The assertion that an unjust edict has no force of law is a long-established principle in Western thought. Cicero insisted that true law is based on justice and the common good; statutes which were unjust, he wrote, "no more deserve to be called laws than the rules a band of robbers might pass." The Catholic Church has long taught this, but also has taught that the Holy Father is the ultimate arbiter of the justice or injustice of civil law. Up through the last century, it was common for Pontiffs to declare laws, and sometimes entire regimes, illegitimate. In the last decades, however, the Church has adopted a less confrontational approach and has abandoned the practice of ruling specific laws invalid.

In Evangelium Vitae however, the Holy Father goes beyond the general statements that unjust edicts are not laws, and declares invalid particular laws. The fact that the Holy Father so forcefully and explicitly declared invalid laws supporting abortion, contraception, euthanasia, and other sins against life is a surprising and highly significant turn. Pope John Paul repeatedly insists that civil law derives its force from the natural moral law and therefore edicts which support evil have no moral force: "Laws which authorise and promote abortion and euthanasia are radically opposed not only to the good of the individual but also to the common good, as such they are completely lacking in authentic juridical validity" (n. 72).

Moreover, he says that all Christians have an obligation to oppose such laws: "Abortion and euthanasia are thus crimes which no human law can claim to legitimise. There is no obligation in conscience to obey such laws; instead, there is a grave and clear obligation to oppose them by conscientious objection" (n. 73). In the next paragraph, he goes on to say that "in the case of an intrinsically unjust law . . . it is therefore never licit to obey it." By this last, I take the Holy Father to mean that it is sinful to participate in the enforcement of these unjust edicts in any way, or to let the edict stop a responsible private person-such as a father-from executing his moral duty.

The Holy Father even goes so far as to use disobedience to the Egyptian pharaoh as an "example of resistance to the unjust command of those in authority". He then continues:
"It is precisely from obedience to God -to whom alone is due that fear which is acknowledgment of absolute sovereignty-that the strength and courage to resist unjust human laws are born. It is the strength and the courage of those prepared even to be imprisoned or put to the sword, in the certainty that this is what makes for 'the endurance and faith of the saints' "(n.73).

These are remarkable words. They make it clear that Catholics have a moral obligation to actively resist and disobey unjust laws. I see no other alternative but that Catholic officials from police officers to governors have a moral obligation to refuse to enforce laws which support abortion and other "rights" to do wrong. In the case of governors or mayors, it would even seem to follow that such officials have an obligation to enforce the demands of the common good and reject federal mandates protecting and encouraging inherently unjust activities.

As if this teaching were not radical enough, there seems to be an even more radical criticism of liberal democracy just beneath the surface. Pope John Paul II quotes Pacem in Terris as saying that "any government which refused to recognise human rights or acted in violation of them would not only fail in its duty; its decrees would be wholly lacking in binding force" (n. 71 ). In the context of Evangelium Vitae it is not clear whether Pope John Paul wants this quotation to indicate that all of the decrees of such a government lose their authority, or only the unjust decrees. If we look to Pacem in Terris, however, it is clear that Pope John XXIII is declaring that such governments become illegitimate and lose their moral authority to make law. Prior to this quotation, Pope John had made the case that unjust laws are no law; then in the part of the document from which the quotation is taken, Pope John is now speaking of regimes which do not serve the common good at all by reason of their level of injustice. He directed this criticism primarily against Communist regimes which had slaughtered so many millions of their own people. It seems clear that Pope John Paul II is similarly distressed by the systematic slaughter of millions of innocents in Western democracies, and he makes it quite clear that the governments are at least as much to blame for the deaths of these innocents as the doctors who perform the murders. He writes in n. 59 that:
"abortion goes beyond the responsibility of individuals and beyond the harm done to them and takes on a distinctly social dimension. It is a most serious wound inflicted on society and its culture by the very people who ought to be society's promoters and benefactors.'"

Is Pope John Paul all but declaring the liberal democracies to be illegitimate? Early on in the document, John Paul says that any government which allows the slaughter of innocents:
"effectively moves toward a form of totalitarianism. The state is no longer the 'common home' where all can live together on the basis of principles of fundamental equalities, but is transformed into a tyrant state, which arrogates to itself the right to dispose of the life of the weakest and most defenceless members, from the unborn child to the elderly, in the name of a public interest which is really nothing but the interest of a part" (n. 20).

These are strong words, indeed. He is arguing that such regimes by reason of their manifest injustice no longer serve the common good, which is the purpose and basis of all authority. Again in n. 70 the Holy Father refers to such laws as "tyrannical." He warns quite ominously that when government refuses to protect a class of its citizens, "the disintegration of the state itself has already begun"
(n. 20). This is a man who grew up under totalitarianism, and spent his Pontificate opposing totalitarianism. If anyone knows what tyranny and totalitarianism are, it is Pope John Paul II. We cannot merely dismiss his use of these terms as rhetorical. What we are seeing here is the realisation that government which refuses to recognise a higher moral authority must ultimately sink into totalitarianism.

Even if the Holy Father is not declaring all liberal democracies to be illegitimate, but only those laws which are unjust, we are presented with very nearly the same result. It is quite clear that while laws permitting and encouraging the slaughter of innocents is the most grotesque example, no unjust edict whatsoever is lawful, and Catholics have an obligation to oppose such edicts.

