My previous article on history and nationalism elicited far more responses than I had anticipated. What I saw simply as a window into one aspect of American Catholic intellectual life seems to have touched a nerve with some readers.
This month’s column leads me unexpectedly into yet another encounter with nationalism. I was drawn to review William T. Cavanaugh’s recent book, The Uses of Idolatry (2024), by its provocative argument that ours is not a secular age, but a profoundly “religious” one: the modern world has not lost belief in God, but has instead abandoned Christianity for many false gods, or idols.
Somewhat to my surprise, I found that Cavanaugh devotes an entire chapter to critiquing the “idol” of the nation-state, worshipped through the religion of nationalism. This framework raises the stakes far beyond the critique I offered of Americanism. The stakes of Cavanaugh’s book are the highest possible. He argues that living honestly as a Christian in the contemporary world requires an awareness of our implication in a world filled with idols that demand our worship even as it allows us to continue to worship Jesus Christ. Further, living faithfully as a Christian requires maximum effort to extract ourselves from the social and political practices demanded by these idolatrous cults, the established churches of our age.
Rethinking religion/”religion” in the modern world
A professor of theology at DePaul University, Cavanaugh has, for over thirty years, provided a powerful voice for bringing the Catholic intellectual tradition to bear on secular topics too often left to sociologists and historians. In my historiography class at Christendom College, I have assigned his essay, “The Myth of the State as Saviour,” included in his 2002 work, Theopolitical Imagination: Discovering the Liturgy as a Political Act in an Age of Global Consumerism. The article presents two provocative arguments that challenge the common-sense understanding of religion and politics in the contemporary West.
First, he rejects the current, still dominant narrative of the modern secular nation state arising from the ashes of the Reformation-era “wars of religion” as the only rational alternative to religious violence. Against popular narratives, Cavanaugh argues that even secular historians have long conceded that these early-modern wars were wars of state formation as much as wars of religion. More often than not, these wars pitted alliances of Catholics and Protestants against other alliances of Catholics and Protestants; during the Glorious Revolution, for example, Pope Innocent XI supported the Protestant William of Orange against the Catholic James Stuart due to his own conflicts with the Catholic King of France, Louis XIV.
Perhaps even more provocatively, Cavanaugh argues that this period saw less the separation of religion and politics than the invention of “religion” as merely a set of beliefs one held in one’s head rather than, as previously, a whole way of life shaping a wide range of social, cultural, political and economic practices. Reduced to a set of beliefs, “religion” could be more easily privatized and managed by the state. At first, monarchs used this conception of religion to create the confessional state, in which an absolute monarch determined the “religion” of his kingdom and controlled the church within it; later, these monarchs concluded that their power could be served even better by allowing for religious toleration, which would weaken “religion” even further by dividing believers among different churches, leaving the state alone as the principle of unity. Church membership would be optional; loyalty to the monarch (later, the state) would be mandatory.
In effect, this returns us to the old religious model of the Roman Empire: the modern state allows the worship of many gods, as long as its citizen/subjects pledge allegiance/burn incense to the state/Caesar.
These are powerful arguments that should be front and center in the intellectual formation of every Catholic in America. Alas, they are not. Cavanaugh has spent his entire career restating and refining these arguments, but his work remains largely unknown to the average educated Catholic. The Uses of Idolatry continues this process of refinement, though it is not likely to make Cavanaugh a household name. It is an important work, but very dense and clearly directed at an academic audience.
In this review, I wish to translate some of its key principles into more accessible language in the hope of fostering discussion among a wider, non-academic audience.
Religion reappears in a different guise
Cavanaugh begins by challenging the notion that we live in a secular age. He makes his argument through an engagement with the work of the early-twentieth-century sociologist Max Weber.
A dominant intellectual presence in Wilhelmine Germany, Weber is perhaps the thinker most associated with the notion of secularization, understood as the waning of religion in the modern world. At the same time, Weber’s best-known work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, argues something quite different: capitalism, the materialist philosophy and economic system that shaped the modern world, grew out of a particular attitude toward the social and material world first developed in the theology of John Calvin.
