Are the Roots of Catholic Social Teaching Really Understood?
The 20th Annual John F. Scarpa Conference on Law, Politics and Culture, 09/29
I would like to begin with two anecdotes central to my argument. A don I knew at Oxford told me that he once asked Sir Isaiah Berlin if he really thought that the natural world had no supernatural explanation and influence over it. “Some people are tone deaf”, he responded; “and I am deaf to the music of the spheres”. In 1978 I was working as the Eastern Director of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. One of our European speakers told me that he had briefly taught in the 1930s at Georgetown University. He was fired when his reponse to a student asking him his thoughts regarding the American system was: “I cannot answer that question; I am a political philosopher, not a pyschiatrist”.
My task here is threefold: to discuss the effort of a major segment of the nineteenth century Catholic revival movement to reopen natural ears “ to the eternal music of the spheres”; its identification of obstacles to this project, with Anglo-American Liberalism the psychologically most effective one; and its prediction of our contemporary deafening of the ears to any music other than that driving men stark raving mad. I will do so with reference to the editors and allies of a journal crucial to my doctoral work on that Catholic revival in Oxford in the 1970s: La Civiltà Cattolica: “Catholic Civilization”.
Its first issue, in April of 1850, was announced by a massive, innovative advertising campaign. Published by Italian Jesuits with loans from Pius IX, it appeared twice a month in three-year series whose themes were systematically explored from theological, philosophical, scientific, historical, and sociological standpoints, and also popularized in polemical articles. A book review and a chronicle of world events, along with fictional pieces providing literary expressions of the scholarly pieces, were soon added. Two of its editors, the already well known thinker, Luigi Prospero Taparelli d’Azeglio, and Matteo Liberatore, one of his pupils, had especially widespread influence. The goal, as Taparelli stated in 1855, was the construction of a clear and doctrinally authoritative Catholic Social Doctrine.
It will come, there is no doubt about it. A day will come in which social and juridical theory will shine forth with that certitude with which morality shines forth in the Church today, defined in precepts and canons. But before this hoped-for progress can be realized, long studies must be pursued on the nature of society; studies in which the human intellect…prepares the material for the infallible voice of the Church. (La Civiltà Cattolica, II, 9, 1855, 390)
This doctrine was rooted in a patristic ecclesiology reflecting the extensive impact of the writings of Johann Adam Möhler of the University of Tübingen. It developed Augustine’s concept of the Whole Christ, His Mystical Body, entrusted with the supernatural mission of redeeming a good natural world badly wounded by sin. Year after year, the editors dealt with the consequences of this Church-guided labor in articles such as “The Divine Element in Society”, “The Restoration of Individual Personality in Christ”, and “Does Human Personality Have to Fear the Authority of the Church?” Those in love “hear music” not because they have gone mad, but because they now actually see one another as God intended them to be. The editors argued that those in love with Christ see all of nature’s elements through His eyes, under the social authority of His Mystical Body, as God wants them to be, in their intended hierarchy of values, thus awakening men to the “music of the spheres”.
But these natural forces could only serve that purpose when they themselves were “transfigured vitally by means of the individual operation of each member of the faithful”, “no longer by the finger of God, but {indirectly} by that of man, divinized by grace in Christ’s Body”. (La Civiltà Cattolica, II, 9, 1855, 134, 135; IV, 3, 1859, 414-426). Hence, the insistent call for the mobilization of the laity, organized in manifold forms of innovative Catholic Action of the kind that the Civiltà was undertaking, and whose value German militants, through political parties, labor unions, and educational and broadly cultural institutions, best illustrated. In short, believers, like lovers, all damaged by sin had to work out their “divinization” with the supernatural aid of the Church through natural communities and with tools which, in their turn, desperately needed individuals’ grace-filled labors to function properly.
Each issue of the Civiltà arrived in the Bodelian Library from the outset. I cut open every one of its thousands of pages from the first until 1870, where I finished my research. Apparently, no one in Oxford had ever read it, including my supervisor, who himself was nevertheless highly critical of its “obscurantist” attack on “freedom”. But by the time he expressed that judgement, I had already learned from the Civiltà camp of what Blandford Parker in The Triumph of Augustan Poetics called the “Formula of Exclusion”—which my supervisor was himself employing.
