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Beginning before 1800 and extending over two centuries, there occurred, simultaneously, the greatest revolutions in the history of the world—political, social, economic, intellectual, and scientific.
The Restoration
The attack on religion by the French Revolution had led to the downfall of the entire Old Regime and to decades of near chaos, so that even people of skeptical mentality now came to believe that religion was necessary. (The aged Talleyrand, repenting on his deathbed, turned his hands over to remind the attending priest that, as a bishop, he had already been anointed on his palms.)
De Maistre
To Joseph de Maistre (d. 1821), a diplomat in the service of the principality of Savoy, the Revolution had been a cleansing fire that restored Christendom—a whirlpool in which God had destroyed and made new, with the revolutionaries, against their own will, serving as His agents. The destruction of the Old Regime and the Gallican church had been necessary for the revival of Christendom, thought de Maistre, and the Revolution had also revealed the anarchic character of popular sovereignty, showing that fear of punishment and obedience to authority—that of the pope above all—alone could suppress the disorders wrought by human sinfulness.
Congress of Vienna
Following Napoleon’s defeat, the great powers assembled in the Congress of Vienna in order to restore Europe as much as possible to the conditions of 1789. Based on the principle of “legitimacy”, dynastic rights as they existed prior to the Revolution were renewed for several royal families.
Cardinal Consalvi, the papal secretary of state, was recognized as the most able diplomat at the conference, obtaining the return of almost all the Papal States that had been lost. But, despite his achievements, the relationship of church and state in the nineteenth century was a tangled skein almost everywhere. Catholic Austria led the way in restoring the prerevolutionary regimes, but Josephinism survived, as did Febronianism among some German and Italian bishops. In France, the close alliance with the restored Bourbon monarchy also restored a kind of Gallicanism.
New Ideologies
The history of the West after 1815 was to a great extent the history of continuing conflict among competing ideologies: Conservatism, Liberalism, Socialism, Nationalism, and others. Antagonisms of race, nationality, class, and religion, all of which were perennial in human affairs, were now the proverbial genies that could not be put back into the bottle. It was during this period that the familiar division of politics into liberal and conservative (“left” and “right”, from the seating arrangements in the French National Assembly in 1790) came into common use.
Conservatism
Conservatism was a defense of monarchy and social privilege, resting on the force of tradition; it assumed that the old ways, having survived for so long, were presumably the best ways. Society was seen as an organism in which each person functioned as part of a hierarchy. Following the Congress of Vienna, an ecumenical Holy Alliance was forged among Protestant Prussia, Catholic Austria, and Orthodox Russia—all pledged to suppress rebellion wherever it reared up. Whatever their personal beliefs, such conservatives always recognized the social importance of religion.
Liberalism
Liberalism was in a sense the unfinished agenda of the Revolution—relativizing the traditional authorities of church and state, free elections, governments answerable to their citizens, basic civil liberties—and it was embraced by much of the growing middle class. Liberalism did not necessarily require the end of monarchy, which was still regarded by many people as the natural form of government. But the monarch had to accept a limited role defined by a constitution, an arrangement that, through much conflict, was eventually worked out in most European monarchies.
Vatican Response
Consalvi, the consummate diplomat, believed that the Holy See should avoid rigid positions, so as to be able to survive in the changing world. Thus, under Pius VII, the Holy See remained aloof from the Holy Alliance when rebellions broke out against the Austrians in Italy, and it officially recognized Latin American countries that threw over the rule of Spain. When Charles X of France (1824-1830), brother of the guillotined Louis XVI, was overthrown in a second revolution, Pope Pius VIII (1829-1830) reluctantly recognized the new regime of the liberal monarch Louis Philippe (1830-1848). The Holy See responded to these situations mainly by diplomatic means, concluding a series of concordats with various states that achieved (usually only temporarily) the restoration of some lost rights. But under Pope Gregory XVI (1831-1846), the papacy essentially made a strategic alliance with Conservatism, and that brought its own problems.
The Liberal Order
Church leaders were resistant to Liberalism because of the belief that the social and political orders were based on divine law and could not be altered merely by human will and that rebellion was wicked because of the inherent sinfulness of human nature. The idea of popular sovereignty was therefore seen as a kind of idolatry of the popular will. Even many liberals admitted that their political program was necessarily based on a relativistic philosophy that denied the possibility of absolute truth.
Anti-Religion
The antagonism between the Church and Liberalism was thus a vicious circle—the Church condemned Liberalism as a subversion of order, while liberals opposed the Church as a remnant of the Old Regime and an enemy of progress. Wherever it triumphed in Catholic lands (France, Spain, Belgium, various Italian states, the newly independent countries of Latin America), Liberalism tended to curtail the Church’s rights; while in dominantly Protestant lands (Prussia, the Netherlands, Switzerland), it allied itself with the Reformation churches. The Masonic Order was now a champion of Liberalism and sometimes openly atheistic. In many countries, it was an implacable foe of the Church.
Liberal Coercion
In countries without a tradition of religious toleration, Liberalism was often violent, provoking fierce Catholic opposition in turn. Mob violence against churches or priests often went unpunished, and protesting bishops were sometimes imprisoned or exiled. Liberal governments often violated their own professed principles, but the Church could not readily claim the protection of those principles, because most of the hierarchy rejected them, instead claiming toleration for Catholicism on the grounds that the true faith could not be suppressed. The hierarchy opposed the extension of religious liberty to Protestants by Catholic governments because “Error has no rights” and freedom of religion would undermine the divine authority of the state.
The Limits of Toleration
In practice, most countries adopted limited toleration in order to avoid civil strife. There was minimal freedom of worship, so that nonestablished churches were often not allowed to call attention to themselves by building steeples, for example. In the British Isles, only Anglican places of worship could officially be called churches, all others being mere “chapels”.
A disputed issue in every country with an official religion was the legal standing of marriages performed by clergy of other churches. Only gradually did governments recognize such unions, in the face of opposition by the clergy of the established churches. In Protestant lands, governments sometimes forbade Catholic priests to require the partners in a mixed marriage to promise to raise their children as Catholics. In some ways, the most important part of the liberal program was universal, state-sponsored education, which to a great extent was intended to bring about the secularization of society, an issue that continued to fester well into the twenty-first century.
Besides attempting to control education, states unfriendly to Catholicism interfered with the appointment of bishops and restricted or suppressed religious orders. The restored Jesuits were expelled from Switzerland and Russia and for a time were again suppressed in France, although they were allowed to function there under a different name. (They were not permitted back into Switzerland until 1973.)
In England, Liberalism came closest to living up to its professed beliefs. In 1829, despite the opposition of George IV (1820-1830) and fierce popular anti-Catholicism, the government, under the hero of Waterloo, the duke of Wellington (d. 1852), granted Catholics most civil rights.
The Papal States
The papacy was most directly confronted with the forces of Liberalism in the Papal States themselves. After their restoration in 1815, all the reforms introduced under French rule were repealed, against Consalvi’s better judgment, so that, for example, clergy once again held most government posts and Jews were returned to the ghettoes, where on Sundays they were required to listen to sermons haranguing them for their stubborn resistance to the Gospel. The Papal States were among the last European countries to allow torture in regular criminal proceedings.
Intense agitation for change followed the 1815 restoration, including acts of terrorism and armed rebellions, many of them organized by an anticlerical secret society called the Carbonari (“charcoal-burners”, because they originally met in the forests), which had Masonic links. The rebellions were put down by force, including numerous executions. Some of the rebels wanted to abolish papal rule altogether, while others demanded a modernized administration, a degree of self-government, and a guarantee of personal liberties. The popes, however, introduced only minor reforms. These disorders exposed a dilemma that the papacy had long had to face: the Catholic powers, especially Austria, often interfered in Italian affairs in ways that constricted the autonomy of the Papal States, but Austrian armies were sometimes needed to suppress Italian rebellions.
Lamennais
While many Catholics could see no alternative to the traditional alliance of throne and altar, a bold new vision—simultaneously both conservative and radical—was proposed by the French priest Hughes-Félicité de Lamennais (d. 1854). He proposed nothing less than that the Church should put herself at the head of the new liberal movements, with the clergy taking control of what he considered to be an inevitable new revolution, in order to establish a society infused by Christianity and guaranteeing liberal freedoms.
Lamennais began as a royalist, a traditionalist, and an Ultra-montane. But his opposition to Gallicanism eventually forced him to abandon his royalism and to seek ways of christianizing the new social and political movements, basing political liberty on the teachings of the Church concerning human free will. Lamennais proclaimed that divine providence was bringing a new order into being and urged the practice of apostolic poverty as the antidote to social injustice. He had a profound sense of the Church as a spiritual society, without which kingdoms would collapse, and he opposed union of church and state as the reduction of the Church to a mere political institution.
Lamennais was radically democratic, not primarily in a political way but with a mystical faith in “the People”, whom he considered the recipients of divine inspiration, guided by the Church. His movement provoked mistrust because his separation of religion from politics seemed dangerously radical to conservatives and highly reactionary to liberals.
Lamennais appealed to the pope to lead a new Christendom, and for a time, Leo XII (1823-1829) seemed sympathetic. But Lamennais was censured by the archbishop of Paris and, appealing to Gregory XVI (1831-1846), found himself condemned by that pope as well. Increasingly bitter, he abandoned Christianity altogether and appealed directly to the people, refusing the last sacraments and dying outside the Church.
Liberal Catholicism
Some of Lamennais’ disciples, such was the noted apologist Charles de Montalembert (d. 1870), submitted to Church authority and became the leaders of what was sometimes called liberal Catholicism, which meant a vague conviction that the Church should come to terms with what was good in modern civilization without compromising her soul. While most liberal Catholics remained clearly on the side of orthodoxy, a few did not, notably the German historian and theologian Johann Ignaz von Döllinger (d. 1890), originally an adherent of Lamennais’ blend of radical politics with Ultramontanisn. Döllinger became increasingly anti-papal in both politics and theology.
Nationalism
The medieval concept of Christendom was of a single society of diverse peoples united by a common faith, and it thus had no room for the modern idea of nationality. While elements of Nationalism existed in earlier times, it only came into its own with the French Revolution, when loyalty to the nation replaced loyalty to the king, requiring from the citizen not only obedience but inner adherence and emotional fervor. The state itself became a kind of church, based on faith, its power derived from orchestrated passion.
During the nineteenth century, the spirit of Nationalism was kindled all over the world. While it could be supportive of Catholicism, it triumphed most completely in Protestant Prussia and anticlerical Italy. Since it represented the forces of change, it was held in deep suspicion by Church authorities. Beginning with the French Revolution, universal military conscription was enacted by nationalist regimes, not only in order to provide the state with armies but as a way of inculcating patriotic conformity in the people, an educational function that was, once again, in competition with the Church.
Catholic Nationalists
Nationalism thrust in two opposite directions: seeking to dismember states in which disparate peoples were yoked together under a single government and seeking to unite people of the same ethnic identity who lived scattered under different governments. The Catholic Austrian Empire represented the first pattern, with the Catholic Hungarians chief among those who sought independence. After 1815, Catholics in various countries subject to non-Catholic governments began asserting themselves. Catholics in what had been the Austrian (southern) Netherlands chafed under the rule of the Protestant (northern) Netherlands; Catholics in Poland resisted the periodic persecution at the hands of their Russian rulers; and Catholics in Ireland demanded more rights from England.
Poland
Polish Nationalism took on a deeply Catholic character. Some of its proponents, such as the mystical poet Adam Mickiewicz (d. 1855), compared the sufferings of the Polish people to those of Jesus Himself and proclaimed Poland as the “Christ among nations”.
Gregory XVI
Poland, Ireland, and the southern Netherlands showed how the newer political movements might serve Catholic interests, with clergy, including bishops, among the leaders agitating for political independence. In all cases, however, Pope Gregory XVI admonished his flock to remain obedient to their lawful rulers, even going so far as to characterize the Russian czar as a loving father to his Polish subjects. Belatedly, the Pope recognized his naïveté and was able to obtain some concessions for the Poles.
Belgium
In the revolutions of 1830, the southern Netherlands gained their independence from the North under the name of Belgium. It enacted a liberal constitution that formally separated church and state while protecting the rights of the Church.
Ireland
In the southern three-fourths of Ireland, the small Protestant minority, who were mostly of English descent, owned almost all the land, with the Catholic majority living merely as tenant farmers subject to arbitrary eviction and having to pay tithes to the church of Ireland.
Daniel O’Connell—“the Liberator” (d. 1847)—made use of religious and ethnic loyalties to forge an alliance of Catholicism, Liberalism, and Nationalism that involved clergy, laity, and even some Protestants. He opposed overt rebellion and demanded not complete independence from England but full political and religious rights, most of which were eventually granted. He neither sought nor received papal approval, although he died en route to meet the Pope. In general, the clergy, including most of the bishops, at least tacitly supported his movement, although the terrorist Fenian movement was condemned by both the bishops and the Pope.
