Catholic Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democracy

Jay P. Corrin

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780268159283
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

Tracing the development of progressive Catholic approaches to political and economic modernization, Catholic Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democracy disputes standard interpretations of the Catholic response to democracy and modernity in the English-speaking world—particularly the conventional view that the Church was the servant of right-wing reactionaries and authoritarian, patriarchal structures.

Starting with the writings of Bishop Wilhelm von Ketteler of Germany, the Frenchman Frédérick Ozanam, and England's Cardinal Henry Edward Manning, whose pioneering work laid the foundation of the Catholic "third way, " Corrin reveals a long tradition within Roman Catholicism that championed social activism. These visionary writers were the forerunners of Pope John XXIII's aggiornamento, a call for Catholics to broaden their historical perspectives and move beyond a static theology fixed to the past.

By examining this often overlooked tradition, Corrin attempts to confront the perception that Catholicism in the modern age has invariably been an institution of reaction that is highly suspicious of liberalism and progressive social reform. Catholic Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democracy charts the efforts of key Catholic intellectuals, primarily in Britain and the United States, who embraced the modern world and endeavored to use the legacies of their faith to form an alternative, pluralistic path that avoided both socialist collectivism and capitalism.

In this sweeping volume, Corrin discusses the influences of Cecil and G. K. Chesterton, H. A. Reinhold, Hilaire Belloc, and many others on the development of Catholic social, economic, and political thought, with a special focus on Belloc and Reinhold as representatives of reactionary and progressive positions, respectively. He also provides an in-depth analysis of Catholic Distributists' responses to the labor unrest in Britain prior to World War I and later, in the 1930s, to the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War and the forces of fascism and communism.

CHAPTER 1

European Catholics Confront Revolution

The nineteenth century, a “Century of Revolution,” inaugurated an era of unprecedented economic expansion. By emancipating individuals and social classes from paternalistic political orders, it became a golden age for European civilization. Yet the historical forces behind such change—the disintegration of the medieval order brought on by the accumulated blows of the Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment culminating in the French Revolution—generated painful conflicts in values and social relationships. No institution was more directly challenged by these forces than that which had shaped the cultural ethos out of which European civilization had emerged: the Roman Catholic Church. The consciousness of nineteenth-century Europe had become transformed and, in the process, disenchanted and earth-bound. The “Modern Mind,” wrote Peter Wust, “was secularized, the world stripped of its sacred meaning, the Church ruled out of public affairs, God dethroned in the soul of man.”¹

The cultural configuration of this new industrial age was shaped by the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie, a social class whose driving purpose was business and the amassment of material wealth. Theirs was a world where religion and spiritual values, presumably old-fashioned sentiments that had no relevance to the marketplace, were relegated to drawing rooms or the Sunday musings of one’s private life. Most significantly, the era was defined by the power of the state, a social institution that, beginning with the age of absolute monarchy and then finely-tuned by Robespierre and the Jacobins, had come to dominate cultural and economic life. By the nineteenth century this institution was falling swiftly under the control of the middle classes, a new elite that both legitimated and rationalized its position through the canonization of capitalism.

The nineteenth-century capitalist-driven economy reposed on the principle of individual freedom; its central belief was that each person must be free to pursue his own self-interest unfettered by governments or the prerogatives of privilege. The word “liberty,” enshrined as religion, was the core idea of liberalism, the political philosophy of the bourgeoisie that made the practice of capitalism possible. The central premise of liberalism was that humans were benign, rational creatures who, if given freedom, could achieve self-perfection by following the dictates of reason.

Closely allied to liberalism was the creed of nationalism. Where liberalism fought against all domestic constraints that mitigated individual self-enhancement, nationalism demanded liberty for the group, asserting that the sovereignty of the people (popular democracy), freed from the compulsions of other foreign powers, would assure the self-fulfillment and ultimate perfection of the nationstate. Both nationalism and liberalism were legacies of the French Revolution. Furthermore, given the punishing anticlericalism that accompanied the overthrow of the old regime in France, the French Revolution also appeared to present a formidable opposition to the traditions of the Roman Catholic Church.

