The appearance of a full-scale, comparative study of Christian Democratic movements in Western Europe from the early 19th century to the present should be an occasion for joy, not only to students of modern European history, but also to that wider circle of readers concerned for the future of democracy in our time. In any assessment of the political prospects for Western Europe, Christian Democracy necessarily takes a central place. Its present prominence offers the great ideological novelty of the postwar era—considerably more of a novelty, indeed, than the strength of Communism, which was already anticipated in the inter-war period. The fact that political parties inspired by Christian principles currently hold more than a third of the seats in the lower houses of Western and Central European parliaments—and that a majority of those deputies loyal to the Western concept of liberty call themselves Christian Democrats—suggests the extent of this postwar growth. A wide-ranging scholarly study of the phenomenon of Christian Democracy has long been required.

One would like to say that Professor Michael P. Fogarty’s Christian Democracy in Western Europe, 1820-1953¹ fills the gap. It is detailed and learned. It has breadth and sweep. It makes heroic efforts at objectivity. Its style, while neither lively nor distinguished, is adequate to convey its message. Above all, it is so evidently inspired by a spirit of robust no-nonsense and a yearning for human fellowship that it seems churlish to criticize it, even in detail. It is an estimable work—and estimable works are often the most difficult to assess with any degree of fairness.

Initially let me say that whatever its eventual—and largely implicit—weaknesses, Professor Fogarty’s book is eminently worth reading. Not only does it convey all sorts of out-of-the-way information. It is the first important book, so far as I know, to concentrate on Christian Democracy’s social and economic organizations rather than on its more obvious political structures. “People in the Anglo-Saxon countries,” the author notes in his preface, “have a way of being blinded by the parties and forgetting the social movements and the movements of Christian Action : that weightier part of the iceberg which lies for the most part below the vision of the British or American press.” It is his aim to correct this imbalance: the greater part of his book is concerned with the trade unions and the family and youth organizations that give contemporary Christian Democracy its enormously varied character. And these, he observes, are stronger in countries like Belgium and France, where the Christian Democratic political parties are relatively weak, than in Germany and Italy, where the latter actually govern the state.

A second noteworthy feature of Professor Fogarty’s work is the attention it devotes to Protestantism. Here again he is trying to rectify a previous disproportion in emphasis. Although a Catholic himself, he is unhappy about the almost universal tendency—even among Protestants—to treat Christian Democracy as a Catholic phenomenon. In our newspaper reading we are occasionally made aware of the fact that Chancellor Adenauer’s party has a large Protestant wing. But we are considerably less familiar with the widely ramifying Protestant organizations in a country like the Netherlands—the only nation on the Western European continent with a large non-Catholic majority. Through his sympathetic analysis of Protestant social action, Professor Fogarty has made a real contribution to understanding between the two faiths. And he has exploited in imaginative fashion his unusual personal vantage point as a British social scientist with close Catholic connections on the Continent who is currently teaching in militantly Evangelical Wales.

Indeed, it is this recognition of the Protestant contribution to Christian Democratic thought and action that leads him to the most novel generalization his work affords. In scanning the statistics of religious practice among the populations of Western and Central Europe, Professor Fogarty began to discern a “sort of heartland of European Christianity” stretching “from Flanders to Venice” and including within it the Low Countries, the French and German borderlands, Austria, Switzerland, and parts of northern Italy. In the frontier areas in particular, he discovered, national and religious differences seemed to reinforce each other: where Protestants and Catholics lived close together, both were strong in their faith. Hence it was natural that he should have chosen to concentrate on these border regions of intense religious practice.

Such a non-sectarian definition of the religious heartland is sufficient in itself to suggest how far Professor Fogarty’s book is from being a routine work of Catholic apologia. And it further suggests the ideological pluralism on which he insists as one of the basic tenets of Christian Democratic thinking. Indeed, the independence and permissiveness of Professor Fogarty’s own attitude offer a third—and perhaps the most remarkable—of the strong points of his account. Although respectful of ecclesiastical authority, he is by no means a clerical—quite the contrary. Again and again he stresses the difficulties that have arisen when the clergy has interfered in the conduct of Christian Democratic policy. And he intimates unmistakably that the Catholic hierarchy ought to leave the Christian Democratic movements alone to direct their own affairs at their own discretion. In the same fashion he tells the clergy that it should not expect these laymen’s movements to fight all the Church’s battles for it: to Americans accustomed to think of a monolithic Catholic attitude on the question of state aid to religious education, it may come as a surprise to find Professor Fogarty arguing that in France, at least, this issue should “be left to the ecclesiastical authorities to negotiate as best they may, but be put, so far as Christian politicians are concerned, into cold storage.”

