Roman Catholicism's links with democracy and dictatorships
The Roman Catholic Church has had controversial relationships with various forms of government. In its two thousand year history it has had to deal with various concepts and systems of governance, from the
Roman Empire to the
medićval divine right of kings, from nineteenth and twentieth century concepts of
democracy and pluralist democracy to the appearance of left wing and right wing dictatorial regimes.
Catholicism and the Roman Emperors
The papacy and the Divine Right of Kings
The concept of the Divine Right of Kings, though biblical in origin, came to dominate medićval concepts of kingship. Augustine of Hippo in his work The City of God had stated his opinion that while the City of Man and the City of God may stand at cross-purposes, both of them have been instituted by God and served His ultimate will. Even though the City of Man --- the world of secular government --- may seem ungodly and be governed by sinners, it has been placed on earth for the protection of the City of God. Therefore, monarchs have been placed on their thrones for God's purpose, and to question their authority is to question God. This could discourage Roman Catholics from taking action to overthrow tyrannical governments.
This belief was central to the Roman Catholic vision of governance in the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Ancien Régime. It believed that only God, and itself as "God's church" could depose a monarch. In a society based on an alliance of throne and altar, the Church itself became a player in medićval governing elites. A senior cleric, usually and archbishop or cardinal anointed and crowned a monarch. Senior members of the hierarchy, such as Thomas Cardinal Wolsey in England, and Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin, or prominent Catholic laymen like Sir Thomas More served as senior advisors to monarchs.
The Church however was more than just an advisor to monarchs. It was directly linked to mediaeval society as a landowner, a power-broker, a policy maker, etc. Some of its bishops and archbishops were feudal lords in their own right, equivalent in rank and precedence to counts and dukes. Some were even sovereignss in their own right. Bishops played a prominent role in Holy Roman Empire as electors. Jacques-Benigne Bossuet, preacher to Louis XIV, defended the doctrine of the divine right of kings in his sermons. The Church itself was a model of hierarchy in a world of hierarchies, and saw the defence of that system as a defence of itself, a defence of itself as a defence of what it believed was a god-ordained system.
See also Gallicanism, Guelph, Weiblingen, missi dominici
Catholic missionaries at the Chinese court
\nMatteo Ricci
Popular democracy
The French Revolutions
The central principle of the mediaeval, Renaissance and Ancien Régime periods, the right of a monarch to rule 'by God's will', was fundamentally challenged by the French Revolution. While initially the revolution was based on a belief that the existing system of French government needed overhall to recognise the limits on the monarch's power and his need to govern on behalf of the state, not in his own interest, the lack of political reform for generations led to a build up of frustrations that led the revolution to spiral in ways unimaginable only a few years earlier, and indeed in ways unplanned by the initial wave of reformers.
For Roman Catholicism, the Divine Right of Kings meant that only it or God could interfere with the right of a monarch to rule. Thus the attack on the French absolute monarchy was seen as an attack on God's anointed king. In addition, the Church's leadership came largely from the classes most threatened by the growing revolution, while the Church was a major landowner in its own right. So the revolution was seen to introduce concepts alien to its belief in the rights of kings and in its own rights, as God's anointed church and as a power-broker in the ancien regime.
Resolutions such as the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, passed by the National Constituent Assembly, seemed to some in the church to mark the appearance of the antichrist, in that they excluded Christian morality from the new 'natural order'. The problem was made worse by the fast moving nature of the revolution, which saw early demands for reform turn quickly into demands for a constitutional monarchy, and then become regicide and the declaration of the First French Republic. These swift changes far outpaced Roman Catholicism's ability to adapt or come to any terms with them.
The Church's association with the doomed ancien regime, its position as a large-scale landowner, led by people from the establishment classes, and its inability to accept many of the fundamental principles of the revolution, led the Church to be seen by the revolutionaries as being as much an enemy of the revolution as King Louis XVI and the aristocracy. Instead of being able to influence the new political elite and so shape the public agenda, the Church found itself sidelined at best, detested at worst. As a result, the new state and its leaders set up its own rival deities and religion, a cult of reason, closing many Catholic churches, transforming cathedrals into "temples of reason", disbanding the monasteries, destroying the buildings (as at Cluny), and seizing their lands. In this process many hundreds of catholic priests were killed, further polarising revolutionaries and the church. The revolutionary leadership went so far as to devise a metric calendar to displace the Christian year and week. Catholic reaction, in anti-revolutionary risings such as the Vendee were often bloodily suppressed.