In the years just prior to O’Connell’s death, Ireland was devastated by the Potato Famine, when the crop that was the staple of most Irishmen’s diet succumbed to blight. Over seven hundred thousand Irish died of starvation or disease, and millions more emigrated in the greatest natural catastrophe to strike a Western country since the Black Death.
Germany and Italy
Germany (a collection of essentially independent principalities) and Italy (mainly divided between the Papal States and various territories ruled by foreign powers) were the chief battlegrounds of the kind of Nationalism that sought to amalgamate separate states into one.
In the struggle over who would dominate a united Germany, Protestant Prussia defeated Catholic Austria and also successfully laid claim to territories in the Catholic Rhineland, where it harassed Catholics believed to be a threat to national unity. Prussia represented a conservative kind of Nationalism, effected not by the popular will but by the actions of an authoritarian government.
Bl. Pope Pius IX (1846-1878) was a one-time papal diplomat who at his election was a popular diocesan bishop viewed by some as a kind of liberal. While making it clear that he condemned Liberalism as a philosophy, he granted amnesty to those imprisoned in past rebellions, authorized railways and independent newspapers in his domain, and issued a constitution for the Papal States. Giuseppe Mazzini (d. 1872), the leader of the Nationalist Risorgimento (“coming to life”) movement in Italy, hailed Pius at his election and even proposed that the papacy might serve as leader of a united Italy, while the archconservative Austrian prime minister Klemens von Metternich (d. 1859) was dismayed at the tenor of the new pontificate.
1848
But events moved with great speed. In 1848, revolution suddenly broke out all over Europe, with people on both sides of the barricades swept along by intense passion. Both Louis Philippe and Metternich were forced to flee, and the king of Prussia had to grant a constitution. In Paris, Archbishop Denis Affre, attempting to bring peace to the streets, was shot dead, perhaps accidentally.
Full-scale rebellion broke out in the Papal States, partly because the Pope refused to embrace Italian Nationalism by supporting a revolt against Austria. One of the Pope’s closest advisors was assassinated, his funeral disrupted, and his body thrown into the Tiber. Pius fled from Rome, and by the time of his return, he had come to view the new movements of the age with unrestrained loathing. For the remainder of his pontificate, he pursued very conservative policies, closely advised by his secretary of state, Cardinal Giacomo Antonelli (d. 1876), probably the last cardinal who was a deacon only, not a priest.
France was one of the few places where the 1848 revolution was successful. Despite Affre’s death, some Catholics hailed the Second Republic as a new beginning that was not hostile to the Church. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of the great emperor, served as president of the Republic, then had himself proclaimed emperor (1852-1871) as Napoleon III (the title “Napoleon II” was claimed by Napoleon Bonaparte’s son [d. 1832], who never ruled). An adventurer, Louis Napoleon had participated in an unsuccessful Carbonari revolt in Italy, after which the future Pius IX had helped him to escape. The emperor’s policies toward the Church in France vacillated according to the degree that he needed Catholic support, but he supplied troops to guarantee the continued independence of the Papal States and to protect the foreign missions.
Papal Authority and Power
The Mortara Case Syllabus of Errors
The extent to which Pius IX was at odds with modern sensibilities was dramatically illustrated when a Jewish boy living in the Papal States, Edgar Mortara (d. 1940), was taken from his parents to be raised as a ward of the Pope, because he had been secretly baptized by a Catholic maid. (Mortara came to idolize the Pope and eventually became a priest.) Pius could not comprehend the outrage that the incident provoked even among some Catholics.
Syllabus of Errors
In 1864, Pius IX issued the famous Syllabus of Errors, attached to the encyclical Quanta Cura (With Great Care), condemning numerous modern ideas, above all the idea that the state was the ultimate authority in human affairs. The Syllabus declared the Church’s independence from the state, including the Catholic state, in all areas of religious and moral life and proclaimed the “fullness of papal authority” even in areas which did not concern faith and morals.
Religious Freedom
The most controversial passages in the document condemned the propositions that the Catholic religion should not be “the only religion of the state” and that there should be freedom of worship and speech, things that tended to produce “corruption of morals and religious indifferentism”, according to the Pope. The ultimate problem, as Pius saw it, was the liberal idea of a “neutral” state without an official religious foundation, which was a denial that society needed to be subordinated to divine law. The Pope affirmed the divine origin of all legitimate authority and condemned the claim that ultimate sovereignty rested with the people.
Liberalism Condemned
Summing up, Pius proclaimed, “If anyone thinks that the Roman Pontiff can and should reconcile himself and come to terms with progress, with Liberalism, and with modern civilization, let him be anathema.”1 Pius’ condemnation of Liberalism obviously owed a great deal to his traumatic experiences early in his pontificate, which made Liberalism appear to be a sham that promised freedom while imposing restrictions, sometimes even outright persecution, on the Church.
Quanta Cura and the Syllabus aroused fierce reactions. In some places, the document was publicly burned, and in France, bishops were warned that they would be arrested if they had it read from the pulpit. No prominent Catholic rejected the document outright, but it seemed to preclude even the possibility of liberal Catholicism. For a century afterward, some people attempted to interpret it in the narrowest possible way, even as others read into it more than the Pope perhaps intended. His intentions were in some ways uncertain, in that, for example, to deny that the pope must reconcile himself to modern society did not necessarily mean that he might not choose to do so, and to deny that democracy was the only legitimate form of government was not to say that it was illegitimate.
Pius’ proclamation of Church authority directly challenged the state and allowed him to see the validity of at least some rebellions. He was, for example, virtually the only European ruler who denounced yet another savage Russian suppression of a Polish uprising, a complete reversal of his predecessor’s habitual defense of political authority.
Risorgimento
The Italian Risorgimento had liberal political goals based on an appeal to a past Italian cultural greatness that was now being revived. Most Italian nationalists, many of whom were Masons, saw the papacy as an obstacle both to greater freedom and to Italian unification and were candid about their eventual goal of abolishing the Papal States, which bisected the peninsula. Mazzini and others wanted a republic, but the kingdom of Sardinia, a liberal monarchy that ruled much of northern Italy and had curtailed the rights of the Church, took the lead in unification. Victor Emmanuel II of Sardinia was also proclaimed the first king of Italy (1861-1878).
Fall of the Papal States
The Papal States began falling to the Sardinians a piece at a time, and nationalists demanded that Rome be made the Italian capital. Pius was both offered bribes and threatened in order to get him to surrender, but he refused both, saying that the Papal States had been given to him by God in stewardship and he had no right to relinquish them. But when France went to war with Prussia in 1870, Napoleon III had to withdraw his forces from Rome. For a time, the city was defended by the small papal army and by volunteers from all over the Catholic world, but, as Victor Emmanuel’s army besieged the city, Pius ordered his troops not to shed unnecessary blood and hoisted the white flag of surrender.
A plebiscite appeared to show an overwhelming majority of the people of the Papal States favoring union with the kingdom of Italy, and Victor Emmanuel was installed in the Quirinal Palace that had been the principal papal residence. Pius IX withdrew across the Tiber to become the self-imposed “prisoner of the Vatican”, a living protest against what he deemed to be a crime against God. Although the kingdom of Italy offered the Pope certain concessions, including monetary indemnities, Pius refused them in principle. Italian Catholics were told not to vote or otherwise participate in the civic life of what was declared to be an illegitimate state.
The question of the papacy’s “temporal power” remained an issue in Catholic circles for many years. The argument in its favor was both theoretical—the Papal States were bestowed by God—and practical: How could the Pope be secure in the exercise of his spiritual authority unless he ruled an autonomous principality free of the secular powers? But on balance, the loss of the Papal States proved to be beneficial to the Church. They were only a fragile protection for papal autonomy, and fifteen hundred years of fighting for territory often had a deeply corrupting effect on the papacy.
Church Reforms
After 1870, the spiritual authority of the papacy increased. Pius devoted himself to Church reforms that increased the ecclesiastical importance of his office: broadening membership in the College of Cardinals and basing it primarily on merit; expanding the Roman Curia and giving it major responsibilities; establishing colleges in Rome for seminarians from all over the world; appointing bishops with less regard for the opinion of secular governments; establishing the custom of ad limina (“to the threshold”) visits of bishops to Rome; using papal nuncios (“heralds”) as representatives to the various national hierarchies, not just to governments; and establishing many new dioceses, especially in mission lands.
Spirituality
After the defeat of Napoleon, there occurred one of the great revivals in the history of the Church, although some regions, having been deprived of their priests, never fully recovered. The peasantry had remained loyal to the Church throughout the eighteenth century, and now many of the secularized bourgeoisie also returned to religion, although many of the intelligentsia continued to adhere to Enlightenment skepticism. The spiritual revival was especially measured in a great increase in religious vocations and the founding of new religious orders.
The Restored Jesuits
Pius VII restored the Society of Jesus in Italy in 1804 and restored it to the universal Church a decade later, calling it a “powerful new oar on Peter’s bark”. Jesuits once again lived their special vow of obedience to the pope and, consequently, were once again the targets of agitation, especially because of their involvement in education.
New Communities
France, having led the way in the destruction of the Church, also led the way in her revival through new orders: among many others, the Society of Mary (Marianists, founded by Bl. William-Joseph Chami-nade [d. 1850]), the Society (“Madames”) of the Sacred Heart (St. Madeleine Sophie Barat [d. 1865]), the Oblates of Mary Immaculate (St. Eugene de Mazenod [d. 1861]), and the Congregation of Holy Cross (Bl. Basil Anthony Moreau [d. 1873]).
Monastic Revival
Monasticism had been all but wiped out in France, but it underwent a dramatic revival in the Benedictine house of Solesmes, under the abbot Prosper Guéranger (d. 1875). Meanwhile, Jean-Baptiste Lacor-daire (d. 1861) almost single-handedly revived the Dominican order in France, becoming the most celebrated preacher of the age. (Both men had been disciples of Lamennais.)
The Cur of Ars
St. John Vianney (d. 1859) was the best-known and most revered French saint of the nineteenth century, a man who dramatically demonstrated the continuing power of the faith in people’s lives. At first thought to lack the intelligence necessary for the priesthood, he spent almost four decades as curé of the obscure village of Ars, where his reputation for works of charity, heroic self-denial, and simple but heartfelt preaching attracted thousands of people.
He had a powerful sense of the sinfulness of mankind and longed to become a Trappist and devote himself to penance, but instead he spent as many as eighteen hours a day in the confessional. (When offered a ribbon of honor by the French government, he declined, because it had no resale value and thus would be of no use to his work with the poor.)
The Irish Revival
Ireland underwent a remarkably rapid spiritual recovery after the Potato Famine. Under the leadership especially of Cardinal Paul Cullen (d. 1878) of Dublin, who had been rector of the Irish College in Rome, the reforms of Trent were belatedly introduced into a church that had finally emerged into the light after centuries of quasi-underground existence. In every measurable way (church attendance, reception of the sacraments, popular devotions, educational and charitable work), Ireland came to be seen as perhaps the most intensely Catholic society in the world. (At one time, religious vocations were so plentiful that half of all Irish priests served abroad.) Some bishops were outspoken champions of independence, but Cullen concentrated on religious matters, of which the major issue was the National (public) schools, which had a Protestant bias.
John Bosco
St. John Bosco2 (d. 1888) was perhaps even more famous than the Curé of Ars. An Italian of scholarly interests and attainments, he founded the Oratory of St. Francis de Sales especially to work with abandoned or abused boys. He invoked de Sales’ name because he ministered to his young charges with mildness and a spirit of trust.
The Little Flower
St. Thérèse of Lisieux (Therese of the Child Jesus; the Little Flower, d. 1897) was a French girl who at age fifteen was allowed to enter a Carmelite convent. She died when only twenty-four, but her posthumously published writings, describing her imperfections, anxieties, sufferings, and mortifications, laid out a “little way” to sanctity, the significance of which was eventually recognized when she was made a doctor of the Church in 1997. Therese became one of the most popular saints of the twentieth century. Unable to fulfill her desire of going to the missions, she became instead the patroness of the missions.3
Marian Apparitions
In the history of the Church, innumerable people have reported private visions of Christ or His saints, but in the nineteenth century such experiences became the focus of a number of popular movements, and since that time there have been more than two hundred alleged visitations by Mary in various parts of the world.
Anna Katherina Emmerich (d. 1824) was a German nun who, after her convent was closed under Napoleon, retired to a private house and apparently experienced the stigmata. She claimed to have received special revelations of things not revealed in Scripture: the hidden life of Jesus at Nazareth, Mary’s life after Jesus’ death, and other things. Her claims attracted both fervent credulity and much skepticism.
