Misunderstood Civic Duty: The Center Party and the Enabling Act

Abstract

In the late nineteenth century, Pope Leo XIII cautiously abandoned the reactionary positions of Pius IX and defined teachings with which to begin engaging the evolving modern secular state. While Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum famously provided a foundation for modern Catholic social teaching, two other encyclicals, Diuturnum Illud of 1881 and Immortale Dei of 1885, defined Catholic teaching about the state and the role of Catholics as subjects and citizens of the state. This teaching sought mostly to insulate the life of the Church from the political world and by doing so, weakened the ability of the Church, both hierarchy and faithful, successfully to influence the secular state on the basis of Catholic values. The German Catholic Center Party's tortuous decision to support the Enabling Act of 1933 which provided the constitutional basis for the Nazi regime is a case in point.1 In Diuturnum Illud, Leo XIII defined as Catholic teaching a principle that became known as accidentalism. Two primary tenets characterized accidentalism. First, the modern state was a secular contrivance to meet secular needs without any particular relevance for the life of the Church. Conversely, the Church did not prefer one form of government over another as long as the life of the Church—largely defined as the sacramental life of the Church but also the communal life—remained unaffected. Governments were accidents of history, the Church was eternal. Second, Catholics should accept any existing authority as legitimate and deserving of Catholics' loyalty and service as long as the life of the Church remained intact. After World War I, this accidentalism proved quite useful, for it permitted some Catholics and forced more reluctant Catholics to adapt to the new political realities.