When Napoleon Bonaparte came to power in the late 1790s, he began the process of coming back to terms with the Catholic Church. While Louis' brother, Louis XVIII and some of the old establishment regained power following the Napoleonic era by accepting some of the principles of the revolution, the Church continued to strongly hold the conviction of the error of the revolution and its "attack on God". The Church found itself more at home under the monarchy of the Louis's youngest brother Charles X (r: 1824-1830). His overthrow in 1830 marked the end of any hope of a return to the ancien regime certainties of the alliance of throne and altar. Throughout the nineteenth century, the Church found itself increasingly marginalised as it associated with Henry V, the Legitimist pretender, than the bourgeois July Monarchy of King Louis Phillippe, who reigned not as a 'throne and altar' King of France but as a popular monarch, the implicitly citizen-orientated King of the French. It was only under Pope Leo XIII (r: 1878-1903) that the Church leadership tried to move away from its right wing legitimist royalist associations, when he ordered the deeply unhappy French Church to accept the Third French Republic (1875-1940). Though his liberalising initiative was undone by Pope Pius X (r: 1903-1914), a conservative traditionalist with more sympathy with the French royalists than with the bourgeois Third Republic. An already bubbling dispute under Pius's interventions led to a full and irrevocable break between the French state and the Church, with Church property seized and religious orders banned. Catholicism never regained major power or influence from that point.
Pius IX and the 'errors of the world'
The nineteenth century was dominated by attitudes shaped by the French Revolution and its aftermath. The concept of revolution as a means of achieving dramatic change had grown in popularity, as had the belief that the citizenry had rights. These ideas became of particular importance in the Italian peninsula, which was divided up between a number of states, notably the Kingdom of Piedmont to the north, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies to the south, and in between the Patrimony of St. Peter, more commonly known as the Papal States, a collection of states controlled by the Pope for many centuries.
Growing Italian nationalistic demands for the creation of an all-Italy state came to a head in the 1940s. In 1846 the liberal-leaning Giovanni Maria Cardinal Mastai-Ferretti became Pope Pius IX Pius's liberal policies, in contrast with the autocracy of his predecessors, led to growing belief that under him the Papal States would not stand in the way of Italian unification. However the outbreak of revolution in Italy (alongside France, where King Louis Philippe lost his throne, in Austria and even unsuccessfully in tame versions in the United Kingdom and Ireland, shocked Pius, who himself, when unwilling to support Italian nationalism, was forced to flee into exile, producing a shortlived Roman Republic. Pius on his return, abandoned the liberalism that had been his trademark, returned to the more traditional conservativism of his immediate predecessors and spent the rest of his papacy condemning nationalism, populism and democracy, most dramatically his 1864 papal encyclical Quanta Cura and its attached Syllabus of Errors. Under Pius IX, the Church set itself against all the new theories of popular sovereignty and rights of citizens, which, having been fringe ideas on the left at the time of the French Revolution of 1789, had now gained widespread acceptance among moderate opinion. Pius's continuing defence of the Divine Right of Kings and his insistence on condemning policies and perspectives championed by such leaders as Benjamin Disraeli and William E. Gladstone (United Kingdom), Daniel O'Connell and Issac Butt (Ireland), and Abraham Lincoln, earned for him and the Papal States widespread international criticism. Pius's world still looked back on the pre-revolutionary theory of the alliance of throne and altar, as the embodiment of God's design for government, with God's king and God's church together governing as God's will.
Ironically, given that many of the ideas which so appalled Pope Pius IX came from France via the revolutions of 1789 and after, Pius's control of the Papal States rested on France, whose army under Emperor Napoleon III defended the Papal States from attack. But the Franco-Prussian War forced Napoleon III to take back his soldiers in his own ultimately unsuccessful attempt to defend his imperial throne. Without the French Emperor's protection, the Papal States and Rome fell to invading Piedmontese troops. For Pius the final evidence of the sinfulness of the modern world was the seizure by secular troops of the Vicar of Christ's own lands. The First Vatican Council, which had been meeting and which had only just proclaimed the pope infallible in matters of faith and morals, was itself a victim of the invasion and never reassembled. Though infallibility was not a political concept, some of Pius's critics thought its proclamation was meant to bolster his moral authority as the Vicar of Christ, perhaps discouraging Italian nationalists from attacking the Pope's own Rome. In reality it was merely a doctrinal issue, not a political one. Pope Pius, stripped of his temporal power retreated into the Vatican Palace and declared himself the "prisoner in the Vatican", while the King of Piedmont, now proclaimed King of Italy, was installed in the former papal residence, the Quirinal Palace.
