“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others,” insisted Winston Churchill. Less famously, he went on to say that the best argument against it is a five minute conversation with the average voter.
The Church has never expected from democracy more than it can deliver, but it has valued it for the freedom of conscience that is a usual by-product of it.
Not everyone is starry eyed about it as a system: “democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve,” wrote George Bernard Shaw.
During an interview with EWTN news recently (<a href="https://ewtn.co.uk/article-cardinal-sarah-to-ewtn-news-religious-liberty-is-under-threat-in-the-west-too/">https://ewtn.co.uk/article-cardinal-sarah-to-ewtn-news-religious-liberty-is-under-threat-in-the-west-too/</a>), Cardinal Robert Sarah reminded Christians in the West that they should not take religious liberty and freedom of worship for granted.
“Liberal democracy requires debate, but never can the importance of our worship of God be forgotten or neglected in the course of debate. Liberal democracy must not forget God.”
But liberal democracy <em>is</em> forgetting God. The great temptation since the Enlightenment has been to try to stifle humanity’s longings for an afterlife and instead offer the diversion of heaven on earth now. All utopians have fixated on this and as the left wing revolutions demonstrated there was no limit to the number of people they were willing to murder to make it happen.
Marx quite liked democracy because for him it was a means to an end. He called it “the road to socialism”. So the Church finds itself in an ambiguous place when it comes to democracy. It has wanted to defend it as an environment where human freedom can flourish, but is has also had to fight to keep it clean. It quickly slips into utopian mode as extremists grab the political steering wheel, and then it veers off the straight and narrow into the ditch of totalitarianism.
In his interview, Cardinal Sarah reminded Christians in the West that they should be alert to threats to Catholic integrity: “Religious liberty is not to be taken for granted, or compromised, or neglected,” he said. “Threats against religious liberty take many forms. Countless martyrs continue to die for the faith around the world…but religious liberty is under threat in the West, too.”
“It is not often an overt threat, or hatred of the faith,” he added, but an “implicit bias against Christianity.”
The bias is implicit in some areas of our cultural life, but it bursts out explicitly enough the moment a Catholic expresses belief in Christian sexual and cultural ethics in the professional or cultural space.
Any attempt to defend the normality of heterosexual marriage, any preference for biology over imaginative gender, any hesitation about the hygiene, stability or sterility of same-sex attracted coupledom, any repudiation of the defining categories of collectivism and the preference for the sanctity of the individual, and implicit becomes swiftly explicit.
Monsignor Michael Nazir Ali reflected on Cardinal Sarah’s admonition to both use democracy to preserve religious freedom and also to fight it to preserve our freedom.
He pointed out in a conversation in "Merely Catholic"<a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/podcasts-merely-catholic/">,</a> the Catholic Herald’s podcast (to be released on December 8<sup>th</sup> )(<a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/podcasts-merely-catholic/">https://catholicherald.co.uk/podcasts-merely-catholic/</a>) that Catholics should be much more focussed on preserving the sanctity of the individual conscience than on democracy itself. In other words, in order to test what support or challenge democracy needs from us, we should interrogate it over its responsibilities to preserve political space for the integrity of conscience. If we turn to the “freedom of conscience” test, religious freedom is in deep trouble. And democracy will not save it by itself.
Education for decades now has been preparing the minds of the young to embrace the new utopianisms, from Critical Race Theory to environmental apocalypticism. If we have any doubt how restricted religious freedom and the liberty of the conscience has become, we need only look at the culture in Catholic schools where teachers and governors find the faith and its ethics uncongenial and unconvincing in its counter-culturalism.
Perhaps given the Church’s silence in the face of the threats to conscience in our own culture, it should be no great surprise that the voice of the Vatican is so silent in the protection of the consciences of Catholics in Nicaragua and China in particular.
Simon Caldwell chronicled Bianca Jagger’s protest recently in these columns when he wrote about a film she has released in which she implores Pope Francis to speak out about the persecution of the Catholic Church in her native Nicaragua.
Ms Jagger, a human rights defender, said in the film that bishops, priests and nuns have been targeted in an “unholy war” by Marxist President Daniel Ortega and his wife, Rosario Murillo.
Of special concern is the treatment of Bishop Rolando José Álvarez Lagos of Matagalpa. He has spent more than three months in captivity and was recently hurt in a fall. A bishop of great courage, he has been outspoken critic of human rights abuses of the regime.
“I would like one more time to make an appeal to His Holiness Pope Francis and ask him why, Your Holiness, you have not spoken about Bishop Álvarez and the priests who are in jail?” she says in the film.
“Why not about the Nicaraguan prisoners who are being tortured? Why not pray for us people of Nicaragua and for the Catholic Church that is victim of the tyrant Daniel Ortega?”
Catholics across the world remain horrified and disturbed at the treatment of Cardinal Zen at the hands of the Chinese in Hong Kong, and completely mystified at the deal done with the Government by the Vatican; the surrendering of Catholic autonomy, and the almost total silence over the brutalised consciences and innumerable casualties within the Catholic community in China cause the deepest distress.
If the Church cannot find any resolve to defend its members in such places of overt brutality as Nicaragua and China, it is no great surprise it is desensitised to the threats of steady diminishment in the West.
In his new book “Catechism of the Spiritual Life” Cardinal Sarah returned once again to rebuke the Church for its carelessness in the wide acceptance of “draconian restrictions” on Mass attendance during the COVID-19 pandemic, and its abandonment of its principle duty.
“We cannot forget this: The Eucharist is the source and the summit of a Christian life,” he insisted.
Cardinal Sarah’s courage and clarity continue to act as a wake-up call to Catholics in the West. The Church cannot say it has not been warned.
