PopeWatch: Primacy of Politics

Sandro Magister publishes a letter from an Italian historian who views Pope Francis, and  his emphasis on politics, as part of a strong trend in the Church since the French Revolution:

PRIMACY OF THE SPIRITUAL OR PRIMACY OF THE POLITICAL?

by Roberto Pertici

Dear Magister,

Pope Francis’s letter to the “popular movements” and even before that his message to Luca Casarini have seemed to many to confirm the abnormal role that politics – and radical left-wing politics – plays in his magisterium.

You too have spoken of “a strange Easter message, coming from a pope, for a resurrection wholly and solely political.” In many respects it is difficult to disagree with you: yet one gets the impression that the true innovation of Francis is ultimately something else. That is, that he should engage in politics in an explicit and direct way, outside the usual theological or spiritual mediations that he evidently now considers superfluous; and that he should do so with a political culture on the “fringe”  with respect to the major currents of contemporary culture.

I know it may seem like a bold thesis, but on closer inspection the papal magisterium, at least from the French revolution onward, has always been heavily influenced by politics, at times even more than by merely religious discourse. Of course, this was not admitted in the past as explicitly as Francis does today; of course, the reasoning was often bogged down in a style and type of reasoning inherited from previous centuries, but there was a direct relationship between theology and politics, and it is not a given that it was always the former that acted on the latter.

This is because – after the revolution – the Church had ceased to be everything, even in Catholic European societies. It had become a part, indeed quite soon a party: ”le parti prêtre” of which the French liberals were already speaking after 1815. It was the time of the “Rouge” and the “Noir,” to use Stendhal’s words, and the Church was on the side of the “Noir.”

Of course, the Church had its good reasons. The trauma of the revolution had been immense, it had twice seen the suppression of the pope’s temporal power, twice the popes had remained prisoners for a long time; in 1799, at the death of Pius VI, many had hoped or feared that even the apostolic succession would be interrupted. After 1815, an anxiety for restoration was widely felt in European society: the Church became its interpreter and promoted it in an ambiguous relationship with political power. Ambiguous because no sovereign was truly prepared for a wholesale restoration of the “societas christiana,” so much so that soon a series of Catholic thinkers who had dreamed of it began to say: if this is the way things are, then it is better that the Church no longer compromise with these states, it should set sail and begin thinking about its freedom. But introducing the theme of the Church’s freedom implied, more or less explicitly, more or less instrumentally, the broader one of “modern” freedoms. Then began the great season of liberal Catholicism, which with Lamennais also sought a new religious philosophy.

From then on, all the most interesting cultural, theological, and philosophical movements in the Catholic sphere were intimately “political”: like the currents inspired by Vincenzo Gioberti and Antonio Rosmini in the 1830’s and 1840’s in Italy, and the rebirth of English Catholicism in the mid-nineteenth century. The genesis of the papal “Syllabus” of 1864 cannot be understood without another shock, that of 1848-49, another fall of temporal power, with the red flags of the various European revolutions, and with Giuseppe Mazzini in Rome at the head of a republic of “fiends and freemasons,” as it was put back then. Hopes for this had been expressed right from the start by Juan Donoso Cortés, who in spite of being a liberal Catholic before 1848 would call afterward for  nothing less than dictatorship. But even in the first phase of “La Civiltà Cattolica,” that of the 1850’s, was it not “political” discourse that prevailed, or rather was there not support for a religion that had an explicitly political significance?

Half a century later, “modernism” was an essentially theological and philosophical movement, albeit with significant political and social implications, but certainly anti-modernism was also a political reality. It is no coincidence that a “devoted atheist” like Charles Maurras engaged with great vehemence, strongly disputing against Marc Sangnier and “Le Sillon” and always recognizing Pius X as his pope: he warned that if the anti-modern dam constituted by the Church was breached, its project for the restoration of politics and values would be compromised. And in the great Catholic intellectuals who followed him and who often came, like Jacques Maritain, from an ambient Third Republic-style agnosticism and secularism, to what extent was religious conversion motivated by political factors as well, and to what extent were political decisions substantiated by religious components?

The same goes for the dozens of philosophers and writers from every part of Europe between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who made up the “Renouveau catholique,” which remains the last major Catholic cultural movement that has been able to get outside the walls. Who can distinguish in Péguy and Bernanos, Claudel and Mauriac, Eliot and Chesterton, Graham Greene, Hilaire Belloc and Sigrid Undset, the aspiration of religious restoration from the project of some sort of political restoration? And in the pontifical condemnation of “Action Française,” so lacerating in the conscience of many French Catholics, how much influence, alongside the distrust toward the “pagan” positions of Maurras, came from the political drive of Pius XI to manage on his own, even politically, the forces of Catholicism, without farming them out to foreign powers: the same drive that would lead to the clashes between the Holy See and the fascist regime in Italy in 1931 and 1938?