This Formula’s instruments, first sharpened in the Sophist battle with the Socratics, and all too perfected in our own censorship loving decade, involve everything from fear-mongering to contemptuous mockery. They were avidly mobilized to steer the intelligent and the righteous away from anything that my Jesuits had to say. Civiltà analysis of the Formula and its usefulness in building a revolutionary world illustrated its ability also to cripple rational thought, thereby deafening everyone to the “music of the spheres”, and eventually ensuring general psychological derangement. To quote one French ally in this regard:
…{F}erocious pride is the genius of the Revolution; it has established a control in the world which places reason out of the struggle. It has a horror of reason, it gags it, it hunts it, and if it can kill it, it kills it. Prove to it the divinity of Christianity, its intellectual and philosophical reality, its historical reality, its moral and social reality: it wants none of it. That is its reason, and it is the strongest. It has placed a blindfold of impenetrable sophisms on the face of European civilization. It cannot see the heavens, nor hear the thunder. (L. Veuillot, Mélanges, 1933, X, 45-46.
Why? Because the spirit of modernity, taking social flesh from the time of the Renaissance, entailed an ever more complete “naturalism”; a reduction of the tools for understanding and dealing with life to what nature alone could teach. Appropriating Christian words and themes, naturalism turned the longing for “the Truth that sets men free” into that for the natural “freedom” that defines the Truth. This naturalist call for “freedom” step by step cut off good natural forces badly weakened by Original Sin, including human reason and a myriad of authoritative communities, from the supernatural message required for nature’s Redemption through the Mystical Body. Individuals were therefore blindfolded to the fullness of reality, condemned to hear a concert of discordant notes composed by their insufficient and severly corrupted postlapsarian nature and environment. As Taparelli said:
Starting with the words “I am free” and their new-found spirit of independence, men began to believe in the infallibility of whatever seemed natural to them, and then to call “nature” everything that is sickness and weakness; to want sickness and weakness to be encouraged instead of healed; to suppose that encouraging weakness makes men healthier and happy; to conclude, finally, that human nature {conceived of as sickness and weakness} possesses the means to render man and society blissful on earth, and this without faith, grace, authority, or supernatural community…since “nature” gives us the feeling that it must be so. (La Civiltà Cattolica, I, 6, 1851, 497-498)
This reality favored the triumph of the strongest, passionate, discordant wills over the disoriented societies and individuals they oppressed. Though many might struggle with one another for domination, all could agree to keeping their victims blind to their manipulation by jointly enforcing the Formula of Exclusion hiding the liberating Catholic message. Hence the drama depicted by the Civiltà in another Taparelli article: O Dio re colla libertà, o L'uomo re colla forza. (“Either God as King with Liberty, or Man as King Through Force”, La Civiltà Cattolica, IV, 3, 1853, 609-620). If Catholics did not build the Social Kingship of Christ, guaranteeing a true freedom for individuals to see and use nature through the Savior’s eyes, thus awakening them to the music of the spheres, “free” men guided by what Richard Gawthorp in Pietism and the Making of Eighteenth Century Prussia calls “the Promethean lust for material power that serves as the deepest common drive behind all modern Western cultures” would deafen them with the maddening cacophany emerging from a nature out of tune with its Creator . (Gawthorp, p. 284).
But the Civiltà camp also wanted “freedom”; the “freedom” for undisturbed teaching of Catholic Truth and Catholic Action in the socio-political realm. Joseph de Maistre had convinced it that only a liberated Papacy could awaken the timid episcopacies subject to nominally pro-Catholic Restoration Monarchies to free the universal Church. His disciple, the Abbé Félicité de la Mennais, vigorously propelled this new Ultramontanist Movement forward, gathering around him numerous clerical and lay followers—the Mennaisians—destined to have a crucial impact in every realm of Catholic Revival. Disillusioned by monarchical obstructions to free Catholic expression and action, de la Mennais argued that only a separation of Church and State would enable local episcopacies and clergy, united under a reinvigorated Papacy, to dedicate themselves freely to unleashing the vital Catholic energy of a laity whose Faith remained unshaken. “God and liberty” was the motto of his journal l’Avenir. But condemnation of the principle of separation of Church and State by Pope Gregory XVI in Mirari vos in 1832 thwarted his project.
