Bodies of Christ in Seas of Change: The Relationship between Ecclesiology, Politics and Practice in the Conditioning of Twentieth Century Roman Catholic Responses to Violence more

1 Introduction Framing the Question This thesis examines Christian interpretation in light of political contexts. Fundamentally, it is concerned with the way in which the latter shapes the former, and with the manner in which resulting Christian interpretations feed back into political transformations. In elaborating on this process, the first point of embarkation would be the apparent tension that exists within the Church’s mission to both extend Christ’s “light of revelation to the gentiles”,1 and “read the signs of the times”.2 The Second Vatican Council noted that the Church, while claiming its place as the “guide…on the journey towards eternal beatitude”, 3 is simultaneously journeying as an “exile on earth”4. Given this apparent contradiction, many questions arise pertaining to the Church’s competence to judge the world while fulfilling its task of “reading the signs of the times” that circulate within the world. Nowhere is this questioning more intense than in the political realm, the reading of which forms the central focal point of this thesis. Because of the great investment of social capital into the political realm as the privileged site of social change and well being, its integrity is guarded jealously against any unwelcome intrusion. In a post-9/11 context, the persona non grata of choice is what many term “religion”, in particular the Christian religion and its communicator, the Church. A particular line of questioning casts doubt over the Church’s 1 Luke 2:32 Matthew 16:3 Paul VI, Lumen Gentium (1964), 21 2 3 http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vatii_const_19641121_lumen-gentium_en.html. This document will hereinafter be cited as “LG”. 4 Ibid., 49 ability to be more competent than other political players in judging sociopolitical processes, however theologically charged that judgment might be, considering that the Church is just as embedded in those same sociopolitical processes as all other political players. If the Church is indeed embedded in these political processes, and if these processes no longer look to Christian sources for legitimation, then the Church would be engaged battles for influence with all other sociopolitical forms. While revelation by its very nature transcends the world, the contemporary Church as the site of revelation cannot be conceived outside the aforementioned battles, but must be thought of as emerging out of them.5 The fact that the Church is in the world, however, gives rise to questions concerning whether any Christian theological judgment would merely reflect the influences of the context within which the Church is situated. This in turn leads to doubt concerning the uniqueness of the Church’s contributions, and the ability of the Church to change inequitable sociopolitical developments, the most prominent of these being the ubiquity of violence. At its inception, the concern of this project was not so much the well-worn debate about whether violence or peace necessarily emerge from religious sources, but how religious actors formulate responses to violence when it occurs. In its current form, the issue of responses to violence still figures highly. This however is secondary to the consideration of just how the Church arrives at such responses, and why those responses differ in different places and times. This thesis takes its cue from the observations by Stanley Fish, who doubts the ready accessibility of evidence to establish the veracity of any claim or conclusion. This point is important because responses to violence come after receiving the evidence of a violent situation. However, says Fish, such evidence does not exist independently, but rather emerges from interpretations, which are borne out by an immersion into a socially generated web of “assumptions…that produce the field of inquiry in the context of which…something can appear as evidence”.6 Perceiving evidence of violence, as well as responding to it, requires 5 Terry Veling, Living in the Margins: Intentional Communities and the Art of Interpretation (New York: Crossroad, 1996), 30. 6 Stanley Fish, "God Talk, Part 2," The New York Times (2009) http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/god-talk-part-2/. See another incisive commentary by Fish concerning evidence in ———, "Atheism and Evidence," The New York Times (2007) first an immersion in interpretive strategies borne out by regimes of knowledge that are socially constituted.7 With Fish, this thesis argues that analyzing the Church’s responses to violence proceeds on an understanding that the Church, though it is the prefigurement of the heavenly Jerusalem, is nonetheless a socially constituted, situated and conditioned regime of knowledge. Christians as members of this configuration will find themselves immersed in and fully engaged with other social configurations. The thesis will argue that the immersion of the Church and its members in these social and cultural configurations inevitably shape the contours of Christian perceptions of social phenomena, and thus the shape of the Church’s “reading of the signs of the times”. As the chapters below would demonstrate, this understanding of the Church’s radical immersion in the world does open up the risk of reducing Christian interpretation to mere reflections of its political surroundings. This is problematic because as the Body of Christ, the Church is called to resist