Christian democracy
기독교민주주의
Christian democracy is a political current and party movement that seeks to realise Christian values within a democratic, pluralist society, drawing on Catholic social teaching and Protestant social ethics. Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum novarum (1891) is regarded as its founding text. Its themes are the dignity of the person, solidarity, subsidiarity, the family, and an economy serving people, expressed after 1945 in the social market economy. Parties emerged with Luigi Sturzo's Italian People's Party in 1919; after 1945 Christian democrats led governments in Italy, West Germany and elsewhere, and spread to Latin America and, after 1989, to Eastern Europe. They reject communism, and German scholarship distinguishes them by their democratic and social commitments from the older conservatism of the nobility.
In depth
Definition and sources
French usage defines Christian democracy as a political and religious current that seeks to promote, within a democratic and pluralist society, the values carried by the Christian churches: liberty, respect for the person, human rights, fraternity and help for the poorest. It inspired major parties in Western Europe and South America, sitting variously on the right, centre or left. German surveys trace it to Catholic social teaching and Protestant social ethics; English-language surveys add neo-scholasticism and neo-Calvinism and name its 19th-century concerns as reconciling Catholicism with democracy and answering the 'social question'. Jacques Maritain tried to ground democracy and human rights in Thomist natural law.
From 1791 to Rerum novarum
The phrase 'démocratie chrétienne' is said to have been used first on 21 November 1791 by the constitutional bishop Antoine-Adrien Lamourette, without much political meaning. From 1848 Frédéric Ozanam and the writers of L'Ère nouvelle gave it its present sense of a democratic government applying the Church's social doctrine. Leo XIII's Rerum novarum (15 May 1891) recognised workers' misery, rejected nationalist and socialist movements and urged Catholics into social action; its ideas closely follow Bishop Ketteler's Die Arbeiterfrage und das Christentum (1864). In 1892 Leo asked French Catholics to rally to the Republic, and Graves de communi re (1901) was the first papal text to explain the term, contrasting it with social democracy.
Parties between the wars
Luigi Sturzo's Italian People's Party (1919) was among the first Christian democratic parties and a model for others; France's Popular Democratic Party followed in 1924, and in 1925 such parties formed an international secretariat in Paris, where Robert Schuman, Konrad Adenauer and Alcide De Gasperi made contact. Germany's Centre Party, founded in 1870, supplied most Weimar chancellors. Pius XI's Quadragesimo anno (1931) set out the principle of subsidiarity.
Post-war ascendancy
Italy's Christian Democracy, founded in 1942, dominated Italian politics until 1992–1993. In West Germany the CDU and Bavarian CSU united Catholics and Protestants; East Germany had a CDU bloc party that merged with the all-German CDU in 1990. France's MRP was the largest party in 1946. From the 1940s Chilean and Venezuelan Christian democrats became major forces, and after 1989 parties formed in Central and Eastern Europe. Many post-war Europeans saw Christian democracy as a moderate alternative to right-wing nationalism and left-wing communism.
Economics and distinctions
Christian democrats see the economy as serving people but do not question capitalism; they moved from solidarism to the social market economy and from the 1980s partly adopted neo-liberal policies. They have been considered centre-left on economics and centre-right on social and moral issues, oppose secularisation and state atheism, and reject communism. German scholarship separates them by their democratic and social content from conservatives proper, who historically represented the nobility; Christian trade unions kept apart from socialist unions.