Totalitarianism

The State that wants to be the whole

The word totalitarianism says the essential at once: it is a power that claims the whole (totalitas). An absolute monarchy, a military dictatorship, an authoritarian oligarchy confiscate political power; totalitarianism wants far more. It wants the soul. It claims to give man his truth, his morality, his ends, his history, and even his emotions, and it accepts no sphere — religious, familial, intellectual, interior — that would escape it.^[11][12]

This is what the most famous formula of Italian fascism sums up, owed to Benito Mussolini and the philosopher Giovanni Gentile in the Doctrine of Fascism of 1932:

"Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State." — Benito Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile, The Doctrine of Fascism, "Fascism" entry in the Italian Encyclopedia, 1932^[13]

Such a sentence is not a metaphor: it states a program. If nothing legitimately exists outside the State, then the family, the school, the union, the Church, science, and conscience are no more than organs of the State, living by its permission and revocable by it. That is exactly the point Catholic doctrine refuses: there are realities prior and superior to the State — the person, the family, truth, God — before which political power must stop.^[14][15]

How a word began: from anti-fascist insult to the pride of the regime

Remarkably, it was the opponents of fascism who invented the word. The liberal writer and politician Giovanni Amendola spoke of a sistema totalitario as early as 12 May 1923, in the newspaper Il Mondo, to denounce fascism's claim to occupy the whole of Italian public life; the noun totalitarismo appeared with Lelio Basso in January 1925.^[16][17] The term was therefore born pejorative, as a denunciation of the stifling of freedom of conscience.

Yet, by a revealing reversal, Mussolini seized the word and turned it into a badge of honor, claiming for fascism a totalitarian will. Fascist Italy was the only State of the twentieth century openly to proclaim itself totalitarian.^[18] This detail is not anecdotal: it shows that totalitarianism recognizes itself as an ambition of integral absorption, and not as a mere method of government.

Totalitarianism, authoritarianism, dictatorship: not to be confused

Every dictatorship is not a totalitarianism, and the Church does not confuse the two. A regime can be unjust, authoritarian, oppressive, without claiming to remake man. The distinction, classic in political science, is essential for understanding the Catholic condemnation: what the Church reproves in totalitarianism is not only the harshness of power, but its total claim over the person.^[19][20]

The following table compares three forms of power according to what they demand of the citizen.

The decisive boundary lies in the last column. The authoritarian regime says: "Do not oppose me." The totalitarian regime says: "Think, believe, love, hope as I command you." It is this second demand — control over interior life — that the Catholic faith holds to be radically impossible and impious, because "we must obey God rather than men" (Ac 5, 29).^[21]

The constant features of the phenomenon

Beyond the diversity of ideologies (race, class, nation), totalitarian regimes display a family of converging traits, brought to light by twentieth-century political analysis — notably by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951): an official ideology claiming to explain everything; a single party fused with the State; a monopoly over the means of communication, education and force; terror and surveillance erected into a system; and the cult of an infallible leader or vanguard.^[22] The Church did not wait for this analysis to perceive the heart of the phenomenon, but it recognizes its descriptive accuracy — while going further, for it names the spiritual root.

The root: the denial of the transcendent dignity of the person

The deepest Catholic diagnosis was formulated by John Paul II in 1991. For him, totalitarianism is not first an error of organization: it is an error about the identity of man. He identified its source in a sentence that has become classic:

"The root of modern totalitarianism is to be found in the denial of the transcendent dignity of the human person who, as the visible image of the invisible God, is therefore by his very nature the subject of rights which no one may violate — no individual, group, class, nation or State." — John Paul II, Centesimus annus, n. 44, 1ᵉʳ mai 1991^[23]

Everything is said in that sentence. If man is "the image of God", he bears within him a worth that no power created and that no power can therefore abolish. His fundamental rights are not concessions granted by the State: they are prior to it. Totalitarianism, by contrast, assumes that man is nothing other than what the collective decides he is — a product of race, class or nation. Remove transcendent dignity, and nothing remains to prevent the absorption of the person into the "whole".^[24][25]

When the State makes itself god: statolatry

Totalitarianism is thus, in the proper sense, a political idolatry: it divinizes a created reality — the State, the party, the race, the leader — and renders to it the worship that belongs to God alone. Pius XI struck at this failing with a word that has remained famous, as early as 1931, when he denounced the Fascist claim to monopolize the education of Italian youth:

"A true and authentic pagan statolatry, which is no less in opposition to the natural rights of the family than to the supernatural rights of the Church." — Pius XI, Non abbiamo bisogno, 29 juin 1931^[26]

Six years later, he rose against the Nazi idolatry of race, in an encyclical exceptionally written in German and read from the pulpit throughout Germany on Palm Sunday 1937:

"Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power [...] above their standard value and places them on an idolatrous level, requiring divine honours, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God." — Pius XI, Mit brennender Sorge, 14 mars 1937^[27]

These two texts say the same thing under two different skies: as soon as an earthly reality proclaims itself the supreme value, it usurps the place of God and crushes man. Statolatry is not an excess of patriotism; it is a false religion.

