Abstract
The author argues that the Vatican’s teaching on family, sexuality and human life is best understood within the frame of Foucault’s concept of biopolitics. His hypothesis is based on two major claims: first, that in the 20th century the Pope took on a new role, that of manager of populations of believers; and second, that a number of essential functions for the Church as an organization, such as the recruitment of members and of clergy, the maintaining of a distinctive Catholic identity, competition with other faiths and competition with nation states, have increasingly revolved around biopolitical issues, particularly around contraception and human life. Therefore, religious teaching on these topics should be read as a discourse where power and morals intertwine.
The Catholic hierarchy’s growing concern with regulating reproduction is not a quaint survival of olden times. It is another instance of Catholic power’s assimilation to very modern forms of state power.
Introduction
In his Introduction to the
The concept of biopolitics has since been widely discussed and applied in a variety of contexts, from bioethics to political philosophy (Lemke, 2011). Despite its ubiquitous character, one rarely finds it cited in the sociology of religion (but see McDonnell and Allison, 2006). There seems to be no reason for limiting the scope of the concept to national governments and medical institutions though. Contemporary religious organizations may be as much concerned with populations as governments are. In this article we will show how in the 20th century the Vatican has strived to cope with the emergence of biopolitical issues, and how in turn the new context has influenced the theological discourse of the Catholic Church. In the latter part, we will make a case for the general relevance of the concept of biopolitics in the study of contemporary religious organizations.
In the same book, Foucault states: ‘What might be called a society’s “threshold of [biological] 1 modernity” is reached when the life of the species is wagered on its own political strategies’ (Foucault, 1979: 143). Our hypothesis here is that the Vatican passed this threshold at the beginning of the 20th century, and has subsequently moved on. This hypothesis stands on two major claims: first, that at this time the Pope took on a new role, that of manager of populations of believers; and second, that a number of essential functions for the Catholic Church as an organization, such as the recruitment of believers, the maintaining of a distinctive Catholic identity, competition with other faiths and competition with nation states, have increasingly revolved around biopolitical issues, particularly around sexuality, human life and the family as the natural environment where, according to the Church, sexuality and the transmission of human life should take place. The growing importance of these issues in the context of the management of the Church also helps to explain the insistence on such topics by the ecclesiastical hierarchy.
We will focus on the years 1930–2000, but the genesis of this ongoing process dates back to the mid-19th century. In this study we will consider only the official teaching of the Holy See. Our aim is to provide a theoretical framework for further empirical research on how the Catholic politics of life is implemented in different social and institutional contexts.
Following Foucault, we think that the contemporary Catholic discourse on family, sexuality and human life should be understood as an intertwining of morals, power and science. Therefore, we need to address two possible counterarguments: first, that the Vatican is simply responding to recent Western scientific developments; and second, that Catholic concern with issues such as contraception is traditional, and due to the intrinsic moral nature of such arguments. Regarding the first objection, it should be noted that in the 20th century the Holy See has been, if anything, quite unconcerned with scientific and technological developments. The attention given to the new cosmologies of Copernicus and Galileo by Catholic authorities in the 16th and 17th centuries finds no comparison today: neither quantum physics, nor the theory of relativity, nor space missions, nor information technology has received systematic treatment in the teaching of the Church. It is only in the domain of the life sciences that every new finding is carefully examined and judged by the religious authority.
On the other hand, the moral nature of the topic does not suffice to account for its centrality. From a moral point of view, for example, masturbation is as condemned by Catholic teaching as contraception is, and for the same reason 2 ; however, no relevant papal statement has dealt with it, whereas at least three encyclicals – and many other minor declarations – have overtly condemned contraception. Moreover, in the past centuries contraception and sexual behaviour in general have been mainly a concern for theologians and confessors (Noonan, 1965); they were only rarely addressed by the governing authority of the Church, and they have never before remained so high on its agenda for almost a century.
