Catholicism and Democracy in the Age of John Paul II

IN DISCUSSING "Catholicism and Democracy in the Age of John Paul II," I hope to develop several themes in the Catholic interaction with modern history that were of intense interest to Lord Acton. In describing history as the history of liberty, and in stressing the central role of Christianity in the history of liberty, Lord Acton challenged the conventional historiography of his time (and ours) and helped make possible the developments in Catholic social doctrine I shall be discussing in this article. These developments are, I think, of interest far beyond the formal boundaries of the Catholic Church, and engage the concerns of Protestants, Jews, Muslims, and all men and women of goodwill who are concerned about the future of democracy.

Let me begin, however, not with Lord Acton, but with another distinguished British historian.

In the early 1980s, Sir Michael Howard, the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, suggested in a conversation that there had been two great twentieth-century revolutions. The first was in 1917, when Lenin's Bolsheviks expropriated the Russian people's revolution and launched the world's first totalitarian state. The second was going on as we spoke--the evolution of the Catholic Church into the world's premier institutional defender of human rights.

I remembered this intriguing proposal a few years later, when Sir Michael's two great twentieth-century revolutions intersected in the "Revolution of 1989" in east central Europe. And, for the moment at least, the answer to Stalin's cynical question, "How many divisions has the Pope?" was given: a sufficiency, thank you.

That the Catholic Church and Pope John Paul II played a significant role in the Revolution of 1989 and the collapse of European communism is now recognized by scholars and statesmen alike. But how did this come to be? How did the Catholic Church, for so long identified with the politics of altar-and-throne alliances, become a defender of the democratic project in history? Did this transformation include a wrenching change in Catholic doctrine? Was it simply the response of a pragmatic and venerable institution to changing social conditions? Or was something else afoot? And as the twentieth century gave way to the twenty-first, how did the Church appraise the democratic project it had helped bring to what seemed, a decade ago, a moment of unalloyed triumph?

These questions are not of abstract interest only. Crossing the threshold of the twenty-first century, the Catholic Church is the largest religious community on the planet, numbering some 1.1 billion adherents. The demographic center of world Catholicism is in Latin America, which is struggling, with varying degrees of success, to secure the democratic and market transitions of the 1980s. Poland, the most intensely Catholic country on earth, was the spear-point for the crack-up of the external Soviet empire and is the largest new democracy in east central Europe. Ukraine, where the Greek Catholic Church was the chief institutional repository of national identity during decades of Stalinization and attempted russification, is a struggling new democracy in eastern Europe and a country whose continued independence is the single most important geopolitical barrier to Russian great power ambitions. Asia's only majority-Christian country, the Philippines, is enjoying another chance at democracy, in part because of the Catholic Church's role in the 1986 overthrow of the Marcos dictatorship. Catholics are 25 percent of the population of the United States, the lead society among world democracies. These demographic factors alone suggest that the Church's engagement with the democratic project will have a lot to do with the politics of democracy in the twenty-first century.

But more is at issue here than politics, narrowly construed. If by "democracy" we mean, not simply certain electoral, legislative, executive, and judicial procedures, but a way of public life characterized by...