Christian democracy in France is dead. On Sept. 13 the executive committee of the Mouvement Republicain Populaire (MRP) declared that, assuming the agreement of the MRP’s national convention in November, the party would dissolve itself into a sort of political club. The event was noted, to be sure—a few columns in Le Monde and Le Figaro—but more in passing than in bareheaded attentiveness. In France the death of a political party is nothing compared to that of a genuine institution like Andre Maurois.
And why should it be otherwise? Yes, the MRP was once the largest party in France, and almost always the pivotal group without whose participation no government could last. Yes, it finished for good the quarrel between French Catholics and the republic. It also slipped into alliance with the Right, harbored Georges Bidault and his disastrous colonialist policies in North Africa and Southeast Asia, bitterly blocked the hope of the Fourth Republic that was Mendes-France, and repeatedly repressed the demands of its progressive militants in favor of ministerial maneuvering. Why mourn the disappearance of a political group whose elected deputies could now be numbered on both hands and one foot? Wasn’t it finally only a skeleton party with the wisdom and good grace to call it quits? Let the dead bury the dead, and the Fourth Republic the Fourth Republic.
Yet the MRP was something more. It was the representative of a tradition in French, or even European, political thought going back well into the nineteenth-century. Christian democracy was the major attempt of Catholics to relate their faith to the facts of the French and industrial revolutions; and from Lamennais to Luigi Sturzo or March Sangnier, it had to fight fiercely to push an ancient institution into the modern world. These names remind us that Christian democracy has known its share of setbacks, condemnations and apparent eclipses, but last month, as French historian Rene Remond points out, the deed was freely done by its own hand. Not attempted murder this time but suicide.
Christian democracy was always beset with numerous shortcomings; its philosophy was confused and nostalgic for medieval Christendom; its actions were frequently timid and defensive. But in a period when Catholicism could claim disturbingly little to be proud of, Christian democracy certainly played one of the more sympathetic roles. Its passing in France is cause for reflection.
There are, of course, some very particular lessons. French Christian democracy was a victim of Cold War anti-Communism. In 1946, the MRP’s votes were swelled by Conservatives who saw it as a bulwark against the Reds, and it was this artificial growth, to be reversed as soon as the Conservatives found more congenial parties on the Right, which prematurely precipitated the MRP into ministerial jockeying before it had developed a base strong enough to maintain an independent position. It was anti-Communism which provided a justification for Georges Bidault’s diehard colonialism in Vietnam. The Christian democrats were all in favor of emancipation for the Indochinese and North Africans, but not if it meant a gain for Communism or a loss of face for France. They had to choose between their theoretical belief in self-determination for the peoples in revolt and their anti-Communism. They chose the latter, and set themselves on the treadmill to the Right.
But the larger question which emerges at a wake like this is simply: does Christianity have anything to say about politics at all? Pointing to the German and Italian CD parties is certainly no help. Any political scientist could analyze them fairly successfully without knowing a word of the Gospels. They are relatively effective parties of the status quo, where Christian democracy once aimed at creating a new kind of civilization.
Christianity and Politics
Even the renunciation of such a sweeping claim does not do away with the question of relating Christianity to politics. Among Christians today, there seem to me to be two general directions in the search for an answer, and any number of subvariations. The first approach stresses the autonomy of the political realm. It is a reaction against clericalism and the tendency of religious spokesmen to substitute simple moralizing for the complexity of workable political solutions. It is a defense of pluralism in society and in the Church (or churches) as well. Religion is not discarded, by any means; but, one way or the other, it is set at a certain distance. The Church should pronounce general principles and leave specific applications to the individual judgments of Christians, who, inspired by these principles and formed by the imperatives of their religious lives in general, enter politics as individuals, as citizens, who may differ and dispute with one another.
Virtually no one will deny that this position was a necessary step in freeing the Church from its unhappy dream of a Christendom, in establishing moral and intellectual tolerance, and in maturing the Christian’s notion of the demands of modern democratic politics. But not a few are nervous with the difficulties of this approach, difficulties which exist both on the level of the Church and on the level of the individual, politically-concerned Christian.
On the level of the Church, doesn’t the restriction of political involvement to the enunciation of principles result in any number of forms of irresponsibility? Either these statements can be “prophetic”—perhaps like Paul VI’s cry of “no more war, war never again”—and ignore the harsh calculations of either means or consequences. Or they can be general and vague, enunciating the loveliest of principles but avoiding the dotting of i’s. This was partially Hochhuth’s complaint against Pius, but it was also noted by Bernanos when he wrote that the Church “defines oppression admirably, but these irreproachable definitions, which entrance the philosophers, are of little help to the oppressed, since the Church almost always avoids naming the oppressors by name.”
On the level of the individual Christian, this approach also has its drawbacks. He may have entered political activity as a result of his Christian formation; he may even have chosen his general political beliefs as a result of his religious ones. But once in politics he is on his own. The struggle produces its own solutions and its own motivation for continuing. An occasional statement from the Pope or the bishops, an occasional renewal of the will to go on; but otherwise no direct and immediate connection emerges between his intense and detailed day-by-day commitment and the activity of his religious community. Naturally, the tendency is to lose touch. Christianity’s relation to politics seems to reduce itself to a matter of childhood and adolescent formation and an intermittent interior fortification.