A unique and bizarre heresy called the Maravites (“followers of Mary”) arose in deeply Catholic Poland in the early nineteenth century, when a nun not only claimed visions but said she had been mystically united to the second Person of the Trinity. The sect, which used the vernacular in the liturgy and ordained women to the priesthood, attracted hundreds of thousands of followers at its peak.
In 1830, St. Catherine Labouré (d. 1875), a Daughter of Charity in a Paris convent, felt herself drawn to the chapel in the middle of the night, where the Virgin Mary gave her the design for the Miraculous Medal that became a popular Marian devotion.
In 1849, three children in the French village of La Salette also had a vision of Mary that attracted numerous pilgrims. Other visions followed, as at Knock in Ireland.
Lourdes
The most influential of these nineteenth-century visions was at Lourdes, France, in 1858, where a peasant girl, St. Bernadette Soubirous (d. 1879), had a series of visions of a lady who said of herself, “I am the Immaculate Conception”, a dogma only recently officially proclaimed and which the uneducated Bernadette probably did not fully understand. Lourdes captured the imagination of the world, its story eventually told even in a popular Hollywood film (The Song of Bernadette) and it became one of the world’s greatest pilgrimage places, the scene of countless reported miracles of healing.
Fatima
Marian piety culminated at Fatima in Portugal in 1917, when three peasant children saw visions of Mary, who preached a message of repentance, warned of coming catastrophes, and gave the children three “secrets” to convey to Church authorities. The Fatima devotion became immensely popular.
Pope Pius XII (1939-1958) was especially devoted, perhaps because the Virgin’s first reported apparition occurred on the day of his consecration as a bishop. Heeding one of the Fatima admonitions, he consecrated the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary during World War II, and immediately after the war over seven hundred thousand people—one-tenth of the entire population of Portugal—came to Fatima on the anniversary of the apparitions. Pius XII also gave strong impetus to Marian devotion by his proclamation of the dogma of the Assumption in 1950.
Official Caution
In each case, the authorities’ initial reaction to alleged visions was almost always negative, even hostile. But if the visionaries persisted even in the face of threats and obloquy, their claims were often examined sympathetically. Mainly because of Lourdes, the Church developed a formalized procedure for dealing with apparitions. Such revelations are classified as “private”, meaning that they do not have to be believed and can add nothing substantial to the original deposit of faith. But they might be declared free of error and “worthy of credence by the faithful”. At Lourdes, a special medical bureau was set up to investigate alleged cures.
Eucharistic Congresses
Beginning in the early twentieth century, “eucharistic congresses” were periodically held all over the world—massive gatherings of Catholics to pay homage to Christ in the Blessed Sacrament and to hear sermons from leading prelates encouraging them in their faith. Besides their devotional purpose, the congresses served as dramatic public evidence of the vibrant life of the Church.
The Social Apostolate
Humanitarianism
Humanitarianism—organized efforts to alleviate the sufferings of the poor, the sick, the insane, the imprisoned, children, and animals—flourished in the nineteenth century. It sprang from Christian roots but was virtually the only movement of the age that transcended religious and political differences. For some people, it was an alternative to formal religion, and it diverged philosophically from orthodox Christianity to the degree that it considered earthly paradise an attainable goal.
Nineteenth-century people were not necessarily more compassionate than their forebears, but they were less fatalistic. Technological innovations in agriculture, sanitation, medicine, and other areas for the first time in history made it possible to eliminate many kinds of suffering that had been considered unavoidable. But belief in progress was called into question by the fact that those same technological changes were creating their own kinds of suffering. In particular, the nature of poverty was changing because of the industrial revolution, which transformed rural peasants into urban laborers crowded into slums and dependent on the insecurity of wages.
Laymen in the nineteenth century—some of them emerging from Lamennais’ circle—had an importance unprecedented in the previous history of the Church in their attempt to transform society according to Christian principles.
Ozanam and the St. Vincent de Paul Society
Frederic Ozanam (d. 1853) was a French historian who supported the Revolution of 1848 but was also powerfully drawn to the Middle Ages, which he extolled as a time of social and cultural wholeness infused by faith. He and his associates attempted to rediscover the roots of that culture in order to bring them to bear on contemporary society. Like most Catholic reformers throughout history, they saw practical charity as essential.
Ozanam and his friends took direction from the Daughters of Charity, who were among the few people working with the poorest of the poor (like the destitute described in Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel, Les Misérables), visiting them in their hovels and doing whatever was possible to alleviate their sufferings. Ozanam and his friends established the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, which rapidly spread beyond France. The organization was the most important practical development in Catholic charity in the nineteenth century.
Laissez-Faire
Among the various “liberties” that Liberalism demanded was the “free market” (labeled laissez-faire [“let it act”]), in which unfettered competition and the law of supply and demand would set prices and wages. Liberalism aimed to abolish most economic regulations, so as to allow the market to flourish unhindered, a radical departure from the centuries-old system in which economic activities were closely regulated by law for the sake of justice.
Utopian Socialism
The various movements called Socialism were mainly a response to liberal economic philosophy, positing a society based on harmony and cooperation rather than competition. The “Utopian Socialists”, such as Claude de Saint-Simon (d. 1825), were heirs to Rousseau and dreamed of an ideal society based on innate human goodness.
Marx
Karl Marx (d. 1883), who insisted that his own theories were scientific, despised the Utopians for not realizing that coercion was necessary to achieve their goals. He was an atheist and a materialist who insisted that revolutionary violence be directed at religion (the “opiate of the people”) as well as at those with political power and economic wealth. When “Communards” briefly got control of Paris in 1871, they executed a number of “enemies of the people”, including the progressive-minded Archbishop Georges Darboy (d. 1871). (After the Commune’s failure, twenty thousand Communards were themselves executed.)
Industrialism
The Church had relatively little experience with urbanized industry; and, while there was much concern with poverty, including sometimes heroic programs of charity, few Catholics of the time thought deeply about industrialization itself. (Famously, Pope Gregory XVI was so opposed to technological change that he forbade railways from being extended into the Papal States and would not install gas lights in Rome.) Catholic leaders tended to take for granted the traditional, closely knit agricultural society and saw the new industrialism as subversive of traditional values, destroying the rural communities where the Church had been an integral part of the social fabric for fifteen hundred years. Laissez-faire economic philosophy was seen as giving free rein to acquisitiveness and allowing industrialists to grow rich at the expense of their underpaid workers, yet another instance of the liberal abuse of freedom.
Von Ketteler
The German bishop Wilhelm von Ketteler (d. 1877) and the French layman Philippe Buchez (d. 1865) were among those who responded to industrialism creatively. Both advocated “workers’ associations” partly modeled on the medieval guilds and similar in some ways to labor unions but taking responsibility for the entire lives of their members. Ketteler and Buchez were radical for their time in asserting that the workers had God-given rights, such as a just wage, that should be secured through organized action.
Kolping
The Catholic social program was implemented best in Germany, where a priest, Bl. Adolf Kolping (d. 1865), helped put Ketteler’s ideas into practice. He established workers’ groups that had their own religious devotions, clubhouses, newspapers, credit unions, and insurance programs and that at their height numbered more than one hundred thousand members.
Rerum Novarum
Catholic social thought received its greatest impetus from the 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum (On Capital and Labor; literally “new things”, hence “revolution”) of Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903), which drew on the ideas of Ozanam, von Ketteler, and others and was widely hailed for its statesmanship, even by non-Catholics. Leo bluntly condemned the heartlessness of the unrestrained free market and affirmed the dignity of labor and the laborer’s right to a just wage. But he also affirmed the right of private property and condemned Socialism and Communism for denying that right and subordinating everything to the state. The Pope affirmed the Catholic ideal of a cooperative social order based on justice, an almost unique perspective at a time when the harsh doctrine of “Social Darwinism” (the “survival of the fittest”) clashed with the equally harsh Marxist doctrine of inevitable class conflict and the necessary use of force.
Catholic Principles
Out of the German school and Rerum Novarum, a basic set of Catholic social principles evolved: the spiritual welfare of mankind as the highest purpose of society, the primacy of the family, natural rights, a spirit of cooperation rather than conflict, private property as modified by the demands of justice, and “subsidiarity”—the principle that every social issue should be resolved at the most immediate level possible, first the family, then local government, and the central government only as a last resort.
Distributive Justice
According to Catholic theory, the accumulation and concentration of private wealth and the vagaries of the “free market” need to be balanced by the requirement of “distributive justice”: the distribution of material goods in such a way that no one is denied a fair share, a principle that permits government intervention in the economy through taxes, labor laws, welfare programs, and even the redistribution of wealth.
Corporatism
As it developed, one major strain of Catholic social thought was called Corporatism, an ideal according to which society was to be organized around natural social groups or “corporations”—churches, families, and trades. Inspired by the medieval guilds, Corporatism conceived of society as a unified entity based on a spirit of cooperation among all classes that facilitated consensus rather than a clash of interests or majority rule. In Corporatism, strikes and other kinds of conflict were to be avoided by free discussion among all parties, then by submitting disputes to binding arbitration enforced by the government. (Because of this idea, priests sometimes served as mediators in labor disputes.) Employers were to take a fatherly interest in their workers rather than treat them merely as instruments of production.
Harmel
These ideas were put into practice in the textile factories of the French industrialist Leon Harmel (d. 1915), who sought to establish ideal Catholic communities for his workers and even led groups of as many as ten thousand on pilgrimages to Rome. But such paternalism was criticized for making workers dependent on the good will of their employers rather than empowering them to claim their rights.
Labor Unions
Although the idea of labor unions did not fit well with Corporatism, some Catholics endorsed them, leading to disagreements as to whether Catholics should be part of the general labor movement or should form their own unions. The English Cardinal Henry Edward Manning (d. 1892) strongly supported the aspirations of the working class, even to the point of personally mediating strikes. Von Ketteler supported unions in Germany, and the hierarchy of the United States persuaded the Holy See to rescind its condemnation of such groups as “secret societies”.
The Welfare State
Paradoxically, the first movement toward the modern “welfare state” was under the conservative premier Otto von Bismarck (d. 1898) of Germany, something that was possible because the philosophy of laissez-faire was identified with his political opponents, the liberals. The Catholic Center Party supported such things as old-age pensions and payments to injured workers, seeing them as natural applications of Catholic social principles.
Secularization
After the initial revival, there was a gradual falling off in church attendance in most countries in the nineteenth century. Many of the aristocracy treated it primarily as a social duty, while it was still relatively high among the middle classes, very high among the peasants, and sharply declining among the urban working class. Secularization was also reflected in such things as the growing practice of civil marriages, Sunday as primarily a day for leisure and recreation, and the practice of cremation.
Contraception
Even though the sale of contraceptives remained illegal everywhere, the practice of birth control increased. The Holy See, while recalling Liguori’s advice not to disturb the consciences of the ignorant, nonetheless held that the official teaching should be disseminated. It was assumed that it was usually husbands who insisted on practicing contraception and that wives were innocent if they cooperated reluctantly in coitus interruptus but not if they allowed their husbands to use condoms.
Catholic Marriage
Leo XIII reiterated the Catholic doctrine of marriage, once again affirming its indissolubility, condemning divorce as one of the greatest of modern evils, and identifying the family as the foundation of society He definitively affirmed that marriage, even more than it was a contract, was a free union based on mutual love, an understanding that had previously been considered a theological opinion. Gradually, the idea was accepted that the husband and wife are the actual ministers of the sacrament of matrimony, with the priest serving as the principal witness.
Urbanization
Except in the Anglo-Saxon countries (for reasons that are unclear), urbanization led to secularization, in that peasants tended to lose their ties to religion as they moved to towns and cities, partly because the Church was unable to keep up with urban growth. In the later part of the century, some parishes in Paris were said to have as many as 120,000 nominal parishioners.
The Cult of Progress
More nebulously, secularization may have been promoted by the severing of ties to the land. No longer did the peasant contend with unpredictable cycles of nature dependent on the divine will; increasingly, he was part of an industrial process that was all too obviously under human control. There was a new idea of progress based on dramatic scientific and technological advancements—the Eiffel Tower in Paris, for example, was intended to be a man-made structure that soared over every church.
The Syllabus of Errors
Intellectually, the nineteenth century continued to be a troubled time for religion. While the Syllabus of Errors attracted the greatest attention because of its position on politics, it also condemned a series of philosophical errors: rationalism, by which reason alone could know truth; pantheism, in which the universe itself was divine; naturalism, which denied the reality of the supernatural; indifferentism, which held that all beliefs were mere opinions; and utilitarianism, which made practical results the sole guide to moral action.
