Liberal Horizons Revisited

E nglish Catholics were in an assertive mood at the dawn of the 20th century. The Catholic Emancipation Act was passed in 1829, lifting many of the most important legal disabilities from Catholic citizens. A significant number began to serve in the Houses of Parliament.

As part of its response to the modern world, the church had developed a very public celebration and proclamation of its faith that the bread and wine, once consecrated at Mass, truly become the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus Christ. They called the 1908 event a Eucharistic Congress and decided that the 18th such gathering should happen in London, the seat of the world’s largest empire, and the most powerful Protestant nation on earth. The summit of any such Congress is a public procession — a religious march through the streets — with the Eucharist held aloft in a golden throne called a monstrance.

The papal legate of the time explained that the choice of London was meant to honor England for its tolerance. It was “proof,” he said, of England’s “liberty enjoyed by her subjects in exercising their own opinions, a system not merely written in her statute-book, but reduced to actual practice.” Cardinal Serafino Vannutelli explained to the Times of London, the real intent of the march: “The members of the Congress are not assembling in England with any political intent,” he said, “They come with an object which is exclusively religious — to affirm with all simplicity their faith in the Eucharist, recalling the time when that faith was universal in England.” In this way, Vannutelli was articulating what would later become a liberal orthodoxy, that religious belief, even when proclaimed publicly, is not a political act.

Not everyone agreed. “It is impossible to deny,” the London Spectator editorialized, “that this assemblage of princes of the Church and of lesser members of the Roman hierarchy from all parts of the world wears the appearance of a demonstration, and almost of a challenge, which excites apprehension in respectable quarters, and has given rise to regrettable effusions of bigotry in others.” Nevertheless, the Metropolitan police agreed to a parade route.

It turned out that Prime Minister Herbert Asquith would need to intervene. A few marginal “No Popery” groups had publicly campaigned that a Eucharistic procession was still technically barred by law. The very law that gave Catholics their political rights still restricted them from performing their rites and wearing their vestments outside of churches — out in public.

Asquith prevailed upon the organizers to desist from their plans. On the one hand, he would delicately mention that such a march was dubiously legal. But he also stressed a wish for safety, pointing to the passions of sectarian Protestants as a danger his police might not be able to control. This was the leader of the Liberal Party, a time memorialized in history as the zenith of “liberal England.” And yet, his liberalism was moderated.

A march would happen, just without the Eucharist. And members of religious orders — Dominicans, Franciscans, Jesuits — would process in their simple black clerical garb. Some of them carried their distinctive habits on their arms, in what was then a gesture of protest. Catholics had planned the event partly to highlight liberal tolerance. Instead, the event served to demonstrate the opposite.

I thought of this recently when Reverend Douglas Wilson, a pastor in Moscow, Idaho, was pilloried by all the good and the great for a video in which he said in his vision of a future Christian republic, there would be no public calls to Muslim prayer. Asked if there would be Catholic processions, he said they would be disallowed by law, too. Commentators treated him as if he were bearing the rack and rope of the religious wars, everything we escaped several centuries earlier. I happen to have met Wilson, after years of occasional correspondence, at a National Conservatism Conference. We patiently debated the finer points of soteriology with each other.

But for those familiar with the controversies of 1908, what Wilson is describing isn’t some pre-modern tyranny; it’s how a liberal state would function, or dysfunction, under Protestant cultural and political supremacy, a condition he means to achieve by means far more peaceful than those that England actually used to achieve it.

Far from an exotic threat, it should be a familiar one. We don’t live in a polity in which Wilson’s tribe of Calvinists predominates, but in which secular progressives do. Those secular progressives aren’t mad about Eucharistic processions. They’re mad that Catholic hospitals don’t perform abortions or “gender-confirmation” mutilations. They’re mad that Catholic colleges don’t allow same-sex couples to have couples’ dorms. Or that hospice nuns prefer not to remunerate their hired help in the form of discounted contraceptives. And they are suing and legislating on behalf of their convictions — convictions I would argue that are just as metaphysical as the doctrines they oppose.

And that is why I have a hard time accepting the account of Francis Fukuyama, that our modern polities have effectively pushed religious questions into a private realm. If they would, then the Catholic Church’s opposition to contraception wouldn’t be the subject of lawfare. Can he really be so sure that religious fights have disappeared into the background? Our last large legal fight about the definition of marriage was settled by the Supreme Court in 2015. It was settled along lines anticipated six years earlier by a doctrinal revision in the Episcopal Church, the ghostly ecclesial body that carries on the spirit of America’s now progressive establishment.

Chesterton said that America, having been founded on creeds, has the soul of a church. Well, it’s a church always redefining its heretics.