God and Caesar: Selected Essays on Religion, Politics, & Society

3. Catholicism and the Architecture of Freedom

3. Catholicism & the 3. Architecture of Freedom In 1894 the English prime minister Lord Rosebery appointed to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge Regius Professors of Modern History, neither of whom had published a book or would do so in their lifetimes. The first of these was Rosebery’s old tutor at Oxford, Frederick Powell. The other had been debarred from entering Cambridge in 1850 by the unrepealed religious tests against Catholics. His name was John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, better known to us as Lord Acton. Acton was a man of immense erudition, who became an inspiring public speaker. He is remembered today primarily for his aphorism that “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely”; changed by a contemporary cynic into “power corrupts and the loss of power corrupts absolutely.” Even amongst churchmen his influence has been significant. In September 1964, as a student in Rome during the third session of the Second Vatican Council, I remember Cardinal Cushing of Boston reminding the council fathers of Acton’s claim that “freedom is the highest political end,” a sentiment that the council partly endorsed in its Declaration on Religious Freedom, Dignitatas humanae (1965). It is a pity that his great project for a universal history of liberty never eventuated. Acton was born in 1834 into an old landed family of English Catholic recusants. His studies in France, Germany, and Scotland, as well as England, helped him become a cosmopolitan figure, con35 This chapter was originally the inaugural Acton Lecture on Religion and Freedom, delivered at the Centre for Independent Studies, Sydney, Australia, 4 August 1999, and shortly thereafter published by the Centre of Independent Studies as an occasional paper. 36 catholicism & democracy servative and aristocratic in temper, although a liberal rather than a Tory in politics. A largely silent member of the House of Commons for the Whigs for six years (1859–64), he was a trusted adviser to the liberal prime minister William Gladstone. Acton drew his political philosophy from Edmund Burke, believing firmly in the importance of custom, tradition, and what we today would call civil society or social capital as the guarantee and “organic foundation ” of individual freedom against the power of the state. Throughout his life Acton was a devout Catholic, while skeptical and often critical. He believed that faith had nothing to fear from history, and that Catholicism was by nature liberal rather than clerical and obscurantist. This outlook ran counter to the Catholic spirit of his times. The restoration of the Catholic hierarchy to England in 1850 reinforced an ultramontanism there that was at once triumphalist and defensive, and sometimes narrow and ungenerous in intellectual and theological matters. This was compounded by international developments that saw the end of the temporal power of the pope over the Papal States, the declaration of the First Vatican Council concerning papal infallibility in 1870, and the publication of Pius IX’s Syllabus of eighty errors (1864), including condemnations of the separation of church and state, religious freedom , and the proposition that the Roman Pontiff should reconcile himself with progress, liberalism, and contemporary political life (civilitas). It was not a good time for Catholic liberals. Acton sought to apply to the story of the Church the critical historical scholarship he had learned in Germany, and he held firmly to the view that the Catholic scholar should be free to discuss without restriction all religious questions that were not defined doctrine. As a consequence he was often in conflict with leaders of the Church, particularly during the late 1850s and the 1860s, when he was editor of Catholic intellectual periodicals, such as The Rambler (his predecessor here had been John Henry Newman) and The Home and Foreign Review. The provocative and sometimes arrogant manner in which he asserted his views did not help his situation. Although Acton had been a leading (although pseudonymous) critic of the First Vatican Council and had worked closely with his teacher, Father Johann von Dollinger, in opposing a solemn definition of papal primacy and infallibility, he refused to join him in repudiating the conciliar definitions of the papal prerogatives. Thereafter, he turned away from active involvement in religious controversy and lived undisturbed in his faith until his death in 1902, although with a deepening sense of isolation from his coreligionists . Acton was influenced by contemporary ideas of progress and human perfectibility, and although his optimism was tempered by his dark view of...