On Christmas Day
in the year 1797 the aristocratic Luigi Barnabà Chiaramonte (1742-1823),
Cardinal Bishop of Imola in Romagna in northern Italy, startled his
congregation by declaring that there is no essential conflict between democracy
and Christianity. Coming as it did hard
on the heels of the Reign of Terror in Revolutionary France (1793-1794), it
must have seemed to many that their Ordinary had lost his mind. (E.E.Y. Hales, Pio Nono: A Study in European Politics and
Religion in the Nineteenth Century.
New York: P.J. Kenedy & Sons, 1954, 35.)
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| Pope Pius VII |
Nor would
subsequent events have quelled their fears.
On Chiaramonte’s election to the papacy in 1800 as Pius VII, he moved
the papal court back to Rome as soon as he could. Once there he instituted some moderate
reforms in the Curia and made it clear that he and his Secretary of State,
Cardinal Ercole Consalvi (1757-1824), were prepared to accommodate to the new
regime in France as far as they could so long as it was consistent with
Catholic principles.
In response to
overtures from then-First Consul Napoléon Bonaparte a concordat was signed with
the French Republic but was soon violated.
When Pius VII refused to support Napoléon’s war effort, the Man of
Destiny occupied the Papal States and imprisoned him. Following years of harsh captivity, the pope
returned to the Vatican in 1815 after the Hundred Days.
Undaunted by his sufferings
under liberté, égalité, and fraternité, Pius
VII again attempted to implement liberal reforms in the Papal States and Church
administration but was frustrated by reactionary revolts. Although unsuccessful, his goal was to accommodate
the Church as far as possible to the modern world without altering doctrine but
emphasizing religious issues and maintaining political neutrality. In 1823 he sent Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti
(1792-1878), the future Pope Pius IX (elected 1846), on a two-year mission to
Chile to solidify relations with the new republics of Central and South America.
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| Alexis de Tocqueville |
What puzzles
papal historians down to the present day is how Pius VII could continue to
champion liberal democracy after experiencing the brutal reality of it first-hand. The solution to this conundrum lies in the
fact that “liberal democracy” is a term that covers a multitude of sins as well
as virtues. The real question is what
one means by “liberal” and the particular philosophy of democracy followed.
Three major types
of liberal (as opposed to classical) democracy prevailed at the end of the
eighteenth century and carried over into the nineteenth. As described briefly by Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
(1805-1859) in Democracy in America
(1835, 1840), the
French or European type of democracy that tends to socialism is that humanity
itself, the collective, is sovereign.
The English type of democracy that tends to capitalism is that the
“great man” or an élite, is
sovereign.
In America, where the highest
form of democracy was to be found, the human person, the individual, is
sovereign. (Alexis de
Tocqueville, Democracy in America,
II.2.v.) This is the “Catholic” form of liberal
democracy, firmly grounded on the dignity and sovereignty of the human
person under God. Every child, woman,
and man is innately worthy of respect by the mere fact of being human, and this
is reflected in “Catholic” political theory.
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| Thomas Aquinas |
Strictly
speaking, of course, there is no such thing as “Catholic political theory,” any
more than there is “Catholic philosophy,” “Catholic mathematics,” “Catholic
physics,” or — worst of all in this discussion — “Catholic economics.” There are at best schools of economics (or
philosophies or political theories) that materially conform to or at least do
not contradict the precepts of the natural law and Catholic doctrine, but that
is as far as it goes or can go. It would
be as unreasonable in order to be a “good Catholic” to require membership in a
particular political party or adhere to some scientific theory about astronomy
or biology as it would be to demand that someone subscribe to a specific school
of economics.
That being said,
however, at least since the time of Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) democratic
forms of government have been recognized as being consistent with the natural
law and Catholic doctrine. From the
Angelic Doctor’s De Regimine Principum
to the De Laicis of Saint Robert
Bellarmine (1542-1621), Catholic
political theory has incorporated democratic principles.
Bellarmine,
however, made an error that has had serious repercussions down to the present
day. In an effort to counter the
heretical “Divine Right of Kings,” Bellarmine separated social rights — the
rights to enforce the law and punish offenders, to tax, to declare war, etc. — from the human person created by
God, and then vested social rights in the collective created by man. (See Rev. John Clement Rager, S.T.D., The Political Philosophy of Blessed Cardinal
Bellarmine. Washington, DC: Catholic
University of America Press, 1926.)
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| Robert Cardinal Bellarmine |
The significance
of Bellarmine’s error is . . . profound. By claiming that something created by man has
rights that man created by God does not, Bellarmine’s theory made God
subordinate not merely to actual human beings, but to a “legal fiction,” an
imaginary concept that has no existence apart from the human mind.
This reversed the
entire order of creation that has God at the top, then man, then whatever man
creates, the last of which is at the command and under the control of human
beings. Instead, an imaginary construct
— the collective or the State — is at the top, then man, and God is at the
bottom. The collective calls the tune,
man fiddles, and God dances in response.
Pope Pius XI
(Ambrogio Damiano Achille Ratti, 1857-1939; elected 1922) would correct
Bellarmine’s error in his social doctrine, but that was of no use a century
before his election. As a result, when
the Industrial and French Revolutions disrupted society and traditional
political and religious institutions failed adequately to address the new
things, thoughtful — and desperate — people began searching for alternatives.
What they came up
with was “the democratic religion” — what would soon be called socialism.
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