conforming to the world. In its transformation by the world, the Church is also supposed to extend the Spirit’s transformation of the world.8 This thesis asserts that ecclesiology constitutes the node where both processes intersect. Ecclesiology not only makes Christian interpretation possible in the first place, it also shapes the Church’s ability to leave its own unique mark on surrounding sociopolitical forms. In elaborating on the importance of ecclesiology, this thesis will make a corporeal turn. It will, with Graham Ward, conceive of the Church’s surroundings not merely as a shapeless energies but as a series of interlocking corporeal configurations, implicating a traffic of living, breathing physical bodies, occupying concrete social spaces and mapping themselves onto other social bodies. This thesis will also argue that the extent to which the Church can even understand, let alone judge and transform, these social configurations is dependent on the degree to which the Church understands its own configuration as the Body of Christ. In other words, how does this collection of bodies called Christians, whilst being trafficked within this and other http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/06/17/atheism-and-evidence/. 7 Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class: The Authority of Interpretive Communities (NY: Harvard University Press, 1980), 14. See also Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall, Second Revised ed. (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 276-84. 8 Romans 12:2 collections of bodies, nonetheless constitute another distinct ecclesial body called Christ? The answer to this question is what shapes Christian interpretation of its political environment, identifies particular political developments as violent ones and sets the contours of Christian political responses. This representation of the ecclesial body called ecclesiology thus becomes the primary reference point of the Church’s interpretations of its political surroundings and the central generator of the Church’s political actions.9 However, naming the centrality of ecclesiology in the Church’s reading of the political signs of the times does not adequately delineate the contours of this thesis’ analysis. As Terry Veling reminds us, every act and experience is an act of interpretation. 10 Given the Church’s is socially configured and immersed in the traffic of other social configurations, its corporate identity cannot be considered a category that the Church simply accesses independent of its social engagements. In other words, this thesis cannot ignore the fact that in coming to an understanding of the Church’s identity as a vehicle for interpretation, the Church is also engaging an act of interpretation, a historical product circumscribed by the horizons set by its own tradition.11 There is an added layer of complexity when one considers the fact that the Church’s being embedded in the world requires consideration of the dimension of practice. “Reading the signs of the times” is synonymous with a “Christian Kulturkritik” in a vein similar to the project of the Frankfurt School.12 As such, the Church’s interpretations cannot be an abstract theory that is separate from its practical engagements with the world. This thesis therefore, with Charles Davis, cannot consider the Church’s reflections of its own identity without consideration of its concrete political practices.13 9 John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 380. 10 Veling, Living in the Margins, 15. Ibid., 27-28. 11 12 Graham Ward, "Radical Orthodoxy and/as Cultural Politics," in Radical Orthodoxy? A Catholic Enquiry, ed. Laurence Paul Hemming (Burlington: Ashgate, 2000), 104. One cannot ignore questions pertaining to the processes by which the Church’s corporate identity is generated, the identity or positions of certain parties to others within that social body that generates that identity, and their collective positioning with respect to other nonecclesial social configurations when that corporate identity is generated. Because of the profound overlap that exists between the Church’s corporate identity, its immersion in the ebbs and flows of political tides and its concomitant practical interlocking, this thesis will answer the question: What is the relationship between ecclesiology, politics and practice in the conditioning of twentieth century Roman Catholic responses to violence? Theology, Ecclesiology and Social Theory Answering the above question involves providing a social analysis in a theological key. However, one must be mindful of Graham Ward’s observation that theology qua theology lacks its own social analysis. The tools that can be considered the exclusive property of theology are not necessarily in themselves tools for social analysis. Theology needs to draw “upon all [social] discourses to substantiate its own corpus and to bespeak that which has been and is being revealed”.14 As such, answering the question theologically requires simultaneously traversing into the realm of social theory. Nevertheless, this does not necessarily require theology to uncritically meet the standards set by “benign” and “neutral” secular sciences. Ward notes that not all the social sciences will complement a theological analysis and critique, since a good number of these allegedly scientific projects are 13 Charles Davis, Theology and Political Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 17. At the same time, however, James K A Smith argues further that there must be a collapse of the Modern dichotomy between theory and practice, such that the task of theorizing ecclesiology is not a distraction from the Church’s more important practical tasks, but becomes itself a valid practice in its own right. See James K. A. Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-Secular Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004), 232. 14 Graham Ward, Cities of God (London: Routledge, 2000), 117. antithetical to theology, proceeding on the assumption of rejecting religion as the foundation for any credible criticism.15 Engaging in an analysis that traverses the social sciences whilst keeping faithful to the essentially theological character of its central inquiry, requires this thesis to dedicate chapter two to a review of the broad methods of inquiry pertaining to religious actors. It will look first to modern Behaviouralism, which constitutes the social scientific analytical orthodoxy. It will expose not just its a priori disregard of anything associated with religion as scientific anathema, but also its assumptions concerning an atomized and strategic self-maximisation as the foundation for social analysis and its penchant for the segmentation of human experiences and rejection of the salience of meaning. These traits skew any holistic analysis of the drivers of religious actors, such as the Church. Despite the apparent promise of the academically trendy school of Social Constructivism, this thesis will look at how Scott Thomas’ identification of an “unbearable lightness”16 exposes constructivism’s refusal to engage with the religious dimension of religious actors. This is a refusal that betrays a continuation of some of the modern assumptions that Constructivism sought to overcome. In canvassing analytical methods that seek to fully engage actors that extol participation with the divine on its own terms, this chapter will conclude that Radical Orthodoxy, in particular the cultural hermeneutics of Graham Ward, provides the most promising avenue to further this inquiry. Having identified the method of analysis, chapter three will explore the contours of the inquiry through the lens of cultural hermeneutics. It will explore how the task of reading the signs of the times is intimately intertwined with political practices, and implicates Christians in what Ward calls “the politics of belief” and the creation of economies of credence.17 In outlining such a politics, this chapter will also explore the implication of bodies in the 15 ———, Cultural Transformation and Religious Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1-2. 16 Scott M. Thomas, The Global Resurgence of Religion and the Transformation of International Relations: The Struggle for the Soul of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 93. 17 Ward, Cities of God, 212. production of knowledge claims, which in turn influence the perception of political problems and the formulation of political responses. It will demonstrate that Christian interpretation is bound up in and conditioned by the interlocking of Christian bodies with non-Christian ones, forming a restless sea of ever changing communal configurations. Because of the multiplicity of possible communal configurations, and the fluidity of borders between them, the stability of any regime of knowledge requires the maintenance of communal cohesion. Ecclesiology thus becomes the theological task of maintaining an explicitly Christian community, and thus a Christian corpus of knowledge, within this sea. This occurs by generating a stable image of the ecclesial body. This thesis will argue that the image being generated then shapes the political responses of the ecclesial body vis a vis other bodies. The above understanding of ecclesiology implicates Foucauldian power relations in the production of knowledge and credence. This necessitates an exploration of hierarchies and privilege within communities, as well as the mechanics whereby the Church acts as a site of power that is conditioned by, and also conditions, secular sites of power. This chapter will look at the knowledge generated by these communal formations in three sites of particularly acute generative power, namely the political, intellectual and the ecclesial. This chapter will conclude by making explicit something that Ward’s project currently seems to imply. This pertains to how the ecclesial image, in the face of changes in the secular configurations on which it is mapped, eventually desiccates and loses its persuasive power to maintain a particular configuration of corporeal practices. This constant shift in the sea of corporeal configurations thus raises the need for the Church to “recontextualise” itself, via the generation of new ecclesiologies. The Bodies of Christ in History Chapters four through to seven will develop on the theoretical reflections above by demonstrating how these cultural mechanics played out in the history of twentieth century Roman Catholic ecclesiology. These historical dramas would encompass three broad ecclesiological archetypes, which conceive of the Body of Christ as the “Perfect Society”, the “Mystical Body” and as part of a “Nuptial Communion”. The analysis of the historical, intellectual, and political dynamics that conditioned these ecclesiologies would be divided into four historical episodes, each of which approximates a distinct convergence of political, intellectual, social and ecclesial developments. The chapters do not presume to be an exhaustive list of converging historical, political and theological drivers. Nevertheless, these chapters hope to present enough