The new role of the family
Catholic biopolitics emerge in the context of 19th-century conflicts between the Church and nation states. In the ideological and political struggles triggered by the French Revolution, the Church lost the support of states and, as a consequence, between 1859 and 1870, most of its territory to the newly created state of Italy. After the loss of temporal power and the new challenges posed by modern states and ideologies, the Catholic hierarchy had to cope with a major problem threatening the future of the Church. For 1,500 years, the Catholic faith in Europe had received the support of the continent’s sovereigns. The so-called Constantinian era (Chenu, 1964), begun in the 4th century with the conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine the Great, come to an end with the fall of the Ancien Régime and the growth of liberal states. The Church, therefore, faced the need of finding new allies in order to continue exerting its broad religious influence on society.
A reading of the papal documents of the late 19th century suggests that the hierarchy began to identify the family as a viable strategic partner. Increasingly, Popes concerned themselves with families, in fact almost ‘turning them against’ the states. The Catholic emphasis on family is well known, and usually interpreted as a defence of traditional values, but this view needs to be qualified. Indeed, both its very definition, and the attention given to it by the Catholic hierarchy, varied much over the centuries. As the historian John Bossy (1970: 68) remarks:
[t]here seems to be no reference to the
The level of reserve and wariness of 16th-century authority towards the family contrasts strikingly with the attention and warm endorsement the family unit has received from 20th- and 21st-century Popes. Since the Second Vatican Council, the family has frequently and solemnly been dubbed the ‘domestic Church’. It is, in fact, identified as the right arm of the Holy See and entrusted with the task of evangelization:
it must be emphasized once more that the pastoral intervention of the Church in support of the family is a matter of urgency. Every effort should be made to strengthen and develop pastoral care for the family, which should be treated as a real matter of priority, in the certainty that future evangelization depends largely on the domestic Church. (John Paul II,
Agnès Walch (2002) described the long and difficult acceptance of spousal life by a Catholic hierarchy that strongly affirmed the supremacy of celibacy over marriage. Not until the 20th century could pastoral care for the family and conjugal spirituality freely develop without resistance from the clergy.
Additionally, throughout its history the Church has given only intermittent consideration to the issue of children. Three important papal documents on marriage, promulgated at intervals of 50 years between 1880 and 1981, show a recognizable pattern: divorce, once a major point of conflict with civil law, moves to the back of the stage, whilst children come to the front. In the encyclical
It is through the confrontation with the nation states and with modern political doctrines that the family arises as a political, ideological and economic battleground. In
However, the relevance of the family in contemporary Church teaching also depends on the central role it plays in human reproduction. We saw that the gradual shift from marriage to family entailed a growing interest in children. Indeed, the family is a key actor in demographic policies, an issue we shall now address in detail.
Over the threshold of biological modernity
Beginning in mid-19th century, public debates on population in various Western countries raised the issue of different fertility rates between racial or religious groups. In the USA, for example,
[t]he prevalence of abortion among Protestant women, and its (supposed) absence among Catholics, was frequently noted in physicians’ anti-abortion rhetoric … Physicians threatened that the consequence of extant demographic trends would be the eventual loss of political control to the offspring of recent, predominantly Catholic, immigrants. (Beisel and Kay, 2004: 508–509)
Religious leaders were quite naturally drawn into the biopolitical arena by the national governments’ management of the general population and the emergence of inter-group conflicts and debates. For the Church, ignoring the challenge would have meant running the risk of vanishing altogether in the course of a few generations.
5
Indeed, the influence that the Vatican is able to exert on a government partly derives from the proportion of Catholics in that country’s population. Therefore, the management of Catholic minorities has two aspects: diplomatic and demographic, where the former depends on the latter. Hence, the imperative is to avoid the shrinking of these minorities. Studying the population debate in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s, Richard Soloway (1995: 265) observes:
Catholics were, admittedly, vanishing more slowly than the population at large, but the low birth rates in Austria, France, and even Ireland, as well as in some of the predominantly Catholic states in Germany and America, indicated their faith was less of a barrier to family limitation than it had once been. The hierarchy was clearly worried at home as well that many of the 13 million people who [cardinal] Bourne predicted would disappear over the next thirty years, when the population fell from 45 million to 32 million, might come from the approximately 2.4 million who made up the small Catholic community in Britain.