The End of the Enlightenment
In a sense, the Enlightenment ended with the skeptical Scottish philosopher David Hume (d. 1776), who sought to undermine the “natural religion” of Deism, and the pious German Protestant Immanuel Kant (d. 1804), who held that the mind cannot know reality in itself but only in terms of its own categories, such as causality, time, and space. Like Hume, Kant thought the existence of God could not be demonstrated by reason, but he postulated it as necessary in order to support the moral law.
Romanticism
Deriving partly from Rousseau, the cultural movement called Romanticism (ultimately named after the city of Rome) created a new intellectual climate that, like the Enlightenment, became a permanent influence in Western civilization. In part, a reaction against Rationalism, Romanticism deepened the sense of reality beyond what could be explained rationally, requiring that religious belief once more be taken seriously.
Three examples of the new attitudes are de Maistre, Novalis, and Chateaubriand. Anticipating later psychological theories, de Maistre rediscovered the darker side of life that the Enlightenment had denied. He saw human culture as an underground stream flowing from subterranean sources and only partially understood by reason, a world of rich symbolism that could not be explained. Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg, d. 1801), a German Lutheran who exalted the Middle Ages, condemned the Reformation for having fragmented Christianity and the Enlightenment for its rational skepticism. François de Chateaubriand (d. 1848), a French aristocrat who first supported the Revolution but then fled the Terror, published The Genius of Christianity, which argued for the truths of Catholicism on the grounds of their aesthetic and imaginative appeal to the depths of the human soul.
Mystery
The key to Romanticism was “mystery”. To the Romantics, reality was so profound and impenetrable that the only appropriate attitude was one of humble submission. Religious dogmas, precisely because they were inexplicable by reason, embodied the deepest truths, and religious rituals, far from being meaningless formalism, expressed those truths in symbolic ways (an insight later developed by the discipline of anthropology).
Medievalism
The term Romantic came to imply a dreamy, entirely subjective sense of reality. Even when Romanticism was overtly Christian, it could involve a superficial love of ritual and a desire to recapture the color and drama of the Middle Ages. The latter was marked by a fascination with the secrets (both holy and devilish) hidden in monasteries and convents—dark cloisters, picturesque robes, gaunt monks, and mysterious rites. These images even had an effect on Gueranger and other monastic reformers of the age.
Romantic Challenges to Christianity
But Romanticism was dangerous to religion in that its ultimate tendency was a kind of pantheism—the deification of nature itself. It provided a seductive, powerful alternative to Christianity, a new way of disbelieving that accused Christianity of having captured the sense of mystery for its own purposes.4
The philosopher G. F.W. Hegel (d. 1831), also a German Protestant, was a kind of Romantic who saw “Spirit” as incarnate in history, with religion as its symbolic expression. Spirit continually disclosed itself, revealing higher and higher levels of meaning in each age, with Jesus merely one of Spirit’s highest manifestations. In the same tradition, the German composer Richard Wagner (d. 1883) wrote operas on medieval subjects like the quest for the Holy Grail but turned them into celebrations of pagan mysticism.
Perhaps the ultimate Romantic hero was the English poet George Gordon, Lord Byron (d. 1824), who cast himself in the role of a superman who had risen above all laws and systematically flouted traditional morality.
Catholics and Science
Some nineteenth-century scientists were outright materialists for whom the physical world alone was real or positivists who saw the scientific method alone as a valid approach to truth. But others were devout Catholics—notably the Austrian Augustinian abbot Gregor Mendel (d. 1884), who laid the foundations of the science of genetics, and the French layman Louis Pasteur (d. 1895), who pioneered the germ theory of disease. A perhaps unexpected result of the new science was a strengthening of the traditional condemnation of abortion, as scientists discovered that life began at conception.
Evolution
The theory of evolution, developed by Charles Darwin (d. 1882), was completely materialistic. Man was no longer above nature but was subject to blind laws. Herbert Spencer’s (d. 1903) application of evolution to social life—“the survival of the fittest”—claimed that nature rewarded amoral self-interest. Ideas about evolution set off a conflict with religion that still rages, although from the beginning there were Catholics who thought it possible to reconcile the two, by positing that God at some point intervened in the natural process to create the human soul.
Biblical Criticism
Especially in Germany, Romanticism sometimes had the effect of making it seem that religion was not to be understood literally Along with the scientific spirit, this culminated—mainly in Protestantism—in an almost compulsively skeptical view of the Bible. Attempting to be scientific, the “Higher Criticism” called into doubt the fundamental historicity of the Scriptures, thereby depriving Christianity of any solid claim to intellectual credibility and essentially reducing it to a vague kind of moralism. Ernest Renan (d. 1892), a former seminarian at St. Sulpice, especially encouraged such skepticism.
Historical Scholarship
Historical scholarship, including Catholic historical scholarship, came to a legitimate maturity in the nineteenth century, especially through the publication of sources, such as the 383 volumes of the writings of the Fathers of the Church published by the French priest Jacques Migne (d. 1875). But the close study of sources by the French priest-archaeologist Louis Duchesne (d. 1922) called into question some of the legends of the saints, especially those concerning St. Denis, the apostle of France. Other beliefs about the early history of the Church were also doubted. (Duchesne once lost a teaching post because he questioned the legend that St. Mary Magdalen had migrated to Gaul after the Resurrection.)
Modernism
In premodern cultures, tradition tended to be venerated and change treated with suspicion. In modernity, however, that outlook was reversed, as the “modern” was automatically assumed to be superior to the old and change promised wisdom and freedom. The new cultural phenomenon of Modernism insisted that men were obligated to adapt themselves to change in all its forms, so that in all areas of cultural life—philosophy, theology, the arts—modernists began an experimental quest for what was new and daring. This was especially manifest in intellectual relativism—the contention that there were no truths as such, merely ideas which seemed true at particular times or places, a philosophy that over time caused society to abandon many of its earlier moral principles.
Atheism
Thus the Western mind in the nineteenth century ranged from mysticism to Materialism, from deep religious faith to atheism, with some people taking the rejection of Christianity even further than the Enlightenment had done. Atheism, while still not fully respectable, was more respectable than it had been. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (d. 1900), with his famous proclamation of the “death of God”, took doubt to its furthest possible point, in an act of ferocious rebellion against the very idea of God.
Theology
In this environment, attempts to synthesize Catholic theology with compatible aspects of secular philosophy were difficult and were sometimes condemned by the Vatican. Even attempts to find new ways to defend Catholic belief against the assaults of modernity were sometimes looked at with suspicion.
The Tübingen School
The German theologians Johann Adam Möhler (d. 1838) and Matthias Scheeben (d. 1888), while not abandoning the Scholastic method, returned to patristic sources and developed Catholic doctrine in terms of its mysteries. Scheeben was to a great extent responsible for the recovery of the Pauline doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ that would have great influence in the twentieth century.
Rosmini
Bl. Antonio Rosmini (d. 1855), founder of the Institute of Charity (Rosminian Fathers) and the Sisters of Providence, was a revered priest who lamented the Church’s “five wounds”: lack of lay participation in the liturgy, the inferior education of priests, political interference in the appointment of bishops, and clerical attachment to wealth. He favored the papacy’s giving up its temporal power and thought that, properly understood, democracy is a legitimate form of government.
Rosmini was an original theologian whose works were at one time placed on the Index, under the suspicion that he taught that men had a direct natural intuition of God, prior to their reception of grace. But Pope John XXIII (1958-1963) and Pope John Paul I (1978) were influenced by his writings. As head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger exonerated Rosmini, and as Pope Benedict XVI (2005—) he beatified him.
The Thomistic Revival
While Aquinas’ thought enjoyed preeminence in the Church, it was by no means universally followed. Pope Leo XIII initiated the “Thomistic Revival”, affirming that Catholics should embrace truth wherever it is found but extolling Aquinas as the primary philosopher, the source of a unified view of reality that all Catholics should achieve.
The Oxford Movement
What was in some ways the most important Catholic intellectual development of the nineteenth century emerged in an unlikely place—Protestant England. The Oxford Movement of the 1830s and 1840s brought many Anglicans into the Catholic Church and left a deep and lasting Catholic imprint on Anglicanism itself. The leading lights of this movement were called “Tractarians” by their contemporaries because of the “tracts for the times” they published.
Newman
The greatest of these was Bl. John Henry Newman (d. 1890), an Anglican clergyman who became a Roman Catholic. The most original Catholic thinker since Pascal, Newman joined the Oratorians and was eventually made a cardinal. (Although ritual was recognized as having been integral to the early Church, love of ritual was not part of the original Oxford Movement and played no role in Newman’s conversion.)
Religious Liberalism
The real conflict was not between Catholics and Protestants as such, Newman thought. Rather the enemy of both was religious Liberalism, whose essence was the denial of dogma and the exaltation of private judgment in matters of belief. Against this, Protestantism, because of its reliance on Scripture alone, provided no defense.
The Development of Doctrine
Newman recognized that historical consciousness—the awareness that everything changes over time—posed a greater challenge to religious belief than did science (he accepted the theory of evolution), in that the historical bases of even fundamental Christian beliefs were being called into question. Part of his achievement was to reconcile historical consciousness with faith.
Searching the writings of the Fathers, Newman found what he considered to be the essentials of Catholicism, and his theory of the “development of doctrine”—formulated just before he entered the Catholic Church—was aimed primarily at Protestants who accused the Church of having added to the revelation found in Scripture. According to Newman’s theory, everything essential to the faith was present embryonically in the Gospel, but many elements, even the fundamental doctrine of the Trinity, emerged only gradually. All such development had to be an organic growth from the original seed, harmonizing with previous expressions of the faith.
The Immaculate Conception
A contemporary example was Pius IX’s 1854 proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, which had been commonly believed for centuries, although it had been doubted by some leading theologians, notably Aquinas himself. The doctrine was thought to be implicit in the angel Gabriel’s salutation to Mary as “full of grace”, hence as free from sin, something necessary in order for her to be worthy to bear the Redeemer.
The Grammar of Assent
Newman recognized that the skepticism of the Enlightenment had made it impossible to insulate religious belief from doubt, but he affirmed, famously, that “a thousand difficulties do not make a doubt.” The foundation of religious certitude was for him the ultimate question. Strict rationalism, he argued, was appropriate to subjects like mathematics, but it was not the way by which men knew what was of ultimate significance. Reason as such led only to “notional assent”, which was the acceptance of an idea in a purely abstract way. In contrast, he outlined what he called the “illative sense”—numerous particular insights that eventually coalesced, not into iron certitude but into a high degree of probability. (By contrast, the Scholastics, notably Aquinas, precisely claimed to have achieved certitude rather than probability.) By such a process, rather than by formal argument, the individual came to sense the divine order of the universe and the fundamental rightness of Christian teaching and could offer “real assent” to them, an act that involved the entire person.
Although Newman was steeped in the Church Fathers and some medieval writers, he had not been educated as a Catholic and had rather slight familiarity with the Catholic theology of his day. This, along with his theory of the development of dogma and his theory of knowledge, made his orthodoxy suspect to some people. His proposal to establish a Catholic house at Oxford was vetoed by the English hierarchy, who thought it dangerous for Catholics to attend a Protestant institution, and his attempt to found a Catholic university in Dublin failed. He would later be made a cardinal and recognized as one of the greatest Catholic theologians.
The Arts
The Gothic Revival
From about 1750, for the first time since the early centuries, the Church inspired no original architectural style of her own. But the Gothic, which since the Renaissance had been disdained by cultivated artistic tastes, was among those aspects of medieval civilization that came back into favor because of Romanticism. Eugène Viollet-le-Duc (d. 1879) “restored” the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, with special attention to dramatic elements like gargoyles, and Augustus Welby Pugin (d. 1852), a convert from Anglicanism, established the Gothic Revival as the preferred style of public architecture for the next century, employed even in Protestant churches and in civic buildings like the English Houses of Parliament.
Painting
During the Romantic period, a few leading artists—Jacques-Louis David (d. 1825) and Eugene Delacroix (d. 1863)—occasionally painted religious subjects, but for the most part, the visual arts separated themselves from religion. The best religious art was competent but unoriginal, and very few leading artists were religious believers.
Music
But for reasons that are by no means clear, the same was not true of music. Ludwig von Beethoven (d. 1827) burst out of the formalism of the Baroque style as a man of two worlds: at the same time a promethean rebel and a devout Catholic. Besides the pantheism of the “Ode to Joy” in his Ninth Symphony, or his paean to the superman in his Third Symphony, he composed numerous Masses and other religious pieces. The Austrian Franz Schubert (d. 1828), the Pole Frederic Chopin (d. 1849), and the Frenchmen Hector Berlioz (d. 1869) and Charles Gounod (d. 1893) were major composers who continued to write Masses and other religious compositions. After a very irregular life, the Hungarian Franz Liszt (d. 1886) joined a Franciscan order and for a time lived in a monastery and studied for the priesthood while creating religiously inspired works.