Henceforward, under the democratized name of Lamennais, he radicalized what was always implicit in his argument: that the real guide to the Faith and its meaning was the Holy Spirit-driven vital energy of the believing masses. Alas, this populace’s lack of consciousness of that active Spirit called for its awakening through Lamennais’ fully conscious, prophetic, discerning “witness”. He believed that Christianity was a palingenesist phenomenon—that is to say, something born anew in each age. A union of Church and Prophet would explain the Holy Spirit’s evolving dogmatic message to the slumbering Catholic population, whose vital energy was longing to enforce it.
Many of Lamennais’ followers rejected his dogmatic teaching but nevertheless still demanded freedom of association for both clergy and laity to continue his practical work for the liberation of Catholic Faith and Action. Given the contemporary difficulties of obtaining such liberty, battle conditions seemed to require a pragmatic alliance with naturalist-inspired political forces who were also calling for freedom to attain their own purposes: liberals, democrats, nationalists, and socialists.
This hunt for non-Catholic allies gave rise to the hope for an honest dialogue revealing intellectual differences to be mere misunderstandings. Such collaborative hopes reached their peak with the apparent support of Pope Pius IX and in the first victorious stage of the Revolutions of 1848. But it did not take long for conflicts to arise, as the definitions of liberty by varied non-Catholic allies led to new restrictions on Catholics in the name of the very freedom that Catholic activists wanted. For “freedom” and “dialogue”, in non-Catholic eyes, meant Catholic surrender on whatever issue was of deepest concern to them as the sole proof of the Church’s good will.
The future editors of the Civiltà were deeply engaged in this dialogue, and their disillusionment stimulated their massive educational project. They felt that insufficient knowledge of the true meaning of freedom seduced many activists engaged in cooperation and dialogue into accepting skillful naturalist redefinitions of familiar words and themes as somehow also being Catholic. They thereby contracted the disease that St. Cyril of Alexandria called dypsychia: the possession of two souls entertaining two contradictory “truths”: one anti-Catholic and the other Catholic.
The Civiltà camp identified the contradictory message coming from a supposedly moderate Liberalism as the most seductive tool for spreading both dypsychia and more radical naturalism. By Liberalism, they did not mean representative government or even religious toleration made necessary in a divided society. What they critiqued was its underlying spirit, emerging first from Britain’s Glorious Revolution. It was this naturalising vision that Catholics suffering from what was then called Anglomania spread to the Continent from the 1730s onwards, and against whose influence the revival movement was battling.
Anglomania meant adulation of all Whig elements, including the individual and physical sensation centered philosophy of John Locke and the love of technological success associated with the Royal Society and the Baconian-Newtonian scientific method. Both of these were praised by British physico-theologians who claimed that scientific laws giving common sense confirmation of the existence of the harmonious plan of the Creator God produced a natural theology infinitely better than that of divisive dogmatic squabbling—-along with unprecedented practical tools for fulfilling Christ’s law of charity, feeding the hungry and curing the sick. Continental Anglomanes argued that the British example offered the sole possible protection for Christianity and traditional institutions from the advance of the radical, naturalist, atheist, and demagogic democratic Menace. Post-revolutionary, anti-radical Liberals told Catholics that a grand Party of Order offered the only real protection against recurrences of the Reign of Terror and, after 1848, the budding Red Menace as well.
The entire Civiltà camp attacked that underlying Liberal spirit, Taparelli in particular. He saw that emerging Liberalism left the definition of the common good and public morality in the hands of the members of a propertied oligarchy—-for whose narrow benefit Whiggery also used Locke’s philosophy and the traditional British division of powers to weaken exercise of a broader-minded State authority. Could anything guide these individuals’ “common good” judgements away from indulgence of the mad personal passions to which he saw naturalism’s logic leading?
