Leo XIII’s Rallying Cry: A False Good Idea
Did Leo XIII’s instructions to French Catholics to rally to the Republic anticipate the Second Vatican Council?[1] In truth, the directives of the encyclical Au milieu des sollicitudes were intended to be tactical. However, the somewhat acrobatic rhetorical exercise in which Leo XIII engaged contains an element of theory, even of theology, at least by default. In this respect, we might, by way of a remote analogy, speak of a “pastoral” teaching.
Leo XIII, an Anti-Modern Pope
Faced with the rupture constituted by the Revolution, the Church’s anti-modern magisterium was established as early as Pius VI’s condemnation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man (Quod aliquantum of 10 March 1791 and Adeo nota of 23 April 1791). This anti-modern magisterium pursued its course by condemning Catholic liberalism with the publication of Gregory XVI’s encyclical Mirari vos on 15 August 1832. It culminated under Pius IX, with the encyclical Quanta cura of 8 December 1854, against all modern errors, accompanied by the Syllabus errorum, a list of condemned propositions. After the annexation of the Papal States by the new Kingdom of Italy, this magisterium was in some sense consolidated from Leo XIII to Pius XI (Quas primas, 11 December 1925), by becoming a teaching more directly devoted to political principles.
Among Leo XIII’s main interventions denouncing the new principles (Quod Apostolici Muneris, 1878, Diuturnum illud, 1881, Libertas præstantissimum, 1888), the encyclical Immortale Dei of 1st November 1885 on the “Christian constitution of States” constitutes a synthesis: “Whatever the form of government, all heads of state must absolutely have their gaze fixed on God, sovereign Moderator of the world, and, in the fulfillment of their mandate, take him as their model and rule.”
Referring to the “new conception of law”, the encyclical describes the novel understanding of society and social relations which modern principles have engendered. It isa “new conception of law which was not merely previously unknown, but was at variance on many points with not only the Christian, but even the natural law” (n° 23). It derives from the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man: power no longer emanates from God, as St. Paul affirms (Rom 13:1), but “the principle of all Sovereignty resides essentially in the nation” (art. 3), and the law, “expression of the general will”, is untethered from any reference to divine law (art. 6).
It is precisely this which is condemned by Immortale Dei with regard to sovereignty (“The sovereignty of God is veiled in silence, exactly as if God did not exist, […] or as if one could imagine any power whose cause, strength, authority did not reside entirely in God himself”) and with regard to law (“the State is nothing other than the multitude mastering and governing itself”).
The “new conception of law” is thus the fruit of new principles born of the revolutionary rupture, and emanates from a new State where “the people are understood as the source of every right and power.” It “veils the sovereignty of God in silence” and treats the Church as if it were “merely an association similar to the others that exist within the State.”
For Christian law and natural law, on the other hand, law has as its object “what is good or bad naturally, adding to the prescription to practice the one and to avoid the other a suitable sanction.” These true laws, ordered to the common good of the City, i.e. to the virtuous life and therefore to the true happiness of citizens, “in no way derive their origin from the society of men; for, just as it is not society that has created human nature, it is not society that causes good to be in harmony and evil in disharmony with that nature; but all this is prior to human society itself and must absolutely be attached to natural law, and hence to eternal law.”
For all that, the anti-modern papal magisterium in general, and Immortale Dei in particular, did not explicitly designate the object of their condemnation, namely liberal democracy in its republican form in France, or in its constitutional monarchy form in Italy. In 1937, the German-language encyclical Mit brennender Sorge took far clearer aim at the Nazi state: “Whoever, according to an alleged conception of the ancient Germanic people before Christ, puts the dark and impersonal Destiny in the place of the personal God, […] cannot claim to be among those who believe in God.” And in Divini Redemptoris, once again in 1937, even clearer aim was taken at the communist state and its power established by communist doctrine, while awaiting the golden age of classless, stateless society.
Furthermore, Immortale Dei, in its final considerations, suggested that the liberal state could be Catholicized: “It is evident, then, that Catholics have just motives for approaching political life; for they do so, and must do so, not to approve what may be blameworthy at present in political institutions, but to draw from these very institutions, as far as possible, the sincere and true public good, by proposing to infuse into all the veins of the State, like a sap and restorative blood, the virtue and influence of the Catholic religion.” The prospect of a sort of Catholic blood transfusion to replace the criterion of the general will with that of divine law may seem extremely naive. In fact, the encyclical’s closing remark was not far removed from the tactical directives that Leo XIII would develop seven years later through his rallying cry in Au milieu des sollicitudes: to fill legislative assemblies with Catholics and men of good will who, imbued with “sound principles”, would oppose “bad legislation.”
