Reading Adrian Vermeule’s assessment of the many defects of liberalism’s “good and faithful servants” I wondered how post-liberal political Catholicism compares and contrasts with Liberation Theology and other ideologized forms of Christianity.
Friar Clodovis Boff, brother of Leonardo Boff, recently concluded that Liberation Theology (which he and his brother developed and promoted in 1970s Latin America) is responsible for the decline of Catholicism in Brazil. Combining Catholic teaching on the duty to care for the poor with Marxism distorted the message of the Gospel. The faith was instrumentalized to advance socialism and revolution.
The Holy See’s 1984 statement on Liberation Theology is clarifying. Pope John Paul II sought to distinguish between authentic Catholic efforts to alleviate poverty and human suffering with the radical and error-riddled ideas that had taken root in Central and South America.
Today’s post liberal Catholics have their own meta-critique of free(er) markets and democratic governments as destructive to peaceful and just orders. The solution: transform them (peacefully and gradually as the liberal order collapses under its own contradictions) so that “the common good” and thus salvation will be more readily obtained for larger numbers of people.
There are many differences between Liberation Theology and the ideologically amorphous post liberals of the New Right. What they have in common is an embrace of a “politics of faith” as defined by Michael Oakeshott. A “politics of faith” does not require religious belief (there are both religious and material variants). It describes a faith in government’s ability to order human affairs towards some societal ideal.
Liberation theology held up socialism as a means to advance the Gospel’s message to care for the poor. The post liberal Catholic proposes using the administrative state to harness and nudge the mysterious action of grace in individual souls constructing a great civilization that is aligned with God’s holy will.
Vermeule vision casts a future to be unlocked with a master key that would utilize the Catholic Church to accomplish astonishing ends. He writes:
What is at stake is, indeed, far more elevated than power. What is at stake is no less than authority, the full authority of a reasoned political order, composed of both temporal and spiritual powers in right relation to the natural and divine law, that would put a mere Rome to shame. That limitless ambition is why liberalism finds a genuinely political Catholicism intolerable; why the liberal order will accept only a version of Catholicism that submits to be ruled; and why, whatever their justifications and whatever their self-conceptions, the practitioners and advocates of political quietism unfailingly receive their present rewards.
And yet this is not what Rome imagines, nor is it the Church’s ambition, in its own words.
The canonization of the martyred Salvadoran priest Fr. Oscar Romero (archbishop of San Salvador) is instructive.
Romero was neither a quietist nor a Marxist. Contrary to popular opinion, he did not endorse Liberation Theology even as he rebuked the increasing violence of right-wing militias against the campesinos. He did not seek political solutions. In his vocation as a parish priest he illuminated injustices and awakened individual consciences to the suffering in their midst and to reject violence.
His canonization aggravated some right-leaning Catholics who viewed him through a fog of ideological priors, even as his writings influenced Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger’s (Pope Benedict XVI) critique of Liberation Theology.
Cardinal Gerhard Muller in a 2018 review of Romero’s writings recalls the debates his cause raised with critics trying to fit Romero into an ideological framework - to claim him for Liberation Theology or disown him for not being sufficiently capitalist - when in reality his message pointed to the Gospel.
Cardinal Muller writes:
“The gospel is not a tidy theory that explains the world, a spiritual technique for facing life’s challenges, or a program whereby man can redeem itself - by violence or by peace…..Romero does not offer edifying thoughts that, while they might give our souls a temporary lift, do nothing to confront us with the radical call to discipleship. Nor does he select isolated biblical texts in order to validate a prefabricated ideology. He eschews the kind of propaganda that intoxicates a demagogue.”
Ironically, Christian adherents to “the politics of faith” end up discounting Divine Providence and instead ‘put their trust in princes,’ or in a new bureuacratic elite to direct individuals towards their conception of “the common good.” For those who prefer a “politics of skepticism,” there is still a vital connection to be made between religious belief and government but it is less direct, as John Grove notes. In a “politics of skepticism” government’s role is to maintain and enforce the rules, “that undergird civil peace and basic societal well-being.”
Romero’s own words, addressed to his fellow Salvadorans, in a time of violence, economic and political instability contain many exhortations to authentic solidarity with the poor but none more powerful than the call to each individual to daily conversion. Simply - to love - a love that propelled him to speak the truth plainly no matter the cost.