Catholic Triumphalism

The Paragraph Farmer links to this article on What's so great about Catholicism. Sure, it's chauvinistic stuff, but the ability to incorporate the French Foreign Legion into the argument merits a read. Also, I totally endorse the author's take on the Catholic contribution to - of all things - freedom, which deserves a lengthy citation:

Yes, the good old reactionary, repressive Catholic Church has been the most ardent defender of freedom in the history of the world — though it almost never gets credit for it. We live in an age of determinist ideologies — with the fate of nations and individuals supposedly determined by race, economics, history, psychology, genetics, or even — insofar as Protestants have any common doctrinal beliefs — predestination. The Catholic Church stands alone in radical defense of man’s free will.

When the media, Protestants, and dissenters tell practicing Catholics that the impulse to sexual activity is overwhelmingly powerful and can’t be controlled or renounced, Catholics alone say, "No, man is free. All Christians are called to chastity, and what they are called to do, they can do, and some can freely take on celibacy as a sacrifice to better serve God and His Church."

When Maximus in the movie Gladiator rallies his cavalrymen with the words, "What we do in this life echoes in eternity," he is speaking like a Catholic, not like a Reformed Protestant or a Muslim who believes that eternity is already written and that man has no free will.

When skeptics complain that the evidence for God is not clear or that a God who allows suffering and evil is Himself sadistic and evil, the Catholic responds, "Our God has made us free men. True freedom always comes with costs and challenges. You see, ours is not a religion of make-believe where actions have no consequences. Ours is a religion of life as it really is. And life as it really is, is a life of original sin. Catholicism is a religion of pilgrimage, freely accepted, to grow in Christ, to overcome sin."

It is another oft-propounded myth that the Western world didn’t taste of freedom until the Protestant revolt of Martin Luther, which led to the division and state subordination of churches in northern Europe and eventually led, in some countries, to the separation of church and state and the irrelevance of church to state.

But who would blatantly say that the Renaissance — against which Luther revolted — was not free? Who would deny that the great check on state power throughout the entirety of European history, from the conversion of Constantine until the 20th century, was the Catholic Church?

Think of the Roman Emperor Theodosius, commander of all Rome’s legions, stripping himself of all imperial insignia to do penance before an unarmed cleric, St. Ambrose, bishop of Milan. It was the Catholic Church that brought a moral check to bear on the exercise and perquisites of power.

Think of the martyrdom of Sir Thomas Beckett and Sir Thomas More. Think of the Protestant revolt, which argued that the power of the state was scriptural and the power of the papacy — the power of Christ’s Church against the demands of the state — was not.

Think of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Kulturkampf of Bismarck, and later intellectual and political currents, including fascism, communism, and the liberalism of our own time, all of which saw — or see — the state as the essential thing, centralization of state authority as the central task, and state direction as the essential instrument of reform. And what was the roadblock to these "reformers"? The Catholic Church. It was the Church that asserted the independence of "subsidiary institutions." It was the Church that defended the rights of the family against the state. It was the Church that protested, in the words of Pope Pius XI, against the "pagan worship of the state."

It is important to remember, not as an indictment or a smear but as a corrective to conventional wisdom that the foundations of road to the Third Reich were laid to some extent by Luther. Certainly there were courageous Lutheran opponents of Hitler, such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the White Rose conspiracy. But Bonhoeffer had to find a way around Luther's idea that the state was divinely sanctioned by God. Likewise, the Protestant churches went quickly into the control of the Nazis through the process of gleichschaltung. (Concededly, this did trigger a reaction in the "Confessing Church" movement.) Likewise, Hitler's "electoral breakthrough" was found in the Protestant north.

The Catholic Church, on the other hand, in 1937 smuggled into Germany and had the encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge read to Catholics on Palm Sunday. Mit Brennender Sorge condemned Nazism as "paganism", to wit:

"Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community—however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things—whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds"

"None but superficial minds could stumble into concepts of a national God, of a national religion; or attempt to lock within the frontiers of a single people, within the narrow limits of a single race, God, the Creator of the universe, King and Legislator of all nations before whose immensity they are "as a drop of a bucket" "

Particularly germane to my argument is this passage from paragraph 22 of Mit Brennender Sorge:

Should men, who are not even united by faith in Christ, come and offer you the seduction of a national German Church, be convinced that it is nothing but a denial of the one Church of Christ and the evident betrayal of that universal evangelical mission, for which a world Church alone is qualified and competent. The live history of other national churches with their paralysis, their domestication and subjection to worldly powers, is sufficient evidence of the sterility to which is condemned every branch that is severed from the trunk of the living Church. Whoever counters these erroneous developments with an uncompromising No from the very outset, not only serves the purity of his faith in Christ, but also the welfare and the vitality of his own people.

In short, Catholicism historically advanced the cause of freedom by dividing loyalty. There never was a time in the Catholic West when the temporal and spiritual powers were in the hand of the same person, or where the spiritual powers were officially subordinated to that of the temporal power. Accordingly, there was always the possibility of a development in the understanding of freedom of conscience, even to the point that gets us to where we are today.

On that last point I was surprised on this latest re-reading of Mit Brennender Sorge to read the following:

31. The believer has an absolute right to profess his Faith and live according to its dictates. Laws which impede this profession and practice of Faith are against natural law. Parents who are earnest and conscious of their educative duties, have a primary right to the education of the children God has given them in the spirit of their Faith, and according to its prescriptions. Laws and measures which in school questions fail to respect this freedom of the parents go against natural law, and are immoral.

This is an extremely topical point today in light of the circumstances described in Dale Price's post and my exchange in the comments of that post with Franklin Jones. If you read the comments, you will see that the Catechism sections I quote on the "freedom of conscience" seem to be lifted almost verbatim from Mit Brenneder Sorge. (As another aside, when you hear the advocates of the position that Catholicism caused the Holocaust, such as advanced by James Carroll, mention Mit Brennender Sorge, which they often don't, they will make that encyclical sound as if Pius XI was only complaining about Nazi incursion onto Catholic privileges. For example, Carrol claims that [t]he encyclical complains primarily about Hitler's violations of the concordat. Carroll's fundamental dishonesty is seen when that claim is compared to the passage I've excerpted.)

A final disclaimer about triumphalism; there have been illiberal Catholics; there were Catholic supporters of the Nazis; the idea of the freedom of conscience is one which has developed by fits and starts. Nonetheless, the existence of an institution that divided the loyalty of Westerners and which had the ability and cause to oppose national rulers contributed to our idea about freedom, which we treasure today.