Los antecedentes y presupuestos de la encíclica Quas Primas
I. Building the Social Kingship of Christ:
A Constant Theme From the Beginning of Catholic History
Being invited to talk about the antecedents and presuppositions for Pius XI’s encyclical Quas primas is similar to being given a key to enter the vault of a well-funded bank, since the treasures sought lie visible seemingly everywhere, with the only problem the embarrass de choix. That being the case, I see my task here as taking a two-fold form.
On the one hand, I think it necessary to open up the jewel box to demonstrate the omnipresence of the theme of Christ as King throughout the entire history of the Church. There was, however, one significant historical gap in this otherwise abundant testimonial to Christ’s regality that came in the 1700s, a gap that was filled once again by intellectual and activist heroes of the Faith in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to follow. Given the fact that this loss and recovery provide the immediate background to the encyclical in question, a more extensive explanation of what they entailed is of even greater importance to understanding Quas primas than the perennial testimony. Unfortunately, it also is of great help in understanding the renewed and even more thorough dethronement of Christ the King that has taken place since the 1960s.
Let us begin our more concise review of the broad historical evidence by noting that despite the fact that Catholic Christians rather swiftly dispensed with their early millenarian temptations, they nevertheless became ever more conscious of the practical work to which they were called in dealing with the world around them. Even if they did not necessarily use the precise terminology with which we are more familiar in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Apologists already realized that they had to bring their unruly earthly home under the reign of Christ their King, insisting that the Roman Empire could only survive if they did so. 1
St. Jerome, when returning to Rome for a visit after an absence of many years, was stunned by how much had been done by believers triumphantly taking possession of the Eternal City’s public “spaces” for their King, even before the victory of orthodoxy against the Arians in the First Council of Constantinople of 381. But this was inevitable, as St. John Chrysostom indicates, because “it is for the whole earth that we are legislating, and it is a polis that we are founding”.2 St. Augustine, also an enemy of millenarianism, argued that the “sixth age of the world”, which he was certain would last until the coming of the Antichrist and the last days, was one in which all Christians would be called upon to do battle to subdue the earth for the cause of their Master.3 He also underlined the need for them to do so with a vigorous pilgrim spirit, one that recognized that Rome herself, given the barbarian invasions, might be replaced by other ruling secular authorities.
These points were developed even more thoroughly by St. Isidore of Seville (c. 560-636) at the time of the conversion of the Visigothic rulers to Roman Catholicism from Arianism---a time that coincided with the beginnings of the long-term tampering with the decisions of the Council of Chalcedon in order to effect a reconciliation with Monophysites undertaken by the emperors in Constantinople. Building on this dalliance with heresy, Isidore taught the newly Catholic Kings of Spain that Augustine’s “sixth age of struggle” was one in which their meritorious efforts to build the Regnum Christi would be blessed by the Triune God and perhaps serve as a model for others as well. 4
And a model they indeed became. Yes, the Moslem Conquest beginning in 711 reduced the power of the Visigothic Kingdom to a small area in the northwestern part of the peninsula. Nevertheless, Isidore’s writings, along with those of Spanish exiles of great intellectual and missionary dedication, helped in developing the Carolingian vision of the construction of a new Catholic Rome under Frankish auspices. The Spanish impact was matched by the work of other emigrés reflecting that union of Irish and Benedictine monastic practices---the former also shaped by Iberian influences---forged in Britain. Ideas coming from Pseudo Dionysius the Areopagite (5th-6th centuries) regarding what a new expression of the Regnum Christi would mean also lay behind the whole of the Carolingian socio-political experiment, along with the literary “Renaissance” connected with it. The enthusiasm for the future that was thereby released reached its peak in the early years of Charlemagne’s successor, Louis the Pious (814-840).5
II. “When Values Descended Upon the Earth”
(900s-1200s)
Unfortunately, the Frankish attempt to revive a Catholic Roman Empire was already clearly weakening as Louis’ reign itself went along. This did not end the Catholic desire to work for the reign of Christ the King. Meditation on the flaws of the Carolingian approach led those who came to dominate the next stage in the movement to assert Christ’s regal authority to create what the medievalist Jacques Le Goff has called an era “when values descended upon the earth”.6 The groundwork for such a magnificent undertaking was being laid in Benedictine monastic circles in the 900s, and involved the aid of a number of political authorities of both local and more continental significance.7
Nevertheless, it is best to look to Pope Innocent III (1198-1216) for a summary of its spirit and scope at the peak of its success.8 One of that pontiff’s works, The Fourfold Character of Marriage, expresses the obvious concern for the transformation of all things under the Kingship of Christ, but, once again, without utilizing that exact term. For Innocent, the marriage of man and wife is a sacramental tool raising the individual to eternal life with God. It is so, however, only because God is married to the just soul due to a third union, the marriage of the Logos with human nature itself. That union goes about its work through the last of the four marriages, the marrying of Christ to His Church. Through all these four marriages the manifold forms of the beauty of God’s natural Creation are accepted and then corrected of their destructive sinful use, supernaturally transformed and exalted in their character and effect.
The monks of Cluny had taught their charges that they must cultivate a military spirit that would be pleasing to God rather than one damning to its practitioners. This turned soldiers into “armed pilgrims”, first by protecting others on route to the shrines of Compostella and the Holy Land. Then, after the appeal for help from the Roman Emperor in Constantinople, when they “took up their Cross” to aid in the just war of re-conquest of lands that had been stolen from Christendom by the Moslems, they became not just armed pilgrims but “Crusaders”.9 Cluny was, however, concerned for the sanctification of everyone; hence, its promotion of the Feast of All Saints, indicating that “transformation in Christ” was not a project for only small groups of men and women, but, rather, for all of the faithful.
Innocent, who had no doubt that believers were still living in St. Augustine’s Sixth Age of pilgrim struggle, took extremely seriously his special responsibility as “Vicar of Christ” to guide all potential saints to this universal goal. He built upon the work of the monks of Cluny to indicate what “crusading” means, in practice, for all believers. He called all Catholics to a crusading spirit through the militant correction and transformation in Christ of each of their different vocations in life, seeing in this “Internal Crusading” a purification that could bring God’s blessing upon all of Christendom, allowing it to deal with failures in the “External Crusades” as well.
One of Innocent’s teachers at the budding University of Paris was a scholar named Peter Cantor (d. 1197), who underscored the importance of developing specific pastoral strategies appropriately proportioned to each different human activity. It was the pope’s taking of Peter’s teaching to heart that caused him to call the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, the most important medieval aid to the practical work of organizing Catholic sacramental and pastoral life; a gathering that provided the best possible ecclesiastical framework for “marrying” individuals and the particular societies in which they lived to God through His Holy Church.
It was also Cantor who awakened Innocent to the need to enhance the stature of the Universities of Paris and Bologna, mobilizing their intellectual assistance in innovative pastoral endeavors. Peter’s hand may also be seen in Innocent’s encouragement of the many projects of the daring new Franciscan and Dominican mendicant orders, which became internal crusaders for the projects of the Holy See throughout Europe. The pope’s concern for an appropriate pastoral strategy for each and every problem was evident not just in matters involving daily political, social, and economic life in general, but in Innocent’s own particular dedication to marriage questions as well. His intervention here extended from personal pastoral advice to troubled regal couples to precise, practical suggestions for how to deal even with the redemption of prostitutes.
III. Medieval Problems in Building the Regnum Christi
Recognition of the need for militant, crusading struggle indicates the awareness of the presence of constant danger to the attainment of the common and the individual good, all of it emerging from the never-ending problem of human frailty and sin. Warnings regarding failures in going about the good work for achieving the Regnum Christi; failures reflected in human misjudgment regarding the proper hierarchy of supernatural and natural values or a narrow-minded restriction to a limited number of favored tools upon which pastoral field work must move forward were issued even in the midst of the flowering of the era “when values descended upon the earth”.
