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Post by hibernicus on Dec 11, 2011 19:51:27 GMT
Given this historical importance of French Catholicism for IReland and the way in which the traditionalist movement (and its opponents) have been influenced by the French experience - often in ways not fully appreciated in the Engish-speaking world because of the language barrier - I have been thinking for some time of starting a thread on France and French Catholicism to match the one we have on America. THis piece (which I found through a link on Rorate Caeli) which offers an overview of the present state of French Catholicism, seems as good an opportunity as any to get it started: sthughofcluny.org/2011/11/papers-of-the-conference-on-summorum-pontifcum-ii-prof-luc-perrin.htmlSee also the discussion on Rorate itself: www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=19978542&postID=8678945330323507358 THis is a nice point: Not from the Vendee said... "Ala France (in the past) and still Italy, to a degree, I believe the State should sponser only the Catholic faith" [quoting a previous comment - HIB] The only reason Traditional Catholicism exists is because almost all historically Catholic countries are no longer "Catholic states", committed to suppressing dissent. Can you imagine what would happen if historically Catholic countries were to uphold the theological views of the hierarchy, and use coercive measures against those who dissent from these? 10 December, 2011 20:08
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 12, 2011 22:28:47 GMT
I remember seeing a comment on one of Fr Zuhlsdorf's posts about Ireland in which the commenter claims that the Irish were never really Catholic at all and their professed Catholicism was simply an expression of nationalism. That does sound to me very like the sort of French Legitimist mindset which takes the view that Catholic Democracy is a contradiction in terms. (Admittedly it might have been produced by a certain type of English Tory Catholic, or by the sort of elitist who thinks popular Catholicism is a contradiction in terms - those two groups overlap.) American Lefebvrists tend to attribute the absence of monarchism among US Catholics to the influence of "Americanism" and the desire to fit in. (One pet idea is that all Catholics should have supported Spain in the Spanish-American War, which is a real laugh to anyone who knows how Spain misruled Cuba - to be fair this was not unique to the Lefebvrists, there were quite a few Latin American right-wing Catholic intellectuals in the early and mid C20 who argued that all the continent's problems were caused by the break with Spain.) The idea that the American Revolution was just as bad as the French and that it has created a sort of universal anti-culture expanding everywhere and based on unleashing limitless desire is quite widespread among American Lefebvrists. (This view is actually to the right of most American palaeocons who would believe that America has produced such an anti-culture but attribute it to the abandonment of Jeffesonin decentralism - the Radtrad view would be that the universal anti-culture was implicit in the very idea of revolution and that true Catholicism requires unconditional obedience to the Catholic ruler a la Joseph de Maistre.)
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Post by shane on Dec 12, 2011 23:56:52 GMT
"I remember seeing a comment on one of Fr Zuhlsdorf's posts about Ireland in which the commenter claims that the Irish were never really Catholic at all and their professed Catholicism was simply an expression of nationalism." I read this comment too and it infuriated me! Sadly such views are legion on the traditionalist Catholic blogosphere, we have a very negative reputation (eg. Irish Catholicism was Jansenist, etc). There is IMHO a widespread exaggeration nowadays about the 'unique' aspects of Irish Catholicism. Not that Irish Catholicism didn't have unique characteristics, but they've been largely misdiagnosed and/or blown out of proportion; IMHO for a better analysis it might be worth comparing Catholic Ireland before the Council to other rural Catholic societies (such as Quebec). "American Lefebvrists tend to attribute the absence of monarchism among US Catholics to the influence of "Americanism" and the desire to fit in." Indeed and I had a long discussion with an Irish traditionalist layman (now living in England) about the situation in Ireland. He was what might be objectively termed an extreme West Brit. He gave a similar explanation for the lack of monarchism among Irish Catholics. (His idea was that Irish Catholicism was never really orthodox and so it didn't matter.) To take a political philosophy from one society, where it is native and traditional, and seek to graft it onto another society, where it is an entirely alien species, seems to me to be hopelessly irreconcilable with the principles of both de Maistre and Burke. I actually don't have a problem per se with legitimism in countries like France and Spain, where it has obvious historical roots. I can understand it as a social phenomenon (which is not at all to say that I agree with it) but