Not surprisingly, many Catholic laymen and Church prelates were not prepared to endorse the cultural tendencies of the nineteenth century and had made common cause with aristocratic and monarchist elements in defense of dogma and privilege. Many of these conservative Catholics were also deeply troubled by the social problems brought on by the revolution in industry and politics, but they approached these issues from assumptions that were increasingly irrelevant. The solution they advocated for the excessive individualism that had left people at the mercy of the state and of industry was to resurrect a Church-dominated organic social order along medieval lines. For these Catholics the problem was mono-causal and moral: the secularization of society had led to a permanent separation of politics and economics from religion. Their approach to resolving the challenges of modernity has been called Sozialreform by German scholars of Catholic social and political history.²

The French Church tended to be sympathetic to these sentiments, in particular the Gallican wing, which was nationalistic (that is, loyal to the old regime), monarchistic, aristocratic, and opposed to the rational legacies of the Enlightenment. This group was challenged by “liberal” French Catholics, essentially proponents of Sozialpolitik, meaning that they were prepared to recognize the gains of the French Revolution and reconcile the Church with democratic values. These Catholics were “ultramontane,” prepared to go “beyond the mountain” to Rome; they appealed to papal authority in their struggle against conservative monarchist sympathizers within the French Catholic hierarchy. Liberal Catholics with Sozialpolitik leanings recognized that the chief sacramental mission of the Church, the salvation of souls, required entering the temporal world as it was currently constituted. This was a demanding challenge, but many argued that the Church’s mission could be more easily pursued within the democratic liberal state than under the inflexible absolutist regimes of the past.³

The liberal nineteenth-century European Catholics also emphasized the Church’s tradition of “social deaconry,” a recognition that clergy, in addition to their sacramental responsibilities, also had an obligation to perform supplementary welfare work to improve the social life of the community.⁴ There was no necessary conflict between saving souls and engaging in social work, since the Church historically had been a central part of both the spiritual and temporal realms. Yet since the mundane world, that which St. Augustine called the “City of Man,” was by its very nature flawed and imbued with sin, social deaconry could not be expected to achieve the perfection associated with the sacral community. Social deaconry should be guided by the ideals of Christian living but should direct its action toward present needs and be prepared to shift tactics according to the requirements of the day. To such Catholics, the emergence of the liberal state was a historical reality with which the Church had a social responsibility to engage and contend. Rather than fleeing back into the past (Sozialreform), liberal Catholics were more interested in working with what might be salvaged in the present. In the words of the French Catholic Frédéric Ozanam, the Church needed

to search out in the human heart all the secret cords which can lead it back to Christianity, to reawaken in it the love of the true, the good, and the beautiful, and finally to show in revealed faith the ideal of these three things to which every soul aspires; to regain, in short, the strayed spirits, and to increase the number of Christians.⁵

Ozanam, a devout Catholic layman and renowned scholar, was one of those who hoped to rekindle the social deaconry of the Church.⁶ At the age of eighteen, in 1840, he published a pamphlet entitled Reflections on the Doctrine of Saint-Simon, a response to socialists who challenged Catholics to match words with deeds, in which he called upon his co-religionists to apply the message of the Gospels to ameliorate the conditions of the working poor. Churchmen, he wrote, must not only preach the truth of Christ but work for a “speedy improvement in the moral and physical condition of the most numerous class. . . .”⁷ Ozanam singled out economic liberalism as the source of labor’s misery. Its doctrines, he asserted, dehumanized the laborer by relegating his value to the impersonal laws of supply and demand, thereby transforming his person into a mere commodity of the marketplace. Ozanam went beyond criticism to action after witnessing an armed revolt of weavers at Lyons in 1831. In 1833, while still a university student, he established the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, whose mission was to work for the welfare of the laboring classes in Paris.

Many of Ozanam’s contemporaries who shared this spirit of “Catholicism in action” recognized the importance of becoming directly involved with the needs of the working classes, lest they be lost to the Church by falling prey to the rising voices of radical social revolution. A number of liberal Catholics in France became active in the labor movement, aiding the working classes in efforts to develop the solidarity necessary to defend themselves against the claims of capitalism.