Presumably, it is therefore also out of demographic concerns that, between 1869 and 1930, the Holy See redefined its doctrine on abortion and reasserted its position on contraception. While for centuries most Catholic theologians had maintained that only abortion of an ‘ensouled’ foetus 6 was murder, in 1869 Pius IX extended excommunication to anyone who procured an abortion, irrespective of the age of the foetus. 7
The ban on contraception maintained its former stringency. But whereas in the 19th century it had been treated as a problem for confessors to tackle, and therefore awarded only scant publicity
8
, in 1930 the encyclical
Regarding the first point, there is an underlying doctrinal conflict between Christian Churches. Indeed, the letter was intended also as an answer to the resolution that the Church of England had promulgated a few months earlier at Lambeth, to allow couples to reach their own decision about birth control, without imposing any doctrine from above (Thatcher, 2006).
Reasserting the Catholic doctrine was therefore also an effort to maintain a distance from other Christian Churches. 9 Until the 1950s, the teaching on contraception appears as a distinctive feature that strongly distinguishes Roman Catholicism from other denominations (Tentler, 2004). The memory of this confrontation was to emerge again 35 years later in the pontifical commission appointed to study the problems of family, population and birth control. Against the hypothesis of changing the Catholic position on contraception, a theologian in the commission warns: ‘Was the Holy Spirit at Lambeth, and not therefore with the Roman Catholic church?’ (Kaiser, 1987: 211). Different socio-historical conditions back different theologies. The softer attitude of the Church of England might also have depended on the fact that the Anglican clergy had frequent recourse to contraception (Soloway, 1982: 103).
Second, the encyclical aimed at closing the debate among Catholics regarding eugenics. In the first decades of the 20th century, eugenics was a label covering a vast landscape of social reform projects, from the forced sterilization of ‘undesirable’ people (like criminals, alcoholics and the feebleminded) to health certificates for eugenic marriages (Bashford and Levine, 2010). In 1930, in his
Third, the Pope rebuked eugenic policies conducted by national governments. He declared sterilization, abortion and forced prevention of marriages to be illicit and evil practices. At the same time, he contested individual rights over one’s own body:
The biological body has now become a battleground. The State, the Church and individuals strive to maintain a firm grip on it. The Vatican states that the body belongs to God, who has created it; only the Church, representing God on earth, has the authority to judge which uses of the body are right and which are wrong. In sum, the Catholic Church has passed the threshold of biological modernity. At this stage ‘the life of the species is wagered on its own political strategies’, to paraphrase the aforementioned quote by Foucault.
That does not mean that the Church has secularized itself, acting like a secular government and with the same aims. The Catholic hierarchy has to deal with issues of biology and demography because these are now salient for the achievement of traditional religious goals, particularly evangelization. In a 2000 address to the Pontifical mission societies, cardinal Tomko stated:
When John Paul II published the Encyclical
However, as we shall see, at stake is not only evangelization, but also the future of the Church as a clerical organization. Problems that once were dealt with in different domains – such as political participation, biblical exegesis, media control, religious wars, church attendance and dynastic succession, to mention just a few – more and more revolve, today, around biopolitical issues.
The religious management of populations
For a full understanding of this new landscape, we must consider what the role of the Pope in the 20th century is. If we accept as fact that the papacy is a 2,000-year-old institution 11 , we lose sight of the vastly different forms that it adopted over the centuries (Casanova, 1997). Rather, considering that, at various moments, the Pope has been a war organizer, the head of a dynasty, a shepherd, a sovereign, a lawmaker, the resulting picture is of a fractured, not homogeneous, institution. As the temporal power of the Vatican disappears, the Popes take on a new role, which becomes dramatically clear with Pius XI. The Popes, in other words, become responsible for Catholic minorities all over the world, most of them subject to non-Catholic governments. The relationships between the Vatican and totalitarian regimes, both fascist (Gentile, 2010) and socialist (Della Cava, 1997), are marked by the Vatican’s concern for the wellbeing of Catholic minorities. In the course of the 20th century the Holy See has become a diplomatic advocate for Catholic people all over the world. Catholic populations are not only a weak subject that the Holy See strives to shelter from any kind of danger: hostile regimes, famines, wars. They also make up its strength and legitimacy, and they may be mobilized on the occasion of political elections or for resistance against secular governments and laws.
