Suppression of the Jesuits
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Among the repercussions of the controversy over Chinese rites was an intensification of the resentment directed against the Society of Jesus, to which some of the other movements mentioned above also contributed. The campaign to suppress the Jesuits was the result of the general anticlerical and antipapal tenor of the times. Hostility to the Jesuits was further inspired by their defense of the Indigenous populations of the Americas against abuses committed by Spanish colonizers and by the strength of the order, which was regarded as an impediment to the establishment of absolute monarchist rule. The Portuguese crown expelled the Jesuits in 1759, France made them illegal in 1764, and Spain and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies took other repressive action in 1767. Opponents of the Society of Jesus achieved their greatest success when they took their case to Rome. Although Pope Clement XIII (reigned 1758–69) refused to act against the Jesuits, reportedly stating that they “should be as they are or not be at all,” his successor—Clement XIV (reigned 1769–74), whose election was urged by anti-Jesuit forces—issued a brief, Dominus ac redemptor (“Lord and Redeemer”), which suppressed the Society for the good of the church. Frederick II of Prussia and Empress Catherine II of Russia—one of them Protestant and the other Eastern Orthodox—were the only monarchs who refused to promulgate the brief. In these lands and elsewhere the Society of Jesus maintained a shadow existence until 1814, when Pope Pius VII (reigned 1800–23) restored it to full legal validity. Meanwhile, however, the suppression of the Jesuits had done serious damage to the missions and the educational program of the church at a time when both enterprises were under great pressure.
Religious life in the 17th and 18th centuries
It would be a mistake to allow the narrative of these controversies to monopolize one’s attention. Less dramatic but no less important was the continuing life of the Roman Catholic Church as “mother and teacher” during these centuries. Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet was not only the formulator of Gallican ideology but also one of the finest preachers of Christian history. He addressed king and commoner alike and asserted the will of God with eloquence, if sometimes with undue precision. Together with Jean Mabillon, a Benedictine monk and scholar, Bossuet helped to lay the foundations of modern Roman Catholic historiography. During the 18th century their work was continued and expanded, especially by Mabillon’s confreres, the Maurists, a Benedictine group that edited the works of the Greek and Latin Fathers. A similar group, the Bollandists, established by Jean Bolland among the Jesuits in the early 17th century, edited the lives of the saints. Both Jansenism and Quietism must be seen not only as parties in a controversy, but also as symptoms of religious vitality. Engaging as they did considerable segments of the Roman Catholic laity, they expressed “the practice of the presence of God” with a new vigor.
The Roman Catholic Church of this period exercised a profound influence on culture and the arts. Indeed, the spirit of the Baroque is inseparable from the Counter-Reformation, as is evident, for example, in the church of Il Gesù in Rome and in the sculpture and architecture of Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Blaise Pascal and Miguel de Cervantes are notable literary figures who expressed Roman Catholic thought and piety through their works. Despite its strong support for much of contemporary culture, the church also found itself in conflict with that culture during the Counter-Reformation. The condemnation of astronomer and philosopher Galileo in 1616 and again in 1633 as “vehemently suspected of heresy” was more important symbolically than intrinsically, a sign of the alienation between science and theology. Also during this period several major religious orders were established or further developed, among them the Daughters of Charity, founded by St. Vincent de Paul in 1633, and the Trappists, who take their name from the Cistercian abbey of La Trappe, which in 1664 was transformed into a community of the Strict Observance.
The church in the modern period
Catholicism in Revolutionary France
The period of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation was a time of convulsion for the Roman Catholic Church, but the era of revolution that followed it was, if anything, even more traumatic. This was partly because, despite the polemical rancor of Reformation theology, both sides in the controversies of the 16th and 17th centuries still shared much of the Catholic tradition. In the 18th century, however, there arose a political system and a philosophical outlook that not only did not take Christianity for granted, but in fact explicitly opposed it, compelling the church to redefine its position more radically than it had done since the conversion of Constantine in the 4th century.