Sentimentality
The nineteenth century saw the beginning of mass-produced culture of pictures, statues, books, and newspapers. In earlier times, high art differed from popular art only in terms of the artist’s skill. Now, however, there was a popular market that consciously diverged from high style. Popular religious art made an immediate appeal to emotional piety, especially the Infant Jesus or His Mother, who were represented with a fetching sadness or sweetness. Images of the Sacred Heart made that devotion sentimental as well, something that was far from its original spirit. Paralleling the popular taste in religious statues and pictures, and alongside the complex liturgical compositions of serious composers, there was a continually expanding popular repertoire of sentimental hymns, especially those devoted to Mary.
The First Vatican Council
Pius IX’s summoning of the Vatican Council in 1869 was intended to bring to a climax his two decades of struggle against modern errors, and for that purpose, he considered the solemn proclamation of the dogma of papal infallibility to be essential. The Council, the first since Trent three centuries before, was perhaps the best attended in the history of the Church: 754 bishops, more than twice the number at Trent. For the first time, secular governments were not officially represented, which led to some official protests, including that of Napoleon III, whose troops were protecting Rome from the Italian armies. The Eastern Orthodox responded contemptuously to what they considered a condescending invitation to send observers.
Papal Infallibility
The idea of papal infallibility was already widely accepted, and Pius did not ask the Council to approve it, lest it appear that he received his authority from the Council. He merely waited until the Council voted to proclaim it. Pius’ courage in the face of adversity was compromised to some degree by his increasingly irascible self-will. Thus, while ostensibly remaining aloof while the Council Fathers debated infallibility, he exerted strong pressure on wavering bishops. To a bishop who invoked the authority of Tradition as distinct from that of the pope, Pius was reported to have announced, “I am Tradition.”
Resistance
Some bishops were troubled by the doctrine of infallibility because they thought it implied that they received their authority solely from the pope, rather than being direct successors of the Apostles. The issue had been raised at Trent, but it would not be definitively settled at Vatican I.
A substantial minority of the Council Fathers, including most of the Germans, were “inopportunists” who thought the definition was likely to be misunderstood and to provoke unnecessary hostility. Newman too was an inopportunist, although he quickly submitted, and there was tension between him and Cardinal Manning, who was also a convert Anglican clergyman but very Ultramontane. Archbishop Darboy of Paris, who would be executed by revolutionaries the next year, was a Gallican so opposed to the definition of papal infallibility that he tried to persuade Napoleon III to intervene to prevent it. The liberal English lay historian John Dalberg, Lord Acton (d. 1902), also wanted the secular powers to intervene. Dollinger, Acton’s former teacher, vehemently rejected the doctrine in principle, just as he had publicly opposed the dogma of the Immaculate Conception.
A preliminary vote showed 451 in favor of the dogma, 62 in favor “conditionally”, and 88 opposed. On the eve of its solemn ratification, the opposition leaders agreed that, rather than vote “non placet” (“it does not please me”), they would absent themselves. But two bishops, including Edward Fitzgerald of Little Rock (d. 1908), apparently failed to get the message and were the only ones to vote against the solemn proclamation. (Fitzgerald then reportedly told the Pope, “The Little Rock humbly submits to the Big Rock [Peter].”)
But in Germany a schism called the Old Catholics developed under Döllinger’s leadership, making common cause with the schismatic Jansenists in the Netherlands, although Döllinger himself later broke with the Old Catholics when they rejected priestly celibacy, confession, indulgences, prayers to the saints, and other Catholic practices.
“Ex Cathedra”
Infallibility was understood as encompassing only matters of faith and morals that were solemnly proclaimed by the pope ex cathedra (“from the throne”), a limitation necessary in order to exclude the doctrinal errors of some popes, such as John XXII’s espousal of “soul sleep”. The pope could not create new dogmas but merely authoritatively define what were already the Church’s beliefs.
Faith and Reason
Besides papal infallibility, the major doctrinal action of the Council was its proclamation that faith and reason were harmonious and that reason was capable of knowing the existence of God. (The alleged error of Rosmini was his claim that men had a natural intuition of God’s divine nature, not just of His existence.)
An Abrupt End
Unprotected from the advancing Italian armies, the Council adjourned hastily and indefinitely. It was not formally ended until 1962.
The Democratic Era
When Pius IX died, after the longest pontificate in the history of the Church, he was succeeded by Leo XIII, an elderly curial official who had long been a diocesan bishop. Leo would preside over the Church for twenty-five vigorous years and would depart notably from some of his predecessor’s policies, although he too was firmly opposed to most of the things condemned in the Syllabus.
Liberal Policies
For many years, Newman considered himself to be “under a cloud”, but it was lifted when Leo made him a cardinal in his first consistory, thereby seeming to encourage theological speculation. Leo also encouraged biblical scholarship and historical research, especially by opening the Vatican Archives to scholars and enjoining historians always to tell the truth, no matter how uncomfortable it might be.
The Perils of Conservatism
The separation of the Church from monarchical politics—inconceivable when Lamennais advocated it in 1831—was achieved under Leo, guided by his secretary of state, Cardinal Mariano Rampolla (d. 1913).
The perils of an alliance with Conservatism were revealed in the fact that some of the champions of traditional order were among those imposing restrictions on the Church. Catholic Austria continued the policies of Josephinism to some extent, and for a time, the Church’s chief antagonist was the German premier Bismarck, a devout Lutheran who was the epitome of political Conservatism.
Kulturkampf
In his Kulturkampf (“culture war”) against the Church, which was also imposed in the German-ruled parts of Poland, Bismarck excluded Catholics from government offices, abolished Catholic schools, expelled all religious except some nursing nuns, closed seminaries, made candidates for the priesthood attend state universities, required government approval of all clerical appointments, and made civil marriage mandatory for everyone. A dozen bishops and eighteen hundred priests who resisted were jailed and subjected to ruinous fines.
The Center Party
Many Catholics, especially in the Rhineland, emigrated. But others took advantage of the democratic process to mount a highly effective resistance, and in the end, the Church was actually strengthened. The Center Party, which was primarily Catholic, achieved great electoral success, so that after a short time, Bismarck had to back down, and the Vatican was able to negotiate a concordat. Three of the bolder bishops, however, had to resign, and the appointment of theology professors was made subject to the approval of the government. The leaders of the Center Party were ignored by the Vatican, which was mistrustful of an independent lay group.
Belgium
In Belgium, liberals turned against the Church only to be met, as in Germany, with a highly effective Catholic electoral organization that came to dominate Belgian politics for the next generation. Belgium was one of the few countries where the Church retained responsibility for higher education, so that the University of Louvain (Leuven) became a leading center of Catholic intellectual life.
Switzerland
Liberal Switzerland, where Catholics were in a minority, mounted its own Kulturkampf, officially recognizing the schismatic Old Catholics, expelling priests, and imprisoning a bishop. For a time, there was actual civil war between Catholic and Protestant cantons, but eventually the government pulled back from its hostile stance.
France
In France, the Third Republic was at first conservative and supportive of the Church, but the perennial issue of education soon brought conflict. The anticlericals sought to control the system, especially the universities, precisely in order to impede handing on the faith to new generations, and the Catholic intellectual presence was largely excluded. Many Catholics were uncompromising monarchists who recalled that the Republic had been launched with the blood of martyrs—the great Basilica of Sacré Cœur (Sacred Heart) was built to tower above Paris in memory of those executed by the Commune of 1871.
Many French Catholics did voluntarily what Pius IX commanded Catholics in Italy to do—refrain from all participation in civic life under what was deemed to be an illegitimate government. But Leo counseled patience and, when no French bishop appeared willing to do so, persuaded Cardinal Charles-Martial Lavigerie (d. 1892) of Tunisia, a French colony, to make an open gesture of acceptance of the Republic. Many Catholics were appalled, but Leo encouraged others in their Ralliement (“rallying”) to the Republic.
Leo was far from being a liberal, but he recognized a question of crucial importance for the Church: Was it possible to be a Catholic in a modern state, or were Catholics in effect obligated to work toward the increasingly impossible goal of restoring the monarchies of the Old Regime? He warned against the excesses of democracy but accepted it on a pragmatic basis.
The Dreyfus Case
As with the Mortara case in Italy, the Dreyfus Affair in France in the 1890s hardened divisions and demonstrated how far removed some Catholics were from even the positive aspects of Liberalism. Alfred Dreyfus (d. 1935) was a Jewish army officer convicted of treason on the basis of falsified evidence and sent to the brutal penal colony of Devil’s Island. His case became a cause célèbre in which Leo privately expressed doubts about his guilt but monarchist Catholics rallied against him, mainly out of anti-Jewish5prejudice. (Dreyfus was eventually exonerated and won the highest medal of valor in World War I.)
A Hostile Government
In the end, the Ralliement did not accomplish what Leo hoped for, as the Third Republic became increasingly anticlerical, partly in response to the Dreyfus Affair. The Assumptionists, who had waged a particularly bitter anti-Dreyfus campaign, were expelled and, in an effort to save other religious orders, the Pope acquiesced in yet another expulsion of the Jesuits, but to no avail. In 1905, two years after Leo’s death, the other religious orders were also suppressed, their houses closed by the police, and two thousand religious schools shut down.
All church property was in effect seized by the state and public subsidies of the clergy ended, plunging many priests into severe poverty. Unofficial private associations were formed to take control of church buildings that the Church herself could no longer officially own. A positive result of the new anticlericalism was that the government decreed complete separation of church and state, which meant that it could no longer demand a voice in the appointment of bishops.
Recovery
The Church eventually recovered a good deal of influence in France because of the First World War of 1914 to 1918. The Vatican acquiesced in a law requiring priests to serve in the military, and over forty-six hundred died in the service of their country, while the victorious French armies were led by the devout Catholic Marshal Ferdinand Foch (d. 1929). The Church regained her schools, although in law her property still belonged to the state. The canonization of Joan of Arc in 1920 was intended to recognize the new harmony.
Pius X
St. Pius X (1903-1914) was a patriarch of Venice who, unlike most of his predecessors, came from the peasant class and had never been a papal official. He was elected after Rampolla’s candidacy had been vetoed in the name of the Austro-Hungarian emperor Franz Josef (1848-1916), a traditional privilege that Pius X immediately abolished. (Pius was canonized in 1954, the first pope so recognized since Pius V in 1712.)
The Curia Reformed
Pius X thoroughly reorganized the Roman Curia, which was now made up of thirteen “congregations” dealing with particular subjects, along with certain specialized “commissions” and various ecclesiastical courts and tribunals. The leading congregations were the Holy Office, the guardian of orthodoxy; the Consistorial, which advised the pope on the appointment of bishops; Propaganda Fidei, for the missions; and Rites, for the regulation of the liturgy.
Vatican Policy
In public affairs, Pius X for the most part eschewed diplomacy in favor of strong public protests against injustices, including the continued Russian and German oppression of Catholics in Poland and the anticlerical government that came to power in Portugal in 1910. He expressed sympathy for the desire of the Irish to be free of British rule.
Italy
Italy remained the one country where Leo XIII had not followed a policy of accommodation, insisting that, because of its seizure of the Papal States, it was founded on a fundamental injustice. Devout Italian Catholics refrained from voting, which allowed secular liberals to dominate national life. Instead, Catholics organized the Opere dei Congressi (“works of the congresses”), a union of specialized groups of Catholic laborers, journalists, teachers, and other occupations, who had a significant influence in public life. Pius X officially suppressed the group when it began to move toward independence from Church guidance, but he finally authorized Catholics to vote in elections.
While he took strong stands on matters of principle, Pius was opposed to an overly politicized Catholicism, which was one of the reasons he condemned the Opere. He also condemned the aggressively democratic Le Sillon (“the furrow”) movement in France and expressed his disapproval of the Center Party in Germany, which he thought had become overly nationalistic.
Action Française
Near the end of Pius’ pontificate, some of the works of the influential French journalist Charles Maurras (d. 1952) were placed on the Index, but, mindful of Maurras’ support of the Church against the anticlericals, the condemnation was not announced. Maurras was an atheist and founder of the Action Française movement that valued Catholicism as integral to French identity. He called for a renewed union of throne and altar and regarded Jews as inherently inimical to French identity. His movement had considerable Catholic support, including many clergy, but Pius XI (1922-1939) condemned it and, in a highly unusual action, required the Jesuit theologian Louis Billot (d. 1931) to resign from the College of Cardinals because of his espousal of the condemned movement.
Modernism
Pius X was a vigorous champion of orthodoxy who warned that criticism of the Scholastic method was itself a sign of potential heterodoxy and once again proclaimed Thomism to be the preeminent Catholic system of thought, directing that it serve as the basis of all theology. In two encyclicals in 1907—Pascendi Dominici Gregis (Feeding the Lord’s Flock) and Lamentabili Sane Exitu (With Truly Lamentable Effect)—Pius condemned a theological movement he called Modernism. Although he considered it to be “the synthesis of all heresies”, Modernism was in some ways original, in that it was the first heresy in the history of the Church that openly invoked the “spirit of the age” as the ultimate criterion of truth.
