The conditions of peace
By Alan Fimister | 24 July 2024
“[W]hat king, about to go to make war against another king, doth not first sit down and think whether he be able, with ten thousand, to meet him that, with twenty thousand, cometh against him? Or else, while the other is yet afar off, sending an embassy, he desireth conditions of peace. So likewise every one of you that doth not renounce all that he possesseth cannot be my disciple.” (Lk 14:31–33)
Commenting on the disenchantment of the UK Conservative Party’s 2019 electoral coalition with the government of Rishi Sunak, Nigel Farage recently observed that the Tories are “a broad church with no religion”. The early 1980s, when Labour and the Tories (Conservatives) were manifestly both led by politicians of genuine conviction, seem a world away. Clergy and politicians nowadays are far less concerned about the principles that supposedly inspire their institutions. If politics is “show business for ugly people” then the average Catholic congregation might well be described as a captive audience for men with nothing to say.
Towards the end of his famous multi-volume History of Philosophy, Frederick Copleston SJ (by this point having rather gone off the rails amidst the post-conciliar horror) observed that, prior to the Second Vatican Council, “in many ecclesiastical institutions Thomism, or what was considered such, came to be taught in a dogmatic manner analogous to that in which Marxism–Leninism is taught in communist dominated education.” In fact, if one thinks about it, the role of the Party in a Communist country bears a striking resemblance to the function of the ecclesiastical hierarchy in Mediaeval Christendom.
Two parallel governmental structures stand side by side. To one all are formally subject while the other (though it must be joined voluntarily) controls every office of state, and the state formally adheres to its creed. Its principles are taught in every school and its foremost theorists sit in judgment upon the social order to such an extent that unorthodoxy or the repudiation of its central tenets is virtually a death sentence.
Is this a dreadful indictment of Catholicism in its pomp? Not exactly. The ages of faith and the soviet era do not resemble each other because both constitute dangerous and unreasonable “comprehensive doctrines” that claim and ask too much from human nature. They resemble each other because Communism is a mockery of Catholicism, a twisted and terrible attempt to fill the aching void left by the secularisation of Europe and its diaspora.
Ought we to consider the Communist Party then, not as a political party at all, but as a church? Not exactly, or rather, not exclusively. The names of Britain’s first two political parties, the Whigs and the Tories, were after all religious designations. Both groups were made up of Anglicans, but one (the Whigs) wished to exclude King Charles II’s brother, the Duke of York, from the throne because of his Catholicism and were therefore accused by their opponents of secretly being Scotch Presbyterians, Whiggamores; the other wished to preserve the hereditary claims of the future James II despite his Roman allegiance and were therefore accused by their opponents of secretly being Irish Catholics, Tóraidhe.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church §2244 states that “Every institution is inspired, at least implicitly, by a vision of man and his destiny, from which it derives the point of reference for its judgment, its hierarchy of values, its line of conduct.” The Protestant principle of sola scriptura fatally undermines the possibility of any shared “vision of man and his destiny” which might inspire any society where it prevails.
With each passing year, the minimum common “vision of man and his destiny” among the adherents of sola scriptura shrank further and further until there was literally nothing left. Every political party is “a broad church with no religion”. Political parties never were anything more than secularised protestant denominations with nothing to say.
As Vatican I observed:
“Everybody knows that those heresies, condemned by the fathers of Trent, which rejected the divine magisterium of the church and allowed religious questions to be a matter for the judgment of each individual, have gradually collapsed into a multiplicity of sects, either at variance or in agreement with one another; and by this means a good many people have had all faith in Christ destroyed. Indeed even the holy Bible itself, which they at one time claimed to be the sole source and judge of the Christian faith, is no longer held to be divine, but they begin to assimilate it to the inventions of myth. Thereupon there came into being and spread far and wide throughout the world that doctrine of rationalism or naturalism — utterly opposed to the Christian religion, since this is of supernatural origin — which spares no effort to bring it about that Christ, who alone is our Lord and Saviour, is shut out from the minds of people and the moral life of nations.”
In Quadragesimo Anno, Pius XI pointed out that the ecclesiastical hierarchy is neither suitably equipped nor endowed by office to comment upon temporal concerns or matters of technique. But as the mirage of “mere Christianity” dissolved, temporal concerns and matters of technique have ended up as the last remaining questions on which any common “vision of man and his destiny” might be established.
If religious questions are irreducibly subjective matters of private judgement then they cannot be the basis of any vision of man and his destiny from which society might derive the point of reference for its judgment, its hierarchy of values or its line of conduct. But every society does indeed possess such a vision, and this is why Pius X taught that the first of those principal truths directly opposed to the errors of this day, which have been defined, set forth and declared by the unerring teaching authority of the Church, is that “God, the origin and end of all things, can be known with certainty by the natural light of reason from the created world (cf. Rom 1:19), that is, from the visible works of creation, as a cause from its effects, and that, therefore, his existence can also be demonstrated.” Without this fundamental starting point, there can be no political discussion, other than how best technically to achieve the dreams of crass materialism.
