Paul Blanshard and the Church

by SHERMAN E. JOHNSON

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SINCE the time of the Italian elections of 1948, the wave of Communist influence in Western Europe has gradually receded, and it is generally agreed that the influence of the Roman Catholic Church is an important factor in this turn of the tide. Many a critic has, however, wondered if the Roman Church is an altogether appropriate ally for the Western nations. Must the human race line up and choose sides in a struggle between two mighty despotisms, each of which would enhance its own power at the expense of liberal democracy?

Paul Blanshard is not the first to raise this disquieting question or to compare the political and spiritual structures of the two systems. His most recent book, Communism, Democracy, and Catholic Power (Beacon Press, $3.50), is, however, an ambitious attempt to document the thesis and work it out from a secular-democratic point of view. Both Vatican and Kremlin, says Mr. Blanshard, are permanent dictatorships. They practically deify the heroes at the top; dogmatic teaching, constant espionage, and the purgation of heresy are techniques of “thought control” used by both; seeing the public schools as their most dangerous enemy, they seek to build up their own educational systems; they use every device of propaganda to “ manage the truth”; they exploit the devotion of their followers and exercise an unusual discipline over them; and, finally, by manipulation of their constituencies abroad, combined with diplomacy, they “infiltrate” the democratic nations.

Against these systems of power Mr. Blanshard sets American democracy, whose fundamental thesis is that “the majority of the people have the right to determine our future by free choice based on free discussion, with certain inalienable rights guaranteed to minorities.” His way of meeting the Communist threat is, substantially, to adopt the major policies of President Truman. The Vatican, he believes, calls for equally positive treatment, and it is his purpose to “ break the current taboo against any frank discussion of the ‘Catholic question’ and establish a free flow of ideas.” Americans, Mr. Blanshard is careful to say, must not “permit the opposition to political Catholicism to degenerate into religious anti-Catholicism or personal prejudice against individual Catholics,” but they have every right to resist clerical “censorship” of books, newspapers, films, and the radio, the demand for public funds to support Catholic schools, and the imposition upon non-Catholics of Catholic standards in marriage, divorce, and medicine. In the international sphere, America should be wary of alliances with Catholic parties or governments, and he fears that the Vatican’s foreign policy — which he finds too similar to that of Senator McCarthy — might lead us into an “atomic Holy War.”

Mr. Blanshard’s thesis is that the Vatican and Kremlin systems are, despite their manifest differences, fundamentally similar. How apt are his comparisons ?

He is evidently right in analyzing them as authoritarian governments, international in scope, whose ultimate control resides in an elite corps. Each accepts a set of dogmas which are coördinated and defended by an official philosophy. These teachings are taken as absolutely true; they cover every aspect of human life; they are the starting point of all arguments and there is no thought that experience or inductive reasoning could ever overthrow them. It also seems appropriate that Mr. Blanshard finds parallels between the educational policies of both systems and their methods of “thought control” (unfriendly label though it is). If the welfare of the whole human race hangs on your teaching, it is difficult to tolerate error in your own ranks.

In several respects, however, the comparisons are so unhappy as to be caricatures. There is a vast difference between the two philosophies. Communists assume that a man’s ideas are directly conditioned by his social and economic position. The Roman Catholic Church repudiates the very concept of ideology or the relativity of truth, affirms its faith in the power of human reason to discover and recognize the truth, and professes, at least, a readiness to submit its philosophy to the scrutiny of any candid observer. It sometimes seems to non-Catholics that Rome “manages” the truth and that dogmatic considerations control answers to questions, but the Roman Catholic thinks of himself as bearing witness to a revelation and a philosophy to which he is servant, not master. The technique of the Big Lie is something that no Catholic apologist would adopt. The best proof of this is that Catholic universities produce sound, objective scholarship, and not only in “safe” fields like astronomy and the classics. As a theological teacher I bear witness to what I have learned from Catholic scholars in the disciplines of history of religion, archaeology, and textual criticism.

The hierarchy rules not by fiat but under the traditional canon law; and, as any lawyer can see, the underlying principle here is that law (which rests on fundamental principles of right) is superior to the will of the human sovereign. It would be difficult to imagine that under this system Catholicism could ever be as arbitrary as a completely secular state which recognizes no limits to its own power.

Catholic thought, in both these respects, is part of the Western tradition that derives from Athens and Jerusalem — the same stream of culture that has produced Protestantism, modern science, and liberal democracy.

