Catholic nationalism's threat to Europe

Fascist resonances are unmistakable, writes George Pitcher, but Christians offer hope too

I guess one of the roles of the spiritual director is to direct one’s attention to media of a spiritual dimension that one wouldn’t otherwise have read. So mine, an observant Roman Catholic, this week sent me a link to a piece in the Financial Times, nosed on the observation that there’s a populist Catholic counter-revolution in Europe. This grouping corrals religiously conservative young voters in support of nationalism and conservative family values.

The piece is by Jonathan Derbyshire, whom I’ve known a bit and would count as a friend, though I haven’t seen him for ages. I say this because we made common cause when he was culture editor of the New Statesman and I fronted Archbishop Rowan Williams’ guest editorship there, over a decade ago.

Prism of secularism

Jonathan, then and now, has an acute ability to see the political work of religion through the prism of his secularism. I find his excellent piece in the FT terrifying, though largely for what he doesn’t say than for what he does. And in one aspect of his conclusion I think he’s just plain wrong, though for good reasons.

Spanish heils: honest dupes or double agents?

His thesis, based on a poll in the French religious newspaper La Croix, is that youthful conservative Catholicism is re-emergent “as a political, as well as religious, force” and nor “is the fusion of Catholic identity politics with nativist and ‘sovereigntist’ populism… particular to France.” He notes the electoral success of the Vox party in Spain, Georgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy and Poland’s Law and Justice party.

What I find so alarming is that it points towards the Church’s role in an emerging rejection of some aspects of liberal democracy in favour of populist nationalism. And, while I hope that Jonathan won’t think I’m being melodramatic about this, that in turn directs us to the darkness of the Church’s role in 20th-century European history.

Constant debate

We may or may not be familiar with photos of clerics giving the fascist salute, as in Spain in support of General Franco. But it’s been a matter of constant debate since the Second World War whether the Church was an active collaborator with the Nazi regime, an honest dupe or a double agent, appearing to co-operate so that it could subversively defend persecuted Jews.

It’s dangerous to invoke Hitler at every apparent threat to the liberal democratic federalism of the European experiment. But it’s also valid to note resonances when the Church allies itself with nationalism. And that’s what is so frightening.

Against that, there is a more hopeful role into which to cast the Church. In the La Croix poll cited in the FT, 59 per cent see the Church as a “beacon which shows the way through the darkness” of secular modernity. But the Church and, more accurately, some of its clergy have also shone as beacons in the darkness of fascistic nationalism.

Lights in Nazi darkness

Another friend, the Rev’d Fergus Butler-Gallie, wrote a book called Priests De La Resistance!, whose content is as strong as its title is weak. For all the priests joining fascist salutes, sincerely or otherwise, there were also servants of heroic courage who shone as lights in Nazi darkness.

I think of Canon Felix Kir, the bon vivant who rode into liberated Dijon astride an allied tank after a distinguished career of resistance to its occupiers. I think of Abbe Pierre, “the miraculous mountaineering monk”, whose Alpine guidance saved countless Jews. Or Don Pietro Pappagallo, whose talent for forged documentation also saved very many others in Rome.

Or Dietrich Bonhoeffer, similarly a smuggler of Jews, who died a martyr’s death in a concentration camp. Or Sister Sara Salkahazi, beatified by the Church for her breathtaking courage of witness in occupied Hungary. There are very many more of these heroes of Christian witness besides.

Hope in question

Their hope and prayer would be that populist nationalism would never again emerge in Europe to make similar gospel witness necessary. The direction of travel of European popular politics, from France to Vox in Spain to Brothers of Italy, places that hope chillingly in question.

These are, of course, democratic parties and we should be wary of totalitarian comparisons. But the price of our resistance to being drawn into insidious nationalism is, perhaps, constant Christian vigilance. It’s here that I depart from my friend Jonathan in his FT piece

True subsidiarity

He quotes the European Conservatives and Reformists, the organisation that represents these emergent nationalist parties, as being committed to the “sovereign integrity of the nation state, opposition to EU federalism and a renewed respect for true subsidiarity”. He calls out an irony here, in that subsidiarity – the idea that power should be distributed both downwards to local authorities and upwards to supranational organisations – was a key value of post-war Christian Democracy.

“And this was a political ideology that sought to reconcile Christianity (particularly Catholicism) with liberal democracy,” he writes, “not stand in opposition to it, and which did more than any other to shape the project of European integration that Catholic identitarians now anathematise.”

Our difference is in that “upwards” word. The most supranational authority to which Christians owe allegiance is not a worldly power. And we lose sight of that at our peril.

George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest