Pope Benedict XVI’s campaign to remind Europe of its Christian roots and to call Europe to a nobler understanding of democracy. As the Holy Father demonstrated in an address in Zagreb, Croatia, in early June, the two parts of that campaign—the recovery of Christian roots and the deepening of 21st-century Europe’s idea of democracy—go together.
http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2011/08/benedict-xvi-on-europersquos-future
The Pope claims democracy derives from Christianity, but considering how many societies over the centuries considered themselves Christian, one might just as well claim that monarchy, theocracy, serfdom, and tyranny also grew out of Christianity.
Democracy in nation-states is a very recent political/historical phenomenon. After discounting ancient developments in Greek city-states, we can confidently assert that there would be no democracy today without 1. Specific cultural tendencies in England that encourage self-government in 2. its American colonies, which then 3. generated wholly new democratic forms out of its frontier experience.
A careful reading of Christian writers dealing with the existence of the then new American Republic showed that they were actually very worried about said Republic, worried that it not foster Christianity, but would in fact destroy Christian culture. The presumption that European "Christendom" was as firmly based upon the divine right of kings as it was on the Bible is a commonplace historical observation. The further presumption that a society tightly organized under its kings and nobles and official clergy would be the only society capable of sheltering Christianity is also well noted in the literature of political thought in the late 18th century through (at least) the early 20th century.
It would be a much more accurate assertion that modern democracy derives from the Enlightenment...American style.
When did Catholic theologians and popes figure out that their predecessors were wrong about the nature of America and of democracy?
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