Reforming sacred institutions, part II: the Soviet Party-State and the Roman Catholic Church compared

ABSTRACT

The Soviet Party-State and the Roman Catholic Church are conceptualized as hierocratic institutions that faced analogous challenges of adaptation to a changing world from the 1950s onward. Building upon an earlier publication in Post-Soviet Affairs, this article identifies four strategies of “selective inclusion” chosen by these institutions as their leaders sought to reduce the pre-1950s levels of sectarianism: hierocratic reformism; hierocratic managerialism; messianic revivalism; and anti-hierocratic radicalism. Parallels in the adoption of these strategies, and common features of a legitimacy crisis they both came to face, reveal the causal strength of common features, while possible differences in their institutional durability suggest the likely causal impact of differences between them.

KEYWORDS:

• Soviet Party-State
• Roman Catholic Church
• sacred institutions
• hierocracy
• inclusion

Acknowledgments

For comments on an earlier draft of this article, I am grateful to Christopher Ansell, John Connelly, M. Steven Fish, Bruce Parrott, Nicholas Pingatore, Yuri Slezkine, and Jason Wittenberg.

Notes

1. There I defined my focus as the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Since then, I have decided that the generalizations better apply to the Soviet Party-State as a whole.

2. In this article, I will present capsule summaries of reform efforts already delineated in the earlier article, in order to provide a context for understanding the several backlashes against them. I also summarize similarities and differences between the institutions noted in the earlier article, in order to make sense of the legitimacy and durability crises they would both experience eventually. These crises are discussed in the last sections of the present article.

3. By definition, analogs are never identical. Rather, they serve the purpose of steering research toward common features, abstractly defined (see Ketokivi, Mantere, and Cornelissen 2017).

4. See Gentile (2001, chs., 1–2) for a cogent review of the extensive literature.

5. Jowitt (1992) emphasizes the “sacred” nature of the political organization of the Soviet Party-State under Stalin. Slezkine (2017) treats the Bolshevik Revolution as driven by a millenarian ideology, and by organizations that led Bolshevism to evolve from a “sect” to a “Church.” For earlier literature depicting totalitarian regimes as “churches” propounding “political religions,” see Gentile (2001, ch., 3).

6. Jowitt (1992, ch., 5) was the first to dub post-Stalinism a “stage of inclusion” and to explore the implications for policy and organization. As I will use the term, inclusionary policies in hierocratic institutions are not the binary opposite of exclusion; rather, they lie on a continuum between high and low sectarianism. And where they lie on this continuum will shape the ongoing conflict between neo-sectarian and selective-inclusionary policies and perspectives.

7. As Josef Stalin is said to have put it, when told that the Pope might disapprove of a Soviet action: “how many divisions does the Pope have?”.

8. This section is a condensed version of what I presented in Breslauer (2017).

9. Useful sources on hierocratic reform after Stalin’s death include Leonhard (1962), Tucker (1969), Zimmerman (1969), and Taubman (2003).

10. Sources on Vatican II include Hebblethwaite (1985, 1993), Reese (1996), O’Malley (2008), Faggioli (2012), and Connelly (2012).

11. On the Brezhnev era in the USSR, see Breslauer (1982), Cohen (1985), Garthoff (1994), and Malia (1994).

12. For a complete statement of the official Soviet perspective, see Afanas’ev (1971).

13. This section relies heavily on Hebblethwaite (1993), a magisterial biography of Paul VI.

14. Paul VI, quoted in Hebblethwaite (1993, 577).

15. The watershed is often said to be Paul’s encyclical of 1968, in which he reaffirmed the Church’s opposition to artificial methods of birth control.

16. “No other Church or religion ha[d] done that” (Hebblethwaite 1993, 441).

17. But not his immediate successor, John Paul I, who died one month after his election as pope.

18. Based on Leonhard (1962), Zimmerman (1969), Breslauer (1982), and Taubman (2003).

19. This section is based on Hebblethwaite (1985), Reese (1996), Weigel (2010), Faggioli (2012), and Posner (2015).

20. On Benedict’s reign, see Faggioli (2012, 2015), Posner (2015), and Weigel (2010).

21. On Gorbachev’s reforms, see Malia (1994), Brown (1996), Breslauer (2002), and Taubman (2017). This section is a condensed version of what I presented in Breslauer (2017), plus some updating on Francis’s reforms.

22. In Breslauer (2017), I mistakenly referred to Gorbachev’s goal as “socialist democracy,” rather than the more accurate “democratic socialism.” I am grateful to Archie Brown for privately alerting me to this lapse.

23. On Francis’s reforms, see Faggioli (2015), Ivereigh (2015), Vallely (2015), Wills (2015), and Douthat (2018).

24. Respectively, Jowitt (1992, ch., 5) and Faggioli (2012, ch., 4).

25. For the data, see Center for Applied Research (2018).

26. In my earlier article (Breslauer 2017), I claimed that the pedophilia crisis implicated only a very small proportion of RCC clergy. As revelations have snowballed in the past two years, I would have to up that estimate.

27. On threats of schism, see Douthat (2018, ch., 10). Douthat (2018, passim.) refers to intra-hierocratic conflict under Pope Francis as a “civil war.”

28. For the argument that the dualisms within the RCC were in a modicum of equilibrium before Pope Francis, but are now becoming seriously unbalanced and tempting of schism, see Douthat (2018, chs., 9–11). For a critique of Douthat’s argument on both empirical and analytic grounds, see Baumann (2018).