Abstract
Political Catholicism began in the 20th century by presenting a conception of confessional politics to a secularizing Europe. However, this article reveals the reworking of political Catholicism’s historical commitment to a balance of two powers—an ancient Imperium and Sacerdotium—to justify change to this position. A secular democratic faith became a key insight in political Catholicism in the 20th century, as it wedded human rights to an evolving cosmopolitan Catholicism and underlined the growth of Christian democracy. This article argues that the thesis of Christian democracy held a central post-war motif that there existed a prisca theologia or a philosophia perennis, semblances of a natural law, in secular modernity that could reshape the social compact of the modern project of democracy. However, as the Cold War ended, human rights became more secularized in keeping with trends across Europe. The relationship between political Catholicism and human rights reached a turning point, and this article asks if a cosmopolitan political Catholicism still interprets human rights as central to its embrace of the modern world.
Highlights
The arrival of a cosmopolitan Catholic rights-based tradition in the early 20th century has problematized histories of human rights and political Catholicism
Central to the political Catholicism of these new cosmopolitans was the value of the natural law, drawn from various Catholic encyclicals that sustained a Catholic tradition of jurisprudence
A cosmopolitan Political Catholicism no longer needed to rely on confessional politics because the roots of the new post-War political order would be grounded in a prisca theologia or primitive anticipation of Christianity, in the natural law as a foundation for human rights based protections of the civil and public spheres of newly forming democracies (Taylor 2020, pp. 195–217)
Summary
The arrival of a cosmopolitan Catholic rights-based tradition in the early 20th century has problematized histories of human rights and political Catholicism. Catholicism that took seriously the role of human rights, as well as to respond to the changes of the period Those actors are described as cosmopolitan because they looked beyond the domestic plain to consider their contribution to international institutions and bodies, while they collaborated transnationally, and viewed the project of political Catholicism as an international concern. Political Catholicism can be shown to have embraced concerns for the uses of law, the nature of sovereignty, and the exercise of political power to interpret the democratic project These are not new preoccupations in political Catholicism but for Catholic cosmopolitans in the 20th century they become valuable resources to present political Catholicism in the idiom of human rights, liberal democracy, and modern international law. Drawing on a historical thesis that saw political power as defused and decentered, where once temporal and spiritual sovereignty might be shared between papal and monarchical authority, they imagined international legal instruments to defuse the excesses of newly forming nation states in the 20th century
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