Pilgrimage, Politics, and International Relations

Religious Semantics for World Politics

M. Barbato

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781349446360, 9781137275806
• eBook ISBN: 9781137275813
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A standout contribution to post-secular IR theory, this book addresses issues of global politics, from cooperation to conflict, and shows how a religious metaphor, the pilgrim, can help us to rethink our concepts of self, agency, and community in a time of changing world order.

CHAPTER 1

POSTSECULAR PILGRIMAGE: THE IDEA OF THE BOOK

A shrine turns into a pilgrimage site when its narratives or reported miracles, most successfully a combination of the two, appeal to a wider public. Pilgrims spread these news and narratives all over the pilgrim paths they use. They bring home devotional objects as souvenirs like shells from a beach holiday. Indeed, the pilgrimage to the tomb of St. James in Santiago de Compostela, a remote place in northwestern Spain near Finisterre, the end of Europe, spread the scallop—the “mussel of St. James” in many European languages—all over continental Europe. In October 1987, the Council of Europe declared the St. James pilgrimage route the first European Cultural Route because it links the formation of a modern European identity beyond nations to a medieval common European heritage. Most recently, the route experienced a huge revival. It now attracts all sorts of people interested in sportive or cultural hiking and various forms of self-experience. Further east, in a similarly remote place close to the French Pyrenees, Lourdes developed since the apparition of the Virgin Mary in the late nineteenth century a global attractiveness that spread the Lourdes Madonna, white with a blue girdle, all over the world. Lourdes grottos or at least symbols of this shrine are to be found in almost any Catholic community from New Orleans (USA) to Chennai (India), notwithstanding the large number of Catholics who think of it as kitsch. The Lourdes Madonna is an icon that brings Catholics from all over the world together, but you can also distinguish two different types of Catholics by asking if they like the spirituality associated with Lourdes or not. A global identity is never uncontested.

We will come back to both the shrines of Lourdes and St. James and their narratives to reflect on self, agency, and community in a global perspective. To start our examination of pilgrimage for international relations a new type of Catholic pilgrimage that turns the traditional structure upside down is illuminating: John Paul II invented in 1980s the World Youth Day. It is no coincidence that it was John Paul II who invented these gatherings. His life as a pilgrim pope initiated many events of mass gatherings. His journeys were a very genuine contribution of the papacy to an emerging public sphere. A religious community could experience itself globally by watching these visits and joining them if the papal plane came close enough to home. The global mourning of the death of John Paul II showed that the papal ambition of speaking not only to Catholics but to all people of good will was met. The World Youth Day is a spiritual gathering of Catholic youth and their friends. Every second year this gathering brings the pope and a huge crowed of young pilgrims from all over the world together in one city. In 2013, Rio de Janeiro will host the event. So far the World Youth Day took place in Santiago de Compostela (1989), in Paris, Denver, Toronto, Sidney, Buenos Aires, Madrid, Czȩstochowa, Cologne, and of course Rome. The event in Manila in 1995 is, with an estimated four to five millions participants, one of the biggest mass events in human history. All these places have their shrines that are sometimes integrated into the celebrations. The symbols of the World Youth Day are, however, always the same, a very simple wooden cross and an image of the Mother of God, which are carried to all these places. The pilgrims from abroad first spend a week in the guest country’s local parishes and dioceses before they gather in the city of the World Youth Day. The idea is to offer young Catholics an event in which they can experience themselves as part of a global community. Out of many nations the Catholic youth is brought together in unity. However, the local and national particularities are not excluded. Being guest in the various parishes, the pilgrims experience what it means to be a Catholic in France or in Latin America. It is a kind of Catholic cosmopolitanism that highlights the bright side of globalization.

