The Pope, the Public, and International Relations

Postsecular Transformations

Mariano P. Barbato

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030461065
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030461072
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion, Politics & State

This edited volume engages a long-standing religious power, the Holy See, to discuss the impact of the structural and postsecular transformations of international relations through the emergence of a global and digital public sphere.Despite the legal construction that enables the separation of the Holy See as a distinct legal entity, it is also an instrument for the papacy to represent externally and regulate internally the global and transnational Catholic Church. The Holy See is also the tool that enables the papacy to address a transnational or a global public beyond Catholic adherence – most prominently through journeys that are often at the same time state visits and pastoral journeys. Instead of understanding these hybrid roles as an irregular exemption, the contributions of the book argue that the Holy See should be seen as a certainly special but nevertheless quite normal actor of international and public diplomacy.

© The Author(s) 2020

M. P. Barbato (ed.)The Pope, the Public, and International RelationsCulture and Religion in International Relationshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46107-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. The Holy See, Public Spheres and Postsecular Transformations of International Relations: An Introduction

Mariano P. Barbato¹

(1)

Center for Religion and Modernity, University of Münster, Münster, Germany

Mariano P. Barbato

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

PopeHoly SeePublicInternationalPostsecularParis

End Abstract

Scholars usually conceptualize international relations as being dominated by secular and sovereign nation states that contain an internal public sphere with specific arrangements for religious communities and individual believers, too.¹ In doing so, they reflect, maybe too uncritically, the political project of state building first in the Western, and later in the post-colonial, world. The state project seemed to replace the old networks of towns and empires, sometimes chaotic, certainly full of nooks and crannies, that grew not only around the market place or the palace, but also around the temples, churches, synagogues, and mosques. Instead, like the grid plan of urban planning, a new international checkerboard was imagined which allowed only nation states, albeit differentiated in power, to act and play.

It is safe to say that, from the European Reformation onwards, the rise of the states increasingly pushed the Holy See from the center of medieval politics to the fringes of the state system. Usually, this displacement of the papacy from politics and publics is applauded as a progressive step, even from within the Roman Church. Given the dark side of the entanglement of the papacy with politics, this perspective has its points. However, the story could also be told in a different way.

The modern grid plan of politics could be understood as a reaction to the astonishing rise of the papal actor in the public sphere, which managed to institutionalize the revolutionary impulse of the so-called Axial Age² to free spiritual intellectuals from the domination of warrior lords. From this perspective, the papacy played a key role in establishing an institutionally protected public space, beyond kin, tribe, and nation.

It is perhaps risky to call Jürgen Habermas as a witness for this thesis, as he is still willing to stress the merits of later secularization processes.³ However, his seminal history of philosophy, in which the “papal revolution”⁴ of the eleventh century echoes the axial revolution, opens up the possibility of thinking in this direction.⁵

A new space emerged when priests, prophets and philosophers no longer restricted their role to that of a critical counselor to the prince or a disputing scholar among scholars, but instead started to understand themselves as facilitators in their own right for the poor and illiterate masses. In this new re-telling of the story, the pope and his clergy can be seen as pioneering a full-scale operation to reach out to the masses.⁶ The point is not to frame the pope as a liberation theologian who leads the crowd in the uprising against the oppressor. Instead, a case could be made that the pope’s claim to independence and supremacy based on theological doctrine and canon law secured and enlarged the space of rules and deliberation beyond the arbitrariness of the noble warrior.⁷

The papal reforms inspired by Cluny and culminating in the papal revolution of 1075 focused on three points. A precondition was the presence of institutionalized intellectuals, an independent elite of celibate clerics who had not bought their ministry for the sake of the sinecure, but had been chosen to fulfil the mission. The main issue was papal supremacy over the emperor, which stripped all secular rule—for king and princes cannot claim what the emperor does not have—of direct religious legitimacy. In effect, the juridical system of canon law, with the pope as last resort, absorbed the Cluniac inspired Peace and Truce Movement to end noble feud.⁸

The papacy was not able to pacify Europe by creating a public space of deliberation and law, but Habermas seems to see papal efforts in that direction as being successful.⁹ He seems to acknowledge the pope as a forerunner and comrade for those who argue today for a cosmopolitan public sphere. Such a perspective might answer the question of why the papacy managed to survive and flourish under the conditions of an increasingly open, transnational, and global public sphere: the papacy is flourishing in a re-cultivated habitat.

