Sarah Shortall is an associate professor of history at the University of Notre Dame and a faculty fellow with the Ansari Institute. She specializes as an intellectual and cultural historian of modern Europe, with a particular interest in modern France, Catholic thought, and the relationship between religion and politics.
Professor Shortall published her first book, Soldiers of God in a Secular World: Catholic Theology and Twentieth-Century French Politics, which received a number of awards, in 2021. She also co-edited a volume of essays titled Christianity and Human Rights Reconsidered in 2020. She is currently working on a second book, tentatively called Planetary Catholicism.
Over Zoom, Professor Shortall sat down with Rebekah Go, the Ansari Institute’s Program and Communication Manager, to talk about her research and scholarship. The following has been edited and abridged for clarity.
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Your book Soldiers of God in a Secular World: Catholic Theology and Twentieth-Century French Politics examines the lives of the Catholic Church in France after the separation of church and state in 1905. It sounds like a fairly uncomfortable situation, especially for Roman Catholic clerics at the time. For those who have not read the book, can you elaborate a little on what this anticlerical movement entailed?
Absolutely. To understand the separation of Church and state at the turn of the twentieth century, you need to know a little bit about the prehistory of the conflict between the Church and the French Republic, which dates back to the French Revolution and the battle over the Civil Constitution of the Clergy.
France did not have a continuous republican government from the French Revolution until the twentieth century. It went through many different political regimes over the course of the nineteenth century, including the restoration of the monarchy, two Napoleonic empires, and another short-lived Republic. It was not until after 1870 that France became a republic again–what’s called the Third Republic. Once it had solidified its power by the 1880s, the Third Republic set about trying to dismantle the power of the Catholic Church, which it saw as a threat to the survival of the Republic. Its first act, in the form of the Ferry decrees, was to summarily disband the Jesuit order and a few other Catholic religious orders in France. It also made the primary education system secular, removing religious orders from the public school system.
Then, much more radical anticlerical legislation in 1901 disbanded nearly all religious orders, driving about 30,000 religious into exile. Some of them ended up in the colonies, where these laws were not applied. Some of them - like the ones that I talk about in my book - ended up forming institutions just across the border; in Belgium, Spain, Italy, or England. Finally, in 1905, the French Republic formally separated Church and state. That was the culmination of this anticlerical campaign, which was really quite bitter and polarizing, as you can imagine.
At the same time that many French theologians were physically exiled from France, this seems to have been a fruitful period for the generation of quite a bit of Catholic political theology from French theologians. As a historian, can you speak to why you think that this is true?
One of the surprising things I found was that this assault on religious orders and on the Church more broadly actually had a counterintuitive effect. It actually had a productive rather than a destructive effect on Catholic theology and led to a theological renaissance in France. There are both intellectual and institutional reasons for this.
At an institutional level, the Jesuits and Dominicans I look at were sent into exile, which freed them from a number of the pastoral commitments that they usually had. It also protected them from another crisis within the Church at this moment (the modernist crisis - when Rome was cracking down on theologians and philosophers who were engaging with modern philosophy) and gave them a little bit of a buffer from ecclesiastical oversight. The other context I should mention, too, is the First World War. Previously, there had been a clerical exemption from military service for priests and seminarians. That exemption was lifted because of anticlerical legislation. As a result, many of these priests were mobilized during World War One, which brought them into contact with a whole range of people they never would have encountered due to their class and religious background. The experience showed them just how many Frenchmen had abandoned the Church and it convinced them of the urgent need to build bridges between the Church and the world.
There's a kind of irony, then, about the anticlerical legislation. The two main seminaries-in-exile that I focus on in my research were created because of this legislation: a Jesuit scholasticate on the island of Jersey (a dependency of the British Crown) and the Dominican house of Le Saulchoir, which was sent into exile just across the border in Belgium. These two institutions became the cradles for one of the most important movements in twentieth-century Catholic theology, known as the nouvelle théologie, which would go on to inspire many of the changes made at Vatican II. In fact, a number of priests who studied at these institutions were among the most influential theologians at the Council. In other words, the anticlerical campaign unwittingly created the conditions for a major renaissance in Catholic theology.
