Laicism

LAICISM. - A mentality of systematic opposition to any influence over men by a religious hierarchy, and particularly by the Catholic Church. The word became fashionable in the 19th century, when the word "lay" was given a polemical sense that it did not have in ancient times. The distinction between clergy and people (clerics and laity in the Christian conception) does not exclude harmony and mutual help, and a proof of this is the flourishing of Catholic Action (v.).

Protestantism abolished that distinction and imputed to abuse of power the superiority that the hierarchy had until then exercised over the Christian people. Thus it prepared the way for the Enlightenment (v.), which prevailed in the most cultured nations of Europe in the 18th century. This drew especially on an alleged conflict of interests between the class of ecclesiastics and the rest of the Christian people (the laity), taking aim at the privileges that had been recognized to the clergy in the Middle Ages. In fact medieval society considered itself bound to the clergy for the salvation of civilization, which the clergy had brought about in the period of the barbarian invasions and of the long crisis that followed. In that time culture remained concentrated almost entirely among ecclesiastics (cleric and educated man were synonyms); hence the pre-eminent position of the clergy not only in the Church but in civil society, which regarded that pre-eminence as a benefit, as in fact it was. Later, with the spread, through the work of the Church, of culture among the laity, the latter too were able to take part with competence in the direction of public life and to seek those offices that for a certain time had seemed a monopoly of ecclesiastics. The laity thus came to grow in importance in the world; but this ascent of theirs had no anti-religious character, nor was it hindered by the Church, which indeed felt the grave danger of worldliness to which ecclesiastics were exposed in the position in which historical circumstances had placed them during the first half of the Middle Ages. The reform of Gregory VII (v.) aimed to defend the Church from that danger, and was supported by the laity, which fought, together with the Pope, not against ecclesiastics as such, but against worldly ecclesiastics, supporters of the pretensions of the emperors. At the beginning of the modern age the laity is in full possession of the administration of civil power in the States that had been taking shape with the dissolution of the imperial idea. In Germany and generally in the northern countries the lords took advantage of the Protestant movement to seize the goods of the Church. This served to make Protestantism stable in those countries, and therefore to extend its influence over European thought, and to prepare a mentality that embraces the whole conception of life, such as precisely the Enlightenment. The remnants of privilege left to the clergy until the French Revolution were only the occasion for a struggle that aimed at removing in general from every positive religion, but more especially and more directly from the Catholic Church, any influence over society. A concept of life was preached based on the exclusion of any supernatural Revolution, and therefore of a purely rationalistic character, with ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity purely worldly, with the exaltation of the instincts of nature, considered in the manner of Rousseau as essentially good, with the promise of an infallible and imminent worldly happiness as the fruit of human progress (identified with scientific progress), with a "social" morality, that is, concerned only with what preserves and favors outward coexistence, with principles of friendship and benevolence among men, not however sanctioned by an absolute law superior to men themselves, with a vague "religion of humanity" that tends to take the place of the true worship of the Divinity, leaving in any case religion to the consciences of individuals, as an entirely private affair. In practice not only was every positive faith opposed, but gradually every form of religiosity came to be regarded with suspicion; and rightly so, because the latter necessarily tends to blossom into the former. Much was said, especially in the 19th century, of a "lay" State, a "lay" school, a "lay" culture, insofar as they were inspired by such concepts. And the word "lay" was chosen almost to call the laity to form an organization similar to that of the clergy, which it was intended to fight. L. had its most clamorous manifestations in France, in the last thirty years of the 19th century and in the decade preceding the First World War (1914-18), going as far as the expulsion of the teaching Religious Orders and the rupture of the Concordat.

In other countries too L. was proclaimed the highest expression of modern civilization, and was favored by governments that called themselves liberal, especially where Freemasonry had the most powerful influence. With the First World War it began to decline, but its spirit persists in those who, even though belonging to parties and currents of thought in other respects very different, agree in having too absolute a concept of the State. They do not admit, that is, the principle that civil society, and therefore the State, although possessing an autonomy of its own, nevertheless has, in the very essence of its powers and in the exercise of them, certain limits. Among these are the demands of the human person, supreme and inviolable, those of humanity (an indication of a natural society of all men) and finally, especially in a Christian country, the demands of the supernatural spiritual society, the Church. The State therefore is never something absolute, such as to be able to claim to be the source of every right and every power. Even if it declares itself non-confessional, there remains for it the obligation to take account of the religious conscience of citizens, which is one of the supreme demands of the human person; in its legislation and in its measures of government it is bound to regulate itself in such a way as to satisfy that demand. In practice, if the citizens are Catholics, the State must recognize the existence and the rights of the Catholic Church, which with each of them is one and the same. The ordinarily most suitable way to this consists in concluding with the Church reasonable agreements that safeguard the rights of both contracting parties, and which experience shows to be feasible. L. as a state of mind, that is, as distrust toward the action in general of the clergy and of the hierarchy, can be favored by contingent historical circumstances, as was the Roman question in Italy before the conciliation of 1929. The prejudices that arise in these cases fall through the enlightened work of sincere souls on both sides.

