In his article “Christianity in a ‘Post-Western’ Era” (January), David Danzig discussed some of the consequences for Christianity of the decline in Western prestige and power. Here he examines the effects of the trend toward Western unity on the relations between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism.

For the first time in about four centuries, the wall between Catholics and Protestants, erected first on one side by the Reformation and then on the other by the counter-Reformation, has begun to be breached. Throughout the hundred-year period following the Reformation, the wall was unsuccessfully assaulted by armies fighting civil and foreign religious wars, until the forces of a burgeoning nationalism, in their own interests, decreed a religious truce. Today the religious landscape of the West is again being affected by developments within the history of European nationalism: just as the flowering of nationalism transformed the religious polity of Renaissance Europe, so its decline in the post-World War II period is working to produce a new set of relationships between Protestants and Roman Catholics.

Thus, inroads have begun to be made by each of the two major branches of Western Christianity into territory traditionally belonging exclusively to the other. For the most part these inroads are the consequence not of missionary activity, but of demographic and political factors—immigration, birth rates, and the like. For example, the division of Germany, which put the predominantly Protestant Eastern part under Communist rule, has left the Western half of the birthplace of Protestantism almost 50 per cent Catholic. Holland, which is still generally thought of as a Protestant country, is today also almost 50 per cent Catholic. So also is Canada. Australia, in part because of the recently stepped-up immigration from southern Europe, now has a Catholic minority of about 25 per cent, which is still growing. And in the United States the Catholic populaton has expanded from a small minority into a vigorous group of about forty million.

Such inroads by Catholicism into Protestant strongholds have not yet been matched by Protestant gains in traditionally Catholic territory. But this is to some extent offset by the fact that Catholic territory (concentrated largely in the Latin-Hispanic world) has itself declined in power and importance in relation to the technologically superior “Protestant” countries. In addition, the Protestant missionary movement has by no means been slow to seize the opportunities that have presented themselves for eating into Catholic monopolies. The main case in point is Latin America, which most Protestants once considered an untouchable area. (As late as 1910 the Anglican Church refused to join in the Edinburgh Protestant Ecumenical Council until the subject of possible missionary activity in Latin America was removed from the agenda.) But recognizing that the Church in many Latin countries has lacked direct contact with the people—one priest to some eight thousand baptized Catholics is common, compared with one for six hundred in the United States—and that Catholicism had never penetrated the social fabric of Latin America as extensively as had been assumed, Protestantism has mounted an aggressive missionary assault on those countries since the end of the war. The result, according to Father Willard F. Jabusch, is “that Protestantism has solidly established itself in many places in Latin America.”

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To appreciate the significance of all these changes, it is only necessary to remind oneself that the religious map drawn in 1648 by the princes of Europe at Westphalia was still largely intact at the end of World War II, three hundred years later. The Treaty of Westphalia brought an end to the Thirty Years’ War, which was waged for a combination of religious, national, dynastic, and mercenary reasons, and which so ravaged Central Europe that the historians estimate it killed off a full third of the German population. The famous formula of Westphalia, cuius regio eius religio (the religion of the country must be that of the ruler), meant that henceforth nations established as Protestant, Catholic, or both, would remain such—that, in other words, no further attempts would be made to destroy the balance of religious power then obtaining in Europe. This formula, intended as a means of preventing any future religious wars, served notice on the churches that the nation-state would no longer permit itself to be used as a secular arm of religion. On the contrary, religion was now to be subordinated to the interests of the state—as indeed had already happened in Louis XIII’s France, whose first minister, Richelieu, a cardinal of the Church, had entered into alliances with various Protestant principalities against the Catholic powers in the Thirty Years’ War. In short, at Westphalia, Europe chose not to be united under the suzerainty of either Protestantism or Catholicism, and opted instead for fragmentation into a series of autonomous, absolute sovereignties.

