Abstract
Broadly construed, reflection and debate over the relationship between the church and modernity was one of the defining features of 20th-century Catholicism, culminating but certainly not ending with the Second Vatican Council. This trajectory had a number of facets—theological, philosophical, political—all of which have been explored by a growing literature on the period. James Chappel’s Catholic Modern represents a key contribution to understanding the relationship between Catholicism and political modernity as experienced particularly in the decades before and immediately after the Second World War.
Given the time period in question, C. focuses significant attention on the Catholic relationship to fascism and communism. Notably, he remarks that “The two forms of Catholic modernism … were not fascist and Communist but antifascist and anti-Communist” (13). This distinction, developed in the introduction, sets the tone for the work by articulating how Catholics navigated the civilizational challenges of the era. He further elaborates them in terms of what he calls the “paternal” Catholic modernism that characterized anti-Communism, and the “fraternal” modernism of antifascism. The former, which became official Vatican policy during the pontificates of Pius XI and Pius XII (at least through the war), represented “a form of Catholic modernism in which powerful, centralized, and secular states would protect the welfare, property, and rights of religious families” (66). With the integralism of throne and altar no longer a viable option, this seemed to many like the best way to preserve the freedom of the church and of Catholics. The latter, fraternal, option, characterized by the work of Jacques Maritain and Dietrich von Hildebrand, among others, developed a Catholic modernism that reconstituted institutions such as the family and the state around the common good of all (113). Its advocates thus tended to resist fascism on what were, basically, traditional Catholic grounds.
C.’s assessment of the antifascist and anti-Communist dynamics is helpful precisely because it sympathetically presents how these dynamics arose and differed from one another, as well as from earlier Catholic trajectories such as the aforementioned integralism. In his emphasis on Catholic modernism, C. occasionally misses connections between it and these older movements (in evidence, for example, when Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange infamously told Jacques Maritain that he endangered his soul by not supporting Vichy), but on the whole his analysis is detailed and will introduce most readers to figures and connections that might not have been apparent.
The rise and trajectory of Christian Democracy in Europe defines the aftermath of the war for Chappel’s study. In C.’s assessment, the Christian Democratic parties that rose to prominence in many European countries succeeded “because they were able to corral religious conservatives, liberals, and secular nationalists under one center-right, constitutionalist banner” (151). This development resulted in a diminishment of the antifascist tradition as well as the Catholic role in silencing discussions about complicity with the Holocaust (158). The beginning of the Cold War played a strong role in these dynamics, particularly the strengthening of Catholic anti-Communist sentiment. C. views this later anti-Communist ascendancy as an outgrowth of the earlier movement that included erstwhile antifascists such as Jacques Maritain (168-69). This in turn influenced what C. calls the 1950s dynamic of “Christian Democratic modernism” both in Europe and the United States (183). C.’s assessment again is quite strong, although its categorizations miss, for example, continued Catholic support for authoritarianism after the war in places such as Franco’s Spain. C.’s work concludes with several developments in the 1960s, notably the Catholic embrace of religious freedom at Vatican II and the rise of what he calls a “Catholic New Left.” This conclusion ties the social movements of the 1960s—particularly movements for political and sexual liberation—to a revival of strands of Catholic modernism, particularly of the antifascist variety, that had been suppressed since the 1940s. This coda, which helps frame the book, also reveals perhaps its biggest weakness: its somewhat scattered treatment of theology, with an underdeveloped account of its influence. C’s more thoroughgoing treatments of intellectual figures tend to feature philosophers such as Maritain and von Hildebrand. This is to some degree an inevitable function of limited space as well as specialization, but it ought to be kept in mind when reading the book to avoid reductionism.
C.’s work offers an immensely useful assessment of a critical period for the formation of Catholic attitudes and ideas that still resonate in today’s church and secular politics. It is helpful for thinking through issues about religious freedom, the relationship between the church and secular politics, and the hermeneutics of assessing Pius XII’s conduct during the wartime period. It brings grounded historical understanding to debates about the church and modernity that will be of great help to researchers on this period, on 20th-century European Catholicism broadly construed, and on church/world issues such as secularity.