Rome ou Babel: Pour un christianisme universaliste et enracine, by Laurent Dandrieu, Artege, 400 pages.
The American right is discussed on many topics. The range of topics covered by American right discussions is impressive. They cover everything from geopolitics to industrial policies, and even criticisms of Big Tech monopolies. Two themes dominate debates on the French right: immigration and multiculturalism. One cannot help but notice that conservative Catholic voices have been largely unheard or timid in this debate on the French right. Laurent Dandrieu, an essayist, is trying to change this with Rome or Babel: Pour un Christianisme Universaliste et Enracine.
Dandrieu is one Catholic intellectual in France that looks critically at Pope Francis’s pontificate. The majority of conservative French Catholics have avoided addressing any aspects of the pope’s message they find problematic. They highlight the ecological aspects of Francis’s teachings, as expressed in the Laudato Si’ encyclical. They also combine it with conservation and degrowth ideas. Young Catholics have highlighted this side of the pope’s worldview by gathering around the Revue Limite Magazine and Frederic Rouvillois (law professor) who, in his book La clameur de terre, combines the pope’s holistic ecology with a critique and call for the restoration and maintenance of monarchy. The conversation is often cut off from the issues of immigration, European heritage and national culture, which are all frequently addressed by Pope Francis in his speeches.
Dandrieu claims that the 2015 migrant crisis revealed deep divisions among Catholics. Many European Catholics couldn’t believe it was possible to invoke national interest and speak of European civilization at the start of the 21st Century when they were confronted by a “global humanitarian emergency”. The division in the Roman Church has been highlighted by Francis’s pontificate: those who see it as a vehicle to a particular kind of globalism and others who are attached to rooted universalalism.
The pope has made the issue of immigration a core moral principle of Catholicism. Although his encyclicals are not without ambiguity, the media statements and gestures of the pope leave no doubt about their stance. Dandrieu recalls Francis’ comparison of refugee camps and “concentration camps” in his April 22, 2017 homily. He also argued that Europe was “made from invasions, migrants” at his February 17, 2017, meetings in Rome.
Rome or Babel not just demonstrates the centrality and importance of the topic immigration to Francis’s teachings but also draws attention a fundamental new development in the pontificate: Theology of Migration. Conversations with Dominique Wolton, a French socioologist, revealed that Francis believed that “Our theology” is a “theology of migrants.” This new theology, which is found in the book Policy et societe, is no longer Christocentric but is “migrantocentric.”
Dandrieu points out that Pope Francis seems determined to sever the connection between Catholicism, European civilization, and Pope Francis. He called Europe a grandmother in a speech he delivered at the European Parliament 2014 and said that Europe, which is no longer capable of renewal itself, should accept being regenerated from peoples from other continents. The head of the Catholic Church, however, is cautious about referring to Europe’s “Christian roots.” He spoke to the Catholic daily La Croix and admitted that he avoids the phrase because it can sound “vengeful” or even “triumphalist” and thus “colonialist.”
The author of Rome or Babel correctly points out the absurdity in accusations of colonialism against Europeans, when they refer to the Christian origins of their civilization. The Argentine shows what Eric Kauffmann, a demographer, has described as “asymmetrical multiculturalism.” Francis says that there are two types of cultures: those who are allowed to care for their identity–the cultures of migrants to Europe–and those who, like Europeans are concerned about their own identity.
Dandrieu demonstrates that the immigrationist turn didn’t begin with Francis. Pius XII’s apostolic constitution Exsul Familie already shows that the problem is not being viewed only from the perspective of migrants. It does not address the questions of how the migration scale or the cultural background of newcomers impact host societies.
The 1960s marked the beginning of Catholicism’s globalist shift. John XXIII considered mass immigration a sign that a new era was beginning. He argued in his encyclical pacem in terris that the current world evolution requires global institutions to govern it. John Paul II, despite the fact that he had his own doctrine of nations, also considered mass migration a process that would, as he declared on World Day of Migrants 1987, “a new world… founded upon truth and justice.”
Benedict XVI, the late Pope, defended Catholicism’s European roots but also associated it to certain messianisms, such as when he stated that migration was “the prefiguration of an undivided city of God” in 2011. Dandrieu reminds us that he believed in the necessity of global institutions that would serve the common good of all humanity and ensure its unity.
Dandrieu argues Catholicism is falling prey to the temptations of Babel that Benedict XVI, whose message was multifaceted and more complex than Francis’s globalist messianism, warned against. This “babelism”, as the author puts it, is illustrated by William T. Cavanaugh (an American Catholic theologian). When asked if nationalism and Catholicism can be reconciled in an interview with La Vie the American answered that “Catholic” means universal and that the Catholic Church was the first truly global organization. Therefore, any segmentation would be a violation of the Catholic nature.
Leo XIII did not question this “segmentation”, who argued in Sapientiae Christiansae, that we owe a special fidelity to the country into which we were born. Pius X was not afraid to say it bluntly: “If Catholicism was an enemy of our homeland, it wouldn’t be a divine religion.” Dandrieu asserts that the globalist unity of The Tower of Babel should be challenged by Catholicism’s rooted universalism, which is the spiritual unity of all nations anchored within their cultures.
Dandrieu points out personalism as the source of this “contamination” of Catholic universalism through globalism. This intellectual current has shifted the focus from the common good to Catholicism. Although Jacques Maritain’s ideas and those of his followers were meant to be criticized for liberalism, they accidentally led to its triumph in the church. John XXIII, a personalist, defined the common good to be “safeguarding human rights and duties,” leaving out its intrinsic communal dimension. This was central to St. Thomas’s thinking and the entire classical Catholic tradition. Personalism, without an anchor in the common benefit, has become subjectivism. This provides the intellectual and moral conditions necessary for the utopian dream of a united humanity.
The view that the Catholic Church drifted into political romanticism after 1945 is what I hold. Carl Schmitt suggested that the latter boils to the abolition or the creation of an imagined world. Pierre Lasserre was another critic of romanticism. Dandrieu wrote that Catholic globalism “turns its face towards reality…breaks with concrete world and natural community, replacing the concrete relationship of the world with an abstract, ideological one.”
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It is romantic to think that the Catholic Church’s view of immigration, particularly under the pontificate Francis, is romantic. It does not take into account the real limitations of countries or national communities that are called to absorb all “the poor of the earth.” It is a romantic approach to immigration, especially under the pontificate of Francis.
French essayist Dandrieu recommends that we return to St. Thomas’s realism. Dandrieu explains that while the great philosopher can’t tell us which political institutions to build, he allows us see past the absurdities of current political ideals. It is obvious that the Catholic Church must make a strong turn towards realism. It would be an antidote for what is most pernicious about the Church’s current romantic predicament: reliance on emotions and disregard for specific problems when it comes to matters of greatest importance.
It’s time to bring back Catholicism in its original form: Romantic, not Romantic. Rome or Babel pave the way for this restoration.
