionally laity, can have offices giving them authority to supervise and administer these temporal goods. Where there is just title, the Church cannot be stripped of these things even by the state; that is, because it is based on individual right applied to societies, it is as unjust if the state does it to the Church as it would be if the state did it to an individual or any other society. (It is worth noting that nationalization of temporal goods by anti-clericalist states was still very common in Rosmini's day, although he is optimistic about people increasingly rejecting the underlying "revolutionary, anarchical and totalitarian principles of public utility and reasons of State" (p. 106).) As with all other rights, the rights of the Church with regard to temporal goods allow for a right of sanction to protect them, and the Church has the same right to defend its property that any other human society or human individual does.
The third general element of universal social right is communal right, which concerns the rights of the members of the society in relation to the society itself. Some such communal right are the natural rights of the members, given further support, sanction, and title by the Church. However, other communal rights are specifically tied to the Church as a society. These fall into three groups: rights concerning admission, rights concerning membership, and accessory rights.
The most important right concerning admission, of course, is that every person deciding to accept the teaching of the Church has the right to join it; every person repenting of a prior rejection also has a right to readmission.
Rights of membership are quite a bit more involved, because all faithful in the Church have rights associated with all of the seven social powers of the Church. Baptism gives the faithful a share in the constitutive power; it consecrates the individual and unites him to the Church, and in so doing it establishes a contractual state involving God, the Church, and the individual, with relevant contractual rights. In addition, baptism confers a sacramental character, which gives the individual rights appropriate to the priesthood of all believers. The sacramental character elevates the member to a supernatural order as part of the Church, it brings the member into the proprietà of the Lord, and it grants "the faculty to carry out certain acts of supernatural worship, and to receive and exercise certain offices in the Church" (p. 124). This faculty, Rosmini says, is the essential right of every member, and the first and originating connatural right of membership in the Church. It is the baptismal character that gives a share in all seven social powers of the Church, and therefore acquired rights associated with them. The baptized have a share in the constitutive power by being able to baptize others when necessary; they have a share in litugical power by being participants in the liturgy and to use sacramentals; as the eucharist is such a holy sacrament that the very reception of it is priestly, they share in the eucharistic power by being able to receive it; they participate in the medicinal power by being able to receive the sacrament of penance and perform satisfactions; they participate in the hierogenetic power by being able actively to administer the sacrament of matrimony; they share in the didactic power by confessing Jesus Christ, by communicating the teachings of the Church and instructing others in the faith when appropriate, and by comparing the teaching of an individual pastor or preacher to the teaching of the whole Church in order to accept or reject it (which Rosmini notes can be a considerable power and right, and much of the historical involvement of Christian princes in the Church has been based on it); and they share in the ordinative power by having various rights to influence, through advice, petition, and the like, the persons, laws, and temporalities of the Church, and by being able to receive various offices of administration and assistance in the Church. Rosmini doesn't spend any time on it, but it follows from his argument that the sacramental character in ordination (certainly) and that in confirmation (most probably) also give further rights by giving a greater share in the social powers of the Church. And all of these rights, of course, have associated rights of sanction and reparation, just as other rights do.
Other rights, which Rosmini calls accessory and occasional rights, result from the fact that the Church Militant (i.e., the Church on earth), while one, also has many very diverse members and subsocieties, each of which is capable of being a subject of right. Thus the Church has a whole has rights specifically insofar as it is headed by the pope; the clergy, as a subsociety within the Church arising from its nature, has rights; the faithful as a whole have rights; the various bodies of clergy (e.g., dioceses, parishes, and clerical societies) have rights; the various bodies of the faithful (e.g., parishes and nations) have rights; the individuals of all of these have rights; and every corporate body considered as faithful members of the Catholic Church has rights. Each of these subjects has individual right, and of course can acquire right were it has just title. These can vary quite a bit depending on the society, the age, and past history; for instance, rights that arise because of donations or grants can be occasional, incidental, and limited in time and space.
The Church can be regarded as a supernatural domestic society (cf. p. 148), and therefore it makes sense to move from the Church to discuss the natural domestic society, i.e., the family or household.
to be continued
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Antonio Rosmini, The Philosophy of Right, Volume 4: Rights in God's Church, Cleary and Watson, trs., Rosmini House (Durham, UK: 1995.