In a globalized world the authority of the Pope over the universal Church becomes real and effective, whereas in the past it had been mostly spiritual, each Catholic community being politically autonomous. One of the pillars of this new arrangement is the election of bishops. In the previous centuries, secular authorities actually selected bishops and the Popes compliantly appointed them (Costigan, 1966). When the Holy See, in the course of the 20th century, finally secured complete control over the process, it could fully centralize Catholic politics. Today, as an effect of both globalization and centralization, the Vatican is able to launch campaigns that are truly global and to successfully coordinate the agendas of bishops all over the world.
The Church fights its demographic battle on three fronts, the first being the ratio of Catholics to the population as a whole. The aim here is to avoid a dramatic decline in the fertility rates of Catholic couples. Hence the fight against the diffusion of a ‘contraceptive mentality’ among Catholics. The teaching of the Church is not unconditionally pro-birth, though. What is most important is that families breed a reasonable number of children, and give them a Catholic education. Since the 1960s the Church has promoted Natural Family Planning, an alternative to artificial contraception that avoids the risk of a contraceptive mentality, that is, of childless marriages. Indeed, since 1951 Catholic doctrine has not condemned birth control
This competition among national and international organizations over the proper avenues of controlling births is apparent in Finally, careful consideration should be given to the danger of this power passing into the hands of those public authorities who care little for the precepts of the moral law. Who will blame a government which in its attempt to resolve the problems affecting an entire country resorts to the same measures as are regarded as lawful by married people in the solution of a particular family difficulty? Who will prevent public authorities from favouring those contraceptive methods which they consider more effective? Should they regard this as necessary, they may even impose their use on everyone. It could well happen, therefore, that when people, either individually or in family or social life, experience the inherent difficulties of the divine law and are determined to avoid them, they may give into the hands of public authorities the power to intervene in the most personal and intimate responsibility of husband and wife. (HV: 17)
Secondly, as Claude Langlois (2005: 452) has suggested, there is the menace represented by other faiths, like Islam, in whose countries the birth rate is higher than in Christian regions (Pew Forum, 2011). This fear is voiced by some Catholic movements. The followers of the Neocatechumenal Way, for example, understand their commitment to large families as both an identity badge that marks their religious involvement and a demographic struggle with other religious groups:
Neocatechumenals do not practise birth control as it is intended in the secular society, but follow instead the commands of the Vatican and avoid using contraceptive devices. Within their communities, procreation is encouraged, and having many children (‘all the children that God wants’) is considered a sign of being a good Christian. Therefore, it is not unusual to find couples with, on average, five or six children. In their remarks, a protectionist logic is evident inasmuch as they reveal their fear of being overwhelmed by other faiths. Various comments that state the necessity of having many children to avoid being outnumbered by immigrants of other faiths and customs are a good example of this mindset. In their preaching, itinerant catechists predicate the necessity for today’s Catholicism to swell its ranks. (Castilla, 2008: 87)
As a third point, the recruitment of clergy is also to be taken into account: in modern Europe the clergy mainly comes from large families, as Langlois (2005: 453) has again showed. The link between families and religious vocations was often present in John Paul II’s messages for the World days of prayer for vocations: ‘The strength and stability of the fabric of the Christian family represent the primary condition for the growth and maturation of sacred vocations, and they constitute the most pertinent response to the crisis of vocations.’ (Message for the 31st World day of prayer for vocations, 1993: 2).
