Jacques Maritain’s work,16 Humanisme intégral,17 published in 1936, was the manifesto of a new philosophy of history and society that offered the foundation for an evolution of Catholic Action in an opposite direction to the programme prepared by Pius XI in the Quas Primas.
Maritain in fact wanted to replace holy Christian civilization with the “concrete historical ideal of a new Christianity”,18 a profane civitas humana, taken as “a temporal regime of an age of civilization whose inspiring form would be Christian and would respond to the historical climate of the times into which we are entering”.19 At the root of his philosophy of history that seeks an hypothetical “third way”, between the “medieval ideal” and the “liberal” one,20 is the deterministic thesis of the irreversibility of the modern world and the Marxist postulate of the “historical role of the proletariat.”21
What Humanisme intégral really makes its own are the principles of the French Revolution, condemned by the Pontifical Magisterium and destined, starting from this period, to infiltrate to an increasingly greater extent Catholic circles, all to the advantage of socialism and “progressivism”. The work of the French philosopher, as Antonio Carlos Villaça observes,
had enormous repercussion in the Catholic thought in Brazil. It divided the waters. He brought about profound divisions. It raised terrible divergences. From this moment, Brazilian Catholic thought divides in two: the maritainians and the anti-maritainians”.22
Despite the declared adhesion of Maritain to the principles of Thomism, his philosophy of history and his sociology converge with the Neo-modernism appearing among the young religious of the Jesuit and Dominican Orders. Priests, such as the Dominican Yves Congar, were already at that point convinced that their generation should “recover and transfer into the patrimony of the Church any worthwhile element that could emerge from an approach to modernism”.23
Catholic Action was, along with the “liturgical movement”, the preferred sector for the infiltration of especially political and social modernism24 that, after a silent incubation period, had reappeared at the beginning of the 1930s.
Notes:
16. Jacques Maritain was born in Paris in 1882 and died in Toulouse in 1973. A disciple of the philosopher Bergson, he was converted to Catholicism in 1906, together with his wife Raissa, a Jewess of Russian origin. After having been closely involved in Action Française, he broke loose from Maurras, presenting himself as the new maître à penser of the Catholic world. Having spent the period of the war in America, he was nominated French Ambassador to the Holy See (1944-1948), after which he again returned to America as Professor in the University of Princeton. It was to Maritain that Paul VI delivered the “message to the intellectuals” at the end of Vatican Council II.
17. Jacques Maritain, Humanisme intégral. Problèmes temporels et spirituels d’une nouvelle chrétienté, Paris, Aubier-Montaigne, 1936, now in Jacques and Raissa Maritain, Oeuvres complètes, (Fribourg, Editions Universitaires, 1984), vol. VI, pp. 293-642. The volume derived from a series of conferences held in August 1934 at the university of Santander. Louis Salleron, in the Revue Hebdomadaire of 22 August 1936, (then Humanisme intégral? “M. Jacques Maritain, marxiste chrétien”, L’Ordre Français, no. 176, December 1973, pp. 11-24), since 1936 had been clearly denouncing as “purely Marxist” Maritain’s dialectics (ibid., p. 21). Among the numerous articles on Maritain by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, cf. “Maritain e o ‘dogma’ de sua infalibilidade”, O Legionário, no. 190, 28 November 1943. For a critical analysis of the thinking of the French philosopher Cf. also Julio Meinvielle, De Lamennais à Maritain, Buenos Aires, Theoria, 1967 (1945); Leopoldo Palacios, El mito de la nueva cristiandad, Madrid, Speiro, 1952; Rafael Gambra, Maritain y Teilhard de Chardin, Madrid, Speiro, 1969; and the important articles in Civiltà Cattolica by Father Antonio Messineo S.J.: “Evoluzione storica e messaggio cristiano”, no. 102, 1951, pp. 253-63; “Laicismo politico e dottrina cattolica”, no. 103, 1952, pp. 18-28; “L’uomo e lo stato”, no. 105, 1954, pp. 663-9; “Umanesimo integrale”, no. 107, 1956, pp. 449-63, translated with the title O humanismo integral, in nos. 75, March 1957, 76, April 1957, 77, May 1957 of Catolicismo.
18. J. Maritain, Humanisme intégral, pp. 437-526.
19. Ibid, p. 442.
20. Ibid, p. 495.
21. Ibid, pp. 552-4.
22. A. C. Villaça, O pensamento católico no Brasil, p. 14.
23. Aidan Nichols, Yves Congar, London, Cassel Publishers Limited, 1989, It. tr. Yves Congar, (Cinisello Balsamo, Edizioni Paoline, 1991), p. 12. The Dominican Yves Congar (1904-95), pupil of Father Marie-Dominique Chenu, was one of the main exponents of the “Nouvelle Théologie”. Called the “father and inspirer of Vatican II” (Bruno Forte, “Avvenire”, 23 June 1996), he was made a Cardinal purple, in November 1994, by John Paul II. Marie Dominique Chenu, Une école de théologie. Le Saulchoir, Paris, Editions du Cerf, 1985 (1st edn. Tournai 1937).
24. On Modernism, Cornelio Fabro, entry Modernismo, in EC, vol. VIII (1952), coll. 1187-96; Ramón García de Haro, Historia teológica del modernismo, Pamplona, Universidad de Navarra, 1972 and, among the works in favour of the movement: Emile Poulat, Histoire, dogme et critique dans la crise moderniste, Paris, Casterman, 1962; Bernard M. G. Reardon, Roman Catholic Modernism, London, Stanford University Press, 1970; Thomas Leslie Loome, Liberal Catholicism, Reform Catholicism, Modernism. A contribution to a New Orientation on Modernist Research, Mainz, Matthias Grünewald Verlag, 1979; Gabriel Daly, O.S.A., Transcendence and Immanence. A study in Catholic Modernism and Integralism, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1980.