Catholic Politics Research Articles

‘Real Toryism’ or Christian democracy? The political thought of Douglas Jerrold and Charles Petrie at the New English Review, 1945–50*

Abstract This article uses the periodical press, memoirs and archival sources to examine the Conservative thought of Douglas Jerrold and Charles Petrie at the New English Review between 1945 and 1950. It seeks to argue that while there was more continuity than rupture in their political thought, they were able to make a transition from interwar authoritarianism and ‘fascism’ to postwar anti-communism and democracy. There were similarities between their political Catholicism and Christian democracy, but ultimately their ‘real Toryism’ and continued sympathy for Franco prevented them from fully aligning themselves with British and west European Christian democrats.

Benedicto Kiwanuka and Catholic Democracy in Uganda

In this article, I introduce Benedicto Kiwanuka (1922–72), Uganda’s first prime minister and most prominent modern Catholic politician, and explore how his religious and political sensibilities — especially his vision of democracy — intersected with Catholic thought and historical experience in Buganda and Uganda. Far from turning him into a “Catholic tribalist” looking to empower Catholics vis à vis other religious groups, Kiwanuka’s Catholic identity was a core component of his political commitment to non‐sectarian democracy, the common good, and pan‐ethnic nation‐building. He saw in Catholicism the possibility of envisioning political solidarity during a moment of social rupture, and he and his Democratic Party used Catholic and biblical discourse and theology to help undergird a broader political commitment to liberal democratic nationalism during Uganda’s transition to independence (1958–62). At the same time, Kiwanuka’s prophetic commitment to principle — an uncompromising dogmatism often expressed in religious and theological language — also helped cost him the opportunity to lead Uganda into and beyond independence.

Does the social teaching of the Catholic Church contain the modernized elements of the medieval doctrina de duo gladi?

The purpose of the medieval Catholic political and theological doctrine of the "two swords" was to ground the thesis of the supremacy of the pope's authority over political power, and this enabled the spiritual institute to claim on the issues of secular and state character. However, as a result of reform processes in Europe, the doctrine of the "two swords" has been minimized but it assumes that certain elements of the doctrine could be preserved till our time and used by the Church in a time-adapted form. The solution of this problem is based on the study of the social doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church, as far as it is the Catholic social doctrine that has absorbed a number of secular issues, and this enables the Church to influence on civil society by addressing problems in the economic, political and social realms. As the Doctrine of the Two Swords contained a political component, the main focus of the article is made on the study of the theoretical and practical steps of the Roman Catholic Church in the diplomatic and geopolitical arena which in some ways may be consistent with the provisions of medieval doctrine. However, by paying attention to the socio-political aspects, the Church reserves the right to exercise moral and ethical control over both society and government, thereby demonstrating that the spiritual institute obtains an important role in shaping the architecture of the modern world. Therefore, the purpose of the article is to investigate Catholic social doctrine and to identify its elements that can be interpreted as a modern realization of the medieval "two swords" theory.

Performing the Northern Athens: Dr. Corry's Diorama of Ireland and the Belfast Riot of 1864

Although sectarian violence characterized life in Belfast for hundreds of years, 1864 marked a shift in how violence played out in the city. Unlike previous conflicts that occurred in open spaces and reflected long-held rural rituals, the riots of August 1864 took place in the city's rapidly developing urban streets. The violence broke out in response to celebrations around the foundation laying for a new statue of Daniel O'Connell, the late Catholic politician, in Dublin. Thousands of Belfast Catholics traveled to Dublin for the celebration. Upon their return to Belfast, ten thousand Protestant loyalists greeted them by burning an effigy of O'Connell on Boyne Bridge and staging a mock funeral and procession that attempted to enter a Catholic burial ground. The resulting violence and rioting continued for ten days on the city streets, where homes and businesses faced destruction on a scale previously unseen. Expelling residents of opposing views, rioters reinforced older ideas of “communal conflict” expressed through “disagreements over each group's place—literally and imaginatively—in the city” and strengthened notions of neighborhood geography based on religious beliefs. As historian Mark Doyle argues, the shifting patterns of violence resulted from “[t]he steady advance of working-class alienation from the state, the growing hegemony of violent extremists in working-class neighbourhoods, the sectarian alliance between Protestant workers and elites, the insecurity of the Catholics and, above all, the polarising effects of earlier outbreaks of violence.” Lasting reminders of conflict lingered as the city recovered, reminding anyone walking the streets of the city's violent past and the likely potential of future clashes.