Thus it is as a layman militantly conscious of the rights of the laity that Professor Fogarty argues his case. This is a most appealing attitude—and one that has grown increasingly rare in the past three or four generations. Traditionally, and down to the late 19th century, prominent Catholic laymen were accustomed to dispute the authority of the clergy not only on secular affairs, but even on matters of dogma. Today such an attitude—certainly in our own country—is almost unheard of. Since the Vatican Council of 1870 and the Papal condemnation of “Modernism” a generation later, the Catholic laity has grown understandably cautious. Nowadays almost nobody dares talk back to a cardinal or a bishop. In this context, Professor Fogarty’s insistence on the “independent responsibility” of the laity for the sole conduct of Christian Democracy comes as a refreshing breath of courage from an almost forgotten past.

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Yet when all of the foregoing has been granted, I still have the impression of a great gap in the texture of Professor Fogarty’s reasoning—that in some sense he has missed the main point. This is the major criticism that I should like to direct at his book. It seems to me that by simply leaving out of his account the implicit tension between the Christian tradition and the tradition of Continental European democracy, Professor Fogarty has subtly distorted, in ways that are not always immediately apparent, the whole sequence of historical events and of present-day relationships.

Professor Fogarty simply assumes the compatibility of Christianity and democracy. He does not argue it—he just begs the whole question. Historically, however, I think it is beyond dispute that democracy on the Western European continent grew up outside of and frequently in opposition to the tradition of organized Christianity. Things were quite different in Britain and in the United States—but it is not about these that Professor Fogarty is writing: he is concerned solely with the Continent. And here the characteristic democratic leadership has until comparatively recently been at the very least secular-minded, agnostic, or anti-clerical if not frankly anti-Christian—“humanist” (to use Professor Fogarty’s own expression)—rather than religious in inclination.

In passing over or minimizing this traditional cleavage, Professor Fogarty derives full advantage from his concentration on the social as opposed to the political groupings of Christian Democracy. In the worthy endeavors of labor, youth, and family organizations, a kind of Boy Scout morality offers a convenient link between the mentality of the religious and that of the secular-oriented: where the major goals are tangible and precise, final philosophical issues may well remain obscure. In national politics it is otherwise. Here—again I am speaking only of the European continent—ideology is central: ultimately the great divisive issues cannot be denied.

Moreover, by focusing on social organizations at the expense of politics, Professor Fogarty accomplishes another feat of subtle readjustment. In youth and family groups Christian Democratic principles can appear in their “purest” and most attractive guise: in politics they reveal all the insufficiencies of practical and worldly compromise. Indeed, it is in the Christian Democratic political parties that one first discerns the enormous gap between principle and practice characteristic of movements of this sort. Here once again Professor Fogarty simply glides over the discrepancy. In his account, the distinction is never clarified between Christian Democracy as an ideal and Christian Democracy in its highly fallible political embodiments.

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When one speaks of these embodiments, obviously one is thinking primarily of the two great parties that have governed Western Germany and Italy without interruption over the past decade. It is from the regimes established by Adenauer and De Gasperi that the public has derived its conception of what Christian Democracy is all about. In Professor Fogarty’s terms of reference, this may be unfortunate. But it cannot be altered simply by a unilateral declaration that politics is a secondary matter in the Christian Democratic hierarchy of values.

By their position as virtual monopolists of governmental authority, the Christian Democratic parties of Germany and Italy have perforce been drastically altered in character. The consolidation of their situation as the exclusive wielders of administrative power has necessarily been at the expense of their traditional principles. Where these called for decentralization and “vertical pluralism,” the actual conduct of government in Germany and Italy has emphasized central authority and the power of the state. In Italy in particular the governing party’s conviction of its own indispensability in the struggle against Communism has served to justify a multitude of sins. The casuistry of practical expedience has condoned administrative arbitrariness, petty corruption, and the betrayal or watering-down of promised reforms. Again and again the party has revealed a guilty penchant for indirect censorship and thought control. And along with these there has gone a notable reinforcement of clerical influence.

All this Professor Fogarty would doubtless condemn as a lamentable perversion of the Christian Democratic ideal. But is it in fact a perversion? May it not equally well be regarded as a logical conclusion from Christian Democratic assumptions? The pure and permissive policy that Professor Fogarty prefers may be no more than a Utopia—attainable in family and youth movements, perhaps, but impracticable in national politics. This second line of reasoning I should like to follow for a moment, taking my cue from Professor Fogarty’s own obiter dicta.