The dark sides of humanity have their own pilgrimage sites. In 1994 the world and also the Catholic church failed to prevent the genocide in Rwanda. From a Catholic perspective it is disturbing that this genocide happened in one of Africa’s most Catholic countries. Catholics slaughtered and were slaughtered. Not surprisingly, the percentage of Catholics in Rwanda fell significantly. However, there is also a Catholic answer to this tragedy. It was offered already a decade before in Kibeho, Southern Rwanda, through an apparition of the Virgin Mary: reconciliation. After the genocide, in April 1995, the place became known for the Kibeho massacre. Kibeho was a large camp of up to 150,000 repatriated Hutu refugees, some of them suspects of the genocide. The camp was rounded up by the new Rwanda Army of Tutsi soldiers to sort out the suspects and force the other refugee to go home. On April 22, 1995, the army opened fire at the camp. The massacre ended with 338 (official number) to 4000 (Australian Medical Corps) or 20,000 (estimation including those who died on the march after the massacre) casualties.¹ The Kibeho massacre stands for revenge. A decade before, girls and boys—some were killed in the genocide later—had seen the Virgin Mary—an event not completely unusual in modern Catholicism and indeed the very reason for the origin of many pilgrim places from Lourdes to Fatima. The message had the usual tone of calling men to stop sinning, turn back to God, and ask for repentance. The almighty God would be merciful to a repentant sinner but continuing sinning would lead to catastrophe. On one occasion the seer saw floods of blood, people killing each other, and dead with chopped limbs. In 2001, the Catholic church accepted the apparition of Kibeho as authentic and turned the sight into a pilgrim shrine of Our Lady of the Sorrows. When the site in Kibeho was turned into an official shrine, it was linked to the shrine of the Divine Mercy of the Polish Sister Faustina, whose message was widely spread under the pontiff of John Paul II. Born in Wadowice, close to his later episcopal city Krakow, the boy Karol and later Pope John Paul II grew up in an area that was forced during his early adult years to be the center of Nazi genocide. Auschwitz was erected in this part of the German-occupied Poland. In her monastery in the outskirts of Krakow, Sister Faustina died shortly before the outbreak of the war. In her visions she saw the crimes of humanity, God’s justice, and also the overriding Divine Mercy that includes even sinners if they return to God in faith and repentance.² John Paul II declared her a saint, established the Sunday after Easter as the Feast of Divine Mercy, and integrated devotional forms of her apparitions into the prayer life of the church. The icon of the Divine Mercy, a painting after her visions in the tradition of the Sacred Heart with the line “Jesus I trust in you,” that is the center of the shrine in Krakow, spread in different versions all over the world. In a few decades it might have become the most popular image of Jesus of Global Catholicism although, similarly to the Lourdes Madonna, many reject it as kitsch. A big statue modeled after the painting has been erected in Kibeho. Both narratives speak of human atrocities that have to face the justice of God but also harbor the chance of repentance and reconciliation.

The twentieth-century record of mass murder in genocide and war threatened the faith in enlightenment as well as in God. For Jürgen Habermas the experience of death, not as a natural thing of individual life but as a political mass murder, is devastating especially for agnostics:

When sin was converted to culpability, and the breaking of divine commands to an offense against human laws, something was lost. The wish for forgiveness is still bound up with the unsentimental wish to undo the harm inflicted on others. What is even more disconcerting is the irreversibility of past sufferings—the injustice inflicted on innocent people who were abused, debased, and murdered, reaching far beyond any extent of reparation with human power. The lost hope of resurrection is keenly felt as a void . . . In moments like these [referring to debates about coming to terms with the Holocaust], the unbelieving sons and daughters of modernity seem to believe that they owe more to one another, and need more for themselves, than what is accessible to them, in translation, of religious tradition—as if the semantic potential of the latter was still not exhausted.³

Indeed, there is no way out of death but faith, in the version of Pascal’s bet, Kierkegaard’s leap, or of the Catholic trust in tradition, experience, and reason. The deepest hope of religion might be barred for a translation into a narrative accessible for agnostics. My claim, however, is that the concept of pilgrimage can lead agnostics very deep into the semantics of religion and provide them with new conceptual grounds to imagine a world polity.

