The Church and the Resurgence of Nationalism, Part III

The Church has always promoted patriotism and opposed nationalism. I am afraid that many "conservative" Catholics are confusing the two.

From Crisis

By Darrick Taylor, PhD

The conflict between nationalism and the Church came about because the Church believed society and human nature to be hierarchical, which clashed with the (relative) egalitarianism of nationalism.

See previous parts of this essay here and here.

The conflict between nationalism and the Church at the outset of modernity came about because the Church believed society and human nature to be hierarchical. This belief clashed with the (relative) egalitarianism of nationalism. The Church saw society as a hierarchy of communities, from the family upward, with the Church at the top of this hierarchy. This is the reason for the intense clash with the new nation-states over marriage, religious liberty, and education. These nation-states needed to treat all citizens equally regardless of religious beliefs. The Church saw such freedoms as impinging on her rights and privileges.

Pius VI made this very assertion in 1791, when responding to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, in two briefs: Quod Aliquantum and Charitas Quae. In these, he claimed the Civil Constitution was aimed at the “abolition of the Catholic religion and the obedience due to kings” and “overturned the rights and primacy of the Church.” According to Pius, the idea that all men had the right to freedom of opinion and religion because they were equal by nature was an “insane idea,” citing St. Paul and St. Augustine against it.
Popes throughout the 19th century frequently repeated such warnings. In Mirari Vos (1832), his encyclical condemning Liberalism, Gregory XVI castigated the idea that “liberty of conscience must be maintained for everyone.” He also asserted that “trust and due submission to princes” was a doctrine which “proceeded from the most holy precepts of the Christian religion.” Gregory was writing in the wake of the French Revolution of 1830, when a liberal revolution overthrew the restored monarchy, and equated their nationalist aspirations narrowly in terms of rebellion against the natural order. 

Pius IX, in Quanta Cura and the Syllabus of Errors (1864), repeated the same ideas as the Risorgimento was nearing its completion. The Syllabus, for example, condemns the idea that “in the present day it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the State” and that it is lawful to “refuse obedience to legitimate princes.” It also rejects the notion that “The best theory of civil society requires that popular schools open to children of every class,” free from ecclesiastical control, “according to the standard of the prevalent opinions of the age.” These were the very issues at stake with the unification of Italy and Germany at the time, of course. 

The popes of the later 19th and early 20th centuries reiterated a theme that clashed with the new nationalism: that for civil society to be properly ordered, it needed to be shaped by religion—one religion, not many, for that would create confusion. And, optimally, this needed to be the true religion, Catholicism. This is most clearly articulated in the encyclicals of Leo XIII, such as Immortale Dei (1885), Libertas  (1888), Sapientiae Christianae (1890), and Au Milieu Des Sollicitudes (1892). 

According to Leo, “religion only can create the social bond” that “maintains the peace of the nation.” A nation’s citizens are “bound to unite in maintaining in the nation true religious sentiment, and to defend it in case of need.” It would run counter to the natural unity of the nation “to treat the various religions (as they call them) alike…bestow upon them promiscuously equal rights and privileges. Since…the profession of one religion is necessary in the State, that religion must be professed which alone is true.” 

Leo admitted in Au Milieu Des Sollicitudes, which was addressed to French Catholics, that it is not always possible to make the “profession of one religion for a nation” the true one, but that in countries with a Catholic majority (such as France) the Church should not “be reduced to the liberty of living according to the law common to all citizens” nor “placed in the precarious position to which she must submit among other peoples.” This encyclical is the one which Leo called for Catholics to try and work within the Third Republic, the so-called ralliément, in order to work for a Catholic vision of society, which came to naught when the Republic enacted the Law of Separation in 1905, officially separating Church and State. 

Throughout the early 20th century, the Church, in her papal teaching, reiterated its hierarchical conception of society, in which God (and therefore the Church) rested atop this hierarchy, above the nation and the state. Beginning with Leo, she began more and more to make a distinction between patriotism as an ordinate love of country that maintained this hierarchy and “extreme” forms of nationalism that appeared to undo it. This appears clearly in the reign of Pius XI, who in his first encyclical, Urbi Arcano Dei Consilio (1922), warned that 

true love of country is debased to the condition of an extreme nationalism, when we forget that all men are our brothers and members of the same great human family, that other nations have an equal right with us both to life and to prosperity.

The Interwar Period witnessed a shift in the way the Vatican viewed nationalism, as World War I and the Great Depression led to the rise of fascism and communism. Pius XI began to emphasize that not only is religion crucial to the internal unity of nations but also between nations. Pius XI’s 1932 Caritate Christi Compulsi argues that “men who in every nation pray to the same God for peace on earth will not kindle flames of discord” and “will not set up in their own country a craving for domination; nor foster that inordinate love of country which of its own nation makes its own god.” 

Having tried to convince European nations that religion—and especially Catholicism—was the key to national unity, the papal magisterium begins in this age to emphasize how the Church can prevent enmity between nations. The rise of dictatorship and nationalist ideologies increasingly focused on race led the papacy to condemn forms of nationalism for the first time. In 1926, Pius XI condemned Action Française for putting politics, and therefore the nation, above the Church (politiques d’abord, “politics first” was one of Action Française’ slogans), but its anti-Semitism also offended many clergy. 

