Maurice Blondel, Social Catholicism, & Action Française
The Clash over the Church's Role in Society during the Modernist Era
By Peter J. Bernardi The Catholic University of America Press
Copyright © 2009 The Catholic University of America Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8132-1542-6
Chapter One
The
Semaines sociales under Attack Prelude to the "Testis" Series
How did the "Testis" essays come to be written? As a blind old man, two years before his death, Blondel publicly recalled the circumstances that prompted the "Testis" series. The occasion for his reminiscence was the 1947 Semaine sociale that had convened in Paris. Europe was just emerging from the devastation of the Second World War and was now facing the daunting task of rebuilding her shattered societies. The venerable "philosopher of Aix" had been invited to address the semainiers with whom he had had a fruitful association since before the First World War. Presented in absentia by his son Charles, the lesson on "the conception of the social order" elicited vivid emotions. A participant wrote to Blondel that "[your] moral reappearance and the sight of a copy of the critique of monophorism on a table gave your disciples the feeling of a rehabilitation." The "critique of monophorism" was a compilation of the "Testis" essays.
The 86-year-old philosopher began his presentation by recalling a dramatic moment at the 1909 Semaine sociale in Bordeaux. At the conclusion of his opening declaration, Henri Lorin, the president of the Semaines sociales, had publicly appealed to Blondel to give a philosophical response "to the criticisms and pusillanimities that might distort or compromise the spirit and role of our Semaines sociales." In the anti-Modernist climate following the promulgation of Pascendi in 1907, the Semaines sociales had been accused of "social modernism." Seeking an effective defense of their "social constructions," Lorin had summoned "his father in philosophy" (son père philosophique) to preparatory meetings at his country estate and then to the opening conference at Bordeaux. Lorin had cultivated Blondel's friendship since the mid-1890s when he first became enamored of Blondel's magnum opus Action. He valued Blondel's criticisms of his sociological method and positions. Lorin was convinced of the "interdependence" of the "material, economic, legal, philosophical, and spiritual" areas. He perceived an affinity between Blondel's philosophy of action and the initiatives of the Semaines sociales. Over the objections of those semainiers who thought it too risky to associate the Semaines sociales with a determinate philosophical doctrine, Lorin appealed to Blondel for his "philosophical and religious witness." In August 1909, Blondel began to prepare a series of articles that he signed with the nom de plume "Testis" (Witness).
The purpose of this first chapter is to describe the context that prompted Blondel to compose the "Testis" series. I will describe the origin and purpose of the Semaines sociales, and then I will explain why and how the Semaines sociales that met in the summers of 1908 and 1909 came to be accused of social modernism.
The Semaines sociales: Origin and Purpose
What were the Semaines sociales? Literally, "social weeks," the Semaines sociales were a sort of peripatetic university (université sociale ambulante) that were founded in 1904 by Marius Gonin, director of the Chronique des comités du Sud-Est, and Adéodat Boissard, Blondel's brother-in-law and professor at the School of Social and Political Sciences at the Catholic University of Lille. Seeking to propagate Catholic social teaching beyond the urban centers of Paris and Lille, the Semaines sociales brought together for a week in a different city each summer a varied group of professionals, workers, clergy, and students. As many as two thousand participants followed courses given by experts on the Church's social doctrine and practice. Adopting "knowledge for the sake of action" as their motto, the initial Semaines sociales focused on the following themes: "the individualist and social conceptions of the human person" (1905), "family, occupation, and citizenship" (1906), "the principles of Christian economics" (1907), "collaboration of citizens in the application of social laws" (1908), "associations and employment protection" (1909), "the social function of public authority" (1910), "the human person and the economic system" (1911), "family and contemporary morality" (1912), and "the idea of responsibility" (1913). Specific proposals for improving the workers' lot were shared and discussed. From its inaugural assembly in Lyon, a center of Catholic social activism, these annual gatherings generated an enormous enthusiasm and energy.
Veteran social Catholic Henri Lorin (1857-1914) was the first president of the Semaines sociales. He was a lawyer from the grande bourgeoisie parisienne who had been very influenced by Pope Leo XIII's Thomistic revival. As a member of the influential Fribourg Union (1883-1891), he helped prepare the founding document of modern Catholic social teaching Rerum Novarum, promulgated by Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903) in 1891. At the time of the Semaine sociale founding, he was president of the Union d'Études des Catholiques Sociaux. As Semaine sociale president from 1905 until his death in 1914, Lorin presented an annual declaration (leçon d'ouverture). He defined their character at the 1905 assembly:
Practicing Catholics, we want, on the one hand, to become clearly aware of what Catholicism demands and entails from the social point of view, to bring the demands of justice implied in the affirmations of our faith into the details of social relations.