it's absolute madness to seek to import that into an American context. "One pet idea is that all Catholics should have supported Spain in the Spanish-American War, which is a real laugh to anyone who knows how Spain misruled Cuba" Funny you should say this as I just took out a book ( Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom by Hugh Thomas) from the library today on Cuban history. I've already read quite a bit on the Spanish-American War before but I'm not familiar with Spain's treatment of Cuba before that. I remember reading an interesting article in History Ireland about the views of the Irish nationalist papers and politicians on the War, some equating Cuban oppression with the oppression of Ireland and others championing Spain on account of its treatment of Irish nobles exiled in the 17th century. I read another very interesting article somewhere else (can't remember where) on the attitudes of Mexicans towards the War; there was still considerable bitterness towards Spain in Mexico at that time, but, interestingly, the overwhelming majority of Mexicans supported Spain, partly because they believed Spain might act as a check on America's expansionist ambitions. Personally I tend to think Spain was in the right. (I know I would hate to be forced to live under the Castros, which is what eventually ended up happening to Cubans.) "there were quite a few Latin American right-wing Catholic intellectuals in the early and mid C20 who argued that all the continent's problems were caused by the break with Spain." I have two Argentine traditionalist friends with whom I correspond by email who are very definitely of this view. While it would obviously be wrong to blame *all* of Latin America's problems on independence, I'm inclined to the view that they probably would indeed have been much better off had they not been independent. If you read Spanish, there is a very interesting article here taking that view which I found convincing.
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 13, 2011 22:03:24 GMT
Some of Castro's early statements argue against the view that Cuba should have stayed with Spain, which suggests it was widespread enough to be worth arguing - the Castro line is that the post-independence governments were stooges of the Americans and that his revolution represents the completion of the independence struggle. (The Miami Cubans like to point out that this is pretty ironic given that Castro's father was a Galician plantation-owner who fought for Spain against the rebels. Oddly enough Franco, who was also Galician, had a soft spot for Castro despite their ideological differences - it has been suggested that he saw Castro's activities as paying back america for the humiliation inflicted upon Spain.) BTW one interesting argument about monarchism and the US is that the US president is actually a monarchical figure - he has the powers that an eighteenth-century British Whig would have expected a British king to exercise. Similarly, it has been argued that the presidential constitution of the French Republic was based by de Gaulle on the old monarchist (and Bonapartist) argument that a parliamentary republic could never function effectively and that a single ruler was necessary to take decisions and to serve as symbolic embodiment of the nation. BTW I'm not sure that imposing a monarch on a society unused to monarchy would be contrary to de Maistre given that he believed political authority must necessarily be based on a transcendent source. It is certainly contrary to Burke, and one interesting feature of American Radtrads is that many of them positively hate Burke because they regard him as an unprincipled Anglican compromiser - E. Michael Jones, for example, never wearies of denouncing Burke. I think this is an example of cult-like boundary definition given that many American palaeocons, with whom Lefebvrists might be expected to sympathise, present small government and isolationism as Burkean and cast the neocons as Jacobins. (They can't be thinking of LETTERS ON A REGICIDE PEACE in which Burke calls for unremitting ideological war against the Jacobins on the grounds that their very nature makes it impossible for them to coexist with accepted forms of government.)
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Post by shane on Dec 13, 2011 23:03:41 GMT
Yes, Castro expressed admiration of Franco for keeping Spain out of the War and had read works of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, son of the dictator Miguel and founder of the Falange. (Interestingly Batista was very hostile to the Falange in Cuba.) In the book I'm reading it states that the Cuban revolutionaries tried to solicit loans from European countries, including Spain. Castro expressed concern to Franco that America would try to get compensation for the expropriated assets of American citizens; Franco told him: "Don't give them a penny. Not a penny."
As for the US republic, its presidential system probably would conform to the etymological meaning of the word 'monarchy' (rule by one). It was in this sense that Aquinas and Aristotle used the term. Surely the United Kingdom would qualify as a republic?
