Towards a Catholic Democracy

For you are all the children of God by faith, in Christ Jesus. For as many of you as have been baptized in Christ, have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek: there is neither bond nor free: there is neither male nor female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus.

-Galatians 3:28

The following post deals with a very messy topic: politics.I am not an expert on political science, but government is a subject that has always intrigued me. It has taken me a lot of days to write this, partly because I am so very busy, and partly because I haven't had the right 'moment' to start it.

Some of my readers may recall a certain post which I blogged way back in December of last year, wherein I expressed my main gripes with democracy. It shouldn't be too hard too find, as it is the only post for that month. Back then, I was still very much a self-confessed 'radical traditionalist'; my concerns were still very much political, and most of the time I wanted to turn this blog into a little corner where all my rants and gripes could be expressed. The only thing that stopped me from doing so was that I didn't really like controversy.

Today, I am a very different person-- I am a lot more sober and realistic in dealing with things, and I am a lot more 'level-headed', compared to my overly-impassioned self eleven months ago (not that this is entirely bad, mind you). Part of this change involves my own political views, which have, interestingly enough, been more 'leftist', in that what some of us might call 'Catholofascism' started to lose its appeal to me. Perhaps it is because I am currently in the university that this has happened; perhaps this change is due to myself alone, the external factors helping only slightly. Needless to say, I have beens saying a lot of things lately which would have made my blood pressure climb through the roof just over a year ago. What a difference a year makes!

To tell the truth, I am still sort of suspicious of democracy, at least the version of it that we are all familiar with. I stand by my earlier convictions that it is a system which can be heavily prone to abuse, from both far-leftists and far-rightists. It is a thing of incredible, indelible irony, indeed, that many governments could justify their totalitarianism under the guise of the people's will; it has been so abused that democracy has practically been stripped of any political significance. Be that as it may, I have begun to rethink my earlier position, namely, that democracy is an inherently flawed, and evil political system.

The seeds of this process began some moons ago, when my parents, out of the blue, began to reminisce on the Martial Law days of the Philippines from the 1970s to the mid-1980s. Adding to the growing bonfire was the spate of high-profile murders of journalists and leftists, which reached a feverish peak in May of this year, when the senatorial elections took place. I guess what really prodded me to be suspicious of far-rightists was the pregnant silence of the Philippine government on the matter of these killings. It was the kind of silence that one would expect from a cabal, or an anti-clerical entity like the Freemasons. I won't go into details here, but I seem to have lost much of my trust in the government.

Romanticism can be a very dangerous thing: what the freedom fighter is to one group could very well be an anarcho-terrorist extraordinaire for another. An excess of the romantic spirit could just as well be dangerous as a deplorable lack of it. It all comes full circle, as the adage goes. That is why legislation can be a very dangerous thing: it reduces problems into a set of propositions, and by the might of a majority, proclaims it as gospel truth. In fact, I think the gravest problem of democracy is its ability to provide too many answers for a single question.

But then again, to say that democracy is in itself an inherently evil thing would be just as wrong as saying that it is God's best gift to mankind after silly string. As is well known to all, democracy comes to us form the Greeks, a term which means 'the rule of the people'. Going back to the Greeks, we have Plato and his student Aristotle, both intellectual titans of the ancient world. Plato, of course, is more idealistic and poetic, while Aristotle's though focuses on the pragmatic and the scientific. To cut a long story short, Aristotle disagreed with his master's positions. Plato mentions in his Politeia that there are roughly three types of government: tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy. Aristotle differs from his master in that he classes these different systems in a somewhat hierarchical manner: first, monarchy, then the aristocracy, and lastly, polity. He cites these three systems for their pragmatism and efficiency.

Given the intelligence of the Greeks, one would expect the kind of liberal socialistic-democracy we have today to be the same rule of law as back then. But, as it turns out, this is not the case. Aristotle still endorsed slavery and reserved education to the ruling class; Plato believed in a totalianarian absolutism, where all power rested in the reigning, 'enlightened' monarch. This democracy, then, is just as elitist as the aristocracy. Mob rule would be a more fitting term.

The arrival of Christianity brought about an unprecedented change in European civilization, a very radical one, indeed. We see how it was necessary for the arrival of the Christian religion to develop democracy as we know it today: without Galatians 3:28, Europe could still very well be composed of barbarians, reavers and slavers. Without that verse, we would not have the concept of human rights, fair trial, dignity, freedom or a transcendent happiness. The concept of a People of God was not yet established; but with its establishment came the sense of entitlement we have today. Thus we can demand our rights to free speech and a fair trial because of the radical notions of Christianity, which liberated entire peoples from slavery to the pagan gods. We can shout for our dignity at the behest of others because Christianity taught that all peoples were equal in the eyes of God: kings and bandits alike were of the same substance, and would one day be subject to the same judgment. But whither each shall go, remains to be seen.

Would we really want to live in a world without free speech or thought? Would we really want to live in a world where a commoner can never question the infallible words of a monarch? Would we really want to worship in a Church where the word of a corrupt bishop are heard as the voice of God? None of us would like to do so. The danger in idealizing monarchy as an infallible ideal is that we run the risk of associating God with a certain politics, effectively confining Him under the limits of a few zip codes. This is in marked contrast to what the Church has always taught about God: that He is everywhere, being confined by neither time nor space. He is not a provincial, back water deity, but the God of the Nations, the Lord of Hosts.

The problem with today's praxis of democracy is the overwhelming lack of responsibility on our part. Consequently, legislation loses all its meaning and morphs into a whimpering paper tiger, which can be freely challenged at anytime. We patent laws and statutes which have no meaning at all other than to serve as witnesses to our own decadence and sin. In due course, we arrive at the democracy envisioned, or at least taught, by Aristotle: a veritable anarchy, where the rule of the mob is law. We thus arrive at the old elitisms and cease to progress.

The danger of assuming that God has certain politics is that we eventually make that god contingent to our own politics; it is a god that ceases to exist outside the confines of Republican or Democratic territory. This god, then, is an elitist god, that hogs all power unto itself. We lose the light, and are slaves to the darkness once more.



"Their gods were sadder than the sea,
Gods of a wandering will,
Who cried for blood like beasts at night
Sadly, from hill to hill."

-Chesterton