John of Salisbury (c. 1115-1180), the Bishop of Chartres, was troubled by the obstacles emerging from the growing influence in authoritative decision-making processes of what he already labeled as “naturalism”--- with the bourgeoisie, a group whose financial concerns required a spiritual transformation perhaps greater and more thorough going than that of any other, among its most effective agents. Some of the representatives of the first stage of the reform movement felt that its second wave, most associated with Pope Gregory VII (1076-1085) and its profound exaltation of papal authority, was headed down a potentially dangerous pathway. St. Bernard (1090-1153), in a letter known as the De Consideratione put his former pupil, now become Pope Eugenius III (1145-1153), on guard against Rome’s particular temptations, such as that of placing too great a reliance on the self-sufficiency of the papal administrative and legal apparatus needed for the practical “descent of values upon the earth”.10
One could, in fact, justifiably argue that Rome’s obsession with getting things “just right” on the earthly political level, did indeed play a central role in creating not just skepticism about the supernatural value of working for the Kingship of Christ, but outright rejection of the entire vision. That rejection was encouraged in many different ways: in the serious abandonment of work for improvement of this world to be found in the teachings of gnostic sects and a revived millenarianism; the critiques of papal claims by the legal advisors of emperors and kings; the still more thorough theological and philosophical assault offered by of men such as William of Ockham (c. 1286—1347/1349) and Marsilius of Padua (c. 1280—c.1343); and the open naturalism of some of the more obsessive Renaissance Humanists.11 Exaggerations of papal authority and curial failings in general certainly lay at the center of the cardinals’ report commissioned in 1537 by Pope Paul III (1534-1549) on the causes of the Protestant Revolt.12
IV. From Renewed Catholic Effort to Reformed Catholic Neglect
Thankfully, it can readily be asserted that the whole spirit of the Catholic Reformation, which reinvigorated the neglected but never entirely abandoned effort to build the Regnum Christi worked to put the Church’s priorities with respect to the proper hierarchy of values and her understanding of the fullness of the tools needed to make her goals effective into focus once again.13 That spirit was one that judged success in a specific vocation with reference to what was first and foremost spiritually demanded by Christ; not what Roman bureaucrats and legalists considered to be practically necessary for the protection of papal prerogatives and standard operating procedures. Moreover, its work for the transformation of all things in Christ was now, for the first time in Church History, given the opportunity to expand the globe over.
Unfortunately, despite this real reinvigoration, the Tridentine Reform gradually lost its vigor. As the eighteenth century moved forward, the Catholic world backed farther and farther away from emphasizing the supernatural influence over the natural world needed to sustain a serious commitment to the idea of the Kingship of Christ. A conglomerate of different and often contradictory forces came to support a “Reformed Catholicism” that viewed a vision of life built upon a focus aimed upwards to the supernatural as dangerous at best and downright sacrilegious in its pretensions at worst. And this continued to make reference to the arguments of all of the earlier medieval opponents of the Kingship of Christ. 14
Protestant Pietist or Moderate Enlightenment Newtonian and physico-theological arguments, both urging the need to shun doctrinal concerns as productive of a divisive Christian spirit that actually aided advance of atheism, greatly influenced the growth of Reformed Catholicism. This also came to share the Pietist and phyisco-theological claim that the defense of Christianity should rest upon its “obvious”, “common sense filled”, and “unchangeable” moral and practical teachings alone; that scientific observation of nature and experimentation with its function more clearly proved the existence of the Creator God than anything else. Such an approach was said to provide an irrefutable technological progress that enabled the pious to do the work of Christian charity pleasing to God with an effectiveness that those engaged in doctrinal warfare thwarted.
Visible and influential in Rome from the late 1600's onwards, Reformed Catholicism was certainly prevalent in the Eternal City by the reign of Pope Benedict XIV (1740-1758). Historians also count him as being in its ranks, along with numerous other Princes of the Church, heads of religious orders, and clerical scholars, with Jesuits also prominent among them. It would not be far off the mark to say that the Papacy itself seemed to be embarrassed at Catholic "inadequacy" as a spiritual force, and was calling out for help from more serious students of nature to remedy this scandal.
Meanwhile, Jansenists, whose heavy emphasis upon human sinfulness made them innately hostile to the thought that anything good could be accomplished with a scientific development of fallen nature, inevitably promoted a kind of “Catholic naturalism” of their own. They mercilessly mocked all “Tridentine” and “Baroque” attempts to sacralize the wretched created world as nothing other than hypocritical masquerades for sinful group and personal self-interest. To make matters still worse, Catholic dynasties, licking their wounds due to the successful victories of Protestant armies whose states had indeed abandoned doctrinal disputes and utilized “practical” science to focus their attention primarily on building a more powerful military, also digested all of these naturalizing developments. They began seriously to secularize the political and social order half a century before the outbreak of the French Revolution.15
V. 19th Century Catholics and the Full Consequences of the Incarnation
All of this changed drastically in the nineteenth century, with what one might call the rediscovery of the obvious: the essential Christo-centric foundation of the Catholic Church and the consequences of the Incarnation for every aspect of life and every individual, both on the natural as well as on the supernatural plane. The centers of re-discovery were manifold--German, Italian, French for the most part, but with a good deal of Spanish influence as well, and aided in the spread of its message through the work of enthusiastic British fellow-travelers. They included jointly lay and clerical circles of believers, religious confraternities, orders restored after the devastation of the Revolution, university faculties, and journals and newspapers that seemed to spring up everywhere in the course of the 1800s: all of them eager to restore a supernaturally-inspired Catholic society on the natural level; a society under the “Kingship of Christ”, whose actual term now came more and more into use.
Anyone wishing to grasp the character of this school of thought as it developed should examine the pages of Der Katholik, the Historisch-Politische Blätter, and Archiv für Katholisches Kirchenrecht in the German world; La Civiltà Cattolica in Italy and L’Univers/Le Monde in France—and the Dublin Review in the United Kingdom. The early spiritual and political stimulus for the rediscovery was given by Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821), the Abbe Félicité de la Mennais (1782-1854), Fr. Johann Adam Möhler (1796-1838), and also to a number of German Romantic converts to Catholicism. To these, one must add the contribution of the Spaniard, Donoso Cortes (1809-1853), whose impact was felt as the movement took full flight after 1848. All of these sources tell us much not just about the beginnings of Catholic Action seeking the Kingship of Christ, but also the deep problems that almost immediately divided some of the pioneers of the movement---who brought radical revolutionary themes into the life of the Church or maintained already existing though more moderate ones---from the mainline of the development in question.16
Many of the devotional, liturgical, and neo-scholastic aspects of this era of rediscovery, important as they are to the current topic, cannot be examined in any detail here. What concerns us most are the central theological and spiritual foundations of the era, along with the practical developments promoted by it. These begin with the basic insistence upon the impossibility of understanding anything natural or seeking effective action in the natural order without reference both to nature’s future supernatural destiny as well as the supernatural life that could be said naturally to be surging through it now as a consequence of the Incarnation.
