Origins of Modern Christian Politics
The French Revolution of 1789 was quick, dirty, implacable, and irresistible because it sought to realize the Empire of Reason and to dispose once and for all of the Judeo-Christian or biblical heritage—that is, of Christendom, which was diagnosed by elites as “fanaticism” and “superstition.” The Revolution’s most radical Jacobin phase lasted only a few years before giving way to the Napoleonic military dictatorship, and then progressed from 1814 on to a much milder regime, thanks to Anglo-Saxon influences. But the Revolution was never really reversed. Indeed, its legacy influenced the rest of Europe and its colonies. Revolutionary France was the paradigmatic “modern regime,” and its modes of social engineering and modernization spread even to countries such as Prussia and Russia, which pretended to oppose it.
Revolutionary upheavals occurred again and again in France and elsewhere: the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, the Parisian Commune of 1871, and finally, the twentieth-century “secular religions” of communism and fascism, which fully realized the inherently totalitarian drive toward social engineering that characterizes modern revolutionary politics. But Christianity did not just survive; it acquired new forms of strength throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Christianity’s continued influence was first and foremost a matter of sheer numbers. There were many Christians in the post-Revolution world. In their imagery and on their coins, French Republicans represented the Sovereign People as Hercules, the mace-wielding giant who smashed everything in his way—a transparent allusion to the sans-culotte mob that had stormed the Bastille in 1789 and the Tuileries Royal Palace in 1792. But they, like Napoleon after them, were curbed or defeated by another Hercules. He showed his power in a series of Catholic rebellions, from the War in the Vendée and the Chouannerie uprisings to the counterrevolution in Naples in 1799 to the Spanish War of Independence (1808–14).
As representative governments were established, Christian demographic strength translated into electoral power. The steady growth of confessional parties in Western countries, from the early nineteenth century to the late twentieth, paralleled the steady extension of the electoral franchise. The first Catholic political congresses or caucuses took place between 1864 and 1884 when most European countries granted electoral franchise to most or all men. The formation of Catholic parties occurred in Germany in the 1870s, a result of Bismarck’s constitutional provision for universal male suffrage. In other countries the introduction or expansion of the electoral franchise led to the formation of confessional parties, Protestant as well as Catholic, and some Jewish ones. The Golden Era of confessional parties, starting in the 1920s in some countries and in the late 1940s in others, coincided with the extension of the franchise to women: 1918 in Austria and Poland, 1919 in Germany, 1922 in Ireland, 1931 in Spain, 1944 in France, 1945 in Italy.
What brought Christians and other religiously minded voters together was an anti-totalitarian resistance to revolutionary politics, expressed in the willingness of confessional blocs to defend themselves and their mores as organic elements of society. This meant protecting family values against social engineering, upholding popular traditions, supporting traditional marriage and independent education, and fostering local and professional autonomy (subsidiarity, to use a partly Calvinist, partly Catholic term). Christian parties also recognized at a very early stage the disruptive effects of the Industrial Revolution and were willing to address them. They did so through paternalistic but usually effective private initiatives (providing decent family housing to industrial workers and sufficient wages to allow fathers to provide for their families) or state-managed initiatives (retirement plans, medical insurance).
The Christian influence had a strong civic dimension outside formal political activity. Christian parties built up a host of ancillary organizations, from school networks to publishing houses and media, from youth movements (including the Scouts) to sports clubs, from guilds to trade unions. This civic dimension gave them a decisive advantage against secular liberals (whose main civil society institution was freemasonry) and, perhaps more importantly, against the socialists, who presented themselves as champions of the growing industrial working class. The Christian trade-union movement, which gained ground throughout Europe in the 1880s, competed with the more powerful Marxist and social-democratic unions, and even managed to attain dominance among some laborers, such as the miners of Northern France or the skilled workers in the Ruhr.
In Christendom, kings and rulers had been the temporal coregents or protectors of the churches. As Christendom ended, the churches were emancipated and, paradoxically, far from becoming less politically relevant, they became more so. For the first time since Constantine, kings and rulers were more dependent on church support than the church was on their patronage. Among Catholics, Ultramontanism—the doctrine of the pope’s absolute supremacy in religious matters—superseded Gallicanism and similar views that insisted on the union of Church and nation. Protestant churches, often more subservient to the state than Catholic churches, likewise became more assertive, especially nonconformist or “free” churches. As a consequence, a self-consciously Christian form of modern politics arose. It was to have extraordinary consequences.
Christian Democracy, Phase One
Belgium was the first European country in which a Christian party rose to power in the nineteenth century. Formerly the Austrian Netherlands (and part of Republican and Napoleonic France for about twenty years), Belgium was a largely Catholic and partially French-speaking nation. Belgians resented being incorporated into the predominantly Protestant and Dutch-speaking Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1815. Things only worsened when the haughty Dutch king, William I, attempted in the 1820s to turn the Catholic Church into a “national church,” that is to say, to cut it from the Holy See. In the wake of the French Revolution of 1830, which installed the Orleans dynasty in place of the Bourbons, both liberal and confessional Belgians rose against King William and declared independence.
