Abstract
This is an outstanding book on a pressing theme. What Cavanaugh seeks to do is to de-sacralise the state and re-politicise the Church, albeit in a new way. His prior assumption here is that our problem is not secularism, despite the contrary assertion of many Church leaders and spokespersons. The trouble he sees is rather the migration of our sense of the holy to the nation-state, so that it becomes something to which we are expected to give unquestioning allegiance even, if necessary, unto death. Since his conviction is that the state lives by the unregenerate violence of warfare, whether actual or threatened, this sacralising tendency is hugely destructive. He writes very much in the American context where allegiance to the flag, the national anthem and other such symbols is much more up-front than here, but this cultural difference does not invalidate his argument.
As I write these words I am reminded of the outbreak of the Falklands War. My intellectual reservations about what seemed a dubious conflict were overwhelmed by an atavistic sense coming from a deep place within me that this was our war. This identification with the great ship pulling out of harbour full of British soldiers, vivid on the television screen, was extraordinarily disturbing. Perhaps it was an echo of childhood memories of the Second World War, when mother occasionally came into our bedroom at night to announce a triumph or a disaster, the sinking of the Hood or of the Bismarck.
There was of course an underlying anxiety about the survival of civilisation as my parents understood it, but our national allegiance was unquestioned. This despite the fact that my mother as a strongly committed Roman Catholic ought in Cavanaugh’s terms to have given priority to the supra-national cause of Catholicism. Complex and taxing questions arise here. Our firm sense of the righteous cause of Britain against Hitler seemed to co-exist happily enough with our equally strong opinion, instilled by our rigorous Catholic education, that the regime of Henry VIII and all his successors, with the failed exceptions of the Catholics Mary Tudor and James II, were heretical. The fact that we saw them as enemies of the truth meant that they were, to put it mildly, unworthy of our support. Later my father cancelled his subscription to the Observer at the time of the Suez fiasco of 1956, which that newspaper opposed. He was by no means a Tory, so the move struck me even at the time as scarily close to ‘My country, right or wrong’. But then, of course, he was not a Catholic!
Cavanaugh sees the sacralised, over-arching state as at least in danger of cancelling out or over-riding all intermediate associations and allegiances, so that there is as it were nothing between the individual and the state itself. The thinking behind this is that the state stands for the rights of the individual, adjudicating as necessary between inevitably competing rights but claiming ultimate loyalty. This book’s argument is that there is no place here for any developed notion of the common good, without which our inescapably shared life is disastrously stunted or distorted.
While taking the author’s point I read this with a slightly jaundiced eye, in face of a recently revived fashion among Catholic bishops to invoke this concept in a pre-critical way, begging questions about who decides, and how, about what constitutes the common good. Hard questions to do with the nature and exercise of power tend to be evaded in this discourse. The notion of the common good has a long and chequered history, so that any application of it today requires the accompaniment of an appropriate hermeneutic of suspicion. Cavanaugh is not blind to this difficulty, but perhaps gives it insufficient weight in his earnest pursuit of the de-individualisation of politics.
This writer sees the Roman Catholic Church as well placed, because of its international character, to pursue the struggle with the overweening claims of the sacralised nation. He points out that the modern state is in any case too large and impersonal to retain the kind of devotion it seeks, quite apart from the fact that for such an entity to be given such uncritical service is idolatrous. But there is no comparable sense here of the grave deficiencies of the contemporary Catholic Church as potential leader of the opposition. Cavanaugh is right to recognise that since the Constantinian form of church belonging has at last faded out, Christian practice has tended to be restricted to the sphere of private interiority and a divorced sacramentalism. This state of affairs cries out for a remedy, which the author sees as a new form of political involvement.
The trouble is that the Catholic Church is paralysed by the dominance within it of an abusive power-structure which touches every layer of church life. This is the unnoticed irony from Cavanaugh’s point of view, that the Church he is particularly commending bears an eerie resemblance to the state of which he is so severely critical. The erosion of the proper sphere of authority of the diocesan bishop has proceeded apace under the last two popes. A body whose leadership is committed to an unprecedented degree of thought-control is in any case likely to be a non-starter in the political stakes as he conceives them. He criticises Catholic leaders for their habit of lobbying the government as the main way to promote desirable change, not seeing that this has to do with their being servants of and accountable to a highly centralised Church authority which seems no longer to know any other way.
The history of the Catholic Church in Germany in the 1930s is an early example, with tragic consequences, of what has since become the norm. John Cornwell’s book, misleadingly entitled ‘Hitler’s Pope’, tells how Cardinal Pacelli, the future Pius XII, as papal legate dismembered the local Church to promote a concordat between the Vatican and the German state. This centralising move had as its unintended consequence, for Pacelli was not a Nazi sympathiser, the hopeless weakness of the Catholic Church in Germany as a possible focus of resistance during the rise and ascendancy of Hitler.
