Craig Calhoun and Charles Tilly, “The New Dispensation? Religion, Resistance, and the Mediation of New Theological Currents in Socialist Europe,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 1984.
The study of religion in Socialist Europe is still buried under an unfortunate pall of ideological self-mystification, with both committed socialist historians and religious authorities in the capitalist world equally guilty of obfuscation. Contrary to the presumptions of both committed marxist partisans and religious purists, religion would neither disappear under a withering proletarian assault nor be forced into a merely private refuge as a consequence of state illiberalism. While persecution did exist, and was in some places even totalizing, the more common tendency was a managed accommodation, with religious doctrine evolving, sometimes slowly, sometimes fitfully, as a consequence of the changed social relations within the socialist world and the pressures placed upon it by both state and society. The incremental movements in the roman church and more drastic ones in northern protestantism were not merely functional responses to repression, but they also cannot be understood as a simply metaphysical analogue of socialist ideology. Instead, they must both be grasped as elements of an evolving social totality, whose meaningful evolution was a consequence of combined and uneven politico-religious development.
We will begin by examining two test cases of relative theological conservativism: Italy and Poland, in which struggles with the Roman church played a vital but differentiated role in the imbrication of socialist power in everyday life. The relative lack of state repression in the Italian case is due primarily to the evolving modus vivendi with the roman church, while the Polish state, which always possessed a lesser degree of popular legitimacy, found itself locked in a far more confrontational power struggle. Nonetheless, in both cases the relative institutional power of the church forced the state into patterns of dependence and confrontation that posed longer-term difficulties. In contrast, the protestant churches of the Netherlands and northern Germany possessed far less institutional power, and under conditions of general competition became the site of millennial and charismatic movements. Finally, Jewish congregations, whose populations were the beneficiaries of socialist policies of non-discrimination and whose members were overrepresented in the expanding bureaucracies, were structurally inclined to accommodate themselves to the state, and though more conservative branches were intermittently subject to persecution, a relative willingness to collaborate fractured organized resistance to policies of state atheism.
The Italian Case: Managed Accommodation, Slow Homiletic Drift
Background and Institutional Setting
Catholicism survived in Italy less by theological innovation and flamboyant resistance than by accommodation and a careful tending to both administrative and sacramental authority. Following the flight of the senior hierarchy from Rome, Luigi Sturzo was elected the new pope, donning the name Francis and issuing a series of encyclicals that anticlerical activists and socialist officials expected would make way for a radical reform of the church’s practices. Though these moves and the participation of the Catholic People’s Party in socialist government would serve as fodder for attacks from the white church, they masked a deeper continuity of practices.
The history of the Roman Church was shaped by the fragile modus vivendi reached with the Italian Union of Revolutionary Marxists, always the largest party in the Federal Government, and typically present as a coalitional partner in the provincial Camera D’Lavoro. No formal agreement was ever signed between the church and the Italian government, and even the Catholic People’s Party, the representative of the church, never established official links with it. Nonetheless, we can reconstruct the general shape that church-state politics would take from patterns established in the early years of revolution: the church would acknowledge socialist government, in return for government non-interference in internal church affairs. In borderline matters, the participation of the Catholic People’s Party in elections would have to act as a soft guarantee that the church’s interests would not be ignored.
This placed the so-called “red” church in a contradictory position. On the one hand, it was dependent for both patronage and sheer survival on the tolerance of the socialist government, especially as the Socialists steadily expanded their electoral foothold and accumulated political power in the rural hinterlands of Italy. On the other hand, its claims to authority rested precisely on its autonomy as an independent religious institution that could claim to be the legitimate successor to the pre-revolutionary church. As a consequence, the initial moves by Sturzo to mark out battle lines with the white church, intended as an oath of allegiance of sorts to the revolutionary government, were soon followed by moderating gestures intended to make clear that the Roman Church had little desire to interfere with politics. At times, it would be forced to restrain the more enthusiastic members of its refounded orders, some of whom had a penchant for revolutionary activism.
