Democracy may be over, but should Catholics Care?
- Sebastian Morello
- Mar 27
- 7 min read
According to a report published by The Guardian in January of this year, a fifth of Brits aged 18-45 would prefer to have unelected leaders, and hence to cease living in a democracy. There may be many reasons for this rise in anti-democratic feeling, one of which is surely that our democratic settlement is meant to make ‘the people’—the demos—feel more politically empowered, but with each election, changes for the better do not seem to come about and changes for the worse seem to escalate. People feel disempowered by our democratic arrangement, not empowered; and consequently, we seem to be observing the rise of an age of strongman politics.
Perhaps Catholics need not feel terribly alarmed by this trajectory away from our short-lived love affair in the West with democracy. Pope Leo XIII’s 1892 letter to the French Church stated the following:
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