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Catholics and Modern Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 October 2024

Aelred Graham
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It is said that the onlooker sees most of the game. When, however, what is to be surveyed is the dimly lit and sometimes treacherous field of inter-action between religion and politics, only the most confident of observers would lay claim to any privileged insight. And yet these musings at a monastery window, which is all they can pretend to be, may not wholly lack interest; they are an attempt to glean something of the significance of the contemporary scene in the light of ultimate principles. But the process will demand of us a certain corporate self-scrutiny, and of this a word must be said.

The divine constitution of the Catholic Church, indefectible in its essence and hierarchic in its structure, necessarily precludes any criticism by its members of the Church itself. It is not our business— nor, if we are wise, should it be our wish—to call in question what God has ordained. But the mental attitude engendered by this state of things, one of unquestioning acceptance, can sometimes extend beyond its due limits .and so lead us to leave unexamined what in fact has every claim to searching attention. It is important to know, for example, to the extent that the thing can be ascertained, how far the Church in this or that particular country embodies all that is implied in Catholicism, or how far circumstances of time and place, not excluding the personal limitations of its members, seem to hamper the flowering of the full Christian life.

Type
Research Article
Information
Blackfriars , Volume 30 , Issue 348 , March 1949 , pp. 99 - 115
Copyright
Copyright © 1949 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

Footnotes

1

Being a paper read to the Catholic Society of the University of Leeds, 3rd February, 1949.

References

2 John Bowle: Western Political Thought (Jonstban Cape, 1947), p. 438.

3 Loc. cit.

4 A hint d this accusation has been aimed at the highest level. Cf. Michael Oakeshott: The Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary Europe (Cambridge University Press 1941). Some thirty pages of this book are devoted to ‘Catholicism’; they consist of a balanced and objective presentation of the Church's attitude to politics, being made up of extracts from the Encyclicals of Leo XIII and Pius XI. In the author's introductory note (p. 45) he recalls the fact, that ‘The social and political doctrine of Catholicism is a doctrine in terms of Natural Law; it belongs, that is, to the most ancient of the Western European traditions of social and political thought. So far as Catholicism is concerned, this tradition received a definitive statement in the philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas. But in modern times an admirable restatement of it was made in Leo XIII's remarkable series of Encyclical Letters, the most important of which are: Arcanum (1880), Diuturnum (1881). Immortale Dei (1885), Libertas (1888), and Rerum Novarum (1891). More recently,… Pius XI has contributed to the exposition of this doctrine a number of letters to different national branches of the Church, and two Encyclicals, Quadragesimo Anno (1931) and Divini Redemptoris (1937)’. The author then goes on. ‘I have gone to the pronouncements of Leo XIII (1937)’. and Pius XI for the statement of this doctrine, and I have quoted from all these Encyclicals with the exception of Divini Redemptoris, directed against Communism, which seemed to provide nothing that was not available elsewhere and to display no very profound appreciation of the doctrine of Communism’.

5 History of England, Vol. I, p. 99.

6 Catholics and World Reconstruction (An Allocution of 1st June, 1946, translated from the Italian for the Catholic Truth Society by Canon G. D. Smith), p. 9.

7 Pope Pius XII: Wealth, Work, and Freedom (Whitsun Broadcast, 1941; C.T.S. translation), p. 8.

8 Pops Pius XII: Cathclics and World Reconstruction, p. 8.