On the other hand, we want to recognize what is unconsciously Catholic and for that reason profoundly true in the various doctrines that are trying to resolve the social question and to give to people who thus unwittingly share our idea an awareness of their affinities with Christian concepts, of what they are borrowing from it, and of the convergences to which logic ought to lead them.
To perfect the knowledge of Christian morality in our own consciences and to prepare us to make the social importance of Christian dogmas better known to people outside: this is our objective.
Implied in this program are both a method and a mentality (état d'esprit). The method was distinctive for the two sources it employed: "the fundamental moral teachings of Catholicism and the observation of facts, properly termed the science of sociology." The mentality was characterized by simple obedience to Christian conscience and a "disinterested attitude" reflected in their "concern to place themselves outside existing groups, whatever they may be." Evidence of this désintéressement can be seen in the composition of its founding "patronage committee" and in the variety of its professors. The Semaines sociales received a broad range of support among leading social Catholics, including Albert de Mun and Marc Sangnier, and among clergy, especially several prominent democratic abbés. Though Christian democrats predominated among the leadership of the Semaines sociales, Gonin and Boissard turned down an invitation to join with Sangnier's Sillonists to form a national, democratic, political movement called the "greater" Sillon. Furthermore, in its early years, the directors of the Semaines sociales invited Fr. Georges de Pascal, O.P., a sympathizer of Action Française, to give lessons. The leading social Catholic monarchist René de La Tour du Pin also lent his support. The Semaines sociales aspired to bridge the rancorous political divisions among French Catholics.
The Semaines sociales in the Context of French Social Catholicism
The Semaines sociales must be understood in the larger context of the history of the French Catholic response to the "social problem." The Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution had initiated a vast and ongoing process of change. Secularization and new social configurations, especially a growing proletariat class, posed a growing challenge to the Church's pastoral mission. In the course of the nineteenth century, tensions increased among Catholics about what strategies to adopt to bring about the Christian renewal of society and, more fundamentally, over how to conceive of this renewal. Beginning in the 1830s with the school of Abbé Félicité de Lamennais (1782-1854), a strain of "liberal" Catholicism developed that was characterized by its openness to the democratic values championed by the first phase of the French Revolution (1789). This strain, a minority voice in French Catholic life during the nineteenth century, came into increasing conflict with the dominant strain of intransigent Catholicism that repudiated the French Revolution "root and branch" and that was dedicated to a "restorationist" project.
The awakening of conscience prompted by the violence of the Commune insurrection in the spring of 1871 led to the first sustained efforts to respond to the workers' plight. Under the leadership of intransigent Catholics Albert de Mun (1841-1914) and René de La Tour du Pin (1834-1924), French "social Catholicism" had its modern beginnings. Ultramontane and counterrevolutionary, they fervently adhered to Pope Pius IX's antiliberal Syllabus of Errors (1864). They rejected "the prevailing secular ideology, economic liberalism, as well as its younger rival, socialism, in the name of Catholicism or tradition." They favored a corporatist and hierarchical type of social organization that evinced a certain nostalgia for the medieval guilds, an approach that can be termed "paternal" because it favored traditional, nondemocratic models of authority. However, as the century drew to a close, this paternal and counterrevolutionary mentality found itself in growing tension with proponents of "Christian democracy" who were feeling their way to a less traditional, more democratic approach to the social problem. French Catholics splintered along political lines when Pope Leo appealed to them to "rally" [Ralliement] to the Third Republic. The split was conspicuously exemplified in the contrasting responses of social Catholicism's two most venerable figures: La Tour du Pin, a dyed-in-the-wool monarchist, refused the pope's appeal; on the other hand, de Mun set aside his monarchist sympathies to become a "rallié."
The promulgation of Rerum Novarum gave magisterial encouragement to the groundbreaking efforts of the "social Catholics," who, it should be noted, never comprised more than a small slice of French Catholicism. Opposing revolutionary socialism, which most alarmed Pope Leo, and laissezfaire capitalism, Rerum Novarum affirmed both the right to private property and the right of workers to organize and to be protected, when necessary, by intervention of the state. However, Rerum Novarum left open many practical questions concerning the nature and function of unions as well as the limits of state intervention. The thorny questions concerning the composition and status of unions were to become especially divisive. The divided response to the Ralliement and the different readings of Rerum Novarum contributed to growing divisions among Catholics. These divisions, however, are complicated because they cut across political, social, economic, and religious planes. A notable instance is the development of a Christiandemocratic wing among social Catholics who shared the same antipathy toward socioeconomic liberalism as their erstwhile confrères who continued to adhere to a paternal and hierarchical notion of society, including the hope of restoring the monarchy. The political differences among Catholics were exacerbated by the harsh anticlerical policies of the Third Republic (1871-1940) that culminated in the hostile revocation of the Church-state concordat effected by the 1905 Law of Separation. New political movements arose that further polarized Catholics. On the one hand, Action Française promoted a political monarchism and a social corporatism that appealed to the traditionalists. On the other hand, the movement known as the Sillon promoted a visionary political and social democratism.