"A 'Bon François' Desirous of the Glory of the King": Intra-Catholic Anti-Jesuitism and the Collapse of the Port Royal Mission, 1610-1613

Cet article examine l'échec de la mission jésuite à Port-Royal, en Acadie, en 1613 dans l'optique du discours pamphlétaire anti-jésuite alors populaire en France. Après l'effondrement de la colonie, son propriétaire, Jean de Poutrincourt, écrivit un factum anonyme expliquant en détail comment deux missionnaires jésuites, Pierre Briard et Enemond Massé, conspirèrent contre la France pour causer la perte de l'établissement. Bien que les faits rapportés dans le factum soient inexacts, le litige démontre que, dans le contexte de la politique catholique française consécutive aux guerres de religion, les débats européens sur le catholicisme et la Réforme se transportèrent de l'autre côté de l'Atlantique dans les premières années de la Nouvelle-France.

Marx or Malthus? Population debates and the reproductive politics of state-socialist Poland in the 1950s and 1960s

ABSTRACT The article presents state-socialist and Catholic reproductive and population politics of Cold War Poland, focusing on competing discourses of population growth that were present in public debates since the 1950s up to the 1970s. Situating the local Polish case in a wider international framework, I examine references to Malthusian and Marxists theories of population in the statements of party-state and Catholic journalists during the only period of (moderate) anti-natalism in the history of state-socialist Poland. I argue that by ignoring the more moderate Catholic population and reproductive politics rationales, party-state journalists attempted to position Church leaders and commentators as unanimous supporters of ‘unfettered fertility’ and to present the party state as the only modernizing force whose population and reproductive politics would guarantee Polish citizens’ prosperous standards of living attained thanks to small-sized families rearing high-quality children. In the official rhetoric this model of the modern family was to be achieved thanks to contraceptives that were endorsed by the party state supporting a ‘conscious motherhood’ campaign initiated in the late 1950s by the Polish family planning association.

Slovenci, Jugoslavija in začetek vojne

Po oblikovanju Banovine Hrvaške 26. avgusta 1939 so se jeseni 1939 v katoliškem taboru, ki je v Dravski banovini – jugoslovanski Sloveniji imel absolutno oblast, začeli pripravljati na vzpostavitev posebne Banovine Slovenije. V vprašanje državnopravne emancipacije v Kraljevini Jugoslaviji so se leta 1939 poglobili tudi v opozicijskem ljudskofrontem gibanju. Narodni demokrati, krščanski socialisti in komunisti so oblikovali tri zelo določne, izvirne in radikalne avtonomistično-federalistične narodne programe. Ob narodni so bile na Slovenskem poudarjene tudi idejnopolitične opredelitve. V katoliškem taboru so zaostrili ideološki boj ne le proti liberalizmu, temveč posebej proti socializmu in komunizmu. Obenem je v njem prišlo do cepitve, saj so krščanski socialisti s katoliško politiko pretrgali vse vezi. Ideološko stališče večinskega dela katoliškega tabora so leta 1939 izrazili na VI. Mednarodnem kongresu Kristusa Kralja 25. do 30. julija 1939 v Ljubljani z zahtevo po nujni katoliški obnovi. Živo je bilo narodnoobrambno gibanje, ki je spodbujalo povezovanje ljudi, društev in organizacij ne glede na politično pripadnost zaradi obrambe pred zunanjo nevarnostjo fašističnih držav in v boju zoper hitlerizem. Leta 1939 je izšel tudi znani Spominski zbornik Slovenije, Univerza v Ljubljani je praznovala dvajsetletnico obstoja, Antonu Korošcu pa so ob tem podelili naslov častnega doktorja prava. Leta 1939 je postal tudi častni ljubljanski meščan. Vojna in bojazen, za marsikoga že prepričanje, da Jugoslavije ne bo obšla, so ob pričakovanju demokratičnih sprememb v državi, ideoloških in političnih razhajanjih ter odločenosti braniti Jugoslavijo spremljali Slovence po začetku druge svetovne vojne 1. septembra 1939. Ko je novi svetovni spopad dobro leto in pol kasneje vase potegnil celotni slovenski narod ter njegovo idejno in socialnopolitično zaznamovanost, sta nastopila najtežja zgodovinska preizkušnja Slovencev in v njej njihovo srečanje samih s seboj.