Leo XIII, a Conciliatory Pope
For, indeed, this anti-liberal magisterium of the Papacy, which relentlessly condemned the principles of modern liberty that had gradually become those of European states since the Revolution, was coupled with a diplomatic practice of this same Papacy, which compromised with the established powers born of the Revolution.
Of course, one must recognize the Papacy’s good intentions to safeguard what could be safeguarded in this radically new context. Clearly, the Holy See wanted to ensure freedom of religious practice and Christian instruction, not with all its might,[2] but at all cost – and the cost was very high. But the deal which was struck: “I will accept the Republic, so long as you put secularism on the back burner”, does this not constitute a form of despair that deems it impossible to win back the lost world? Yet it is not the new democracy that has the words of eternal life.
The rift between the papal fulminations against the new state of affairs and the diplomacy of the Holy See is thus perceptible immediately following the Revolution. Pius VI, the Pope of the 1791 condemnations, nevertheless felt obliged to say in 1796, in the brief Pastoralis sollicitudo, that he had never failed to “recommend [to French Catholics] the submission due to the established powers.” The signing, in 1801, of the Concordat between the Holy See and Napoleon Bonaparte, First Consul, which gave the latter the appointment of bishops from which the Most Christian King benefited, and the imperial coronation of the same Napoleon, assumed heir to the Revolution, in 1804, heralded Leo XIII’s instructions. Moreover, ten years before French Catholics were invited to turn away from the Count of Chambord in favor of Jules Grévy, Spanish Catholics had been invited in 1882, by the encyclical Cum multa, to turn away from Don Carlos and rally to the established power of the liberal monarchy of Isabella II.[3]
Later, in 1919, Benedict XV, as we shall see below, urged Portuguese Catholics to bury the dream of a monarchical restoration. In 1926, Pius XI placed the newspaper L’Action française on the index, a measure accompanied by a deprivation of the sacraments for those who continued to read it, which, in practice, broke the back of a largely Catholic resistance to the republican regime. We could also mention the case of the Mexican Cristeros, forced to bargain with the government and abandoned to its persecution. With the exception of the interlude of Saint Pius X and his Secretary of State Raphael Merry del Val, there was continuity in the Holy See’s diplomatic line of conciliation with the Secretaries of State, who were moreover great figures, such as Cardinal Consalvi under Pius VII, Cardinal Rampolla under Leo XIII and Cardinal Gasparri under Pius XI.[4]
Leo XIII made it a duty for Catholics to accept the institutions presently established, so that once they had became legislators through elections and a Catholic, albeit republican party, they could enact good laws favorable to religion. For, “in practice, the quality of laws depends more on the quality of these men than on the form of power. These laws will therefore be good or bad, depending on whether the legislators’ minds are imbued with good or bad principles, and whether they allow themselves to be led by political prudence or by passion,” says Au milieu des sollicitudes.
The fact remains that the very principles of the new legitimacy, on which this very specific “form of power” represented by modern liberal institutions is based, mean that any improvement in legislation which might be achieved by maintaining this new legitimacy is highly unstable. The Republic of 1898, which French Catholics had a duty to join, was secular in itself before it was secular in its legislation. It was true, however, that it had become so through the Republicans’ electoral success in 1877, when they had adopted the garb of a constitution fabricated by the partisans of the “moral order”, of which President Mac Mahon was the guarantor. In other words, a Republic which, so it was hoped, would remain conservative and not overly republican, had become unabashedly republican. In short, Leo XIII imagined the opposite maneuver: French Catholics, transformed into sincere republicans and united in a single party, would win the elections and revive a conservative Republic favorable to Catholicism.