The denial of God, mother of totalitarianism

Why does this idolatry occur? Because when society ceases to recognize God as the measure of good and evil, it can no longer recognize in man any dignity it has not itself decreed. This is the teaching, of great density, of the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

"Societies not recognizing this vision or rejecting it in the name of their independence from God are brought to seek themselves in themselves or borrow from some ideology their references and their end; and, since they do not admit that one can defend an objective criterion of good and evil, they arrogate to themselves over man and his destiny a totalitarian power, open or covert, as history shows." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 2244^[28]

John Paul II offered the same diagnosis: "the first cause" of the erroneous conception of the person and of society, he wrote, "is atheism".^[29] Where God is denied or set aside, an empty throne remains — and ideology takes its seat upon it. Communist totalitarianism demonstrated this to the very end: by making atheism a dogma of the State, it logically "deprives man of his freedom" and "takes away from the human person all dignity" that belongs to him, as Pius XI denounced in Divini Redemptoris.^[30]

"Communism deprives man of his liberty, the spiritual principle of moral conduct; it takes away from the human person all dignity and all moral support with which he can resist the onslaught of blind passions." — Pius XI, Divini Redemptoris, 19 mars 1937^[31]

Totalitarianism against the four principles of social doctrine

The condemnation of totalitarianism is not an appendix to social doctrine: it follows directly from it. For totalitarianism denies, one after another, the four permanent principles of the Church's social teaching.

• It denies the dignity of the person, by making man a means in the service of the "whole".^[32]
• It perverts the common good, which it confuses with the interest of the party or the race, whereas the true common good is "the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfilment".^[33]
• It destroys subsidiarity, by absorbing intermediate bodies — families, associations, municipalities, Churches — instead of supporting them.^[34]
• It falsifies solidarity, which it replaces with the forced fusion of individuals into an anonymous mass.^[35]

Totalitarianism thus appears as the anti-social-doctrine par excellence: it takes each of the principles the Church defends and turns it into its opposite. That is why subsidiarity, formulated by Pius XI as early as 1931, was explicitly conceived against the twin threat of absorbing statism and totalitarian collectivism.^[36]

The Church did not settle for abstract principles: it confronted totalitarianisms at the very moment they were unfolding, often alone and at great risk. The chronology of its interventions outlines a coherent doctrine, from Italian Fascism to the Compendium of 2004.

1931: Pius XI against Fascist statolatry

The first great confrontation took place in Italy itself. After the Lateran Agreements (1929), Mussolini's regime set out to dissolve Catholic youth organizations in order to reserve the education of the young for the party. Pius XI replied with Non abbiamo bisogno, written in Italian — an extremely rare occurrence — so that it could be read directly by the Italian people. In it, the pope recognized the legitimate rights of the State, but absolutely refused that it "absorb youth entirely, from early childhood to adulthood, for the exclusive benefit of a party, a regime".^[37] The demand for a "totalitarian" education was named for what it is: a usurpation of the rights of the family and of God.

March 1937: the double condemnation, brown and red

The year 1937 remains a high point of magisterial lucidity. Within five days, Pius XI condemned the two most powerful totalitarianisms of his time. On 14 March, Mit brennender Sorge struck National Socialism and its idolatry of race.^[38] On 19 March, Divini Redemptoris condemned atheistic communism as a system "full of errors and sophisms", "intrinsically perverse", with which "no one who wishes to save Christian civilization may collaborate on any terrain".^[39]

This symmetry is doctrinally decisive. It forbids reducing the Catholic condemnation to a political quarrel of right or left: what the Church refuses is the totalitarian principle itself, in all its colors. Fascism deifies the nation, Nazism deifies race, communism deifies class; all three deify a created reality and crush the person. The analysis holds for communism as for the fascist regimes, with no forced moral symmetry but no indulgence on either side.

Pius XII and the defense of the person

Elected a few days before the war, Pius XII devoted his first encyclical, Summi Pontificatus (20 October 1939), to denouncing the "errors" that dissolve man and society: the forgetting of the divine law, the denial of the unity of the human race, and above all the claim of the State to be "the ultimate end of human life, the supreme criterion of the moral and juridical order".^[40] Throughout the war, his Christmas radio messages developed a genuine charter of the rights of the person that no State may violate: the right to life, to bodily integrity, to the worship of God, to marriage and to the education of children.^[41]

Vatican II: the person, conscience, religious freedom

The Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) gathered this heritage and transformed it into positive doctrine. The constitution Gaudium et spes proclaims that the social order "must always have the progress of persons as its end" and not the reverse, and praises regimes in which "as many citizens as possible" take free part in public life.^[42] Above all, the declaration Dignitatis humanae establishes religious freedom in law: in religious matters, "no one is to be forced to act against conscience nor prevented from acting according to conscience".^[43] This is the anti-totalitarian lock par excellence, since totalitarianism always begins by seeking to seize conscience.