French liberal Catholics moved against their conservative adversaries in November 1831 when their leading spokesman, Félicité de Lamennais, made a pilgrimage to Rome and appealed directly to Pope Gregory XVI to support the reformist position. Gregory’s response was swift and disappointing: his encyclical Mirai vos, issued on 15 August 1832, condemned Catholic liberal attempts to compromise with the age. The Pope denied that the Church had any need to regenerate itself or modernize, and he rejected the notion that liberty of conscience and freedom of the press were unqualified rights. This was a particularly crushing blow to Lamennais, whose profound disappointment eventually led to his repudiation of Catholicism.

Despite Gregory’s rejection of the principles of the liberal state, Catholic liberals continued their efforts to come to grips with the political issues of the day, especially as they concerned Church-state relations and the interplay between faith and reason. French liberals such as Count Charles de Montalembert, for instance, persistently dismissed the notion that Catholics had anything to fear from freedom of ideas and liberty of conscience, since the Church had always held its own in the intellectual give-and-take that was part of the evolution of Western culture. Montalembert pointed out to his fellow Catholics that the recent resurgence of the faith in Belgium, for example, was directly due to “liberty, nothing but liberty, and the struggle made possible by liberty.” Political freedom, he asserted, “has been the safeguard and the instument of Catholic revival in Europe.”⁸

Mirai vos in fact had little effect on the continued growth of nineteenth-century Catholic social action. None worked more diligently to apply Christian teaching to labor problems than Frédéric Ozanam, who, along with Bishop Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler of Germany, established the groundwork for the Catholic social movement and was a major inspiration for Pope Leo XIII’s great labor encyclical, Rerum Novarum (1891). Ozanam’s Society of St. Vincent de Paul, whose “Conferences” eventually spread throughout Europe and became one the the world’s largest organizations for the relief of poverty, had a purpose beyond simply alleviating the suffering of the poor. The Society was a means to an end: “our true aim,” wrote Ozanam, “was to preserve intact in ourselves the Catholic faith in all its purity and to communicate it to others through the channel of charity. We wished to be able to answer those who, in the words of the Psalmist, asked of us: Ubi est Deus eorum?” (Where is their God?).⁹

Ozanam modeled his society on the worldwide organization of the Sisters of Charity, founded by Vincent de Paul in 1617; however, Ozanam’s organization aimed to draw into its rank young men, mainly university students. The conferences of the Society of Vincent de Paul became the training ground for Catholicism’s next generation of social activists. In the words of Albert de Mun, they “were the great school of experience in which we first learned to serve the cause of the people. Out of them sprang the whole Catholic Social Movement of the nineteenth century.”¹⁰

Ozanam had begun his analysis of labor and capital in response to the socialist followers of Saint-Simon, who had demanded to know how Catholicism could do anything positive to improve the lives of the working poor. His subsequent writings on the labor question went far beyond the analyses of the Saint-Simonians and reveal a level of sophistication and moral insight that compare more closely with Marx’s critique of capitalism. It should be noted that Ozanam’s early criticisms in Reflections on the Doctrine of Saint-Simon, emerging fully in his university lectures after becoming a professor of literature at the Sorbonne, predated by some eight years the publication of Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, which appeared in February 1848.¹¹

Like Marx, Ozanam had recognized that the ethos of unbridled capitalism, buttressed by the classical liberal ideas of influential economic philosophers such as Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, and Frédéric Bastiat, was a powerful tool used to justify the rapacity of the economically strong. In Ozanam’s view, the equally destructive and misguided socialist alternative to such exploitation, was, however, a logical response to the excesses of capitalism. Socialism, said Ozanam, simply was reaping the harvest of the transgressions of liberalism.

