(ZENIT News – La Bussola Quotidiana / Rome, 18.02.2025).- What would the Social Doctrine of the Church have to say about American Vice-President James David Vance’ address in Munich last Friday, February 14? The address is destined to be remembered for a long time, both for the things that were said as well as those that should be said to complete the argument.
The address will be remembered for a long time, not only for its impact on current political, economic and military questions, but especially for its attempt to offer a global proposal that goes to the root of the reason of political existence. At the center of the address was the realization that the enemy is not outside but within, both in Europe as well as in America, and which consists of a retreat from their fundamental values, a sickness of the soul, an exhaustion of moral and spiritual force.
A reader of the address might have thought that Vance’s criticism was directed only to Europe. However, it was addressed also to America, but with the difference that the latter has awakened, whereas Europe is still living in the profound dream of the artifice that despises the reality. For instance: in Europe a forced mass pedagogy is applied to educate the European man, but to do this techniques are used that are developed in the United States, where education of the masses has a long scientific and practical history.
However, Americans have begun to change direction and the new Administration, for instance, has removed USAID, which was funding ideological and forced forms of civic education that were subversive for the common good. Hence, Vance talks about both a pro-European as well as an Americanist ideology. He denounces especially the former, but only because he spoke at length of the latter during the electoral campaign and because he is the representative of a Government that issued from it. His very harsh words addressed to Europe, his parrhesia, which did not grant much to political goodwill despite being in a diplomatic context, stem from the awareness that he represents an America that has come out or is coming out of a pseudo-totalitarian system in which Europeans continue to be entangled.
Seen from the point of view of the Social Doctrine of the Church, this “return to reality” in defense of a genuine freedom — which never begins with itself, but is nourished by reality and “common sense” –, must be valued positively. Moreover, John Paul II, whom Vance quotes at the end of his address, wrote in Evangelium Vitae that the value of democracy is sustained or falls with the values it embodies and promotes.” Unfortunately, the Church in Europe, as was demonstrated recently in a Report dedicated to it, has not tried to free the people from the pro-European ideology, has seconded all the policies that later were revealed unfruitful, and has given up its role to educate in the truth in the light of reason and faith. Hence, it can be said that Vance’s address also contains implicitly a reproach to the Catholic Church’s attitude, which has become a “chaplaincy” of the prevailing political course. However, if one refers to the Social Doctrine of the Church, and not to its praxis, the judgment on these aspects of the address can only be positive.
In part of his address, Vance alludes to some interesting perspectives. When he touches on the topic of the crisis of democracy in Europe, he says that a true democracy is one that listens to the people, one that doesn’t stifle voices, opinions, consciences (his references to the restrictions of abortion in England and Scotland were very eloquent), the democracy that is based on the principle that the people matter, which accepts the people’s will, although it’s not in agreement with it, which seeks a true democratic mandate to take the hard decisions necessary.
This has not happened and is not happening in Europe, as the cases mentioned demonstrated. When saying this, he seems to understand the people as a disjointed collection of individuals according to the vision of liberal individualism, as a organism bearing a “common feeling” that does not originate in it, but that precedes it. This is what Vance suggests, a dimension to which he seems to allude in reference to that “common sense” also evoked by Trump in his Inauguration address. “Democracy,” he seems to say, “must not consist, at the risk of its own suicide, in the majority’s fight against that common sense that the people have in their interior.” However, These are indications and references that, if they are developed, would find the full consensus of the Social Doctrine of the Church.
Finally, we come to what Vance didn’t say, because he stopped before, but that the Church’s Social Doctrine has very present. On what is democracy ultimately founded? To say that it’s founded on the popular mandate, including its promising allusions to the nature of the people to which I just referred, is insufficient. To call Europe not to domesticate the popular mandate or even deny it, as in the case he mentioned of the annulment of the elections in Rumania, is not sufficient, because a “sovereignty” of the people could thus be founded, which is equally potentially totalitarian. This is where the Social Doctrine of the Church would intervene, to say to Vance to continue on the path of that “common sense” to which he alluded, to arrive of the conception of that social and final order that gives democracy the values to defend.
Majorities do not create values, they respect and defend them.
Translation of the Italian original into Spanish by ZENIT’s Editorial Director and, into English, by Virginia M. Forrester.
