Catholic Church and politics
The Catholic Church and politics concerns the interplay of Catholicism with religious, and later secular, politics.
The Catholic Church's views and teachings have evolved over its history and have at times been significant political influences within nations.
Overview
Historically, the Church followed the policy of strict neutrality, with Catholic thinkers such as Eusebius of Caesarea believing that the Church should not concern itself with political matters. However, Saint Augustine, one of the Doctors of the Church, influenced the Church with his theory of minimal involvement in politics, according to which the Church "accepted the legitimacy of even pagan governments that maintained a social order useful to Christians as well, and to the extent that the freedom of the Church to carry out its evangelical task was allowed." In the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas discussed the concept of political legitimacy and the moral issues of using political power, concluding that explicit limitations to governmental power are necessary. Later Thomists such as Saint Cajetan, Francisco Suárez and Robert Bellarmine introduced the idea of early Christian democracy, according to which political power was granted by God to each community, and every political official was to obey the community's determination in his political decisions; according to this concept, the community could transfer the authority from one official to another as well.In the early Church, the biblical passage Matthew 22:21 was a source of discussion regarding the role of the Church and its relations with secular governments, defining the dualism of Catholic political thinking; unlike earlier religions, the Catholic Church became a separate, independent institution that was not a part of any ethnic or political structures of already existing communities. The Church's doctrine considered Christian communities to be the "recipients of divine grace and inspiration", along with the clergy. Paul E. Sigmund argues that democratic thinking was already present in the early Church, as early Catholics "acted as communities to make decisions about common affairs, becoming almost independent self-governing entities in periods of persecution".
The High Middle Ages was the heyday of monarchism. In the Church, this meant the rise of papal authority under popes such as Gregory VIII and Innocent III, who exerted wide influence over the Christian states of Europe and claimed supremacy over all of Europe's kings, engaging in major political battles such as the Investiture Controversy. However, medieval Catholic thinkers also pioneered ideas of democracy: John of Salisbury spoke of a conceptual democracy based on the ideals of Christian corporatism, comparing the organisation of society to the structure of the human body, with each social class having its role in the society and democratic right to participate in politics. The Church's tradition taught that government and laws originally emerged from the people, and were justified with their consent. Catholic thinkers believed that government authority was to be limited by natural and customary laws, as well as independent institutions such as the Church. Even papal authority should be balanced by the secular nobility and the Church hierarchy. According to Walter Ullmann, medieval Catholic scholars came close to envisioning and endorsing democracy in its modern form, with Saint Thomas writing that the law should be formulated by "the whole community or the person who represents it" and describing a regime in which "all participate in the election of those who rule" as the best form of governance, formulating the concept of universal suffrage. He also recognised limits to papal authority, writing that the pope can only intervene in affairs "in which the temporal power is subject to him".
In the modern era, which saw the rise of electoral democracy and secularism, the Church strongly rejected and clashed with regimes of anti-clerical and anti-Catholic nature. This included Revolutionary France, where the Church was the target of harsh persecution; hundreds of Catholic priests were murdered in the September Massacres, and the Reign of Terror that followed partly targeted the Church as well. Although the Church's resistance to French, German and Italian regimes is seen as an example of the Church's opposition to democracy, Bradley Lewis argues that these regimes were not democratic at all, and Carolyn M. Warner states that the Church "adapted to democratic context" and supported democracy as long as it respected clerical interests.
Despite its struggle against democratic and liberal anti-clericalism, the Church's commitment to a communitarian and Christian type of democracy was officially established by Pope Leo XIII in his encyclicals Au milieu des sollicitudes and Graves de communi re. There, Pope Leo XIII endorsed democracy as the most Catholic type of governance, but warned that a Catholic democracy must "benefit the lower classes of society", work for the common good and reject individualism in favor of communitarianism, thus reaffirming the Church's rejection of "individualistic liberal" capitalism. These declarations laid the foundation of Catholic social teaching, which rejected both capitalism and communism. In terms of political development, Catholic social teaching endorsed democracy on the condition that it constitutes a protection of human dignity and the moral law, and valued common good over individualism.