Certainly not religious dogma, rational principles, and “common sense” protected scientific laws! The Liberal principle of religious toleration blocked public, dogmatic, denominational influence as divisive. Protestant and Lockean Nominalism prohibited guidance from universal philosophical pronouncements. Praise of the Baconian-Newtonian system brought with it an opening to that magic-driven, knowledge-is-for-power spirit which could bless anything immoral that experimentation with fallen nature might successfully obtain. And what property owner might not be tempted by Locke’s reduction of the human person to a conglomerate of physical sensations, and the natural law to the individual’s right to gain all the goods needed to satisfy them? In this environment, economically victimized majorities, angrily reacting against the hypocrisy of a “common good” and “public morality” defined by the individualism of the few, would inevitably employ the same destructive naturalist materialist tools.
Liberalism therefore unleashed a kind of sissified version of Hobbes’ war of all against all, offering the utopian hope that “common sense” and “checks and balances” deprived of substantive theological and rational nourishment could control the consequences of Original Sin through merely conventional agreements regarding morality. Iago, in Othello, honestly revealed himself to be the devil when he said “I am not what I am”. But the Formula of Exclusion, first invented along with Whiggery, condemned anyone criticizing the Liberal vision as an enemy of religious and individual freedom and social peace, prohibiting revelation of its diabolical character.
In a religiously divided England, religious toleration liberated so many warring denominations that they all "checked and balanced" each other, limiting their impact over the individual members of the oligarchy to diverse religious “clubhouses” where Nominalism and Lockean materialist individualism worked to erode their remaining authority. But given greater difficulties in reducing dogmatic Catholicism to a clubhouse phenomen in lands lacking denominational competition, solidifying a Liberal Party of Order required changes in Catholic teaching.
Charles de Montalembert, a former Mennaisian and now the French Liberal Catholic leader, satisfied this demand with another palengenesist argument. “Changed times” dictated Catholic acceptance of the Liberal State as a universal pragmatic necessity. Taparelli responded by insisting that this pragmatic acceptance brought with it all of the dogmatic materialist individualist woes just described. Efforts to engage Montalembert in dialogue over such matters, using the tools of Faith and Reason, were greeted with the application of the Formula of Exclusion and in that bitter, contemptuous prophetic spirit characteristic of many former Mennaisians.
In consequence, the Civiltà and its allies were convinced that the long-term development of a proper Catholic Social Doctrine required an immediate, succinct, authoritative condemnation of the basic problems of naturalism and its seductive transformation of seemingly Christian words and themes. Hence, their overwhelmng influence over the Syllabus of Errors of 1864, many of whose “negative” attacks nevertheless point directly to what was later developed more “positively” in the Social Encyclicals.
The Civiltà camp was certain that the the British, conservative-sounding Liberalism inherited by the United States would lead its underlying radical materialist individualism to develop numerous unnatural interpretations of nature out of tune with the harmonious order willed by God. Yes, to use James Madison’s words,“freedom” multiplied so many factions that checked and balanced one another that the propertied oligarchy put in power by the Founding Fathers might hope to retain control. But America offered a much more threatening pluralist religious and ethnic environment than England. Protection of the peace of the established disorder required additional, psychologically unbreachable, armour.
The religion of Americanism and the transfer of the messianic religious fervor of Puritainism to its Liberation Theology was the answer. America’s merely pragmatic Liberal system thus became “mankind’s last, best hope for religious and personal freedom, peace, and all that technology and property could give purely sensual individuals. Redemption came through submission to the will of America’s divinized Founders, worshipped in the place of Christ in the cupola of the Capitol and other temples in Washington, and through the Goddess of Liberty in New York Harbor.
Many Catholics succumbed to this evangelization, rejoicing in Fr. Isaac Hecker’s palingenesist claim that “the union of American liberty with Catholic Truth would create a future brighter for the Faith than any past”. But, once again, the irrational fruitfulness of the naturalist individualism underlying the system created more radical forces interpreting the “will” of the Founders, “the common good”, and the natural freedom teaching universal Truth in other ways, offering varied options for the expression of American Catholic dypsychia. Meanwhile, the Formula of Exclusion crushing any criticism of its Liberation Theology as ignorant or tyrannical insisted that Americanism was a figment of the divisive, dogmatic, obscurantist imagination as well; a “phantom heresy”.