Historicism
In a sense, Modernism was Hegelian, in that the unfolding of history was said to demand the adaptation of Christian doctrine to changing times, whether or not this was done consciously It also owed much to Darwinian evolution, and above all, it developed in the shadow of liberal Protestantism, which had moved along the same road decades before and to which Newman, in his theory of the development of doctrine, attempted to provide an orthodox response.
Modernists tended to a radical historicism, believing that it was impossible to transcend the limits of one’s own age and that attempts to do so were illusory. The historic creeds could not remain permanently valid, since they expressed merely the times in which they were formulated. Modernists were especially hostile to Thomism, which they regarded as a desiccated relic of the Middle Ages.
Loisy
The first and most important of the modernists was the French secular priest Alfred Loisy (d. 1940), who studied modern biblical criticism in order to refute Renan but instead became himself a skeptic. Loisy renounced the priesthood even prior to Pius’ condemnation of Modernism and years later admitted that at the time of the condemnation he believed nothing in the Nicene Creed except that Jesus had suffered under Pontius Pilate.
Convinced by Renan that the quest for the “historical Jesus” was futile, Loisy saw the Catholic emphasis on Tradition as the alternative, making it unnecessary to ground faith in an infallible Scripture. The Holy Spirit was always guiding and directing the Church, which could therefore express spiritual truths in the language of each new age. But for Loisy, the Holy Spirit did not mean the third Person of the Trinity but something closer to the “spirit of the age”, while Tradition was merely the Church’s way of accommodating to historical change.
Tyrell
George Tyrrell (d. 1909) was an Irish Protestant convert who, after several warnings, was expelled from the Jesuits. He was one of the few intellectual converts of the age who found doctrinal orthodoxy a burden rather than a blessing. Even before the condemnation of 1907, he had come to hate the papacy.
Von Hugel
Friedrich von Hugel (d. 1925) was an Austrian nobleman living in England. Although not a strong proponent of evolution, he shared with other modernists the belief that science had raised new questions for religious faith and that believers could not rely on dogmatic authority. Von Hugel too was deeply influenced by modern biblical criticism, for which he sought to compensate by appealing to a sense of “transcendence” inherent in the human soul, meaning a realization that there are higher, deeper, more mysterious realities beyond the empirical. Access to these realities was made possible by religious mysticism.
Von Hugel was a man of seeming paradoxes. Like other modernists, he was unfavorable to Scholasticism, but unlike some, he was not strident nor did he allow himself to express doubt concerning any official doctrine. Most paradoxically, he considered himself an Ultramontane, although he was devastated by the papal condemnation of Modernism. Personally, he was deeply devout, spending hours in front of the Blessed Sacrament and regularly praying the rosary, practices consistent with his sense of the faith as essentially an inner spiritual reality.
Von Hugel functioned as a kind of broker for the modernists, familiarizing them with each other’s work and offering strong moral support to those censured by ecclesiastical authority. (Probably because he was a layman, he received no personal censure in the modernist condemnation.)6
Blondel
The French lay philosopher Maurice Blondel (d. 1949) also regarded Scholastic philosophy as overly abstract and proposed instead that the assent to truth involved the entire human person, including will, imagination, and emotion, a position somewhat like Newman’s idea of assent. Like von Hugel, Blondel aimed to show that the human quest for truth stemmed from an inherent sense of a higher reality, an awareness of something beyond human experience. Evidence of transcendence lies everywhere in the universe, waiting to be apprehended.
The most controversial of Blondel’s ideas was his claim that, since such evidences were indeed found everywhere in the world, “the supernatural” was really natural. Like Rosmini, his work was held in suspicion because of the fear that he denied the necessity of divine grace and reduced belief to a natural phenomenon. After considerable anguish, Blondel announced his acceptance of the papal condemnation, on the grounds that he did not hold any of the condemned propositions.
Bremond
Henri Bremond (d. 1933) was a French Jesuit and historian of spirituality, which he saw as a way of evading the demands of Scholastic orthodoxy without explicitly denying them, since he believed the real Tradition of the Church was found not in dogmas but in the lives of saints. Often in tension with his superiors, Bremond too left the Society of Jesus and became a secular priest and, disregarding the fact that Tyrrell had been excommunicated, officiated at his fellow ex-Jesuit’s funeral.
The Anti-Modernist Oath
After Modernism was condemned, all candidates for the priesthood had to swear a special oath against it. Encouraged by Pius X’s secretary of state, the aristocratic Spanish-English Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val (d. 1930), a secret organization called the Sodality of St. Pius V gathered material on suspected modernists, especially seminary professors, and submitted it to the Holy See, which sometimes took action against the accused. The Sodality tended to cast its net very wide, often on the basis of hearsay, and ensnared some people who were in fact orthodox. (The future popes Benedict XV and John XXIII were on its lists of suspects.)
Benedict XV
Pope Benedict XV (1914-1922) was elected partly because he was not associated with what were regarded as the rigidities of Pius X’s pontificate, and he immediately replaced Merry del Val. Benedict’s election brought an end to the systematic hunting of modernists, because, while he strongly reaffirmed the anti-modernist condemnations, he insisted that they be implemented responsibly.
The “Great War”
Benedict’s pontificate was dominated by the First World War (1914-1918), where in each country the majority of Catholics patriotically supported the war effort. The German and French bishops both issued statements proclaiming the justice of their respective causes. Far more legitimately, Cardinal Desire Mercier (d. 1926) of Malines (Mechelen) fearlessly denounced German atrocities against the Belgian people.
The Papal Program
Benedict worked indefatigably for a negotiated settlement and sponsored humanitarian efforts to alleviate the sufferings of both prisoners of war and civilians, efforts that prompted the secular-minded Turkish government to erect a statue in his honor after the war. Besides the end to hostilities, the Pope had more specific aims: keeping Italy out of the war, lest a victory strengthen its anticlerical government against the Church; preserving the Muslim Ottoman Empire, in order to keep Russia from promoting an aggressive Orthodoxy in the Near East; and preserving the Austro-Hungarian Empire as the last great Catholic state in Europe. He denounced anti-Jewish outbursts in Poland and was friendly to the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine, although he was anxious to insure Christian access to the Holy Places.
Rejection
Most of Benedict’s goals failed, as Italy entered the war on the winning side and the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires were defeated and dismembered, although the Bolshevik Revolution marked the end of Russian Orthodox expansion. Benedict was disheartened by his failure to end the conflict, as most of the great powers ignored his peace proposals. Others coldly rejected them, and the Holy See was excluded from participation in the Versailles Peace Conference.
The Peace Settlement
In most ways, the Versailles settlement was a failure, as demonstrated by the outbreak of World War II only two decades later. In principle, the popes strongly approved the idea of international cooperation, but the Holy See was excluded from the League of Nations, an organization the popes considered inadequate in any case, and the Vatican continued to pursue its goals mainly through a series of concordats.
Between the Wars
Pius XI (1922-1939) was a professional librarian who served as a papal diplomat, then as archbishop of Milan for only a few months before his election as pope. He ruled the Church during what has been called the Age of the Dictators, and he showed both diplomatic skill and great boldness in dealing with political conditions for which there were no real precedents. The period between the two world wars was a time of widespread and severe religious persecution.
The Soviet Union
The new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) attempted to exterminate all religion, including various Catholic minorities. Under the leadership of Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union was a police state based on terror. The Orthodox church continued to exist subject to the most severe restrictions, with its clergy often functioning as government agents.
Benedict sent aid to the USSR during a famine, although, except in Ukraine, Catholics were a small minority. As the government moved to destroy the Catholic Church, Pius XI appealed for freedom and, when this went unheeded, made a clandestine attempt to reestablish the hierarchy, an effort that was discovered and thwarted. A large number of Soviet Catholics were put to death in the mid-1920s, and in the early 1930s, the Soviet government deliberately starved millions of Ukrainian peasants to death, as part of its attempt to socialize agriculture.
New States
In dismembering the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Versailles conference created the new states of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, both of which were ethnically and religiously divided, containing large Catholic populations side by side with various kinds of Protestants and secularists in Czechoslovakia and Serbian Orthodox and Muslims in Yugoslavia. In both countries, the Church encountered considerable harassment. The new state of Turkey began systematically oppressing, even to the point of genocide, various Near Eastern peoples, some of whom (Lebanese, Syrians, Armenians) were Catholic.
Mexico
Following a revolution in 1910, Mexico became one of the fiercest anti-religious regimes in the world, virtually outlawing the practice of the faith. Priests who continued to minister to their people were systematically hunted down and killed,7 notably the Jesuit martyr Bl. Miguel-Agostino Pro, who was shot by a firing squad in 1927, his arms outstretched in the form of a cross. In the late 1920s, desperate Catholics mounted an armed Cristeros rebellion against the government, until urged to cease by the Holy See. The government violated its promise not to engage in reprisals, but the persecution gradually ceased in the later 1930s.
Portugal
Portugal experienced rather chaotic conditions after World War I, and for a time, the government was unfriendly to the Church. This changed in 1932 with the ascent to power of the economist Antonio Salazar (d. 1970), a devout Catholic who appealed to the social teachings of the Church as the basis of his policies. But his suppression of free elections and of many basic civil liberties, as well as his ardent commitment to colonialism, made him unpopular with many Portuguese.
Weimar Republic
The Germany of the 1920s—called the Weimar Republic after its capital city—was an unstable structure plagued by severe economic problems and strong opposition from both sides of the political spectrum. Officially secular, it respected religious freedom, even allowing religious instruction in the state schools.
Poland
One benefit of the peace settlement was that Catholic Poland at last gained its independence, and thus its religious freedom, from Germany. In the period between the wars, Poland was a dominantly Catholic country, as reflected in its laws and its charitable and educational systems.
Ireland
The Catholic hierarchy in Ireland cautiously supported the abortive Easter Uprising against Great Britain in 1916 and criticized the conscription of Irishmen into the British Army. After the war, the bishops supported a second rebellion that led to the establishment of the new Irish Free State (Eire), which did not include the predominantly Protestant six northern counties known as Ulster or Northern Ireland.
The Irish Republican Army (IRA), which was influenced by Marxism, denounced the settlement and embarked on terrorist tactics—employed in tandem with Protestant violence in Ulster—that continued into the twenty-first century, often condemned by the bishops. A broader Republican movement, led by Brooklyn-born, half-Spanish Eamon De Valera (d. 1975), also opposed the settlement. But after being imprisoned for a time, he accepted the situation and for decades was the dominant figure in Irish political life.
The Irish Free State adopted a constitution that guaranteed religious liberty for all but gave the Catholic Church a “special place” in Irish life, notably the primary responsibility for operating educational and charitable institutions. Eire sought to base its laws on Catholic moral principles, such as not permitting divorce, and by 2010 was the only Western European country that did not permit abortion.
Social Doctrine
In 1931, Pius XI issued the encyclical Quadragesimo Anno (In the Fortieth Year), commemorating Rerum Novarum. It restated Catholic social teaching on the rights of labor and even more strongly endorsed Corporatism (sometimes called Syndicalism).
Inspired by the two great social encyclicals, “social Catholicism” in practice meant strong support of labor unions and of the welfare state. But the integrity of the family was considered paramount, so that “social Catholicism” diverged from most labor unions in advocating a “family wage”—paying men on the basis of how many dependents they supported, thereby making large families possible and making it unnecessary for mothers to enter the work force.
Distributism
In England, a movement that included the writers G. K. Chesterton (d. 1936) and Hilaire Belloc (d. 1953) promoted Distributism as an alternative to both Socialism and free-market capitalism. Distributists urged that ownership of property be shared as widely as possible, thereby making each family secure and independent and encouraging smaller scale economic activities.
In practical terms, Catholic social movements often tried to organize cooperatives for buying and selling goods almost at cost and credit unions whereby people pooled their savings and offered loans to their members at low rates of interest. Some of these efforts resulted in worker-owned businesses. Some socially minded Catholics strongly advocated a return to the land, judging modern urban life to be inherently corrupting of both religion and morals, and from time to time, experimental agricultural communities were founded, although all eventually failed.
Catholic Action
Catholic Action (a term not often used in the United States) grew out of the varying efforts of Catholics to deal with the modern secular state. As endorsed by the popes beginning with Pius X, it was alternatively called the “lay apostolate”, meaning lay Catholics in the world attempting to reshape society according to moral and spiritual principles, guided by the hierarchy. How this was to be done depended on the circumstances of particular countries, so that Catholic Action at different times might be considered either “right wing” or “left wing”.
