Fr Gerard Quirke of Achill parish celebrates dawn Mass on Easter Sunday at a penal times Mass rock overlooking Keem Bay on Achill Island. Photo: Sean Molloy. The return to public worship is welcome, but now is not the time for silence and inaction, writes Dr Philip Gonzales
Are we now living in a health dictatorship and one that is targeting religious services and public worship? These questions can no longer be avoided. With the Primate of All-Ireland Archbishop Eamon Martin, I would like to express my “deep concern” over the criminalisation of public worship and outdoor Confession. This is a slippery and devious slope. We must call a spade a spade and say that a totalitarian precedent is being set. It is time for Catholics (and our religious brothers and sisters from all religions) to vigorously — yet peacefully and nonviolently — voice their concern over the way in which the Government in the Republic is responding to the Covid-19 crisis. This is not the time for inaction and silence. It is the moment to show our deep solidarity as members of the body of Christ; a body which is communal and incarnate and that finds its life and centre within the sacramental life of the Church.
The Eucharist is essential and, indeed, as the great theologians Henri de Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar understood, the Eucharist institutes the Church. There is nothing more essential than Christ. There is more than simple bodily health. There is the health of the spirit which, for Catholics, is to feed off the body and blood of Christ. The Church has been nothing but cautious and compliant and all rightful caution can be met without excluding spiritual health.
Believing citizens
A government that can no longer see — or care — about this aspect of its believing citizens is one that no longer understands or sees the common good and the essential nature of freedom to worship, not just for Catholics, but for all its believing citizens within the Irish Republic. Every governmental decision is being made on the sole basis of ‘biosecurity,’ and this is the bare minimum of human life and what it means to be human, communal, political, and religious.
There is far more to human communal life than the biological. But how can the Government have really lost sight of this? How is its stance towards public worship been the most extreme in the European Union? Can philosophy tell us anything about the kind of base biological politics and decision-making being practiced by the Government and its disastrous and inhuman decision to criminalise public worship, the Mass, and Confession? My position is that it can and that the response of the Irish Government to the Covid-19 crisis, although the most extreme in the EU, is part and parcel of a larger political shift in Western liberal democracies and their drift towards a new form of totalitarianism. To understand this drift and what is happening in Ireland today and, indeed, around the world we must look at one of the major discoveries in political and juristic theory in the 20th Century, for totalitarianism feeds off our ignorance of history.
State of exception
This drift is rooted in a politics that is more and more governed by the ‘state of exception.’ The most important political theorist in this regard is Carl Schmitt (1888-1985). Mr Schmitt was the leading jurist of the Weimar Republic and he became known as the ‘crown jurist of the Third Reich.’ In 1922 he wrote a landmark book entitled Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, in which he famously and ominously declared “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” His basic point is that within politics there are always emergencies, exceptions, and events that cannot be foreseen and handled within the normal political order. And when these emergencies or exceptions happen rapid decisions are required that must bypass the normal deliberations of the workings of Western bureaucratic democracies. This is seen in the fact that within the various constitutions of Western democracies there are articles or provisions for ‘states of emergencies,’ ‘states of siege,’ ‘states of war,’ ‘martial law,’ and so on.
Suspend
There are articles and provisions in the law that suspend the normal working of the law, our rights, and freedoms. Historically, this is most notoriously seen in Article 48 of the Weimar Republic that allowed for a suspension of the law in the event that public security was under threat. Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party convinced President Paul von Hindenburg to trigger article 48 after the burning of the Reichstag, a fire that the Nazis alleged was set by the communists. This allowed for the Nazi regime to lawfully enact a continuous ‘state of exception’ that lasted the duration of their power. Under this legally valid suspension of the law came about some of the most horrific crimes ever committed against humanity.
Mr Schmitt joined the Nazi party in 1933 and devoted his legal brilliance to justifying Hitler’s killings of his political opponents as well as purging Jewish influence from jurisprudence. It would be easy to dismiss Mr Schmitt and his legal theory of the exception as a mere horrific Nazi episode which happened once and could never be repeated.