But this did not happen, as we know, and religious persecution worsened: expulsion of clerics, separation of Church and State. The error consisted in believing that the course of revolutionary events could be reversed by playing according to the rules of their own game, that of national sovereignty, through an electoral victory.[5] The case of Salazar’s “republican” rise to power in Portugal testifies against the possibility of the painless circumvention dreamed of by Leo XIII. Salazar, a staunch supporter of a state with a Christian constitution and an avid reader of Maurras, was nonetheless typically a “rallied” Catholic, active in the Christian Democracy Academic Center (CADC).[6] He entered politics by joining the Portuguese Catholic Center (CCP) to “promote the Christianization of national political life”, encouraged by Benedict XV’s letter Celeberrima evenisse of 18 December 1919, which repeated the themes of Au milieu des sollicitudes for Portuguese Catholics: they were invited “to unite their forces for the defense of their rights, to obey in good faith the civil power and to accept without reluctance the public offices which would be proposed, because so requires the good of religion and of the fatherland.”[7] In this context, he was elected deputy for one legislature. However, if he was able to become all-powerful Minister of Finance and then Head of Government within a republican constitutional framework, which he maintained to the end, it was due to the fact that he was in fact vested with power by the military regime established by a coup d’état in 1926, with General-President Carmona giving him the keys to power.
The earlier example of Gabriel García Moreno,[8] who became President of the Republic of Ecuador in 1860 within an identical constitutional framework (a republic he later replaced with the “Ecuadorian Nation”), is a case in point. In fact, García Moreno, who went on to promulgate a new constitution recognizing the Catholic religion as the only true religion with sole right of existence and public expression, had come to power at the end of a civil war. His assassination in 1875 marked the end of the experiment, and another golpe returned power to the Republicans. Moreover, in the Ecuadorian Republic, which returned to secularism in 1895, a leonine-type rallying movement saw the high clergy ally themselves with moderate liberalism, without however being able to halt the course of secularism.
On the other hand, since democracy has become the way of life in the Western world, the opposite reversal, i.e. the transition from a regime that is essentially Christian to a modern democracy, may eventually take place smoothly, like a return to normality, in the manner of a “democratic transition”. This term refers to the Spanish political process of this type that began immediately after Franco’s death, a process that was largely prepared by the Franco regime itself.[9]
“Forms of government”
In fact, no more than Pius VII did for the Napoleonic government, Leo XIII did not examine the intrinsic nature of republican power. This particular Republic was, in his view, one “form of power” among others, such as a monarchy or an aristocratic government. Except that classical democracy, that of Athens, was of a different nature to modern democracy, whose birth certificate is, as we said, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, a democracy whose legitimacy, exclusive of all others, is founded not upon God, but upon the nation.[10]
Certainly, any form of government, said Leo XIII, can be good, “provided it knows how to walk straight to its end, that is, the common good, for which social authority is constituted.” The pope went on to clarify that it is possible to discuss the best of regimes in itself, and also for specific situations in the history of peoples.[11]
In fact, this was the whole point of Leo XIII’s reasoning: to neutralize, so to speak, this type of regime – the French Republic as it existed in 1892 – so that it would not be qualified a priori as a tyranny. In the encyclical, the Pope bases this neutralization on the “considerable distinction between constituted powers and legislation. Legislation differs so much from political powers and their form, that under the regime whose form is the most excellent, legislation can be detestable; while on the contrary, under the regime whose form is the most imperfect, excellent legislation can be found.”
Except that the neutrality of this “form of power” that is modern democracy is not a material that is morally neither positive nor negative, and is capable of being utilized in a good or bad way depending on the legislator. In truth, its neutrality is to be taken in the strongest sense, contrary to natural law, since it is founded on the non-recognition of divine transcendence. And as tyranny is defined as the regime in which power misappropriates the common good to make it its own particular good, the tyranny based upon the “new conception of law” is the worst of all, since it denies God his sovereign power over society in favor of the supposed good of individuals.
Today, we have come to know the extreme consequences of this. As we said in our article The Political Dimension of the Defense of Natural Law, defining the right to kill an innocent child as one of the fundamental rights henceforth enshrined in the constitution, symbolically represents a sort of pinnacle in the affirmation of the primacy of the “general will” of individuals over the divine will. This extreme step comes on the heels of a series of unnatural attacks on the family: the Taubira law on homosexual marriage in 2013, the PCAS law on homosexual civil unions in 1999, the Neuwirth law on the contraceptive pill in 1967, the Naquet law on divorce in 1884. Commenting on the ground covered up to now, we quoted Yves-Marie Adeline:[12] “This constitutionalizing [of abortion] marks the fulfillment of democracy, that is, a regime in which the citizen recognizes no bond superior to himself, no law of Antigone, but only Liberty.”