At the same time, however, the individual nations of Europe were to use religion as a means of achieving unity within their own borders, and thus the peace of Westphalia also brought suppression and persecution to religious minorities throughout the Christian world. In Protestant countries, Catholics were persecuted; in Catholic countries, Protestants were persecuted; and Jews were persecuted in both. Hence the very nationalism which led to the fragmentation of Europe imposed religious uniformity within the confines of each state, and ultimately elevated itself to the status of a quasi-religion. Even after legal equality began in most places to be extended to dissident religious minorities during the 19th century, this equality was understood as ensuring them protection from persecution and discrimination rather than as permitting them a full exercise of influence in public affairs. Today three Western countries—Spain, Portugal, and Colombia—still discriminate legally against their religious minorities, but less flagrant attempts continue to be made in many countries to inhibit effective action by any religious group other than the majority. For instance, in Austria, “contempt of religion” and “attempts to spread irreligion” are illegal, while in Norway the law requires the majority of the cabinet to belong to the state (Lutheran) church.

Such attempts to deny or qualify religious equality might fancifully be described in this context as efforts to resist the final abrogation of the cuius regio eius religio provision of the Treaty of Westphalia. But whether the churches like it or not—and many of them like it very much—forces are at work in the world which are bound to create a new system of religious relationships and destroy the vestiges of the pattern set at Westphalia.

The most immediately relevant of these forces is the growth of secularism. Americans rightly think of secularism as the enemy of religion in general, yet the whole truth is that not all religion loses equally when secularism gains, but mainly the dominant religion of the particular culture in question. In other words, if secularism has hurt nominal religiosity, it has also produced a social environment conducive to the welfare of religious minorities.

We can take France among the Catholic countries and Great Britain among the Protestant countries as examples. In France the power of the Church has been seriously weakened by ever greater waves of militant atheism and anti-clericalism, but neither atheism nor anti-clericalism has succeeded in really damaging the commitment of the Protestant population to its faith. In consequence, France’s million Protestants, well organized and aggressive, are now able to exert an influence in public life far out of proportion to their numbers. Similarly with England and Scotland, where a Catholic minority of more than two million (as against only 120,000 in 1800) exists side by side with an established church whose large nominal membership in no sense reflects its actual power and influence.

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Commenting on this situation as regards Protestant countries, the late Paul Hutchinson, editor of the Christian Century, wrote: “A striking but incontrovertible fact about European countries which have traditionally been Protestant strongholds—such countries as England, Scotland, Holland and the Scandinavian countries—is the almost complete withdrawal of organized labor from the churches and the rapid shrinking in the number of young people who show more than the most passive interest in Protestant church activities.” It was Hutchinson’s conclusion that “the actual working of establishment was to leave [such] countries filled with churches from which the congregations have largely vanished.”

The reference to organized labor and to youth in the above quotation points to another way in which secularism has been working to the disadvantage of religious monopoly. This has to do with the fact that dominant or established religions have tended, for obvious reasons, to back the status quo, and consequently any movement toward social reform in a given area will almost invariably be either indifferent to religion, opposed to the dominant religion, or opposed to religion in general. While European history shows innumerable instances of an established church buttressing the political and social status quo—like the Catholic Church’s old preference for “the concordat of Throne and Altar”—the most obvious example at the moment is Latin America, where the Church has generally been regarded by the liberal and radical intelligentsia as a major enemy of social reform. (It should be pointed out, however, that there are signs, partly a reflection and partly a cause of the great changes now under way, which indicate that the traditional hostility of many churchmen to social reform can no longer be taken for granted. It is common knowledge, for example, that forces within the Church were important in the overthrow of Peron in Argentina and have also been active among the opposition to other Latin American dictators. The appeal made in 1959 by the South American bishops for land reform is another proof that the Church has increasingly come to realize that an intelligent fight against Communism must feature a program of economic reform. And in Europe, the economic policies advocated by most of the Catholic parties since the war represent a sharp departure from past conservatism.)

