Rome Has Spoken: The Most Contested Encyclical in the Modern Church | Immortale Dei

Want to reach out to us? Want to leave a comment or review? Want to give us a suggestion or berate Anthony? Send us a text by clicking this link!You’ve probably heard the Saint Michael Prayer. The part most people miss is that its origin story is bound up with a Pope who believed the Church was facing more than bad politics, and he answered with something sharper than commentary: Immortali Dei, Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical on how a nation should be ordered, what authority is, and why the state cannot pretend God is irrelevant without slowly hollowing itself out.We walk through Leo’s core framework: two real powers established by God, the spiritual authority of the Church and the temporal authority of the state. That distinction is not a call for theocracy, but it is a direct challenge to the modern “religiously neutral” state. From natural law to public education to marriage, Leo argues that law and culture always point somewhere, and when they stop pointing toward truth, they don’t become neutral, they drift toward chaos. Along the way we dig into the thesis hypothesis approach, the idea that there’s an ideal political order, and there are also prudent concessions Catholics may accept when the ideal is impossible without greater harm.That sets up the tension a lot of Catholics still feel today: Immortali Dei’s “error has no rights” versus Vatican II’s Dignitatis Humanae and the modern language of religious liberty. We lay out why this debate keeps splitting the Catholic world, and we test it against real life examples, including a clip of JD Vance explaining how he weighs papal criticism against his duties in civil office. If you’ve ever felt like you didn’t have the words to explain what went wrong in the modern West, Leo XIII gives you a vocabulary worth recovering.Subscribe for the next installment as we move toward Rerum Novarum, and if this helped you, share it with a friend and leave a review so more people can find the series.Support the showGet 10% off an amazing Black Monk Rosary by going to https://www.blackmonkrosaries.com/?ref=AVOIDINGBABYLON and using code AVOIDINGBABYLON at checkout!Check out our sponsor, Nic Nac, at www.nicnac.com and use code "AB25%" for 25% off of your first order!Please subscribe! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKsxnv80ByFV4OGvt_kImjQ?sub_confirmation=1https://www.avoidingbabylon.comMerchandise: https://avoiding-babylon-shop.fourthwall.comLocals Community: https://avoidingbabylon.locals.comFull Premium/Locals Shows on Audio Podcast: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1987412/subscribeRSS Feed for Podcast Apps: https://feeds.buzzsprout.com/1987412.rss