The Spirit of Vatican II: Western European Progressive Catholicism in the Long Sixties by Gerd-Rainer Horn (review)

This is a sequel to the author’s The Spirit of ’68 (New York, 2007), a standard work on 1960s radicalism. Gerd-Rainer Horn notes that no reviewer commented on the absence of religion from the book. Yet, in his view, this was a serious lacuna. He argues that the ferment arising from the Second Vatican Council prepared Catholics to be active participants, and sometimes pioneers, in the social movements of the “red decade” from about 1966 to 1976. Moreover, the “utopian” dimensions of progressive theology mixed readily with the utopianism of the “early” Marx that was so influential at the time. The book is entirely about Catholics, although he notes similar developments among European Protestants. The principal focus is on Italy, but there are also substantial sections on Spain, France, and Belgium. Horn brings to this book a unique range of skills. He is the leading authority on “Left Catholicism,” and although primarily a social and political historian, he is well versed in theology and is able to draw on sources in seven languages. The book is written with an enthusiasm that energizes his narrative, without ever becoming uncritical. He has a keen eye for the local and for the role of particular personalities, while also placing these specifics in a wider political, social, and intellectual context.

He begins with the Second Vatican Council and the theologians who were shaping the thinking of progressive Catholics, including both internationally renowned figures and those whose influence was more national, such as Ernesto Balducci in Italy and José María González Ruiz in Spain. Subsequent chapters focus on the renewed worker-priest movement and the organizations of radical priests that proliferated in the later 1960s; on base communities (especially numerous in Italy); on Catholic student organizations; and, in an outstanding chapter, on industrial militancy, in which the role of Catholics was especially important in Italy and, for a time, in Spain. In the conclusion he looks both at the reasons for the efflorescence of Catholic radicalism and at its decline in the later 1970s. Summing up, he claims that “in many countries throughout Western Europe, a large number of social movements—of which student movements were often only the most visible component—in the mid-to-late-1960s were animated to a significant degree by Catholics” (p. 254). As he shows, the familiar picture of the “secular Sixties” is a serious oversimplification insofar as many parts of Catholic Europe were concerned. In the early and middle years of that decade, levels of religious practice were high, and in the very specific atmosphere of the later 1960s the dense networks of Catholic organizations were readily mobilized for new causes. The Catholic activists of those years eventually moved in many different directions. Some are still living and still upholding the same ideals in a very different world; some moved into more secular forms of radicalism; some retreated, disillusioned as so many were by the defeat of their utopian hopes, into private life. Horn has not said the last word. There is room, for example, for a book that looks much more closely at the role of the Catholic hierarchy, including both those like Cardinal Michele Pellegrino of Turin, who provided a relatively favorable environment for radical priests and laypeople, and those like Cardinal Ermenegildo Florit of Florence, who did his best to make life impossible for them. We have here the story as seen through the eyes of the activists, and it is a story that is both important and wrongly neglected (for reasons that Horn explains). But Horn’s impressive book will be the essential starting-point for all future work in this field.