Most prominently, Pius XI issued Mit Brennender Sorge in 1937, his encyclical addressed to the German Church, in which he condemned “concepts of a national God, of a national religion.” Pius wrote that “whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State…and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God.” 

Two years later, Pius XII affirmed the racial equality of all within the Church, writing in Summi Pontificatus that “the Church hails with joy…the individual character of each race, provided that they are not opposed to the duties incumbent on men from their unity of origin and common destiny” and that whatever their race “they have equal rights as children in the House of the Lord.” 

Until the 1960s, there was a consistent theme running through papal teaching on nationalism: nations are natural, good, and have their place in a universal hierarchy of communities, along with individuals, families, smaller communities, but also humankind as such. There is a definite change in tenor with the pontificate of John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council. 

In Mater et Magistra (1961), his encyclical on “social progress,” John reiterates much of what his predecessors articulated. He writes that every nation has “unmistakable characteristics of its own” which other nations should respect and that “to undermine this national integrity is clearly immoral.” (These passages refer to poor countries which might be taken advantage of by more advanced nations, it should be noted). It recognizes that nations are a part of that larger universal hierarchy of communities sketched out by earlier popes.

But with Pacem in Terris (1963), his final encyclical issued just before his death, something new appears. Whereas Mater et Magistra talks of the “formation of a world community, in which each individual nation…can work on terms of equality with the rest for the attainment of universal prosperity” as a goal to be worked toward, Pacem in Terris treats the “world community” almost as an accomplished fact. It says that people are becoming “more conscious of being living members of the universal family of mankind”; the terms “world community” and “human family” appear a half dozen times, as opposed to only once each in Mater et Magistra.

More than this, though it stresses nations still have their proper role in the universal hierarchy of communities, Pacem in Terris says historical changes have so altered the relations between states that the “structure of political life in the modern world, and the…public authority in all the nations of the world are unequal to the task of promoting the common good of all peoples.” As a result, it calls for the creation of a “general authority equipped with world-wide power and adequate means for achieving the universal common good.” John XXIII goes on to cite, approvingly, the establishment of the United Nations as a step “toward the establishment of a juridical and political ordering of the world community.”

This is a major shift in how modern Church teaching discussed the role of nations in the hierarchy of human communities. Previously, the only institution the Church recognized as having responsibility for the universal common good was the Church herself. As Pius XI put it in Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, 

no merely human institution of today can be as successful in devising a set of international laws which will be in harmony with world conditions as the Middle Ages were in the possession of that true League of Nations, Christianity. 

Only an institution which “is a part of every nation; at the same time it is above all nations” could do this, and the only institution capable of doing so “is the Church of Christ.”

This shift parallels another made by the Church at the Second Vatican Council: the embrace of religious liberty. Having been the most neuralgic point with nationalism since its inception, the Church embraced religious liberty in Dignitatis Humanae (1965), the council’s declaration on the subject. But even before this, Pacem in Terris proclaimed all men had a natural right “to worship God in accordance with the right dictates of his own conscience, and to profess his religion both in private and in public.” It also proclaimed a right to “freedom of speech and publication,” within the limits of natural law. 

Popes since the French Revolution had condemned both of these as incompatible with social order, but Pacem in Terris embraces them and goes even further than this. It notes with approval that “the conviction is widespread that all men are equal in natural dignity,” and it extends this from individuals to nations: “since all men are equally noble in natural dignity…consequently there are no differences at all between political communities from the point of view of natural dignity” calling this an “inviolable principle.” 

From there, the document makes predictions about the future of human society, claiming it “is evolving on entirely new social and political lines” such that “soon no nation will rule over another and none will be subject to an alien power.” In an extraordinary passage, it claims that “the longstanding inferiority complex of certain classes because of their economic and social status, sex, or position in the State, and the corresponding superiority complex of other classes, is rapidly becoming a thing of the past.” 

These passages suggest that just as nations have become one homogenous people and therefore require a state to express this, humanity as a whole was now becoming more homogenized, so it requires a “juridical and political” expression as well. Pacem in Terris seems to treat the process that produced modern nation-states (eroding or muting of local loyalties and the homogenizing of them as equal members of one community) as if it could be extended to the entire globe. Almost as if the culture and civilization of “liberal democracy” to which it undoubtedly refers represented a permanent and universal development, whereas nation-states would eventually lose their importance. 

The 1960s marked a watershed in the Church’s teaching with regard to nationalism. Having begun the modern era by condemning the equality between members of the nation, it ended by embracing this idea simultaneously with the ideal of global order which clearly de-emphasizes the importance of nations. Undoubtedly, this was influenced by the Cold War and the Church’s alliance with Western liberal democracies. Some adjustment of its teaching on relationships between nations was probably necessary, and likely inevitable. 

What is more interesting is what did not change throughout all of these documents under consideration: namely, the idea that “extreme” nationalism is a threat to the natural order of human society. What changed was the definition of the natural order of society described in those documents from the 1960s onward.

This survey still leaves several questions unanswered. Church documents often reiterate a distinction between “patriotism” and “extreme nationalism,” the former being positive and conducive to peace, the latter unhealthy and a cause of violent conflict. Can there be a “healthy” form of nationalism that is distinct from mere love of country? What does this resurgence mean for the Church today? And how should the Church react to the resurgence of nationalism in recent years? 

In the fourth and final part of this essay, we will address these and other questions raised by the return of modern nationalism today.