By announcing itself as a generally neutral, apolitical institution, the church would not only signal to its more conservative supporters that it had no desire to remake itself in a revolutionary self-image, it would also convey to the new socialist government that it had no intention to meddle in the politics of the new state. There was another upshot: given the quite open political activism of the white church based in Portugal, the Roman one would be better able to present itself as a broad tent, capable of appealing to believers from a variety of religious faiths. This would be crucial in the search for adherents overseas.
In practice, given the survival of significant reactionary vestiges within the church hierarchy, covert state support for compliant clergy was pervasive though relatively well-hidden. This support, while officially denied by both sides, quietly undermined the Church’s claim to independence even as it preserved its institutional integrity. Although the college of cardinals was quickly filled out with loyal personnel, the middle and lower layers of the church were composed of either holdovers or opportunistic elements. In these circumstances, the red hierarchy’s greatest strength became its control of seminaries, ordination, and access to canonical recognition within the territories controlled by socialist states. By keeping its churches open, sacraments regular, and funerals legal, the Roman Church secured obedience - if not always belief - on the part of the vast majority of priests and deacons. In Italy, defection to the white pope was rampant early on, but as the costs became clear - a loss of patronage and, frequently, large numbers of parishioners - the amount decreased. Efforts to organize a white church were also perpetually stymied by state repression; a 1928 law, which granted privileges to the roman church and made it illegal for any body claiming “false religious authority” to own property, merely codified existing practices.
Historical Change
From 1925-1945, the modus vivendi between church and state uneasily held, though not without occasional flareups. Within the church, there was no drastic change: under the conditions of the schism, any move away from Latin or the core sacramental forms was difficult to imagine. Despite some notable pressures from below, there was no introduction of democratic church governance or doctrinal embrace of socialism, even if the Catholic People’s Party frequently assisted in implementing socialist policy. Yet the fact that change was quiet and gradual does not mean it was insignificant. To the average Italian Catholic, catholic practice “felt” different in 1945 than it did 20 years ago. It was the same church, but something significant had changed.
Within individual parishes, there was a notable thematic shift in the content of sermons. While individual sin, metaphysical guilt, and submission to authority did not disappear as substantive topics, they were slowly displaced by a new emphasis on social responsibility and solidarity. Divine grace and mercy were substituted for judgement, punishment, and hell. Priests lauded the role of charity and good works in salvation, and salvation itself was often spoken of less as a rescue from perdition than as the restitution of dignity in community. Metaphors which employed hierarchy and divine monarchy increasingly failed to appear, replaced with a newfound emphasis on the organic, united “church body”. Suffering, too, ceased to be spoken of as something divine or triumphant, instead becoming a social ill that catholics were called upon to redress in their own communities.
These gradual changes in homiletic practices were driven by a broader reorientation of the church’s place in everyday life. The parish, long the central hub of catholic organization, became ever more embedded in the social fabric of local communities. As the central government in Italy and individual camera del’lavoro struggled to provide universal welfare provision amidst the straitened post-war circumstances, parishes stepped in as administrators of mutual aid and assistance for the sick and elderly. Priests became important mediators between the individual parish and the regional camera del’lavoro, advocating for patronage to their towns and villages. In conjunction with the changes in homiletic content, priests gradually lost the image of strict moral judge, instead becoming figured and imagined as community managers and advocates.
The new role of the parish placed increased pressures on the administrative capacity of the church, strengthening already existing trends toward lay participation. Women’s charitable societies, church youth groups, and informal parish committees all proliferated between 1925-1945, particularly in areas where socialism had little traditional loyalty amongst the mass of peasants. These expansions in volitional lay activity occurred alongside a steady decline in catholic schools, which were displaced less by active state repression than the widespread availability and low cost of public schooling. As literacy rose and superstition declined, religious education itself featured catechisms which were truncated: shorter, less systematic, and laying a greater stress on a generic moral universalism than Christian dogma. The clergy and other catholic personnel who taught these classes came increasingly from urban strata, and their values were oriented around bureaucratic competence rather than asceticism.