12
In fact, the most recent generations of clergy hail in large part from numerous families, as the Father General of the Jesuits, Adolfo Nicolás, acknowledged in an interview:
Nowadays, in traditional Catholic countries like Italy and Spain, families have no children: they have just one or two, and with great difficulties. We were four at home, and in many families of Jesuits I know there were four, five, twelve, thirteen brothers. Today, instead, an only child [is the norm]: it is much more difficult to allow that your only child become a priest, a Jesuit! This is a sociological change that surely has an influence on vocations. (Osservatore romano, 2008)
On all these fronts the stakes for the hierarchy are very high. From this perspective, for example, the demography of Africa, a vast continent where Catholicism is widespread, constitutes a major geopolitical challenge for the future. Therefore, to speak against the use of condoms in Africa, as Benedict XVI has recently done, is not purely a matter of morality. Rather, it is a long-term demographic policy conducted in moral language, the only legitimate register for a religious leader today.
13
As an article in
From populations to individuals: post-war biopolitics
The years of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) showed the ongoing relevance of sexual discipline for the Church. All over the world, groups of reform-minded Catholics hoped that a Church more open to the experience of lay people would ensue out of the process. Theologians and even bishops publicly clamoured for a revision of the ban on contraception. Unexpectedly, during the Council an amazing resolution by Pope Paul VI took place. On two occasions, he chose to stem the discussions that were taking place: once on the celibacy of the clergy; the other time, on birth control. On these topics he had his secretary announce to the Fathers that he personally would take a stance (Grootaers and Jans, 2002). Later it became known that a pontifical commission of theologians, physicians, demographers and married couples was at work to advise him on the problem of birth control (Kaiser, 1987). In 1966, the commission submitted to the Pope a majority report declaring that the doctrine on contraception could be revised. Two years later,
The utopian order upon which the post-Council Church founds its hope for the future is built on a well regulated use of the human body. Other characteristics, like the sacraments and the identity of the Church, increasingly revolve around sexuality, the family and the management of human life. Re-affirming – after divesting the Council of the authority to do so – clerical celibacy (in the encyclical
First, a distinctive Catholic culture, fighting against the surrounding liberal culture. It is the Church’s fate to be a ‘sign of contradiction’ (HV: 18): ‘Everything therefore in the modern means of social communication which arouses men’s baser passions and encourages low moral standards, as well as every obscenity in the written word and every form of indecency on the stage and screen, should be condemned publicly and unanimously’ (HV: 22).
Second, the inescapable mediation of the sacraments, made all the more likely by the difficulty of complying with strict rules of sexual behaviour:
We have no wish at all to pass over in silence the difficulties, at times very great, which beset the lives of Christian married couples. … Then let them implore God for help with unremitting prayer and, most of all,
Third, the primacy of Rome, which is apparent in the authoritarian way the Pope made his deliberation and declared it to be a natural law admitting no exception.
Within this frame, the different tasks of clergy and lay people receive a corresponding new shape: the clergy is called to help the couples carry out their duties (28–29), while couples are supposed to spread the Catholic ideal of familial love among lay people: ‘like ministering to like, married couples themselves by the leadership they offer will become apostles to other married couples’ (26). A double evangelization, vertical and horizontal, is warmly supported here, centred on conjugal morality. Indeed, in the teaching of John Paul II, pastoral care will be increasingly family-centred. In traditional theology the main concern was the fate of individual souls; therefore the two spouses were considered separately. In sexual sins, they could be differently responsible, the woman sometimes being innocent before the guilty behaviour of her husband (Noonan, 1965: 398–400). In the age of biopolitics, theology considers the couple as a unity, since its outstanding concern is now the transmission and conservation of human life.
At this stage sexuality, the family and human life have become for the Vatican a major investment, both symbolically and strategically. Those issues that once were the abstract concern of moral theologians have arisen as primary for the governing authority. The recruitment of followers and of clergy, a distinct Catholic culture opposed to mainstream liberal culture, and competition with other faiths both depend largely on these issues. The same can be said for competition with nation states. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the struggle was first military and then political. Now it focuses mainly on liberal legislation regarding moral matters (Burns, 1990). For centuries, the condemnation of contraception, abortion and homosexuality was a common point for religious and secular law. Legalisation of abortion and contraception, and increasing social tolerance towards homosexuality – all these processes taking place during the 1960s and 1970s in Western democracies – made civil and religious law diverge for the first time. Western public opinion and law increasingly tended to frame sexual behaviour as a private affair, while the Church insisted on conformity with natural and divine rules.
