The revolutions of 1789 and 1848 effectively ended the confessional state system in Europe and Latin America and introduced a “modern” politics. With a supposedly secular public sphere and religious faith consigned to the private sphere, Catholic citizens were left to reimagine their church as a social body in a new kind of political space.
Trained at Columbia by Samuel Moyn and other historians who see Catholic ideas as ingredients in twentieth-century European history, James Chappel recognizes the Catholic Church as a socially embedded “archipelago of institutions” (1). With Catholic Modern, he has gifted contemporary students of twentieth-century Catholic theology with a map of the deep social and political context of the figures they study. He has written a “transnational intellectual history of the Catholic laity from the 1920s to the 1960s” (5). It focuses on France, Germany, and Austria, but the ideas generated there circulate beyond national borders in supranational Catholic networks. For each period, the intellectual biographies of a key set of figures embody and articulate various possible forms of Catholic modernity.
“If secular modernity is a state-sanctioned condition of religious freedom,” Chappel writes, “religious modernism can be understood as the set of tactics that religious communities use to conceptualize, mobilize within, and shape that modern settlement” (5). When did Catholics abandon their antimodern stance? What were their strategies for becoming modern? Chappel argues that the encounter with totalitarianism in fascist and communist forms in the 1930s dislodged Catholics from antimodernism. Divided over the question of whether fascism or communism was more dangerous, Catholics began to fashion two types of Catholic modern. At this point, they did not necessarily assume the secular nation state or liberal democracy as normative. Chappel calls anticommunist Catholic modern “paternal” and antifascist Catholic modern “fraternal” and structures the book around the tensions between them. Key to these dynamics is how Catholics imagine the private sphere, to which the modern settlement consigns “religion.” To become modern is to accept that settlement and begin to negotiate it.
A brief review can hardly do justice to Chappel's intricate argumentation and meticulous research. Chapter 1 argues that 1920s Catholics continued to debate different antimodernisms. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on the period from 1929 to 1944, when Catholics became modern, treating paternal and fraternal Catholic modernism, respectively. Paternal Catholic modernists conceive the private sphere as focused on the reproductive family and are willing to cede control of politics and commerce to the state in exchange for its guarantee of protection for heteronormative nuclear families. Talks of human rights, religious freedom, human dignity, and anti-totalitarianism replaced talk of the church's rights. This made fascist governments easier to negotiate with than communist governments. Fraternal Catholic modernists remained a minority tradition. They did not see the reproductive family as the key to social justice. Rather they imagined the private sphere in terms of “free and interfaith organizing in civil society” (112).
Chapter 4 treats the postwar birth of Christian democracy from 1944 to 1950 and “contests the anti-fascist, Maritain-centric genealogy of Christian Democracy” (150). Rather it is the offspring of paternal Catholic modernism. Chapter 5 takes Christian democracy through the long 1950s, where the private sphere was reimagined yet again as a space for consuming families and eventually issued in a view of social justice centered on “the turn to development” (214–25). Conflicts “between Catholic family values and the new consumer economy dissolved in the heat of the dishwasher” (197). Entitled “The Return of Heresy in the Global 1960s,” Chapter 6 briefly charts the return of fraternal modernism, a turn to face complicity with fascists and the Holocaust, as well as attempts to bring the private sphere from the home into the streets.
“The mercurial career and manifold disappointments of Jacques Maritain” (151), Chappel's leading fraternalist, offers a fascinating window into this history, one that will surprise those who associate the French philosopher only with contemporary authoritarian Thomism. Chappel has historicized the dueling forms of Catholic modern at the heart of present polarization in the church. One need only briefly consider the thought of Popes Paul VI, John Paul II, and Francis to see how theologically illuminating the dynamic between Chappel's paradigmatic categories of paternal and fraternal modernism can be. If you are a Catholic theologian working with twentieth-century European or Latin American figures, you need to read this book. It belongs in all university libraries.
