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In order to understand modern Catholic Social Teaching it is helpful to understand the context in which it was developed. The teachings of Pope Leo XIII were informed by the experience of 19th century Catholic political action. One of the first countries to have a modern, Catholic parliamentary party was Imperial Germany. The following description the Zentrumspartei is taken from the non-Catholic historian Golo Mann’s The History of Germany Since 1789, trans. Marian Jackson (London, Chatto and Windus: 1996 [orig. 1958]), pp. 212-214, the translation has been slightly modified.

The Zentrumspartei [Party of the Centre] was a strange product of German history and also of conditions in Europe around 1870. There was no other great European country in which the Catholics were a minority but at the same time such a very strong minority. This, in the middle of the enlightened nineteenth century, was result of decisions taken in the sixteenth. As Protestantism appeared to have won great victory recently—it was the Protestant Prussian state that had set up the national state, and, what is more, it had done so in league with the un-Catholic intellectual strength of liberalism—it was felt that the German Catholics too must take up the new weapons of party politics so as not to lose their heritage to an estranged world. The church must remain independent of the ever more powerful state. It must be able to teach freely in churches and schools, it must preserve its influence over men’s souls by using the old methods, and strengthen it by founding modern institutions, newspapers and clubs, for the welfare of the working masses. To do all this it was necessary to enter the political arena. The Catholic Church felt that constitutions served a purpose if they were utilised properly; if the invention of liberalism was used to restrict liberalism. Religious freedom was one of the basic rights of the citizen listed in the Prussian constitution, and hitherto the Prussian state had treated all great religious communities with exemplary fairness. But there was reason to believe that things would not continue so smoothly in the ‘Protestant empire’.

Continue reading “A Catholic Political Party in Wilhelmine Germany”

by G Sanchez

[T]he fact that the new right-wing Germany does not tolerate us says nothing against the principles of the right. To the contrary: only from the principles of the right, that is from fascist, authoritarian and imperial principles, is it possible with seemliness, that is, without resort to the ludicrous and despicable appeal to the droits imprescriptibles de l’homme [the rights of man] to protest against the shabby abomination. I am reading Caesar’s Commentaries with deep understanding, and I think of Virgil’s Tu regere imperio . . . parcere subjectis et debellare superbos [to rule the peoples . . . to spare the conquered and subdue the proud]. There is no reason to crawl to the cross, neither to the cross of liberalism, as long as somewhere in the world there is a glimmer of the spark of Roman thought. And even then: rather than any cross, I’ll take the ghetto.

These striking words, penned by a Leo Strauss in his May 19, 1933 letter to Karl Löwith, remain at the heart of a seemingly endless debate over whether or not one of the most polarizing thinkers of the past century was not only the secret mastermind behind the ideology of neoconservatism, but also a crypto-fascist whose obscure and labyrinthine books lead unsuspecting young men to adopt opprobrious political principles. Had Strauss never become the progenitor of a controversial hermeneutics and the founder of loosely aligned “school” which, if one believes the frequent complaints of Paul Gottfried, has strong-armed itself into unmerited positions of power and prestige in American academia, the paragraph quoted above might be interpreted for what it likely is: a young German Jew’s defiant rejection of an intellectually, morally, and pragmatically bankrupt liberalism which had, since the close of the Great War, helped plunge Germany into socio-economic ruin while proving incapable of stopping the rise of National Socialism. Strauss saw first-hand what the principles of the Left had done to his native land; the principles of the Right—fascist, authoritarian, and imperial—were, to a fledgling scholar who would later inform readers that he was caught in the midst of the theological-political problem, all that was left.

Continue reading “Have the Principles of the Right been Discredited? Leo Strauss’s Rome and Ours”