Catholic Church and politics

Historically, the Church followed the policy of strict neutrality, with Catholic thinkers such as Eusebius of Caesarea believing that the Church should not concern itself with political matters. However, Saint Augustine, one of the Doctors of the Church, influenced the Church with his theory of minimal involvement in politics, according to which the Church "accepted the legitimacy of even pagan governments that maintained a social order useful to Christians as well, and to the extent that the freedom of the Church to carry out its evangelical task was allowed." The Church's doctrine considered Christian communities to be the "recipients of divine grace and inspiration", along with the clergy. Paul E. Sigmund argues that democratic thinking was already present in the early Church, as early Catholics "acted as communities to make decisions about common affairs, becoming almost independent self-governing entities in periods of persecution". Despite its struggle against democratic and liberal anti-clericalism, the Church's commitment to a communitarian and Christian type of democracy was officially established by Pope Leo XIII in his encyclicals Au milieu des sollicitudes and Graves de communi re. In terms of political development, Catholic social teaching endorsed democracy on the condition that it constitutes a protection of human dignity and the moral law, and valued common good over individualism. He also affirmed the need for an "authentic democracy" to follow communitarian and Catholic values: In the 1960s, the Second Vatican Council and Pope Paul VI endorsed the notion that the Church must fight not only for democracy itself but also for human rights, and it was concluded that participation in public affairs, to the degree that the country's level of development allowed, was a human right; the council also confirmed the Church's duty to promote democracy as a system that best ensured the protection of the common good. According to the teachings of Pope John Paul II, any political regime must be measured by its ability to protect human dignity, which is "rooted in man’s living in both freedom and truth". Pope John Paul II describes democracy as having three dimensions: • the participation of citizens in political decision-making; • elections and the consequent accountability to the voters of political officials; • and the notion that democracy is more likely to pursue the common good as distinct from the good of the rulers only. However, John Paul II also highlighted that a democracy cannot be individualist, as a free civil society is one that provides "a widespread opportunity for participation in the goods only available to persons through cooperation". John Paul II also stressed the need for subsidiarity and the need for local self-government that would preserve regional cultures, and remarked that a "high degree of moral achievement" and adherence to Catholic virtues as well as "courage, moderation, justice, and prudence" are needed for democracy to succeed. Pope Benedict XVI defined democracy as protector of human dignity, and stressed that abandoning "moral reasoning" in favor of purely technical reasoning promoted by total understanding of "modern science and technology" can lead to a "dictatorship of relativism", which would lack universal moral values. Benedict XVI warned that "without a consciousness of the moral law, democracy cannot be sustained and degenerates into the dictatorship of relativism or what Tocqueville famously called the "tyranny of the majority". ==19th century==

As a program and a movement, political Catholicism – a political and cultural conception which promotes the ideas and social teaching of the Catholic Church in public life through government action – was started by Prussian Catholics in the second half of the 19th century. Germany German Catholics opposed the German Unification, as they wished to preserve the independence of German nations as well as the old German Confederation, which guaranteed Catholics religious freedom. When Catholic activists requested North German parliament to enact similar protections, "Protestant liberals in the North German parliament vetoed this request and pointed to it as an act of Catholic disloyalty". According to Hajo Holborn, German liberals were ready to give up their liberal principles and support Kulturkampf out of anti-Catholic sentiment. Holborn notes that the measures against the Catholic Church "constituted shocking violations of liberal principles" and that "German liberalism showed no loyalty to the ideas of lawful procedure or of political and cultural freedom which had formerly been its lifeblood". The Kulturkampf laws had a double purpose: they were directed against German Catholics, who were considered opponents of a unified German state and harboured pro-French sympathies, and against Poles, against whom the German state was conducting an ethnic cleansing campaign. Bismarck accused the Catholic Church of harbouring "Polish tendencies" and of actively "polonizing" German Catholics; Bismarck also saw the Church as a major obstacle to his Germanisation policies against Poles in Germany. Both the Catholic clergy and German Catholics were accused of aiding the Polish national movement, with Bismarck contending that Catholics in Germany "were actively supporting Polish candidates to the Reichstag". West Prussian officials would describe a "suspiciously agitated mood" amongst German Catholics, and a Danzig report from 1871 claimed that the Polish and German Catholic population "persists in its cool, suspicious attitude; even now hopes for the success of French arms are audible from these circles". The Kulturkampf did unite German Catholics and Poles as both were harshly affected by the anti-Catholic policies, and Catholics of Germany were supportive of the Polish national movement. According to Jürgen W. Falter, 83% of recruits to the NSDAP were Protestant, while the Nazi Party failed to make any inroads among Catholics. Richard Steigmann-Gall observed that electorally, Catholic areas "saw near total opposition to the Nazis" and concluded that "Nazi party's share of a region's vote was inversely proportional to the Catholic percentage of its population". Austria From Germany, political Catholic social movements spread in Austria-Hungary, especially in today's Austria, Ukraine, Slovenia and Croatia. Catholic Action was the name of many groups of lay Catholics attempting to encourage Catholic influence on political society. Many Catholic movements were born in 19th-century Austria, such as the Progressive Catholic movement promoted by thinkers such as Wilfried Daim and Ernst Karl Winter. Once strongly opposed by the Church because of its anti-clerical tendencies, liberalism started to be reapproached by Catholics, giving birth to a Catholic liberal movement in Austria. As Austria was an overwhelmingly agrarian country until the 1930s, the Catholic social movement was mostly represented by agrarian leagues as well as rural trade unions. Catholic leaders had their roots in farming and artisan environments, and the social thought promoted by political Catholicism was communitarian and distributist, reflecting "the social model of the village". Anton Burghardt observes that Social Catholicism in Austria "was never friendly to capitalism; on the contrary, there was always a strong aversion to industrial capitalism in the Catholic camp". This allowed left-wing Catholic organisations to enter dialogue with socialist and social-democrat activists. Spain Political changes in Spain during the second half of the nineteenth century led to the development of Catholic Integrism and Carlism struggling against a separation of Church and State. The clearest expression of this struggle arose around the 1884 publication of the book Liberalism is a Sin by Roman Catholic priest Félix Sardà y Salvany. The book was rapidly referred to Rome, where it received a positive, albeit cautious welcome. Italy The Church opposed the Unification of Italy, put in motion by anti-clerical nationalism and resulting in the abolition of the Papal States. In late 19th century, Social Catholicism based on Catholic social teaching became a prevalent force amongst Italian Catholics, who started to organize themselves into labor federations and labour unions, promoting Catholic socialism as an alternative to the nationalist, anti-clerical socialism. These political developments led to the creation of Italian People's Party as well as the , a Catholic socialist confederation of trade unions. Catholic trade union membership was particularly high among rural workers, small landowners and sharecroppers, as well as peasants. The Catholic ideal appealed to marginalised and impoverished groups, and proved itself a formidable alternative to socialist unions. ==Rerum novarum==

