Church and Revolution: Catholics and the Struggle for Democracy and Social Justice.

Thomas Bokenkotter Doubleday Image Books, $15, 597 pp.

John A. Coleman

This spring an international conference on Catholic social thinking will be held at the Von Hugel Institute in Cambridge, England. The preliminary outline for the conference laments the general lack of attention given to nonofficial Catholic social thinking. Such movements, the conference's organizers argue, "have acted as precursor, challenger, or developer. Yet, particularly in recent times, there has been a shortfall in such thinking, at least in the first world."

"Official" Catholic social teaching almost never falls virginally from the heavens in ahistorical papal pronouncements. Real social movements and circles of thinkers, such as the Munchen-Gladbach group around the Center party in Germany (for Quadragesimo anno) or Poland's Solidarity (for Laborem exercens) feed into, evoke, and subsequently enact the papal teaching. Behind official Catholic social teaching lies a host of thinkers such as Jacques Maritain, Joseph LeBret, and Barbara Ward. Exhibiting an intellectual rigor the somewhat more pastorally oriented encyclicals often lacked, these philosophers and writers wrestled with problems such as structural unemployment, third-world development, human-rights theory, and new concrete strategies for enacting church-society models of interaction.

My own experience in teaching courses on Catholic social thought for more than twenty years has been that students take to the history and social analysis of such thinkers and movements more readily than they do to the often laboriously written encyclicals and bishops' pastorals. Moreover, students actually read the pastorals and social encyclicals with more zest and insight when they can see, behind these often dense texts, the real policy debates that fuel them. They then can imaginatively transpose the conflicts of earlier periods to their own contemporary struggles.

Thomas Bokenkotter, a church historian at Xavier University in Cincinnati, has written an able, well-researched, and lively history recalling many of the key figures and movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that fed into or inspired official social Catholicism. Many of the usual cast of characters appear in his book: Felicite Robert de Lamennais, Henri Lacordaire, Charles de Montalembert, Luigi Sturzo, Frederick Ozanam, Cardinal Henry Manning, Jacques Maritain, Emmanuel Mounier. Large chunks of the book are devoted to the "official" church's discerning judgment (or knee-jerk biases and self-serving compromises) about the social and moral consequences of the French and industrial revolutions, and the subsequent rise of fascism and communism.

The title of the book suggests a special focus, throughout, on revolution. Yet, except in a vaguely metaphorical way, it is hard to tie several of Bokenkotter's subjects, especially Dorothy Day, Cardinal Manning, and Konrad Adenauer, to any revolution. The subtitle of the book also somewhat misleadingly conflates the distinct Catholic struggles for democracy and social justice for the poor. Many of the "liberal" Catholic thinkers of the nineteenth century, such as Montalembert, Daniel O'Connell, and Lord Acton, in no way nurtured any decided social sense or program to address a festering poverty. For example, Montalembert, thinking no mediation between Catholicism and socialism possible, came close to a laissez-faire rejection of any governmental programs for poor relief. "O'Connell and his followers always tended to subordinate economic to political issues and can scarcely be said to have evolved a coherent policy of social reform," Bokenkotter himself writes. "As landlords and landholders, they had little interest in a radical reconstruction of Irish society."

Moreover, many of the most ardent Catholic proponents of social justice for the poor were definitely no friends of democracy. Both Albert de Mun (who was dubbed "the Knight of the Syllabus of Errors") and his close associate Rene La Tour du Pin were royalists who organized a counterrevolutionary centennial in 1889 and were on the wrong side of the Dreyfus case (as were most Catholics). Indeed, anti-Semitism infected much of social Catholicism in pre-World War I France and Austria.

Bokenkotter might have analyzed how Catholic thinking on democracy and social justice for the poor, so frequently separated in the nineteenth century, actually came together in the twentieth. But he is a traditional historian who hews closely to straightforward narratives more than to any deeper social analysis; to the recounting of lives and thought more than to an assessment of social forces. This is not a book of social history or a broader evocation of shifting mentalites. What Bokenkotter does, however, he does well. He gives us the persons, events, and ideas - in effect, the building blocks - to begin a wider interpretation of the evolution of social Catholicism. In doing so, he amply covers France, Italy, and Ireland, but, surprisingly, neglects Germany. It struck me that Bishop yon Ketteler, especially, deserved more than three pages. Almost nothing is said about Heinrich Pesch and solidarism.

As a sociologist, I was also frustrated when Bokenkotter seemed surprised that social Catholicism did not thrive in Sicily. He comes close to suggesting that all that was needed was a bevy of Luigi Sturzos with their social zeal. Any reader of Robert Putnam's Democracy in Italy (Princeton University Press, 1993) would know that the kind of civil society which breeds democracy and voluntarist social organizations was systematically squelched in the Italian South. No number of bright ideas or amount of saintly virtue could finesse the structural realities of such a top-down society.

In many ways, Bokenkotter seems to have written of people he esteems as heroes and heroines. He includes chapters on Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera (an unusual choice, but illuminating); Adenauer (a fascinating political figure, but surely no great shakes as a social Catholic); Dorothy Day, Oscar Romero, and Lech Walesa. That the Walesa chapter does not mention the debates among more foundational social thinkers, such as Josef Tischner and Adam Michnik, rather astounded me.

In this long (yet sprightly written) book, there is no summing up, no clear social analysis, little in the way of an interpretive map. Yet no other book presents, in such an accessible form, the essential biographical and philosophical thought of so many of the key figures in nonofficial social Catholicism. In sum, a rather idiosyncratic book, but one that should prove very useful to those who can place the lives and ideas discussed into a broader framework of social forces, constraints, and possibilities.

The Von Hugel Institute memorandum also issues a call for a more careful comparison of Catholic social thought with "secular" social philosophy. Denis Janz, a historian at Loyola University in New Orleans, in a retrospective study of the encounter of Christianity with Marxism, takes us a long way toward achieving a key part of this task.

World Christianity and Marxism stems from Janz's twelve years of participation in the annual "Future of Religion Seminar" in Dubrovnik, which brought together revisionist Marxists and critical Christian thinkers. Janz's thesis is provocative, but thoroughly persuades me. Behind the loud Christian "no" to Marx, Janz contends, social Catholicism snuck in an important, if muted, "yes."

Long ago, the Protestant theologian Adolph Harnack contended that Christianity, over and over, defeated its most dangerous foes by absorbing and then transmuting the enemy's essential features. Janz mounts careful case studies of the Christian-Marxist encounter in places such as Cuba, Nicaragua, Poland, and China. In this nuanced, learned, and yet accessible study, Janz comes to the conclusion that, on balance, world Christianity has benefited from its encounter with Marxism. In Cuba the church is now poised to benefit from a kind of credibility and renewal that eluded it in the pre-Castro era. Thoughtful Christians have often, even if by subterfuge, internalized key elements of the Marxist critique of religion. As Janz concludes: "Ultimately, though they were often reluctant students, Christians learned something about themselves from Karl Marx."

John A. Coleman, S.J., is Casassa Professor of Social Values, Loyola-Marymount University, Los Angeles, California.