The Catholic Church and the Nation-State: Comparative Perspectives

Introduction: Theoretical Considerations on the Relationship between the Catholic Church and the Nation-State

Introduction: Theoretical Considerations on the Relationship between the Catholic Church and the Nation-State IN 2004, THE ROMAN CATHOLIC Church was intensely involved in an amazing range of international, national, and subnational politics around the world. Internationally, the Church was actively influencing the language of international agreements being negotiated within various United Nations organizations. Pope John Paul II spoke eloquently in opposition to the American invasion and occupation of Iraq, including during his private discussions with the American president , George W. Bush. For his part, since his 2005 election as pope, Benedict XVI has been warning the world about the dangers of a “dictatorship of relativism,” which rejects absolute truth and exalts personal desires. At the national level, the Chilean Church lost a battle to stop the legalization of divorce but convinced legislators to require a longer period of separation before a divorce could be granted. Some American bishops influenced the 2004 presidential elections by announcing that they would deny Holy Communion to Senator John Kerry, the first Catholic presidential candidate in a generation, because he was pro-choice. In Europe, the Spanish Church became the focus for national mourning and consolation as it conducted the March 2004 state funeral mass for the victims of the Madrid train bombing. The Polish Church lobbied a leftist government to maintain strict antiabortion policies. In Africa, Bishop Ernest Kombo openly criticized the conduct of officials from the Congolese government and the Congolese Church. At the subnational level, the Church was actively involved in lobbying state legislators in the United States, Brazil, and Germany on a range of issues from antipoverty policies to sex education to health care programs to laws affecting Church-run schools and hospitals.1 Conceiving of the Church in the Political Sphere Making sense of this range of activity is complicated, and the sheer diversity of cases poses a severe challenge for any inductive understanding of Catholic 1 2 Introduction politics. Although core Church theology and teachings are consistent across nations , national churches vary considerably in the emphasis of their teachings and in the scope and nature of their political involvement. These cross-national differences have themselves varied across history. Casanova traces the transformation of the Catholic Church in Brazil from a supporter of oligarchy to an institution strongly based in popular sectors, from a disestablished church that sought to protect the country against foreign rule to a national church providing space for resistance to communism in Poland, and from an insecure sect to an assertive public actor in the United States.2 In this volume, experts from the United States and abroad describe how the Vatican and the national churches influence politics and public policy debates in a variety of countries across the globe. From these cases, the book seeks to build a broader understanding of the role of the Church in cross-national politics . The first two chapters provide useful insights into just how we should conceive of the Church in national and international politics. In chapter 1, Kenneth Himes provides a theological conception of the role of the Church, and he shows how theological change can lead to a change in the way that the Church engages in politics. He notes that Vatican II consolidated a set of ideas that had been on the margins of Catholic thought into the “warm center of Catholic theology, spirituality, and practice.” He then lays out five metaphorical images of the Church—as sacrament, as servant, as communion, as the people of God, and as ecumenical—each of which captures some important theological aspect of the role of the Church in society and politics. The first metaphor, of Church as sacrament, focuses on the role of the Church to make grace incarnate. Here Himes reminds us that the Church must be exemplary in its embodiment of Christ’s teachings. There are clear examples in this book where the Church has fallen short of this most high standard—in the failure to strenuously resist genocide in Rwanda, for example, and in the clergy sex scandal in the United States. Yet in many countries Catholic leaders have enhanced their prophetic role by the purity of their religious vision as evidenced in their lives. Church as servant focuses on the “responsibility to assist in the transfiguration of the world.” The Church’s role as servant is very evident in India, where the Church has played a key role in providing needed services in a poor country, and in the United States, where Catholic-run...