Towards a Politics of Communion

Catholic Social Teaching in Dark Times

Anna Rowlands

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780567212337
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Christliche Theologie

Anna Rowlands offers a guide to the main time periods, key figures, documents and themes of thinking developed as Catholic Social Teaching (CST). A wealth of material has been produced by the Catholic Church during its long history which considers the implications of scripture, doctrine and natural law for the way these elements live together in community - most particularly in the tradition of social encyclicals dating from 1891. Rowlands takes a fresh approach in weaving overviews of the central principles with the development of thinking on political community and democracy, migration, and integral ecology, and by considering the increasingly critical questions concerning the role of CST in a pluralist and post-secular context. As such this book offers both an incisive overview of this distinctive body of Catholic political theology and a new and challenging contribution to the debate about the transformative potential of CST in contemporary society.

Chapter 1

The emergence of modern Catholic social teaching

Three letters: Catholic social teaching as political theology

Within the space of eighteen days in the spring of 1937 Pope Pius XI issued three letters to a world in turmoil. The first letter, issued on 10 March, was written in secret and smuggled from Rome into the heart of Nazi Germany. Mit brennender sorge (With burning concern) was to be read from the pulpit of every German Catholic Church on Palm Sunday 1937. The letter reversed the earlier attempt – which many had warned was ill conceived – to form a treaty with Hitler in the hope of protecting the rights of the German Catholic Church to self-determination. Explaining his change of stance, Pius denounced the appeal to false forms of order, the dark impersonal destiny that appeared to lie at the heart of National Socialism and the exaltation or divinizing of race, the people or the state ‘above a standard value’.¹ Pius, alarmed at the denial of the personal dimensions to justice and dignity in Germany, wrote: ‘Our God is the Personal God, supernatural, omnipotent, infinitely perfect, one in the Trinity of Persons, tri-personal in the unity of divine essence.’²

Divini redemptoris, issued just a week later, was intended for a rather different audience and one that the Catholic Church had perhaps been more consistent in criticizing. Written as a condemnation of atheistic communism, the text outlines the objection of the Church to Bolshevism’s suppression of individual natural rights. Rejecting both liberal individualism and atheistic communism, Pius called for a Christian civic humanism as the root to a social order able to respect individual self-determination brought about ‘by means of an organic union with society and by mutual collaboration’.³

The final letter issued on 28 March, Nos es muy conocida, was addressed to the bishops, priests and laity of Mexico. Following the deaths of around 5,000 priests and Catholic laity and the exile of many more, Pius wrote to the Catholics of Mexico to set out his condemnation of their persecution and to outline a set of principles that could be drawn upon to inspire legitimate resistance. He argued that Catholics had a right and a duty to take their inspiration from the imitation of Jesus Christ, to be inspired by the call to a life of prayer, sacrifice and love. Such an imitation and pattern of life would naturally produce a form of social renewal, a form of Christian citizenship focused on the needs of the poorest and resistance to all injustice including injustice that refuses the right to religious expression and education.

During the course of the mid and late 1930s Pius had written on a dizzying range of social challenges: nativism in Germany and France, anti-Semitism in Europe and North America, economic injustice, migration and religious persecution. Yet, what connects these three letters is not only a common set of social issues besetting the 1930s (with some alarming contemporary resonance) but also the papal attempt to address the presence of, what were considered to be, rival pseudo-theological ideas present in the secular or even self-avowedly atheistic, public sphere. Each of the letters from the spring of 1937 attempts to name these ‘secular’ political theologies and their weaknesses, and to set out a contrasting Christian story of human nature and social order.

Pius was clear that the draw to Nazism and Bolshevism was not merely economic or social but also, in an important sense, ‘theological’. Mit brennender sorge did not name or denounce Hitler personally, but it did make clear that Nazism sought to replace God with man and to deify a particular leader, race and nation. In each of the letters of 1937 Pius outlines the theological failures of political movements that he views as more than a mere economic or social settlement. He viewed both Nazism and Bolshevism as determined to erase the personal, Trinitarian God of Christianity and to propose to its people a ‘false messianism’ and ‘deceptive mysticism’. These supposedly secular movements were viewed as rival, inadequate theologies, drawn to the mystical and messianic as much as any theology. They produced and traded in their own idols, putting to use their own ultimate meanings and versions of classic narratives of sin, purity, sacrifice and redemption. Whilst he criticized German fascism and Russian Bolshevism concretely for the denial of material justice to their members, Pius believed that it was incumbent upon the Church to also demonstrate that they perpetrated their injustice in theologically resonant language. The political messianism of totalitarianism was for the modern papacy but one form of such modern pseudo-theology – all the more disguised for its refusal of overt religion and displacement of the Church from its public realm.

