April 2016
Applying Democratic Centralism to the Catholic Church
Modern democracy depends upon a hidden oligarchy, which is contrary to its principles but indispensable to its functioning. |
- François Furet |
* * * |
That is to say, modern democracy is built upon — and depends upon — a deception. |
- Arnaud de Lassus |
* * * |
You stopped to call on King Herod. Deadly exchange of compliments [perhaps opportunistic blandishments?] in which there began that unended war of mobs and magistrates against the innocent [e.g., the incited and manipulated “ochlos” soon to be cheering for Barabbas]! |
- Evelyn Waugh |
Josef Pieper once memorably said to me in a conversation in the library of his home: “You find the most precious truths in unlikely places.” (And he often manifested the implications of that insight, in his attentive receptivity and buoyant expectancy. In his early 90s, he even once said to a group of students and professors in Germany: “May I tell you a love-story?” And he suddenly returned to a gracious nun he had known many years earlier, when he had travelled to Iceland as a young adolescent with two of his friends.)
Such a precious and abiding discovery of truth also came to me suddenly in France in the late 1980s — in the home of another beloved mentor, Arnaud de Lassus. Through my mentor's generosity, he took a book in French and pointed me to one sentence. It was a sentence from François Furet's book on the French Revolution, Penser la Révolution française (1978), specifically to be found in his concluding chapter on Augustin Cochin (1876-1916), the admired young Catholic historian who died at the battle of the Somme in World War I. (As a young historical scholar Augustin Cochin had also already written much on the French Revolution and especially on Les Sociétés de Pensée et La Démocratie Moderne, an analysis of influential and well-organised, revolutionary oligarchies which was highly esteemed by Furet, who was himself then, in 1988, a well-known leftist-leaning intellectual historian, surprisingly.)
François Furet's own lapidary sentence candidly said the following: “Modern democracy is dependent upon a hidden oligarchy which is contrary to its principles but indispensable to its functioning.”
As I stood there reflecting on that incisive insight, Arnaud de Lassus then said with his characteristic modesty: “I consider that sentence almost perfect. But, I would place 'hidden oligarchy' ['oligarchie cachée'] in the plural, 'oligarchies cachées.' For, there are also civil wars within — and among — the revolutionary elites themselves and their own leavens — as Léon de Poncins so well understood.” And then he added his own lucid inference from Furet's own insight: “Modern democracy is built upon — and depends upon — a deception.” That is where we must start! Thus begins the breaking of trust, for the greatest social effect of the lie is that it breaks trust. And we
soon discover the rancid fruits of such perfidy and intimately broken trust.
Co-opting Socialist Methodology
To what extent do we see this deception in the procedures and the consequential breaking of trust now also spreading in and throughout the Neo-Modernist Occupied, updated Catholic Church, especially in the form of a Specious “Democratic Centralism”?
We might now learn a little more to help us illuminate reality, if we better come to understand “The Concept and Reality of Democratic Centralism” — in light of the three Soviet Constitutions and even the 1982 Chinese Communist Constitution. But especially as that Principle and Doctrine might be (or is being) effectively applied today by an apostle of Antonio Gramsci and his grasp of how to achieve a Cultural Hegemony, also through Liberation Theology.(1) (In all of this brief presentation, however, I propose to be — and please allow me to be — suggestive, not comprehensive, much less conclusive.)
Our reflections now should also be guided and prudently disciplined by another profound insight from Arnaud de Lassus, an insight which is also a formidable challenge to us: “How does one resist the corruptions of authority without thereby subverting the principle of authority?” And, he added, “especially in the Catholic Church.”
One test case of the reality of this challenge is the currently applied equivocal methods of the October 2015 Synod on the Family in Rome. I speak especially of the procedures directed and applied by Cardinal Lorenzo Baldissieri — the Secretary General of the Synod — with the acknowledged prior approval of the Pope.
“Baldissieri's Papally-Approved Principles and Ambiguously Applied Methods” certainly remind me of the manipulative changes and equivocations in Praxis of the important and recurrent Concept: the Soviet-and-Chinese Communist Concept and Reality of “Democratic Centralism,” as specifically defined in the texts of all three Soviet Communist Constitutions (1924, 1936, and 1977); and also still in the later, “post-Mao” 4 December 1982 Chinese Communist “Constitution of the People's Republic [sic] of China (Chapter I, Article 3). The three Soviet Constitutions are sometimes sequentially called by shorthand: “the Lenin Constitution” (1924), “the Stalin Constitution” (1936), and “the Brezhnev Constitution” (1977).