There's also an intellectual reason for this, which is that the separation of Church and state forced theologians to reimagine the nature of the Church and its relationship to the political order. It forced them to grapple with the key problem the Church was facing in the twentieth century: how to maintain a public role for itself once the institutions of public life had been secularized. How could the Church play a robust role in the secular public sphere without compromising its values in the process? I argue that the separation of Church and state in France therefore inspired new forms of political theology and new ways of imagining the role of the Church in public life.
That gets us directly to the third question, which is that Catholic political theology in the early to mid-1950s seems particularly interested in the role of the Church in a secular public sphere and seems to have engaged a fair amount in conversations that resulted in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Can you tell me a little bit more about this – and in your research was Catholic intellectual thought really persuasive, or was it just “in the air,” so to speak, around the same time?
Catholics were beginning to talk about human rights more systematically in the 1940s. Jacques Maritain (1882-1973) turned to the concept of human rights in part because he thought it could take over the role that Christianity had once played as the foundation for public life in medieval Christendom. He recognized that Christianity could no longer serve this function in a pluralist, modern society, and he saw human rights as a civic or secular faith that could take over this function since it preserved the ethical norms of Christianity while also being intelligible to people outside of the Christian tradition.
Though Jacques Maritain did not play a direct role in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, he was very involved in the survey that UNESCO sent out in 1947 to intellectuals from a wide range of cultural, philosophical, and religious traditions, which was meant to be a preparatory document for the drafting of the Universal Declaration (though it ended up not actually influencing it for complicated reasons). Maritain was really involved in those debates, and his ideas also influenced some of the figures who were involved in drafting the Universal Declaration, like Charles Malik, a Lebanese Orthodox Christian, who was President of the UN Commission on Human Rights and played a really important role in drafting the Declaration - especially the language on religious freedom and freedom of conscience. So Maritain had an indirect influence on the document, I would say. But of course, the Universal Declaration is also a self-consciously secular document and there were many actors and traditions involved in its creation.
We can also look at other examples from the same period, like the European Convention on Human Rights. Historians have shown that, along with British Conservatives, Catholics played a crucial role in its drafting and, more generally, in establishing the foundations for what later became the European Union. Christian Democratic parties and politicians - many of whom were Catholic - were among the key architects of European integration and federalism, partly because they were quite suspicious of the power of the state (especially in light of the history of the 1930s and 1940s).
I listened to a really interesting interview that you gave on the New Books Network podcast, where you talk a little bit about the importance of really digging into the archival documents - beyond the official writings of these important theologians - to your research, in that you specifically referenced the existence of both Church and State censorship. Can you speak a little bit about the context of those times? How did censorship work back then? How were you able to access these archival documents in your research, and how did they contribute to your understanding of what theologians were really thinking?
I think it's especially important to look at archives when studying and writing about priests in particular, because they are subject to ecclesiastical censorship in their published writings. In the case of the Jesuits I focus on, for example, all of their published works had to be approved by a member of the order and by a representative of the local bishop, which obviously affected what they could say and how they said it. It also led to forms of self-censorship as well, because they had a sense of what they could and couldn’t get away with. That's why archival documents are so useful, because they give us a more unfiltered sense of what these priests actually believed than we can get from their published works. I found their correspondence to be especially useful because the letters between these priests or between them and their superiors give us a clearer sense of what was going on behind the scenes.
The other way in which censorship comes up in the book has to do with state censorship under the Vichy Government, which was the collaborationist regime that governed part of France after the Germans occupied the country in 1940. This government had a robust censorship regime that prevented people from criticizing the regime and the German occupiers in print. I show how some theologians tried to get around that censorship by encoding their criticisms in the language of theology. In other words, I argue that theology became politically powerful in this instance exactly because it seemed to be apolitical. These priests were therefore able to use it to smuggle a resistance message into their writing without seeming to be overtly engaging in politics. This is an example of a broader phenomenon that I call, in the book, “counter-politics.” What I mean by that term is that theology gave these priests a way to intervene in politics while claiming to remain at arm's length from it and while rejecting secular political categories.
