Immortale Dei
| Immortale Dei Latin : God's Immortal Encyclical letter of Pope Leo XIII |
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| Date | 1 November 1885 |
| Argument | On the Christian Constitution of States |
| Encyclical number | 16 of 85 of the pontificate |
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Immortale Dei written in 1885 is one of five encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII on Church-State relations.
The encyclical Immortale Dei of Pope Leo XIII, Concerning the Christian Constitution of States (De Civitatum Constitutione Christiana), was issued November 1, 1885, during the time of the Kulturkampf in Germany, and the laicizing of schools in France. It is a reaffirmation of ecclesiastical rights in which Leo deplored what he saw as a modern tendency to install in society the supremacy of man to the exclusion of God. He believed social contract theories dangerous, as fostering authoritarianism.
According to Michael L. Brock, the Church's position has always been that there exist two orders, the supernatural and the natural, that in the latter the governing body has (or is delegated) priority and in the former the Church has priority, and that governments are natural institutions which should be respected. "To despise legitimate authority, in whomsoever vested, is unlawful, as a rebellion against the divine will, and whoever resists that, rushes willfully to destruction," (...) however, "To wish the Church to be subject to the civil power in the exercise of her duty is a great folly and a sheer injustice. Whenever this is the case, order is disturbed, for things natural are put above things supernatural...
It is the Church, and not the State, that is to be man's guide to heaven. ... It is to the Church that God has assigned the charge of ... administering freely and without hindrance, in accordance with her own judgment, all matters that fall within its competence.
Leo bases his philosophy of society on Aquinas's theory of natural law. Leo had promoted the study of scholastic philosophy in his earlier encyclical Aeterni Patris in 1879.
He rejects the claim that the Church is opposed to the rightful aims of the civil government.
Man's natural instinct moves him to live in civil society, for he cannot, if dwelling apart, provide himself with the necessary requirements of life, nor procure the means of developing his mental and moral faculties. Hence it is divinely ordained that he should lead his life, be it family, social, or civil, with his fellow-men, amongst whom alone his several wants can be adequately supplied. But as no society can hold together unless someone be over all, directing all to strive earnestly for the common good, every civilized community must have a ruling authority, and this authority, no less than society itself, has its source in nature, and has consequently God for its author.
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