Nulla Proportio in Concordantia: Catholic Political Theology and the Mystery of Consensus

AbstractThe main question in this article is whether there is room for a genuine Catholic political theology in a contemporary liberal society. Catholic political theology faces the dilemma that it is either opposed to the autonomy of the political sphere as it has been given shape in liberal society by its totality claim, or that it is not, and thereby loses its plausibility as it does in the case of Catholic Social Teaching. The authors of this article assume that there is a way out of the dilemma, namely by applying the fundamental theological concept of ‘locus theologicus’ to political theology. By viewing the political as a locus theologicus, the question arises: Which political aspects of the theological tradition could qualify as having a critical function in modern liberal society? The proposal in this article is to consider Nicholas of Cusa’s theory of finding consensus. Cusa developed this theory during and in response to the Council of Basel (1431‐1449) in his book De concordantia catholica. The experience of consensus is viewed in this text as an apophatic confirmation of God in the performance of political authority. The way in which Cusa develops the idea of consensus is in sharp contrast with modern liberal thinkers such as John Rawls. Cusa’s theory shares a resemblance with those of modern critics of consensus such as Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Rancière. While these authors do not formulate their criticism theologically, once brought into conversation with Cusa, one can find opportunities of seeing the mystery of consensus as a theological critique.

Royal Patronage and Catholic Politics in Cynthia's Revels

Royal Patronage and Catholic Politics in <i>Cynthia's Revels</i>

An inconvenient legacy: corporatism and Catholic culture from Fascism to the Republic

Abstract: In the Italian Republic of the late 1940s, the corporatist experience was something of an antimodel. However, some political and legal currents in Italy reflected on the corporatist legacy and on the possibility to make it democratic. Certain Catholic exponents were especially sensitive to the new version of corporatism. Our analysis of the legacy of corporatist thinking in Catholic culture during the early Republican age will be fourfold: reflection on the Constituent Assembly as a potential development away from corporatism; analysis of the main social-economic documents of contemporary political Catholicism; the evolution of some leading Christian Democrats’ theoretical ideas; the debate on “democratic corporatism” in Italian Catholic circles spanning the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Secular Power, Sectarian Politics: The American-Born Irish Elite and Catholic Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York

Abstract This paper takes as its subject the complex ethnic, religious, and political entanglements of the American-born Irish elite of nineteenth-century New York City. Because historians have traditionally viewed the Irish famine as a watershed event in the history of organized Catholicism in New York, the contributions of American-born Irish elites to Irish Catholic political culture have largely gone unnoticed. Having come of age in the early nineteenth century, when institutional Catholicism had scant presence in the Empire City, these lawyers, politicians, and statesmen embraced a secular and metropolitan identity that allowed them to mix easily with the city’s Anglo-Dutch Protestant ruling class. However, mass immigration at midcentury, coupled with growing nativist persecution of the Catholic Church, forced these elites to navigate a middle ground between the secular world of New York politics and the rising sectarianism of the Irish immigrant community. Ultimately, these men would leverage their influence within the Democratic establishment—which at the time remained tied to the pro-slavery Southern elite—to advance the institutional interests of the Church, while reaping personal benefits from the growing power of the Irish vote. Though never fully assimilated into the immigrant community, they nonetheless adapted Irish Catholicism to the hardscrabble world of machine politics, forging an alliance between the Catholic Archdiocese of New York and Tammany Hall that would endure for half a century.

Catholic Social Thought, Politics and Human Dignity in the Brazilian Constitutional Assembly of 1987-1988

Catholic Social Thought, Politics and Human Dignity in the Brazilian Constitutional Assembly of 1987-1988

Embers of Empire. Continuity and Rupture in the Habsburg Successor States after 1918 by Paul Miller Claire Morelon

