Catholic natural law thinkers on nation versus race

As I’ve noted many times (e.g. here and here), natural law theory and Catholic moral theology both affirm the indispensable role in human life of the nation, which is a natural social formation.  The nation is an extension of the family, and like family members, citizens of a nation are typically related by common ancestry.  However, in neither case is this strictly necessary.  Just as someone might become part of a family by marriage or adoption, so too might someone become part of a nation through immigration and assimilation.  Moreover, nations are much looser social formations than families, and common descent is much less essential to them than it is to the family.

The Catholic and natural law traditions recognize this.  Unfortunately, it appears that a certain notorious segment of the online Catholic right does not recognize it.  Obsessed with matters of race, they seem to think their fixation is justified by what the tradition says about the nation, and that only liberalism and post-Vatican II theological mushiness could prevent their fellow Catholics from seeing this.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  In reality, while thinkers in the tradition acknowledge that nations usually arise out of racial or ethnic groups, they commonly deny that a nation is reducible to a racial or ethnic group, or connected to race or ethnicity by strict necessity.  Territorial, historical, and cultural ties between peoples are also important to nationhood, and in some cases more important.

For example, in his classic book Social Ethics: Natural Law in the Western World, Johannes Messner (pictured above) writes:   

In origin the word “nation” indicates a large group united by the common descent of its members.  The example of the Swiss nation, however, in which four different groups are united, shows that even common descent and the associated element of common language is not an integral characteristic of the idea of the nation.  Indispensable, however, are the elements of a fellowship in socially relevant values and the common will to assert this fellowship within the society of nations.  This fellowship is chiefly rooted in common historical experience and presupposes a common territory.

Since historical development is of such significance in the origin of the nation, historical factors must be taken into account, as determining its individual features, more than in any other concept of the social sciences.  Whereas the family is an elementary social unit guaranteed by unvarying functions, the nation, its status, and its functions are subject to far-reaching change.  Some features are conspicuous at certain times and others recede.  The idea of the nation, therefore, is elastic… The fellowship in values may comprise all the fundamental cultural and social values, even religion; it may, however, be confined to a few human and social values of a general character. (p. 474)

Again, writes Messner, while it “possesses great unifying force,” nevertheless “kinship by blood is, as we have said, not an indispensable factor in the constitution of a nation” (p. 477).  He also distinguishes “bond of common blood” from “modern race feeling [which] is an altogether different phenomenon,” and commenting on the historical origins of the latter, he says:

Toynbee sees one of the predominant causes of modern race feeling in Protestantism.  With the disintegration of the European community of Christian spirit, it first emerged, Toynbee points out, in the consciousness of the White overseas settlers who adapted the Old Testament idea of the “chosen people” to their own situation and intermingled it with the fear of losing their new possessions through the defensive action of the natives… Toynbee emphasizes the fact that up to the last quarter of the fifteenth century the members of our Western society did not divide the human family into Whites and Colored, as we do today, but into Christians and Heathens. (p. 477)

Of the relationship between nation and race, Messner concludes:

Therefore, we are bound to conclude that racial consciousness, that is, consciousness of belonging to a particular race, cannot be a decisive element in the life of a nation.  Indeed, history offers no example of racial consciousness playing a pre-eminent part in the progress of a people toward nationhood.  (p. 478)

Catholic legal scholar John Eppstein, in his 1935 book The Catholic Tradition of the Law of Nations, acknowledges that there is a connection between nation and ethnicity, writing:

The fact of birth from certain parents, the fact of their descent in turn from certain ancestors, the far-reaching forces of heredity in the physiological order, and the immemorial institution of inheritance in the social order, these combine to form a community of human souls more or less strongly attached to a certain part of the earth’s surface which human laws, municipal, national or international, can only recognize and respect. (p. 349)

At the same time, he warns against exaggerating the significance of this connection, immediately going on to write:

Yet there is nothing absolute in the association based upon birth.  The mere fact of intermarriage between men and women of different tribal or racial origins, which is an equally natural and almost equally universal phenomenon, while it creates a new family, and therefore a new chain of blood relationship, blurs the outlines of racial particularism.  The universal confraternity of mankind gives rise… to a series of mutual rights and duties which no human groupings have the right to frustrate.  Christianity sanctifying the brotherly union of men, forbids an attachment to race or family so great as to impede the love of God and the love of all men for His sake.  The vision of Peter in the household of Joppe revealed the littleness of racial conservatism.  (pp. 349-50)

 Again, while recognizing that “a natural association, both physical and spiritual, exists between those who have descended from the same progenitor,” Eppstein writes that “it is not necessary to seek in this, the quintessence of racial origin, the sole or even the main basis of society” (p. 348).  He goes on to say:

We have established first that, in the strict sense of association derived from birth, nationality is a natural factor of great importance in the construction of human society.  Secondly, that its mission is neither absolute nor adequate to the whole needs of man.  It is relative: its operation is limited notably by the constant mixture and compenetration of races. (p. 350)

And, commenting on the connection between nationality and culture, Eppstein writes:

Though it is by birth that every human being inherits this form of culture in which domestic tradition plays a predominant part, it is an error to suppose that the only idiom, gestures, modes of expression, physical and moral customs or rules which the human child is normally taught to adopt must be those which are solely connected with racial descent.  This cultural heritage may be changed or even enriched in successive generations by migration, learning, intercourse with other families, groups or nationalities.  (pp. 350-51)

Michael Cronin’s The Science of Ethics also addresses these matters.  In the 1939 edition of Volume II, Cronin notes that families give rise to larger communities which eventually give rise in turn to nations, and that blood relationships initially play a large role.  But of these intermediate communities, he writes:

As growth continued, however, and particularly as intermarriage increased, or perhaps as fusion occurred with other groups, blood-relationships would gradually become so distant as to be almost negligible, so that that which in the beginning constituted the vital bond of connection would at length be superseded in importance by other characteristics of the expanding community. (pp. 507-8)

Cronin goes on to say that while “nationality in its fullest sense” involves descent from a common stock, there is also an extended sense of nationality which does not involve such common descent but instead the binding of peoples together by intermarriage, common environment and history, religion, and the like (pp. 508-9).

Roberti and Palazzini’s 1957 Dictionary of Moral Theology, in its entry on “Nation,” says that “race… is a natural but not exclusive element of nation.  Almost all nations consist of a mixture of different types of peoples” (p. 812).  Its entry on “Race” distinguishes the notion of race from the notions of people and nation.  Race, it says, concerns anatomical and physiological features.  A people, by contrast, is a “sociological entity,” and “one and the same people may consist of various races” (p. 1015).  And a nation is “a political entity made up not only of diverse races but of diverse peoples and inhabitants of different territories who are nevertheless united to some degree by the same cultural ties” (ibid.).

More could be said, but that makes the point.  That ethnic ties are typically a factor in the origin of nations is true enough, but the natural law and Catholic theological traditions do not support an obsessive focus on race or ethnicity as defining or strictly necessary characteristics of nationhood.