Weber’s argument is too complex to render here, but the key point of it for Cavanaugh is that religion did not disappear, but rather reappeared in a different guise; put simply, the theology of Calvinism morphed into the economy of capitalism. Nor did Weber see this as the “secularization” of Calvinism. Capitalism retained much of the supernatural qualities of religion, as have most institutions associated with “secular” modernity. Weber wrote of the modern state keeping peace among the “warring gods” of modern society. He stressed most of all that the modern state took over many of the attributes of the old Church; writing somewhat prophetically on the eve of World War I, he insists that in modern nationalism the state has out-Churched the Church by inspiring men to kill and die for the state as few would imagine doing for Church itself. Drawing on work of John Bossy, Cavanaugh glosses these observations as the “migration” of the sacred to other spheres.
Weber was notoriously conflicted and contradictory in his account of this process. Cavanaugh offers some clarity by identifying our “secular age” not as an age without gods, but simply as an age that claims to have no gods and distinguishes, as perhaps no other, between the secular (godless) and the religious (godly).
In chapter two, he critiques the contemporary Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor, known best for his monumental work, A Secular Age (2007), for failing to make this distinction and thus reproducing the very dichotomies Cavanaugh writes to overcome. The next three chapters examine a variety of forms of Catholic idolatry critique, ranging from the Bible to St. Augustine to the philosopher Jean-Luc Marion. Again, these chapters are challenging, but bear fruit. Some key points include: the Old Testament critique of idolatry extended far beyond denouncing the worship of graven images to include all attachments that threaten the priority of our devotion to God; and St. Augustine’s equation of idolatry with self-love, or what Cavanaugh renders in a modern psychological idiom, narcissism.
Modern idolatry
The next two chapters offer case studies in modern idolatry. In chapter six, Cavanaugh examines the “splendid” idolatry of nationalism. This idol earns the positive adjective because Cavanaugh recognizes something noble in nationalism’s ability to inspire self-sacrifice, even to the point of death; he is less sanguine about nationalism’s ability to inspire violence against others, to the point of killing. As we have seen, thinkers as far back as Weber observed the religious character of modern nationalism. Weber, as with the other great sociologist of his day, Émile Durkheim, observed this connection favorably; others, such as the great Catholic historian Carlton Hayes, observed it less favorably.
Cavanaugh draws extensively from Hayes’s classic 1926 essay, “Nationalism as a Religion,” in ways that should give any “patriotic” American Catholic pause this Fourth of July. Cavanaugh summarizes, with some direct quotes from Hayes:
Around this faith in the national god is built an entire system of formation that Hayes likens to medieval Christendom. One does not join the nation voluntarily but is registered as a citizen at birth, as one was previously baptized. Membership in one nation or another is compulsory. The education system inculcates reverence for the stories of national holiness and a proper awe for sacred national symbols like the flag. . . . “[C]urious liturgical forms” have developed for handling the flag, which must never, for example, be profaned by contact with the ground. Schoolchildren are “required to recite, daily, with hierophantic voice and ritual gesture, the mystical formula,” pledging allegiance to the flag and to the nation. The national anthem is “the Te Deum of the new dispensation,” and proper care must be shown not to blaspheme during its performance. Nationalism has its processions, pilgrimages, and holy days. Just as Christians borrowed elements from pagan feasts, so now nationalists borrow freely from Christian celebrations: Flag Day substitutes for Corpus Christi, Memorial Day is the new All Souls Day for remembering the faithful departed, Presidents Day replaces saints’ feast days, the Capitol building is the new cathedral.
True, in theory, the Church allows for a proper love of country (or homeland) under the category of “patriotism.” Still, Cavanaugh shows through convincing examples that the “distinction between patriotism and nationalism is often nothing more than the distinction between what we do and what you do. When Turks have a military parade, it is nationalistic; when it is done in the United States, it is patriotic”.
Cavanaugh’s critique of the idol of consumerism might seem likely to ruffle fewer patriotic Catholic feathers. The word “consumerism” evokes a vulgar materialism that few Catholics would defend. Cavanaugh understands consumerism in a much broader, and more troubling, sense. In his account, consumerism speaks less to the body than to the soul. He quotes a talk presented at a 1923 convention of store display designers, exhorting: “Sell them dreams . . . Sell them what they longed for and hoped for and almost despaired of having. . . . After all, people don’t buy things to have things. . . . They buy hope. . . . Sell them this hope and you won’t have to worry about selling them goods.”
The material pleasure provided by consuming particular objects comes off as reasonable and natural compared to the spiritual lies promoted by consumerism in general.