Of course, this approach only worked for a certain amount of time in France. These priests were eventually driven underground to create a clandestine newspaper called Cahiers du Témoignage chrétien (“Christian Witness”) in 1941, which meant that they had to publish not only without state approval but also without ecclesiastical approval. Consequently, they were denounced by the French bishops as “theologians without a mandate,” because they published without the necessary ecclesiastical imprimatur (and also because the French bishops were largely supportive of the Vichy regime).
And how did you access these things? Did you physically have to go to the island?
The Jesuit and Dominican archives are in Paris. The Jesuit ones especially bring together the archives for all French Jesuits, which was very useful. The Dominican archives are more fractured, since they're divided by province. But some of the figures I look at, many of whom were censured by their religious superiors for their controversial views, didn't leave their papers to the Jesuits. For instance, Henri de Lubac (1896-1991) left most of his papers to his biographer, so his documents are in Belgium. He's not the only one. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) didn't leave his papers to the Jesuits either. He left them to his personal secretary, which is why his writings (which he was forbidden from publishing during his lifetime) were able to be published after his death, over the objections of the Jesuit order.
I read your article “Theology and the Politics of Christian Human Rights” just recently and really enjoyed the contrast that you identify between Jacques Maritain’s understanding of human rights and Henri de Lubac’s theology of the same. Can you talk about that a little bit here - their differences – and how these two Catholic theologians help us to understand how rich, complex, and sometimes even contradictory the Catholic intellectual tradition can be?
The article is about these two figures and how they develop different accounts of human rights and why. That “why” is significant. Jacques Maritain is much more famous for his human rights theory, which he laid out in his book The Rights of Man and Natural Law in 1942. Maritain derives human rights from natural law, which comes from God but is inscribed on the human heart and can therefore be apprehended without the aid of revelation. That means that people who are not Catholic or Christian can also access it. This was the basis for his participation in the UNESCO survey that I mentioned and his support for projects like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
But Henri de Lubac (1896-1991) took a very different approach. He didn't really have an explicit theory of human rights because it wasn’t central to his work, but you can intuit it from a few different works of his (including the resistance newspaper that he helped to edit during the war, Cahiers du Témoignage chrétien). Basically, de Lubac rejected Maritain's distinction between the natural and the supernatural ends of human life, which is foundational to the natural-law theory of human rights. De Lubac instead roots human dignity in the fact that we all have a desire to see God that is written into our nature. This means that we cannot separate the theoretical justification for rights from their practical implementation, as Maritain claims. I argue that de Lubac’s approach is a lot harder to square with projects like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I think he would see such projects (though he does not comment explicitly on them) as unable to acknowledge the constitutive role of the divine at the heart of human nature.
I think this can help us to understand the suspicion with which so many Catholics have long regarded the liberal rights tradition. It was expressed most recently by Pope Benedict XVI, in an address to the UN in 2008, when he warned against a relativistic and subjective conception of human rights that divorces them from their ethico-religious foundation and reduces them to mere legal instruments. It also helps us to understand a more general tension that I think exists within Catholic social teaching, between a robustly theological ethics and one that doesn't presuppose Christian faith. The disagreement between Maritain and de Lubac is a case in point of this tension, and it affects how Catholics relate to secular political or legal projects.
You conclude that article - and I love this line - with the statement, “we cannot assume, then, that all Christians mean the same thing when they invoke human rights or that all Christian models are necessarily compatible with secular human rights projects.” Can you explain this a little further?