Many problems blocked the victory of a Catholic Social Doctrine rooted in a dogmatic Christocentric vision. Ultramontanist pressure and the Franco-Prussian War prevented First Vatican Council from promulgating its complete schema on the nature of the Church, allowing the accurate conciliar definition of Papal Infallibility to be exaggerated by enthusiasts, rendering very difficult future justified criticisms of Roman policies. Fears of the Red Menace, worsened from 1917 onwards, and exploited by chameleon like Party of Order projects, helped to give liberal economic and political ideas influence with an always infallible Papacy. These are visible in some encyclicals of Leo XIII and in his successors’ relationship with Liberal Parties, unions, and Fascism. Even Pius XI’s encyclical on Christ the King did not prevent a Vatican abandonment of the Mexican Cristeros demanded for “business as usual” reasons by the American Government and its fellow-travelling American Catholic Episcopacy. Georges Bernanos, in an unpublished Epistle to the French after the Second World War, begged the Church to give some sign that it really believed that the work for the Social Kingship of Christ it theoretically promoted was practical.
Demoralization of Catholic activists in many realms obtained a theological and philosophical voice through the vitalist and palingenesist Mennaisian ideas revived by some proponents of the variegated Personalist Movement. These argued that Catholics, still too influenced by liberal individualism, must abandon themselves to the innate supernatural significance of every natural value found in the “mystiques” of all successful, vital, energetic communities, their open “witness” helping each of them to come to its own innate perfection. But “witnessing” could involve nothing traditionally Catholic, because Catholicism could not know what the Holy Spirit wanted it to be until everything natural had converged to the Omega Point. And nothing rational as well. To quote Emmanuel Mounier:
Surely [development] is slow and long when only average men are working at it. But then heroes, geniuses, a saint come along: a Saint Paul, a Joan of Arc, a Catherine of Siena, a Saint Bernard, or a Lenin, a Hitler and a Mussolini, or a Gandhi, and suddenly everything picks up speed...[H]uman irrationality, the human will, or simply, for the Christian, the Holy Spirit suddenly provides elements which men lacking imagination would never have foreseen. May the democrat, may the communist, may the fascist push the positive aspirations which inspire their enthusiasm to the limit and plenitude. (J. Hellman, Emmanuel Mounier and the New Catholic Left, 1997, pp. 85, 90)
Although critical of Mounier, whose exaltation of vital energy he said would leave him “barren in the face of a Ramakrishna” (Hellman, p. 42), Jacques Maritain’s Integral Humanism also gave life to the idea of a parallel activity of the Holy Spirit. This worked through “modern man’s” deep sense of personal dignity, rooted in the Christian heritage, which was forging a New Christianity whose Magisterium temporarily leaped ahead of that of the Church. Her help was still essential, but could only be provided by humble recognition of modernity’s current superiority in developing doctrine.
Maritain saw in the American system that invitation to an uncoerced dialogue among all manner of sensitive “persons” through which men unconsciously longing for the Faith would find it. A post-Second World War Americanist Government espousing the more conservative Liberation Theology’s Magisterium was eager to take up the crusade for the “opening to dialogue” of a still too dogmatic and authoritative Church to win her to its own Party of Order answer to the Red Menace. Theologians like John Courtenay Murray, publicists such as Henry Luce with his Time/Life network, and Wall Street, were all mobilized through the CIA guided Doctrinal Warfare Program to fight for American Truth to be recognized as Catholic Truth. (See David A. Wemhoff: John Courtney Murray, Time/Life, and the American Proposition—How the CIA’s Doctrinal Warfare Program Changed the Catholic Church).
By the time Second Vatican Council met, pressure for the desired opening was overwhelming. Murray explained that aggiornamento meant getting the Church of 1965 up to where the US Constitution was in 1787. He had big-time bucks behind him and the help of those with more radical, Mounier-like palengenesist aims to assure evolution through the emasculation of existing Church authority. In the giddy atmosphere of “joy” and “hope” characterizing the wake of the Council—-one reminiscent of the period from 1832–1848—all vital energetic forces made use of American pluralist freedom to seduce the Church into “dialoguing” with them to gain that surrender to their prophetic goals that alone could prove her good will.