It is known to all that it is precisely from the papal condemnation of the Maurras movement that there arose the long march of French Catholic progressivism, which was of crucial importance in the events of the following fifty years. At the time Maritain spoke of a “primacy of the spiritual” to be recovered: but behind such “religious” programs – as behind the famous “religious choice” of Catholic Action in Italy during the early seventies – there was emerging in reality another political project, quite different from the one previously supported.

Dear Magister, this could go on, but I don’t want to bore you. On closer inspection, even the widespread hostility shown to Benedict XVI by large sectors of contemporary culture and even by the Catholic establishment was primarily political. It could have seemed that his magisterium was situated in a climate marked by the breakdown of Marxism, the end of communism in Europe, reflection on the fate and identity of the West after the attack on the Twin Towers, the defense and development of Catholic tradition already pursued by John Paul II; which could have contributed, in short, to the spread of a new philosophical-cultural “conservatism” that at the time seemed to be playing its cards. For Henri Tincq, the recently deceased vaticanista of “Le Monde,” this was a matter of “a kind of disciplinary, doctrinal, and moral glaciation of the Church that rendered it incapable of facing the tumultuous events of the present.” For him and his newspaper there was no doubt: the center of gravity of the Church had shifted “to the right.”

You will reproach me for always and only looking at the upper levels, at theological and cultural debates. I admit it: it is not easy to define the political significance inherent in the religious experience of the many “paysans de la Garonne” – to put it again with Maritain – of the last two centuries. But even among them, those who have chosen to remain within the Catholic world have done so through a combination of motivations, conscious and unconscious, in which politics and religion have backed each other up. I am not saying in the peasants of the various nineteenth-twentieth-century insurgencies, but in the militant wing of the Civic Committees in Italy in 1948, to what extent did religious affiliation drive political action, and to what extent did anti-communism cement the religious position?

The reasons for this “primacy of politics” in the Catholic discourse of the last two centuries remain to be understood. First of all because the “new history” born from the French revolution posed new questions of an eminently political nature to the Church: what attitude to adopt in the face of the constitutional state, modern liberties, the effects of the industrial revolution, the end of peasant society, the class struggle, socialism and communism, the disappearance of empires, the formation of national states, the new and terrible conflicts that broke out among them, the unprecedented forms of power such as twentieth-century totalitarianism, the end of European centrality, the process of decolonization, the emergence of the Third World? And it could go on.

But there is something less obvious and more profound. And back to the dance comes the famous process of secularization, the advent of that “secular age,” on which I have often spoken in my contributions hosted by Settimo Cielo.

It could be said that late modernity has provoked an intense process of the politicization of contemporary societies and, at the same time, their “de-spiritualization.” A great and thoroughly secular Italian historian like Rosario Romeo often said that in the last two centuries a new ethics had come about that had replaced the “old Catholic morality,” the one based on personal sin, hell, heaven, etc. This transition was confirmed – according to him – by the “increasingly broad place [that in contemporary society] was occupied by political values.” So men and women of late modernity look at each other in perplexity when they hear about the Church as the “mystical body of Christ,” but understand it very well when it acts as an ethical or ethical-political agency.

The “anthropological turn” of a substantial part of contemporary Catholicism took note of this process, with the justification that accepting it was the only way to find a space of renewed Christian presence. This is why Francis proposes “a resurrection wholly and solely political” – to put it in your words in commenting on the pope’s Easter letter to the “popular movements” – and speaks so often of ecology or of the Third World. But I believe that a political tension of the opposite nature is also present in many of Francis’s adversaries within the Church and that in them too the appeal to a “primacy of the spiritual” coincides with a different politics.

The fact is that secularization – as Benedict XVI warned in Verona on October 19, 2006 – has not only unfolded in the world in which the Church is placed and moves, but has affected the Church itself. “We learn,” he said, “to resist that ‘internal secularization’ that threatens the Church of our time, a consequence of the secularization process that has profoundly marked European civilization.”

Of this “internal secularization” of the Church, the “primacy of politics,” in the various and contrasting forms of its public discourse, is one of the most striking manifestations.

Go here to read the rest.  This brings to mind what CS Lewis wrote in The Screwtape Letters:

We do want, and want very much, to make men treat Christianity as a means; preferably, of course, as a means to their own advancement but, failing that, as a means to anything — even to social justice. The thing to do is to get a man at first to value social justice as a thing which the Enemy demands, and then work him on to the stage at which he values Christianity because it may produce social justice. For the Enemy will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of Heaven as a short cut to the nearest chemist’s shop. Only today I have found a passage in a Christian writer where he recommends his own version of Christianity on the grounds that ‘only such a faith can outlast the death of old cultures and the birth of new civilisations’. You see the little rift? ‘Believe this, not because it is true, but for some other reason’. That’s the game.