The issue here is foundational and controversial as it brings heaven back into political considerations. It is a new answer to a problem similar to the one Hobbes faced when he wrote the Leviathan. In the sectarian wars of early modern Europe, Hobbes tried to find a new narrative plot beyond a divine universal order that would serve the needs of his generation. At the time the Leviathan became persuasive. Globalization and the return of religion have now brought this persuasiveness under siege. The crucial argument Hobbes pushed through was that dying the first death—the end of life on earth—is politically much more important than the second death—going to hell instead of heaven in the afterlife. This changed the realm of politics fundamentally. Indeed, preventing the first death became the cornerstone of political theory and the legitimization of politics. Hell was secularized into earthly death. Echoing St. Augustine’s word that the human heart is restless until it rests in God, Hobbes turned the human longing for heaven into an unlimited material desire that laid the ground for the market society. A full-blown secularization of heaven was a later project, most prominent in the ideas of Karl Marx. Death and progress, hell and heaven, or, in the more down-to-earth language of international relations, conflict and cooperation are still with us. The underlying argument of the book is that we have to go back to these conceptual considerations. Avoiding conflict and fostering cooperation needs a fresh look on religion.

Why? Because by now we can tell that Hobbes and Marx got it wrong. Exclusion of religion is not a cure but an ill. First of all the secular arguments of Hobbes and Marx did not prevent the genocides of the twentieth century and also failed to achieve the promised progress. Second, in the global village, the secular arguments of Hobbes and Marx have of course their followers but the strict separation of religion and politics is out of fashion even in those circles. European Marxists such as Slavoj Žižek go back to Christianity to conceptualize their anticapitalistic interpretations and debate them with radical orthodoxy.⁴ In America, the Gospel of Prosperity might still fuel Hobbesian “possessive individualism”⁵ and the “evangelical-capitalist resonance machine.”⁶ Thomas Farr argues that liberalism needs religious freedom and that the liberal project of spreading democracy needs the spread of religious freedom.⁷ It is this richness of the religious semantics that stands for me as the third and the most convincing argument. Religious semantics, the practice of the faithful, and the narratives they can offer are too important to be missed out. For me the question is not whether to use, but how to use religion in politics. In contrast to the Hobbesian legacy, I believe that the idea of heaven, which I term here “heavenly utopia,” is helpful to prevent deadly conflict and foster progressive cooperation. This does not mean that the idea of heaven is without ambivalence. Any great concept from love to justice is ambivalent. However, only a few would make a big issue out of these kinds of ambivalences as R. Scott Appleby did with the sacred.⁸

Hobbes’s contractarianism has its religious forerunner in the Abrahamitic and Mosaic covenant between God and man. Joseph Weiler comes back to the covenant in the perspective of European integration theory and in the importance of treaties for European Law and the constitutive rules of the European Union.⁹ In contrast to religious semantics along the contractarian lines, the narratives of pilgrimage have the advantage that they are suitable for a time of transformation. The focus on transformation as an ongoing process is the specific value added by the pilgrim.

Like in the pre-agrarian age the forces of globalization pressure people to be on the move. Zygmunt Bauman coined aptly the term of “liquid times” for our age.¹⁰ Societies are under siege and new communities are difficult to imagine.¹¹ Political agency on a global scale is demanded for pragmatic reasons like organizing the basic rules for the world market, regulating the protection of the environment and sustainable exploitation of the natural resources, or deciding when the global movement of people is understood as a threat and when as part of the necessary workforce flexibility of global capitalism. In this context of global transformation, the concept of “pilgrimage” will be introduced to offer a new root metaphor of self, community, and agency beyond liberal individualism, the Leviathan, and contract and s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue: Imagine
• Acknowledgments
• 1   Postsecular Pilgrimage: The Idea of the Book
• 2   Global Return of Religion: Clash or Engagement
• 3   Self: Pilgrim, Nomad, Homo Faber
• 4   Agency: Pilgrimage between Departure and Destiny
• 5   Community: The Pilgrim’s Cosmopolitan Communitarian Companions
• 6   The Pilgrim’s Policy Conclusions: Cooperation, Conflict, Change
• 7   Pilgrim City: Seeing International Relations Again for the First Time
• Epilogue: D—Destiny or F—Freedom
• Notes
• Index