historical data to indicate a consistent pattern, whereby Catholic responses to violence were profoundly shaped by the Church’s ecclesiology, and ecclesiology was the function of the Church’s situatedness amongst a unique set of contextual drivers. Chapter four will look at how the Church’s largely defensive posture against the rapid consolidation of the liberal nation state, the ascendency of modern mass communications as the new site of power, and the dissemination and entrenchment of caesaropapist currents conditioned the essentially modern conception of the Church as the “Perfect Society”. This became the crucible for the formation of Modern Catholic Social Teaching as the primary response to the violence brought about by the harsh inequities of the Industrial Revolution and the comprehensive destruction of total war. It will explore how this “Perfect Society’ ecclesiology, which presumed an ecclesial omnicompetence in temporal matters, shaped the Church’s responses to this violence through its assertion of an institutional and hierarchical order. This order situated the Church at the top of this hierarchy, playing a supervisory role in both the spiritual and political affairs of all of the newly consolidated countries in Europe. Chapter five will explore what is arguably the defining period of the twentieth century, a period bookended by two World Wars. The chapter will focus on the period situated between them, with particular attention to the ascendency of the totalitarian states in both Italy and Germany as the historical foil for ecclesiological development. This chapter will analyse how the pervasive reach of the totalitarian body undermined the integrity of all other social bodies, including the Church, and conditioned a situation of ecclesial captivity. This chapter will look at the pivotal role of Jacques Maritain in shaping the ecclesiology of the Mystical Body, which became the mainstay of much of twentieth century ecclesiological thought. What this chapter seeks to bring to attention is not so much the length to which his influence endured, but Maritain’s curious mixture of fierce critique of Modernity’s exclusion of the Church from sociopolitical life, and his acceptance of Modernity’s insistence of the autonomy of the temporal from spiritual interference in setting the boundaries of Christian political action. This thesis will show how Maritain’s conception of the Mystical Body as a twentieth century Christendom formed the backbone of Pius XI’s ecclesiology. It will show how Pius’ conception of an ecclesial response to the violence of the totalitarian state, the “Peace of Christ”, was strongly influenced by Maritain’s insistence on the autonomy of the temporal through a program centred on an exclusively interior, spiritual formation through the vehicle of Catholic Action. Chapter six analyses the continuation of Maritain’s ecclesiological influence, but in the context of the Latin American incorporation into a nascent post-war global capitalist order. It will explore the intensification, and even sanctification of the autonomy of the temporal as part of the unfolding of grace in history. It will explore how this perceived ubiquity of grace within temporality extended to an uncritical acceptance by theologians of the role of the secular sciences in subordinating the ecclesial body to the larger body of the nation state. It will show how these currents emerged from a unique combination of political, intellectual and ecclesial communal praxes from both without and within the Latin American context and were converged through the work of Gustavo Gutierrez. The chapter will explore how Gutierrez’s A Theology of Liberation formed the blueprint from which the “Church of the Poor” was configured, deemed as one of the most politically charged ecclesiologies, though one that was severely limited by its privileging of a modern notion of freedom and statecraft. Chapter seven looks at the final pivotal drama of the twentieth century, the end of the Cold War. More specifically, it will look at the political engagements between the Polish Church and another form of totalitarianism, Polish Communism, as the last major ecclesiological turning point. The chapter will look at the central role, not of the social sciences, but of a peculiar form of Polish nationalism tied to an old Polish folk piety as the bedrock for a new ecclesiology. This ecclesiology, for a brief time, configured the bodies of Christians in a manner that decisively rejected the competency and legitimacy of modern statecraft. The chapter will identify the sites whereby this foundation was built upon by the French personalism of Emmanuel Mournier. It will then outline the genealogy by which Mounier’s personalism would converge with the phenomenology of Max Scheler and the Nuptial Mysticism of St. John of the Cross, and how this convergence manifests in Karol Wojtyla. This chapter will argue how, far from being an intellectual sideshow, the convergence of all these strands in the person of Wojtyla would prove key in identifying the covert violence of the instrumentalisation of the person as well as the overt violence of the Communist state. It will show how this convergence proved key also in conditioning an ecclesiology of “Nuptial Communion” as the site of resistance to that violence. This chapter will show how this ecclesiology was activated by what George Weigel calls the “Resistance Church”. It will show how this ecclesial program was marked by an unabashed political confrontation with the covert and overt violence of the totalitarian