The work of the editors of La Civiltà Cattolica and of Cardinal Louis Pie (1815-1880), Bishop of Poitiers, is extremely informative in this regard. Try as modern man might, Pie argued at Lourdes in 1876, he could never escape the fact that he lived in a world created and redeemed at the behest of a supernatural will. “The supernatural is finished”, he quoted nineteenth century man as gloating. “Well, look here, then! The supernatural pours out, overflows, sweats from the sand and from the rock, spurts out from the source, and rolls along on the long folds of the living waves of a river of prayers, of chants and of light”. Similarly, the reality of the supernatural, its impact, its demands, and the folly of denying it, could be seen in politics, economics, and every other aspect of human life. The enemy of the supernatural, Cardinal Pie noted, thought that he was the friend of nature; instead he was actually nature’s most aggressive enemy, and an ignorant one to boot.17
Central to this theme of natural-supernatural interaction was the role of the Church as Christ continued in time. For those engaged in the rediscovery, the Church was Jesus in action on earth today, possessing a spiritual significance far surpassing anything obviously natural, administrative, and legalistic in her structure. Discussion of the Church in this context enabled the “School of Rediscovery” to place the functions of pope, bishop, and priest in a different light than a purely juridical treatment of their responsibilities would allow; to stress their character as “other-Christs” active in the world. Thinkers underlined the same theme in explaining every other “fleshly” aspect of the Church’s activity, from the most sacramental to the most mundane. A correct understanding of the Church as Christ-continued, as the Civiltà, explained, would so transform one’s appreciation of her that “the very carriages of the cardinals would change their appearance in your eyes”. The Church was the chief manifestation of the supernatural penetration of the natural world and the chief instrument for awakening consciousness of the practical meaning of that penetration.18
Such a concept, while fed from many sources, was especially nourished by the ideas of Johann Adam Möhler (1796 –1838) of the University of Tübingen, whose works Giovanni Perrone (1794-1876), professor at the Gregorian in Rome from 1824-1863, made known to many of his influential students: Carlo Passaglia (1812-1887), Clemens Schrader (1820-1875), and Johannes Baptist Franzelin (1816-1886). Perrone was also a channel of Möhler’s ecclesiology to the Jesuit editors of La Civiltà Cattolica: Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio (1793-1862), Matteo Liberatore (1810-1892), and Carlo Maria Curci (1809-1891). Year after year, these Jesuits churned out articles dealing with the consequences of the concepts of natural-supernatural interaction and of the Church as Christ-continued for all aspects of life. ”Official” acceptance of the entire argument took many decades. Pius X’s adoption of the motto “to transform all things in Christ” and the encyclical letter of Pope Pius XII on the subject of the Mystical Body in 1943 clearly illustrated its ultimate impact.19
Intimately connected with the doctrine of the interaction of nature and the supernatural was that of a spirituality emphasizing the ineffable personal friendship offered man by God, and the ascent to the divine to which every individual was invited. On a theoretical level, such a theme entailed emphasis upon the concept of individual divinization in Christ. This, again, was a favorite topic of the editors of the Civiltà, who persistently argued that membership in the Church meant participation in the life of the God-Man, and hence in every conceivable perfection, human freedom and human personality thereby being raised to heights undreamed of by any rationalist.20 On a popular level, the theme of friendship and closeness to God, attained through humble union with the God-Man, brought with it a victory for the anti-Jansenist moral theology of Alphonsus Liguori (1696-1787), which recognized the crucial importance of earthly human labor in the path to salvation. Brunone Lanteri (1759-1830), inspirer of the lay/clerical circles called amicizie cattoliche in Italy, Cardinal Thomas Marie Gousset (1792-1866), Archbishop of Rheims, in his Justification de la théologie du bienheureux A.M. de Liguori of 1832, in France, and the Redemptorists everywhere all waged vigorous combat for the victory of Liguorian thought. Its triumphant march was accompanied by a revivification and expansion of a variety of devotions providing flesh and blood manifestations of spiritual realities active naturally that were loathed by Jansenist and Enlightened Catholics of the previous era.
Nothing illustrated the divinization of a part of nature through incorporation into the life of a Divine Person better than devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. This devotion, hated by the Jansenists perhaps more than any other, enjoyed enormous popularity wherever the Rediscovery School gained influence. One can follow its recovery, from strength to strength, in the fortunes of the Apostolate of Prayer, begun in 1844, in the pages of The Sacred Heart Messenger (1861), in the ceremony of the consecration of the world to the Sacred Heart in 1875, and in Leo XIII’s encyclical letter, Annum sacrum, of May 25, 1899. Proponents of the movement also similarly encouraged a very anti-Jansenist devotion to the saints, with the exaltation of Marian practices heading the list. The cults of the Sacred Heart of Mary, of Mary as Mediatrix, of the Miraculous Medal, of Our Lady of La Salette (1846) and of Lourdes (1858), along with Leo XIII’s fifteen encyclicals on the Rosary and the publication of the previously ignored works of Louis Grignion de Montfort (1673-1716), all testify to the importance Marian devotion attained in the course of the century.21
VI. Individual Transformation in Christ Requires Catholic Action to Build His Social Kingdom to Achieve its Work
I have spent time dwelling upon the theological, spiritual, and also devotional foundations of those rediscovering the fullness of the Catholic message because these are crucial to our understanding of their belief that these all enshrine a powerful call to believers to undertake “missionary work” on the political and social level. Thinkers were convinced that they also had a practical activist message---in fact, the most practical of all---whose neglect could only result in disaster. That disaster was twofold: real disaster for all natural social and individual life, which wandered aimlessly to a nihilistic meaninglessness without it; and potential disaster for the supernatural redemption of the faithful, who had a right to all of the help that they could get on the earthly plane through the proper functioning of temporal institutions and forces. In other words, Catholic dogma, spirituality, and devotional life had a jointly natural and supernatural goal that could only be fulfilled if Christ were made the King of society at large through the work of individuals transforming themselves with the aid of that same society as well.
An early witness to this conviction can be seen in the Olympe Philippe Gerbet’s (1798-1864) book, Considérations sur le dogme générateur de la foi catholique (1829). Later ones appear in the writings of Juan Donoso Cortes and of the editors of La Civiltà Cattolica. The sense of urgency and drama felt by all of them is well depicted in one major article of that Roman Jesuit journal: “O dio re colla libertà, o l’uomo re colla forza”. Catholics had to transform the world in Christ, or the world would be handed over to the perverted free will of libertine tyrants to destroy as they pleased, and sooner rather than later.22
Two consequences flowed from this sense of mission. One was that, given the fundamentally political and social activity involved in “transforming the world in Christ”, the laity had to be looked to as the Church’s chief militants in daily Catholic Action bringing society under His Kingship. The call to arms of the laity was a nineteenth century mobilization, and the proponents of the Rediscovery School were very much the recruiting sergeants.
A second consequence was the great care with which things modern had to be separated from the concept of modernity, which was based upon a rejection of either the reality of the supernatural in and of itself or as an active element in natural life. Modernity meant a desire to barricade oneself in nature alone--naturalism; and naturalism meant the destruction of the human personality and all of the perfections offered to civilization by the God who created it and knew what it needed for its own good. Hence, the enthusiastic defense of proposition number 80 of Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors (1864), which denounced that reconciliation of the Roman Pontiff with “liberalism, progress, and modern civilization” which signified the embrace of slavery to self-deluding will and the most technologically-advanced barbarism.23
A laity armed with knowledge and grace and devotional vigor was therefore called to a two-pronged offensive-defensive “Catholic Action”. France and Belgium played a crucial role in the birth of Catholic Action, starting with the Abbé de la Mennais' Congregation of St. Peter and the Belgian Catholic Union in the 1820's. Countless other clerical and lay societies were added as time went along. Germany eventually became even more important in this organizational regard, beginning its pugnacious work with the transformation of instances of governmental repression into major causes célèbres.24
VII. Practical Problems in the Building of Christ’s Social Kingship
Many of those working in the development of Catholic Action were ready to allow it a wide scope for tactical experimentation in pursuit of victory, while urging retreat into Catholic fortresses should success be denied. The key was always to keep one’s focus on Christ and use only Catholic weapons in battle. As Louis Veuillot, the editor of L’Univers/Le Monde was later to reiterate: “all borrowed armor chokes us”.25 Unfortunately, the work of finding those weapons and mobilizing all of them in a world just as filled with sinful temptations, as well as human narrow-mindedness and cowardice, was to prove just as difficult as in the time of Pope Innocent III.