The most visible change in church practice was the winnowing of the Christian presence in public life. This did not occur instantly, or absolutely. The festivals of the traditional christian calendar were not banned, but permits became more difficult to acquire, police presence frequently chilled enthusiasm, and, most notably, socialist rituals were often purposefully designed to compete for the same temporal space. The spread of revolutionary commemorations, celebrations, and marches gradually displaced the traditional time of catholicism, dominated by saints festivals and the major holidays of Christmas, Easter, and Lent. Catholicism ceased to hegemonically structure time, and began to merely inhabit it. As it receded from the public sphere, it began to feel more intimate, familial, and inward-looking.
The last remaining site of fervent public catholicism was the ceremony. Funerals remained heavily attended, emotionally charged, and socially protected. Even camera del’lavoro dominated by socialist hardliners and their anarchist allies felt somewhat hesitant about interfering with rituals of burial and mourning. Even as other public rituals of catholic faith faded, funerals kept them alive, conveying forward a mentality around death and the afterlife that was deeply alien to the socialist ideology.
By 1945, Catholicism had become a stabilizing element of Italian society. The long cohabitation between socialists and catholics had not entirely purged anticlerical ideology from the socialist party nor completely allayed catholic fears of socialist repression, but it had created a situation where each side was accustomed to a continued, if occasionally brittle, coexistence. The Roman Church fulfilled important functions in rural districts which the party struggled with, and built up networks of activists that frequently were of use to socialist administrators in the management of rural areas. The schism itself became normalized as well, with even more conservative catholic parishioners ceasing to contemplate a return to the white church, which was widely castigated as “the church that left”.
The Polish Case: Confrontation, Resistance, and Religious Nationalism
Background and Institutional Setting
In Poland, socialism did not emerge through the revolutionary enthusiasm of the masses or the adroit foresight of party strategists: it was imposed at gunpoint in a situation of extraordinary violence. We in the capitalist world may not accept that Russia and Germany invaded to save the helpless Jews of Galicia, but we cannot, while retaining moral and intellectual integrity, deny or downplay the reality of what occurred under the government of Roman Dmowski. Extensive historical research has revealed that the initial counts of the death toll from socialist historians were, if anything, underestimated.
The new socialist government, composed at the top from a thin layer of cadres from the PPS-Left, lacked broad popular legitimacy amongst the public outside of a narrow band of urban workers in Warsaw and Lodz. The movement of Jews into Galicia, Posen, and Silesia deprived this government of many of its potential supporters, and made Poland into a far more homogeneously catholic nation. This made the state ever-more dependent on support and patronage from both Berlin and Moscow. The socialist government was therefore viewed as a mere puppet of nefarious foreign forces, and, in turn, its leading members saw the Polish people as a recalcitrant and potentially hostile mass, responsible for one of the worst crimes of the 20th century.
In this situation of simmering resentment between an avowedly atheist state and a society set firmly against its encroachments, it was natural that Catholicism became identified with the Polish nation. The clergy historically had a close relationship with large landowners, who had good reasons to oppose the socialist government, and possessed a sufficiently dense institutional network to resist its impositions. Most importantly, however, it was clearly tied to Dmowski’s regime, having assisted him in both rising to power. The extent to which it actually participated in the Jewish ethnocide is still a subject of historical debate, though it is clear that large sections of the clergy were at least comfortable looking the other way.
Given these realities, an Italian-style modus vivendi was impossible. Instead, the socialist government resolved to weaken the institutional power of the church through the levying of taxes upon its properties and the introduction of laws regulating almost every aspect of public religious life. It is now clear that the intention on the part of the anticlerical leadership was to secure a source of permanent leverage over the church which would lead to its subordination, but the heated ideological rhetoric of confrontation pursued by the government’s radical wing led the church to read this instead as a desire for extinction. In practice, though, the state hardly had the means to crush the church outright, and instead attempted to cooperate with the Roman hierarchy to fill its ranks with loyalists - or at least opportunists - who would remain compliant. Meanwhile, a series of commissions purported to reveal the full extent of the clergy’s awareness of and participation in the Jewish ethnocide, providing grounds for purges within the church hierarchy and muting international protests against the repression of religious life.
