Triumph:
The Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church
By H.W. Crocker, III
Prima Publishing
Review
by Ryan McMaken
 H.W.
Crocker's 2,000 year history of the Catholic Church reads like
an old fashioned hero epic. For Crocker, the story of the Church
is the story of Western Civilization itself, and he relates to his
readers vivid accounts of the popes, kings, armies, and nations
that made Western Civilization what it is. Always at the center
of this civilization, however, is the Catholic Church. It is the
one undeniable fact of Western history, the oldest institution in
its history. Loved by many, hated by some, but always unrelentingly
present for friends and foes alike.
As
one might expect, a book dealing with a subject so broad as the
history of the Catholic Church contains so many themes as to be
far too numerous to discuss here. There are two central themes,
however, that deserve mention. The first is Crocker's assertion
that the Church is now and has always been a counter balance to
nationalism and to the nation-state. The second is that "progress"
as conceived by the modern liberal and socialist mind is an illusion,
and that the anti-utopian way of the Church is the only hope against
the messianic dreams of the state and its drive to create its own
Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.
When
the early Catholics took control of the Roman Empire, it was an
empire in decline. It was not so obvious in Constantine's day when
the first edict of religious toleration in Western History was issued,
but by the time of Augustine, the decline was clear. As the empire
in the West declined and broke up into smaller barbarian kingdoms,
the Church survived to preserve literature, law, and philosophy.
To the Christian barbarians, it served as the one unifying cultural
factor in the West. Barbarian kings like Charlemagne served as lords
of their own realms, but as such, they were only members of a larger
realm, the realm of Christendom, not ruled by a king, but by Christ
through his vicar the pope. For centuries, governments co-existed
with the Church. They were responsible for their own sphere of authority,
and kept the peace as best they could. Yet, no true king could be
crowned except by a bishop of the Church, and all Christian kings
washed the feet of peasants on Holy Thursday.
Needless
to say, this system of divided sovereignty did not go unchallenged
by the kings of the day. The late medieval era was the age of the
state's struggle against the Church. This struggle is personified
most dramatically in Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury, and
his king, Henry II of England. Crocker presents a vivid and masterful
account of one of the central events in the medieval struggle between
kings and the Church. Becket, unwilling to yield the Church's property
and the Church's autonomy to the king, was murdered in his own cathedral
by the king's knights. Bursting into Canterbury Cathedral, the knights
demanded, "Where is the traitor?" Becket appeared declaring,
"Here I am, no traitor to the King, but a priest of God."
Struck down before the altar, Becket was soon afterward declared
a Saint, a symbol of the righteousness of defying the arbitrary
rule of kings.
The
story of Henry and Becket is only part of the rich tapestry woven
by Crocker who amply demonstrates that it is no coincidence that
the rise of the all-powerful state coincided with the decline of
the Church's political power. The dark age of the Church reached
its pinnacle in the late 19th and 20th centuries as nationalism
spread and led inevitably to World War, atomic bombs, eugenics,
racial extermination, and totalitarianism. In the age of nationalism,
socialism, and fascism, the Church found itself in retreat on all
fronts. From Mexico to the Soviet Union, the Church was outlawed,
priests and bishops were murdered, and the sacraments of the Church
became acts of treason performed in basements and attics. Through
all of this the Church denied the possibility of reforming human
nature, of the "new man" of communism, and affirmed the
inherent evil in the modern state and modern war.
It
is here that Crocker presents the most challenging argument for
the libertarian mind: that liberalism (of all kinds) does not save
individual rights, but destroys them and leads to nationalism and
war. Crocker examines the Church's writings on liberalism, socialism,
nationalism, fascism, and communism and finds all these ideologies
to be destructive to individualism and human dignity. In the twentieth
century, the Church attacked these new trends in a number of encyclicals.
Beginning with Pope Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum, the Church
attacked the unlimited monopoly of the modern nation-state, the
injustice of heavy taxation, and expounded upon the benefits of
private property. Leo's teachings were followed up by a number of
other works by his successors condemning mass society and the modern
nation-state including Non Abbiamo Bisogno, an anti-fascist
encyclical condemning the modern "pagan worship of the state."
The
Church recognized that at the heart of all state worship was the
concept of "progress." The Church denied that the state
could serve any purpose other than helping to secure peace and allowing
people to exercise free will. Modern government, on the other hand,
declares that government exists to take society from where it is
to somewhere wonderful. For the modern ideologue, the state is to
create paradise whether it is through abolition of private property,
through coerced "equality", or through the "final
solution."
For
Crocker then, the Church is a medieval institution in a modern world,
and for Crocker medievalism is a wonderful thing. The Church's antagonism
thus must be understood within the context of medieval thought.
Human liberty and dignity is not maintained through nation-states
and what Edmund Burke called "artificial societies", but
through limiting power and instituting relationships built on shared
sovereignty instead of the modern ideal of national "sovereignty"
placed rather laughably in the hands of the imaginary entity known
as "the people." Modern liberalism does not allow for
such institutions and relationships. Instead, liberalism relies
on a variety of artificial mechanisms designed to check government
power within the confines of a monopolistic and absolutely sovereign
state. The Church never bought this and always asserted that such
ideology would lead to mass movement, socialism and war. After a
blood-soaked century of attempted democracy, who can deny this?
It
is the bloody 20th century that is the crowning achievement of anti-Catholicism,
the modern state, and "progress." For the Catholic Church,
it is the ideal of progress that brought us the 20th century, and
compared to the wars and the murder of millions to make the world
safe for democracy, progress and equality, the allegedly dastardly
and unforgivable crimes of the Church (i.e., the crusades and the
inquisition) seem but mere skirmishes.
For
the typical American conservative or libertarian, the arguments
against liberalism will seem repulsive at first, but we must ask
ourselves why liberalism is supposedly the road to salvation. Liberalism
did not invent human rights or limited government. The Church did.
The rise of democracy, did, however, produce fascism and communism
around half the globe. The message of the Church is clear: Paradise
is not attainable in this world, and if it were, the state would
not take you there. Perhaps the Church's view of history closely
resembles that of historian Eugen Weber's view that human history
is something like a winding river going nowhere but often bending
back on itself and washing over similar territory again and again.
For the Church, it is not the duty of a man to save the world, but
only to save himself.
Crocker
does not try to pass off this book as an unbiased account. It is
clear where he stands, and his biases are laid out so plainly as
to make the book comically idiosyncratic at times. This "the
Catholic Church is so wonderful I can barely stand it" attitude
of Crocker is at times chuckle-worthy, and for purposes of expediency,
Crocker has no problem with generously employing stereotypes to
dismiss Italians as hot-headed anarchists, Byzantines as effeminate
bureaucrats, and Jesuits as heroic dragon-slayers. The critical
reader, though, will find that this does not take away from the
thorough scholarship of this work. This is a book that should be
in the home of every Catholic and anyone interested in the undeniably
unique and freedom-loving heritage of European civilization.
April
11, 2002
Ryan
McMaken [send him mail]
is editor of the Western
Mercury.
Copyright
2002 LewRockwell.com
Ryan
McMaken Archives
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