For one thing, political outspokenness evoked outrage among those who were used to seeing Catholics look for their protection to the state authorities, either alone or through their negotiation with the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Activists quickly began to believe that the legitimist monarchies of the Restoration were unwilling to do the cause of Catholic liberty any discernible good. Moreover, they were frequently distressed at the inaction of local episcopacies, with many bishops appearing to be nothing more than bureaucratic functionaries eager to keep the Church in a narrow sacramental, liturgical, devotional space preventing it from rocking the boat politically and socially. But two ways out of this dilemma offered themselves.
Although intimations of an escape route can be found in some French apologists even before 1789, it was Joseph de Maistre who indicated that the basic unity of the diverse revolutionary elements in their common naturalism and drive for secularization required a strengthening of the mobilization of all Catholics opposing them underneath the central authority of the Church: that of the Papacy. Theological hopes for what this could achieve were enhanced by practical admiration for the stubborn resistance offered to revolutionary and Napoleonic depredations by Pius VI and Pius VII. A new Ultramontanist Movement was the consequence. Stirred still more by the Abbé de Lamennais and other clerics angered at episcopal inaction or outright betrayal of the cause, and then by Romantic and Protestant converts to Catholicism, one had to await the reign of Pius IX (1846-1878) before its arrival at the center of the papal stage. Vatican Council (1870) and the proclamation of the dogma of papal infallibility demonstrated its victorious progress most dramatically.26
Activists saw a second escape route as involving a breaking free of a slavish alliance with legitimist monarchies and a seeking of friendship with groups promising the creation of free, responsive institutions that might offer opportunities for a salutary Catholic Action. An opportunity to form just such an alliance with liberals was offered through the 1830 Revolution in Belgium. This was followed by the contemplation of possible ententes cordiales with a variety of liberal, democratic, and nationalist forces in Italy, France, and Germany, culminating in the heady hopes engendered by the Revolutions of 1848. And certainly the movement to promote the formation of properly motivated Catholic associations, lay and clerical, did gain enormous further steam in many of those nations adopting liberal or democratic political institutions in the years immediately following 1848.27
But all of this brought with it new difficulties, beginning with Lamennais’ presumption that the Papacy would support him in his insistence that work of transformation of all things in Christ actually demanded a separation of Church and State and a trust that the support of the believing masses provided the only sure foundation for effective Catholic Action. He ultimately espoused a Rousseau-like association of enthusiastic “feeling” with orthodox Faith, and the need to rely on the stimulation of prophetic voices---such as his own---to stir the faithful on to “feel properly”. This led not only to the condemnation of his approach and his own person, but also to the development of a “democratic Catholicism” with a growing militant socialist tinge seeing the Savior as the “Christ of the Barricades”. 28
Unfortunately, however, the proponents of liberal constitutional government also proved to be false friends. The "freedom" that they were willing to grant to Catholics to defend their "rights" turned out to have an Enlightenment-shaped definition involving certain conditions which were impossible for the faithful both to accept and to fulfill. Activists began to realize that liberal constitutionalism was designed to ensure the victory of an anti-Catholic faction using the word "freedom" to whitewash and justify its continuation of an even more effective state repression in new, hypocritical ways.
Crises were already visible in the liberal governments functioning in France and Belgium in the 1830's and 1840's. These multiplied and intensified throughout Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century, affecting Italy, the German countries, the Netherlands, and then Belgium and France anew. Sometimes they focused on a single issue, especially that of education. Very frequently, however, the crisis was a universal one, striking not only at education but at the existence of the religious orders engaged in it, the ability of Church authorities to control their dioceses and parishes, the general freedom of association, and the very right of individual Catholics to speak out on any political matter whatsoever: in short, to use the German term, due to a full-scale Kulturkampf or "culture war". 29
Catholic reaction to such measures was often very impressive. Lay Catholics were particularly incensed over school issues, which directly touched the average family. They saw the "School Wars" that liberals fomented as the first step towards the complete destruction of the Church. If secularists succeeded in destroying Catholic education, one activist noted, "the church will then be a building with four walls, whose interior, as the liberals count on, will become emptier with every decade". “They are not going to have it, the beautiful souls of children", Flemish peasants sang.”30 The generosity and ardor of the Catholics surpassed everything imaginable", one observer of the Belgian scene reported. "Almost every Catholic meeting which I attended at that time", a witness of Austrian passion noted, "was a fiery furnace for the souls, from which a torrent of sparks and flames of holy enthusiasm was generated; a powerful forge, in which the armaments were hardened for a battle for the Cross which now threatened from all sides".31
Some more militant teaching hierarchies called upon the laity to fight the good fight in these battles. Thus, Belgian prelates summoned the laity to three seminal organizing congresses in Mâlines in 1863, 1864, and 1867, culminating in the formation of a Fédération des cercles catholiques in 1868. After collective appeals for repeal of nefarious educational laws were ignored, the organized hierarchy and laity moved on to stronger action--teachers by resigning their positions in public schools, parents by refusing to send their children to them, and priests by denying the sacraments to anyone who failed to toe the designated line. A private Catholic school system was planned, and a campaign launched to pay for it. By 1880, this network was in place and had managed to garner the majority of Belgian students. Its creation provoked still more anticlerical legislation. Committees of resistance of all kinds were then formed, with the Catholic press publicizing a petition signed by 317,000 against the repressive educational legislation.
After similar episcopal action, Dutch Catholics also focused on the building up of a primary school network. One ought to note that their organizational vigor was matched, if not surpassed, by pious Calvinists. Abraham Kuyper's league against school reform, and his newspaper, De Standaard, joined with Catholics in a massive petition movement demanding repeal of the Netherland's detested 1878 decrees on secular education. As Kuyper argued, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!” At a time when the entire Dutch electorate was limited to around 100,000 voters, Kuyper's petition collected 305,000 signatures; its Catholic counterpart, an additional 164,000 names. 32
Popular reaction to the cultural wars in Austria came with demonstrations in favor of the Venerable Bishop Franz Rudigier (1811-1884) of Linz, imprisoned in 1869 for his vociferous opposition to the changes of the newly liberal government of the Empire. Various lay organizations came into being at this moment, with Karl von Vogelsang's (1818-1890) newspaper, Das Vaterland, drawing up a complex battle strategy for the future, economically, socially, and politically.
Perhaps most impressive was the organizational fever initially excited by the Kulturkampf in the German Empire, leading to the formation of the Katholische Frauenbund, Katholische Mütterverein, Katholische Kaufmännische Vereinigung, and a large number of youth, student, and teacher groups. Growth in the Catholic Press was enormous, the Kölnische Volkszeitung and the Berlin Germania being the giants of the media. Most famous of all the associations formed after 1870 was the Volksverein für das Katholische Deutschland (1890), whose stronghold was the Rhineland, and whose secretaries, Franz Hitze (1851-1921) and August Pieper (1857-1946), presided over a vast membership undertaking all manner of tasks on behalf of the Catholic population.
VIII. “Conservatives”, Catholic Parties, and Many New Difficulties
Catholic associations seeking not just to overturn anticlerical legislation but also to replace it with Church-friendly laws often first approached existing "conservative parties" to serve as their agents. Such parties would be offered what were in essence contracts. The network of active Catholic associations would do much of the propaganda and legwork for the election of conservative deputies to parliament, with the proviso that these, when winning office, would follow Catholic bidding on state matters touching upon religion.