The Leonian tactic was decidedly ill-advised.
Fr. Claude Barthe
[1] “Supposing it to be true that Leo XIII’s dominant idea was, as his biographer writes, that of ‘reconciling the modern world with the Church [Charles T’Serclaes de Wommerson, Le pape Léon XIII, sa vie, son action religieuse, politique et sociale, Desclée de Brouwer, 1894, vol 3, pp. 714-715]’, the pastoral project which failed under his pontificate came to fruition with the Second Vatican Council. What happened in Rome from 1962 to 1965, and in the years that followed, finds its antecedent in the rallying cry ofLeo XIII” (Roberto De Mattei, Le ralliement de Léon XIII. L’échec d’un projet pastoral, Cerf, 2016, p. 263).
[2] “In order to condemn in timely fashion this modern, so-called liberal society, but in which freedom was merely the mask of the most abject submission to economics, a blinding prefiguration of totalitarian servitude, it is not charity that has been found wanting in the Church, but strength.” Georges Bernanos, Encyclique aux Français, Éditions de l’Homme nouveau, p. 26.
[3] Carlism was not explicitly named, but was recognizable as the opinion “that identifies religion with a political party and confounds the two, to the point of considering the whole of another party as no longer deserving the name of Catholic.” Cf. Miguel Ayuso, La crisis de la cultura política católica, Dykinson SL, 2021, especially pp. 126-130.
[4] The conciliatory line taken by Pius VII, Leo XIII and Pius XI is sometimes referred to as “Consalvism” (see Fabrice Bouthillon, “Thomisme et consalvisme”, in Revue thomiste, April-June 2024, pp. 267-280).
[5] It is true that after 1830, some Legitimists, such as Henri-Auguste de La Rochejaquelein, Henri’s nephew, advocated recourse to the plebiscite to renew the pact between the people and the king (Jean-François Chiappe, La France et le roi. De la Restauration à nos jours, Perrin, 1994, pp. 373-374), which the Count of Chambord categorically refused to do. But recourse to the democratic ballot box was simply part of the plan to overthrow the Republic.
[6] “Christianity in its perfect and complete form is not opposed to public liberties or modern institutions. And if there is a very serious misunderstanding between democracy and the Church, it is precisely up to us Christian Democrats to remedy it” (Antonio Oliveira Salazar, Inéditos e dispersos, “Conferência de reabertura do CADC”, vol. I, p. 181).
[7] Yves Léonard, Salazar, le dictateur énigmatique, Perrin, 2024, pp. 68-69.
[8] Miguel Ayuso Torres, Álvaro R. Mejía Salazar (dir.), Gabriel García Moreno, el estadista y el hombre. Reflexiones en el bicentenario de su nacimiento, Dykinson, Madrid, 2022.
[9] Paul VI exerted considerable pressure on him to abdicate the part most in line with the doctrine of Christ the King, notably by rewriting article 6 of the Spanish charter (“the profession and practice of the Catholic religion, which is that of the Spanish State, shall enjoy official protection. […] No other ceremony or external manifestation other than those of the Catholic religion will be authorized”) in the sense of religious freedom (“The State will ensure the protection of religious freedom, which will be guaranteed by effective legal protection that safeguards morality and public order at the same time”).
[10] Jean Madiran, Les deux démocraties, Nouvelles Éditions latines, 1977. See also the historical reference on the subject: Charles Maignen, des Religieux de Saint-Vincent de Paul, La souveraineté du peuple est une hérésie, A. Roger et F. Cernoviz, 1892, and Delacroix, 2016.
[11] Without going into the endless discussions about Saint Thomas’s thought on this point (latest interpretation: François Daguet, Du politique chez Thomas d’Aquin, Vrin, 2015), we know that he advocated a “tempered” monarchy (De Regno, l. 1, c. 6), and we can recall what he says in the Summa Theologica: “Kingship is the best form of government, if it remains sound” (Ia IIae, q. 105, a. 1, ad 2.).
[12] « Le droit constitutionnel à l’avortement: la démocratie réalisée? » : Le droit constitutionnel à l’avortement: la démocratie réalisée? par Yves-Marie Adeline – Le Courrier des Stratèges (lecourrierdesstrateges.fr), in Le Courrier des Stratèges, March 2024.