Is it true that de Gaulle had been a monarchist? What was his attitude towards the ancien régime and the revolution, do you know? I suspect the wide powers of the presidency may also have been to avert a military coup, in light of the volatile Algerian situation.
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 14, 2011 22:26:32 GMT
De Gaulle grew up in a very Catholic household at a time when monarchy v. Republic was a live issue for Catholics (note, for example, that Maritain and Mauriac both went through a period of association with Maurras before rejecting him) so he would have had to address the issue. My understanding is that he believed that monarchy could not be an unifying focus for French identity because too large a proportion of the population were opposed to it in principle/ The military coup point is quite relevant; de Gaulle's view was that a directly elected president could symbolise the legitimacy of the state as a bunch of ephemeral politicians could not (which was a Bonapartist view - Napoleon I and Napoleon III liked to use referenda to claim personal mandates). It was quite common in the C18 to refer to the British system as a republic, because the king's title derived from parliament and not from divine right. (C18 Holland was also technically a republic, though in fact the Stadtholder was an elective monarch and the office became pretty much hereditary though I don't think they called him King until after 1814.)
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Post by shane on Dec 15, 2011 21:52:32 GMT
Very interesting, hibernicus. What was de Gaulle's own beliefs? Was he a devout Catholic, as I have read?
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 16, 2011 22:42:10 GMT
I understand de Gaulle was a fairly devout Catholic; I have heard rumours that he had affairs and of course he could be quite politically ruthless, but both of those are compatible with sincere faith (and I'm not sure if the first one is true). He was influenced profoundly by the experience of having a mentally handicapped daughter, who died young. His wife Yvonne was much more high-profile and strict in her religious observance (this again was a well-known French pattern). A few years ago when Sarkozy uttered some criticisms of the '68 protesters, some of them commented that the protests were as much directed against the social conservatism of "Tante Yvonne" as against her husband's politics, and that without the cultural changes promoted by and following from '68 it would have been very unlikely that a two-time divorcee such as Sarkozy himself could have been elected President.
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 21, 2011 15:35:03 GMT
In regard to the people who complain to Shane that Ireland was not "really" Catholic like France - the nineteenth-century French experience was in some ways more like the Irish in the same period than we realise. Much of the French ecclesiastical infrastructure was smashed in the Revolutionary Era and had to be re-created from scratch; the religious orders had to be reintroduced and the process involved a certain amount of trial and error (for example, the Dominicans were brought back by LAcordaire and a section of the Order tried to adopt a very strict regimen of fasting ad experimentam, which eventually had to be abandoned because it left friars who adopted it incapable of carrying out their other duties; Gueranger had to re-create the Benedictines from a blank slate at Solesmes). The Cure d'Ars' stamping out dancing in his parish and trying to re-create a full devotional life and revive sacramental observance was not all that different from Irish priests of the same era (except the latter would not have encountered such a strong current of anti-clericalism, which would have been seen as selling out to the Protestants). Similarly, excessive attention to French Catholic intellectuals and aristocrats tends to obscure the extent to which the congregations and personnel of French Catholicism came from the peasantry and the lower bourgeoisie; English commentators tended to say the same sort of things about the social background and mindset of the French lower clergy as they did about Maynooth priests. And of course Irish Catholicism imported a lot of French devotional and spiritual practices in the nineteenth century, and even when these didn't originate in France they were usually transmitted via France.
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 22, 2011 16:42:10 GMT
One other problem the "Irish Catholicism is not really Catholic as compared to traditional French Catholicism" brigade have is that Continental Catholic culture had some extremely dubious features which were not nearly as pronounced in Ireland. For example, when Sean O Faolain wrote about Irish Catholicism not being really Catholic like the Continentals, part of what he meant was that many Continental male Catholics thought it perfectly acceptable to cheat on your wife while going to Mass (as indeed O Faolain did on his 1940s Italian tour, on which he was accompanied by Honor Tracy, an English Catholic of Bohemian sensibilities. Hubert Butler said that Honor Tracy's modus operandi was to present herself as a superior being to the English because she was a Catholic, while ignoring the bits of Catholicism that didn't suit her and sneering at Irish Catholics for taking Catholicism seriously. That was one occasion when Hubert Butler was smack on the button.) Simone de Beauvoir, who was brought up in a devout Catholic family, said that one reason why she left the Church was that while she was expected to remain chaste until marriage and faithful afterwards, her brothers were expected - even encouraged - to fornicate and would have been considered odd had they not done so. This was not the universal attitude among French Catholics in the early C20, but it was pretty widespread.
