“While we members of the Church are hardly perfect, the Church is. This means it is complete, an entity in itself, with a divine, not a political, mandate. Will Haun rightly laments a loss of this understanding, which has a toxic effect on religious liberty and the common good. This is a timely, intriguing study well worth the read, a recovery of what Christ intended for His Church, and what James Madison intended for our country.” —TIMOTHY MICHAEL CARDINAL DOLAN, Archbishop Emeritus of New York
“William Haun explores the significance of the Catholic Church possessing a God-given authority that transcends political powers. Although the state has all the power it needs for temporal governance, research shows a resurgence by younger American Catholics who turn to the Church to fill a void left by modern society. Rather than bending a knee to the world, they want a Church that engages the culture from a place of stability and fidelity and challenges the culture by showcasing its distinctive powers through church architecture, sacred art, and beautiful music. They are attracted by a Church that is bold in proclaiming the Gospel and exercising its authority to be Christ’s judgment on the world.” —ARCHBISHOP SALVATORE CORDILEONE, Archbishop of San Francisco
“Will Haun has written what is sure to become the standard text on Catholic ecclesiology in the context of the tradition of American pluralism. He provides a broad and deep historical presentation as a highly trained American legal practitioner with the deep faith and knowledge of a deeply committed Catholic intellectual. The result is an approach to religious pluralism, in the American Catholic context, that has something to say not just to American Constitutional scholars, but to Church leaders both in the U.S. and in Rome.” —FATHER PIUS PIETRZYK, O.P., Vicar for Administration for the Dominican Province of St. Joseph, USA
“Not to Caesar but to Peter is the single best book I’ve read on how Catholics should engage the world today: by the Church remembering who Christ made her to be and coming alive to her own power as a perfect society capable of making and enforcing law that by divine right must be respected by the civil power. Experienced Supreme Court advocate that he is, William Haun provides a wise lawyerly brief that demonstrates how the Church’s work today can be pursued and vindicated in the public square one case at a time by drawing on what Pope Leo XIII called the ‘latent forces’ in the American Founding. Almost two centuries ago, John Hughes, first Archbishop of New York, urged the Catholics of his day to live as Catholics had always lived: ‘Let us respect ourselves and others will respect us.’ Today, Catholic bishops, priests, and laity need to take up Haun’s brilliant book, study it, and share it with other people of good will before their religious freedoms disappear because they watched the Church’s freedom be canceled by Caesar. With Christian charity and analytical clarity, Haun shows his readers why Machiavellian means to Aristotelian ends are no way to inherit the Kingdom.” —PATRICK BRENNAN, John F. Scarpa Chair in Catholic Legal Studies, Villanova University School of Law
“These days, the Church keeps winning religious liberty cases, but the cases never end. There’s no foreseeable peace in the war between Church and State in the U.S. unless something changes. That’s where Will Haun’s book is invaluable. Haun, a legal scholar, clearly shows how our faulty cultural assumptions—our hyper-individualism and seeing the Church as merely another voluntary institution—have created this endless clash. To get any sort of harmony, Haun argues deftly, we need to remember an old understanding of the Church as a separate authority, with its own jurisdiction, that exists not under but alongside the state. Not to Caesar but to Peter makes sense of the contentious battles between Church and State, and liberalism and post-liberalism.” —TIMOTHY P. CARNEY, AEI Senior Fellow and Washington Examiner Senior Columnist
“Religious Americans are questioning just what the relationship between the church and the state should be. Old frameworks of separation, government neutrality, and even religious exemption are under increasing pressure. Will Haun enters the discussion to offer a strongly jurisdictional, legal pluralist account in which the Church’s freedom is not that of just another ‘association’ subject to the state’s power, but a genuinely independent and ‘perfect society.’ A deep and thoughtful reflection about what religious freedom once was, and might again become.” —MARC DEGIROLAMI, the Catholic University of America, Columbus School of Law
