The Roman Catholic Church has had an uneasy relationship with the nation state since the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) ratified the political breakup of Latin Christendom. In the eyes of Rome, the sovereign state is the illegitimate offspring of the Protestant Reformation — but also a potential ally in the sacramental and evangelistic mission of the Church. In the eyes of the state, the universal Church is either an enemy bent on domination or a partner in governing — either of which, as it turns out, is a useful tool for nation building. In short, both Church and state have an interest in maintaining a relationship with the sometimes dangerous “other.” Exactly how the Catholic Church relates to contemporary states and how these relationships vary over time and between countries are important questions for students of religion and politics. This book is one of the most significant recent contributions to a growing literature that addresses these issues in a truly comparative fashion.

Most chapters in this well-edited volume contain single nation case studies of Church-state relations over time. Some of the old standbys are present — the countries of Latin Europe, Ireland, and Poland, for instance — but so are neglected cases including India, China, East Timor and Congo. Each richly detailed chapter sets the Church-state relationship in its historical context, giving the non-area specialist enough background to make sense of the contemporary situation.

The book is divided into five parts preceded by a theoretical introduction by the editors. The first part contains two chapters on the theological and political challenges of the Vatican: the first, by Kenneth Himes, explores the theological and political implications of Vatican II; the second, by Lisa Ferrari — somewhat oddly in a book focused on domestic politics — examines the Vatican's international role as a transnational actor. The remaining four parts of the book group the cases by the challenges facing the contemporary Church in each country: secularization (Latin Europe, America, Chile), opposition (Poland, Ireland, East Timor), justice (Brazil, Rwanda, Angola) and accommodation (India, China, Congo). The volume concludes with a valuable set of statistical appendixes.

The editors' strategy makes clear that the Catholic Church experiences a variety of relationships with host nations. In the United States, Chile, and the old countries of Latin Europe (France, Italy, Spain and Portugal), the Church faces internal and external secularizing forces but remains an important pressure group, especially on moral issues such as divorce and abortion. In Poland, Northern Ireland and East Timor, the Church led the nation through an intense struggle for independence and now must establish a new relationship with a state no longer considered an enemy, but not always a friend. Similarly, the Church in Brazil, Rwanda, and Angola has taken prophetic stands against the state in a continuing struggle for economic and social justice. The Indian, Chinese and Congolese Churches face the challenge of accommodating to state regulation in unfavorable religious and political climates. The picture painted by these challenges is not a particularly bright one from the perspective of the Church: it is struggling for political and social influence in different ways in each of the countries analyzed.

The central message of this book is that one size does not fit all when it comes to Church-state relations. Nevertheless, common themes stretch across the cases. For instance, Vatican II revolutionized the Church's approach to domestic governments. Prior to Vatican II, the Church aligned itself with anti-democratic, right wing, authoritarian regimes in an attempt to forestall communism and the secularizing elements of liberal democracy. Thus the Church explicitly or implicitly backed authoritarian regimes in Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Chile and Congo, and colonial regimes in East Timor, Rwanda and Angola. Vatican II reordered the Church's priorities by placing human dignity at the center of its social mission. Defending human dignity placed the Church in opposition to many regimes it had previously supported; by the early 1970s national churches were backing anti-authoritarian forces in Europe, Latin America and Africa, helping to launch what Samuel Huntington has called the “third wave” of democratization.

Another theme that runs through the volume concerns the Church's efforts to steer a middle course between socialism and liberalism. In 1891, Pope Leo XIII issued his influential encyclical, Rerum Novarum, directing the Church to work for economic and social justice by rejecting both the godlessness of Marxism and the individualism of liberalism. Leo's alternative was to embrace a corporatist approach to political economy that preserved community and softened the harsh edges of capitalism. In response, the Church tended to support Vatican-friendly, corporatist regimes in Europe and Latin America. After Vatican II, however, the Catholic critique of capitalism and a newfound emphasis on bringing justice to the poor pushed parts of the Church (especially in Brazil) toward the radical left. Pope John Paul II checked the most extreme liberationist tendencies but did encourage Catholics to continue working against economic and social injustice. The struggle for justice meant combating the evils of capitalism in some countries (Brazil, America) and the evils of colonialism in others (East Timor), as well as communism (Poland, China), the caste system (India), corruption (Congo) and ethnic competition (Angola). Here we see the Church at its prophetic best.

But the Church also faces external and internal difficulties — a third theme in the volume — that complicate and often weaken its ability to influence the state. Sex scandals have undermined its moral authority everywhere, but especially in America and Europe. Furthermore, the Church has lost ground to Protestant groups — particularly Pentecostals — in the Global South and finds it hard to adjust to this new competitive environment, especially when its clergy is stretched thin and aging. On the whole, the Church takes seemingly contradictory positions in different national contexts — outsider versus insider; source of national identity versus colonial collaborator; moral versus institutional actor — that sometimes defy easy explanation.

The cases presented in this volume offer students of politics and the Catholic Church much raw material for analysis. The weakness of the book is that it contains too few social scientific conclusions. “Why?” is a question never fully explored. Tremendous differences in Church-state relations are revealed by the cases. Do any of the standard theories prominent in the literature explain variation? Do theories of secularization, religious market competition, social cleavage, or institutional organization apply? The curious will have to seek the answers elsewhere.

In the end the volume suffers from a split personality. It admirably combines theological reflection with social science to deepen our understanding of Church-state relations. But keeping theology and science in balance is difficult, and some contributors veer off into polemics. The chapter on Rwanda, for instance, critiques the Church for complicity in the 1994 genocide on moral grounds but offers no rigorous explanation for why the Church so abandoned its mission of protecting human life there. Other chapters will be pleasing to social scientists, especially those by Ted Jelen (America) and Timothy Byrnes (Poland). But the book as a whole leaves the student of Church-state relations wondering what ties all of the cases together.