This opening chapter begins with Pius’ three letters not because they are definitive or oft-cited texts (they are not) but rather because they illustrate something important and not always well understood about the core of the post-1891 Catholic social tradition. In the first instance, I have used them here to illustrate the fact that CST in its modern form is as much a tarrying with the ideas that constitute modernity as with its concrete practices. In the second instance, the letters illustrate that CST is both uniquely modern in its form – it gradually comes to accept the separation of Church from state and the de facto independence of social, political and economic questions from direct church competency – and it also functions as a social philosophy that never fully baptizes a liberal philosophy or settlement. It remains locked in a complex dialogue – and often a drama of recognition and misrecognition – with liberal modernity.

The documents issued by popes and bishops’ conferences do not view any of the major thought traditions of the last three hundred years as fully compatible with the revealed truth of the Gospel concerning human nature and the transcendent purpose of the social order. Neither does the church hierarchy view such thought traditions, despite their claims, as fully ‘secular’: that is to say, devoid of religious or implicitly ‘theological’ claims. The modern state, so the authors of CST imply, still trades in its own secular version of notions of sin and salvation, manifesting fairly readily identifiable eschatological beliefs. In this light, the political theological questions posed by the popes to a secular audience might be simplified and articulated in the following ways: Who or what do you think will save you, and what do you want to be saved from and for? What are your sources of authority and legitimacy and who, or what, grounds or guarantees them? What kind of freedom results and for whom? Who is your ‘Other’ and what work do they (are they made to) perform in your social vision?

Thus, none of the major ideologies that have formed the post-Reformation world are seen as neutral ideologies for Christians. Nonetheless, the kind of speech act that formal CST represents is bound up with the conditions, thought forms and societal settlements of the modern industrial era: it represents a deeply material form of thought that emerges from a particular crucible of history and indelibly bears those historical marks. It does not simply peer downwards into its own historical moment from a space of material protection or abstraction.

Thus, CST is not properly ‘political’ on its own terms because it seeks to draw a direct line between the Scriptures and public policy as a rival to the tough vocation of the politician to work out the common good. It cannot offer society a shortcut to a theologically infused set of political answers, cutting out the uncertain and risky business of political judgement, negotiation, sacrifice and decision-making. Nor does it have to offer revealed knowledge of which political system works best. Nor can it claim a higher right to political knowledge or power.

The Church, as articulated in its social teaching, is political because the Church sees in the Scriptures a call to proclaim a social vision of the human person within a human and divine community, to live this out in its own life and to proclaim it to the world as a way of living. This social vision proposes basic things about the human person fully alive (the message Christ bears to the world): human interdependence, co-creativity, vulnerability to others, singular value and dignity and completion through others is core to this. Equally, the Scriptures are seen to contain a necessarily negative political theology: a call to unveil and critique forms of power which make of themselves rival deities, forms of domination, and in the process distort the image of God in creation and deny the person fully alive.

The Church is political in its negative form (as critique) insofar as the political is given to lapsing into its own forms of deadly politicization that threaten a vision of social living that the Church is called to stand for. This is especially clearly the case when politics erroneously makes the political the supreme and dominating reality and loyalty, rather than a form of service to the common good and relative to other goods. The Church, as we have noted, is rightly attentive to the ways that the political tends to be ‘theological’ in its own way: through the co-option of religious language and symbol as tools of power or through its own value system of ultimate claims that ought to be duly socially scrutinized. Whilst we may talk rightly of the separation of Church from state, it is simply evident that we cannot divide the political from the theological in any final or absolute way. The political remains part of how we make and find theological meaning, for truth is suffused throughout the material order; the political has always been drawn to propose fundamental visions of human society. And political systems continue to deploy religion for ends that are political; the draw to religious and theological symbol, ritual and language is rightly to be engaged and scrutinized in the light of the Gospel.

