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Catholicism and Liberal Democracy: The 'Other Twentieth-Century Revolution'
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19107 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1991 |
9,248 Words |
| Author
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George Weigel
George Weigel, a Roman Catholic theologian, is president of
the Washington-based James Madison Foundation and the editor
of American Purpose. His most recent book is Tranquillitas
Ordinis: The Present Failure and Future Promise of American
Catholic Thought on War and Peace. |
In a conversation early in the 1980s, Sir Michael Howard, the Regius Professor of Modern History of Oxford, allowed that there had been two great revolutions in the twentieth century. The first took place when Lenin's Bolsheviks expropriated the Russian people's revolution in November 1917. The second was going on even as we apoke: the transformation of the Roman Catholic Church from a bastion of the ancient regime into perhaps the world's foremost institutional defender of human rights. It was a fascinating reading of the history of our century. One also sensed, in Sir Michael's story, just the slightest hint of an element of surprise: Fancy that--the Vatican as defender of the rights of man!
There are, to be sure, reasons to be surprised by the contemporary Vatican's aggressive defense of human rights, and by Pope John Paul II's endorsement of democracy as the form of government that best coheres with the church's vision of "integral human development"; in the worlds of political power, those surprised would include the late Leonid Brezhnev (puzzled by the concurrent rise of Solidarnosc and the election of a Polish pope), Ferdinand Marcos, Augusto Pinochet, and the leaders of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. On the other hand (and viewed with perhaps more clarity in historical retrospect), key themes in classic Catholic social ethics--personalism, the common good, and the principle of subsidiarity--seem not merely congruent with democracy but pointed positively toward the evolution of liberal democratic form of governance.
That, of course, would come as news indeed to Gregory XVI or Pius IX, nineteenth-century popes whose attitudes to ward liberal democracy were rather ... chilly. At best. What has happened, between then and now, to transform an official Catholic skepticism about democracy that bordered on hostility into a Catholic endorsement of democracy that not only threatens tyrants but actually helps to topple them?
The Mid-Nineteenth Century Argument
The hostility of official Roman Catholicism's papal magisterium to the liberal concepts of the "rights of man" as defined in the French Revolutions' creed, and to the liberal democratic state, is well known to all students of the period. This sentiment is neatly encapsulated in the last of the condemned propositions in Pius IX's 1864 Syllabus of Errors; namely, that "the Roman Pontiff can and should reconcile himself to and agree with progress, liberalism, and modern civilization." What is perhaps less well known is that Pius IX, Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti, was
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