Catholicism and Democracy

by Perreau-saussine, Emile; Rex, Richard; MacIntyre, Alasdair C.

• ISBN13: 9780691153940
• ISBN10: 0691153949
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-01-04
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

Catholicism and Democracyis a history of Catholic political thinking from the French Revolution to the present day. Emile Perreau-Saussine investigates the church's response to liberal democracy, a political system for which the church was utterly unprepared. Looking at leading philosophers and political theologians--among them Joseph de Maistre, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Charles Pguy--Perreau-Saussine shows how the church redefined its relationship to the State in the long wake of the French Revolution. Disenfranchised by the fall of the monarchy, the church in France at first embraced that most conservative of ideologies, "ultramontanism" (an emphasis on the central role of the papacy). Catholics whose church had lost its national status henceforth looked to the papacy for spiritual authority. Perreau-Saussine argues that this move paradoxically combined a fundamental repudiation of the liberal political order with an implicit acknowledgment of one of its core principles, the autonomy of the church from the state. However, as Perreau-Saussine shows, in the context of twentieth-century totalitarianism, the Catholic Church retrieved elements of its Gallican heritage and came to embrace another liberal (and Gallican) principle, the autonomy of the state from the church, for the sake of its corollary, freedom of religion. Perreau-Saussine concludes that Catholics came to terms with liberal democracy, though not without abiding concerns about the potential of that system to compromise freedom of religion in the pursuit of other goals.

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. vii
Introduction	p. 1
A New Role for the Papacy: The Origins of Vatican I	p. 5
From Bossuet to Maistre: The Deconfessionalization of the State as a Political Problem	p. 7
The Civil Constitution of the Clergy	p. 7
The Autonomy of the Temporal Power in Relation to the Church	p. 15
The Alliance of Church and State as a Matrix of Intolerance	p. 22
The Inadequacy of Spiritual Constraints and the Need for Temporal Constraints	p. 26
The French Revolution through the Lens of Political Theology	p. 30
The Collapse of Reactionary Ultramontanism	p. 37
Napoleons Miscalculations	p. 37
Félicité de Lamennais on the Atheism of the Law	p. 46
Against Political Theology	p. 51
A Papacy Refocused on Its Spiritual Role	p. 58
Alexis de Tocqueville and the Preservation of Gallicanism	p. 69
A New Role for the Laity: The Origins of Vatican II	p. 81
Intolerant Secularism and Liberal Secularism	p. 83
Auguste Comte: From Papal Infallibility to the Infallibility of Science	p. 84
Laicism as Statism	p. 88
Two Kinds of Laicity	p. 95
Emile Littré's "Catholicism of Universal Suffrage"	p. 99
Charles Péguy: The Eternal Dwelling in the Temporal	p. 103
The Political Virtues of Moderation	p. 109
Neither Maurras nor Marx	p. 109
The Political Role of the Laity	p. 117
Freedom of Religion as the Cornerstone of Catholic Political Thought	p. 127
A Degree of Disenchantment since Vatican II	p. 132
A Positive Idea of Laicity	p. 141
Conclusion	p. 147
Notes	p. 153
Index	p. 179
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