Results rarely matched expectations. Conservatives were too inclined to negotiate with immovable enemies of the Catholic cause. Gradually, Catholic activists came to loathe conservatives as "doubtful friends", people who were happy to have the support of a religious electorate, but only to twist that backing to serve their own narrow purposes. It thus became clear, as one Italian activist said in 1879, that this "exchange between Catholics and Conservatives is a great error and is very suspect"; that "Catholic feeling is not necessarily conservative, and conservative feeling is not necessarily Catholic". 33 Catholics were not alone in this bitterness, either. The Dutch Calvinist leader and fellow traveler Kuyper insisted that the battle being fought by all religious people was also "against conservatism; not conservatism of a specific brand but against conservatism of every description". 34
Although in many places they called themselves Rightists, conservatives were soon understood to be merely "liberals who had been mugged". Conservatives were men who shared with liberals the same basic Enlightenment principles, especially with regard to the concept of economic freedom, but who had simply become more cautious about their implementation in most other realms. Hence the activists sought to move from contractual agreements with conservations to the establishment of consciously Catholic parties of their own. 35
Perhaps the first clear instance of such a venture was the "Committee for the Defense of Religious Freedom", that Charles de Montalembert (1810-1870) and Louis Veuillot's Parisian daily newspaper, l'Univers both promoted. This elected 144 representatives to the French Parliament in the 1840's. Another example of early political development was the "Catholic Club", composed of various prelates, clerics and laymen, which was formed at the German revolutionary Frankfurt Assembly of 1848.
A third initiative was the Prussian "Catholic Faction", founded in 1851 by August Reichensperger (1808-1895), his brother Peter (1810-1892), and Hermann von Malinckrodt (1821-1874) for the purpose of defending the freedoms enshrined in the religious clauses of their Kingdom's Constitution and protected until the cultural war twenty years later. After 1870, these rather loosely organized factions began to tighten up. Catholics from Prussia formed the Center Party, which also functioned in the new, democratically elected, imperial Reichstag. The increasing severity of the Kulturkampf legislation from 1872 onwards made the party's fortune, since the devastation of the Catholic hierarchy and priesthood during these very difficult years necessitated what amounted to a temporary assumption of church guidance by the active laity.
Belgium, in 1884, saw the formation of the Union nationale pour le redressement des griefs as a temporary "war machine against liberalism" and its secularist educational laws. Although this still desired to work with conservatives, it nevertheless aimed to "absolutely prevent the return to power of an autonomous Right, which would not take into account, as it did [not] in the past, the demands of the Catholic world". The electoral campaign "was animated, enthusiastic, marked by religious mysticism", and helped enormously by the various Catholic associations. Results were spectacular. June, 1884, saw a triumph over the Liberals which was "more a massacre than a defeat", and the hated laws were repealed.36
In the Netherlands, Kuyper formed the Antirevolutionary Party, its Declaration of Principles proclaiming consistent resistance to the world of 1789 on behalf of the victory of Christ the King. Catholics, under the guidance of Fr. Hermann Shaepman (1844-1903), were by that time also building a "war machine" of their own out of a federation of local groupings. Despite enormous disagreements and even hatreds, an Unio Mystica of Catholics and Protestants was proclaimed by Kuyper in 1888. 37 Both denominations coordinated their support for candidates. The Conservative Party broke up under the pressure, and, just as in Belgium, the Liberals were soundly trounced. Calvinists and Catholics then continued to share power, ensuring their separate, autonomous free development, though the "party" formed by the latter remained an amorphous entity until some years into the next century.
As early as 1868 the Austrian newspaper Das Vaterland had called for an "anti-liberal confederation" of all those who 'suffered from the financial and material consequences of the recently adopted system'". 38 A coalition was indeed formed in 1887, holding a convention the following year whose importance was grasped by Karl Lueger (1844-1910), the head of the Vienna democrats. Das Vaterland promoted Lueger's leadership of the coalition, and suggested the name Christian Social Party to designate it. In 1890, the parliamentary leader of the traditional conservatives, Alois Liechtenstein, "grew weary of his lack of tactical success" and joined the Christian Socials. By 1897 a permanent central party bureaucracy was firmly established.39
Troubles, however, did not cease. Parties often had difficult relations with the complex network of active Catholic lay and clerical associations, which they viewed as competitors for ultimate direction of the Catholic movement. Much more significantly, however, Catholic associations expressed the concerns of an ever-greater assortment of social groups with divergent interests and agendas, especially economic ones. This complicated the life of a Catholic Party enormously, forcing it to take stands regarding given positions that might satisfy one element of its clientele but horrify another.
As Joseph Edmund Jörg noted, "any attempt to construct a detailed political program would be injurious and perhaps fatal to the Party". 40. Bismarck claimed that "there are not two souls in the Center but seven ideological tendencies which portray all the colours of the political rainbow from the most extreme right to the radical left". 41 Hence, raising the banner of the “Church in Danger” was the only means of assuring internal unity. It became ever more difficult to hoist that flag when the Kulturkampf in Germany eventually eased, and the more each internal group demanded doctrinal confirmation of its principles from Rome.
Parties also showed a propensity to easy acceptance of new "false friends". Once they had found some way through their initial difficulties and begun to function more smoothly in a given nation, they all too frequently valued their institutional survival more than the purposes for which they were created. When working in a liberal constitutional system, they tended to treat the rules of that system, hostile though they might be, as givens, accepting limitations upon and modification of Catholic expectations. If laboring in a more democratic environment, they began to praise the will of "The People", no matter how rabidly nationalistic, racist, Marxist, libertine, or fraudulently manipulated this could be. Criticism might be met by insisting that everything the "religious party" accepted and promoted was ipso facto, Catholic; as though its claim to be the "Catholic Party" protected it from error in its political defense of Christianity; as though an idea or policy which was notoriously secular and bad could become sacred and good through its magic wand. Victories by opposing parties might then bring down upon Catholics a persecution for supporting positions that really had nothing to do with their Faith at all, but only partisan self-interest.
That parties, Catholic and non-Catholic, were indeed succumbing to such temptations was clear. The Center Party defined religious truth ever more broadly in order to win elections. "Confessional party leaders such as Julius Bachem were repeatedly attacked for setting aside the Catholic basis of the most important organization of German Catholicism in order to substitute a so-called non-denominational Christian basis as the party's guiding philosophy." 42 "Catholics must appeal to the ideas on which modern society is based in order to vindicate their belief", Etienne Lamy, one of the French Catholic democratic leaders, argued in 1896. 43 An Austrian Christian Social spokesman put it most succinctly a bit later: "in politics the only thing that counted was success". 44
Many laymen were also dangerously insistent upon their role as religious leaders. Cardinal Archbishop Victor Dechamps (1810-1883) complained to the pope of two prominent and politically active lay Belgian Catholics, both "fervent and good soldiers", but problematic since they "want to command within the church". 45 Italian lay activists often ended up "giving directives to bishops, provoking frequent complaint". 46 Le Temps in 1881 labeled the French activist, Albert de Mun (1841-1914), "a lay bishop who undertakes…a political campaign, and who finds nothing better than to address the authentic bishop like a master". 47 One priest bitterly criticized the special pretensions of journalists, noting their claim to a right to resolve doctrinal disputes. "Is not that a stunning victory for laicism?" 48, he wondered. Worse still, organizations sometimes moved from liberal constitutionalism and democratic politics to calls for internal Church reform on their bases. Austrian prelates, for example, were told that they "must cease to act autocratically" or face the consequences of the wrath of a more conscious democratic populace. 49
Another problem for Catholic parties came from the hierarchy's dislike of participation of the lower clergy in their affairs. Special circumstances were one thing, bishops reiterated; a general permission for clerical involvement, however, was quite another matter. The bishops' chief grievance--that political activity took priests away from their primary spiritual responsibilities, and also gave them a power base enabling them to speak to their clerical superiors as equals or even inferiors--was more than understandable. The Bishop of Trier was not alone in lamenting, in 1873, that his subordinate clergy was simultaneously guilty of absenteeism and monitoring his own behavior for political correctness. 50
Complaints on the part of the hierarchy regarding lay and clerical activism were rejected by many in the Catholic Movement as a sign of the high clergy's tradition of timidity, outright cowardice, or hypocritical protection of its own unacceptable political position. There are, indeed, a number of cases where all these accusations appear to be valid, perhaps most clearly in Austria-Hungary. 51 Still, practical examples of episcopal failure should not blind us to the fact that the general critique made by the hierarchy regarding the Catholic Movement by the late nineteenth century was the same as that which its founders itself had made of the earlier Catholic political position!