Pius, initially a liberal, by the end of his reign saw the world in apocalyptic terms; the attack on the symbols of God (thrones, the papacy, the Church), the triumph of godless ideas (rights of citizens, freedom of those whom he believed were in error to worship and have their "wrong" beliefs accepted), etc. Pius by the end was a believer in the world of throne and altar that had been undermined through the French Revolution. In his view, God's will for government, his anointed kings were being swept away, as power moved to the unanointed masses. In 1878 Pius died, broken by a world he could not understand and which he believed had left god to one side for the world of he 'mob'. It was an analysis increasingly abandoned by most leaders in Europe and the Americas.
Leo XIII
Pope Leo XIII, seeing that popular democracy seemed to be on the ascendant, tried a new and somewhat more sophisticated approach to political questions than his predecessor Pius IX.
On May 15, 1891, Leo XIII issued an encyclical on political issues known as Rerum Novarum (Latin: "About New Things"). This addressed politics as it had been transformed by the Industrial Revolution and other changes in society that had occurred during the nineteenth century. The document criticised capitalism, complaining of the exploitation of the masses in industry. However, it also sharply criticized the socialist's concept of class struggle, and their proposed solution to eliminate private property. It called for strong governments to undertake a mission to protect their people from exploitation, and asked Roman Catholics to apply principles of social justice in their own lives.
This document was rightly seen as a profound change in the thinking of the Holy See about political matters. It drew on the economic thought of St Thomas Aquinas, whose "just price" theory taught that prices in a marketplace ought not to be allowed to fluctuate on account of temporary shortages or gluts.
Seeking to find some principle to replace the threatening Marxist doctrine of class struggle, Rerum Novarum urged social solidarity between the upper and lower classes, and endorsed nationalism as a way of preserving traditional morality, customs, and folkways. In doing so, Rerum Novarum proposed a kind of corporatism, the organisation of political societies along industrial lines that resembled mediaeval guilds. Under corporatism, your place in society would be determined by the ethnic, work, and social groups you were born into or joined. A one-person, one-vote democracy was rejected in favour of representation by interest groups. A strong government was required to serve as the arbiter among competing factions. Forty years later, the corporatist tendencies of Rerum Novarum were underscored by Pope Pius XI's May 25, 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo Anno ("In the Fortieth Year"), which restated the hostility of Rerum Novarum to both unbridled competition and class struggle.
Pius X - back to 'Throne and Altar'
Pope Pius X clashed with the anti-clericalism of France's Third Republic which abolished religious orders and introduced a complete separation of church and state.
The Church and the Twentieth Century
Pius XI and the Roman Question
\nPius XI - autocratic. Determination to solve the Roman Question. Lateran Treaty
Fascism
Some have contended that the Roman Catholic Church tainted itself an uncritical and even friendly relationship with Fascism and Nazism. Since the end of World War II, these accusations have been hurled at the Roman Church in various degrees of plausibility and quality, by works ranging from Rolf Hochhuth's play The Deputy to John Cornwell's book Hitler's Pope. Pope Pius XII is usually cast as the villain in this view of history, which Roman Catholic apologists typically seek to discredit. To understand the background of these allegations, it is necessary to go back in time at least to the French Revolution.
Spain
Association with monarchists, Carlism, Basque nationalism. Opus Dei.
Italy
In 1924, Pope Pius XI forbade the Catholic Popular Party to work with the Socialist Party against Mussolini. He later dissolved the party.
Fear of communism, and a certain disdain for liberal democracy, made explicit in such Papal documents as Quanta Cura and the Syllabus of Errors, may have contributed to the perception that the Church supported fascism. By the Lateran Treaties, Mussolini granted Pope Pius XI the crown of Vatican City as a nation to rule, made Roman Catholicism the state church of Italy, and paid the Pope compensation for the loss of the Papal States. This gave rise to the impression that Mussolini had paid off the Pope not to oppose his coup. The relationship to Mussolini's government deteriorated drastically in the following years. As a consequence in 1931 Pius issued the encyclical Non Abbiamo Bisogno [1].
Germany
In 1930 Pope Pius XI persuaded the Catholic Centre Party to reject cooperation with the Social Democratic Party against the Nazis. The Vatican signed a Concordat with Hitler in 1933 and had the Centre Party support the Enabling Act that gave Hitler dictatorial powers.
Hitler said, "The concordat gave Germany an opportunity and created a sense of trust that was particularly significant in the developing struggle against international Jewry," and that it "imposed a moral duty on Catholics to obey the Nazi rulers."
In many parts of the country Catholics opposed Hitler, however in largely Catholic Bavaria the Catholic BVP favoured the Nazis. However many clergy opposed the Nazis and were arrested. In 1937 Pius XI condemned in one of his last encyclical - Mit Brennender Sorge [1]- the Nazi ideology of racism.