What I wanted to do in the article was recover the internal diversity of the Catholic rights tradition. Many historians have recently become interested in what Catholics or Christians contributed to wider projects like the Universal Declaration or the European Convention on Human Rights, but they tend to treat Catholic human rights theory as monolithic and, politically, as fundamentally conservative. That's something I wanted to push back on, both because I think that the Catholic tradition is much more diverse and also because, in contrast to Maritain, I’m not really convinced that we can decouple theory from practice in speaking about human rights.
I think the religious or philosophical or political justification for rights does affect the kinds of rights that we think are fundamental and worthy of protection. We can't just bracket out those theoretical considerations. We see this, for example, with contemporary debates about the right to life. I think virtually everyone can agree that humans have a fundamental right to life. But, evidently, many Catholics have a very different view of what sorts of legal protections that entails than, say, secular liberals do. So I think it's important to take seriously the theoretical foundations for rights discourses. Otherwise we can't understand why people arrive at the sorts of mutually incompatible positions on questions of fundamental rights that we are seeing today.
Focusing on the theologies that inform Christian rights projects also allows us to see the internal diversity within the Christian tradition a bit better and to avoid reducing Christian human rights discourse to its secular telos in projects like the UDHR. I think it also helps us to recover the political plasticity of Christian rights discourse and to push back on the idea that Christian rights theory is inherently or necessarily conservative. There are lots of examples, from Maritain and others, that defy the logic of right vs. left. That’s because the inspiration for Catholic human rights theory was religious and spiritual rather than political, so the ideas of these theorists are hard to classify according to categories like “right” and “left.” Often they defend rights that we would think of as conservative, like the rights of the family, but then they're much closer to the left on questions of economic justice and workers’ rights. So, unless we take seriously the theologies that inspired these rights theories, we can't really understand why they don't map readily onto the political categories that we tend to use to make sense of the world.
Last question: as a historian, have you been a little bit surprised by how much theology you had to learn in order to contextualize what was happening in France? And can you tell us why you feel that understanding the history of religion or the development of theology over time is essential to understanding the human story?
Yes, I was definitely surprised and it required quite a lot of additional training on my part. I'm trained as an intellectual historian of modern Europe, so I'm primarily a historian of ideas. One of the things I noticed when I was doing my graduate training was how little modern intellectual historians engage with theology. That's not really the case with medieval or early modern intellectual historians, who are much more used to dealing with theology, but it tends to drop out of the picture when intellectual historians talk about the nineteenth, and especially the twentieth, centuries. So I had to do some training with a theologian in the Divinity School at Harvard in order to gain the necessary background in theology for this project.
I think this was important because part of what I try to do in the book is show that theologians were grappling with the same developments in European thought as secular philosophers, but also that those wider intellectual debates were influenced in significant ways by theologians. They played a key role, for instance, in debates about fascism and communism, capitalism and the dignity of labor, colonialism, nuclear war, democracy, and human rights. And they were especially important to the development of certain intellectual movements in twentieth-century France, such as phenomenology and existentialism, as well as the French reception of Hegel, the early writings of Marx (which were just being rediscovered in this period), and Heidegger.
We tend to think of some of these movements, like French existentialism, as a secular project through and through, in part because it’s so closely associated with the atheist philosophies of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. But in fact there was a thriving Christian existentialist tradition in France and people like Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Heidegger - all of these people read and engaged with the theologians that I look at and were very much in dialogue with Catholic thought. And I think that's still true of many continental philosophers today.
In the epilogue, I try to draw some of this out - the way that theology continues to influence contemporary debates about secularization theory and the role of religion in public life more broadly. A major goal of the book is to show that theology and theologians continue to play an important role in intellectual and political life, even in a robustly secular country like France. To put this another way, my goal is to begin to integrate theology into the canon of modern European thought.
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Professor Shortall's first book, Solidiers of God in a Secular World, received an impressive four awards in the first ten months after it was published! You can read that story here.
Many thanks to Joe Smith at the Notre Dame Archives, who was particularly helpful in finding information and photos related to Jacques Maritain and Rev. Henri de Lubac's time at Notre Dame