“Our public conversations and legal doctrines about ‘law and religion’ presume and privilege the perspective and aims of the state. In this timely and compelling work, William Haun flips the script, urging the Church to remember her rights and responsibilities as a self-sufficient society, with legal authority. In so doing, the Church can remind Americans of the commitments to legal pluralism and jurisdictional limits that form the bedrock of our constitutional experiment. Haun points the way to a jurisprudence consistent with Christ’s insistence that there are things that are not Caesar’s.” —RICHARD GARNETT, Notre Dame Law School
“William Haun’s Not to Caesar but to Peter is a welcome intervention in the debates surrounding postliberalism, integralism, and religious liberty generally. Haun intervenes with a profoundly well researched and well written assertion that … the Church is itself a legal authority that transcends that of the state. What is more, this authority is not necessarily in competition with that of civil government precisely because legal pluralism and not monistic sovereignty is the deep tradition of the West. Haun, therefore, moves past the debates between ‘liberal’ and ‘common good’ constitutionalisms with the claim that Western legal theory itself affords the possibility of multiple legitimate legal authorities operating in the same space and over the same people, but nevertheless with different jurisdictions. Such a claim, Haun convincingly demonstrates, is not only an expression of the Church’s deepest tradition, but, perhaps surprisingly, is consistent with America’s own tradition of self-rule through religious commitment. Haun’s convincing demonstration of this reality is a major contribution to legal theory, clearly, but also to history and to policy debates.” —ANDREW WILLARD JONES, College of St. Joseph the Worker
“This profound and clarifying book painstakingly recovers the crucial concept of legal pluralism, and uses it to powerfully illuminate the character of the Western legal tradition and the depths of American constitutionalism. It is simply an essential read for anyone concerned for the future of religious communities in modern America.” —YUVAL LEVIN, author of American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation and Could Again
“In a world of recurring conflict between Church and State, Will Haun seeks to strengthen the American Catholic Church through a rediscovery of her God-given authority. Much like Dagger John Hughes, Haun’s bold insistence on the Church’s proper role holds out the promise of a reinvigorated religious liberty jurisprudence—one that would enliven the Church, shape the State around the promise of religious liberty for all in Dignitatis Humanae, and honor the freedom of the human person that both Church and State serve.” —MARK RIENZI, President, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty
“At a time when the modern jurisprudence of Church and State is unmoored and in disarray, Will Haun attempts in this feisty, faithful, and immensely informative book to reconnect religious freedom with its classical and Christian foundations. Even more urgently, he calls upon Catholics to remember what their Church claims to be—not just another blandly edifying social club, but rather a societas perfecta or ‘Catholic ministate’ with actual jurisdiction over Catholics’ religious duties. The book will be jarring to the sensibilities both of complacent secular or religious liberals and of so-called Catholic ‘integralists’; that is precisely why it is such a trenchant and timely contribution.” —STEVEN D. SMITH, author of The Disintegrating Conscience and the Decline of Modernity
“The rise of Catholic post-liberalism has revived fundamental questions about the relationship between the Church and political order. This movement has recovered the classical understanding of the Church as a polity with its own legal system, a conception with radical implications for contemporary politics. In this innovative work, Will Haun embraces this ecclesiological vision while demonstrating what today’s post-liberals often miss: its fundamental compatibility with the American constitutional order. His argument offers a vital path forward that preserves post-liberalism’s deepest insights without embracing its counterrevolutionary politics.” —KEVIN VALLIER, author of All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism
“The United States of America is in need of a resurgence in Catholic patriotism. We need faithful people who are willing to take on civic leadership roles in city halls and civic organizations, legislatures, and courthouses. But we also need Americans who are willing to seriously defend and advance the Catholic Church’s legitimate juridical autonomy. Will Haun’s Not to Caesar but to Peter provides deep insight into how to do the latter by deeply engaging the tradition, considering modern political realities, and deriving lessons from decades of successful and failed strategies for advancing Church-State relations in America.” —STEPHEN D. MINNIS, President, Benedictine College