Furthermore, at the time of the abolition of the French Concordat in 1905 (and indeed for some time before and after) Republican anti-clericals made a big song and dance about allegations of priest-teachers abusing boys in Catholic schools and of ill-treatment of inmates in Catholic convent laundries (i.e. Magdalen laundries - these were not a purely French or Catholic invention, there were Protestant-run Magdalen asylums in Ireland and Britain in the C18 and C19). I know about this because British and Irish ultra-Protestants picked up on these reports (that sort of ultra-Protestant was always willing to ally with Continental atheists against Catholicism) and I have read some of their material. Admittedly, the Republican anti-clericals were pretty unscrupulous (I have noted elsewhere that some scholars have noted analogies between the imagery of classic anti-semitism and of French anti-clericalism) but I would be surprised if all these reports were fabrications. The idea that C19 French traditionalist Catholicism is somehow the gold standard of authenticity by which all others must be judged is pretty shoddy IMHO. Every age is equidistant from God.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 25, 2012 20:41:30 GMT
The MArch 2012 issue of STANDPOINT magazine has an interesting article on a new book which argues the relationship of Catholicism and democracy has been centrally defined by French developments since the C17. This should be of interest to trads, since so much of the argument over traditionalism is carried on by Continentals more aware of and influenced by these precedents than most English-speaking Catholics. www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/4343/fullEXTRACTS ...The loss that this premature death represents can be judged by Perreau-Saussine's posthumously published Catholicism and Democracy (Princeton University Press, £30.95). Not only is this a fine work of scholarship and one that is beautifully written; it also occasions pause for thought on almost every page. Far more than "an essay in the history of political thought", as its modest subtitle suggests, Perreau-Saussine's book seeks to address the complicated relationship of the Catholic Church with modern secular democracy. In so doing, it raises questions that transcend the narrow confines of its French subject matter, inviting us to reflect more generally upon what happens when the activity of politics is freed of the limitations and constraints imposed by an irksome and unwanted God. It was France, according to Perreau-Saussine, that set the tone for Catholic political thought from 1650 to 1950. This was so because France was at once the eldest daughter of the Church, the birthplace of the nation state and the stage for the revolution of 1789. What was distinctive about French Catholicism was the tradition of Gallicanism. In 1682, with Louis XIV on the throne, the French clergy formally recognised that the French monarchy was not subject to papal authority in temporal matters. Condemned by the Holy See, the theological justification of what became known as Gallican liberty was that an elect nation had no need of papal sanction to ensure that it acted in a Christian manner. [IT WILL BE NOTED THAT THIS HAS CERTAIN AFFINITIES WITH CERTAIN STRAINS OF CATHOLIC NATIONALISM FOUND IN TRADITIONALLY CATHOLIC COUNTRIES, INCLUDING OUR OWN In political terms, this assertion of the autonomy of monarchical power marked the subordination of the Church to the state. Nevertheless, the relationship between the Church and an absolute monarchy that saw itself as divinely ordained was one of intimate union. French national identity remained tightly linked to Catholicism... This [END OF THE OLD REGIME ARRANGEMENT]was confirmed with the enactment of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in July 1790. There is much that might be said about this controversial piece of legislation. At one level it looked like an attempt to integrate the Church into the Revolution on a Gallican basis. Crucially, it stipulated that bishops were to be subject to election and that the electors were to be not the clergy but all citizens, including those who were not Catholics. It also obliged the clergy to swear an oath of allegiance to the French state. If nothing else, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy was a massive political