Utilitarianism –

Religion is a great force in the world. Even in those social spheres of the world which are actually quite far removed from religion, religion continues to enjoy no little prestige, especially when it is possessed, as is Catholicism, of a strong hierarchical organization.

There is a great temptation to divert this power from its purely spiritual aims and put it to the service of purely earthly goals. And that temptation has often been indulged in. History is filled with stories of annexation or prostitution of the spiritual to the temporal.

This spirit of utilitarianism bobs up repeatedly, without ceasing. For it constitutes a threat to religion that is most apt to conceal its transcendency and purity, its absolute and supreme value, and to turn it into something suspect and even hateful for a great number of men.

The first form of religious utilitarianism is the one which tempts individuals to put religion to use in their own interests, in order to work out some temporal gain or improve their secular standing.

A great many examples could be listed here: the beggar who goes to church in order to get a piece of bread, the workman or employee who makes his Easter duty so that he can find work on the recommendation of his pastor, the property owner who discovers that religion is necessary to maintain order (“One priest is worth ten policemen”) the king who lets himself be converted in order to enlist the support he needs to maintain his throne (“Paris ought to be worth at least one Mass”) or the Emperor who gives the Church freedom and then tries to run it in order to put his own power on a more solid footing. Religion is merely reduced to a sort of spiritual spring-board for social climbers. To all appearances, it is the individual who is serving religion. But actually he is making use of religion. And by his activity he makes the whole of religion suspect as nothing more than a tool for domination and subjugation.

Thus it often happens that ill-informed Christians do more harm than good to the Catholic religion when they present it as one of the traditional elements in the soul of a people or a country. They insist so strongly on this point, they join religion and fatherland so imprudently in their speech and song, as to give the impression that the value of Catholicism is essentially based upon the fact that it makes up an important element in the history and character and soul of their nation. This is a new and often unconscious treason against the transcendent character of Catholicism. Catholicism is not French, Belgian, nor Italian, nor Spanish, nor Occidental: it is universal. And it is hard enough to get it recognized as universal without having the work of evangelization further complicated by someone’s coming and giving a national or racial cast to the Church.

Neither is Catholicism the monopoly of any one particular social or economic regime. And still Catholicism is frequently enlisted either in defense of what is called the existing order or as the vanguard of a new order. There is no doubt that the religion of Christ does inspire ideals of justice and charity and that Christians in a community have the duty of being dissatisfied with social inadequacies and being vitally interested in any concrete solution that will result in the establishment of a more brotherly society.

But the Church is not only a social technician. “The Church can make infallible promises about the hereafter, “writes Duméry in The Three Temptations of the Modern Apostolate, “but it has no positive guarantee for temporal welfare. To set up a big poster on a billboard with the challenging dilemma ‘Jesus Christ or catastrophe’ is really confusing two entirely different planes of reality and reducing the Gospel to nothing more than a charter of social security and prosperity. And to make the people believe that our religious teachings contain ready-made, universal, and infallible solutions for elevating the standard of life and resolving all its economic problems is both naturalizing the transcendence of God and denying that human reflection has any role to play, through the long and laborious medium of experience and trial and error, in reconstructing a better social status.” (Op. cit. p.p. 53 ff.)

More apparent, though not less distressing, is the tendency to use religion to the profit of a political regime or party.

Everyone knows how, in the mind of French Catholics of the old kingdom, “religion and royalty” were inseparably linked together. It seemed that one could not stand without the other and that the disappearance of royalty necessarily had to mean the decline of the Church.

But the Church has taken every opportunity to prove the fact that she does not mean to bind herself to any one political regime. Usually in fact, whenever there is any way to do so – she gives her support to the existing government. This support does not mean that she approves the injustices and even the crimes by which the new government has been set up, that she recognizes the philosophy upon which the government is based, or that she gives her blessing to every act of the government. The support simply means that the Church is willing to live together peacefully with the existing powers and fulfill her spiritual mission in spite of the unjust limitations that are imposed upon her from time to time.

It goes without saying that the same thing is true of the political parties. The ideal, from the Church’s point of view, would be to see her prerogatives respected by all existing political parties so that Catholics could choose among them solely on the grounds of their different programs of temporal reform. This is the situation in England and America. In many European countries, however, political parties spring from a purely materialistic philosophy or pursue an anti-religious political policy. That is when it becomes necessary for Catholics to join together in powerful political organizations in defence of their religious interests.

This does not mean that the Church controls these parties, nor even that she approves all the points in their program. It is not the Church’s place to approve them and she could not condemn them unless they ran counter to the moral law. Nor does it mean that the Church is inseparably bound up with the party. All it means is that the Church sees in these political groups the defenders of her spiritual mission upon earth.

Still, this situation is most regrettable. For there is always a great danger that those who do not reflect – and their name is legion – will identify the Church with politics, religion with one individual party; and the harm that such an identification can do the Church in the mind of the people is only too well known. It is confusion, however, for which the Church can hardly be held responsible.
There is a further danger for certain political figures which put the defense of the Church’s rights on their political program. They might tend to use religious energies for questionable temporal interests or to maintain a social regime that the Church cannot approve of in anyway. Once again it is a question of religion being used in the furtherance of purely temporal interests.

In our days we frequently hear the expression of “defense of Christian civilization”. It is one of the most equivocal expressions of all because, once again, it runs the risk of identifying, in the public eye, two things that are really quite distinct the actual state of a culture or civilization, which is something essentially provisional and changeable and perishable, and the Church or Christianity, which transcends every limitation of time and space and civilization.

Culture or civilization is something purely temporal. It consists in the development of the whole complexes of human activities, intellectual, technical, social, economic, political, and even moral. It is called Christian when it is inspired by the moral ideals that Christianity proposes as the only ones which correspond to the needs of human nature and permits its harmonious development. These ideals are, basically, the following freedom of the human person in the face of false pretensions of any kind of purely human authority to control souls; subordination of human passion and instinct to the clarity of human intelligence and the final sovereignty of human conscience; the rights of the family, one and indissoluble in the face of every other power, and especially the state; the fundamental equality of men and nations; the supremacy of justice over force and power; the commandment of love as a force capable of transforming justice and all social life; the subordination of man and human society to God the Creator.

A civilization is Christian in the measure that it respects these ideals and makes them the principle of its life, no matter what the other elements might be - material, intellectual, social, economic, political - that make up its essence; for these are essentially variable: they change from age to age and country to country. That is why it is wrong to speak of the Christian civilization. The correct way of describing it is to speak of a certain particular Christian civilization, or, better perhaps, of certain Christian elements verified in a particular civilization, which might be that of the Middle Ages or modern times, that of the Orient or the Occident, that of yesterday or that of tomorrow.

If we observed these necessary distinctions, we would see everything quite clearly. But most of the time one gets the impression that popular writers who use the expression “Christian civilization” of tend to identify it on the one hand with Western civilization as it actually exists and all the elements that make it up, and on the other hand with the Catholic Church itself.

This forces the Church into a position where, quite against her real will, she turns into a defense of situations and interests which are purely temporal, or even into a support for social and economic frameworks that official Catholic teaching has disapproved of more than once.

And all this, once again, is just one more veil, in the eyes of men, to conceal the purity and transcendence of the Catholic Church and the real spiritual character of her mission upon earth.