In Westminster Hall on his recent visit to this island Pope Benedict XVI touched on the potentially intractable question of the rights of minorities in a pluralistic democracy. The immediate background was the row over Catholic adoption agencies being subjected to a new law forbidding the exclusion of gay couples as possible adoptive parents. As a result these agencies, which had an outstanding reputation in the field, either ceased to offer adoption services or distanced themselves from the Church. In drawing attention to this issue of competing rights the Pope had a point, but the commentators appeared not to notice that he is the last person qualified to make it. He and his henchmen continue to demonstrate absolute intolerance of any comparable pluralism within the Church. It is passing strange that the last two popes have spoken out strongly in favour of human rights around the world while stoutly resisting any parallel movement within the Church. Having abandoned the absolutism of Pius IX’s rejection of the modern world the papacy finds itself stuck in a severe contradiction.
There is extended and important discussion here of intellectual engagements between Hauerwas, Stout, O’Donovan, Milbank and others on the form Christian political involvement could or should take. Hauerwas looms largest. His joke about being a high-church Mennonite has perhaps been taken too seriously by some, but there remains a problem about what he means by the Church, given his conviction that it is the indispensable agent and representative of the only political development which is desirable. Cavanaugh explains that Hauerwas understands the Church not as an institution but as a set of practices, importantly and indivisibly both liturgical and moral. As with Milbank, this idealised Church remains elusive. Nevertheless, our author is sympathetic to Hauerwas in this respect. Both are frequently excoriating about the form of state which liberal democracy has produced. Their criticism is pertinent and incisive, but is by no means matched by comparable rigor in analysis of the Church. Both readily acknowledge the Church’s sinfulness, but are curiously reluctant to examine this structurally, or to question the habits of thought and behaviour sustaining existing structures.
In an ingeniously argued chapter on whether Catholics should repent of the Inquisition this book offers an unequivocal yes. The argument is that such repentance should find expression in vigorous opposition to the continuing practice of torture by modern states. This point receives eloquent confirmation in Cullen Murphy’s newly published book, God’s Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern State. Cullen and Cavanaugh are both thinking primarily of the USA, but heightened forms of surveillance, repression and deprivation of liberty raise similar questions for the British state. Cavanaugh writes that penance should ‘take the form of resisting the idolatry of nation and state and its attendant violence’ (p. 113).
It is pointed out that there is profound ambiguity in the American government’s attitude to torture: we do not torture, but because of the subhuman, demonic enemy whom we fight we have to have available ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’. This view is given heightened resonance by what is called American exceptionalism, which endows the United States with a messianic role in the movement of history. But should we not be comparably on our guard against any tendency to idolise the Church, or indeed any of our preferred images of Jesus? P. J. Fitzpatrick wrote some years ago that a change of name does not in itself mean a change of nature: what is nowadays called the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is essentially an inquisitorial body, even though physical torture is no longer available to it (In Breaking of Bread: The Eucharist and Ritual, CUP, 1993). Cullen’s book recognises this even as he aims his conclusion mainly at the inquisitorial modern state.
Cavanaugh quotes Hauerwas as holding that orthodoxy ‘names the developments across time that the Church has found necessary for keeping the story of Jesus straight’ (p. 191). The unverifiable assumptions here are that the story has been kept straight, and that the location of that straightness is easy to find. Remember the immense range of conflicting priorities offered through the centuries by different Churches, and by the same Church at different times. It seems to me that neither Hauerwas nor Cavanaugh give any satisfactory account of their preferred location of truth. The former seems to find certainty in his preferred forms of liturgical and moral practice, which he associates with Jesus, seen as the embodiment and promoter of true peace. He is of course entitled to his reading of traditional texts, but his is as much in danger of circularity as anyone’s. If on the other hand Cavanaugh is correct when he reports Hauerwas as having been persuaded by Stout to engage more positively with modern democratic regimes, this speaks well of both these erstwhile antagonists.
Cavanaugh has produced an admirably forthright, well-argued and lively book. The text began life as essays, and bears some marks of that, but there is a unifying theme. The author sees himself as pointing to church practices that ‘resist the colonization of the nation-state that wants to subordinate all other attachments to itself’. To this end it is necessary ‘to complexify political space: to create forms of local and translocal community that disperse and resist the powers invested in the state and corporation’. His reference here is to transnational corporations, which some commentators see as inimical to the state. Not so, says Cavanaugh: state and corporation serve each other’s interests, to the detriment of the common good. This book, the author hopes, will contribute to what he calls ‘a kind of Christian micro-politics that comes first and foremost from grass-roots groups of Christians’ (all quotations in this paragraph from p. 5).