As controversial as Mr Schmitt is, he is largely acknowledged as one of the greatest legal theorists in the 20th Century, by thinkers on both the right and the left. He seemed to hit the pulse of the development of Western liberal democracies in the latter half of the 20th Century and 21st Century. The Jewish philosopher, Jacob Taubes, suggests that Mr Schmitt’s political theories were used in the founding of the State of Israel. It has likewise been argued that he had a significant influence on American neoconservatism and its justification of its ‘war on terror’ as seen in the political thinking of Alberto Gonzales and John Yoo. An effect that was seen in the US Patriot Act of 2001. This law perversely erased any legal status of suspected terrorist detainees to the point of them not even having the rights of criminals charged with a crime or having the status of a prisoner of war (POW), as defined by the Geneva Convention. In a word, they did not exist before the law. Since 9/11 and the ‘war on terror’ the ‘state of emergency’ is becoming more and more the norm in Western governments’ responses to perceived terrorist threats or otherwise. Mr Schmitt’s theories, however, are not confined to the West but have also had an enormous impact on the Chinese government — that monstrous hybrid of capitalism/communism — since Xi Jinping became leader of the Chinese Communist Party, as seen in theorists like Liu Xiaofeng, Wang Shaoguang, Jiang Shigong.
In present day Europe the world-renowned philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, is using Mr Schmitt’s theory of the ‘state of exception’ to critique the current workings of Western democracies drift towards totalitarianism. Dr Agamben brilliantly showed how the ‘state of exception’ was used to justify the Patriot Act, and he was heralded as a kind of intellectual hero in doing show. Dr Agamben has recently caused enormous shockwaves when, at the outset of the pandemic, he was highly critical of the excessive response by Western democracies in the wholesale freezing of civil liberties in a universal ‘state of exception’ the likes of which the world has yet to see. He was also critical of the Catholic Church’s response that too easily forgot the work of mercy, visiting the sick to the point of risking one’s life for love of neighbour, as is integral to Christian teaching.
Biosecurity
Dr Agamben is largely acknowledged to be one of Europe’s greatest living philosophers, if not the greatest. But with his response to Covid-19 some are now dismissing him as a raving old man. Yet, what he is saying is that there is far more to human life than our obsession with ‘biosecurity,’ and that if fathers cannot be there for the birth of their children, if we cannot bury our dead, if we cannot receive our Lord, if we cannot love our neighbour and be with them in their time of sickness, then something perverse is going on. The trick of the theory of the exception is that it tells us it will save the good by suspending the good, save our freedom by suspending our freedom. But this is false, and we must ask what is going on.
The Irish constitution of 1937 has a narrow provision for the state of emergency that only allows the government to declare a national emergency “in time of war or armed rebellion.” So, in mid-March of last year the Health (Preservation and Protection and other emergency measures in the public interest) Act 2020 was enacted. This gives the power for “far reaching regulations” to combat Covid-19, to the point of even allowing “detention and isolation of persons in certain circumstances.” This part has come under strong criticism by the Irish Council of Civil Liberties. And now, the criminalisation of public worship and outdoor Confession. This is the logic of the ‘state of exception’ to the core. Who of us would have ever thought that in the 21st Century that we would be living in a country where it can be made a criminal offence by the stroke of a pen to receive the Eucharist, where to confess one’s sins out of sorrow and love is a crime, where it is forbidden to bury the dead, where a father is not allowed to be present at the birth of his child? The good is not saved by forbidding what is most human about us and our freedoms are not secured by taking them away in the name of a ‘common good’ that knows nothing of the meaning of our communal and religious nature. When this is done, we are reduced to biological beings that are no longer human because all decisions are made solely on the basis of physical health. “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” In Ireland this is taking the form of a health dictatorship which makes all decisions only through the narrow lens of the health ‘exception’ of Covid-19. In these decisions what is human is forgotten and what is religious is criminalised.
We returned to Mass this week, but has the precedent been set for our future…?
Dr Philip Gonzales is a lecturer in philosophy at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth. This article is part of a new regular column where philosophers from Maynooth Drs Gaven Kerr and Philip Gonzales offer accessible introductory thoughts on perennial themes in the history of philosophy and the Catholic tradition.