The promulgation of HV raised vast and loud reactions. Soon thereafter, many moral theologians and national bishops’ conferences distanced themselves from the Vatican’s positions, many theologians and clergy were officially sanctioned, and some of them left the Church (Massa, 2010: ch. 3; Sevegrand, 2008). In the ensuing years an equally formidable silence fell upon it. HV remained Paul VI’s last encyclical, although his papacy lasted for ten more years until 1978. In the following decades endorsement of the official doctrine on sexual behaviour became the new standard to measure loyalty to the hierarchy, both for bishops and for lay people (Burns, 2005).
As the head of an international organization, the Vatican campaigns on two fronts. As a permanent observer at the UN, the Holy See struggles to influence decisions affecting third-world demography (Connelly, 2008). In the developed countries, the problem has taken on quite a different shape. In the age of bioethics, issues like fertilization techniques, stem cell research and euthanasia have become more important than birth control. The evolution in the field of bioethics should not lead us to conclude, however, that everything has changed since the age of pre-war biopolitics. First, some issues are not new: artificial insemination was condemned by the Holy Office in 1897, and later by Pius XII in the 1950s (Noonan, 1965: 499–500); euthanasia had been the cause of a direct confrontation between the German bishops (both Protestant and Catholic) and the Nazis (Richter, 2001). Second, the ‘preferential option’ given from the late 19th century to married, heterosexual couples, who were seen as the most reliable carriers of the faith to new generations, still motivates many of the Vatican’s attempts to contest IVF and homosexual marriages. Finally, the later encyclicals cite the earlier, thereby confirming previous positions even when the context has dramatically changed. 14
The magisterium of John Paul II coped with the varied landscape of bioethical issues by providing a new synthesis, in which the core concept was that of life – biologically-based, not tied to individual bodies, open to the new realities of tissues, cells and embryos that grow only in advanced laboratories. In his writings, he took biopolitics one step further, so much so that it even appears to ‘conquer’ the Bible, as the title of his most important encyclical on these themes,
The emphasis on biological life goes hand in hand with the decline of the topic of eternal life. The post-Council Church has not developed a fully fledged teaching on the afterlife comparable to that on biological life. Indeed, when the hierarchy talks about eschatology, it is often with a certain vagueness and even discomfort. 17 The wary and reticent language used when talking about eternal life marks a clear contrast with the peremptoriness of the statements on sexuality and bioethics.
Fertility and the new religious wave
What we have said about the Catholic Church can, in part, be generalized to other large religious organizations. The Vatican is not the only religious authority that competes in the biopolitical arena. Recently, demographers and sociologists have showed renewed interest in the reproductive behaviour of religious groups. Authors have focused on differences in fertility rates among faiths, and between believers and non-believers (Hout et al., 2001; McQuillan, 2004). On the basis of these and other findings, Eric Kaufmann (2010) has hypothesized that the religious awakening, and the decline in secularization of the last two decades, is mainly due to the higher fertility of religious people. His claim could be complemented by a study of the organizational side of religious groups. As we have seen, the Roman Church has tried hard to make procreation a paramount duty of Catholic couples. Therefore, though religious couples are not naturally more willing to procreate than secular ones, religious organizations may try to influence, through moral arguments, the fertility of believers.
