Maritain and Recent Popes vs. Aquinas and Cultural Nationalism

A thought-provoking essay at The American Conservative (PJB's old hangout).

The author, Krzysztof Tyszka-Drozdowski, reviews Rome ou Babel: Pour un christianisme universaliste et enraciné by Laurent Dandrieu, which notes that the new 'theology of migration' espoused to one degree or the other by Popes since John XXIII is founded on Maritain's 'personalism.'   While Francis I is by far the most extreme on the matter of mass migration and Benedict XVI is the least so, the concept has been around for quite some time.

...The consideration of the issue exclusively from the point of view of migrants, without taking into account the societies that receive them, can already be seen in Pius XII's apostolic constitution, Exsul Familia. The questions of how the scale of migration or cultural background of the newcomers affects host societies are absent in it.

Catholicism's globalist turn begins in earnest in the 1960s. John XXIII saw mass immigration as a sign of a new era, and in his encyclical Pacem in terris argues that the current evolution of the world requires global institutions to govern the world. Despite the fact that he developed his own theology of nations, John Paul II also regarded mass migration as a process that, as he proclaimed on the occasion of World Day of Migrants in 1987, would create “a new world… founded on truth and justice.”...

The book's author, Dandrieu, points to Babel as the origin of this globalism.  He's correct.

Previous Popes disagreed with this globaloney-think.

...Leo XIII, [...] argued in Sapientiae Christianae that we owe special fidelity and love to the homeland into which we were born. Pius X did not hesitate to put it more bluntly: “If Catholicism were an enemy of the homeland, it would not be a divine religion.” The globalist unity of the Tower of Babel, Dandrieu claims, should be countered by Catholicism's rooted universalism: the spiritual unity of nations anchored in their cultures.

Now to Maritain:

 ...Dandrieu points to personalism [as the root of the problem]. This intellectual current has detached Catholicism from the notion of the common good, shifting the focus to the individual. While the ideas of Jacques Maritain and his disciples sought to criticize liberalism, they inadvertently led to its triumph within the church. In a personalist vein, John XXIII defined the common good as “safeguarding the rights and duties of the human person,” thus disregarding its inherently communal dimension, central to St. Thomas’s thought and to the whole classical Catholic tradition. Absent an anchor in the common good, personalism has degenerated into subjectivism, providing the intellectual and moral conditions for the utopian pipe dream of a united humanity. ...

Of course, 'the common good' and 'immigration' are not necessarily opposed, and Francis' description of Europe as 'a grandmother in need of new blood' is not entirely silly; Italy, Germany, and France's birth rates are effectively depopulating those countries.  If there is no immigration, there will be no one to pay for the grave-diggers.

...The Catholic Church's attitude toward immigration, especially under the pontificate of Francis, seems purely romantic. It takes into account neither any real limitations of states nor of national communities called to absorb all “the wretched of the Earth.” It provides moral "intoxication” to the faithful and hierarchy, denies the constraints of the “here and now,” and represents, in essence, a rupture within the tradition of Catholic doctrine, undermining one of the most crucial rights to which nations are entitled—the right to continuity....

"Romantic."  He means "unrealistic."  

PJ Buchanan's thinking on the matter of immigration was simple and clear.  He maintained that immigration was a good thing, so long as the immigrants were from a Judaeo-Christian culture.

Yep.  Religious discrimination.  But remember this Iron Rule of Civilization:  "Cult" is parent to "Culture" which is parent to "Politics."  PJB knew that very well, and understood that importing millions of Muslims, or Shintos, or Buddhists, would Balkanize the US.

No mere politician ever looked at culture as a screening device for immigration, of course.  They're either incapable of the thinking or totally devoid of courage.  Or both.  

You got what you paid for.