Pius XI's posthumous encyclical on nazism
Pius XII - silence, diplomacy. Jewish escape networks. Allegations. Scholars' review of archives.
France
Action Française (AF), campaigned for the return of the monarchy and for aggressive action against Jews as well as a corporatist system. It was supported by a strong section of the clerical hiearchy, eleven out of seventeen cardinals and bishops.
Slovakia
During World War II, Jozef Tiso, a Roman Catholic monsigneur, became the Nazi quisling in Slovakia. Tiso was head of state and the security forces, as well as the leader of the paramilitary Hlinka Guard, which wore the Catholic Episcopal cross on its armbands. The Catholic clergy was represented at all levels of the regime and its corporatist were based on papal encyclicals.
Croatia
Mike Budak, the Minister of Religion of Independent State of Croatia, said on July 22, 1941:
"The Ustashi movement is based on the Catholic Religion. For the minorities, Serbs, Jews and Gypsies, we have three million bullets. A part of these minorities has already been eliminated and many are waiting to be killed. Some will be sent to Serbia and the rest will be forced to change their religion to Catholicism. Our new Croatia will therefore be free of all heretics, becoming purely Catholic for the future years."
Controversy surrounds the depths of the involvement of the Roman Catholic clergy with the Ustaše, a Croatian Fascist movement in the former Yugoslavia. According to Branko Bokun, a Roman Catholic priest made the following remarks on June 13, 1941:
"Brethren, up to now we have worked for the Holy Roman Apostolic Church with the cross and the missal. Now the moment has come to work with a knife in one hand and a gun in the other. The more Serbs and Jews you succeed in eliminating, the more you will be raised in esteem in the heart of the Roman Catholic Church"
The issue of clerical fascism in wartime Croatia is further discussed in the article Involvement of Croatian Catholic clergy with the Ustasa regime.
Elsewhere in Europe
The association of Roman Catholicism, sometimes in the form of the hierarchial church, sometimes in the form of lay catholic organisations acting independently of the hierarchy produced links to dictatorial governments in various states.
- The Roman Catholic Church supported the dictator António de Oliveira Salazar in Portugal;
- In Austria, Engelbert Dollfuss turned a Roman Catholic political party into the single party of a one-party state. In rural Austria the Catholic Christian Social Party collaborated with the Heimwehr militia and helped bring Dollfuss to power in 1932. In June 1934, he produced his authoritarian constitution which stated "We shall establish a state on the basis of a Christian weltanschaung". The Pope described Dolfuss as a "Christian, giant-hearted man ... who rules Austria so well, so resolutely and in such a Christian manner. His actions are witness to Catholic visions and convictions. The Austrian people, Our beloved Austria, now has the government it deserves".
- In Poland, Józef Pilsudski founded a military style government that incorporated Catholic corporatism into its ideology.
- The Belgian Fascist movement Rexism arose out of a conservative Catholic movement and its publications. The full names of the Rexists was Christus Rex or "Christ the King"
See also: clerical fascism
The Second Vatican Council
endorsement of democracy, freedom of assembly, religion, concept of 'people of God'
Liberation Theology
Association between marxism and catholicism. Allegations of Ronald Reagan,
Pope John Paul II, Cardinal Lorschider.
FSLN
The Church and Central and South America
Jean Bertrand Aristide
The church establishment and regimes
allegations of official church support for Augusto Pinochet - Church role in coup against Allende.
Argentina. Nuncios' role.
The radical church and regimes
Local church opposition to Marcos, Pinochet, Smith, Mugabe, Apartheid South Africa, the Indonesian occupation of East Timor.
Communism
The Eastern Bloc
The Catholic churches of Communist China
\nChinese Catholic Patriotic Association
Text being edited \nFor strategic reasons, it was desirable for the (essentially agnostic) fascist movements of
Mussolini in
Italy and
Hitler in
Germany to avoid
en masse alienation of Catholics. Some critics have alleged that
Pope Pius XII was complicit with the rise of fascism. While such claims are questionable (particularly with regards to
Nazism?), the Catholic leadership certainly chose quiet, "
neutral" resistance over an explicit ideological struggle with fascism.
Fear of
communism, and a certain disdain for
liberal democracy, made explicit in such Papal documents as
Quanta Cura and the
Syllabus of Errors, may have contributed to this perception. By the
Lateran Treaties, Mussolini granted
Pope Pius XI the crown of
Vatican City as a nation to rule, made Roman Catholicism the
state church of
Italy, and paid the Pope compensation for the loss of the
Papal States. This gave rise to the impression that Mussolini had paid off the Pope not to oppose his
coup.
