Religion In William Cavanaugh's Torture And Eucharist

In his work Torture and Eucharist, William Cavanaugh traces the Catholic Church’s responses to the use of state-sanctioned torture by the mid-twentieth century Pinochet regime in Chile. In doing so, Cavanaugh confronts various ecclesiologies concerning church-state relations and the Church’s role within civil society, lending theological support to a Eucharistic ecclesiology in the process. However, Cavanaugh is highly critical of ecclesiologies that make a distinction between the political and social planes, such as Jacque Maritain’s New Christendom model. Cavanaugh argues that by exclusively circumscribing the Church within the social, or spiritual, realm, such ecclesiologies facilitate the Church’s disappearance as a societal body and strip

The modern state seeks its self-preservation above all else, and history reveals that governments are more than willing to exercise their monopoly on force and coercion in order to cement and defend their authority (5-6). Normally, unified social bodies such as the Church seek to counteract the dominance of the state through their public and political influence. However, when the Church simultaneously abdicates its political connections and powers and interiorizes itself within individual Catholics, it frees the state to exercise its will with little backlash: “Once the church has been individualized and eliminated as Christ’s body in the world, only the state is left to impersonate God”

This does not, however, dismiss the reality of torture in Chile nor soften Cavanaugh’s criticisms of “distinction of planes” ecclesiologies. Church paradigms such as Maritain’s New Christendom have led Catholics in Chile and elsewhere to buy into a “devil’s bargain” wherein the Church confines itself to the social, or spiritual, realm and allows the state to dominate in the political, or temporal, realm (196). Such ecclesiologies simultaneously facilitate the Church’s disappearance as a societal body and strip the Church of any tangible ability to counteract the actions of oppressive governments. The Chilean church’s ecclesiology had real, disastrous consequences for Chileans under the Pinochet regime – consequences that perhaps could have been mitigated under a different ecclesiological