Catholicism and Political Mythology

Extract

In our day the Church is present, as it were, only on the margin of politics. Even in those countries, such as Ireland and Spain, where the Church is in one sense an obvious power in politics, the action of the Church is still marginal; for the substance of politics, however it may be constituted and whatever analysis of it we may offer, is what it is by reason of those secular forces which determine the character of politics in other states where the Church institutionally is of little or no account; and the fundamental decisions of the political authorities are always in the last resort swayed by secular considerations of precisely the same kind as those operative in non-Catholic societies. There is, outside the Soviet Union, the popular democracies, and China, a common social pattern, diversified in appearance and in its degree of maturity and in the political superstructure it bears, but still a common pattern: that of the capitalism of the mid-twentieth century.