Excerpt from Samuel Gregg’s lecture for the 2019 Cátedra Joseph Keckeissen. 

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I first met Brother Joe, as I call him (I insisted on calling him that), in the late 1990s. And there were many things which immediately impressed me about him. One was his humility and his gentleness of character, which I suspect was just one of the reasons why he was loved by many of his students. Another characteristic was the time and care he invested in them. He remained very attentive to their needs, not just as students, but also as young people. 

Brother Joe also took the life of the mind very seriously, which meant he took Francisco Marroquín University very seriously, and his chosen discipline of economics, very seriously. As has been mentioned, he was a participant in Ludwig von Mises’s New York Seminar in the 1960s, and he wrote his dissertation under the supervision of another Mises student: Rabbi Israel Kirzner. Those of you who knew Brother Joe will recall his firm commitment to intellectual rigour, as well as his patience in explaining the genuine insights of economics into reality to those who knew little about economics or who were skeptical about the effectiveness of market economies. 

Most importantly, from the standpoint of the purpose of why we’re here this evening, Brother Joe was very serious about his Christian faith. Just as serious as he was about his commitment to the insights revealed by economics. And that, I would submit, is because he was concerned about truth: religious truth, philosophical truth, and economic truth. Theology, philosophy, and economics approach the acquisition of truth in different ways, but what unites them is the conviction that there is truth, that we can know it, and that all truth is one. Without that commitment to knowing truth and the conviction that there is truth, and that we can know it, there would be no reason for Francisco Marroquín University, Instituto Fe y Libertad, or for us to be here this evening. 

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Joe Keckeissen, as most of you know, saw himself as working within the liberal tradition of economic thought. Something which he understood as embedded in the political tradition of what we often call liberalism. Now, I don’t need to tell this audience that liberalism is a word that lends itself to many— sometimes even contradictory—meanings. Both the philosopher John Rawls and the economist F. A. Hayek called themselves liberals, but it’s hard to imagine two men with more different economic and political views. 

One way of understanding liberalism (at least, the way I try to approach it) is to understand it as a rich tradition whose origins go back to the medieval period, which was further developed in the early modern period, and which received, in a way, a decisive shape in the late 18th century. This is a tradition which emphasizes constitutionally limited government, rule of law, a regime of private property, economic liberty, and a strong civil society. 

Liberalism is also a tradition that has had an ambiguous relationship with Christianity. The roots of liberalism, as I’ve briefly described it, go back to the very Christian world of medieval Europe. But since the late 18th century, especially in continental Europe, the relationship between liberalism and Christianity has been marked by deep tensions and even considerable hostility on a number of occasions. There are many reasons for these tensions and conflicts which I will not elaborate upon here, but there have been, and are, many Christians and liberals who have worked to overcome these differences, and Brother Joe was one of these people.

There were also many others. In his opening address at the first Mont Pelerin Society meeting in the 1940s, F. A. Hayek, who’s probably best described as an agnostic, lamented the history of hostility between continental liberalism and Christianity. Others, such as the ordoliberal thinkers and economists Walter Eucken and Wilhelm Röpke, both of whom were devout Christians, sought to develop bridges between what they understood to be liberal ideas and the doctrines of Christianity. We can even go back to the Scottish Enlightenment, and here we discover that the vast majority of those involved in this intellectual movement were believing Christians. Many of them were presbyterian Church of Scotland ministers. 

Tonight, I would like to draw attention to one such 19th century figure who sought to establish genuine dialogue and reconciliation between the claims of Christian faith and what he understood to be liberalism. One reason that I chose the subject of tonight’s lecture, the Dominican priest Henri-Dominique Lacordaire, was that, like Brother Joe, he was a professed member of a Catholic religious order. Father Henri-Dominique Lacordaire is certainly not a household name today, but in the 19th century he was among the most famous Christian thinkers and preachers of his time. Living as he did, in the wake of various enlightenments and in the aftermath of the French Revolution, the life and writings of Lacordaire reflect all the dramas of Christianity’s ongoing difficult but inescapable engagement with societies shaped by the movements of ideas which emerged in the 18th century and which transformed the world, for better and for worse.