In 1901, to give a fresh impetus to Catholic social action, Pope Leo exhorted French Catholics to promote "a beneficent action among the people" (aller au peuple), a "Christian democratic" action in a nonpolitical sense. Seeking to practice "integral" Catholicism, Gonin, Broissard, and their collaborators organized the Semaines sociales to energize efforts on behalf of social justice. Like the Association Catholique de la Jeunesse Française and Action Populaire, they conceived of a new strategy for enabling Christian values to penetrate an increasingly secular and pluralist society. These Catholic movements shared a "progressive" spirit in that, in contrast with intransigent reactionaries, they considered society to be reformable within its republican framework.
When the Law of Separation threw French Catholicism into disarray, Pope Pius X (1903-1914) took an uncompromising stand of "religious defense." On another-but not unrelated-front, Pius X declared war on "Modernism" in its many expressions. These events intensified an integralist reaction that received encouragement from the highest levels of the Vatican. Despite their ultramontane pedigree, social Catholics were not immune from attack, especially if they promoted "egalitarianism" and democratic structures. Jean-Marie Mayeur notes the irony:
Thus a regrouping [reclassement] was seen: the social Catholics (who accepted political democracy-the Republic and universal suffrage-and social democracy-equality) were accused of liberalism and "social modernism" by those with whom they often had been closely allied. However, beyond an ideological border, apparently well marked and along which the war was pitiless, [their] roots rejoined to be nourished in the one same soil. The very fact that "hostile brothers" opposed each other explains the intensity of the conflicts.
The Semaines sociales under Attack
How and why did the Semaines sociales become a target? What were "the criticisms and pusillanimities that might distort or compromise the spirit and role of the Semaines sociales" to which Lorin referred? A month before their 1909 assembly convened, Julien Fontaine, S.J., had published Le Modernisme sociologique: Décadence ou régénération? Dedicating his book to Pius X, Fontaine wrote that "this volume is born of an attentive study of the encyclical Pascendi Gregis.... Modernism, condemned by Your Holiness as destructive of Christianity, has modified its forms; from dogmatician it has made itself [a] sociologist. Its goal is to ruin the social order by attacking the principles of natural law that sustain it, just as recently it attacked the principles of the faith." Fontaine, described in Études as a "franc-tireur" (literally, "sniper"; figuratively, "freelancer"), was a well-known crusader against suspected Modernists and their innovations. His earlier books had won official Vatican approbation and this latest volume also received a warm commendation from the Vatican secretary of state Rafael Merry del Val (1865-1930). Le Modernisme sociologique devoted a chapter to exposing the "excessive and dangerous tendencies" that had been taught at the 1908 Semaine sociale of Marseilles by Henri Lorin and Maurice Deslandres. Fontaine's general accusation was that the Semaines sociales were propagating "social modernism." In the volatile ecclesial atmosphere that followed the publication of Pascendi, the accusation of "social modernism" was extremely serious. Fontaine's accusations received a large echo in the intégriste Catholic press, and "provoked a real stir in social Catholic circles." Though Pascendi did not employ the term "social modernism," it had warned Catholics about possible deviations on the social terrain, but stopped short of condemning any particular social doctrine or individual. Pascendi accused the attitude of the "modernist as reformer," that is, that "the ecclesiastical authority must alter its line of conduct in the social and political world; while keeping outside political organizations, it must adapt itself to them, in order to penetrate them with its spirit" (para. 38). Talmy elaborates:
In fact, by condemning religious immanence in his encyclical Pascendi, Pius X had indeed warned Catholics against possible deviations on the social terrain. The error denounced by the Sovereign Pontiff ... consisted in neglecting the authority of the Church and her doctrine, and in presenting the aspirations of the modern person as social necessities. [While] solemnly repudiating certain methods of research, the encyclical did not condemn any social Catholic doctrine, [and] still less the reformers who appealed to it.
(Continues...)
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