The idolatrous spirituality of consumerism extends to the production process itself. Drawing on Marx’s concept of the “fetishism of commodities,” Cavanaugh focuses less on capitalist exploitation than on how man-made structures of capitalism have come to be accepted as simply natural, even God-given. Marx, no less than Dicken,s condemned the exploitation of child labor; the atheist Marx, more so than Dickens, linked it to the worship of Moloch, the Canaanite god linked to child sacrifice. Those who object that we have corrected the early abuses of capitalism simply ignore how these abusive structures have been moved to the Third World.
The state and the market
With the shift to a consumer economy in the developed world, objects just magically appear on a store shelf—or in an Amazon box—with consumers having no idea how such objects were produced. Still, in arguing for capitalism and consumerism as idols, Cavanaugh is less concerned with the critique of exploitation than with highlighting the way in which the market becomes a natural principle that demands our allegiance. Like the state, the market gives us no choice. One may be modest in one’s consumer habits, but except for the extreme survivalist, there is no escaping the market. We may or may not attend a church. We all must burn our incense to Mammon.
I am sympathetic to and persuaded by Cavanaugh’s critique of the state and market. I take issue with what remains unsaid, or to use his terms, “un-thought.” Cavanaugh writes for an academic audience overwhelmingly left-liberal in their political orientation. The idols he attacks are safe targets for such an audience; much of his critique could be seen as simply offering a Christian gloss on criticisms common to “secular” academia. Yet, to use his framework, “secular” academia is not secular at all, but has its own idols.
One in particular comes to mind: “autonomy.” By autonomy, I simply mean the assertion of the unfettered freedom to create one’s own identity, free from all received traditions and contemporary social norms. Such a demand has provided the legal and cultural rationale for abortion. To date, in America, alone, over sixty million children have been sacrificed on the altar of autonomy. Is this not worthy of some mention, in a book that claims bravely to attack the idols of the age? In his chapter on consumerism, Cavanaugh cites favorably Latin American liberation theologists who read the Bible “as a contest between the God of life and the idols of death.” Such language resonates with the vision St. John Paul II, that arch-foe of liberation theology, advanced in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae (1995).
This seems to me to be a missed opportunity for a synthesis capable of critiquing the idols of the left as well as of the right. Instead, Cavanaugh’s selective choice of idols renders him acceptable, and nearly indistinguishable, from his mainstream academic colleagues.
I say nearly, because Cavanaugh concludes with a robust account of what makes his critique different from a non-Catholic critique: the understanding of nature as sacramental. Generally, I roll my eyes when Catholic scholars invoke “the sacramental imagination” to explain a distinctly Catholic approach to the world. Too often, it amounts to little more than saying that Catholics affirm the goodness of the created world in opposition to the suspicion of the material world voiced in traditions ranging from Platonism to Puritanism. Cavanaugh puts meat on the bones, so to speak, in drawing on a rich tradition of theological reflection on the meaning of the Incarnation and the relation between nature and grace in the Catholic tradition.
For those up to the challenge of reading a challenging book but preferring small doses, I would start with the last chapter, “Incarnation and Sacrament.” Unlike some other Catholic scholars working in idolatry critique, Cavanaugh realizes that if one is going to attack an idol as a false god, one must be willing to name a god that is true. Cavanaugh has a courage, rare in academia, to name that one, true God: Jesus Christ.
The Uses of Idolatry
By William T. Cavanaugh
Oxford University Press, 2024
Hardcover, 504 pages
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Much of the current discussion concerning “re-enchantment” of the world seems to be degenerating into ordinary aninimism, which Christianity is said to “complete”. It has thoroughly taken hold of conservatism. Scruton openly taught this, claiming that Christ’s Incarnation was just a special repetition of something innate to the world. But this is not raising nature to the divine. Rather, it’s is the compromising of what the divine means – just a romantic take on the Enlightenment in fact. Christianity insists that matter is just “stuff”, unless it’s part of a human body/soul composite, whose destiny is heaven, not earth.
And as a “body/soul composite,” the transcendent unity of an embodied soul (more than even an ensouled body). With St. Paul, a “new creation”.
About the idol of the “nation-state,” we actually have the full spectrum including “multinational states” at one end (post-colonial states aggregated within arbitrary colonial boundaries, and too-often roiled by internal religious conflicts and other disparate communal identities: sectarian, ethnic, racial, language, tribal, urban-rural).
And, at the other end, “multistate nations” (most especially the umma or family of Islam, veneered with the Western nation-state idiom, and reaching from Morocco to Indonesia). And, predating the Westphalian nation-state solution (in 1648, following the Thirty-Years War) by a full millennium is the Islamic mosque-state or caliphate. As in the West, there is an underlying version of natural law, but this is too easily conflated with Sharia Law even as Islamic members of the post-World War II United Nations.