Sacred monarchies of the past had bent religious concerns to parochial secular considerations. Clergy had played too great a role within them, sullying their spiritual mission along the way. Now, out of an initial desire to fight precisely such corruption, the sacred political party had emerged, twisting Catholic goals to the divinized requirements of anticlerical liberal constitutions, willful Peoples, and the charismatic party leaders and journalists interpreting the "true meaning" of their desires, sometimes claiming to be the voice of the Holy Spirit in doing so. The Divine Right of the past had not just reappeared; it had resurfaced compounded, with laymen and secularized clerics claiming to protect a twisted understanding of human freedom and progress along with their own political advantage and a corrupted Catholic Faith.
IX. The Papacy and Catholic Action for the Kingship of Christ:
The Italian Example
What was Rome's reaction to this ferment? Discussion of Roman relations with Austria, Germany, Belgium, and France would offer nuanced answers to that question. All should be looked to in order to understand Vatican policy accurately. For our purposes at the moment, however, it is sufficient to bring up the Holy See's attitude towards the above developments in the context of a more detailed examination of the Italian Catholic Action experience. 52
Italy's introduction to lay-clerical associations began with Brunone Lanteri's early nineteenth century revival of pre-revolutionary amicizie cattoliche. Many Catholic newspapers aided this work from the 1820's onwards, the most influential of which was La Civiltà Cattolica, which began publication in 1850. The creation of an extensive network of Catholic associations was seen by most of these journals to be the only means of making the wishes of the "real country" known in the unnatural situation established by the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861.
This unnatural situation was due to the fact that that Kingdom's liberal constitution limited the number of people who could vote to a miniscule percentage of the population, based upon property ownership and wealth. It also insisted that elected representatives act only in an "enlightened" manner. Where Catholic deputies had been validly elected, as in 1857, in what was then the Kingdom of Sardinia, they had been excluded as unacceptable precisely because they were Catholic and therefore unenlightened. "When we took part in elections and in many places won a victory", an exasperated Catholic witness noted, "we called down upon ourselves all manner of vexations, and our work went up in smoke". 53 The real, long-lasting backdrop for the famous non expedit, the papal prohibition of Catholic participation in the political life of the Kingdom on the national, as opposed to local level, was not aggression against the Temporal Power. It was the recognition that participation under current conditions would be a sham. Hence, it was better to stand apart, and, as the Osservatore Romano noted in 1880, prepare for real participation in the future by temporary abstention from the existing fraudulent system.
This temporary abstention presupposed serious work outside of legal, constitutional national politics. It was to the end of laboring effectively as a kind of parallel government that the vast bulk of Catholic organizations and local parish committees came to be coordinated by the Opera dei congressi e dei comitati cattolici, founded in 1874 and given its definitive name in 1881. The Opera met in regular congresses and aided the work of local groups through five permanent sections established in 1884: Organization and Catholic Action, Christian Social Economy, Instruction and Education, Press, and Christian Art. The second section, headed at the end of the reign of Leo XIII by Giuseppe Toniolo (1845-1918), founder of the Unione cattolica per gli studi sociali, was especially active.
By the late 1890's, however, Opera leaders were seriously divided over future initiatives. One group insisted upon continuing business as usual, neither compromising with the existing liberal authorities nor opposing them in politics directly, lest the socialists pick up the pieces in a bitter national political campaign. Another faction, which came to be known as the clerico-moderates, wished to take advantage of certain liberal invitations to form a broad "conservative party" which could then confront the common danger of socialist extremism. Catholic abstention from national politics would thus end, and leaders who had been prepared during that abstention could move forward to exercise direct influence over Italian political life. Yet a third force, many-headed in character, considered business-as-usual as no longer opportune, but viewed the clerico-moderate position as a sell-out to the anti-Catholic conservatism of the "liberals who had been mugged".
One of this third force's constituent elements wished boldly to declare liberal economic policies to be materialist and immoral. Some proponents longed for the creation of a distinctly popular Catholic political party. They presumed that such a party would also have a broad appeal beyond the immediate camp of the believers, to open-minded socialists in particular, and would therefore have to operate with significant freedom from the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Priests, Don Romolo Murri (1870-1944) prominent among them, played a role within its ranks. Friction among these contesting components of the Opera was stirred by brutal government repression of both socialist and Catholic organizations in the midst of the riotous years of the 1890's, as well as by the failure of the dominant proponents of the business-as-usual approach to make more of an issue of injustices that they, too, abhorred.
At this point, the Papacy became deeply involved. Papal intervention was a two-step affair. It began on January 18th, 1901, with Leo XIII's publication of the encyclical letter Graves de communi, which rejected the creation of a distinctly Catholic Italian “democratic party”. If the words "Christian Democracy" were employed at all, he insisted, they could only legitimately be used to indicate "a beneficent Christian action in favor of the people", not a commitment of the Church to democratic politics. Moreover, as the first of its two words emphasized, "Christian Democracy" could only exist with reference to a sound grounding in the Christian Faith; cooperation with those of democratic spirit who were materialist socialists was thereby excluded. Even what today would be called a "preferential option for the poor" was dismissed as objectionable by the pope, since a true concept of "the People" had to include all social classes, coordinated into one harmonious whole.
A second intervention came in the aftermath of the XIX Congress of the Opera in Bologna, November 10-13, 1903. Romolo Murri, with a certain support from Giovanni Grosoli (1859-1937), the President of the organization, had gained the edge over the older faction eager to continue abstention from national politics in Bologna. An imprudent circular from Grosoli then argued that "old questions", presumably including the issue of the Temporal Power, no longer mattered that much to contemporary Catholics, who were thus freed to confront more serious matters. Although personally content to let the Temporal Power issue die, the new pontiff, Pius X (1903-1914), was disturbed by what he considered to be the Opera's lay-clerical insubordination, and dissolved it on July 28, 1904. Only Section II, dealing with Social Economy, was maintained, in order to emphasize the fact that "beneficent action in favor of the people" was still approved.
The Italian Catholic Movement was then entirely restructured on June 11, 1905, with the publication of an encyclical letter, II fermo proposito. Section II of the Opera became the Unione Economico-Sociale dei Cattolici Italiani. An Unione Popolare tra i Cattolici d'Italia was established on the model of the Volksverein, along with an Unione Elettorale Cattolica Italiana, designed to prepare Catholics for gradual active participation in national political life.
In practice, with the hopes for a “Catholic Party” squelched and the "business as usual" position abandoned, Rome had opted for the clerico-moderate line. The Unione Elettorale gradually pursued the kind of contractual agreement with conservatives utilized in other countries. Its great chance to put this plan into effective operation came with the introduction of universal male suffrage in the next decade, increasing the impact of the pro-Catholic vote and resulting in the famous "Pact" of 1911 of the President of the Unione, Vincenzo Ottorino Gentiloni (1865-1916) with the conservative elements of the liberal party guided by Giovanni Giolitti (1842-1928).
