Michael W. Higgins is the Basilian Distinguished Fellow of Contemporary Catholic Thought at the University of Toronto’s St. Michael’s College.
Prime Minister Mark Carney, left, takes part in a question and answer session with Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs columnist for the Financial Times, during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 20.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
There are several political leaders who like to speak about or invoke God.
U.S. President Donald Trump frequently calls on God to bless America (admittedly a standard non-partisan presidential trope), but also to bless the troops and him. God is his ultimate transactional partner.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s cozy relationship with Vladimir Gundyaev, better known as Kirill, Patriarch of Moscow and all Rus’, confirms their shared conviction that the revival of holy Russia is on the horizon, worth the shattering of millions of lives, and in the process reviving the union of temporal power with spiritual power that we haven’t seen since the Romanov dynasty. We know how that ended.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also likes to keep God on his side, building credibility with the fundamentalist wing of his government. His conjoining with Israel’s righteous right may be more a matter of political pragmatism than religious fervour, but it appeals to a vocal minority of his base and guarantees his tenuous hold on power.
And then there is Prime Minister Mark Carney, a practising Roman Catholic who leaves God out of his political discourse, echoing the often-misconstrued comment of Alastair Campbell, former director of communications for then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who opined “we don’t do God.” Yet religion was present in his celebrated if not controverted Davos address.
Read and watch Mark Carney's Davos speech at the World Economic Forum
Mr. Carney made no direct reference to papal social doctrine, nor did he use theological categories when discussing the challenges facing the world in “midst of a rupture, not a transition.” But he drew from the well of Catholic thought when he referenced the common good, when he called for a “third path” or via media, and when he deployed the social justice principles of subsidiarity (implicitly) and solidarity (explicitly). And in doing so, he anchored his speech in a centuries-old intellectual and spiritual tradition, establishing his legitimacy as a political thinker.
In arguing for a values-based approach, Mr. Carney draws on his substantive pre-political career tome Value(s): Building a Better World for All, in which he wrote that “achieving the common good requires a shared sense of purpose, including the perspective of those on the periphery. With that sense of solidarity we then determine how best to accomplish those goals.”
His effort to form an alliance of middle powers, to strengthen their collective capacity to resist the encroachments of the major powers with their thirst for domination, is reminiscent of Europe in the period immediately after the Second World War. With its devastated economy, shifting territorial identities, crumbling landscape and looming Soviet incursions, Europe was ripe for further shocks to whatever stability it had managed to attain following the end of the Third Reich.
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Out of the ruins, however, emerged three key figures – thinkers, politicians and devout Catholics – who would reconstruct the future of a desolate landscape: Robert Schuman of France, Alcide De Gasperi of Italy, and Konrad Adenauer of Germany. They worked tirelessly to establish a transnational identity for the constituent parts of the European continent. Their efforts – the Council of Europe, the European Coal and Steel Community, and NATO – presaged the creation of the European Union of which they are credited as the founding fathers.
Essential to their political goals – establishing a network of economic integration and defence security as foundations for concord among countries – was the thinking associated with the humanisme intégral of Jacques Maritain, an esteemed metaphysician and political thinker who was a key presence in the drafting of the UN’s Declaration of Human Rights. Maritain’s integral humanism, although grounded in Christian principles, was genuinely interfaith in its scope: it called for co-operation in the pursuit of the common good.
Similarly, Mr. Carney’s Davos summons to create “a dense web of connections across trade, investment, culture on which we can draw for future challenges and opportunities” is a strategy in service of the common good. The Prime Minister’s politics is not a confessional or religious undertaking, but the diverse intellectual and spiritual sources that feed his thought and religious sensibility echo something of the new Europe that rose out of the detritus of the Second World War, and drew on formidable faith and bold thinking.
Canada is not postwar Europe. But the dismantling of the old order and the making of a new one calls for risk management, pragmatic alliances and new visioning – and those things don’t come from a vacuum.
In fighting the new despots and their cabal of power-hungry votaries, Mr. Carney has resources and historical precedents. And he knows that.