Despite these measures, disobedience remained rampant in the lower levels of the church hierarchy and amongst ordinary parishioners. Particularly in outlying rural areas where government surveillance was weaker, sermons found ways to denounce the “false pope” in Rome as well as the “false government” in Warsaw. The ability of parish priests to maintain some level of legitimacy with their followers depended upon signaling at least symbolic opposition to the government, and the state’s continuing skepticism of church authority meant that even this was often grounds for arrest or interference. This contributed to a situation of latent, continuing conflict, in which the attitudes of both clergymen and politicians hardened. It also created frequent diplomatic flare-ups between the leadership of the Roman Church and the Polish government; the former could not be seen as participating in the repression of religious festivals and ceremonies, and issued condemnations of the more draconian measures of the Polish socialists.
Historical Change
Parishes served as defensive moral enclaves and sites of counter-hegemonic practice. With lay organizations banned and welfare distribution centralized by the state, the parish was forced into a purely moral-spiritual role, providing the symbolic language to stimulate resistance to a hostile state. Sermons shifted away from themes of grace, mercy, and fallibility, instead emphasizing heroic martyrdom, triumphant suffering, stoic endurance, and the pervasive dangers of false authority. Solidarity was framed not as a more general, human matter, but one confined to the “true church body”, whose illicit extension posed dangers of contamination.
Efforts to force resistance in the church underground were unsuccessful. Churches were required to secure permits for feasts, festivals, and other public rituals and marches, and the labyrinthine bureaucratic process required to secure them itself acted as a form of state repression. Even without the vouchsafing of public licenses or the explicit go-ahead of their own priests, believers would frequently organize themselves to participate in public festivals, with many writing privately that anything less would constitute a psychologically humiliating submission to a foreign, “atheist” state. These marches and festivals would invariably take on a much more political character because of the armed repression that they faced. Rather than displace the catholic calendar, attempts to impose a new, socialist temporality collided with it.
Rhythms of resistance and repression did not proceed evenly and uninterruptedly. Following the introduction of socialist governance, an initial bout of partisan activity, involving the killing of local collaborators, was repressed with a series of mass arrests. This was not an echo of the ethnocide which preceded it, as some scholars have suggested, but a targeted attempt to eliminate the primary sources of opposition. In this, it was largely successful, as over the next half-decade, movements pledging violent resistance to socialism were forced to reconstitute themselves. Only in the 1930s, with the arrival of ever-larger sums of American money covertly smuggled into Poland through church networks, would both violent resistance and civil protest become more ubiquitous. This time, the response of the socialist state, now more confident of its own footing, was somewhat more measured. By the 1940s, the resistance of Polish society - and Catholic parishioners and clergymen - to the state had not been eliminated, but it had largely been channeled into more ritualized, less violent forms of protest involving marches, illicit pilgrimages, and secret (catholic) education.
Following a twenty year period of soft conflict, the religious settlement in Poland showed few signs of abating. Although it had failed to create a subordinate and pliant Catholic church, the socialist state succeeded in reducing the degree of resistance it could stimulate. For its part, the church managed to preserve its morally central position within Polish society, but only by placing itself under permanent siege by the state and inoculating itself against theological and homiletic innovation. By contrast, in Italy Catholicism was able to make itself an awkward and at times ill-proportioned inhabitant of an emerging socialist modernity, thereby making a crucial contribution to a politico-ethical pluralism unique in the socialist world. Polish catholicism, on the other hand, became a rigid counter-institution rigidly set against the demands of an equally rigid state. This made nearly inevitable a situation of permenant conflict, even if its intensity was eventually tempered over time as both sides realized they could not afford decisive escalation. This standing antagonism would remain one of the enduring fault lines of Polish society.
Bình luận
0