Catholicism and Democracy: An Essay in the History of Political Thought by Emile Perreau-Saussine (review)

291 BOOK REVIEWS Catholicism and Democracy: An Essay in the History of Political Thought. By EMILE PERREAU-SAUSSINE. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012. Pp. 200. $45.00 (cloth). ISBN: 978-0-691-15394-0. It was with striking originality that the late political scientist Samuel P. Huntington observed in his 1991 book, The Third Wave, that the past generation ’s global wave of democratization movements was “overwhelmingly a Catholic wave.” Between 1974 and 1990, he noted, some three quarters of the countries that made a transition to democracy were predominantly Catholic. The originality of Huntington’s observation emerges in contrast to what had been the prevailing view of religion and politics among Western intellectuals , namely, the secularization thesis. Arising from the European Enlightenment, the secularization thesis predicts the decline of religion in the face of modernity: science, free inquiry, and open political systems. From this standpoint, Huntington’s claim that religion was shaping politics and, still more, promoting democracy was remarkable. Even more remarkable was that the Catholic Church was the promoter involved, for this church, more than any other religious body, long had appeared to be modernity’s fiercest opponent. The Church was the chief contender with the French Revolution and its political legatees and the chief critic of political liberalism and the Enlightenment’s version of scientific rationality. As late as 1953, the Holy See signed a Concordat with Spain’s Francisco Franco stipulating that “[t]he Apostolic Roman Catholic Church will continue to be the sole religion of the Spanish State” and that “the Ordinaries can demand that books, publications, and educational materials contrary to Catholic dogma and morality be prohibited or withdrawn.” For the Catholic Wave to occur, then, a long historical rapprochement had to take place through which the Church’s magisterium would come to accept modern liberal democracy. How this rapprochement in fact did take place is the subject of Catholicism and Democracy, a learned, subtle, and fresh monograph by Emile Perreau-Saussine, a political philosopher who died tragically in 2010 at the age of 37. Perreau-Saussine tells the story through France, which, between 1650 and 1950, was the “epicenter and laboratory” for philosophical and theological reflection on the relationship between the Catholic Church and democracy, liberalism, nationalism, and modernity. In France could be found the ancien regime and the revolution that overthrew it, and then 292 BOOK REVIEWS ultramontanism, republicanism, anti-clericalism, Marxism, the Thomistic revival, Jacques Maritain, de Tocqueville, and Christian Democracy. How did this multivocal historical conversation yield the long rapprochement? The conventional wisdom stresses the contrast between “reactionary” and “ultramontanist” nineteenth-century popes like Gregory XVI and especially Pius IX, the author of The Syllabus of Errors and the convener of the First Vatican Council, on one hand, and the Church of the Second Vatican Council, which embraced the liberalism of human rights and, most importantly, religious freedom, on the other hand. It was not until a generation before the latter council that Thomist intellectuals like American Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray and French philosopher Jacques Maritain laid the intellectual groundwork for a Catholic liberalism. Even as late as the 1950s, as purveyors of the conventional wisdom point out, the magisterium of the Church suppressed Murray’s writings on religious freedom and political liberalism. Today, liberals celebrate Vatican II as the moment when the Church finally caught up to modernity, while a certain sort of conservative worries that the Church welcomed modernity hastily and overoptimistically. Perreau-Saussine’s narrative differs sharply from this conventional wisdom. It locates the roots of the rapprochement far earlier, in a concept of churchstate relations known as Gallicanism, to which the French Assembly of the Clergy gave expression in a 1682 declaration. The declaration asserted the freedom of kings and princes from the pope in temporal matters (15). Viewed from a longer-term perspective, Gallicanism established the political sphere as autonomous from religious authority. Early modern theorists of Gallicanism held that kings ruled this political sphere through divine right; latter-day Gallicans hold that the people rule it through democracy. Such a separation of spheres is a kind of secularism—not one of hostility to religion but rather of a differentiation of...