The second approach to the relationship between politics and religion makes these criticisms, but basically, it starts from a different historical reality. It is not the Church’s failure to recognize the pluralism and complexity of the modern political realm which bothers its proponents as much as the Church’s failure to confront effectively the most obvious and simple of evils: Nazism, nuclear annihilation, racial oppression, worldwide poverty. What claims can be made on the part of a Church which, in the face of such evils, can only speak in generalities and as Church act not at all? If the Church as Church keeps its distance from the political, from the twentieth-century arena of seeking justice and making peace and feeding the hungry, how can it be a genuine community living out the Gospels? How can it avoid turning religion into a private, internal affair? (Including even the liturgy, if, for all its physical and group manifestation, it does not somehow express the needs and problems of the society at large.)
These questions are asked not by throne-and-altar advocates but, on the contrary, generally by the celebrants of the secular city and religionless religion. If the religious endeavor is identified with the human one, and particularly in its day-to-day form rather than in its existential crises, then politics must become central. The Church should not act arrogantly or in expectation of meek obedience from society. But recognizing that its conclusions may be wrong and that it may even have to reverse itself in the future, the Church should take precise and detailed political positions. This should not be an exceptional event but a normal practice of the community.
The critique this second position directs toward the first closely resembles the traditional “radical” critique of “liberal” politics. Namely, that the first approach thinks itself a timeless solution when as a matter of fact it is only a response to a certain historical condition—the need to free the Church from the ancien regime—which no longer exists. Second, that it is concerned more about the “rules of the game,” procedural fairness to all disputants, then about the substantive question of who is right and who is wrong. Third, that it intends this pluralistic fairness to be neutral, but as a matter of fact “neutrality” in a given historical situation always works in favor of the status quo and implies, at most, a mild gradualism. Fourth, that it is useless in time of crisis.
But the criticisms of the second position are probably even more obvious than those of the first. Does it not risk substituting a theocracy of the left for the old theocracy of the right? Does it mean returning to the simplistic moralizing of the past? Does the Church really have any political competence, not given in greater amount to specifically political groups or economic and professional communities? The answer to the last question would seem to be no, unless one admitted that the Gospel shed a particular light on politics.
And here we arrive once more at the sticking point. For the first, “liberal,” position does believe the Gospel sheds a particular light on politics, although it is so unsure about the matter that it prefers the light to be thoroughly indirect, gently dispersed in general principles only. The second, “radical,” approach ought to be even more certain about the light the Gospel sheds on politics. A strange predicament, since in general this approach is largely uncertain about what the Gospel says concerning anything else. Indeed, about a year ago, a French Catholic intellectual published two books almost simultaneously, the first declaring that, yes, “there is a Christian political orthodoxy, just as there is an orthodoxy concerning the Trinity or the Incarnation”; Christians ought to differ only on minor points. The second book, a personal reflection on theology, showed just how much trouble the author had with orthodoxies like those on the Trinity or Incarnation! One reviewer noted that he could not help being struck “by the confidence of the author’s political Christianity” at the same time as “the uncertainty of his theological Christianity.” And one naturally wonders whether the one isn’t only a substitute for the other. “Unitarianism is a feather bed for falling Christians,” the non-believer Erasmus Darwin would tease his Unitarian friends. Would he say the same about politics today?
Not that the division I describe cannot be straddled. The most recent issue of Esprit surveyed French Christian intellectuals on the situation of Christianity and the Church after the Council, and one section of the inquiry was devoted to the question, “Is there a Christian politics?” No end of proposals were produced: the Church should witness but not make policy; the Church should not practice a positive but a negative politics, pronouncing the great “no’s” when they are called for, even to the political enterprise itself if it threatens to become an idol; the Church will always harbor a prophetic element and a political element in tension with one another like yin and yang; etc.; etc. Other commentators would perhaps stress the internal organization of the Church as the crucial factor in determining what approach to politics it should take.
Some of these suggestions are more verbal than practical. Can meaningful witness truly not be frankly political? Can one—and should one—really pronounce “no’s” without implying “yes’s”? And the warning that “a tension will always exist” is quickly becoming an unhelpful commonplace. Still, the respondents were all sensitive to the double danger, an overly cautious “neutrality,” on the one hand, and a new clericalism of the left, on the other. From such awareness will probably spring the most workable resolution—or improvisation.
These reflections have wandered a long way from Christian democracy, which, of course, is the point: Catholics have come a long way from Christian democracy, and can now see it, not for what it pretended to be, but for what in fact it was: a halfway house. Along with the papal social encyclicals it took for texts, Christian democracy served to break down an old set of relationships between the Church and politics, to push Catholics toward a new approach, and meantime to patch the weak spots with rhetoric. Not only could Catholics accept liberal freedoms, but under the Christian democratic wing they could try out being a little bit socialist or, in Latin America today, even a little bit revolutionary. If a halfway house eventually puts itself out of business, that I suppose is a certain mark of success. It also signals all former residents that they are definitely on their own.
