Interventionists and Resisters: The Preview of a Study on the Catholic Intellectual Class
They are in favor of state intervention and against the Church´s opening to capitalism. They bear a strong resemblance to the American "knowledge class" as analyzed by Peter L. Berger
by Sandro Magister
ROMA - The religious and political struggle that opposes the "class" of progressivist Catholic intellectuals to the stance exemplified by Camillo Cardinal Ruini, the pope´s vicar and president of the Italian bishops´ conference - a struggle already thoroughly analyzed on www.chiesa - is not simply an Italian phenomenon.
This is proven by a very recent investigation conducted in Italy by sociologists of religion Luca Diotallevi and Roberto Cipriani, who studied more than a thousand Catholic intellectuals.
The results of the investigation demonstrate a strong affinity between the religious and political culture of a large segment of Italian Catholic intellectuals and that of the analogous intellectual strata in the rest of Europe and in the United States.
In particular, they show the adhesion of these Catholic intellectuals to the orientation of the secularized "knowledge class" that dominates public opinion in Italy and the United States, and in economically advanced countries in general. Peter L. Berger (in the photo), a Lutheran skilled in theology and the dean of sociologists of religion in the United States, has written some very interesting passages related to this topic, in a book published twelve years ago which was also translated into Italian, part of which is reproduced below.
* * *For their study, Diotallevi and Cipriani interviewed a selection of persons largely representative of the Italian Catholic intelligentsia. To be precise:
- 700 members of the Ecclesial Movement for Cultural Engagement, MEIC, the cultured branch of Catholic Action;
- 296 members of the Institute of Religious Studies of Padua;
- 100 students of the Italian Catholic University Federation, FUCI;
- 61 students, seminarians, and novices of the Theological Institute of Assisi.
The persons interviewed share certain characteristics: they are highly educated, they belong to official Church organizations, they are concerned with the transmission of religious understanding, and they draw their inspiration from the "spirit of Vatican II" that has dominated cultured Italian Catholicism for the last half-century.
When questioned on politics and economics, a great number of them demonstrated an orientation markedly in favor of state intervention:
- 44 percent of those interviewed held that the state should provide jobs for everyone;
- 48 percent held that the labor market should be made more rigid and less flexible;
- a very great number of them want the state to have control of the most important businesses.
Opposition to free markets among these Catholic intellectuals is stronger than the already high national average among Italians.
And the closer those interviewed are to the heart of Church organizations, the greater is their opposition to economic liberalism.
This opposition to economic liberalism is even capable of opposing the Church´s hierarchy, when the latter aligns itself against the state monopoly - as occurred in Italy recently in the fields of education and health care.
On the issue of education, 72 percent of the Catholic intellectuals interviewed (many of them teachers) support an even greater state presence than is now the case in Italy, where this presence is already very ample. Only 18 percent think that a more free, diversified, and competitive range of educational choices is necessary.
It is the same in the field of health care. Here as well, opposition to the free market increases with the level of education and religious participation of those interviewed.
But this divergence does not hold only for these two fields. The interventionism of many Catholic intellectuals creates resistance, at the highest levels, against the entire recent history of development in the Church´s social doctrine. They simply do not accept the positive assessment of free market capitalism expressed by John Paul II in the 1991 encyclical "Centesimus Annus."
Moreover, as far as Italy is concerned, the interventionism that now predominates among Catholic intellectuals also comes to blows with part of their own history, because it contrasts with the "Anglo-Saxon" liberalism of one of their founding fathers from the beginning of the twentieth century, Fr. Luigi Sturzo. In the second half of the twentieth century, Italian Catholic intellectuals substituted for Sturzo two new leaders with opposing views: Giuseppe Dossetti and Giorgio La Pira. Dossetti, first a politician and later a monk, priest, theologian, and
consultant at the Second Vatican Council, assigned to the state the mission of "reforming" society. And the Christian Democrat party, in power until 1994, put this interventionism into practice at the level of government, for a long time with the approval of the Church´s hierarchy.
Now that the Christian Democrat party is gone, the culture of these Catholic intellectuals has found a natural outlet in the "knowledge class" of the progressivist intelligentsia and in its activist "societés de pensée."
And it has targeted with its antimodern criticisms both the John Paul II of "Centesimus Annus" and, to a much more noticeable extent, Camillo Cardinal Ruini, the pope´s vicar and president of the Italian bishops´ conference.
* * *There remain two open questions, to which the investigation does not give a direct answer.