The Age of Dictators
Italy
As in France, the relationship between the Church and the state improved in postwar Italy. Luigi Sturzo (d. 1959), a priest of Catholic Action who had been active on behalf of peasants and miners, founded the Popular Party with Pius XI’s permission, whereby Catholics ended their long abstention from national politics and began to have a major impact on Italian life.
Mussolini
But Italian politics in the years between the wars proved extraordinarily complex and treacherous, because of the rise of Benito Mussolini (d. 1945), a one-time left-wing socialist who had become an extreme Italian nationalist. He came to power in 1922, at the head of a fascist movement that took its name from the fascis, an ancient Roman symbol of authority. Sturzo, because he headed a movement that was an effective counter-force to the fascists, was forced into exile.
The Lateran Treaty
Although personally contemptuous of religion, Mussolini recognized the spiritual power of the Church and therefore moved away from the anticlerical policies of the previous Italian governments, to the point where, in the Lateran Treaty of 1929, the six-decade stalemate between Italy and the Holy See was at last resolved. Pius XI came to the papal throne already prepared to effect such a resolution, as shown in the fact that at his coronation he gave his blessing urbe et orbe (“to the city and to the world”) publicly, from the balcony of the Vatican Palace, something that his three immediate predecessors had refused to do. The Lateran Treaty in effect settled the fifteen-hundred-year-old question of the temporal power of the papacy, which the popes now implicitly recognized as neither necessary nor appropriate to their office.
Vatican City
The treaty financially compensated the Holy See for its loss of property and recognized the independent state of Vatican City—356 acres surrounding St. Peter’s Basilica and assorted other properties in Rome—an arrangement that gave the popes official security and independence, as they were no longer reliant merely on the good will of the Italian government. The treaty also gave the Church a special place in Italian life, providing for religious instruction in the schools and official observance of holy days and not permitting divorce.
Fascism
But Mussolini’s initial friendliness to the Church masked sinister forces that would soon reveal themselves. He came to power partly through the actions of his Black Shirts—bands of uniformed men who provoked street brawls and intimidated their opponents by force and who continued to operate even after Mussolini had become the official head of state. Fascist Italy was not under a complete reign of terror, but critics of the regime were often imprisoned or sent into exile.
Italian Fascism, along with Soviet Communism, was among the first manifestations of Totalitarianism, a system of government that seeks to unify all of life under the power of the state, while denying that there is any independent sphere of human activity. Inevitably, Totalitarianism takes on the character of a religion, demanding ultimate loyalty from its people and inspiring a religious attitude toward the state, which is often marked by a charismatic leader preaching passionate sermons to adoring crowds, massive processions, sacred symbols like the fascis and the German swastika, patriotic music and art, and huge new temples dedicated to the cult of the state. Fascism and Communism differed more in theory than in practice. The former was intensely nationalistic, the latter officially committed to an international classless society, though the USSR in practice pursued its own national interests single-mindedly. Communism abolished private property while Fascism retained it only under close state control and in the state’s interests. Fascism glorified war and conquest as the highest human endeavors, as the USSR also became highly militarized. Communism was officially atheistic and sought to destroy religion, while fascist governments allowed limited religious liberty only so long as it did not hamper the state’s aims.
Christ the King
In establishing the feast of Christ the King (December 1925), Pius XI proclaimed that no earthly power could claim superiority to religion and that the Church, in the name of Christ, was the ultimate custodian of moral and spiritual truth. The Pope insisted that states and peoples were subject to natural law, which transcends both the authority of the ruler and the will of the people, because it is rooted in the nature of the universe itself and ultimately in the will of God. Natural law was not religious dogma but the concrete application of truths that were known by reason.
Fascism Condemned
The Pope condemned the theory and practice of Fascism in 1931, not only for its atheism but because of its demand for ultimate loyalty, its glorification of military force, its extreme nationalism, and its denial of basic human rights and dignity. For a time, Mussolini’s government backed away from a confrontation with the Church. When Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935, Pius XI protested privately. Bl. Ildefonso Schuster (d. 1954), cardinal archbishop of Milan, supported the invasion of Ethiopia but later denounced Mussolini’s racist ideas.
But Catholic Action was inherently a rival to Fascism, because it diverted loyalty away from the state, and the Black Shirts sometimes broke up Catholic meetings and suppressed Catholic publications. Tellingly, the government forbade Catholic Action to sponsor athletic activities, lest sports bind young people more closely to the Church than to the state.
Corporatism
Even in democratic countries, some Catholics who were not sympathetic to Fascism in other ways thought they saw the Catholic idea of Corporatism in the fascist economic system, which organized society into “syndics” made up of representatives of various industries, under the authority of a government that coordinated their activities for the good of the state. Distinctively Catholic labor unions were outlawed, however, and the “common good” was defined as the interests of the all-powerful state.
Spain
Above all, Spain was the cauldron of religious strife during the 1930s. With no tradition of democracy, all parties tended to seek complete domination of national life and the annihilation of their rivals if possible. Leftist groups—ranging from relatively moderate socialists, through communists, to self-proclaimed anarchists seeking to destroy all government—agreed in seeing the Church as their great enemy, because her influence penetrated so deeply into Spanish life.
Civil War
When the monarchy was abolished in 1931, a leftist coalition announced that Spain was no longer a Catholic country, and mob attacks on clergy and churches, sanctioned by the government, soon followed. In 1936, General Francisco Franco (d. 1975) initiated a rebellion that turned into bitter civil war in which the Republican (Loyalist) government in power received aid from the Soviet Union and Franco’s Nationalists got aid from Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. The war was brutal. About sixty-five hundred priests and religious were killed, many savagely butchered, especially by Anarchists, while the Nationalists sometimes dealt equally ruthlessly with their enemies, including priests who supported the Republicans out of a desire for Basque independence.
International attitudes to the war tended to follow religious lines, with most journalists publicizing atrocities by the Nationalists while ignoring or minimizing those on the other side. Catholic opinion everywhere tended to see Franco’s struggle as a kind of crusade, although some leading Catholics considered the war too morally ambiguous for ready partisanship.
Franco
Franco won a complete military victory in 1939 and became the virtual dictator of Spain, executing thirty thousand former enemies and imprisoning four hundred thousand more. But he lost the propaganda war, so that for decades Spain was treated as a kind of pariah among Western nations, not least because of the prominent role of the Church in national life and its official denial of religious freedom.
Although Franco’s Spain was often characterized as fascist, Franco successfully did a balancing act during World War II. He rebuffed invitations to join Germany and Italy, while allowing their planes to fly over Spanish territory. However, he extended safety to thousands of Jews fleeing Germany and France.
Germany
The Rise of Hitler
Although the National Socialist Party (Nazis) in Germany did not ordinarily call themselves fascists, it was there that Fascism achieved its greatest power. After World War I, the Austrian ex-soldier Adolf Hitler (d. 1945) started a movement similar to Mussolini’s Black Shirts and attempted to seize power by force, an effort that landed him in prison. Afterward, he entered politics, playing on German resentment of the Versailles settlement, and soon the Nazi Party was a substantial minority in the Reichstag (parliament). Nazism began in predominantly Catholic Bavaria, but as tensions developed between the Nazis and the Church, that territory gave the Nazis less support than other areas, and the German bishops condemned Nazi racism and ultra-nationalism.
Anti-Christian
Hitler was born a Catholic but renounced his faith early, partly because his worship of naked power could not be reconciled with Christian morality. (Because of its teachings about love, forgiveness, and humility, Nietzsche had called Christianity a “slave religion”.) Just as Mussolini sought to associate his regime with the pagan Romans, the Nazis invoked the old Norse gods as appropriate deities for a warlike people.
The Concordat
In 1933, Hitler was asked to form a coalition government, an invitation supported by the Catholic Center Party, and the bishops withdrew their condemnation of the Nazis. But once in power, Hitler discarded those who thought they could control him and outlawed all other political parties, including the Center Party. He despised all religions and intended to eliminate them once he had conquered Europe but in the meantime dealt with the Catholic Church pragmatically, applying pressure but stopping short of alienating the large number of German Catholics. The Holy See signed a concordat with the new government, in order to protect the rights of the Church as far as possible, and as far as possible the majority of the German hierarchy tried to work within the framework of that agreement, sending notes of protest to the government over various issues but refraining from public condemnation.
Popular Support
Many Catholics, including clergy, remained loyal to the Nazi regime, although it soon became apparent that its ideology was incompatible with Christianity. Many believed in that ideology, many more willingly supported Hitler because of Germany’s economic recovery, and an undetermined number remained passively supportive of Hitler out of fear, as the government increasingly made use of police-state tactics.
Hitler embarked on policies that made him immensely popular, especially public-works projects to alleviate the unemployment of the Great Depression. Above all, he appealed to the wounded pride of Germans smarting from their defeat in World War I, rearming Germany in defiance of the Versailles treaty and stirring up often hysterical nationalistic feelings, expressed above all in aggression toward other nations. Even more than Italy, the German state demanded absolute loyalty from its citizens.
Austria
In Hitler’s native Austria, a Social Christian Party, with elements of anti-Judaism, emerged after World War I, and a priest, Ignaz Seipel (d. 1932), even served briefly as head of state. Under the devout Catholic chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss (d. 1934), Austria abolished parliamentary democracy and moved toward the kind of corporate state that Quadragesimo Anno seemed to enjoin. After Dollfuss was assassinated by Nazi agents, his policies were continued by the equally devout Kurt von Schuschnigg (d. 1977). In 1938, Germany both invaded Czechoslovakia and annexed Austria, where the Germans were welcomed by many, notably Cardinal Theodor Innitzer of Vienna (d. 1955). But Pius XI rebuked Innitzer, who recanted and later came to the defense of the Jews. Schuschnigg was sent to a concentration camp.8
Racial Purity
Nazism’s fanatical anti-Jewish campaign was based on a theory of racial purity partly derived from the Darwinian idea of the “survival of the fittest”—the strongest people, who were presumed to be those of northern Europe, were destined to rule their inferiors and had to protect themselves from contamination by lesser races. Hitler identified the large Jewish population as an alien element that weakened the German nation, even though many Jews were well assimilated into German life, and he made Jews scapegoats for Germany’s defeat in World War I. The Nazis intensified their campaign against the Jews in the later 1930s, culminating in the death camps where about six million people perished.
Faulhaber
Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber of Munich (d. 1952), a political conservative who had been critical of the Weimar government, was one of the few people who dared speak forcefully against the regime. From the beginning, he denounced Nazi racial ideas and reminded Germans of the Jewish origins of the Christian faith, something that, despite Nazi threats, he continued to do as attacks on the Jews intensified throughout the 1930s. Cardinal George W. Mundelein of Chicago (d. 1939), who was of German extraction, was also among the first to condemn Hitler, dismissing him contemptuously as a mere “paper-hanger”. (Insofar as he had an occupation, Hitler was actually a failed artist.)
Eugenics
The idea of eugenics (“well born”), which advocated “selective breeding” in order to strengthen the racial stock and to eliminate “inferior” people, had for some time been propagated even in democratic countries like the United States. Germany now became the first country to introduce compulsory sterilization for the physically handicapped, the mentally defective, and others. Individuals with these infirmities residing in hospitals and other institutions were euthanized, with over eighty thousand being gassed and cremated, a program that was strongly denounced by Bl. Clemens von Galen (d. 1946), bishop (later cardinal) of Munster.
Pius XI
Pius XI pointedly absented himself from Rome when Hitler made a state visit, at a time when, under Hitler’s prodding, Italian Fascism was becoming officially anti-Jewish, and the Pope once famously proclaimed, “Spiritually, we are all Semites.” With Faulhaber’s help, Pius issued a stinging rebuke to the Nazis in his 1937 letter Mit Brennender Sorge (With Burning Anxiety), a document that the Pope arranged to have smuggled into Germany and read from the pulpits. He followed this the next year by an encyclical that was a kind of syllabus of errors of fascist ideology. Early in 1939, Pius was preparing to issue an even more uncompromising denunciation of Nazism, especially its racism, in an encyclical partly written by the American Jesuit John LaFarge (d. 1965), but the Pope died before the document could be issued, and its existence remained unknown for decades.
Persecution
Papal condemnations provoked an immediate Nazi reaction, but instead of making martyrs, Hitler at first tried to discredit priests as moral leaders. A number were arrested, a favorite tactic being to prosecute them for alleged crimes such as smuggling foreign currency, which showed that they were in league with Germany’s enemies, and sexual misconduct, especially with young people.9 Officially sanctioned mob vandalism of churches and a prohibition on religious orders receiving new members followed, and in 1940, the government began to close religious houses and schools.
