Federal Judge Brett Kavanaugh has been confirmed as the Supreme Court justice to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy – infamous for casting the wrong, but deciding votes in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey (upholding an unlimited right to abortion), Obergefell v. Hodges (mandating homosexual marriage throughout the country) and United States v. Windsor (striking down the Defense of Marriage Act). Both conservatives and liberals know that Kavanaugh has tipped the court to the right and within two years a case will come before the court challenging Roe v. Wade. It is expected that Roe will be overturned. And then what?
The states will decide the question of abortion, and many are already preparing their constitutions and laws for the absence of Roe. I predict that the resulting patchwork of states banning abortion and those permitting (if not celebrating) it will lead to a mass migration of Americans to states that support with law their particular position on abortion. Thus, liberals (and liberal corporations) will leave conservative cities of states in the South and Midwest that will ban abortion, and conservatives will leave cities and rural areas of states in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic and West that will permit it. Such a mass migration will not merely be undertaken for moral reasons, although many will relocate for matters of conscience. People will move because the concentrations of ideology will create general cultural and legislative environments unpalatable to citizens of a different point of view.
And so an opportunity will present itself. The opportunity for traditional Catholics to concentrate their population in one or more states. A Catholic evangelical and missionary outlook to save the souls of the liberals left behind should not prevent such a concentration – missions can always be established by brave souls willing to endure persecutions and attacks similar to the Franciscans and Jesuits that evangelized the Indians of North and South America. A concentration of faithful Catholics will permit the formation and development of such individuals and missionary orders. Having a home state that reflects in its laws and supports with its culture truth, beauty and goodness will be an essential component of an American revival that may take a century to mature, but will heal a nation conceived in liberty and searching from its very beginning for a soul.
Let us call such a state to which traditional Catholics may move “the Benedict State,” in a nod to The Benedict Option, a book by Rod Dreher in which he discusses the potential to preserve the Faith by concentrating believers into homogenous groups until such time as the culture is ready for re-assimilation. The preservation and concentration of traditional Catholicism in a way that integrates belief, culture and education is now essential in battling Modernism and embarking on the New Evangelization envisioned by Pope Saint John Paul II. Forming a Benedict State may be ambitious, but given the signs of the times, it may yet prove to be a propitious means to the salvation of a deeply divided America, and perhaps the Western world.
In Part II of this three-part series, I will discuss where a concentration of faithful Catholics may be most readily achieved in the United States. Part III will discuss how such a Benedict State may ultimately be useful in a reconquista of a secular and Muslim Europe.