Then, there’s the case of China with an adaptation of Western ideological Marxism fused with the long dynastic tradition dating from the third century BC.
What, now, for the perennial Catholic Church to propose (not impose) regarding the “transcendent dignity of the human person”? As unpacked into the broad Catholic Social Teaching?
Recalling with the Second Vatican Council that: “The role and competence of the Church being what it is, she must in no way be confused with the political community, not bound to any political system [!]. For she is at once a sign and a safeguard of the transcendence of the human person” (Gaudium et Spes, n. 76).
At our point in very long terrestrial history, a challenging political landscape for the perennial Catholic Church and for our Augustinian Pope Leo XIV—from within the Apostolic Succession as commissioned by the incarnate and ever new Jesus Christ.
Ages it takes for the intellectual to find
What the simple already has found in mind. 😏
On that note brother Jacques, is it not simply the Idolatry of the Zeitgeist with which we are confronted? The idolatry of permanent change for change’s sake?
This idolatry is called post-conciliarism.
And it explains the whole adherence to permanent liturgical innovation, when the anti-Catholic circus came to town ?
Just as it explains the anti-Catholic magisterium 2013-2025…
Depending on where you start your analysis in the chaing of cause and effect, you could say that 3 things are usually overlooked though important
1) Love God with your whole mind has not been replaced with an idol but it has led to many Catholics/Christians saying, Oh, I don’t read Scripture or stuff like that I just do unto others …well such stupidity is a fall from being a Christian and a scandal to the rest of the world
2) Like students who say a Rosary for a good grade instead of studying, some have not dont their most basic duties as a citizen
2 of 3 Americans Wouldn’t Pass U.S. Citizenship Test
A survey found that people aged 65 and older were more likely to pass the test than those aged 45 and younger.
https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2018-10-12/2-of-3-americans-wouldnt-pass-us-citizenship-test
3) I think most of all that due to Hillary and Biden and Kamala fatigue many just want to make it through the day. The energy and hope needed to change things is sapped
“Hope has two beautiful daughters; their names are Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are, and Courage to see that they do not remain as they are.”
― Augustine of Hippo
I have recently converted to Catholic faith. Coming from a Baptist/Calvinist/Evangelical background this was quite a shift. I still remember my parents saying they could not vote for JFK because he was Catholic and would take direction from the pope. This was many of the negative propaganda I heard about our beautiful faith, but it did contain a mustard seed of truth. Since Catholicism is truly a global faith many anti-western ideas creep in.
I get it the book is about the damaging effects of a consumerist society, but American nationalism is far from the worst boogieman.
Any organization that inspires passion have the same components. Whether the Catholic church, the Notre Dame Football team or the United States Marine Corps. All have traditions of color, music, hymns, temples where the faithful congregate. It is one of the reasons becoming a Catholic seemed so familiar. Capitalism has none of these uniting qualities. Hence it is NOT a religion.
The grievous exception of this article is leaving out the true religious scourge of the modern age and that is secular humanism. Starting with the first component of the faith (and it is simply a belief) is Darwinian Evolution, which morphed into atheism, Marxism, then the addition of eugenics/abortion, (where human beings were no longer all considered “sinners saved by grace”) and finally human race classification. All this resulted 120 million humans being killed in the 20th century. The latest mutation of this religion of Molech is the rainbow group classifications which came right out of the new atheist movement. Even the desecration of what it means to be a woman, Yah’s masterpiece of creation. Secular humanism is truly the “Abomination of Desolation”
Very interesting. Since the review mentions neither “constitution,” “republic,” nor the “limits” they entail regarding the case of the United States dimension of the study,I assume that Cavanaugh doesn’t either.
Concerning “religion”: The Supreme Court once ruled that “this is a religious nation” – and most justices agreed that in meant “Christian.” (Sisters of Holy Trinity v. US, 1892). Yet, as late as 1971, political philosopher Eric Voegelin silenced me with his question at lunch in Notre Dame’s Morris Inn: “What do you mean by ‘religion’?”
The question abides.
Regarding Catholic nationalism, I would welcome Dr. Shannon’s view of the truly historic decision of Cardinal Gibbons, the “Primate of America,” to support in the name of the Church Woodrow Wilson’s determination to involve the United States in Europe’s Great War. Wilson ran on the slogan, “He kept us out of war” in the 1916 election, and then changed his mind with nary a discouraging word from Gibbons (Congress declared war against Germany on April 6, 1917.)