Pope Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical Rerum novarum (Of New Things) gave political Catholic movements an impulse to develop and to spread the area of their involvement. With this encyclical, the Catholic Church expanded its interest in social, economic, political and cultural issues, and it called for a drastic conversion of Western society in the 19th century in the face of capitalist influences. Following the release of the document, the labour movement which had previously floundered began to flourish in Europe, and later in North America. Mary Harris Jones ("Mother Jones") and the National Catholic Welfare Council were central in the campaign to end child labour in the United States during the early 20th century. ==Catholic movements in the 20th century==

In the 20th century, the Catholic Church chose a stance against Capital Punishment and against Nuclear Weapons. Catholic political movements also became very strong in Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria, Ireland, France and Latin America. What these movements had in common was a defense of the acquired rights of the Catholic Church (attacked by anticlerical politicians) and a defense of Christian faith and moral values (threatened by increasing secularization). Opponents called such efforts clericalism. These Catholic movements developed various forms of Christian democratic ideology, generally promoting socially and morally conservative ideas such as traditional family values and a culture of life while supporting alternatives such as distributism to both unrestrained capitalism and state socialism. Freemasons were seen mainly as enemies and vehement opponents of political Catholicism. In Mexico, the atheist President Plutarco Elías Calles repressed the Church and Catholics, leading to the Cristero War that lasted from 1926 to 1929. By the 20th century, the Church's writings on democracy were "directly read, read and commented upon" by Christian politicians, inspiring Christian democratic parties and movements in Europe and South America. In addition to political parties, Catholic/Christian trade unions were created, which fought for worker's rights: the earliest include: • Typographic Workers Trade Union in Spain (1897); • United Federation of Christian Trade Unions in Germany (1901); • Solidarity in South Africa (1902); • Confederation of Christian Trade Unions in Belgium (1904); • Catholic Workers Union in Mexico (1908); • International Federation of Christian Trade Unions (IFCTO), in The Hague in 1920 (which was preceded by the International Secretariat of Christian Trade Unions founded in Zürich in 1908, led through the World Confederation of Labour (WCL) to today's International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC)); • French Confederation of Christian Workers (1919); • Lithuanian Labour Federation (1919); • Luxembourg Confederation of Christian Trade Unions (1921); • Canadian Catholic Federation of Labour (1921) • Young Christian Workers in Belgium (1924); • Catholic Worker Movement in the US (from 1933). After World War II, more such unions were formed, including: • Italian Confederation of Workers' Trade Unions (from 1950); • Christian Trade Union Federation of Germany (from 1959); • Christian Workers' Union in Belize (from 1963); • Solidarity in Poland (from 1980). In the 20th century, and especially after the Second Vatican Council, the church came to be associated with moderately social-democratic and economically left-wing causes; after the encyclicals Rerum novarum of 1891 and Quadragesimo anno of 1931, the church firmly established its Christian democratic outlook which supported "pluralistic democracy, human rights, and a mixed economy". Paul E. Sigmund describes the church's philosophy at that time as one that promoted "free institutions, the welfare state, and political democracy". According to John Hellman, "Not long before he died, Lenin told a French Catholic visitor that "only Communism and Catholicism offered two diverse, complete and inconfusible conceptions of human life". This led Maurice Thorez of the French Communist Party to offer "an outstretched hand" to French Catholics in 1936, wishing "to achieve a tactical alliance to head off fascism in France and Europe and to promote social progress". According to a historian Elisa Carrillo, the Vatican was sceptical of "condemning any variety of communism", and Italian Catholics cooperated with Communists in the anti-fascist resistance. After WWII, members of the Italian Catholic Action "saw no essential incompatibility between Marxism and Catholicism" and established close ties with Communists such as Mario Alicata and Pietro Ingrao. The church started actively opposing authoritarian regimes; in Chile, the church was opposed to the Pinochet Regime and helped rescue "thousands of foreigners and leftist activists