But no matter how corrupt political rulers became, the Catholic Church, beginning with Christ and the Apostles, never discounted the divinely appointed purpose of the State. Even when political regimes exercised hostility towards Christ and his followers, they always held that political authority comes from God and as such, whatever just laws they decreed should be obeyed. As St. Paul said, “Let every person be subordinate to the higher authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been established by God.” (Romans 13:1)
According to Catholic political theology, the authority of the State originates from God. However, this same authority is communicated or given to the people for whom it is meant to benefit. From this, it is the people who decide what kind of government they wish to be subjected to. The main principle here is that State or civil authority exists for the people and it is therefore determined by the people. In fact, it is through the citizenry that political power is conferred on the ruler.
But Islamic autocracies and dictatorships violate these principles. In Islamic nations, political authority is not believed to reside in the people. This is why democracies struggle to find a secure place on Middle Eastern soil. Instead, it is believed by most Muslims that the right to rule comes straight down from God to the State. As for the people or the body politic, they have no share in it. The share in governance bypasses them altogether. Furthermore, Muslim governments are often indistinguishable from the religion of Islam; hence, the lack of check and balance. To be sure, the distinction between Church and State, at the very least, is blurred in Muslim nations.
Unfortunate but true: There is no mechanism to offset or challenge an aggressive Islamic State precisely because there is no single institution possessing moral authority similar to that of the Papacy or Holy See. In any case, the State- Islamic or Christian -needs to be held accountable by an institution of a higher moral and spiritual authority. This is what Christianity provides to the people (By the way, this is why secularism is so dangerous. It takes Christianity and the people out of the equation). In his book, The History of Freedom in Antiquity, Lord Acton expounds on the truly unique role Christ had on the State; a role that Mohammad could not put into effect:
"In the fourth century A.D., there came to be one essential and inevitable transformation in politics. Popular governments had existed, and also mixed and federal governments, but there had been no limited government, no State the circumference of whose authority had been defined by a force external to its own. That was the great problem which philosophy had raised, and which no statesmanship had been able to solve…But when Christ said, 'Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s,' whose words, spoken on His last visit to the Temple, three days before His Death, gave to the civil power, under the protection of conscience, a sacredness it had never enjoyed, and bounds it had never acknowledged; and they were the repudiation of absolutism and the inauguration of freedom. For our Lord not only delivered the precept, but created the force to execute it.”
As with Mohammad, the Islamic religion, even up to this very day, is incapable of delivering this service to civilization. The chemical warfare in Syria is case and point. There is no single authoritative Islamic voice to condemn such atrocities. Perhaps this is why moderate Muslims are muddled together with Jihadists in the minds of Westerners. This, no doubt, is due to their lack of religious authority that is so useful in spelling out to the world what Islam is and what it is not.
Absent the accountability and delineation that a singular and uniform religious authority brings to the table, unlimited power naturally accrues to the government. Indeed, where religion and politics converge into one or where religion is absent all together (as with a secular America), very often what we get is totalitarianism. And, as the sad events in Syria attest, innocent people suffer.