This re-thinking of Western history provides an alternative to the well-established narrative of the structural transformation of the public, also endorsed by Habermas.¹⁰ The established narrative tells the formation of the nation state as a secular enterprise that was enabled by a structural transformation of the public sphere. According to this version, the religious representation of legitimate power was replaced, incrementally and with revolutionary ruptures, by discursive debates and their recourse to reason. National identity, not religious belonging, was created and backed by mass mobilization.¹¹

This narrative has long been accepted almost universally. While the emergence of a global market, transnational migrant communities, and cosmopolitan circles of communication occurred simultaneously with the construction of the nation state, which was never the only actor, it took some time for the Westphalian Myth and the Hobbesian image of the Leviathan to lose some of their persuasive power. Now, however, in a world in which the twitter messages of politicians are partly replacing the international channels of diplomacy, and in which religious extremists can recruit foreign fighters globally for an instant nation-building project based on a fusion of archaic cruelty and hypermodern communication,¹² there is an enormous and still growing body of literature discussing the overlaps and mergers of the public and the international.¹³

The public and political power of religion within these transformations is often understood as a reactionary force, an unpleasant but limited reaction to progress, in which the power of identity stands up against the network society.¹⁴ While this picture has its points, it is certainly biased and insufficient. Even the Islamic State was part of the network society, and the Holy See offers its own vision of universal progress.¹⁵ Despite hostile ruptures and partisan contestations, religion in general and the Holy See in particular have always been part of the transformations of the public and of international relations. The Holy See is not returning from exile, where the papacy has supposedly been since the Peace of Westphalia. The rise of the pope in public¹⁶ is not necessarily part of a “neo-mediaeval form of universal political order”,¹⁷ as the papacy does not belong to the European medieval period alone. While the Holy See certainly had its ups and downs on the diplomatic level and in public opinion, and the particulars were always subject to change, modernity also saw the constant entanglement of the Holy See, the public, and the international. This might be illustrated by a walk through the city that became the capital of secular nationalism during the long—and, for modern international relations, pivotal—nineteenth century.¹⁸

A Walk with the Pope Through Paris

Paris is the capital of the French Revolution. It is certainly not known for its devotion to the pope. Looking in the streets and squares of Paris for historical and recent papal traces might therefore make a good starting point for understanding how the public, religion, and world affairs are entangled. As secularization theory has told us, religious relicts from a distant past are reshaped or become an object of museification in a modernizing world. However, in the twenty-first century, entanglements of public, politics, international relations, and religion are still alive. Walking through Paris on a spring day at the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, a little like Walter Benjamin a hundred years before, but discovering papal traces in the midst of global modernity, can be a diverting experience with unexpected discoveries.

When the Cathedral of Notre Dame succumbed to flames on the Monday of Passion Week in 2019, world leaders and an affected global public looked through the dramatically untiled roof at the sculpture of the pietà. While Christianity in France and Western Europe is in decline, Christian cultural codes are still entangled with politics and publics. These entanglements can trigger high emotions today as they did 200 years ago, when, only decades after the iconoclastic storm of the French Revolution, Victor Hugo mobilized the French public for the derelict building with his novel Notre Dame de Paris. But it is not Notre Dame alone that can tell the story of the entanglements of religion, the public, and international relations.

The vast and open square in front of the cathedral does not date back to the same time as the masterpiece of medieval art itself, which was built by the religious and political elites of European feudalism and their craftsmen and artists. The star architect and urban planner of Napoleon III, Baron Haussmann, who created with his boulevards, view axes and squares the modern image of Paris, had to tear down a whole quarter ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. The Holy See, Public Spheres and Postsecular Transformations of International Relations: An Introduction
• Part I. Media Formats
• Part II. Geopolitical Stages
• Part III. Global Transformation
• Back Matter