Ozanam, of course, condemned the debasement of labor brought on by the wage slavery of industrial capitalism. Such degradation, however, was not in itself a unique occurrence. Labor had been degraded in the ancient world, where the tasks of production had been relegated to helots and slaves. A special virtue of Christianity (symbolized in the divine artisanry of Joseph and Jesus) was that it resurrected labor to the dignified position it deserved as the source of humankind’s creative capacity. Ozanam, like Marx, recognized that capitalism had bifurcated the laboring process, that is, separated the cerebral dimension of work from its natural physical counterpart. This was an inevitable outcome of the wage system. Labor, however, was of many kinds—physical, intellectual, and moral—and the evil of capitalism was that it had destroyed the unity of this natural productive process. Unlike Marx, Ozanam believed that the traditions of Catholicism could resuscitate the solidarity of the laboring process, much as it had existed in the guild society of the Middle Ages. What this demanded in the industrial era, asserted Ozanam, was just compensation to all those who produced. Capitalism rewarded unfairly those with economic and intellectual power at the expense of the numerous classes who provided physical labor. The worker, Ozanam insisted, was entitled to a “just wage” that would provide for a decent living and the education of his children.

Ozanam believed that adequate compensation was denied the worker because he lacked the ability to organize (since it was forbidden by the liberal state as a restraint of trade) and, at the same time, because he was being exploited by the owners of capital.¹² Employers, he pointed out, had not considered “the worker as an associate and an auxiliary, but as a tool from which to derive as much service as possible at the least possible expense.”¹³ The use of humans as tools of production—which Marx would later identify as the objectification of the laboring process—had profound moral implications, for it ultimately eroded the home and family. All this, said Ozanam, was the logical outcome of the liberal laissez-faire assumptions regarding political and economic affairs.

What was to be done? Ozanam found the answer by embracing the most pervasive product of modernization: he turned to the power of the state. The government had both a moral and a social obligation to shape the economic order, since the absolute liberty of capital led to exploitation of labor and spawned conditions for violent social revolution. This was a revolutionary proposal in an era that anathematized the idea of state intervention. But unlike conservative Catholic philosophers who longed for the return of absolutist forms of government, Ozanam saw no role for a paternalistic state. Command economies of the past had only constricted industry and commerce, and for this reason Ozanam rejected not only mercantilist economics but also socialism as solutions to the modern industrial problem. He proposed, instead, a balanced approach, a middle way between the requirements of freedom and authority, undertaken by a government that would carefully weigh the needs of both management and labor before taking action and would act only when the common welfare required it. Ozanam’s solution to the excesses of laissez-faire liberalism presaged the position articulated by John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, which did not appear until 1859 and is recognized today as the classic justification for the interventionist state in the Anglo-Saxon liberal tradition.

In the final analysis, however, Ozanam did not regard the problems of modernity as primarily economic or political in origin. The age lacked charity and economic justice, but the latter could never be restored without universal goodwill and brotherly love. Ozanam provided an important message to his fellow Catholics: charity required taking an active role in relieving the social problem. He put the issues most succinctly in a letter to his friend Lallier in 1836:

The question which agitates the world to-day is not a question of political forms, but a social question; if it be the struggle of those who have nothing with those who have too much, if it be the violent shock of opulence and poverty which is making the ground tremble under our feet, our duty, as Christians, is to throw ourselves between these irreconcilable enemies, and to induce one side to give in order to fulfill the law, and the other to receive as a benefit; to make one side cease to exact, and the other to refuse; to render equality as general as it is possible amongst men; to make voluntary community of possession replace taxation and forced loans; to make charity accomplish what justice and law alone can never do.¹⁴

The above passage displays Ozanam’s prescient sociological analysis as well as his faith in charity. At least a decade before the appearance of the Communist Manifesto (1848), Ozamam recognized that divisions between men were linked to economic disparities and warned of class war unless social programs were initiated to mitigate such inequities.

The approach to social amelioration suggested by Ozanam required that Catholics—those with any measure of power or privilege—make a fundamental political reorientation. This would mean “passing over to the barbarians,” as he put it, that is, embracing the causes of the majority of the people in order to draw them into the Church. Catholics must occupy themselves with those “whose rights are too few,” who justifiably cry out for a share in public affairs, and who require guarantees for work and protection from distress. Ozanam’s call to embrace the struggle of the masses anticipated what Marx described as the historical mission of the “liberated” bourgeoise to join the revolutionary cause of the proletariat.

Ozanam’s call for Catholic action demanded courage and commitment, something Ozanam himself possessed in abundance. He never let a day pass without taking time from his schedule of teaching, scholarship, and jour...