Romolo Murri, disturbed by this development, moved on to build a Lega Democratica Italiana, open to direct cooperation with socialists in a way that seemed to indicate democracy's superiority to the Faith as a guide to political life. Such an impression was confirmed by Murri's calls for an internal democratization of the Church. He was formally expelled from the Catholic Movement and eventually excommunicated. Nevertheless, Christian Democrats still quietly remained within the official camp, hoping one day to be able to build a mass party that could address itself outside as well as inside Catholic circles, and continue to allow a joint lay-clerical political activity.
X. The Quest for Purification:
The Social Kingship of Christ or an Ultramontanist Clericalism?
World War One was to bring practical questions regarding what it meant to work for Christ as King into much greater relief than ever before. This is due to the fact that the idea that this massive conflict brought with it a chance for some kind of purification of civilization as a whole gained great strength in intellectual and activist circles of the most varied kinds.54 Already existing nationalist movements as well as those of the Bolsheviks and their followers around Europe, along with the new Fascist movements born in the post-war era were all of them eager to take advantage of the war for promotion of their particular brand of purification.
Catholic activists, many of them shocked during their military service by just how little impact their work for the Kingship of Christ had had on the average man, were equally aroused. Some of them saw the stimulus of the Holy Spirit behind the zeal with which people were being aroused by Nationalists, Communists, and Fascists alike, and were therefore ready to give what the coming Personalist Movement would call a believing Catholic “witness” to the phenomenon. Others emerged as the leaders of the democratic strains within the Catholic world, with Don Luigi Sturzo (1871-1959) becoming a representative figure of this kind of direction through the Partito Popolare, permitted by the Vatican to contest elections that were now to be decided in Italy by a universal suffrage Catholics wanted to win to their side.
Quas Primas was, in effect, Rome’s broad answer to the Catholic “quest for purification” and all of the problems of creating Christ’s Kingship from the nineteenth century rediscovery of this vision to the postwar era. Allow me to end my intervention---handing the question of how this document and the actions accompanying it actually dealt with these matters over to the other speakers in today’s conference---by addressing the issue of the influence of earlier developments upon the work of the author of that encyclical himself.
Achille Ratti (1857-1939) came to my attention in this regard first with respect to his concern over the dangers of a “Catholic” democratic nationalism to the Faith. These he experienced as the Nuncio to the newly resurrected Polish Republic in the years between 1919-1922. Eager to educate the clergy of those parts of the new nation that had not enjoyed the freedom of the Austro-Hungarian Empire regarding recent Catholic theological and pastoral life, Ratti was told that this would not be necessary. Why? For a reason that smelled a good deal of the error of Lamennais: because the “Polish soul” needed no instruction in what it meant to be Catholic in order to guarantee its orthodoxy. Merely being Polish was said to be a sufficient teaching tool where the Faith was involved.
Ratti was to bring his horror over this response to bear into his confrontation as Pope Pius XI with the Charles Maurras’ (1868-19052) Action Française in 1926. Whether justly or unjustly, he seems to have been convinced that French Maurrasians, as well as others outside France who were influenced by his political positions in general, understood Catholic teaching as somehow emerging from the soul of a nation and the prophet-like guides interpreting what that spirit was or ought to be. In other words, it was not the commitment to monarchy so central to Maurrasian thought that was a problem, but the politique d’abord inversion of the spiritual hierarchy of values; that is to say, yet another insistence of a regular sin of Catholic Action.55
Between these two experiences, so pertinent to our topic here today, came three other events that are central to it: the publication of the encyclical letters Ubi Arcani Dei Consiglio (December 23, 1922) and Quas Primas (December 11, 1925) itself, with the Vatican’s withdrawal of any even tacit approval of the activities of the Partito Poplare---Don Sturzo having been nudged to leave Italy for exile in 1924---sandwiched in between. Moreover, even though they follow the establishment of the Feast of Christ the King, I think that the Arreglos supposedly establishing peace between the soldiers of Christ the King known to us as the Cristeros and the Mexican Republic in June of 1929 are also pertinent to our final judgment regarding the “background” of Quas Primas. 56 Why? Because all of these experiences, documents, and decisions summarize, with reference to Pius XI, what we know about the perennial teaching of the doctrine of Christ the King throughout all of Church History and its practical trials and attenuation as well.
From what we have learned above, now extending into the budding reign of Pope Pius XI, I believe that we must admit that the Papacy, over the course of the entirely of Church History, has ultimately been engaged with the doctrine of Christ the King in a three-fold manner.
On the theoretical level, the Roman teaching—-up until and including the publication of Quas primas---has been almost impeccable. Rome has repeatedly, openly and firmly, stood behind the undeniable doctrinal consequence of the Incarnation that Our Savior is King over all of His Creation; that there can only be a “Peace of Christ in the Reign of Christ”, and that this Truth needed to be emphasized with even greater vigor after the disaster of the First World War. On the practical level, however, I believe that we must also admit that the Papacy has simultaneously revealed contradictory positive and a negative was of going about its pastoral work.
Rome has often---not always, but often---been practically wise in its awareness that sinful and narrow-minded limitations can lead even the most well-meaning of men active in political and social life to back away from seeking implementation of the consequences of the Incarnation for the Social Reign of Christ; that it can cause them to invert the proper hierarchy of values and subject things spiritual to those of dubious and even deadly earthly concern. The Vatican, therefore, often rejected the pusillanimous Catholic Action of local hierarchies that more courageous priestly and lay party and social movement leaders of the nineteenth century begged it to do. And Rome was also coherently reined in in the activism of these latter forces when they too showed pusillanimous signs of succumbing to naturalist goals: merely to keeping their particular partisan movements alive and thriving.
But, sad to say, the less than spiritually “complete” way in which Roman Pontiffs of the late medieval and eighteenth century eras went about their practical pastoral labors, seems also to have reappeared in the latter nineteenth and twentieth centuries anew. In fact, they seem to have reappeared in a way that often mirrored the same pusillanimous action of national episcopacies that priests and laymen had called upon Rome to rebuke and to which they also themselves fell prey.
Exaggerated moderation” was reflected in a form of Roman clericalism; a willingness to compromise with forces that would give the clergy freedom to function sacramentally and liturgically, but at the expense of promoting the broader Social Kingship of Christ as a whole. One has the impression that a Vatican strengthened enormously by the nineteenth century Ultramontanist Movement and given all too many more centralized administrative cares found the desire not to “rock the boat” of a bearable social order an attitude hard to resist. Hence, the readiness to support the maintenance of a terribly flawed Liberal Italy and its Fascist heir with the Gentiloni Pact and the Lateran Accords, a terribly flawed Liberal France with the Ralliement and the exaggerated sacrifice of the Action Française, and an abandonment of the Cristeros for a modicum of peace with an ultimately very untrustworthy Mexican government.
Christ did not come to bring peace to the world, but a sword fighting on behalf of His Kingship. And this is why outsiders, at times, have had militantly to remind popes as well as prelates and all too moderate lay activists what we have already seen that Louis Veuillot has told us: “The right tactic for us is to be visibly and always what we are, nothing more, nothing less. We defend a citadel that cannot be taken except when the garrison itself brings in the enemy. Combatting with our own arms, we only receive minor wounds. All borrowed armor troubles us and often chokes us”. 57 Unfortunately, a timely reminder of this truth to the popes of the day was badly stymied by a major flaw of many of the adherents of the Ultramontanism of the “School of Rediscovery”: a misunderstanding of the limited definition of Papal Infallibility at First Vatican Council and of just how far the adulation of the Vicars of Christ in their all too many fallible actions had to extend.