In its constructive form this ‘negative’ political task can still be one of dialogue – it seeks a reflective engagement with the leading thought proponents and movements of its time, an invitation to any political movement or system to think what it is claiming and doing. It is an invitation to thoughtfulness about the grounds, limits, incompleteness and possible misrecognitions latent in any system of political action – a constructive engagement with the fallibility, imperfection and limit of any human system that aims after goods. A clear example of this spirit of critical dialogue in operation is found in Fratelli tutti. Pope Francis invites liberalism to consider the moral performance of its ideological commitment to the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity.⁴ He notes that liberalism finds it easier to deal in the first two of these ideals and tends to neglect fraternity, which seems in the end the necessary grounds for achieving the other two ambitions. His call is partly for liberalism to understand itself reflectively and evaluate itself against its own ideals.

In its more severe form, this ‘negative’ task can be a simple prophetic calling out. Whilst Fratelli tutti is reflective and nuanced in its engagement with liberalism as a political philosophy, it is outright in its opposition to individualism. It denounces the products of this individualism: a throwaway culture, an objectification and commodification of the human person, and indifference to suffering and inequality. Fratelli tutti is not against liberalism, but it is, in unapologetic terms, against individualism.

None of this exists separately from the equally ‘political’ character of the Church as an ecclesial polity or community, visible in the ways it chooses to structure its own life of community, enacted through worship, propounded through teaching, structured in governance and decision-making and extended in the forms of care it enacts or fails to enact. This is the fragile political work of the Church, in which it too is accountable for the ways that it conceives of, and uses, truth and story. For this reason, the sexual abuse crisis that has gripped the Church and its cover-up, and the role of women and the laity in governance, are necessarily and properly political questions for the Church.

The Church is thus political in all these ways, which are not always easily captured, represented or adequately critiqued in other forms of liberal social and political theory.⁵

The social question and the Church as a society

In Rerum novarum Leo XIII adopted a phrase that would come to frame the popes’ new interventions into modernity, the Church addressed ‘the social question’. Rerum novarum defined its task as commentary on the fundamental shape of the social order and the new patterns of economy, statehood and social value that were shaping a newly industrialized, bureaucratized and increasingly centralized social order. The development of a theological language for discussing defined ‘social questions’ might be viewed in two ways: one secular and one theological.

Through the upheavals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the idea of ‘society’ took shape as something beyond and between the state and Church, and distinct from previous conceptions of spiritual and temporal power. Ideas that had previously found their home in a single, intrinsic (if constantly disputed) cosmic order in which spiritual and temporal powers shared a division of labour within a single whole, shifted into new forms. In this process questions of identity and action were self-consciously ‘social’ questions.

The Church’s adoption of the new language of the social question had a number of dimensions. The first concerns the shifting relationship between the state, market and civil society. Letters and encyclicals issued between Vatican I and Vatican II tend to lament the growth of industrial, technocratic and transactional forms of social organization. They saw in this shift an inexorable drive towards centralization. They feared the suppression of local, diffuse, plural and more organic forms of social cooperation.⁶ In the eyes of the popes, these tendencies were not the preserve of only one expression of modernity. They occurred, to varying degrees, in liberal democratic as well as totalitarian states and lay at the heart of modern capitalism. The shrinking space for rich civic association and the suppression of a space for the development of localized forms of social virtue become constant themes in mid and late twentieth-century encyclicals. Whilst society had become a new reality to be engaged, the space between market, state and person seemed in fact somewhat less ‘social’, less rich, increasingly denuded and at a cost.

The second discernible and recurrent social theme engaged by the popes concerns the changing nature of the state itself. Following the Reformations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries both Catholic and Protestant traditions had increasingly ceded powers to monarchs and national governments, and both traditions had consequently produced (in different forms) new ways of conceiving of the power, purpose, legitimacy and limits of human government, viewed theologically. Whilst CST is often referenced primarily for its economic teaching, much of the tradition is taken up with themes of social and political governance and virtue under the conditions of modernity. The social conditions of statehood therefore become a critical encyclical theme.

The third social theme concerns the constantly shifting relation of labour to capital and the dignity of work. CST teaches the absolute priority of human labour over capital, as well as the basic social creativity core to the experience of human work or labour. It discerns in capitalism a constant tendency to reverse this priority and to exploit and oppress the productive capacity of the human person. Communism in turn denies the true personalism at the heart of work. The popes conceive of the social question as inherently connected to the shifting relation of labour to capital and of the meaning of human productivity. In turn, to address questions of ...