Some of those ideas resulted in positive developments, such as the abolition of hereditary privileges. Other ideas, however, associated with some of the same movements, also brought many people to the guillotine. There’s much that could be said about Father Lacordaire. These might include the reasons for his abandonment of the doctrines of Rousseau and his return to Christian faith as a young man. Another subject worthy of an entire lecture would be Lacordaire’s famous Lenten Lectures. These exercises in Christian apologetics drew thousands of people to Notre Dame in Paris. They facilitated a revival in homiletics and led to Lacordaire being described as one of the greatest orators of the 19th century.

Among Dominicans, Lacordaire is perhaps the most famous for taking the initiative of re-establishing the Dominican Order in France. In that regard, it’s revealing that when Lacordaire wrote about this in the newspaper L’Univers, he made a point of stating that the democratic bottom-up governance traditions of Dominican orders accorded with the spirit of the French Revolution. Now, at the time, this was a very controversial statement for a French Catholic to make. Many Christians, with good reason, associated the French Revolution with hostility to Christianity, with the theft of Church property by revolutionary governments in the 1790s, the closure of monasteries and convents, the expulsion of religious orders, and the widespread persecution and murder of clergy following the promulgation of the Constitution civile du clergé in 1790. All these things and more, again, with good reason, were associated by many Christians with the modern spirit of liberty. 

How Lacordaire, as a Christian and a priest, engaged with this post-revolutionary world, a world in which liberal ideas and institutions had started to flourish throughout Europe and North America, is the focus of my remarks this evening.

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Perhaps it was Lacordaire’s decidedly non-clerical family background—he came from a family of middle-class lawyers, naval officers, and scientists—, but his entire life was marked by an effort to bring the truths of Christian faith into some type of positive contact with the liberal ideas that proliferated in the 18th and 19th centuries. To Lacordaire’s mind, there was no going back to a prerevolutionary world. He also thought that the postrevolutionary world provided a context in which the Church could shed many political and institutional associations that undermined Christianity’s ability to evangelize.

One of Lacordaire’s first appointments after his ordination as a diocesan priest in Paris was to serve as a chaplain at one of Paris’s most famous government schools: the Lycée Henri-IV. The experience led Lacordaire to conclude that public education was fueling the dechristianization of France. It was consequently better, he argued, for Christians to have their own schools, schools which he thought should be completely free of government supervision and government money. 

For the same reason, Lacordaire believed that Christian clergy should refuse the state salaries to which they were entitled under law. In 1830, Lacordaire argued that these salaries allowed Christian clergy to be:

Preyed upon by our enemies, by those who regard us as hypocrites or as imbeciles, and by those who are persuaded that our life depends on money.

At this point, it’s worth noting that relations between the Church and the French State were governed during Lacordaire’s lifetime by the Concordat negotiated by Napoleon and Pius VII in 1801. The Concordat had restored the French Church’s unity with Rome. It also acknowledged that questions of faith and morals were outside the State’s supervision. But it also conceded great control over the Church’s institutional life to the French government. This was not a coincidence. As Napoleon remarked to his brother, Lucien Bonaparte:

Skillful conquerors have not got entangled priests. They can both contain them and use them.

The Concordat, and the considerable control which it gave Napoleon’s regime over Church affairs, was maintained in place during the First Empire, the restored Bourbon monarchy, the July Monarchy of Louis Philippe, the Second Republic, the Second Empire, and the Third Republic, before eventually being unilaterally repudiated by the French government in 1905 with its law on the separation of Church and State. 

Lacordaire’s alternative to the Concordat is perhaps best described in the expression

A Free Church in a Free State.

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