That Protestants, in countries where they are the dominant religious element, have their own problems with social reform is also evident. Indeed, the Protestant tendency to identify itself completely with the local culture wherever there is a Protestant majority actually involves a built-in support of the status quo. Moreover, race discrimination, an uncommon phenomenon in Catholic countries—which are more prone to class discrimination—has been given sanction by important Protestant denominations in the American South, in the Union of South Africa, and elsewhere.

Protestantism, of course, has been striving to change in this respect, just as Catholicism has been trying to change in other respects, and to that degree, at least, both are ceasing to behave as monopolies. What has happened is that the position of the two wings of Christianity in the West as a whole and in the world as a whole—where they are both minorities—has begun to be more important as a determinant of policy and action than any considerations of advantage to be derived from purely local monopoly.

For if demographic factors have combined with the growth of secularism to alter the balance of religious power within individual countries and to convert all religions into actual minorities, another—and, in the last analysis, more significant—force has been having its effect on the character of Christian religious relationships on a supra-national scale. This force is the movement toward European—and ultimately Western—unity which the disillusionment with extreme nationalism and the threat of Communism have done so much to promote. So far only a few political and economic institutions of rather strictly limited scope (NATO, EEC, OECD) have been created, but a number of leading statesmen have seriously begun to envisage the possibility of “a genuine political—as well as economic—community” as the long-run goal for the West. Within Christianity, too, the vision of unity has taken hold and ecumenicism, with its emphasis on the globe rather than the nation, today has the liveliest, most vital appeal for imaginative Christians, Protestant and Catholic alike.

Whatever basis (beyond considerations of mutual defense against Communism) may be found for the creation of a supranational Western political community, it is of course absurd to expect that there can be a return to the medieval idea of unity under the suzertainty of religion. There is, however, a pronounced tendency in the air to appeal to Christianity as the major bond which makes all the diverse elements in the West members of a single civilization. We have heard in the past ten years a good deal of talk about the “Christian civilization” of the West, and it is not uncommon to see the cold war described as a struggle between atheism and Christianity, the implication being that democracy is the product of Christianity while totalitarianism is the logical outcome of secularism.

In line with this reasoning, a greater and greater degree of cooperation has been taking place between Catholics and Protestants, who are themselves seeking for a basis on which they can work together against the two common enemies—secularism at home and Communism abroad—and on which they can collaborate in the effort to revitalize Christianity for the purpose of making it the dominant moral and spiritual influence of the Western world. Some Christian leaders have gone so far as to envisage a reunification of all the churches, while others—like the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Geoffrey Francis Fisher, and his successor, Dr. Arthur Michael Ramsey—see a “Christian Church Commonwealth” as the ultimate goal of the dialogue between Protestantism and Catholicism. (Dr. Fisher, significantly, is reported to have said during his recent historic visit to the Pope, that the “words ‘Catholic’ and ‘Protestant’ are completely out of date.”)

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On its side, the Catholic Church has contributed to this new spirit by a well-nigh revolutionary willingness to think of Protestantism as something more than a heretical schism. At the Catholic Eucharist Congress held in Munich last year, for example, the famed Roman ecumenicist, Otto Karner, spoke of Protestantism as the “Church of the Word” in contrast to Catholicism, which he called the “Church of the Sacrament.” Such language would have been inconceivable as little as thirty years ago. To take another example, Father George Tavard, Counselor on Christian Unity to Pope John, recently defined ecumenicism as a movement that “respects the beliefs and even the errors of others” and “admits that the question of Christian reunion . . . must be solved by a growing together in the truth on the level of the various Christian bodies.” This comes close to recognizing the legitimacy of Protestantism as a Christian faith—something Catholics have rarely been willing to do in the past.