that were fleeing the country or taking refuge in foreign embassies". The 1974 Bishops Conference in Chile harshly criticized the regime and urged for a return to democracy, and in 1975 the clergy started actively partaking in anti-government demonstrations. While the church in Spain was devastated after the Spanish Civil War and signed a concordat with the regime to ensure that it would avoid further persecution, it soon emerged as an opponent of the regime in the 1950s. In Francoist Spain, the "members of clergy were to play a leading role in the opposition to the dictatorship". This was particularly true for the Catholic clergy in "Basque Country and Catalonia, where the clergy were actively involved in regional nationalism, and also for those priests from Catholic worker organisations who took up the defence of striking workers". with help of the local clergy, Catholic churches served as shelters for illegal trade unions and anti-Francoist parties, as "the sanctity of the church, codified in Franco's 1953 Vatican Concordat, assured that the meeting would not be interrupted by the police". The church often founded and engaged in human rights groups in the 20th century. The Committee of Cooperation for Peace in Chile was an anti-Pinochet group that was crucial in rescuing the victims of the regime, with its membership mostly including priests, nuns and middle-class Catholics. Similar Catholic groups were also organised in Brazil and Bolivia under authoritarian regimes there, where they endured police harassment. According to Józef Figa, the involvement of the Church in oppositionist groups was often very important for mobilising and uniting the opposition to authoritarian regimes. In Catalonia, opposition to the Franco regime "brought together members of the church and several illegal parties, including the Communists", while in Poland, Catholic opposition to the Communist regime was crucial in bridging a gap between intelligentsia oppositionist and worker and peasant organisations. Syzmon Chodak wrote: "The role of Catholic Clubs in unifying the opposition forces in Poland was spectacular. These legally independent Catholic organizations provided shop-windows for ideas and ideals of non-Catholics, left-wing socialists, humanists, and others as well as the church." Left-wing Catholic organisations that were common in Latin America and Europe, such as the Movement of Priests for the Third World, French worker-priests or Christians for Socialism not only provided aid to and organised working-class and urban poor Catholics, but also "provided a forum for contact between the middle class and the working class", especially in the context of opposing authoritarian regimes. ==Concordats==

In dealing with hostile regimes, the Church has sometimes signed concordats, formal treaties which limit persecution of Catholic practices in return for concessions to the state. The Concordat of 1801, signed with Napoleon, reduced the persecution endured under the French Revolution in return for Church cooperation with Napoleon's rule. The Lateran Treaty of 1929 settled long-running disputes with Italy by recognising the independence of the Vatican City. The 1933 Reichskonkordat with the emergent Nazi Germany required clergy non-involvement in politics while allowing public practice of the Catholic faith. Similar purposes were served by the 2018 Holy See-China agreement which allowed Chinese government recommendation of bishops' appointments while permitting some practice of the faith. ==United States==

During the 1930s in America, Father Coughlin, initially a left-wing radical supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, Catholic priest and radio firebrand, expounded an anti-communist, social justice platform influenced by the Catholic faith. Coughlin later excoriated the Democratic Party, taking on an increasingly illiberal and anti-Semitic stance. The Catholic Church denounced Couglin's rhetoric for its anti-Semitism and hostility towards trade unions. The Archbishop of Detroit, Edward Aloysius Mooney, demanded Coughlin to cease his attacks on industrial unions such as the Congress of Industrial Organizations. This restriction does not apply to individuals or group provided they do not represent themselves as acting in an official Church capacity. Every four years, the USCCB produces "Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship" (formerly "Faithful Citizenship") guides, to provide guidelines and explanations of Catholic teaching to Catholic voters. According to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, "the separation of church and state does not require division between belief and public action, between moral principles and political choices, but protects the right of believers and religious groups to practice their faith and act on their values in public life." ==See also==