From what I’ve read, Pres. Wilson really did want to keep us out of WWI but it was an increasingly unpopular view & one difficult to maintain when our allies were being attacked. WWI was a needless tragedy & set the stage for WWII.
There were millions who opposed the war in spite of Wilson’s increasing persecution of opponents of American entry. German- and Irish-American Catholics (the ones called “hyphentated” by Teddy Roosevelt) opposed getting into another European war – and moreover, Germans didn’t want to fight their cousins, and the Irish didn’t want to fight alongside their hated English persecutors.
But Britain wanted us in the war, desperately, while Pope Benedict XV did not. I’d like Dr. Shannon’s views on why Gibbons was so adamant in his support of Wilson – a trend which continued in the bishops’ virtually unanimous support of FDR, and a political alliance with the Democrat party that lasts to this day.
Britain was & is our ally. Pres. Wilson was not excited about entering WWI but eventually he saw no other choice.
Britain will be Islamic by 2040 perhaps, 2050 for sure. It is already a administrative superstate that regulates speech and has condemned small children with rare diseases to death.
What good is this alliance?
Pitchfork, I have family in the UK and what’s been happening there as far as free speech and the sanctity of life is very sad indeed. But they’re still among our allies. They’re not perfect and neither are we.
I recall once reading WWI referred to as “the war that proved absolutely nothing.” (I tried posting this response once before but am not sure if it went through. If it did and this is a repeat, no use in posting both.)
Cavanaugh’s ‘state as savior’ was USA in vogue, whereas our two party system has diversified. For the former, self perceived savior, anarchy reigns under new god Liberty. Reigning supreme our current leader is labelled King.
Christopher Dawson named the propensity in Man to worship something, as it’s indicated in his nature to apply his life to some end – religiosity. Dr Shannon recognizes the Church sanctification [initially made by John Paul II] of dreaded nationalism with spiritually amicable patriotism. What to look for?
The Church? Where it stands. It preempted Weber’s Capitalism diagram under Leo XIII. Whereas Leo XIV true to his word as disciple and honorary captain of Francis I is rapidly, despite cries of let’s wait to give the man a chance to clearly reveal his agenda – is demolishing the borders,tearing them down ideologically in pursuit of Francis’ globalization ideologically.
Borders, the sine qua non of nationhood was addressed with serious displeasure during his Pentecost Vigil Mass. Cut to the quick his idea of Synodality as a continuous journey toward new horizons leaves open what’s increasingly shaping out to be a new world of homogenized Christianity.
I’m not sure we should jump to conclusions yet about Pope Leo. He has been more strident than Pope Francis when it comes to Ukraine’s borders. The US border with Mexico is a special case because it’s the only Western border that’s being crossed en masse by Christian, Catholic Westerners (85-90%), not Muslims and pagans. Remember that this was also originally part of the Hispanic world, and the South West of the US never lost its intimate cultural connection with that world. The misdemeanour of residential irregularity obscures the main issue, I think, which is plain WASP hostility to the Catholic, Hispanic world it moved into (via its own illicit mass migration) in the mid nineteenth century. I know that few around here want to hear this, but it’s surely time to face facts. The ICE raids in Los Angeles targeted people who were law-abiding and hard working – apart from that misdemeanour. The protests that ensued were often sponsored by “native” feral leftists. Yet Trump demeaned the soldiers at Fort Bragg by telling them that the US was under invasion by violent aliens. I believe that the eventual result of all this trouble will be zero for the left, Zero for Trump and WASP hegemony, ten for Hispanic consciousness and resurgence – which may not be a bad thing for the Christian West.
What I’m as interested in knowing, as you would be too, is Pope Leo’s attitude to mass Islamic/pagan migration to Europe. If he is as ambivalent/favourable as Pope Francis was, then you might be right on that score, that the continuity is real, not just symbolic and testimonial. I hope you’re wrong there, for the Church’s sake.
Should read: demolishing borders, tearing them down ideologically in pursuit of Francis’ globalization [ideology].
