| Résumé: | <p>This thesis seeks to answer three questions: What did the Catholic Church teach about church-state relations at the Second Vatican Council? What problems can we identify in that teaching? How should those problems be remedied?</p>
<p>To answer the first question, I present an original interpretation of the conciliar documents to argue that the church intended not to contradict its past teachings on church-state relations, as many wrongly think, but rather to change the church's pastoral approach towards states. The church tacitly accepted church-state separation in the hope that that would facilitate its mission of evangelization and enable the laity to bring the influence of Christian values more effectively into politics and society.</p>
<p>In conversation with Stanley Hauerwas and William Cavanaugh, I then offer an original critique of Vatican II’s teaching about church-state relations. I argue that Vatican II's teaching about the laity's role vis-à-vis political authorities retained the problematic features of pre-conciliar conceptions of ecclesiology and of the laity’s role in politics. The problematic features can be summarised as an acceptance of dichotomous categories (religion-politics, spiritual-social, internal-external), which makes it difficult to construe cogently how the laity ought to mediate the Gospel in political life, since the categories separate the church's relation to political authorities from its mission of evangelisation and sanctification.</p>
<p>I then return to scripture and the history of Christian political thought to propose remedies to the problems, and to suggest an improved conception of political authority’s purpose and of the church’s responsibilities post-Christendom in relation to political authorities. In dialogue with Oliver O'Donovan and biblical scholarship on the 'Powers,' I argue that political authorities are a manifestation of the fallen world defeated by Christ (i.e. ‘Powers’); nevertheless, they are authorised by God to facilitate the church’s mission by preserving places of earthly peace in the saeculum. The responsibilities of the church are to regain its missionary posture towards political authorities, to teach the limitations of their authority, even if its preaching should provoke the Powers to persecute the church, and to preserve (where prudent) the valuable remnants of Christendom.</p>
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