The first is: How great an influence does class membership have upon the interventionist orientation of so many of the Catholic intellectuals?
In a paper presented at Roma Tre University along with a preview of the data from the investigation, professor Diotallevi writes, in full agreement with Berger´s analysis:
"The profession of any group of Italian Catholics explains more about their political opinions than their level of education or their religious participation. If an outdated Catholic interventionist culture, set aside by both magisterium and theology, continues to survive and prosper among Italian Catholic intellectuals and the intellectuals of all of continental Europe, it is because this culture has adapted itself well to the model of the state social system of which these intellectuals are a part: it is a model that finds itself in serious difficulty, but is always able to offer its beneficiaries conspicuous material advantages, or even merely psychological advantages."
The second question is: What future do these positions have? Is the Church seeing a numerical increase of the progressivist Catholic sector?
In this instance as well, an answer has already been provided from the United States, beginning with a famous 1972 essay by Dean M. Kelley, a sociologist and director of the National Council of Churches, entitled: "Why Conservative Churches Are Growing."
Kelley´s thesis, and the resulting debate, are revealed in a recent book by Massimo Introvigne: "Fondamentalismi. i diversi volti dell´intransigenza religiosa", Casale Monferrato, Edizioni Piemme, 2004, 240 pp., 12.90 Euros.
Among the reasons that explain the universal trend of numerical decrease among the "liberal" religious groups, there is the fact that these must confront strong non-religious competitors. Introvigne writes:
"Those who tend to commit themselves to purely humanitarian ends or liberal struggles like pacifism, feminism, or homosexual rights, will find Churches where these battles are fought in a militant way. But they will end up asking themselves if they must necessarily participate in the life of a religious organization in order to pursue these ends. After all, there are much more active and efficient secular organizations carrying the standards of pacifism, feminism, or homosexual rights."
In the United States, the extreme point of the overlapping of Catholicism and ultra-liberal struggles is represented by "Catholics for a Free Choice," which demonstrated last April 24 in front of the Vatican nunciature in Washington "in support of abortion rights, family planning and condom use to prevent HIV."
The political battles for which Italian progressivist Catholics fight also have little or nothing distinctively religious about them. This is true both for interventionism and for the pacifism that opposed the war in Iraq.
In the latter case, the span of a year witnessed a dramatic decline in terms of participation and influence. On February 15, 2003, in the big anti-war parade held in Rome just a short distance from the Vatican, the Catholic presence was clearly visible, with groups, banners, and flags, many displaying quotations from the pope. But in the parade on March 20, 2004, the Catholics had all but disappeared, apart from rare and insignificant exceptions, and no one displayed any papal quotations.
* * *The results of the investigation conducted by Diotallevi and Cipriani will be published before 2004.
Here follow some passages of the analysis of the "knowledge class" made by Peter L. Berger in his book "A Far Glory." On the subject of Catholics, Berger speaks of a fracture "between clergy and laity." By "clergy" he means the progressivist Catholic intelligentsia in its totality (composed also, but not exclusively, of priests, bishops, and monks), while by "laity" he means the body of the faithful together with the priests and bishops on their side. It should be remembered that a dozen years ago, when Berger wrote these lines, the leadership of the U.S. bishops sympathized with the progressivist intelligentsia.
The "knowledge class". Religion and cultural conflict in Americaby Peter L. Berger[From "A Far Glory. The Quest for Faith in an Age of Credulity", New York, The Free Press, 1992]
A great part of the cultural conflict in advanced capitalistic societies is connected with the issue of class. The foundation of this interpretation, sometimes called "new class theory," is constituted by the indisputable changes in the economy. [...]
Within the service sector, there is a sub-sector that provides services of a very particular kind; that is, non-material services based upon knowledge: "human resources," "corporate image," "social justice," "quality of life," and so on. The persons employed in this sector constitute an immense army present in all levels of education, in bureaucracies, in the communications media, and in the therapy industry: from professors of psychiatry to sex counselors for the elderly. They all have in common the rather vague criteria on the basis of which their competence and performance are evaluated. The most important criterion is the certification of an officially recognized scholastic career. Higher education thus becomes the main way of access to this world. [...]
The central thesis of the "new class theory" is that these persons constitute a new middle class, profoundly different from the old middle class founded on business and on the traditional professions. [...]