We are plagued by an anti-Christian and anti-family society that murders the unborn, approves of gay marriage, and mutilates children with sex change procedures, We need to return to the society founded by our Christian fathers. We have become a godless society that is on a road of self-destruction. Satan is working overtime to destroy our country
So, another case of globalism good, America bad?? Just wondering, as I am good and sick of hearing such things. Few nations have had the impact of making change for good in the world as America has. Fortunately American culture, if you are honest, includes many positive elements: helping others in need ( no matter if this is war-time, or after a natural disaster) is a big element for us. Highly available public education and health care for its citizens. Our scientists have discovered numerous cures for disease, which have benefitted not only us but again the world at large. . Capitalism has elevated the average citizen here to live in a way which is the envy of the world (even at a basic level of having food, clean water and a place to live). Are there problems we are still working on, like a level of homelessness? Yes. What of it? Further many of those issues have been worsened by the wide open border idiocy of the past administration.
People have drifted from the church in part because of increasing selfishness and secularization, about which the church and its ministers have said little to nothing in recent years. When did you last hear a homily about couples living together, sin in general, or couples not baptizing their kids? Not to mention the sex abuse crisis which the church barely weathered.
I dont think loving your country and appreciating its better qualities rises to the level of worship. If the church is worried about national influences on its members, maybe they should NOT be making deals with obviously corrupt nations like China. Even to allowing them to name their own Bishops!!! I am not aware the US was ever given THAT kind of deal.
Reading your observation that American culture has many positive elements, I’m reminded of the late Jeane Kirkpatrick, who once stated, “Americans are going to have to start accepting the truth about themselves, no matter how flattering.”
Adding to Christopher Manion, and about “constitutions” and “republics,” we also have too much the discontinuous pivot points in the so-called arc of history….
The Presbyterian President Wilson and Great Britain’s deist/agnostic David Lloyd George both had low esteem for things Catholic. The case is made that if the multinational (and Catholic) Austro-Hungarian Empire had not been dismembered by Wilson and others as part of the Versailles Treaty, a political vacuum would not have been resulted in central Europe.
A vacuum then filled by Hitler, beginning with the 1938 Anschluss takeover of Austria, then the 1939 annexation of the Czech Sudetenland (Chamberlain in Munich in 1938: “peace in our times!”), and later, in September 1939 the Blitzkrieg into Poland. The rest is history!
The geographic minorities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were also restless, and so a reformed and yet continuing and unified multinational-state, with a (Catholic-style) constitutional monarchy of some sort (like Great Britain?), might have been a local long shot, but the other shots of World War II were heard round the world.
In our post-Christian civilization, how now to do “discontinuity WITHIN continuity”?
Seemingly very tangential, much of Islam foresees instead the “peace” of an eventual Caliphate under Shariah Law, with what’s left of the West probably as an encysted dhimmi and a flash in the pan between two epochal tyrannies—Roman and Islamic.
Maybe there’s something to Faith & Reason after all, as Pope Benedict proposed in his 2006 Regensburg Lecture. An address rejected outright in the Islamic world and ignored in the sleepwalking West. https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2006/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20060912_university-regensburg.html
As the 19th-century Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) said: “If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and then make fun of it.”
Wilson was a detestable ghoul.
Part of the rest of the story might be the leftist idealist/diplomat/ordained minister George Davis Herron, and last-minute advisor to President Wilson.
On a confidential peace mission from Vienna (Feb. 3-4, 1918) Heinrich Lammach proposed to Herron an Austro-Hungarian monarchy transformed into “a federated political body in which, entirely in keeping with one of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, the individual nations (ethnic groups) would be ‘accorded the freest opportunity of autonomous development.’ But Herron wrote a negative report [!] to the trusting President and “on February 11, the President made a speech which implicitly rejected the Austrian peace overture [….] Lammasch returned to Austria a broken man [….] Had Austria-Hungary been taken out of the war, Germany could not possibly have fought on…” (Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, “Leftism Revisited: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot,” Regnery Gateway, 1990, pp. 210-216, primary citations).
Maybe too little too late. But, today how to connect ideologies and the pragmatic flow of events with the principles of Catholic Social Teaching—which, rather than simply another ideology, “belongs [instead] to the field…of theology and particularly moral theology” (St. John Paul II, Centesimus Annus, 1991, n. 55)?
The answer to THAT question runs higher and deeper than pragmatic diplomacy (or town hall versions of “synodality”?) and involves the splendor of non-variable moral principles and absolutes (Veritatis Splendor, 1991).
World War 1 did indeed set the stage for WW II but WW II was incidental. It was in World War 1 that Western Civilization committed suicide and the West has not recovered since.