Church and Revolution, World Christianity and Marxism
Coleman, John A.
SOCIAL CATHOLICISM Church and Revolution Catholics and the Struggle for Democracy and Social Justice Thomas Bokenkotter lloublethy Image Nooks $15.597 pp. World Christianity and...
...That the Walesa chapter does not mention the debates among more foundational social thinkers, such as Josef Tischner and Adam Michnik, rather astounded me...
...Many of the usual cast of characters appear in his book: Felicite Robert de Lamennais, Henri Lacordaire, Charles de Montalembert, Luigi Sturzo, Frederick Ozanam, Cardinal Henry Manning, Jacques Maritain, Emmanuel Mounier...
...The preliminary outline for the conference laments the general lack of attention given to nonofficial Catholic social thinking...
...The Von Hiigel Institute memorandum also issues a call for a more careful comparison of Catholic social thought with "secular" social philosophy...
...He gives us the persons, events, and ideas—in effect, the building blocks—to begin a wider interpretation of the evolution of social Catholicism...
...In doing so, he amply covers France, Italy, and Ireland, but, surprisingly, neglects Germany...
...My own experience in teaching courses on Catholic social thought for more than twenty years has been that students take to the history and social analysis of such thinkers and movements more readily than they do to the often laboriously written encyclicals and bishops' pastorals...
...Such movements, the conference's organizers argue, "have acted as precursor, challenger, or developer...
...They then can imaginatively transpose the conflicts of earlier periods to their own contemporary struggles...
...For example, Montalembert, thinking no mediation between Catholicism and socialism possible, came close to a laissezfaire rejection of any governmental programs for poor relief...
...Yet, particularly in recent times, there has been a shortfall in such thinking, at least in the first world...
...Dorothy Day, Oscar Romero, and Lech Walesa...
...He comes close to suggesting that all that was needed was a bevy of Luigi Sturzos with their social zeal...
...Real social movements and circles of thinkers, such as the Munchen-Gladbach group around the Center party in Germany (for Quadragesimo anno) or Poland's Solidarity (for Laborem exercens) feed into, evoke, and subsequently enact the papal teaching...
...Bokenkotter might have analyzed how Catholic thinking on democracy and soCommonweal 32 January 29,1999 rial justice for the poor, so frequently separated in the nineteenth century, actually came together in the twentieth...
...Indeed, anti-Semitism infected much of social Catholicism in preWorld War I France and Austria...
...to the recounting of lives and thought more than to an assessment of social forces...
...It struck me that Bishop von Ketteler, especially, deserved more than three pages...
...Moreover, many of the most ardent Catholic proponents of social justice for the poor were definitely no friends of democracy...
...D John A. Coleman, S.J., is Casassa Professor of Social Values, Loyola-Marymouni University, Los Angeles, California...
...What Bokenkotter does, however, he does well...
...Adenauer (a fascinating political figure, but surely no great shakes as a social Catholic...
...Yet, except in a vaguely metaphorical way, it is hard to tie several of Bokenkotter's subjects, especially Dorothy Day, Cardinal Manning, and Kortrad Adenauer, to any revolution...
...As a sociologist, I was also frustrated when Bokenkotter seemed surprised that social Catholicism did not thrive in Sicily...
...Denis Janz, a historian at Loyola University in New Orleans, in a retrospective study of the encounter of Christianity with Marxism, takes us a long way toward achieving a key part of this task...
...Many of the "liberal" Catholic thinkers of the nineteenth century, such as Montalembert, Daniel C Connell, and Lord Acton, in no way nurtured any decided social sense or program to address a festering poverty...
...In this nuanced, learned, and yet accessible study, Janz comes to the conclusion that, on balance, world Christianity has benefited from its encounter with Marxism...
...Janz mounts careful case studies of the Christian-Marxist encounter in places such as Cuba, Nicaragua, Poland, and China...
...World Christianity and Harxisnt Denis R. ]anz Oxfiini University Press, $35, 188 pp...