state, which showed marked differences from both “Peace of Christ” and “the Church of the Poor”. This thesis will show how the Resistance Church resisted the violence of the Communist state primarily through the configuring of the Body of Christ as a parallel polis. Recurrent Themes & Evangelisation With the historical evidence laid out, chapter seven concludes the thesis by identifying key themes that run across each of the four historical episodes, which would provide material for reflection on the positioning of the Body of Christ vis a vis secular bodies when carrying out its evangelical mission. It will first reiterate the situatedness of the ecclesial body amongst non-ecclesial alternatives, which condition both the Church’s identity and political projections. Nevertheless, the Church’s being embedded within non-Christian communal configurations does not detract from the Church’s mission of critique and perfection of those configurations. Second, this chapter will demonstrate how negotiating the tension borne by being configured by the context it seeks to transform, necessitates the generation of the Church’s own corporate image as the Body of Christ. At the same time, the Church cannot be complacent in its adherence for particular modes of engagement with the world as a Church. The eventual desiccation of ecclesial images, which would have been outlined at the conclusion of each of the preceding four chapters, necessitates a constant vigilance by the Church with respect to its positioning within its political, social and cultural contexts, even as it tries to perfect them. Thirdly, it will show how ecclesial engagements with its political contexts constitute engagements between competing corporeal configurations that contain within them specific regimes of knowledge. Therefore, the Church cannot merely focus on establishing the credibility of the Gospel in the minds of Christians while neglecting the salience of the configuring of their bodies, since those bodily configurations play an important role in underpinning the credibility of the Gospel’s claims. Fourthly, it will demonstrate how an important corollary to this awareness of the traffic of bodies between one corporeal configuration and another would be awareness to the often unconscious submission to authority when carrying out acts of interpretation. If Stanley Fish is correct, any understanding of any data requires first a pre-rational immersion into webs of assumptions and interpretive strategies. If such webs are constituted communally, then it follows that any perception of any political challenge or the formulation of responses requires first a submission to the authorities of the communities that generate those webs of assumptions. As such, the unavoidable conditioning of Christian interpretation by nonChristian influences means a submission to multiple authorities at any one time, both ecclesial and non-ecclesial. Therefore, the Christian task as a deliberate attempt to perfect all things in Christ requires also a conscious submission to those in authority within the Body of Christ. Fifthly, it will seek to expose the dangers that come with the stubborn allure of statecraft as a privileged site of sociopolitical transformation, an allure to which the Church had succumbed in seeking to carry out its evangelical mission in all the episodes above. It will show how, as a web of technologies built around a logic of fundamental violence, reliance on the state form is antithetical to the mission of the Church as the body of the Prince of Peace. It will also show how, even when control of the levers of state is avoided, the Church can risk extending the cultural logic of the state through the constitution of the ecclesial body as a modern bureaucratic entity, running along the logic of Weberian instrumental reason. So configuring the Church could handicap its transformative capacity by subordinating transformation towards future horizons to the necessity of managing the present.18 18 Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 24. The final section of this concluding chapter will identify a small sample of the new sites of power to which the Church should cast its attention. It will look at how both the consolidation of consumer culture and what Peter Berger calls the processes of “desecularisation” in large parts of the world, represent two important moments that bring the salience of desire to the analytical foreground. This recovered secular appreciation of affectivity may in some respects represent an opportunity for the repositioning of theology as a task grounded in corporeal practices and traffic. Nevertheless, this section will also identify how this recovery of affectivity cannot be uncritically integrated into the theological task, given the risk of confusing the competitive Freudian desire which finds only a quasi-rest in the embrace of consumption, with the self-giving Christian desire that finds its full rest in the embrace of God. It will then conclude by investigating how another project of recovery, that of ritual studies, can pave the way to look at liturgy as a powerful site for what Daniel Bell calls a “therapy of desire”. Ultimately, this thesis will seek to show the complexity in the thoroughly material dynamics that shape the grammars that in turn condition the Church’s political engagements, whilst at the same time demonstrating how, because of the workings of grace within these material avenues, one need not doubt any distinctly theological competence in bringing all materiality into a Christic orbit.