The new state reflected this novel alliance. Its constitution, which is still in force (excepting some minor adjustments) one hundred and ninety years later, was drafted by the liberals, the party that stood for a moderate, modern government in the Anglo-Saxon style: popular sovereignty, parliamentary governance, and human rights, including freedom of religion, speech, and opinion. But the constitution also extended benefits to the Church and the faithful. As Michael P. Fogarty explains:
The Catholics, led by their bishops, placed themselves squarely on the ground of liberal democracy, and approved and indeed demanded the freeing of the Church from any entanglement with the State. The liberals on their side recognised the right of the Church to manage its own affairs, open its own schools, and even (a little illogically, in view of the general nature of the settlement) to have its clergy paid by public funds.
As the electoral franchise widened, Catholic-dominated parliamentary majorities governed. The Catholic Party of Belgium, founded in 1868, achieved an absolute majority in the Chamber of Representatives in 1884, which it retained until 1918. Under further names—the Catholic Union, the Catholic Block, and finally the dual Christian-Social Party (CSP, in Wallonia) and Christian Popular Party (CVP, in Flanders)—a Catholic party remained part of almost every Belgian government until the end of the twentieth century.
The Belgian experience influenced Christian activists throughout Europe. It made clear that Christian Democracy was a perfectly sensible proposition, even if it contradicted the anti-liberal decrees of Pius IX, the pope who dominated the nineteenth century. But circumstances were different in other countries, more complex and often less idyllic.
From the 1880s on, the Netherlands, like Belgium, was dominated by Christian parties that advocated family values, freedom of education, the extension of the electoral franchise, and the interests of “ordinary people” (kleyne luyden). But these parties were divided on confessional lines and were rocked by a series of quarrels and schisms. Dutch Catholics, a despised minority after the secession of Belgium, initially lent their votes to the secular liberal party, a strategy meant to improve their lot.
Abraham Kuyper’s Anti-Revolutionary Party (ARP) changed Dutch politics. His party rejected Enlightenment philosophy and promoted, on purely Christian principles, a democratic and progressive platform. On this basis a Catholic-Protestant coalition was formed in 1888. Although it never became a unified parliamentary party, this configuration ruled the country on a regular basis, and then exerted full control over Dutch politics from 1918 to 1939. The signal influence continued after 1945 as well.
France came very close to the Belgian model in 1848, under the short-lived Second Republic. Thanks to the universal male franchise, both conservative and progressive Catholics dominated the Constituent Assembly of 1848 and the Legislative Assembly of 1849, implementing many parts of their platforms. A French army was dispatched to restore Pius IX’s temporal authority in Central Italy (albeit motivated by reasons of state); the Falloux Laws abolished the secular state’s monopoly on education and allowed for Catholic schools and colleges; laws were passed to protect the working class. However, the Catholic party could not prevent the 1851 military takeover by President Louis-Napoleon, soon to become Napoleon III. In this period, out of concern over the growth of atheistic socialism, Catholics shifted loyalties toward a larger conservative party, le Parti de l’Ordre. In the Third Republic, founded in 1870, most Catholics remained entangled with the monarchist or authoritarian right. This led to anticlerical backlashes in the 1880s, and eventually to the complete separation of Church and state in 1905. Despite these setbacks, intellectual Catholicism, Catholic civil society, and Christian trade unions prospered in France, paving the way for a political revival in the mid-twentieth century.
At first glance, Christian politics seem to have fared much better in the Germanic countries. Conservative parties were keen to describe themselves as Christian, and liberal parties proclaimed their loyalty to Christian ethics. But actual conditions were less auspicious.
Conservatives in Germany tended to use the churches as tools for social control, and treated them harshly if they did not cooperate: This was the case for both Protestants and Catholics in Prussia in the 1820s and 1830s, and again in the 1870s. The liberals, who were influential in Southern Germany, especially in Bavaria and Baden, were unwilling to endorse a Belgian-style compromise to accommodate the churches. And some groups advancing a Christian agenda drifted toward anti-Semitic agitation. The Christian Social Party founded by Adolf Stöcker, the Lutheran Court chaplain in Berlin, attracted few votes but succeeded in disseminating radical anti-Jewish views. In Austria, Karl Lueger, the charismatic mayor of Vienna, founded a party that achieved political influence at local and national levels. It, too, engaged in anti-Semitic rhetoric, though it did not attempt to translate those sentiments into policy.
The most successful Christian party in Germany was the Zentrum or Center Party, founded in 1870 by Ludwig Windthorst, a Hanoverian lawyer and statesman. Members of Zentrum sought to defend Prussia’s Catholic communities. Catholics constituted almost one-third of Prussia’s population and were a majority in the Eastern Polish-speaking provinces of Posen and Upper Silesia, as well as in the western provinces of Rhineland and Westphalia. The establishment of the Second Reich in 1871 incorporated Bavaria and other southern German states, making Catholics a substantial 40 percent minority within Germany.