Moreover, fair-minded scholars still discuss “the balance” or “changing proportions” of the composite elements of “Democracy” and of “Centralisation” in the “dialectically evolving” meaning and application of “Democratic Centralism”: both as a concept and as an exquisitely fitting “organisational method” to allow — purportedly — “freedom of discussion” and “sternly disciplined unity of action.”
With this specious organisational method, one can have the appearance of a “participatory” democratic procedure while, in reality, the whole process is organised and steered by a small group of people. It is as if one would say about the desired outcome: “these are the conclusions on which I base my facts — and thus the factoids I shall now rearrange to fit my artifice.” A recent example of this tendency might help us to grasp these manoeuvres — even some subtle and indirect Gramscian manoeuvres — more adequately.
Socialist Synod
In his candid report from Rome on 12 October 2015, entitled “Thirteen Cardinals Have Written to the Pope: Here Is the Letter,” Sandro Magister revealed some important facts and manoeuvres concerning the ongoing Synod of Bishops on the Family. A portion of this report is pertinent to our own suspicious consideration of “Democracy,” as such, wherever we hear the word; and also to the evidence confirming an entirely expected Centralised Oligarchic Manipulation of the putatively “Open Synodal Process.” For example, as Sandro Magister says:
On the afternoon of the same Monday, October 5, during the first discussion in the [plenary synodal] assembly, Cardinal Pell [from Australia] and other synod fathers referred to some of the questions presented in the letter [to the pope, personally and privately by more than ten cardinals]. Pope Francis was there and listening. And the next morning, on Tuesday, October 6, he spoke. The text of these unscheduled remarks has not been made public, but only summarised verbally by Fr. Federico Lombardi, S.J. and in writing by L'Osservatore Romano....To this account from L' Osservatore Romano, Fr. Lombardi added that “the decisions of method were also shared and approved by the pope, and therefore cannot be brought back into discussion.” [Franciscus Locutus, Causa Finita?] From this it can be gathered that Francis has rejected the [Cardinals'] letter en bloc, apart from the marginal recommendation not to reduce the discussion only to “communion for the divorced.” And he has not rejected them [the requests of the Cardinals] without a polemical jab, as afterward made known — in a tweet that has not been disowned — by the director [editor] of La Civilta Cattolica, [Fr.] Antonio Spadaro, S.J., also present [with the pope] in the hall, according to whom the pope told the [synod] fathers “not to give in to the conspiracy hermeneutic, which is socially weak and spiritually unhelpful.” All this at the beginning of the synod.... On Friday, October 9, Cardinal Luis G. Tagle, archbishop of Manilla and president delegate of the synod, said out of the blue that, with regard to the final relation [the official Relatio Finalis], “we await the decision of the pope.” And the next day, Father Lombardi, S.J. clarified that “we do not yet have certainty on how the conclusion of the synod will take place, meaning if there will or will not be a final document. We will see if the [capricious? centralising? arbitrary?] pope gives precise [sic] indications [commands?].” Incredible but true. With the synod in full swing, a question mark has suddenly been raised over the very existence of that “Relatio finalis” which figured in the programs [procedures, methods] as the goal towards which all the work of the synod was finalised....“Catholic doctrine on marriage has not been touched,” Pope Francis pledged [sic] in referring to the entire conduct of the synod from 2014 to today [now in mid-October 2015], in response to the “concerns” of the thirteen cardinals of the letter [the official personal, private letter to the reigning pontiff]. But Cardinal Tagle, a prominent representative of the innovators, also said at the press conference on October 9, with visible satisfaction: “The new method adopted by the synod has definitely caused a bit [sic] of confusion, but it is good to be confused once in a while. If things are always clear, then we might not be in real life anymore.” [My bold emphasis.]
Honourable and Merciful?
Does not this entire set of Magister's selected reports and modest insights also suggest the presence and permeation of manipulative Democratic Centralism? At least we should now be convinced that the Directorate of the Synod was “not playing with a full deck.” This kind of “praxis” must not be considered an honourable Pastoral Method, much less an example of the genuine Mercy.
FOOTNOTES:
(1) See Humberto Belli, Nicaragua: Christians Under Fire (1984) about the hidden underground influence of Gramsci, and the use of “symbolic subversion” learned by the Sandinistas from the Cubans to undermine Pope John Paul's March 1983 visit to Nicaragua.