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I have said that his main argument is a vigorous and ethically attractive plea for ideological pluralism. With this I have no quarrel—quite the contrary. Behind this major line of reasoning, however, the careful reader of Professor Fogarty’s book can discern a second argument of a tougher sort, less obvious, less fully spelled out, hidden away in asides and apparent digressions. This second line of reasoning consists of straight theology—orthodox, authoritarian, and uncompromising.

Consider, for example, what Professor Fogarty has to say about Pius IX’s insistence on temporal power and Papal infallibility and his root-and-branch condemnation of democratic and “humanist” thought. To most liberal Catholics these declarations of nearly a hundred years ago have been sources of grief and anxiety. To Professor Fogarty, on the contrary, they rank as mainsprings of Catholic strength. “A major source of . . . self-confidence and security for Catholic Christian Democrats,” he affirms, “has been the consciousness of guidance and backing from a Church which maintains its authority and independence beyond challenge; and Pius IX’s double stand, on the Temporal Power and Infallibility, is the classic reaffirmation of this authority and independence in the conditions of the modern world. It can thus be said in a very real sense that Pius IX’s refusal to accept democracy as applied to himself opened the way for other Catholics to enter confidently into the democratic world.”

This, I submit, is simply tortured reasoning and casuistry. And the same is true of Professor Fogarty’s treatment of the Papal condemnation of “Modernism.” Pius X’s encyclical Pascendi of 1907—a kind of revised edition, nearly half a century later, of the Syllabus of Errors of 1864—has long been a stumbling block for liberal Catholics. And—again like the Syllabus—it has been much attenuated in its practical application over the past fifty years. I have the distinct impression that a large number of good Catholics today are in fact “Modernists”—in the sense that they interpret dogma as symbol, rather than in the literal terms on which Pius X insisted. For Professor Fogarty, however, this whole vast issue—the last great upset in world Catholicism before the present calm of uniformity settled upon it—seems to offer no serious embarrassment. Nowhere does he suggest any disagreement with the Pope’s view or directly deal with the heresies of “Modernism.” But he gently chides the early 20th-century Christian Democrats Marc Sangnier and Romolo Murri for their alleged sentimentality and “woolliness.” This “woolliness” is never quite specified, and we are left wondering in what it consists—that is, until we learn that the movements led by Sangnier and Murri, for all their estimable idealism of motive, both fell afoul of the Papal condemnation of 1907.

One could multiply such examples indefinitely. But these, it may be objected, are of concern only to members of Professor Fogarty’s own faith, and need not trouble the non-Catholic reader. Would that it were so. But in fact the dogmatic, uncompromising element in Professor Fogarty’s work extends beyond the sphere of his own religion to threaten even his allies in the common cause of Christian Democracy. Earlier I noted that he has kind words for the Protestants. But this is only in his foreground argument. In his secondary line of reasoning a harsher view takes over. Protestantism, we learn, “has at times . . . forgotten . . . the relevance of Revelation.” Indeed, Professor Fogarty implies, it has sometimes “denied the Faith or . . . part of it” and “fallen into formal error.”

If he can take so sectarian an attitude toward his fellow Christians, in a context that is, after all, social and political rather than religious, what treatment, we wonder, does Professor Fogarty reserve for agnostics and “humanists”? Here once again he does not deal with the question directly. He never says in so many words that “humanists” are in a state of radical error. But the implication is unmistakable. Again and again he notes the insufficiencies of “humanism”—for instance in questions concerning the “dynamic and autonomous” family, which, he tells us, “is almost exclusively a Christian and particularly a Catholic discovery.” And it is with evident approval that he cites the Christian attitude of exercising “authority . . . in . . . matters of personal morality and social custom,” as opposed to the “humanist’” insistence on leaving “this field . . . as nearly as possible free.” In addition he treats us to a full-dress review of the Catholic stand on birth control (“The safe period method, simple abstention, or the dedicated charity of priests and nuns appear as—in that order—increasingly acceptable.”) Once again, however, his conclusion is ambiguous “Where ‘humanism’ will lead,” he warns, “is not clear. But a good many Christians are taking no risks.”

Is this a declaration of war? I do not think it is quite that. But it is a transparent intimation that a good Catholic cannot trust a “humanist” very far. “There are few if any matters of politics or economics or social life of which Christian Democrats would say that Christianity allows them to see the truth clearly, whereas non-Christians cannot see it at all. . . . What Christian Democrats maintain is that their Christianity gives them an extra assurance, a certainty of touch, and a capacity for recognising and recovering from their mistakes which enables them to grasp and solve the problems of life more completely and competently than if they relied on human reason alone. At point after point, Revelation steps in. . . .”