Quas Primas is a wonderful theoretical encyclical. But did it really guarantee that Rome would always practically work to ensure that Christ would find His Reign secured when He came again? It seems that the world in which we live today proves that this was in no way an infallible assurance. Borrowed armor is now destroying us anew, and all too frequently with the approval of those who ought to know better.
9
27
The best guide to the developing doctrine can be found in Fr. Emile Mersch, The Whole Christ (Dennis Dobson, 1936); Posthumous The Theology of the Mystical Body (Herder, 1958).↩︎
J-M. Mayeur, ed, Histoire du Christianisme (Desclée, Thirteen Volumes, 1990-2002), II, 713.↩︎
See St. Augustine, De catechizandis rudibus, 22↩︎
On St. Isidore, Visigoths, and the Franks, see Judith Herrin, The Formation of Christendom (Princeton, 1987), pp. 220-249, 428, 438-440; Pierre Riché, The Carolingians (U. of Pennsylvania, 1993), p. 66; Mayeur, IV, 612-616, 670-682.↩︎
Riché, pp. 285-359, 333-334; Christopher Dawson, Making of Christendom, pp. 108, 124, 197; Georges Duby, The Three Orders (U. of Chicago, 1982), 34, 49, 66, 111, 130.↩︎
Mayeur, V, 876.↩︎
The material here is vast. See , for example, C. Dawson, Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, pp. 120-139; B. Rosenwein, Rhinoceros Bound: Cluny in the Tenth Century (U. of Pennsylvania, 1982); Mayeur, IV, 852-866; V, 57-175, 367-450; Hughes, II, 206-208.↩︎
On Innocent and his work for the Kingship of Christ, see J. Powell, ed., Innocent III: Vicar of Christ or Lord of the World? (Catholic U, 1994),↩︎
G. Duby, France in the Middle Ages (Blackwell, 1991), pp. 84-105; The Three Orders, pp. 128-146; On monasticism, reform, and the peace movement, see C. Dawson, Religion and the Rise of Western Culture (Penguin, 1991), pp. 120-139; B. Rosenwein, Rhinoceros Bound: Cluny in the Tenth Century (U. of Pennsylvania, 1982); Mayeur, IV, 852-866; V, 57-175, 367-450; P. Hughes, A History of the Church (Sheed & Ward, Three Volumes, 1949), II, 206-208.↩︎
See John of Salisbury, Policraticus, and Duby, The Three Orders, pp. 263-268. On Bernard and other critics like him, see Hughes, II, 276; Dawson, Religion, p. 202; Mayeur, V, 196-200.↩︎
On all of these problems, see Georges de, La naissance de l’esprit laique au declin du moyen age (Nauwelaerts, Five Volumes, 1958); R. Emmerson and B. McGinn, eds., The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (Cornell, 1992); N. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (Oxford, 1979).↩︎
https://sthughofcluny.org/2017/11/consilium-de-emendanda-ecclesia-transparency-and-reform-in-1537.html↩︎
See J. Rao, Black Legends and the Light of the World (Remnant Press, 2011), pp. 295-312.↩︎
For Reformed Catholicism and the political and social secularization before the Revolution, see Mayeur, IX, 151, 237, 276, 1121, 1127, 1146 and passim; X, 1-88, 179-298; H. Jedin and J. Dolan, eds., History of the Church (Crossroad, Ten Volumes, 1981), VI, 443-590 and passim; H.M. Scott, Enlightened Absolutism (U. of Michigan, 1990), p. 59 and passim; D. Van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution (Yale, 1996), pp. 94-97, 104-289; Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested (Oxford, 2009); V. Im Hof, The Enlightenment (Blackwell, 1994).↩︎
J. Rao, “Half the Business of Destruction Done”, on For the Whole Christ (http://jcrao.freeshell.org/).↩︎
See John Rao, Removing the Blindfold (Angelus Press, 2013) for a full discussion of this all that follows on developments of the “Rediscovery” Movement and Catholic Action. Also, John Rao, “School Days” and “All Borrowed Armor Chokes Us”, in For the Whole Christ, ( http://jcrao.freeshell.org).↩︎
Mayeur, XI, p. 350.↩︎
“Roma e il Mondo”, Civiltà Cattolica, i, 7 (1853), 533.↩︎
Rao, Removing the Blindfold, pp. 34-50; See, also, “School Days”.↩︎
Ibid.; Also, just to take a few examples from La Civiltà Cattolica, see, “Il progresso,” 3, 12 (1858), 432; “Il restauro della personalità,” 1, 2 (1850), 369, 536; “Se la personalità abbia da temere dalla chiesa,” 1, 2 (1850), 533; “Dell’elemento divino,” 2, 9 (1855), 134; “La stampa libera,” 1, 4 (1850), 256–57.↩︎
See J. Rao, “School Days”, op. cit.↩︎
Ibid.; Taparelli d’Azeglio, La Civiltà Cattolica, II, iii (1853), 609-620.↩︎
See J. Rao, Removing the Blindfold, pp. 61-132.↩︎
See J. Rao, “School Days”.↩︎
(L. Veuillot, Mélanges, Oeuvres completes, (iii series, 1933, v, 276).↩︎
J. Rao, “School Days” and “All Borrowed Armor Chokes Us”.↩︎
Ibid.↩︎
See J. Rao, “Lamennais, Rousseau, and the New Catholic Order”, in Seattle Catholic www.seattlecatholic.com/article_20050201.html; F.P. Bowman, Le Christ des barricades (Cerf, 1987).↩︎
J. Rao, “All Borrowed Armor Chokes Us”.↩︎
S. N. Kalyvas, The Rise of Christian Democracy in Europe (Cornell, 1966), p. 62.↩︎
Ibid., pp. 97-98.↩︎
J. Rao, “All Borrowed Armor Chokes Us”; Also, James D. Bratt , ed. Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader (Wm. B. Eerdmans , 1998), p. 461.↩︎
See Kalyvas, p. 225.↩︎
Ibid.↩︎
See Kalyvas, pp. 258-259.↩︎
Ibid., p. 191.↩︎
Kalyvas, p. 194.↩︎
Ibid., p. 200.↩︎
Ibid., p. 202.↩︎
Ibid., p. 236.↩︎
Ibid., p. 237.↩︎
Kalyvas, p. 248.↩︎
Ibid., p. 232.↩︎
Ibid.↩︎
Kalyvas, p. 40.↩︎
Ibid.↩︎
Kalyvas, p. 45.↩︎
Ibid., p. 46.↩︎
Ibid., p.40.↩︎
Ibid.↩︎
Ibid., pp. 91, 98, 179.↩︎
See J. Rao, “All Borrowed Armor Chokes Us” and M. Invernizzi, Il movimento cattolico in Italia (Mimep-Docete, 1995) for all of the following on Italy; also, Marcel Launey, La papauté à l’aube du xx siècle (Cerf, 1997).↩︎
Invernizzi, p. 22.↩︎
See John Rao, A Centenary Meditation on a Quest for Purification Gone Mad (Arouca Press, 2019) for all of the below.↩︎
École Française de Rome, ed., Achille Ratti. Pape Pie XI (École Française, 1996);
H. Petit, L’Eglise, le Sillon et l’Action Française (Nouvelles éditions latines, 1998).↩︎
See John Rao, “The Political Culture of American Catholics From the Twentieth to the Twenty-First Centuries, Verbo (LVI). C. Check, “Viva Cristo Rey!”, Catholic Culture,
https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=7826.↩︎
(L. Veuillot, Mélanges, Oeuvres completes, iii series, 1933, v, 276).↩︎
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