Giuseppe Borzetti

THE TEACHING OF THE CHURCH

In the ambiguity of the name and in the variety of the snares it employs, l[aicism] conceals many errors and entails quite different interpretations and practical applications. In effect it is a current of thought or of political and social action that has many points of contact and often comes to interweave, to blend or to identify itself with liberalism, with socialism, with communism, with modernism, with naturalism, with materialism, with religious indifferentism, with atheism, etc. Therefore the various condemnations by the Church against all these errors implicitly sound also as a reprobation of the principles and the practice of l[aicism].

Here it is worth recalling that this system is capable of realizing itself in different forms, which can be reduced to three principal ones. Some, including Catholics, while not going so far as to deny the divine origin and certain rights of the Church, nevertheless maintain the absolute independence of the State, to which indeed the ecclesiastical authority ought to be subject. Others, more logical, arrive at almost the same conclusions by denying the divine origin and the divine institution of the Church, as well as the divinity of its founder, Jesus Christ. The reprobation of these errors is contained in the condemnation of the following propositions by Pius IX in the Syllabus: "The Church cannot exercise its authority without the permission and consent of the civil government" (Denz-U, 1720), "The State, as being the origin and source of all rights, enjoys a right of such a kind that it is not circumscribed by limits of any sort" (ibid., 1739, cf. 1719). Moreover canon 21 of the schema proposed to the Fathers of the Vatican Council, for a modern and complete formulation of the doctrine on the Church, expresses itself thus: "If anyone shall say that the laws of the Church have no value unless they are sanctioned by the civil power; or that it belongs to the civil power to judge and to command in matters of religion: let him be anathema" (Acta et decreta SS. Conciliorum recentiorum. Appendix. Collatio Lacensis, Freiburg im Br. 1890, col. 578).

L[aicism] takes a third, more rigid and absolutist form: every religion is rejected and the very existence of God is denied, so that every distinction between Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, deists, atheists, etc. is eliminated. The State sees in its subjects nothing but human beings; the Italian State recognizes nothing but Italian citizens. Nor is what is at issue here pure and simple neutrality, but rather real and stubborn opposition: a lay State is synonymous with an areligious, irreligious, atheistic State. Already E. Lavisse (d. 1922) declared expressly: "To be lay means to refuse to the religions that pass the right to govern the Humanity that endures" (L. Capéran, L'invasion laïque, Paris 1935, p. 149). Against these doctrinal aberrations the ecclesiastical magisterium has intervened more than once and with extreme energy. It suffices to recall the encyclicals of Gregory XVI, Mirari, 15 Aug. 1832 (Denz-U, 1613 ff.); of Pius IX,

Singulari quadam, 9 Dec. 1854 (ibid., 1642-43); of Leo XIII, Quod apostolici muneris, 28 Dec. 1878 (ibid., 1849-50), Diuturnum illud, 29 June 1881 (ibid., 1857-58), Immortale Dei, 1 Nov. 1885 (ibid., 1866-88), Libertas praestantissimum, 20 June 1888 (ibid., 1931-32); of Pius XI, Ubi arcano, 20 Dec. 1922 (ibid., 2190). Worthy of special note is the encyclical of Pius IX Quanta cura, 8 Dec. 1864, in which complaint is made of the extended application to the social field of the impious and absurd principle of naturalism, by force of which it is dared to affirm that human society must be constituted and governed without taking religion into the least account, or at least without admitting any distinction between the true and the false religions (ibid., 1869). Finally it is well to recall, besides the encyclical of Pius X Pascendi Dominici gregis, 8 Sept. 1907 (ibid., 2091-93), that of Pius XI Quas primas, 11 Dec. 1925, in which l[aicism] is expressly spoken of in the following terms: "The plague of our age is so-called l[aicism], with its errors and its most pernicious incitements... Indeed, people began to deny the empire of Christ over all nations; the Church was denied the right that springs from the right of Jesus Christ, namely to teach the nations, to give laws, to govern peoples in order to lead them to eternal happiness. And little by little the Christian religion was placed on a par with the other false ones and shamefully lowered to their level; then it was subjected to the civil power and was left almost to the arbitrary will of princes and magistrates; people went even further: there were those who thought of replacing the religion of Christ with a certain natural religious sentiment. Nor were States lacking which held that they could do without God and placed their religion in irreligion and in contempt for God himself" (ibid., 2197).

Emanuele Chietini