Here at last we have come to the crux of Professor Fogarty’s second and more subtle line of argument. “Human reason alone” cannot serve as an adequate guide to social and economic progress: those without benefit of Revelation are almost certain to falter somewhere along the road. And this impression that Christian principles give the only complete and satisfactory answer to our current dilemmas is confirmed when at the very end of his book Professor Fogarty suggests his own aspirations for the future. The Christian Democratic parties, he tells us—(note that he has imperceptibly shifted from social movements back to political parties)—have expanded very nearly as far as they can in the purely Christian constituency of Western Europe. The next task before them is to “break through” to the religiously tepid or agnostic. Only when these too have been enrolled under the banner of Christian Democracy will the future be secure. The final vista that Professor Fogarty opens up before us is of a vast Christian Democratic dominance—a monopoly of public activity even more inclusive than what obtains in Italy today.

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In pursuing to its logical conclusion Professor Fogarty’s second and less apparent line of argument, I have of necessity simplified it. But I do not think that I have distorted its underlying drift. In brief, the implication of this second chain of reasoning is that political parties are much more important than Professor Fogarty originally said they were, that state or party direction of morality is the logical corollary to orthodoxy in dogma, and that the Christian Democrat who becomes concerned with the overall government of society discovers himself to be rather more authoritarian than he realized when he was dealing with the family, the youth movement, or the trade union.

Or—to put it another way—the fact that Christian Democracy on its lower levels is so often ethically attractive and at its more exalted levels is correspondingly depressing is not merely an accident of circumstance. It is implicit, rather, in the underlying character of Christian Democracy itself. In its junior ranks Christian Democracy includes many of the most devoted younger activists that Western Europe currently affords—witness Professor Fogarty himself. At the top its leaders are all too often routine politicians—and sanctimonious ones to boot.

Why is this the case? Initially it is Worth noting that in Christian Democracy, the second term of the title is merely instrumental to the first. A Christian Democrat is a Christian primarily, and a democrat only in a subordinate capacity. The adjective is more important than the noun. In Social Democracy it is just the reverse: the behavior of European Socialists during the past forty years has demonstrated that in their eyes the interests of democracy override those of socialism. In this second case, since both the terms of loyalty are purely terrestrial, a choice can be reached through a rational weighing of the relevant issues. For Christian Democrats, on the other hand, no real choice exists: since one term is spiritual and the other political, it is obvious which necessarily takes precedence.

It is for this reason that the behavior of Christian Democratic parties offers such a bewildering alternation of moral judgments and opportunist calculation, and why their behavior has been assessed so very differently by their apologists and by their detractors. For the former, the Christian Democrats are living examples of morality in action; for the latter, they shift their principles to every change in the political weather. And both evaluations are in one or another sense correct. Christian Democrats quite naturally feel called upon to make moral judgments in nearly every sphere of life—but since the criterion of these judgments is religious rather than political, a merely opportunist selection of political means to moral ends may at the same time appear perfectly permissible. Such is the more disquieting significance of that ideological flexibility in which, according to Professor Fogarty, the Christian Democrats take particular pride.

In a peaceful era, this discrepancy creates no serious difficulty. But in times of civil tension it may bring enormous political hazards. When religion itself appears threatened, the Christian Democrat is obliged to make a painful choice. To save his religious faith, he may be obliged to sacrifice his political principles—to preserve Christianity from godless revolution, he may feel it necessary to jettison democracy and have recourse to authoritarian government. This was the logic of the vote of full powers that the Christian Democratic parties of Italy and Germany gave first to Mussolini, and a decade later to Hitler—a practical application of the well-tried Catholic principle of submitting to a lesser evil in order to ward off one greater. Both parties later regretted the stand they had taken, but too late to undo what they had helped to accomplish.

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I recall these “old, unhappy, far-off-things” not in a spirit of anti-clerical provocation but rather to rectify an implication in Professor Fogarty’s book that may escape the hasty reader. The clear impression he leaves with us is that there is some ineradicable insufficiency in the agnostic or “humanist” view of democracy. This sort of religious interpretation of democratic principles is becoming increasingly common in our own country: all manner of American public leaders from President Eisenhower down have suggested in no uncertain terms that it is difficult to be a good democrat (or American) if one is not a good Christian (or Jew). To this equation an unrepentant agnostic or “humanist” must necessarily object with all the vigor at his command. In historical terms, the argument is preposterous. In terms of contemporary politics, it is dangerously discriminatory. Indeed, the reverse can be argued rather more convincingly. To agnostics democracy is not instrumental to some otherworldly goal—it is a terrestrial benefit in its own right, subordinate to no other. Or—to conclude with a paraphrase from Professor Fogarty himself—“Where Christian Democracy will lead is not clear. But a good many ‘humanists’ are taking no risks.”

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¹ University of Notre Dame Press, 461 pp., $6.75.