Politically, the new "knowledge class" is to the left of the old middle class, for reasons profoundly related to class interests. A very large percentage of the "knowledge class" is directly hired or subsidized by the government; it thus has an interest in the expansion of those public functions that furnish it with employment and subsidies, and also with power and status. The "knowledge class," therefore, is favorable toward the reinforcement of public programs. It shouldn´t be a surprise, then, that its constitutive interests push it toward leftist politics. [...]
The culture of the "knowledge class" also differs in a significant way from that of the old middle class. One evident example of this is dress codes, the purpose of which is to favor the reciprocal recognition of members belonging to the same class. [...] The new class and its culture appeared for the first time in the movements of the late 1960´s and early ´70´s. [...]
The new class creates strange alliances. The "knowledge class" must legitimate its interests by identifying itself with haphazard categories of presumed victims at the lowest levels of society. The classic depiction of the resulting social comedy can be found in the description Tom Wolfe made of Leonard Bernstein´s reception for the Black Panthers, the headline of which launched the expression "radical chic." [...] Under the appearance of social comedy, there is a clash between those whose principal interest is production and those whose principal interest is redistribution; the latter common interest is deep enough to sustain within a professor of English a sense of affinity with the young people of the lower classes. [...]
American religion, and Protestantism in particular, has always had a particular relationship with the class system. [...] Let´s consider mainline Protestantism: it is mostly composed of exponents of the old middle class. But the clergy is another matter: its members, its bureaucracies, and its seminary personnel mostly belong to the new "knowledge class" (which is also the most secularized segment of the population and the one least attached to a Church). They share its culture, adhere to its beliefs and values, and enthusiastically practice its politics. Understandably, in these Churches the gap that separates the clergy and the laity has widened. The discontented laity do not fight the clergy; they grow distant without letting it show. In recent years, all of these Churches have lost adherents; some, especially the Episcopalians, have undergone a catastrophic decline. [...]
The clergy, bureaucrats, and official intellectuals of mainline Protestantism have been in the front lines of all of the campaigns of the "new class." If an external observer wanted a reliable and updated compendium of the political program of the "knowledge class," he would need only the latest declarations from the leaders of mainline Protestantism and the National Council of Churches. These statements faithfully reflect that political program. The religious version merely adds a touch of righteous indignation and, naturally, the presumption that this program represents the will of God at this time. [...]
The Catholic community has been struck by the very phenomenon we have just examined. An analogous fracture has separated clergy and laity, and the superpower of the "new class" provides personnel for the ecclesial bureaucracy and its means of mass communication. The result is that in recent years (with one or two exceptions, especially related to abortion), the affirmations of the American Catholic bishops have served, like the declarations of mainline Protestantism, to explain to the outsider the program of the "knowledge class." The authoritative and international structure of the Catholic Church, however, impedes this tendency. And the bishops, as much as they seek acceptance from the cultural elite, have to contend with old, inflexible Rome.
[Back version from the Italian edition of the book]
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This website recently published an analysis by professor Luca Diotallevi on the relationship between parishes and movements:
> A Parish of the People, Not of the Elite. Italy Renews its Model of Church (23.1.2004)
Here are links to three Church organizations that were the object of the investigation by professors Diotallevi and Roberto Cipriani referred to above:
> Movimento Ecclesiale di Impegno Culturale, MEIC> Federazione Universitaria Cattolica Italiana, FUCI> Istituto Teologico di Assisi__________
Massimo Introvigne is the founder and director of CESNUR:
> Center for Studies on New ReligionsThe review on www.chiesa of one of his recent books, which he wrote together with the American Rodney Stark:
> Goodbye, Secularization - There´s a Bull Market in Religion (14.10.2003)
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The criticism brought against Camillo Cardinal Ruini by the Italian progressivist Catholic intelligentsia, with an analysis by professor Pietro De Marco:
> The Church of the Opposition in Italy. The Rise, Activity, and Decline of the Progressivist Catholic Intelligentsia (13.4.2004)
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The anti-capitalism of one of the leaders of Italian intellectual Catholicism, Giorgio La Pira, whose process of beatification is underway:
> La Pira, Kruschev, and the "Poor People." The Saints Can Make Mistakes, Too (13.1.2004)
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The text of the 1991 encyclical by John Paul II with a positive assessment of capitalism:
> "Centesimus Annus"__________
English translation by Matthew Sherry:
> traduttore@hotmail.comGo to the home page of
> www.chiesa.espressonline.it/english, to access the latest articles and links to other resources.
Sandro Magister´s e-mail address is
s.magister@espressoedit.it
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28.4.2004