It therefore distresses me that Mr. Blanshard should think of Rome as cynical, either in polilics or religion. Those of us who reject the Assumption have no business calling it a “contrived doctrine ”; it is, for Roman Catholics, a sincerely believed dogma based on a chain of reasoning that we cannot accept. I do not believe that any church is deliberately engaged in “manufacturing dogma based on fake history.” Such theological doctrines as the infallibility of the Pope, or the relation between Scripture, Tradition, and the Pope’s power to define Tradition, are genuine problems with which Roman Catholic theologians have to wrestle, however strange the results may appear to outsiders. Mr. Blanshard occasionally remarks that Catholics are conscientious, but he fails to remind himself of it often enough.

Equally unfortunate is the chapter on “deification” of leaders in the two systems. To say that the Pope “has become a synthetic god,” while “in the Trinity of the Kremlin ideology, Marx stands for God, Lenin for Christ, and Stalin for the Holy Ghost,” is nothing but ill-tempered polemics.

Mr. Blanshard, to be sure, acknowledges that the Vatican does not use secret police and torture to find out and punish heresy. But he fails to emphasize that in the Communist system violence is the accepted technique for gaining power, and that no Communist revolution has succeeded without it. This, surely, is a fundamental difference between the two systems.

He makes a good deal out of the lack of democracy in the Roman Church but does not recognize the tremendous influence of Catholic opinion, clerical and lay, which acts as a democratic leaven and is certainly respected by the hierarchy. The Church is not altogether “monolithic,” but a vast living organism which contains people of many different kinds of culture and education, and it has its local variations in every country where it operates.

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I no not doubt that Mr. Blanshard wishes to be objective. In view of the difficulty of getting reliable information about conditions in Russia, his assessment of world Communism is probably as accurate as any that we can get at the present time. He has been at immense pains to collect and document facts about the activities of the Roman Church. The documented facts are unquestionable, but they are selected, and the interpreter in this case lacks something of the judicial temper and allows himself to be carried away by what I can only call a psychology of fear.

As a result he is betrayed into using some of the very propaganda methods for which he criticizes his opponents. The unequal comparison is an old device — and on this the whole structure of the book is built. The similarities of the two systems are overemphasized; the radical differences are played down. Here is an example. “Whether the comparison is sound or not ” (to use Mr. Blanshard’s own words), he describes Catholic asceticism and the sense of guilt that often accompanies it, and then sets alongside it the methods of torture used in Lubianka prison to break the spirit of a victim.

Coupled with this is a liberal use of “smear” language. Mr. Blanshard rightly objects when a Catholic paper uses such slogans as “Stop Favoring Atheism” and “godless education ” against the Indiana public schools, but on his part he accuses the Church of “the continuing corruption of human intelligence by systematically cultivated superstition.” What is this but the continuing corruption of human intelligence by pamphleteering methods?

One of Mr. Blanshard’s criticisms of the Vatican is that, as a universal church and a state at the same time, it shifts back and forth between religion and politics and uses its privileges as a church to further its political aims in foreign nations. It appears to many that there is some truth in this, but the point is weakened by Mr. Blanshard’s seeming inability to disentangle religion from politics. He continually steps out of his role of political observer to make theological judgments, so that it is sometimes hard to tell whether he speaks as a secular critic concerned for political and intellectual freedom or a militant Protestant angered at what he takes to be a perversion of primitive Christianity. As a church historian he does not come off very well. His picture of Jesus and Paul, and his story of the relations between Papacy and Empire, are oversimplified to the point of distortion.

In one thing Mr. Blanshard is right. The relationship between ecclesiastical organizations and the American democracy is of vital concern to every American. But his book is too charged with partisan emotion to be a helpful guide for the democratic citizen. One would do much belter to turn to Anson Phelps Stokes’s Church and State in the United States and James Hastings Nichols’s Democracy and the Churches.

Perhaps the greatest weakness of Mr. Blanshard’s book is that the author does not perceive how inevitable, and how complicated, is the problem of church and state. Nor is his contrast between hierarchy and democracy quite accurate.

For example, it is not only inevitable that international systems should operate in this country; it is appropriate. Christianity is by nature universal. It recognizes national differences and expresses itself in terms of various cultures, but it knows no absolute boundaries. My own church, the Episcopal, is influenced by the decisions of the Lambeth Conference, and it is a member of the World Council of Churches. American Judaism, likewise, has to a large degree accepted the leadership of the world Zionist organization, and current happenings in Israel affect the religion and politics of Jews in this country. Yet all of these ecumenical relationships carry with them the potential danger of outside influence in internal politics.

If the Roman Church is hierarchical in make-up, so are many other private corporations in America. Professors in large universities sometimes have scant influence, and no legal right, in the making of university policy. Bureaucracy and elaborate propaganda methods are not unknown in business and industry. It is true that an American legislator is elected, while a Catholic bishop is appointed by the Pope, but candidates for Congress are frequently hand-picked by political machines. The sphere of American democracy is, and always has been, limited, however we may wish that it were otherwise.

