Opinion

So traditional we ignore the Pope...

From the social encyclicals of Leo XIII to Benedict XVI, some Catholics are so loyal to tradition they ignore the Pope, writes Tim Wallace.

Royal wedding fever has again demonstrated, along with the proven commercial track of Disney flicks, that fairy tale fantasy has staying power in the age of celebrity.

Behind the photogenic facade of horse-drawn carriages, posh hats and grand titles, however, lies a mundane fact: our regard for royalty now is largely because it is a thoroughly defanged institution, stripped of any real authority apart from cutting ribbons and exchanging occasional pleasantries with subjects over whom they reign in name only.

As a mechanism for the exercise of real political sovereignty, the happenstance of inheritance leaves much to be desired. History shows the wise and noble monarch to be the exception rather than the rule.

Few are equipped with the temperament and intellect to fulfill high office; even fewer have it by dint of being born into the right family.

Yet, in certain Catholic circles there remains a hankering for the days of old; mostly within what is described as the “traditionalist” movement where an understandable dismay at centuries-old rituals sacrificed on the brutalist altar of modernity has also led, erroneously, to confabulating a past golden age where the Church was triumphant, pews were full and society, from sovereign to serf, bent its knee to a higher power.

None personify this better than the American internet evangelist Michael Voris, a former CBS anchorman who has cannily mimicked the style and tone of the Fox News Network to deliver acidic homilies of great appeal to those upset about cafeteria Catholicism and the moral decay of Western civilisation generally. Last year, Voris captured a wider public imagination with a lament that the inherent problem with democracy is everyone gets to vote – “and the only way to prevent a democracy from committing suicide is to limit the vote to faithful Catholics”.

But even that would be a fudge, Voris went on, since the whole idea of democracy was little less than an experiment doomed to failure from the outset: “Now the only way to run a country is by benevolent dictatorship – a Catholic monarch who protects his people from themselves and bestows on them what they need, not necessarily what they want, who protects their rights as human beings. It was this political system that caused Europe to emerge from the morass of marauding barbarians and create Western civilisation.”

At least two things are notable about this perspective.

The first is its dubious historical accuracy. For, quite apart from might be said about the damage caused by any number of Catholic monarchs to the essential mission of the Church through their weather-vane commitment to Christian values, one virtue of the mediaeval system that sprang from the disintegration of the Roman empire was kings lacking the wherewithal to act as dictators.

That form of monarchy (sometimes benevolent but more often self-serving) developed later with the retrograde trend towards regalism, in which all social and economic institutions, including the Church, were centralised under royal control.

Regalism began before the Reformation. The distributist scholar and monarchist John Medialle has noted that this concentration was the beginning of the modern nation-state, “in which all loyalties, and all power, were transferred to the state in the person of the king; from there it was but a short step to replace the all-powerful king with an oligarchy or a democracy, or more usually, an oligarchy disguised as a democracy”.

It also laid the ground for less democratic revolutions and unvarnished totalitarianism.

Here, then, is the criticism of contemporary government that should be made by a serious Catholic commentator: not that it is too democratic but not democratic enough.

The second notable aspect of this traditionalist longing for monarchy is its demonstration that the papacy, as slow-moving as it may seem to the rest of world, is often in the unenviable position of shepherding a flock that contains both forces enthusiastic for change and those wanting no change whatsoever.

It was Pope Leo XIII, best known for his pioneering social encyclical Rerum Novarum, who faced up to the challenges of a changed world with his policy of ralliement, unburdening French Catholics of their rusted-on loyalty to the deposed ancien régime by recognising that the anti-clerical attitudes of a particular republican government did not invalidate the republican system itself; indeed, obdurate hostility to the latter because of distaste for the former could only make things worse.

As Pope Benedict XVI noted on the bicentenary of his predecessor’s birth last September, Leo XIII was wise and far-sighted in guiding his flock towards “the path of constructive participation, rich in content, firm in its principles yet capable of openness”.

Yet then, as now, there were those who failed to recognise the wisdom, their sense of fidelity to tradition being so acute they felt justified in ignoring the Pope.

A parallel might be noted today in the context of the environmental debate. It is now more than 20 years since Pope John Paul II addressed the “ecological crisis” and the emergence, in response, of a new ecological awareness “which, rather than being downplayed, ought to be encouraged to develop into concrete programmes and initiatives”.

Yet many Catholics continue a staunchly oppositional attitude to environmental concerns, based on their perception of the environmental movement being dominated by people antagonistic to religion in general and some fundamental Christian concerns in particular. Is this a productive strategy? I fear not.

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