...The subtitle of the book also somewhat misleadingly conflates the distinct Catholic struggles for democracy and social justice for the poor...
...As Janz concludes: "Ultimately, though they were often reluctant students, Christians learned something about themselves from Karl Marx...
...Exhibiting an intellectual rigor the somewhat more pastorally oriented encyclicals often lacked, these philosophers and writers wrestled with problems such as structural unemployment, third-world development, humanrights theory, and new concrete strategies for enacting church-society models of interaction...
...Long ago, the Protestant theologian Commonweal 3 3 January 29,1999 Adolph Harnack contended that Christianity, over and over, defeated its most dangerous foes by absorbing and then transmuting the enemy's essential features...
...Behind the loud Christian "no" to Marx, Janz contends, social Catholicism snuck in an important, if muted, "yes...
...Yet no other book presents, in such an accessible form, the essential biographical and philosophical thought of so many of the key figures in nonofficial social Catholicism...
...No number of bright ideas or amount of saintly virtue could finesse the structural realities of such a top-down society...
...He includes chapters on Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera (an unusual choice, but illuminating...
...Thomas Bokenkotter, a church historian at Xavier University in Cincinnati, has written an able, well-researched, and lively history recalling many of the key figures and movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that fed into or inspired official social Catholicism...
...But he is a traditional historian who hews closely to straightforward narratives more than to any deeper social analysis...
...Any reader of Robert Putnam's Democracy in Italy (Princeton University Press, 1993) would know that the kind of civil society which breeds democracy and voluntarist social organizations was systematically squelched in the Italian South...
...Both Albert de Mun (who was dubbed "the Knight of the Syllabus of Errors") and his close associate Rene La Tour du Pin were royalists who organized a counterrevolutionary centennial in 1889 and were on the wrong side of the Dreyfus case (as were most Catholics...
...World Christianity and Marxism stems from Janz's twelve years of participation in the annual "Future of Religion Seminar" in Dubrovnik, which brought together revisionist Marxists and critical Christian thinkers...
...In Cuba the church is now poised to benefit from a kind of credibility and renewal that eluded it in the pre-Castro era...
...In this long (yet sprightly written) book, there is no summing up, no clear social analysis, little in the way of an interpretive map...
...As landlords and landholders, they had little interest in a radical reconstruction of Irish society...
...The title of the book suggests a special focus, throughout, on revolution...
...Thoughtful Christians have often, even if by subterfuge, internalized key elements of the Marxist critique of religion...
...Commonweal 34 January 29,1999...
...Moreover, students actually read the pastorals and social encyclicals with more zest and insight when they can see, behind these often dense texts, the real policy debates that fuel them...
...O'Connell and his followers always tended to subordinate economic to political issues and can scarcely be said to have evolved a coherent policy of social reform," Bokenkotter himself writes...
...This is not a book of social history or a broader evocation of shifting mentalites...
...Large chunks of the book are devoted to the "official" church's discerning judgment (or knee-jerk biases and self-serving compromises) about the social and moral consequences of the French and industrial revolutions, and the subsequent rise of fascism and communism...
...In sum, a rather idiosyncratic book, but one that should prove very useful to those who can place the lives and ideas discussed into a broader framework of social forces, constraints, and possibilities...
...Janz's thesis is provocative, but thoroughly persuades me...
...In many ways, Bokenkotter seems to have written of people he esteems as heroes and heroines...
...John A. Coleman Hhis spring an international conference on Catholic social thinking will be held at the Von Hiigel Institute in Cambridge, England...
...Behind official Catholic social teaching lies a host of thinkers such as Jacques Maritain, Joseph LeBret, and Barbara Ward...
...Almost nothing is said about Heinrich Pesch and solidarism...
...Official" Catholic social teaching almost never falls virginally from the heavens in ahistorical papal pronouncements...
Vol. 126 • January 1999 • No. 2