John Paul II: witness and theologian of totalitarianism

No pope knew totalitarianism as closely as Karol Wojtyła, who lived under the Nazi occupation and then under the Polish communist regime. Having become John Paul II, he delivered its most mature analysis in Centesimus annus (1991), in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet bloc. There he shows how the totalitarian State, having denied all transcendent measure, "tends to absorb into itself the nation, society, the family, religious communities and persons themselves".^[44] And he assigns the Church a precise role: in defending its own freedom, it defends that of all.

"In defending its own freedom, the Church defends the person [...], it defends the transcendent dignity of the human person." — John Paul II, Centesimus annus, no. 46, 1991^[45]

The Catechism and the Compendium: stabilized doctrine

With the Catechism (1992) and then the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (2004), the teaching reached its stable form. The Catechism recalls that the Church, "which is in no way to be confused with the political community, is at once the sign and the safeguard of the transcendent character of the human person".^[46] The Compendium, for its part, explicitly places the acknowledgment of God as a rampart against the totalitarian vision: it is by confessing a transcendent God that society guards itself against deifying itself.^[47] What was a prophetic cry under Pius XI has become ordered doctrine.

The condemnation of totalitarianism was not, for the Church, a matter of theory. The 20th century was the greatest century of martyrs in all of Christian history, and most of these martyrs fell under totalitarian regimes: Nazi camps, Soviet gulags, persecutions in Spain, Mexico, the Eastern countries, communist Asia. John Paul II was determined that the memory of these "witnesses to the faith" should not be lost, and had lists drawn up for the Jubilee of the year 2000.^[48]

A few figures sum up this witness. Saint Maximilian Kolbe, a Franciscan priest, offered his life at Auschwitz in 1941 in place of a father, showing that faced with the totalitarian machine that reduces man to a number, the charity of one man restores the full dignity of the person.^[49] Saint Edith Stein (Teresa Benedicta of the Cross), a Jewish convert and Carmelite, died gassed at Auschwitz in 1942, a victim of the racial idolatry denounced by Mit brennender Sorge.^[50] Thousands of priests, religious and laypeople perished in the gulags for refusing to hand over their conscience to the State.

This martyrdom is, in a sense, the living refutation of totalitarianism. Where the regime claims to possess man entirely, the martyr opposes what does not surrender itself: "They can only kill the body." The blood of martyrs proves that there is in man a point that no State can reach — precisely that transcendent dignity which social doctrine holds to be the foundation of everything.^[51]

"Soft" totalitarianism and the "secular religion"

The great totalitarianisms of the 20th century have collapsed, but the Church warns that the temptation itself remains — in softer and more insidious forms. John Paul II thus describes the danger of a politics which, having lost God, sets out to promise salvation on earth:

"When people think they possess the secret of a perfect social organization which makes evil impossible, they also think that they can use any means, including violence and deceit, in order to bring that organization into being. Politics then becomes a 'secular religion' which operates under the illusion of creating paradise in this world." — John Paul II, Centesimus annus, no. 25, 1991^[52]

This "secular religion" does not always need camps or a single party. It can take the face of a diffuse ideological conformism, of a cultural pressure that discourages dissent, of a media and legal apparatus that imposes a single vision of man while presenting itself as mere self-evidence. Classical totalitarianism imposed itself through terror; its soft version imposes itself through the standardization of minds.

Ideology, "ideological colonization", dictatorship of relativism

Recent popes have named these new forms. Benedict XVI warned against a "dictatorship of relativism" which, under the cover of tolerance, refuses any objective truth about man — and thus deprives the person of the only foundation that protects her from power.^[53] Pope Francis repeatedly denounced "ideological colonization", by which economic or cultural powers impose a foreign anthropology on entire peoples, often making their aid conditional on acceptance of that ideology.^[54] In both cases, we find the same fundamental totalitarian gesture: deciding in man's place what he must be, by denying that there is a truth of the person prior to all power.

What the Church sets against totalitarianism

To the total claim, social doctrine opposes not individualism — which is only another forgetting of the truth about man — but a social order built on four ramparts. First, the primacy of God and the transcendent dignity of the person, which places man beyond the reach of any power.^[55] Next, freedom of conscience and religion, the first space that no State may invade.^[56] Then the life of intermediate bodies — families, associations, municipalities, Churches — protected by subsidiarity and whose richness stands in the way of absorption.^[57] Finally, the recognition that political power is at the service of the common good, not its master.^[58][59]

Totalitarianism thus remains, for Catholic thought, the limit-case of what happens when God is removed from the city: not a city without God, but a city where the State makes itself God. The Church's answer comes down to one unshakable conviction, tested by the blood of her martyrs: man belongs to God before belonging to Caesar, and it is precisely this first belonging that makes him free.

• The dignity of the human person — the foundation denied by every totalitarianism.
• Religious freedom — the first anti-totalitarian lock according to Vatican II.
• Freedom of conscience — what the State can never appropriate.
• Subsidiarity — the principle formulated explicitly against statism and collectivism.
• The common good — its truth, disfigured by totalitarianism.
• Political authority according to the Church — legitimate authority, distinct from total power.
• Democracy according to the Church — the regime the Church appreciates without idolizing it.
• Communism — one of the great incarnations of totalitarianism in the 20th century.