Reviews 252 This reviewer has only one minor criticism of Fiddler’s highly accomplished The Art of Resistance. Genre is unarguably an effective way to organize diverse artistic interventions, yet it appears to be at the expense of developing a cohesive theory of protest art that matches the insightful introduction and conclusion on Austrian politics. Summarizing her revealing insights on individual pieces in a grand finale under categories like space, gender or language might have been helpful for readers taken by surprise at the wealth of material, which leaves one wanting to know more about the transformative, interactive dimension of protest art in a city with such a strong affinity to culture. Thesereservationsaside,TheArtofResistanceisalucidlywritten,meticulously researched magnum opus surveying Austria’s, but above all Vienna’s, culture of dissent at the turn of the millennium. The passionate archivist Fiddler expertly disentangles the complexities behind protest art in a country once dubbed Insel der Seligen (p. 17). Eva Kuttenberg Penn State Behrend Embers of Empire. Continuity and Rupture in the Habsburg Successor States after 1918. Ed. by Paul Miller and Claire Morelon. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2019. x + 332 pp. £69. ISBN 978–1-78920–022–5. The year 1918 has conventionally been cast as a decisive turning point in Central European history, with imperial structures completely dissolved in the wake of military defeat and replaced by entirely new national polities. In the 1920s and 1930s, this assumption formed a common thread between the otherwise very different cultural phenomena of Habsburg nostalgia, inward- and outwardlooking ethnic conflict and triumphalist, nation-state centred historiographies. Whether they mourned the empire’s passing, or denounced it as a stale anachronism, all agreed that it had gone forever. Only the left voiced occasional concerns about a possible monarchist restoration, with the London-based Bureau of Austrian Socialists issuing a fresh warning to this effect as late as 1943 in an English-language pamphlet entitled The Habsburgs — Never Again! The central argument of this new volume of twelve essays edited by Paul Miller and Claire Morelon is that the standard narratives of imperial ‘dissolution’ fail to capture the complexities, ambiguities and hidden continuities behind the — actually far from absolute — transition from empire to successor states after 1918. They also ignore manifestations of popular and communal indifference towards developments in ‘high politics’. As Gábor Egry shows, beyond the prevailing nationalizing discourses, local knowledge and expertise, not past imperial loyalties or rebel credentials, often decided whether former Habsburg officials stayed in post or not. Furthermore, the redrawing of borders did not prevent the survival of older ‘ethnic contact zones’ embedded in the civic life of particular districts, as seen, for instance, in the continuance of voluntary bodies such as joint Romanian-Hungarian firefighter associations in Transylvania (p. 32). Reviews 253 Individuals, too, could use their former imperial networks to advance the national interests of the new states they served, as Iryna Vushko suggests in relation to Leon Biliński, Finance Minister under the Habsburgs and again, albeit briefly, in independent Poland in 1919. And while the Monarchy had gone, other imperial-era institutions survived in various guises, including army, church and nobility. Indeed, according to Christopher Brennan, public displays of mourning for the ex-Emperor Karl in 1922 were more useful to the fortunes of political Catholicism — especially in the shape of the Austrian Christian Social party — than they were to monarchism. The old army of Franz Joseph was no more, but some of its top generals joined the national armies of successor states, without feeling this to be in any sense a betrayal of their former identities as soldiers serving a cause ‘beyond nationalism’. Irina Marin, for instance, shows this in her case study of several high-ranking officers of Romanian nationality. Surprisingly, given the emphasis that the editors place on the non-revocation of existing Habsburg laws, especially in Czechoslovakia, there is no mention in the volumeofCarloMoos’sseminalworkHabsburgpostmortem.Betrachtungenzum Weiterleben der Habsburgermonarchie (Vienna: Böhlau, 2016). More convincing are the discussions of imperial ‘afterlives’ in national and transnational variants of Central European fascism. John Paul Newman addresses this especially well in his piece on the Ustaša, the Croatian right-wing paramilitary movement which...

Pokusy o príchod Československej strany lidovej na Slovensko do roku 1925 a postoje Slovenskej ľudovej stranypohľadom dobovej tlače

The contribution deals with the efforts of introducing the Czechoslovak People‘s Party (CPP) to Slovakia in the period after its close co­‑operation with Hlinka‘s Slovak People‘s Party (SPP), after 26 November 1921. Since that time, CPP has lost significant influence on the formation of Catholic politics in Slovakia and SPP is aware that this could lead to serious competition in its candidacy. For this reason, SPP regarded any stronger internal disagreement as CPP‘s potential arrival in Slovakia. Those were the activities of Jozef Vrabec, Martin Micura and the Association of Christian Farm Workers and Smallholders, among whom the most prominent figures were Jan Teodor Hanak, and up until 1924 the priest – Jan Vanak. The study deals with the above­‑mentioned attempts, until the moment of the creation of the CPP in Slovakia in 1925, while its aim is to point out to what extent were those efforts were connected with CPP, through an analysis of the periodical press and the available archival sources. It also examines the impact of those events on the perception of CPP and main representatives of the Slovak People‘s Party.