Mr. Blanshard may possibly forget that not only Roman Catholics but all thoroughgoing monotheists - Protestants, Jews, and Moslems included - hold that there are some areas of loyalty where no state can be supreme. Christianity, in theory at any rate, expects the coming of a theocracy— the Kingdom of God. American Protestants, for several reasons, prefer democracy to any other polity. They believe it provides the best governmental climate for preparing mankind for God’s Kingdom; their political theory from the beginning has been conciliar and not monarchical; they are less afraid than others of the results of free debate and differences of opinion; their doctrine of man’s sinfulness leads them to distrust all concentrated power; and, finally, they believe that democracy deals more fairly with them and with those who dissent from them. But their belief in God’s sovereignty comes first. Therefore, when Mr. Blanshard asks, “Does the democratic state have the supreme right to educate its children in its own way?” I have to answer, “No. Not a supreme right.”

The churches must always insist on their right to teach the law of God, as they see it, to their own people. Unless they are untrue to their mission, they will claim the right of propaganda. Mr. Blanshard’s zeal for the public school sometimes obscures the main issue: that is, whether one religious body above all others is to be allowed to impose its standards, not only on its own people but on others.

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THERE are genuine tensions, and they constitute a tragedy in the original sense of the Greek word. As in Sophocles’ Antigone, the conflict is often between conscientious people on both sides, each trying to play his own proper part and to do what is right. For a Protestant who is true to his religion it is a particularly poignant one. Roman Catholics, though they deny the validity of the Protestant minister’s ordination, question Protestant baptism, and are obliged to pray for the conversion of nonCatholics to their church, are his fellow Christians. He owes them the duty of his love and prayers. When it is possible, it is his business to work alongside them for the conversion of our nation to Christ, and where he believes they are wrong he must oppose their doctrines and teach his children what he is persuaded is the truth.

The tragedy is played simultaneously in two acts staged in different parts of the world.

In Act One, a religious majority curtails the rights of minorities. From where Protestants are sitting, it looks as though this has happened in Spain, Portugal, and a few other Catholic countries. Monsignor Ronald Knox (whose careful statement is quoted by Mr. Blanshard) seems to know what he is talking about; Rome simply does not recognize equal rights for “error” and “truth” and is not prepared to renounce religious coercion once for all. Here all non-Romanist Americans have a common concern. We can only feel grateful that a number of American Catholics have tried, so far as possible, to mitigate this dangerous doctrine. But this does not make us any happier about Argentina and Spain, and we should not be accused of bigotry if we oppose too close a relationship with them.

Act Two takes place in America. A religious minority seeks public funds for its own schools, and tries to impose its moral standards on the majority.

Let us recognize that there are two sides to the issue of state support for private schools. Protestants are beginning to learn, more and more, the dangers of a type of education in which the Old and New Testaments are completely ignored. How can a child be called educated who does not even know the part that religion has played in human history and culture? And yet, if the issue is joined, most non-Catholics will be obliged to resist, in all charity, a policy that Catholics think right and proper.

Why? Because we believe that to subsidize religious schools would divide our children still further, sharpen the antagonisms which Mr. Blanshard’s book reveals, and produce a generation that might have more denominational loyalty but not necessarily a profounder religious life. We do not think that we, or any others, should have access to funds levied from the whole community in order to teach that our own religion is absolutely true or to point out the errors in the other man’s. Let us keep the discussion going; let us see if Catholics, Protestants, and Jews can work together toward a system which will permit effective religious education without augmenting the differences or wrecking the already overburdened public schools.

Meanwhile our approach ought to be positive rather than polemical. The way to preserve democracy is not just to “contain “ Communism, but to get more and more citizens to participate intelligently and effectively in public life. And if Christianity and democracy are to be strengthened, I believe that the way is not through the public school or the private school, but through the church and home. Once the average citizen and layman has learned to undertake leadership, once he is ready to work for his religion, our problems will be on the way to solution.

The issue of censorship over morals admits of a clear answer. Catholic doctors and clergy are in conscience bound to be loyal to their church’s rulings on debated points of medical ethics. But many who differ from them take their stand because of religious principles and have gone to considerable trouble to ponder the moral issues involved. The attempt to coerce non-Catholics — and the Massachusetts law against dissemination of birth control information could not be kept on the statute books without Catholic pressure — is not only deeply wounding, it invades the proper sphere of family and church. It may well force many conscientious non-Catholics to make a decision between the statutes of Caesar and the Spirit of God.

“God,” says Nicholas Berdyaev, “has laid upon man the duty of being free, of safeguarding freedom of spirit, no matter how difficult that may be, or how much sacrifice and suffering it may require.”