Geography: A Tool for Our Earthly Pilgrimage

Do Catholics care about place? Should they? In analyzing the current crises in Church and world, Catholic commentators often focus more on personalities and ideas rather than physical location. That might seem wise, given we are taught as followers of Christ to understand our life here on earth as a pilgrimage. St. Augustine, for instance, wrote: “Now it is recorded of Cain that he built a city (Genesis 4:17), while Abel, as though he were merely a pilgrim on earth, built none. For the true City of the saints is in heaven” (On the City of God, Book 15). But also remember that Christ admonished His listeners (Luke 16:1-8) to learn from the savvy of the compromised steward who was one of the “wise sons of this world” (v. 7) and thus heed the wisdom of business and marketing about the importance of “location, location, location”—in other words: geography.

Geography matters for assessments of events because—like our Catholic beliefs—it is incarnational. To look at matters solely through the lens of philosophy, politics, and ideas risks giving way to a form of Gnosticism, whereas geography shows that real, tangible places are involved. Geography properly understood is about much more than locating places on a map. Rather, it is the study of human activity as it is distributed over the physical world. It looks at population, resources, transportation routes, physical characteristics (mountains, bodies of water, etc.), climate, cultures, and political boundaries, just to name a few aspects.

Geography is a useful tool in studying both conflicts and religion. (Those two subjects often overlap.) In particular, a subset of geography—geopolitics—can prove valuable. Geopolitics takes as its subject the relation between place and power. Powerful countries have access to good transportation routes (usually including seas), abundant resources, and barriers to invasion such as mountains, oceans, or vast distances of territory. For example, the United States has geopolitical advantages: it is protected by oceans, it has no strong neighbors, and it possesses many natural resources.

Do geopolitics influence Catholicism? For starters, we can look at Vatican City. It has practically no natural geographic advantages: it is miniscule, has no natural resources, and is surrounded by Italy. But the Church itself does have advantages. It is widely-dispersed and has a presence through Catholic adherents and humanitarian organizations through most of the world. In reality though, Catholic geopolitical strength is moral rather than political.

We might then ask: Why do some nations seem to punch above their weight class despite geopolitical disadvantages? Consider Israel. A tiny nation, it lacks resources and isn’t on a major transportation route. However, it has three geopolitical qualities: it is within striking distance of both a major “chokepoint” (the Suez Canal) and oil production facilities; it is populated by a large portion of the world’s Jews; and it contains a city sacred to three major religions, Jerusalem.

The Suez Canal is considered a chokepoint—a key concept in geopolitics—because it is a major transportation artery vulnerable to attack or closure. Other chokepoints would include the Panama Canal, the Strait of Malacca, the Bosphorus, and the Strait of Hormuz.

Having a significant number of Jews makes Israel a focus of political and religious attention and even hatred. Tied to that, the location of Jerusalem within Israel makes it a place of pilgrimage and struggle. It might also, incidentally, help protect the nation from a nuclear attack. Would Muslim powers risk destroying one of their sacred cities by a wholesale destruction of Israel?

Farther east, China’s actions over the past century are a seminar in applied geopolitics. They assimilated Tibet, securing the Tibetan Plateau against their perceived adversary, India, and expelling Buddhists who are critical of the Chinese Communist Party. The Beijing regime has sought to roll back the spread of Islam by supplanting Uighur culture in its western territories with Han Chinese language and culture. Finally, the Chinese military has been working hard to make the seas from China southward past Vietnam and as far as the Philippines a de facto Chinese territory. There is also the constant threat to invade the island of Taiwan.

Geopolitics was prominent in the 19th and early 20th centuries—but often in the guise of environmental determinism, which tried to link success or failure to race and climate. But the 21st century has seen a resurgence in geopolitical thinking linked mainly to the far-right—and nowhere more prominently than in the writing of Russian thinker Aleksandr Dugin. Dugin’s ideas have been disseminated to a wider audience through influencers such as Tucker Carlson, who has given prominence to Dugin’s framing of a unipolar versus a multipolar world. In short: a world dominated by one power (the U.S.) must and is being replaced by a world with several power centers. Dugin, and Russian leader Vladimir Putin, seemingly believe that Russia is bound to be one of the new power centers. That was the dream of the builders of the Russian empire, the Slavophiles, and the Soviets.

But Russia, while its vast distances have sometimes protected it from successful occupation (just ask Napoleaon and Hitler, though not the Mongols), also lacks good access to major shipping routes. Its egress from the Baltic and the Black Seas is hampered by other powers, and its port on the Pacific is not currently economically feasible due to weather and transportation costs. To maintain its influence, it has had to rely on supporting so-called independence movements on its border with Georgia and in Moldova, a former Soviet republic, plus its seized territory of Kaliningrad on the Baltic. Its invasion of Ukraine has been with a mixture of success and failure. Ukraine’s geopolitical position is precarious due to lack of defensive terrain. The Polish writer Henryk Sienkiewicz showed this beautifully in his historical novels With Fire and Sword, The Deluge, and Fire in the Steppe. Russia began its geopolitical push by supporting breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine, then by taking over Crimea. The final step was an invasion of Ukraine itself.

One constant in the history of geopolitics is the necessity to control the seas. The foundational text on this is Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783. But history related to the Church supplies numerous examples too. Constantinople was important for its cultural legacy but also because it was the bridge between Asia and Europe. The Holy Land did not last long under Crusader control because of many factors—but partly because of the difficulty of sending supplies and fresh troops across the sea. Third, the Siege of Malta was perhaps even more crucial to stemming the Ottoman tide than Lepanto. The small archipelago would have made a superb base against Italy and the rest of southern Europe had the knights not defeated—by incredible bravery and God’s good graces—the Muslim forces.

A Catholic student of history can only lament that Europe has forgotten those lessons and allowed the two edges of the sword of civilizational death—loss of Faith and depopulation, coupled with mass migration of non-Catholics—to cut down and undermine a continent once the center of geopolitical power in the service of preaching Christ.

None of this analysis is a substitute for a sacred geopolitics, which marks as the center point of all power dynamics in history a lonely hill located outside Jerusalem, the site of a Cross and a tomb that are actually outposts of Heaven. As the psalmist King David writes: “Truth is sprung out of the earth: and justice hath looked down from heaven” (Psalm 85:11). What can stand before a geopolitics of truth and justice?