Catholicism and Democracy in the Age of John Paul II
Author(s)
Weigel, George
Abstract
That the Catholic Church and Pope John Paul II played a significant role in the Revolution of 1989 and the collapse of European communism is now recognized by scholars and statesmen alike. But how did this come to be? How did the Catholic Church, for so long identified with the politics of altar-and-throne alliances, become a defender of the democratic project in history? Did this transformation include a wrenching change in Catholic doctrine? Was it simply the response of a pragmatic and venerable institution to changing social conditions? Or was something else afoot? And as the twentieth century gave way to the twenty-first, how did the Church appraise the democratic project it had helped bring to what seemed, a decade ago, a moment of unalloyed triumph? These questions are not of abstract interest only. Crossing the threshold of the twenty-first century, the Catholic Church is the largest religious community on the planet, numbering some 1.1 billion adherents. The demographic center of world Catholicism is in Latin America, which is struggling, with varying degrees of success, to secure the democratic and market transitions of the 1980s. Poland, the most intensely Catholic country on earth, was the spear-point for the crack-up of the external Soviet empire and is the largest new democracy in east central Europe. Asia’s only majority-Christian country, the Philippines, is enjoying another chance at democracy, in part because of the Catholic Church’s role in the 1986 overthrow of the Marcos dictatorship. Catholics are 25 percent of the population of the United States, the lead society among world democracies. These demographic factors alone suggest that the Church’s engagement with the democratic project will have a lot to do with the politics of democracy in the twenty-first century.