blunder. It alienated not only the Church hierarchy but also Louis XVI and the greater proportion of the French population. According to Perreau-Saussine, it is at this moment that the breach between religion and the modern world can be dated. Certainly, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy raised an issue of major importance: what was the place of the Church in a democratic polity that presupposed a direct and unmediated relationship between the state and individual. The Church, after all, was neither the people nor the state, but a corporate body resting upon the non-democratic principle of apostolic hierarchy. If democracy meant popular sovereignty it could not but call the authority and privileges of the clergy into question.[THIS IS STILL THE BIG ISSUE BOTH IN CHURCH-STATE RELATIONS AND IN THE DEBATE ABOUT CHURCH GOVERNANCE] The point made by Perreau-Saussine is that the Revolution of 1789 failed to resolve this question, with the result that the Church had no public role and Catholics were excluded from the nation. From this a series of broader questions followed. What reason did the Church have to recognise a state that had taken away its privileged status? Why should the faithful obey a state that was in conflict with the Church and that ignored divine law? More troubling still, what were the goals of the state to be when they were not set by the Church? Was the judgment of the people any more sound than the judgment of the clergy? Beneath this, both then and now, has lain a more fundamental unease among Christians about the hubristic enterprise of emancipating humans from the will of God and of seeking to refashion humanity through the wholesale reconstruction of society. [THIS CAN BE SEEN AS CONTINUING IN THE PALAEOCON CRITIQUE OF NEOCONS - NOT TO MENTION REAL LIBERALS AND SOCIALISTS - AS SIMPLY ANOTHER SORT OF JACOBIN BELIEVER IN LIMITLESS AND AMORAL STATE POWER. OF COURSE THE PROBLEM WITH THIS SORT OF ADVOCACY OF GOVERNMENTAL RESTRAINT IS THAT IT OFTEN IMLIES IN PRACTICE AS WELL AS IN THEORY THE VIEW THAT IT IS WRONG TO TRY TO OVERTURN ESTABLISHED INJUSTICES IF THESE ARE UPHELD BY TIME AND BY LESSER AUTHORITIES] Without wishing to assert that Christianity always prevented injustice and tyranny, Perreau-Saussine nevertheless contends that the sense of the sacred communicated by the Church brought with it a sense of moral restraint. "The secularisation of the state", he writes, "seemed to offer it the potential for action without limits. Challenging the political or quasi-political role of the Church opened the way to potentially totalitarian political monism.".. Much of the focus of Perreau-Saussine's study falls upon the consequences for the Church of this bloody and humiliating experience. For counter-revolutionary writers such as Joseph de Maistre, the Revolution of 1789 was both a satanic event and a Protestant plot. [THIS VIEW STILL UNDERLIES THE LEFEBVRIST INTERPRETATION OF REVOLUTION. YOU CANNOT UNDERSTAND THE LEFEBVRIST VIEW ON THE NEED TO UPHOLD TRADITION AND OPPOSE REVOLUTION - OR INDEED THE SIMILAR VIEWS OF GROUPS LIKE TFP - UNLESS YOU REALISE THAT THEY ASSUME THE MAISTREAN VIEW OF REVOLUTION THE REVOLUTION NOT JUST AS A CHANGE OF REGIME BUT AS A SATANIC MANIFESTATION WITH WHICH NO COMPROMISE IS THINKABLE] It was also an example of divine chastisement. Catholicism was again aligned with monarchy and against democracy. More importantly, many of the faithful came to see the so-called liberties of the Gallican Church as a form of slavery. Unable to identify themselves with either the revolutionary or Napoleonic state, they turned in ever greater numbers to Rome and a sovereign papacy as a guarantee of their spiritual autonomy. Catholics, in short, became ultramontanes, advocates of supreme papal authority in matters of faith. The First Vatican Council and its proclamation of papal infallibility was an answer to their prayers. Paradoxically, however, in defending the liberty of the Church and in refocusing their attention upon its spiritual role, Catholics also became liberals. Probably the best (and most intriguing) example of this is to be found in the writings of Felicité de Lamennais. The atheism of the modern state led him first to denounce the alliance of throne and altar and then to embrace the slogan of God and Liberty. Next came a messianic humanitarianism and