How does this new spirit of cooperation between Protestantism and Catholicism square with the intensified competition described above? The answer seems to be that as the West moves further away from the principle of absolute national sovereignty (with its emphasis upon religious monism) and closer to being a de facto community of nations, roughly on the American model of federalism, so the system of mutually recognized religious spheres of influence bred by the birth of modern nationalism (and made official at Westphalia) gives way to a condition of religious pluralism, also roughly on the American model. The essence of religious pluralism in America, according to L. C. McHugh, is not static insulation, but a peculiarly dynamic blend of cooperation and competition. It is a system whereby “a multiplicity of religious groups, exercising freedom of action under the protection of the uncommitted State, strive to impose their particular values on the general pattern of society by democratic means, thereby shaping public institutions, public policy, and the legal order in accordance with their concept of the common good and the good life of men in the temporal order.” In short, Catholicism and Protestantism are now actively competing—to repeat, for the first time in three hundred years—for dominance in influencing the life of the West (considered as a single unit), while at the same time each is willing to form alliances with the other in pursuit of specific common objectives.

This situation is bound to benefit the cause of religious liberty in those few countries where it is still being denied. Whereas in the past, mistreatment of Catholics in Protestant countries, or mistreatment of Protestants in Catholic ones, was not considered the unambiguously legitimate concern of their co-religionists abroad, today any such instance of oppression immediately calls forth protests and political action. When the Jehovah’s Witnesses were being harassed in Italy not long ago, American Protestants were quick to voice complaints. Similarly, American Protestants have exerted pressure on their government—though without much success—to make its alliance with Spain contingent upon the extension of equal rights to Spanish Protestants.

The part tends to follow the whole. The more the West becomes an integrated system, the more each part of it will have to behave in a “Western” fashion. Belgium and Portugal have learned that their allies will not support them in their colonial policies, because colonialism is an embarrassment to the West as a whole. In the same way, the countries still holding out against religious liberty will be under pressure to bring their domestic policies into line with the standards prevailing throughout the entire Western bloc.

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Many people who would accept the foregoing analysis as more or less accurate have expressed serious doubts about the Catholic Church’s willingness to accept religious pluralism in any country where Catholics are in the majority. Such people contend that Catholics are supporters of pluralism in America only because it has benefited the Church, and they point to Spain, Portugal, and Columbia as evidence for their view that the Church is perfectly willing to suppress religious minorities wherever it has the power to do so. For that matter, a case has also been made against the genuineness of the Protestant enthusiasm for pluralism. While it is a commonplace of Protestant thinking to credit the principle of religious freedom to Protestant theology, some critics, like Philip Scharper, believe that “much of the acceptance by Protestants and Jews of other religious commitments is based less upon a full-bodied theology of toleration than upon a starveling philosophy of skepticism or a practical postulate of civic harmony.” Other critics, more interested in pragmatic tests, have pointed to the resistance offered by prominent Protestants to John F. Kennedy’s candidacy because of his Catholicism, and they have also emphasized the readiness of dominant Protestant denominations to suppress non-conformism wherever they have been in a position to enforce their will, both in the past and in the present—e.g., the laws against birth-control (which were originally put on the books of Massachusetts and Connecticut by Protestant pressure) and prohibition.

But for good historical reasons these doubts of the Protestant willingness to accept and promote religious pluralism are much less widespread than skepticism over the Catholic position, and anyone who wishes to argue that a pluralism on the American model is likely to triumph everywhere in the West is therefore obliged to take particular account of the Catholic position.

