ABSTRACT

The country chapters in this book address the ways in which Catholic religious and political movements, mobilized from below and competing in the arena of electoral and associational politics, developed in inter-war Europe, later contributing to the formation of generally stable political societies in Western Europe after 1945. This chapter involves an equally challenging, although slightly different question, which is how we can connect the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. There is broad agreement that the traditions of political and social Catholicism that emerged with force and authority in the late nineteenth century, especially those associated with the idea of Christian democracy in its many forms, had important implications for the successful reinvention of European politics after 1945. Scholarly literature is certainly replete with variations of this argument. To take examples from American scholarship on Europe published in the last few years, Noel Cary, in a recent book on German political Catholicism, argues that the Centre Party (Zentrum) was a ‘model among Catholics for what was fully achieved only after 1945…a broad party that could integrate conservatives into a liberal democratic system’. Cary believes that ‘the Center Party, the civic agent of the German Catholic Sonderweg, was, for better or worse, the closest example in the German past of a political culture that offered an ideal of tolerance’.1 In a brilliant essay on Germany in the late twentieth century Michael Geyer has argued, in turn, that the history of Germany after 1945 is the history of two ‘pariah nations’—Catholicism and socialism-both of which before 1914 were ‘the foremost antistate, and, indeed, antisystem movements [that] had managed to check their respective particularist proclivities in order to generate programmatic national movements and cultural agendas with their own universal appeal’, and which finally ‘came to govern Germany for the “better”, second half of the century’.2 Finally, Raymond Grew has offered a similar assessment in a recent essay on liberty and Catholicism: ‘Europe’s Catholics can be said to have laid the groundwork before World War I for the parties of Christian democracy that would blossom after World War II and for the Catholic contribution to a European community.’3