what Perreau-Saussine describes as a church-free Christianity. A free church in a free state was to become the watchword of liberal Catholicism. THIS IS THE MOST IFFY PART, BECAUSE MANY LIBERAL CATHOLICS - SUCH AS FREDERICK OZANAM, WHO ARGUED THAT THE CHURCH MUST EMBRACE DEMOCRACY AS THE CHURCH OF LATE ANTIQUITY RESPONDED TO THE DOWNFALL OF CLASSICAL CIVILISATION BY EMBRACING THE BARBARIANS - REMAINED IN THE CHURCH. TO TREAT LAMMENAIS AS THE DEFINING LIBERAL CATHOLIC IMPLIES THAT LIBERAL CATHOLICISM IS ULTIMATELY A CONTRADICTION IN TERMS] It is clear that there was much about these ultramontane developments with which Perreau-Saussine feels uneasy. The ultramontane tendency, he writes, resulted in a disciplined Church but one that was "an empty shell, reactionary and sectarian". In particular, he regrets the abandonment of the search for a harmony between religious and political life. [THIS IS OVERSTATING IT A BIT, SINCE ULTRAMONTANES WERE OFTEN MORE ENTHUSIASTIC SOCIAL CATHOLICS THAN THE LIBERALS. WHAT IS PROBLEMATIC IN CERTAIN FORMS OF ULTRAMONTANISM IS THE BELIEF THAT THERE CAN BE NO MIDDLE GROUND BETWEEN THEOCRACY/SACRED MONARCHY AND SECULARIST ANARCHY, AND THE POLITICAL FORMS WHICH THE ATTEMPT TO RECREATE THEOCRACY OR SACRED MONARCHY TEND TO PRODUCE IN PRACTICE] As he emphasises, infallibility had no implications for papal authority in matters of law and politics. From this follows Perreau-Saussine's admiration for Alexis de Tocqueville — the greatest political thinker of the 19th century, in his opinion — and an endorsement of Tocqueville's view that democracy can and should be both restrained and educated by Christianity. [TOCQUEVILLE IS OFTEN CITED BY AMERICAN OPPONENTS OF THE SECULARIST THESIS OF THE "NAKED PUBLIC SQUARE"] Later in the book he expresses his approval of the liberal Gallicanism of the contemporary writer Pierre Manent. He also sees the Second Vatican Council, with its recognition of the political role and primacy of the laity, as marking the reconciliation of the Catholic Church with this liberal Gallican tradition. The balance between the temporal and the spiritual was reaffirmed, with the result that the Church at last found itself at ease in the world of democracy. As Perreau-Saussine writes: "For all that religion can pose a danger to the state, this risk arises not only when religion is too political, as is generally imagined, but also when it is too apolitical, when believers develop a tendency to see nothing beyond their own religious group and become oblivious of the civic community to which they also belong." The believer, in other words, should also be a proud and active citizen. This, of course, has never been an easy matter, especially in France. Robespierre was not the last voice of intolerant secularism. After the Cult of the Supreme Being came the ludicrous religion of theophilanthropy and a succession of attempts to establish a lay secular power that would act as a substitute for Catholicism. In the 19th century Auguste Comte founded the religion of humanity, with its own rituals and calendar; indeed, Comtean positivism became the quasi-official dogma of the French Third Republic after 1870. A republican catechism was now deployed through the state school system to educate children to become enlightened, autonomous and free citizens. "Laicism", the new state doctrine, quickly turned into anti-clericalism. The 1901 law on freedom of association was used to criminalise religious activities. The separation of Church and state that followed in 1905 was used to cow the Church into submission. Religious faith was reduced to a purely private matter, thereby denying the Catholic concept of the Church as a society and a communion. [SOUNDS FAMILIAR? THIS IS PRETTY MUCH WHAT THE IRISH TIMES, THE NEW ATHEISTS, BARACK OBAMA ETC WANT] Perreau-Saussine cites Charles Péguy as one of the few French writers who showed how Catholics and laicist republicans might find common ground. In fact, the relationship between Church and state in France even before 1940 was often one of compromise. The Church came to see the advantages of separation and the state's schools did not banish the great Catholic authors of the past from their bookshelves. Church and state fought side by side in the union sacrée of the Great War. Over time — and despite the Church's support for the Vichy regime — republicans