Ian Linden: What's the problem with 'Christian civilisation'?

Dr Ian Linden

"Today the meaning of words is ever more fluid and the concepts they represent increasingly ambiguous", Pope Leo told gathered diplomats in the Vatican on 9 January 2026…"Or rather in the contortions of semantic ambiguity, language is becoming more and more a weapon with which to deceive, strike, or offend opponents," he continued. "We need words once again to express distinct and clear realities unequivocally". But did they ever? Some of the Pope's listeners must have wondered. Wasn't ambiguity often useful when diplomats tried to reach mutually acceptable agreements? However, Leo was making a more general point not only addressing diplomats.

To illustrate the Pope's remarks, the words 'Christian civilisation' are both fluid and ambiguous, and offensive when they came to prominence in Europe after the Second World War applied to still colonized peoples. European cities were rubble, like Gaza is today, in many countries people starving, and the horror of the Nazi death camps filmed for all to see. Some 2,500 Catholic priests from Czechoslovakia, Poland and Germany had been incarcerated in Dachau. 'Christian civilisation' referred to a shocking absence.

Christian humanitarianism, though, was an important presence. Oxford Professor of Modern History, Paul Betts' Ruin and Renewal: Civilising Europe after the Second World War Profile Books, 2020, provides a comprehensive account of the role humanitarian organisations played and the extraordinary work of Americans and UNRRWA, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.

Set up in 1943, US Catholic Relief Services was one of the first to work in former enemy-controlled countries beginning in Italy and then in Germany, Czechoslovakia and Poland. Abbé Jean Rodhain, from Lorraine 30 kms. from the German border, set up the Vatican Mission with funding from the deputy Vatican Secretary-of-State Giuseppe Montini, future Pope Paul VI. Catholic relief workers focussed on the French and American zones in Germany, with an additional special mission to Bergen-Belsen. Abbé Rodhain arrived within 24 hours of its liberation and pulled in teams from Germany. The saintly Abbé Charles Amarin-Brand is remembered caring for its victims many dying of starvation and typhus, with particular concern for the children. The Quakers, disproportionately present, followed a similar policy towards suffering Germans as did the majority Lutheran Church. In Britain the Catholic Women's League found UK families who would take in children from formerly Nazi Austria. Together these efforts represented a significant Christian - charitable - universalism, a forerunner of the later hope for a universal civilisation based on the concept of a shared humanity. In the words of Abbé Regnault from Belsen, there would be "no distinction between race or religion"…"since we are at the service of mankind".

For many 'Christian civilization' now defined post-Nazi Western Europe as it confronted Stalin's brutal repression in Russia and Eastern Europe. The sufferings of Cardinal Joséf Mindszenty rallied Catholics behind his 1946-1947 slogan 'Hungary is Virgin Mary's Country'. Mindszenty spent many years in captivity seen as a martyr for 'Christian civilization'. By 1951, from Liverpool to New York, prayers were said for the Cardinal and to ask God's forgiveness for his persecutors. In the 1980s, Pope John Paul II, supporting the Polish national struggle, promoted devotion to Our Lady of Częstochowa. In both instances the challenge to Europe pitted respect for human rights and justice in the 'Christian civilization' of the West against the injustice of bureaucratic communism in the East.

The Christian basis of Christian democracy had been defined by the celebrated French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain who sought a pluralist society based on an 'integral Christian humanism', that he called a New Christendom. De Gaulle appointed him French ambassador to the Vatican 1945-1948. The theme of Christian civilization worked well in strenuous efforts to ensure Communist Parties did not win elections held in Western Europe. The Vatican, with CIA support, threw itself behind the Italian Christian Democrats, defeating the Communist Party by a wide margin in Italy's 1946 General Election. And in Germany it served as a national leitmotif in the success of German Chancellor, (1949-1953), Konrad Adenauer's Christian Democratic Union Party (CDU) hardening divisions between East and West Germany.

The 19th century justification for colonialism, 'bringing Christian civilisation to benighted races', rejected by the colonised as racism, had not disappeared. In apartheid South Africa, National Party Prime Minister during 1948-1954, DF Malan asserted that white South Africans faced two irreconcilable ways of life, "barbarism and civilisation", "heathenism and Christianity". For the Christian African National Congress (ANC) leader, Albert Luthuli (1898-1967), "civilisation was neither white, black or brown", it was what UNESCO called 'broad universal civilisation'.

Decolonisation in the 1960s washed the slogan of 'Christian civilisation' into the gutters of history. It remains in the sewer today thanks to Putin's weaponizing of Patriarch Kirill's brand of Russian Orthodoxy and Trump and his coterie's cosying up to apocalyptic forms of evangelical Christianity.

So, beyond the language of individual human rights, we are left with UNESCO's insubstantial 'broad universal civilisation' to support the rights of communities and nations. But the Church with its body of social teaching, developed organically, can offer coherent meaning to the word 'civilisation', defining the attitudes, actions and relationships required to build a civilisation expressive of "love and genuine compassion", the family as its foundation, "the glue that holds the whole of civilisation together". And, with the caveat of St John Paul II, Francis, Leo and their predecessors, technology and science "evaluated in the light of the centrality of the human person, the common good , and the inner purpose of creation". A dynamic vision interpreted through the prism of integral human development, social, spiritual, cultural, economic and political relationships, and realised as a lifetime vocation.

Pope Benedict XVI in his magisterial Caritas in Veritate 2009 wrote: "Reason, by itself, is capable of grasping the equality between men and of giving stability to their civic coexistence, but it cannot establish fraternity. This originates in a transcendent vocation from God the Father, who loved us first, teaching us through the Son what fraternal charity is." It sounds abstract and academic. Much theological language does. But it speaks to the condition of Ukraine or Gaza or Sudan.

For often it is believers in perverse 'contortions' of the Abrahamic faiths who are dropping the bombs. To establish a 'Christian civilisation', shining its light upon a hill, the settlers in America dispossessed and killed the original inhabitants, imported black slaves and, until the 1960s, denied their descendants civil rights. In Iran, where the BBC reports that families are paying $5,000 to retrieve the bodies of their loved ones, those who massacred them also pray to a Merciful and Compassionate God.

Britain is a secular society. Benedict's insights reveal how secular societies lack an element essential to building a broad universal civilisation in a divided world. Active Christians may now be only 9% , just possibly 12%, of the UK's population. The BBC's More of Less suggests there are no reliable statistics to confirm that the UK's Christian community is growing. That leaves Church leaders in the UK with quite a responsibility, a challenge, but a great opportunity.

Professor Ian Linden is Visiting Professor at St Mary's University, Strawberry Hill, London. A past director of the Catholic Institute for International Relations, he was awarded a CMG for his work for human rights in 2000. He has also been an adviser on Europe and Justice and Peace issues to the Department of International Affairs of the Catholic Bishops Conference of England and Wales. Ian chairs a new charity for After-school schooling in Beirut for Syrian refugees and Lebanese kids in danger of dropping out partnering with CARITAS Lebanon and work on board of Las Casas Institute in Oxford with Richard Finn OP. His latest book was Global Catholicism published by Hurst in 2009.

LINK

Read Professor Ian Linden's latest blogs: www.ianlinden.com/latest-blogs/