Catholic Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democracy (review)

Abstract

Not the synthesis that one might expect from the title, this book actually focuses on selected Catholic intellectuals influential in Britain and America in the first half of the twentieth century. Taking off from his 1981 work, G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc: The Battle Against Modernity, Corrin here pursues a twofold question. Is there something innate to Catholic thought that tends toward authoritarian regimes and hence favored Fascism? Belloc would be a case in point; but the hypothesis limps, as Corrin shows, even for Chesterton and fails completely to account for the likes of Don Luigi Sturzo and the Catholic critics of Mussolini and Franco such as Jacques Maritain. Granting this, however (p. 386), "what was it that made so many leading British and American Catholics political reactionaries and apologists for fascist-type regimes, while only a minority drew on Catholic social teachings to justify an accommodation with liberal politics"? This is the focus that lends consistency to Corrin's study.