came to see that the Church was not quite the intransigent threat to democracy they had taken it to be. The Second Vatican Council, according to Perreau-Saussine, confirmed that this was the case. The Church's new enemy was totalitarianism. [THIS WAS IN MANY RESPECTS A COLD WAR LIBERAL DEVELOPMENT, WHICH IS WHY ITS CRITICS OFTEN REJECT COLD WAR LIBERALISM AS WELL AND TURN TO INTERWAR OR PRE-1914 FORMS] Does this mean that the conflict between Catholicism and democracy has been finally resolved? As an Anglican rather than a Roman Catholic, I am not best placed to judge[AND THIS PROBABLY MAKES HIM MORE SYMPATHETIC TO GALLICANISM THAN MAY BE THE CASE] , but Perreau-Saussine speaks of a "degree of disenchantment". The disquiet and concern of the Church, he contends, is not directed at liberal democracy as such but at the moral consequences of what has become a particular interpretation of individual autonomy. This, as we know, relates largely to issues that concern sexual behaviour. It increasingly bears upon questions of euthanasia and eugenics. More recently, the Church has found itself confronted with an aggressive secularism that seeks to deny the expression of personal religious convictions. Will the Catholic Church be compelled to change its moral teaching in the same way that it has been forced to close adoption agencies because it refuses to place children with homosexual couples? Here is the nub of problem. If the Church believes that individual freedom cannot be understood outside the context of an objective moral order, it cannot be indifferent to truth. Democracy, however, can be. As even Robespierre acknowledged, the people might be the purest expression of the general good but so too were they capable of committing the most bloodthirsty crimes. The Church, then, claims to bear witness to a reality that transcends the general will. "Religious life", Perreau-Saussine concludes, "can go together with a wisdom to which democratic life does not give rise on its own, a wisdom that consists in recognising limits to human autonomy." All believers could agree. END
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Post by shane on Feb 26, 2012 4:34:17 GMT
I've been doing some research on French far-right movements and their relationship to Catholicism. I was amused to come across this site - check the motto on the right-hand side of the header: www.actionroyaliste.com/
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 26, 2012 15:50:09 GMT
I notice the site actually has a section on "Irlande" with three articles - one on Fontenoy, one on the Treaty of Limerick, and one on Irish exiles in C18 France. THe third, hilariously, is illustrated with a photo of a mural (presumably in Belfast) of an armed 1916 Volunteer next to the GPO, although the 1916 Rising was explicitly republican. A brief glimpse at the site doesn't make it clear whether they are "mainstream" supporters of the Orleanist claim to the French throne, or "legitimist Spanish Whites" who favour a Spanish Bourbon as absolute monarch because they think the House of Orleans are compromised by their past dealings with the Republic and association with constitutional monarchy rather than divine right. www.actionroyaliste.com/bibliotheque-du-gar/irlande
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 10, 2012 21:58:56 GMT
Rorate Caeli discusses the latest figures for seminarians in France. At present there are 710 diocesan seminarians, the lowest figure since the Revolution; the SSPX has 49 French seminarians and the indult groups have 91. Both the latter figures are virtually the same as last year, after several years of growth. There is some debate in the combox about what is the meaning of these figures and how far it might reflect overall population decline as distinct from post-1968 changes. rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2012/03/in-france-lowest-number-of-seminarians.html
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 30, 2013 17:45:45 GMT
Here is an article from CRISIS magazine providing an introduction to the life and work of Jacques Maritain. I mean to try and learn more about him when I find time; the account of the apostolic aspect of his dealings with other intellectuals is very striking. www.crisismagazine.com/2013/jacques-maritains-service-to-truth
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