The origins of the Catholic Social Guild in Scotland: ‘We have not attacked the Socialists professedly’

The activities of John Wheatley's Catholic Socialist Society have been analysed in terms of liberating Catholics from clerical dictation in political matters. Yet, beyond the much-discussed clerical backlash against Wheatley, there has been little scholarly attention paid to a more constructive response offered by progressive elements within the Catholic Church. The discussion that follows explores the development of the Catholic social movement from 1906, when the Catholic Socialist Society was formed, up until 1918 when the Catholic Social Guild, an organisation founded by the English Jesuit Charles Plater, had firmly established its local presence in the west of Scotland. This organisation played an important role in the realignment of Catholic politics in this period, and its main activity was the dissemination of the Church's social message among the working-class laity. The Scottish Catholic Church, meanwhile, thanks in large part to Archbishop John Aloysius Maguire of Glasgow, became more amenable to social reform and democracy.

The anti-gender movement in Italy: Catholic participation between electoral and protest politics

ABSTRACTBetween 2013 and 2016, a broad range of Catholic groups following pro-life and pro-family agendas has conducted a large anti-gender campaign, whose main result was the definition of a Catholic anti-gender movement in Italy. The anti-gender movement, opposed to the approval of the bill on civil unions for same-sex couples and the introduction of gender education programs in schools, has grown in popularity, becoming a source of participation and protest for politically committed Catholic and social conservative actors. The emergence and consolidation of the movement has marked a new phase of political Catholicism characterized, on the one hand, by an intensification of protest and lobbying activities in the public and political arenas and, on the other, by a descent into the electoral arena of a part of the movement with the constitution of an autonomous political subject, the People of the Family party. This article proposes to analyze the dynamics of politicization of the anti-gender cause, with the aim of advancing the argument that long-lasting dilemmas are still affecting Catholic politics concerning the best strategies to combine religious coherence, political representation and consensus for the Italian Catholic militancy in an increasingly complex post-secular society.

Book Review: Rwanda before the Genocide: Catholic Politics and Ethnic Discourse in the Late Colonial Era

Book Review: Rwanda before the Genocide: Catholic Politics and Ethnic Discourse in the Late Colonial Era

Political Catholicism in Poland in 1945–1948. An Overview of Political Activity of Catholics

The article is a reconstruction of the most important strands in the historiography devoted to the political activity of the laity after 1945, especially the period between 1945 and 1948. The author first discusses pre-1989 literature and then the most recent studies devoted to political Catholicism in Poland. In the main part of the article he presents three strands in historiography: research into the Labour Party, research into groups associated with Catholic socio-political weeklies, and biographies and syntheses of the history of the Catholics and the Church.

Analysis of Electoral Support for the NSDAP in Weimar Germany During the Early Stages of Fascist Development

This essay presents analysis of electoral support for the NSDAP during the Weimar period in Germany that is informed by a stages-of-fascism concept. The analysis supports popular explanations for NSDAP electoral support that apply both religious and socio-economic classification, as well as an explanation by way of adherence to particular (political) ideologies of socialism, liberalism, political Catholicism, and conservatism. Through multiple-regression analysis of the NSDAP's breakthrough results in the national election of 1930, inference of a (causal) relationship between adherence to particular ideologies at a crucial point during fascist development – when fascism began its rooting as a party in the German political system – and later electoral support for the NSDAP cannot be rejected. Conclusions from this multiple-regression analysis apply strictly to the geographical units from which the data are reported, yet undoubtedly many will infer causally about voting preferences at an individual, voter level. It certainly seems commonsense to make such inferences. When considering this multiple-regression analysis in combination with overall voting patterns for these same ideological groups, it is not possible to reject a hypothesis that the liberals ultimately lost much electoral support to the NSDAP during the 1920s, that the conservatives lost a small amount, while the political Catholics and socialists largely maintained their electoral support.

A Strategy of Containment: Heinrich Drimmel’s Political Activism in the Realm of Higher Education Policy in the Early Second Republic

For over nine years, Heinrich Drimmel served as minister for education, becoming one of the most influential conservative politicians of the early Second Republic during his tenure. While the minister was responsible for many policy fields, higher education was particularly close to Drimmel’s heart. Yet today his reign is mostly interpreted as a period of continued provincialization and missed opportunities. That does not imply that Drimmel was a hapless politician – quite the contrary. This article investigates Drimmel’s biography, his political agenda, and his ideological background of political Catholicism, all of which are rooted in the authoritarian regime of the Standestaat. The analysis establishes that Drimmel’s aim was to preserve conservative hegemony at Austrian universities, and he had the means to realize it through a strategy of containing modernity of thought. Drimmel’s “success” had long-lasting effects on the tertiary sector and scientific research in Austria.