Nineteenth-Century Catholic Internationalism and Its Predecessors

Abstract

‘The pope: how many divisions?’ We all know Stalin’s rhetorical question. What he meant, of course, was that the pope has no divisions and is therefore of no consequence in the world of power politics. Such ‘realism’ was long the dominant outlook of political scientists and international historians on Catholicism, and on religion generally. On this point at least, an A. J. P. Taylor or a HansMorgenthau would have agreed with Stalin. Since then, we have had Samuel Huntington’s conversion on the road to Damascus, and realists have attempted to reappropriate religion. Sociologists always took a bit more note but, following the Gospel according to Max Weber, prophesied religion’s ‘rationalization’ or marginalization as a force in civil society. Now that the demise of religion is not expected anytime soon, some (like Peter Berger) grade it on the scale of ‘the Protestant ethic’: Pentecostalism A, Catholicism B minus, Islam D.1