Prior to World War II, numerous Catholic thinkers advanced the idea of a Catholic political regime; Jacques Maritain argued that democracy was a "fruit of the Gospel itself and its unfolding in history", writing that political Catholicism in its essence promotes democracy based on "justice, charity, and the realization of a fraternal community". More conservative Catholic thinkers such as Yves Simon also fully endorsed democracy, but saw it as a way to prevent the exploitation of the poor and abuse of the Church by the ruling class; in that sense, the conservative Catholic view of democracy was one that supported democracy as an "institutionalization of the people's right of resistance against tyranny". The concept of Catholic democracy was further established by Pope Pius XII in his 1944 Christmas Message, in which he stressed that a "true democracy" must see the people as a "body of citizens" rather than "simply a mass", as the former will make the citizens aware of their fellow rights and duties, while the latter is "an undifferentiated multitude open to manipulation by demagogues". He also affirmed the need for an "authentic democracy" to follow communitarian and Catholic values:
In the 1960s, the Second Vatican Council and Pope Paul VI endorsed the notion that the Church must fight not only for democracy itself but also for human rights, and it was concluded that participation in public affairs, to the degree that the country's level of development allowed, was a human right; the council also confirmed the Church's duty to promote democracy as a system that best ensured the protection of the common good. According to the teachings of Pope John Paul II, any political regime must be measured by its ability to protect human dignity, which is "rooted in man’s living in both freedom and truth". Pope John Paul II describes democracy as having three dimensions:
- the participation of citizens in political decision-making;
- elections and the consequent accountability to the voters of political officials;
- and the notion that democracy is more likely to pursue the common good as distinct from the good of the rulers only.
19th century
As a program and a movement, political Catholicism – a political and cultural conception which promotes the ideas and social teaching of the Catholic Church in public life through government action – was started by Prussian Catholics in the second half of the 19th century.Germany
German Catholics opposed the German Unification, as they wished to preserve the independence of German nations as well as the old German Confederation, which guaranteed Catholics religious freedom. When Catholic activists requested North German parliament to enact similar protections, "Protestant liberals in the North German parliament vetoed this request and pointed to it as an act of Catholic disloyalty". Under the Kulturkampf policy, Otto von Bismarck "associated the meaning of being German with Protestantism". Germany was proclaimed as a "distinctively Protestant empire". Catholic minorities such as Poles and the French were persecuted, and "German Catholics were imagined as Germany's internal foreigners and increasingly marginalized from German society and politics as enemies of the new Reich". German authorities considered German Catholics foreign and saw them as a threat to creation of a homogenous German identity. Kulturkampf aimed to eliminate Catholicism from the cultural and public sphere completely – Catholic seminaries and schools were closed, church property was confiscated, and thousands of Catholic clergy were arrested or exiled. According to a German historian, the Kulturkampf was a "war of annihilation waged by the Prussian state against the Catholic Church as a spiritual-religious and political power".According to Hajo Holborn, German liberals were ready to give up their liberal principles and support Kulturkampf out of anti-Catholic sentiment. Holborn notes that the measures against the Catholic Church "constituted shocking violations of liberal principles" and that "German liberalism showed no loyalty to the ideas of lawful procedure or of political and cultural freedom which had formerly been its lifeblood". Gordon A. Craig points out that German liberals were not coerced by the Prussian state into supporting the Kulturkampf legislation in any way, but willingly backed it despite the fact that it betrayed their principles and included provisions that enabled ethnic cleansing in Poland. Polish Catholics were forcibly removed from their houses, which were then given to the Prussian Settlement Commission. The Kulturkampf laws had a double purpose: they were directed against German Catholics, who were considered opponents of a unified German state and harboured pro-French sympathies, and against Poles, against whom the German state was conducting an ethnic cleansing campaign. Bismarck accused the Catholic Church of harbouring "Polish tendencies" and of actively "polonizing" German Catholics; Bismarck also saw the Church as a major obstacle to his Germanisation policies against Poles in Germany. Both the Catholic clergy and German Catholics were accused of aiding the Polish national movement, with Bismarck contending that Catholics in Germany "were actively supporting Polish candidates to the Reichstag". West Prussian officials would describe a "suspiciously agitated mood" amongst German Catholics, and a Danzig report from 1871 claimed that the Polish and German Catholic population "persists in its cool, suspicious attitude; even now hopes for the success of French arms are audible from these circles". The Kulturkampf did unite German Catholics and Poles as both were harshly affected by the anti-Catholic policies, and Catholics of Germany were supportive of the Polish national movement. As to counteract this, German settlers to Polish territories were exclusively Protestant, as the Prussian authorities believed that "the true German is a Protestant".
In reaction to the Kulturkampf legislation, Catholic distrust of the German state grew and German Catholics retreated into confessionally separate milieus – social organisations, devotional associations, the Catholic press and the political Catholicism of the Centre Party. These institutions became main vehicles of Catholic difference by promoting common Catholic values and worldviews. This led German Catholics to isolate themselves from German nationalism – German Catholics were opposed to a unified German state, and overwhelmingly rejected National Socialism. According to Jürgen W. Falter, 83% of recruits to the NSDAP were Protestant, while the Nazi Party failed to make any inroads among Catholics. Richard Steigmann-Gall observed that electorally, Catholic areas "saw near total opposition to the Nazis" and concluded that "Nazi party's share of a region's vote was inversely proportional to the Catholic percentage of its population".