Pius XII
In an unusually short meeting, the conclave of March 1939 elected Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the first secretary of state to ascend the papal throne in almost three centuries, his speedy election undoubtedly due to the fact that he was by far the prelate best qualified to confront the darkening international situation. The new Pope was from a noble Roman family and had spent his entire career in the papal diplomatic service, including the crucial post of nuncio to Germany just after World War I. As Pius XII (1939-1958), it would be his duty to govern the Church during one of the most difficult times in human history.
The Dilemma
Pius was acutely aware of the dilemma of two regimes pitted against one another, both of which were savagely hostile to religion—Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. (As nuncio to Germany after World War I, he had both faced down a threatening communist mob and witnessed the beginnings of Nazism.)
The Soviet police state was even more terrifying than that of Germany, and it oppressed religion more fiercely; as a result, some people—possibly the Pope himself—judged that either Germany could be a bulwark against Communism or that Germany and the USSR might destroy each other. But as it turned out, Germany was the greater immediate threat, because of its naked assaults on other countries.
War
World War II began when Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, an act that provoked England and France (the Allies) to declare war against the German juggernaut. Mussolini supported his German ally, and the two of them formed the Axis bloc. Most Germans, including most Catholics, probably supported Hitler’s war effort, at least until it became obvious that defeat was inevitable, but there was some German resistance, for example, the White Rose, a group of Catholic and Protestant university students who produced anti-Nazi and anti-war tracts.
Martyrs
In German-conquered lands, priests sometimes joined resistance groups trying to sabotage the conquerors—eventually three thousand priests perished at the hands of the Nazis. Those who resisted openly were martyred, including Bl. Bernhard Lichtenberg (d. 1943), provost of the cathedral in Berlin; the German Jesuit Alfred Delp (d. 1945); the Netherlandish Carmelite Bl. Titus Brandsma (d. 1942); and the Austrian layman Bl. Franz Jäggerstätter (d. 1943).
Attack on the Jews
In every country conquered by the Germans, the systematic elimination of the Jews followed, along with that of other groups, including two million Catholic Poles. The Nazis defined Judaism in terms of ancestry instead of religion, so that, along with many other Jewish converts to Catholicism, the German Carmelite nun and philosopher St. Edith Stein (Sr. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross) was deported in 1942 from the German-occupied Netherlands to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland, where she was killed. The timing of the deportations seemed designed to punish the Dutch Catholic bishops who had issued a public statement condemning the Nazi persecution of the Jews.
Kolbe
Over 160 priests perished in Auschwitz alone. The Polish Franciscan St. Maximilian Kolbe (d. 1941) sheltered Jews until he was himself sent to Auschwitz, where he volunteered to undergo death by starvation in place of the father of a family.
Puppet States
As the German armies marched across Europe, they set up puppet governments in the conquered territories. That of Slovakia was headed by a priest, Josef Tiso, who was hanged by the Soviets in 1947. In France, some Catholics supported the invaders, many from expediency, some because they thought France had been defeated because of its own spiritual and moral degeneracy. The devout Marshal Philippe Pétain (d. 1951), a hero of the First World War who believed armed resistance was impossible, became head of a puppet government set up at Vichy
Papal Policy
Pius XII deplored the German invasion of the Netherlands, Belgium, and France in 1940, and he gave sanctuary in the Vatican to the diplomats of the Allied powers who were trapped in Rome when the war began. As in the previous war, the Vatican continually tried to provide food, medicine, and other humanitarian services to prisoners of war and refugees on both sides. But, as in the previous war, the Holy See remained officially neutral, and Pius refrained from condemning any of the participants by name. He repeatedly called for a peace conference but found, like Benedict XV, that his voice was seldom heard, partly because both sides sought “unconditional surrender”.
Help for the Jews
Without mentioning the Nazis or the Germans by name, Pius condemned racism in his Christmas speech of 1942, and in private audiences he denounced anti-Jewish policies. If he was not as outspoken as he might have been, he may have been motivated by the fact that, when bishops did speak out boldly—in the Netherlands and other places—the Nazis retaliated with even more ferocious acts. Pius encouraged both Vatican diplomats and the various national hierarchies to save as many Jews as possible, and those diplomats helped smuggle Jews to safety from German-occupied countries, many of them to Franco’s Spain. Catholic agencies and individual Catholics hid Jews or shielded them with false certificates of baptism.
Under German orders, Mussolini’s government eventually began deporting Jews to death camps, but thousands were hidden in religious houses in Rome, some in the Vatican itself and in the papal summer residence at Castel Gandolfo. In the end, 85 percent of Italian Jews were saved. Late in the war, when the existence of the death camps was confirmed, the Holy See and its various nuncios lodged strong protests against the systematic internment of Jews and others, and direct Vatican intervention persuaded the Nazi puppet government of Hungary to stop deporting Jews to Germany. The Church served as a major agency of international relief after the war, especially through Catholic Relief Services in the United States and the organization Misereor (“have mercy”) in West Germany.
A Perilous Position
Despite the Lateran concordat, the Vatican was completely at the mercy of the Italian state and remained in that perilous situation throughout most of the war. The Germans themselves occupied Rome in 1943, and Hitler’s government is known to have regarded Pius as an enemy and to have developed a secret contingency plan to seize him and take him to Germany Without knowing of the plan, the Pope himself gave serious consideration to moving the seat of the papacy elsewhere, even of abdicating.
Postwar Reckonings
At the end of the war, Petain was imprisoned, and the French government, under the equally devout Catholic Charles de Gaulle (d. 1970), demanded that the Vatican remove twenty-three bishops thought to have collaborated too closely with the Vichy government. It was a major diplomatic achievement of the papal nuncio, Angelo Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII, to reduce that number to two. Also after the war, some priests and religious, presumably because of fascist sympathies, helped suspected war criminals escape to South America.
Soviet Conquest and Persecution
As a result of the war, the Soviet Union gained control of large sections of Germany and Austria; all of predominantly Catholic Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Lithuania; and a religiously divided Yugoslavia. The communists began a severe persecution of the Church that would last for forty years.
Bl. Aloysius Stepinac, archbishop of Zagreb (d. 1960), was subjected to a show trial and sentenced to prison for alleged collaboration with the Nazi puppet government of Croatia, although in fact he had often denounced the Nazis, helped Jews, and opposed the government’s program of forcing Serbian Orthodox to become Catholics. He was made a cardinal while in prison and was eventually released under house arrest.
The Hungarian bishop Bl. Zoltàn Meszlényi (d. 1951) froze to death in prison after having preached against the regime, and the Hungarian Cardinal Josef Mindszenty (d. 1975) became a worldwide symbol of the victims of communist tyranny when he was imprisoned for seven years, after undergoing a show trial similar to Stepinac’s. After his release, he took sanctuary in the American embassy in Budapest and eventually, with reluctance, went to live in Rome.
Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński (d. 1981) of Warsaw, who had also worked against the Germans during the war, was also imprisoned for a time by the communists, and Cardinal Josef Beran (d. 1969) of Prague was exiled.
The Postwar World
The United Nations
The Holy See in principle supported the formation of the United Nations at the end of the war, and the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights owed much to the French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain (d. 1973) and the Lebanese Greek Orthodox diplomat Charles Malik (d. 1987).
Catholic Statesmen
In the period immediately after the war, serious Catholics held the highest offices in France (de Gaulle, Robert Schuman [d. 1963]), West Germany (Konrad Adenauer [d. 1967]), and Italy (Alcide de Gasperi [d. 1954] and Amintore Fanfani [d. 1999]). To varying degrees, they pursued agenda based on religious principles.
Adenauer, who had been a major figure in the Center Party and was twice imprisoned by the Nazis, helped found the Christian Democratic Union, a coalition of Catholics and Protestants that enacted a unique system by which tax money was apportioned to religious groups according to the number of their members, a system that allowed groups like Misereor to be exceptionally generous in supporting charitable causes around the world.
De Gasperi, who during the war had to take refuge from Mussolini in the Vatican, was one of the founders of the Italian Christian Democratic Party, which grew partly out of Catholic Action. The Christian Democrats were especially a bulwark against Communism. In 1948, Pius XII warned the Italian people not to vote for the communists, as they appeared ready to do, thereby thwarting what might have been the only communist victory achieved anywhere through democratic means.
The Church’s Influence
Through both the dark years (1920 to 1945) and the brighter years (1945 to 1965) the social and cultural influence of the Church was greater than it had been for a long time. Pius XI and Pius XII were respected as moral leaders, and Catholic intellectuals attracted the attention of the secular culture.
Although defenders of the modernists charged that their condemnation in effect put an end to genuine Catholic intellectual life, the six decades after 1907 saw a cultural flowering in the Church unequaled since the seventeenth century, principally led by intellectual converts who were attracted precisely because of Catholic dogmas, not in spite of them.
Early Leaders
Among the earliest representatives of the Catholic intellectual revival were the convert English Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins (d. 1889), a pioneer of modern poetry; the English apologists Chesterton (also a convert) and Belloc; and the Frenchmen Charles Péguy (d. 1914) and Léon Bloy (d. 1917).
Through both journalism and more ambitious works, Chesterton and Belloc entered into direct battle with the modern world, boldly asserting the eternal validity of Catholic doctrine and looking to the Middle Ages as the high point of human history.
Péguy, who was killed in battle, became disillusioned with Socialism at almost the very moment of the papal condemnation of Modernism and soon rediscovered his Catholic faith. He was a leading figure in French intellectual life, and he too appealed to the values of the Middle Ages in order to unmask the spiritual emptiness of modern civilization. Also at the moment Modernism was being condemned, Maritain, a nominally Protestant French layman who was sunk in despair to the point of suicide, converted to the Catholic faith, finding a lifeline in precisely the Thomistic philosophy that the modernists scorned.
Philosophy
The revival of Thomistic thought was at the heart of the intellectual revival, but this “Neo-Thomism” marked something of a break with what was commonly taught in seminaries. The French historian Etienne Gilson (d. 1978), by immersing himself in the original sources, rediscovered a Thomism that he thought had been ignored or distorted not only by various modern philosophies but by other Catholic philosophies as well, and he began a project to recover authentic Thomism. As against Kantianism in particular, the key point for Gilson was Thomistic “realism”—the ability of the mind to perceive the actual existence of the objects it contemplated, unmediated by the categories present in the mind itself. The intellect intuited the real existence of beings, not merely its own ideas.
Jacques Maritain, who held various academic appointments and was for a time French ambassador to the Holy See, endeavored to show that medieval philosophy, far from being outdated, remained perennially valid, applicable in areas ranging from poetry to politics. He traced all the disorders of the modern world—moral and cultural as well as political—to the abandonment of “right reason”, of which Thomism was the highest achievement.
For several decades after World War II, French thought was dominated by a philosophy dubbed Existentialism, which resisted definition but could be described as the sense of the world as an arbitrary place with no inherent meaning, a condition that gives men a radical freedom to define themselves and determine the meaning of their lives.
Existentialism in the full sense was by definition incompatible with Christianity, but the French convert Gabriel Marcel (d. 1973) insisted that, as a man, the believer too experiences existential despair, which he transcends by encountering God in the midst of that despair. For Marcel, the act of faith itself was an exercise of existential freedom, and he therefore rejected all philosophical systemization, including “proofs” for the existence of God, which he thought would in effect rob people of their freedom by leaving them no choice but to believe.
History and Science
The convert English historian Christopher Dawson (d. 1970) ranged over all of history, explicating better than anyone had ever done the crucial importance of religion at the heart of every civilization.
Catholics also contributed to scientific thought. A Belgian secular priest, Georges Lemaitre (d. 1966), was one of the greatest physicists of modern times, anticipating the Big Bang theory, which posits that the universe began in a great explosion from a single atom.
The Arts
The Catholic revival was especially strong in literature, with the Frenchmen François Mauriac (d. 1970) and Georges Bernanos (d. 1948), the Englishmen converts Graham Greene (d. 1991) and Evelyn Waugh (d. 1966), the Norwegian convert Sigrid Undset (d. 1949), and the American Flannery O’Connor (d. 1964). At the heart of most of their “Catholic” novels was the dramatic reality of sin and the crisis it causes in a person’s life.
Catholic music flourished with the Frenchmen Maurice Duruflé (d. 1986) and Olivier Messiaen (d. 1992) but, for whatever reason, the Frenchman Georges Rouault (d. 1958) was virtually the only important Catholic painter. After World War II, numerous churches were designed in self-consciously modern styles, but no distinctive style of church architecture developed except that of the eccentric Spaniard Antoni Gaudi i Cornet (d. 1926), who designed structures of an inimitable (and unimitated) quasi-baroque strangeness.
A Time of Strength
Having recovered from two world wars and a severe depression, the Western world experienced a time of renewed productivity and hope for the future. When Pius XII died in 1958, the Church appeared to be, despite severe persecution in some countries, stronger than she had been for a long time.