What is Christian Democracy?

Abstract

Anti-Materialism Christian Democracy's Philosophy of HistoryThis chapter reconstructs the philosophy of history on which the Christian Democratic ideology is predicated through a discussion of the role this ideological tradition has assigned to the critique of materialism and other related concepts such as naturalism, immanentism, gnosticism and atheism. Reference to these concepts is pervasive in Christian Democratic discourse. In the opening speech he gave as Secretary of the Italian PPI, at its first national congress in 1919, for instance, Luigi Sturzo asserted that the newly founded organization's purpose was to "participate in the public life of the nation . . . in order to contrast the materialism and laicism in which contemporary society has become soaked, and of which it has already experienced the consequences in the catastrophic war that just ended" (Sturzo 1919b, 83).Similarly, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, in a programmatic speech he gave at the University of Cologne on March 24, 1946, the founder and first secretary of the German CDU, Konrad Adenauer, stated that: "Nazism was nothing more than an exaggerated consequence of the materialistic worship of power and defiance, and its contempt for the value of the individual" (Adenauer 1946, 3). "This conception of the supremacy and omnipotence of the State," he added, "contradicts the Christian natural law" (ibid., 4). The practical consequences of this were soon drawn explicitly by another founding member of the same party, Hans Schlange-Schoningen, at the first political convention of the German CDU in October 1946, where he asserted that: "What we understand as Christian [today] is a great declaration of war against materialism" (cited by Mitchell 2012, 87).

Christian Europe Redux

“…Avoiding the pitfalls of materialism then required ‘the decentering of sovereignty away from the nation state and towards a cluster of legitimate, nonpolitical institutions: notably the family, the profession, and the Church’ (Chappel, 2011, p. 565). In the context of European integration, it additionally required diffusing power to supranational bodies as well as to sub‐national regions, applying the principle of subsidiarity as codified in the 1931 papal encyclical Quadragesimo Anno (Invernizzi‐Accetti, 2019, pp. 131–36).…”

Personalism and European Integration: Jacques Delors and the Legacy of the 1930s

“…Beyond anti-materialism, 27 these primarily concerned the principle of subsidiarity, 28 which had entered the lexicon of political Catholicism in the encyclical Quadragesimo anno (1931) to reaffirm the belief, already established in Pope Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum (1891), that the state should not interfere in the activities of the 'intermediate corps'. 29 At the same time, Marc was greatly influenced by Joseph Proudhon's model of federal and decentralised democracy, which in turn reflected the tradition of French libertarian socialism. 30 Indeed, their dismissal of both capitalism and collective socialism made personalist thinkers closer to the model of a corporatist decentralised 'communitarian economy' based on expert arbitration (rather than parliamentary representation) which French economist François Perroux theorised in the late 1930s and early 1940s.…”