In speaking about Catholic attitudes, one must begin by acknowledging that a broad difference exists in the Catholic world (as indeed it does in the Protestant world) between what may, for want of a better term, be called the liberals—that is, those who either cherish the political and civic values of the Enlightenment or who at any rate see these values as not inimical to religious belief—and conservatives, who regard them as the expression of a war against religion. This difference, which in recent history has taken the form of a conflict over approaches to the modern world among Catholics, has manifested itself in Protestantism as a struggle between the fundamentalists and the liberals. The conservative element of the Catholic world can very roughly be said to dominate in the Latin-Hispanic countries—at least it receives much of its support from that area—while the liberal element is strong, though by no means yet dominant, in the northern countries. (There are, of course, many oustanding exceptions to this schematic division, like Cardinal Lercaro of Bologna, in northern Italy.) This liberal element, according to a recent study by the (Protestant) World Council of Churches,¹ has been growing in numbers and importance within the Church and now contains among its numbers persons of prestige within the hierarchy itself—Cardinal Feltin in France and Cardinal Griffin in England, to name only two. The study goes on to say: “Roman Catholic literature representing this modern tendency has lately been so voluminous and of such quality that it would be an understatement to say that, for one book or article in favor of the traditional doctrine, ten have been published defending universal religious freedom as ‘thesis’; and we should note that they have all been published with the ‘nihil obstat’ of the Roman Catholic authorities.” And according to Professor George H. Williams of the Harvard Divinity School, “The American experience of civil and religious liberty has penetrated to the interior of the [Roman Catholic] Church and may well bring about a comprehensive, authoritative restatement of the traditional Catholic thesis on the proper relationship between Church and State.” It is by no means difficult to adduce evidence for Professor William’s observation. There is the work of Father John Courtney Murray, who finds warrant in Catholic theology itself (which is so often taken to be inherently incompatible with pluralism) for the principles on which pluralism is based. And many statements like the one following, made by Bishop Thomas K. Gorman of Dallas-Fort Worth, could also be cited: “We have reason to hope that the pluralistic ideal of our present society will one day triumph. Our only cause for fear is that the violent totalitarian movements of our day may triumph here and sweep all into a monolithic, undemocratic pattern, which may God forbid. We must all work together for the pluralistic way to peace, concord and justice.”

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It would seem, then, that the influence of the Latin-Hispanic element on Roman Catholicism is declining vis-à-vis mounting liberal pressures within the Church. Though the Latin-Hispanic peoples comprise more than a third of the total Catholic world population as against about a fifth in the pluralistic countries, the latter, as we have seen, are growing steadily in numbers and moreover live in the countries that count for most within the West. It is hardly too much to say, for instance, that the American Catholic community, with its forty million voluntarily affiliated members, is now, in terms of real commitment, the strongest and possibly even the largest Catholic community in the world.

All this means that we may in our time be witnessing a shift from Counter-Reformation Catholicism to what might be called “Ecumenical” Catholicism. And just as the Counter-Reformation was culturally laden with the influence of the Hispanic and Mediterranean peoples, so “Ecumenical” Catholicism is likely to be inspired by the civic and cultural outlook of the pluralistic peoples who already are furnishing much of its most active leadership.

At any rate, the division of the West into Catholic and Protestant nations is rapidly losing its old rigidity. Pluralism—in contrast to religious “co-existence” based upon regard for hegemony—leads to interpenetration, cooperation, and competition. As the traditionally Catholic nations and the traditionally Protestant ones change in their internal religious composition and simultaneously tend to become parts of a larger Western bloc, the two branches of Christianity tend increasingly to orient themselves to the bloc as a whole, each seeking to convert it to “its view of the good life.” This is bound to sharpen their differences, both theological and ideological, but it is also bound to sharpen the desire for united action in many spheres. The one great danger in this otherwise encouraging situation is that the present trend may culminate in the development of a united Christendom held together only by opposition to Communism, and using its vast influence to inhibit rather than to further any possibility of working toward the creation of an authentic pluralism—religious and political—on a Western and finally on a world-wide scale. This would be unfortunate, for it would amount to a return by Christianity to its old, tragic partnership with secular power, the only difference being that under the conditions described above the secular power would be an international rather than a national political community.

But one may hope that this danger will be averted by a recognition within Christianity that, by its own example and by exhortation, it can help to foster the development of the only system of unity which in our day can hope to succeed—a system which brings peoples, nations, religious groups, and races together on the basis of full civic equality. This implies supporting a pluralism embracing not only the various Christian groups, but also Jews, Moslems, followers of other religions, and followers of none. And it implies supporting, in the political sphere, a similar system of diversity within unity such as has been proved viable by the historic experience of American society.

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¹ Roman Catholicism and Religious Liberty, by A. P. Carrillo de Albernoz.