But fertility
Religions will not win the biopolitical challenge simply by fostering demographic growth. In a secular nation, an increase in population may serve the power of the State more than that of the Church. Instead, religious leaders support a complete narrative of the heterosexual, married couple that procreates by natural means and then provides religious education to its children. 18 The domain of family and sexual relations is a social sphere that can be more or less secularized, independently (at least in part) of the overall secularization of the surrounding society (Turina, 2007). For the future of religions, this sphere is today crucial. Those organizations that have managed to prevent its secularization in the past now have a better chance of thriving. 19
The Catholic hierarchy’s decision to strengthen, rather than lower, demands on sexual morality may not be as self-defeating as progressive observers have claimed. Couples ready to run counter to the mainstream liberal morality, in order to meet the strict rules of the Catholic doctrine on sexuality, are also ready to give their children a Catholic education. On the one hand, it is true that the condemnation of sexual freedom is likely to have alienated from the Church a large number of Westerners – both lay people and clergy – in the 1960s and 1970s (Greeley, 2004). On the other hand, though, those who committed to letting the Pope decide about their sexual behaviour could surely be trusted to be good carriers of the faith. Keeping their fertility above the average, the Church could count on a number of large and faithful families in future generations. Today, the best allies of the Church in Western democracies are likely to be strong minorities rather than inattentive masses (Turina, 2011). This mechanism brings together elements of the opposite ideal types of ‘Church’ and ‘Sect’ (Troeltsch, 1992). It fosters the hereditary transmission of faith, handed down from parents to children, as with the Church type. But it relies on high levels of commitment, as in the ideal type of the Sect.
In the course of the last decades, theories of religion as a free and changeable choice of the individual (Hervieu-Léger, 1999) have tended to frame religious identity in the West as achieved rather than as ascribed. The idea of religious choice surely captures a large part of the new religious landscape. But the emphasis on family and religious education on the part of well established denominations also highlights the other side of the coin: even in highly individualistic societies, religion may continue to be, for committed minorities, a family heritage.
Conclusion
Between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, the Catholic Church entered the domain of biopolitics. This appears to have been mainly a consequence of the biopolitical engagement of states and social groups, rather than a conscious strategy devised by the hierarchy. Nevertheless, in the ensuing decades, biopolitical issues gained ground, so that capital issues for the Church – identity, recruitment, competition with nation states and with other faiths – have increasingly been redefined around the issues of family, sexuality and human life. Since 1930 the Holy See has pursued its own, distinctive, demographic policy, in competition with other organizations.
Of course, religious and secular biopolitics differ on many points. Religious organizations usually do not directly control a territory, so that their populations are scattered over one or more countries. Moreover, while secular biopolitics stop short of education, religious biopolitics have the education of children at their centre, since they manage populations of believers, not simply of human beings. Finally, religious biopolitics are typically framed in moral language.
From the political theory perspective, we suggest that historical structures of religious power and its discourse should be considered as being mutually influencing. The teaching of the Church in post-Council decades appears to lend growing importance to biological life at the expense of the traditional discourse on eternal life. Indeed, over the past few decades, while many important documents have focused on issues of sexuality and the defence of human life, very few have explored in depth the topic of afterlife. This shift may reflect the new relevance of biopolitical issues in the eyes of the government of the institutional Church. Sociologists of religion have almost entirely overlooked the problem of the contents of religious discourse, leaving the issue to the care of theologians. There is implicit a division of scientific labour, with sociology focusing exclusively on religious structures, and theology confining itself to religious ideas. We argue that such a dichotomy is inappropriate and limits the scope of sociological analysis. Actually, there exist social, historical and political conditions that make the emergence of a given topic in the theological discourse possible and even reasonable. In turn, choices in theology have, in the long run, an influence on the institutional structure.
Within this theoretical framework, many empirical questions remain open: for example, the attitude of priests and the faithful may be far removed from the auspices of the hierarchy, and surely there are contextual differences within the communities that a centralized discourse tends to overlook. 20 Also to be explored is the possibility of generalizing the framework to other faiths.
Thus far, within the study of religious organizations, the implications of Foucault’s theory of biopolitics have remained, for the most part, unexplored. However, since the Church and other religious actors insist upon issues of family and bioethics as they shape their strategies and policies, our discipline cannot afford to be left behind in defining the conceptual instruments that are necessary in order to follow this evolution. Our belief is that biopolitics is, in this sense, a promising start and a solid base upon which to build a comprehensive theoretical structure.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
On many occasions we discussed the topics of this article with Grace Davie and Pier Paolo Giglioli. Their remarks made a valuable contribution to the research. A first version of this paper was presented at the conference
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Notes
Author biography
Address: Dip. di Scienze politiche e sociali, University of Bologna, via Azzo Gardino, 23, 40122 Bologna, Italy.
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References
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