Therefore, anything in pre-existing Catholic teaching that stood in opposition to the evolving message of the Holy Spirit, as heard through natural forces, moderate or radical, Americanist or not, had to be tossed onto the rubbish heap of history. Catholicism had to learn through fallen nature the Truth that sets men free. This condemned the Church to be more united than it ever had been united with Restoration monarchies limiting Catholic Action with whatever willful, libertine, materialist, capitalist, communist, utopian, power hungry, Baconian Transhumanist, or Founding Father interpretation of the Faith—-approved by prophetic discernment—-was most powerful in a given State.
By the later 1850s, the Civiltà camp believed that the hunt for victory in the war of all against all, progressively unleashed by the logic of naturalism and the “nice-and-easy-does it” path of Liberalism, would ultimately lead to bizarre, global, technologically savvy alliances of all would-be oppressors needing one another to gain tyrannical power. They would create a psychologically disturbed “Empire of the World” open only to the most dissonant sounds of fallen nature, accustoming men to a life of drab, criminal ugliness. This prediction of 1859 has a Davos familiarity about it in 2025.
The police will take care that one is amused and that its reins never trouble the flesh. The administration will dispense the citizen of all care. It will fix his situation, his habitation, his vocation, his occupations. It will dress him and allot to him the quantity of air that he must breathe. It will have chosen him his mother, it will choose him his temporary wife; it will raise his children; it will take care of him in his illnesses; it will bury and burn his body, and dispose of his ashes in a record box with his name and his number. There will no longer be any different places or climates, nor any curiosity anywhere. Man will find everywhere the same moderate temperature, the same customs, the same administrative rules, and infallibly the same police taking the same care of him. Everywhere the same language will be spoken, the ballerinas will everywhere dance the same ballet. The old diversity would be a memory of the old liberty, an outrage to the new equality, a greater outrage to the bureaux that would be suspected of not being able to establish uniformity everywhere. Their pride will not suffer that. Everything will be done in the image of the main city of the Empire and of the world. (L. Veuillot, Mélanges, viii, 364, 369).
But how many people would know of this prescience? The Formula of Exclusion, employed by everyone insisting that the Catholic message comes from nature alone, cannot permit evidence from a dogmatic supernatural Magisterium, natural reason, history, pyschology, and sociology to question its interpretation of the movement of the Holy Spirit in our times. As a result, past Social Doctrine, if it is mentioned at all, is dismissed as obscurantist integrism. Its profound emphasis on individual-social interaction, directed by the Mystical Body, divinizing the human person and seeing all nature with Christ’s loving eyes, is tossed down the memory hole. Little or nothing is known of its arousal of the laity to a sustained fight for an economic justice condemning both individualist liberal capitalism and the logical but equally materialist reaction of its collectivist Marxist antithesis; for a Catholic international order versus a nationalist parochialism expressed in modern man’s “dignity-loving” free market imperialist, racist, and now warmongering neo-conservative forms. Dypsychia allows the use of the Catholic name to support the naturalist narratives supplied by all the discerning prophets of nihilistic, utopian, and arbitrary wills, but not the one that fights for human freedom and social order in a traditional, supernatural framework.
Catholic Social Doctrine emerged out of the struggle to escape a troubling burial in naturalism in the eighteenth century. Since that same battle is being fought again, it means—to paraphrase Proverbs and St. Peter—that the Catholic world, like a dog, has returned to its own vomit. Today’s Catholic music generally aids its enemies to deafen men to the harmonious music of the spheres, causing them to dance to a tune creating a criminally insane, criminally ugly, earthly madhouse in preparation for a diabolically ugly Hell. An effective Catholic Social Doctrine can only come from a pragmatic, pastoral approach that nurtures dogmatic and rational truth and does not invent it. As Dietrich von Hildebrand said, the harmonious music of true Christian order can only be heard once again with the glorious words “Anthema sit” identifying its enemies. Viva Cristo Rey!