Catholicism and Democracy

According to the standard story, Catholicism made its peace with democracy rather suddenly in the first half of the twentieth century, culminating in Vatican II. On this narrative, Vatican I represented the kind of authoritarianism that the second Vatican council overturned.

Not so, argues Emile Perreau-Saussine in his Catholicism and Democracy: An Essay in the History of Political Thought . On the contrary, Vatican II continued and completed what had begun in Vatican II.

This argument involves seeing Vatican I in the context of both ongoing debates in the Catholic church about the relation of church and state, and also in the context of Catholic responses to a perceived crisis in Western political life.

According to the TLS reviewer’s summary, “Vatican I dislodged the ideology of Gallicanism, which claimed for the state a solid if limited measure of jurisdiction over the Church, replacing it by ultramontanism – the precedence of Rome as seen from Northern Europe. In that sense (so the argument runs), Vatican I marked the end of unwarranted state interference in church affairs.” More generally, Vatican I’s effect was not to reassert the papal primacy of Innocent I, but to stress the Pope’s role as the spokesman for “the consensus of the universal Church, safeguarding the ‘deposit of the faith.’ Buttressing the pope’s authority in matters of faith and morals resulted in a weakening of his authority on law and politics.”

Vatican I freed the church to be church. “What the Church saw as a corruption of the body politic could be mitigated by refocusing on the papacy. Between Vatican I and Vatican II, the Church established an ‘alternative world of religiously polarized sociability,’ emphasizing that economics should be at the service of humanity, with the authority of such encyclicals as Leo XIII’s worker-friendly Rerum Novarum (1891). Vatican II’s achievement was to show that the Church could be at ease with democracy and intellectual freedom, reasserting the role of the laity. It marked also reconciliation with the liberal tendencies in Gallicanism, according to which the Catholic laity were expected to confer a Christian character on liberal and democratic states, and whose spirit still survives in France.”