The Holy Father also explains that not only those laws which are directly unjust but those which support injustice ought to be disobeyed. Besides blatantly unjust laws, he adds that:
"In other cases, it can happen that carrying out certain actions, which are provided for by legislation that overall is unjust but which in themselves are indifferent or even positive, can serve to protect human lives under threat. There may be reason to fear, however, that willingness to carry out such actions will not only cause scandal and weaken the necessary opposition to attacks on life, but will gradually lead to further capitulation to a mentality of permissiveness" (n. 74).
I think that what the Holy Father has in mind is if, for example, someone worked at a hospital which performed abortions, even if the job is in itself beneficial to many people or at least neutral, the fact that one is willing to work for an institution which practices murder will cause scandal and indirectly weaken opposition. When we put this in a governmental context, we get a more difficult problem. He seems to be suggesting that to indirectly support such policies as abortion should be avoided if at all possible. It is possible to see this as the meaning of his statement quoting from Pacem in Terris that the laws of such a regime lose their moral authority. That is, the legislation of a right to murder invalidates more than just those specific laws, but all other laws which indirectly support this evil. I think, for example, that laws requiring the payment of taxes would cease to be morally binding. Since conscientious objection becomes a moral requirement, and tax protest is a way to practise this objection, it must be morally licit to disregard laws demanding payment of taxes.

But does not the Holy Father's call for conscientious objection and civil disobedience lead to civil war? The Holy Father tells us quite explicitly that the rejection of morality and the practice of injustice on such a mammoth scale of millions of deaths laid at the doorstep of liberal democracy is de facto civil war. He writes that "it is possible to speak of a sense of war of the powerful against the weak" (n. 12). In more than one place, the Holy Father makes reference to a "struggle between the 'culture of life' and the 'culture of death'
(n. 21).

The Holy Father has no delusions that refusal to compromise on these moral issue leads to civil conflict; however, artificially outlawing discussion of justice and injustice in the public arena merely forces the discussion beneath the surface and will eventually lead to a greater explosion. Men will fight injustice, and when there is no legal recourse to redress injustice, men will take illegal means. In the Pope's opinion, these means should be non-violent, but he is warning that violence will beget violence. Pope John Paul says, following St. Thomas, that an unjust law is an act of violence; it is this violence of the liberal democratic regimes that is leading to a breakdown of the legal system and a reversion to "a state of barbarism."

This dispute goes to the very foundations of liberalism, or liberal democracy. At the root of this totalitarian liberalism is the divorce of civil and moral law: "The more radical views go so far as to maintain that in a modern and pluralistic society, people should be allowed complete freedom to dispose of their own lives as well as of the lives of the unborn: It is asserted that it is not the task of the law to choose between different moral opinions, and still less can the law claim to impose one particular opinion to the detriment of others" (n. 68).
"There are those who consider such [moral] relativism an essential condition of democracy, inasmuch as it alone is held to guarantee tolerance, mutual respect between people, and acceptance of the decisions of the majority, whereas moral norms considered to be objective and binding are held to lead to authoritarianism and intolerance" (n. 70).

These relativists argue that belief in objectively binding laws will lead to civil disobedience. In one sense they are correct: rejecting unjust laws will lead to rebellion against those injustices - though, in the Holy Father's hope, a peaceful rebellion. The alternative, placing order above justice, leads to totalitarianism.

The Holy Father warns that Catholics and others who stand up for justice will be derided as intolerant, but insists, "We must not fear hostility or unpopularity, and we must refuse any compromise or ambiguity which might conform us to the world's way of thinking" (n. 82). The Holy Father is not saying that compromise in certain particular areas demanded by political prudence is impossible. But he insists that we must never accept such a compromise position as final, and, more importantly, we must never accept the principle that law and justice may be separate. On the contrary, "the acknowledgment of an objective moral law...is the obligatory point of reference for civil law itself" (n. 70). If governmental power is not exercised in reference to higher law, it lacks authority and is simply violent extortion.

What are the practical implications of this teaching, this call for a "cultural transformation"? He writes in the most solemn terms that by the apostolic authority of St. Peter he confirms "that the direct and voluntary killing of an innocent human being is always gravely immoral...Nor can any authority legitimately recommend or permit such an action" (n. 57). If no authority can permit this injustice, then it seems that Catholic governors, indeed all governors, have a moral obligation (though presumably within the confines of political prudence) to refuse to permit abortion within their states. He emphasises again at the end of encyclical that civil leaders in particular "have a duty to make courageous choices in support of life" and that no person can renounce his responsibility (n. 90).

While political officials are singled out, the Holy Father clearly directs his call for civil disobedience and resistance to unjust laws to all men of goodwill. Private citizens also have an obligation to do everything in their power, within the limits of prudence, to protest and disobey these laws. The thorniest issue here comes by way of indirect support. Does the payment of taxes, for example, constitute indirect support for these policies which allow, encourage, and even financially support abortion, contraception, divorce, and other social injustices?

Of course, the question we must ask is whether more visible and widespread civil disobedience as the Holy Father demands is politically prudent. This depends on particular circumstances, but I think that the Holy Father himself has given us some guidance on this issue. At the beginning of the encyclical, he explains why he thinks it was now necessary to put out such a strongly worded (if not outright incendiary) document. He says that despite all of his past exhortations, respect for life has been growing steadily worse in the liberal democracies (n. 17). I think that the Holy Father has come to the point at which he believes that the situation warrants more than preaching. Only through non-violent civil disobedience, which is forceful and uncompromising, will the Western democracies wake up to the realisation that we are on the brink of a new barbarism.

(Paul Clark is receiving a doctorate in philosophy from the Catholic University of America. He is also the director of the Coalition for Local Sovereignty, Washington, D.C.)