James Chappel - Catholic modern the challenge of totalitarianism and the remaking of the Church

The Catholic Church is the largest and most powerful religious organization in the worldindeed, one of the largest and most powerful organizations of any sort. For hundreds of millions of people, the Church provides guidance on the most intimate questions of sex and marriage, and the most public questions of political and economic order. In a twenty-first-century world of climate change, refugee flows, and bioethical controversy, it seems likely that it will remain as relevant as ever. The Church, after all, is not just a Sunday morning ritual, and it does not wield moral authority alone. It is an archipelago of institutions, from hospitals to shelters to schools, all of which are laboring to theorize and confront the endless challenges offered by a fallen world.

Whatever we might think of the Churchs activism on these fronts, one thing at least is clear: it has embraced modernity. With few exceptions, Catholic thinkers and leaders take for granted that they are living in a religiously plural world, and that their task is to collaborate with others in the name of the common good. They no longer call for church-state fusion or the revocation of religious freedom. They invoke, instead, human rights. They are more likely, too, to agitate for civil rights and pursue Christian-Jewish dialogue than they are to revive the Churchs long history of anti-Semitism.

Catholics have their own idea of what a just modernity should look like, of course. This often places them in tension with others over key issues such as confessional schools, abortion, and same-sex marriage. And yet even here, Catholics fight for those causes with modern means of electioneering, street activism, or government appointment. They do not, in other words, call for an overturning of the secular order and a reinstatement of the Church as the sole guardian of public and private morality. These aspects of Catholic engagement are so familiar to us that we can sometimes forget how recent they are. A devout Catholic in 1900, anywhere in the world, would have been shocked to learn that the Church would one day support values like these. Sometime between 1900 and the present, the Church became modern. This book is an attempt to explain how that happened.

This is not a story of gentle progress and humanist enlightenment, in which the Church slowly discovered the virtues of tolerance and cooperation. The process was faster, and darker, than that. This is a story of fascism, Communism, violence, and war. The Catholic transition to modernity was less a stately procession than a harried scramble, and a desperate bid for relevance in a Europe that was coming apart. An understanding of that process helps us to understand the nature, purpose, and trajectory of the Catholic Church. And it sheds new light on how religious communities grapple with that complex of institutions and practices that we call modern.

In order to avoid moralizing or simplification, it is necessary to be clear about how that much-abused word modern is to be defined. Any reasonable definition of modernity has multiple facets, and a mountain of scholarship in recent years has This scholarship has done much to upset the familiar notion that the Church was a historical deadweight, blindly standing against progress. Historically speaking, it was just as frequently a source of innovation and transformation.

And yet historians have not explained how Catholics came to accept one of the most important features of modernity: the split between the public widely (though not universally) accepted principle of global governance that certain kinds of communities and discursive structures are coded as religious, that the state and economy should be distinguished from that field, and that the state should protect freedom of religion to ensure that citizens can pursue whichever religious identity they choose.

How did Catholics become modern in this tolerance and secular politics is supposedly left behind.

While there is something intuitive about this narrative, it has been widely criticized by scholars in recent years. It turns out that secular modernity is shot through with religiosity in all sorts of ways, and the religiously neutral public square seems to be a chimera. Any concrete form of secularity ends up privileging certain religious

Instead of studying secular modernity as a singular phenomenon, therefore, scholars have begun studying varieties of secularism, interrogating the different ways in which the divide between religion and politics can be conceptualized but can be limiting, too, given that secular modernity is not a creation of constitutions and courtrooms alone.

This book will study secular modernity from the perspective of Catholics themselves, asking how believers reframe their teachings, aspirations, and institutions in the gothic space of the secular modern. It is far from the first to study modernity from the perspective of a religious of moral and political economy that are compatible with a modern framework.

In this spirit, Catholic Modern explores how, when, and why Catholics ceased fighting to overturn modernity and began agitating for Catholic forms of modernityas they do today, and as they have historically done with tremendous consequences. Since the origin of the Church, Catholics have been divided over how to interpret mobilize within, and shape that modern settlement. In other words, the privatization of religion in a modern setting seldom leads to depoliticization but rather leads toward new forms of public intervention that can be legitimated in the name of that sacred private sphere.

Modern is just one half of the books title. The Catholic half requires clarification, too. The Catholic Church is a challenging object of study. It is almost impossible to write a general history of the Church, an unspeakably complex and profoundly global institution. Any account by necessity must highlight certain regions, ideas, and protagonists at the expense of others. Catholic Modern will pursue a transnational intellectual history of the Catholic laity from the 1920s to the 1960s, focusing on France, Germany, and Austria. Each element of this methodology requires a defense, and although each is rooted in an ongoing trend in Catholic scholarship, each comes with costs as well.