The Second Reich established a universal male franchise. In the 1871 election, the Center Party secured 18.6 percent of the vote. It reached 27.9 percent at the second Reichstag (1874) and hovered around 20 percent until 1907. It was thus, for most of this period, Germany’s second-largest parliamentary party, initially behind the National Liberal Party (a broad coalition of conservative and liberal nationalists), and then the Social Democratic Party, which after 1891 rose to first position. On two occasions, in 1881 and 1884, the Zentrum gained the most votes of any party.
In many ways, the Center Party’s rise was the direct outcome of the Kulturkampf waged against the Catholic Church by the Second Reich under Otto von Bismarck. No fewer than twenty-two laws were passed between 1871 and 1876 to curb the Catholic clergy, expel the Jesuits, dissolve other monastic orders, interfere with Church discipline, secularize civil registries and primary schools, and encourage swift denominational disaffiliation. One can dismiss these policies—the harshest attack against the Roman Church in Europe since the 1789 Revolution—as Bismarckian aberrations. But this misjudges. Protestant Prussia dominated the Second Reich, and it was wary of a renewed Catholic coalition of France and Austria. Bismarck worried that such a configuration would attract the loyalty of German Catholics. But the legal measures backfired. It was only natural for German Catholics, as a reaction, to support the Center Party en masse.
From the outset, Windthorst insisted that the Center Party was loyal to the Reich and its constitution. Moreover, he claimed that the party did not defend Catholics as such. Rather, the party insisted that all citizens were entitled to full equality and full religious freedom, and pledged to defend those rights for all Germans. To that end, Windthorst attempted to win Protestant support, and he strongly opposed anti-Semitism. Thus, while Belgian Catholics had led the way in the nineteenth century by endorsing democracy, German Catholics went a step further. The Center Party was Catholic in the sense that its support came primarily from Catholic voters, but the party promoted a non-confessional Judeo-Christian Democratic vision.
The Center Party demonstrated its staying power during the Kulturkampf. Bismarck began looking for ways out of his repressive policies. When the more flexible Leo XIII succeeded Pius IX in 1878, the chancellor agreed to rescind some measures and gradually restored most rights to Catholics. As Social Democrats and more radical elements gained electoral votes, the Center Party cooperated with the Imperial and Prussian governments to buttress national defense and create a comprehensive social security system. Somewhat diminished after World War I because of the loss of Catholic regions to Poland and France, the party nevertheless remained powerful, one of the few stalwarts of democracy in the troubled Weimar state.
Similar political developments took place in Italy. It seems strange, for Italy, which had achieved national unity shortly before Germany, was, unlike Germany, a predominantly Catholic country. How could Catholicism be marginalized there? The blame lies with Pius IX. He refused to recognize the House of Savoy’s “theft” of the Papal States in 1860 and of Rome in 1870, and thus forbade Italian Catholics to take part in Italian political life. Leo XIII relaxed this policy but did not dare reverse it entirely. Leo’s successor, the conservative Pius X, lifted the ban incrementally, beginning in 1903, continuing in 1909, and concluding in 1913.
Though officially they stood outside Italian politics, Pius IX and Leo XIII guided the Catholic Church toward a heavy investment in civil society. The hierarchy nurtured, and to an extent controlled, an array of lay organizations: the Catholic Congress Movement, Catholic Action, and others. At quite an early stage, these groups cooperated indirectly with political parties in order to protect Catholic interests. Under Pius X, they provided a basis for direct Catholic political involvement. This involvement became more explicit still when Benedict XV lifted the ban against the Italian State in 1918 and freed Catholic politicians from direct Church interference. The Italian People’s Party that emerged captured 20 percent of the vote in the two pre-fascist elections of 1919 and 1921.
Just as the Kulturkampf led German Catholics to counterattack by embracing democracy, the rift between the Italian State and the Holy See encouraged Italian Catholics to subscribe to a democratic agenda. The Programme of the Young Christian Democrats, published in Turin in 1899, called for progressive reforms: proportional representation of parties in parliament and local authorities, extension of the franchise, decentralization of the administration, legal protection for labor, a fixed maximum of working hours per day and a fixed minimum wage, vocational education for the masses, workers’ housing societies, industrial arbitration, tax reform, and last but not least, the protection of civil and political liberties: freedom of teaching, of the press, of association, of meeting, of organization. The Programme insisted that these initiatives were rooted in Christian principles: “We demand all this as Christian Democrats, because the reforms for which we call correspond at once to the aspirations of a true democracy and to the social principles of Christianity. Christian Democracy means the wholehearted application of Christianity, that is of Catholicism, to the whole of modern public and private life, and to all its forms of progress.”
In view of their roles in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Germany and Italy, it is not surprising that the Center Party and the Italian People’s Party were the forerunners of the two strongest and most influential Christian parties that emerged in Europe after World War II: the German CDU/CSU and the Italian Democrazia Cristiana. But they first had to pass through very dark times.