On 4 April 1948, Charles de Gaulle met with the then Prime Minister of France, the venerable Robert Schuman. Schuman’s party, the MRP, was the most successful Christian Democratic Party in French history before or since, but it was never able to exert the same kind of total dominance over French politics as its counterpart, the CDU, was able to do over Germany. Robert Schuman was a great and holy man, but he was not a charismatic figure. If Charles de Gaulle had been able to set himself at the head of the MRP, it might have been able to govern France single-handedly, even under proportional representation, as the CDU would be able to do over Germany.
Charles de Gaulle would eventually return to power in France, and yet, for all his personal piety, Christian Democracy would dissolve under his presidency. In a speech he gave two weeks after his meeting with de Gaulle, Schuman left us a hint as to why he was unable to reach agreement with the former leader of the Free French.
“Scholars group themselves into doctrinal schools, politicians adhere to parties. The existence of parties is not an evil, it is part of the logic of democracy. But every party pushed to the extreme becomes a horror and the political organisation which becomes an end in itself, which judges and weighs everything according to the chances which it has of attaining and maintaining power, places in peril the functioning of democracy. The party must be at the service of the common good as much as, or indeed more than the individual; it is called to be the educator of the citizen, the animator of political life, the guarantor of that discipline which must impose itself upon parliamentary assemblies. In justifying parties in this way I do not remotely wish to make apology for our actual political habits. There are certainly faults to be corrected, we are quite in accord. But our salvation will not come to us through the suppression of parties, for this would constitute a dangerous confusion of spirits, ideas and men.”
But if an argument is real, it must be resolvable. It must be possible finally to refute error and establish truth. If it is not, then, in the end, we are talking about nothing. It is after all “the economy, stupid”. There is nothing more to pursue than empty nihilistic hedonism. Theological and political questions would be in the end quite “unreal” in the sense used by St John Henry Newman:
“[P]ersons who have not attended to the subject of morals, or to politics, or to matters ecclesiastical, or to theology, do not know the relative value of questions which they meet with in these departments of knowledge. They do not understand the difference between one point and another. The one and the other are the same to them. They look at them as infants gaze at the objects which meet their eyes, in a vague unapprehensive way, as if not knowing whether a thing is a hundred miles off or close at hand, whether great or small, hard or soft. They have no means of judging, no standard to measure by, and they give judgment at random, saying yea or nay on very deep questions, according as their fancy is struck at the moment, or as some clever or specious argument happens to come across them. Consequently they are inconsistent; say one thing one day, another the next; and if they must act, act in the dark; or if they can help acting, do not act; or if they act freely, act from some other reason not avowed. All this is to be unreal.”
Could that not describe any number of bishops and statesmen in our present world? Catholics cannot seek to seize control of any society as the Bolsheviks did Russia — by intimidation, manipulation and deceit — but we must seek to convince not just men but whole societies of their moral duty, and to guide them “toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ”.
Echoing Pius X, Konrad Adenauer, the great post-war Christian Democratic chancellor of Germany, placed the natural knowability of the existence of God at the centre of any sound political order.
“If the state is a system of order willed by God, and therefore necessarily founded on God, then everyone within the political order who bears responsibility, anywhere and in any manner, must always be aware that he bears this responsibility before his own conscience and before God. In a democratic, parliamentary state, in which the system of democracy is actualized down to the smallest community, every one of us bears responsibility. Some have more, some less, but all of us have a responsibility that no one can take away from us. If we do not meet this responsibility, there are consequences. And those consequences can be frightful for us, for our children and children’s children.”
Too often we allow ourselves to slip into the idea that natural reason consists in some sort of agnosticism, but Scripture and the extraordinary magisterium of the Church teach us in contrast that the one true God, our Creator and Lord, can be certainly known by the natural light of human reason from the things that have been made. And if we know God through reason we know both that we must worship Him in the manner he has appointed and that we cannot know what manner he has appointed unless He tells us.
St Paul was sent by God as His vessel of election to carry His name before the gentiles and their kings. Man is a social and political animal. A Nazi judge famously observed that both Christianity and Nazism “demand the whole person”. In reality, Nazism is simply more explicit about this. Liberalism too demands your children and violates your conscience, dissolves all bonds that unite and insists that you dip your hands in the blood of its victims. All societies not recognising the inspired truth about God and man are brought to seek their criteria and goal in themselves or to borrow them from some ideology. Since they do not admit that one can defend an objective criterion of good and evil, they arrogate to themselves an explicit or implicit totalitarian power over man and his destiny, as history shows. Unless we demand not just the man but the father and the citizen then we do not truly preach the gospel. Our God is a jealous God. In the end, for the gospel, it is not enough simply to win, everybody else must lose.