Although the rhetoricians of the French Revolution spoke as though the church and the ancien régime (the pre-Revolutionary political and social system of France) had been one, no one could study the history of the church in the age of Louis XIV and accept so simplistic an interpretation. Indeed, there had been bitter and uncompromising conflict between the two. Nevertheless, this conflict had taken place within the context of certain shared presuppositions. It is significant, for example, that the French aristocracy, soon to become the hated object of Revolutionary zeal, constituted the source of almost all the bishops of the church in the ancien régime. This also meant that positions of authority in the church were largely foreclosed to the lower clergy because of their class. The theological and ecclesiastical parties identified with opposition to Rome were frequently those that drew the support of the laity; Jansenism, for example, was identified as the position of the lay lawyers who spoke for the French courts of justice against the hierarchy. Despite the hostility between church and state, therefore, the ancien régime appeared to its critics to be a monolith. Thus, when the French philosopher Voltaire (1694–1778) said, “Écrasez l’infâme” (“Crush the infamous one”), he may have meant superstition, ignorance, and tyranny, but what they added up to concretely in the minds of the revolutionaries was the supposed alliance of the monarchy with the Roman Catholic Church. This identification was confirmed only when the defenders of the established order, both lay and clerical, spoke out against the threat of revolution with a greater awareness of its dangers than of its justification.
Complicating the predicament of the church in the ancien régime was the corrosive influence of the Enlightenment on the religious beliefs of much of the lay intelligentsia. Enlightenment rationalism took hold among many defenders of the political status quo as well as among clerical scholars, helping to produce the beginnings of critical biblical scholarship and of religious toleration. It would be an oversimplification, therefore, to put the Enlightenment unequivocally on the side of the critics and revolutionaries. But the confidence in reason and the hostility to “superstition” cultivated by the Enlightenment inevitably clashed with the Christian reliance on revelation and with the belief in supernatural grace as communicated by the sacraments.
The political and social prerogatives of the church were also threatened by the Enlightenment, especially when it became allied with the expanding claims of an autocratic “enlightened despotism.” The brotherhood cultivated by groups such as the Freemasons and the Illuminati, a rationalist secret society, constituted a rival to the feeling of community that the church had once provided. The Masonic alternative to the Catholic mass even became the subject of an opera, The Magic Flute by Mozart.
Although leaders of the state were often more hospitable to the ideas of the Enlightenment than were leaders of the church, the latter proved more accurate in their assessment of the revolutionary implications of these ideas. The “heavenly city of the 18th-century philosophers” may originally have been intended as a substitute for the City of God, but it also provided much of the ideological rationale for the attack upon the ancien régime. In the familiar epigram of the Swiss writer Jacques Mallet du Pan, after the French Revolution, “philosophy may boast her reign over the country she has devastated.”
The actions of the French Revolution against the church took many forms, but the most significant was the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (1790), which attempted to subject the church to the National Assembly. The entire church in France was reorganized, with the authority of the pope restricted to doctrinal matters. Later in the same year, a constitutional oath was required of all the French clergy, most of whom refused. Pope Pius VI (reigned 1775–99) denounced the Civil Constitution in 1791, and Catholic France was divided between adherents of the papal system and proponents of the new order. The closing decade of the 18th century was dominated by this conflict, and no resolution was provided by either church or state. The ultimate humiliation of the church took place in 1798 when Pius VI was driven out of Rome by French armies; the following year he was taken captive and dragged back to France, where he died. As papal prestige sank to depths it had not reached since the crises of the 14th century, some critics called for abolishing the office altogether.
Napoleon I and the restoration
The death of Pius as a martyr and his instructions for a conclave in the event of an emergency contributed to a dramatic reversal of fortune for the papacy and the church in the first half of the 19th century. However, the worst excesses committed against the church by the Revolution were overturned by one of the Revolution’s own. After assuming power, Napoleon Bonaparte, recognizing the great division that attacks on the church had caused in France, sought an accommodation, which was achieved in a concordat concluded with Pope Pius VII (reigned 1800–23) on July 15, 1801. It granted freedom of worship to all French citizens while recognizing that the faith of most of them was Roman Catholicism. All incumbents of bishoprics were to resign and be replaced by bishops whom Napoleon, as first consul, would nominate. The properties of the church that had been secularized during the Revolution were to remain so, but the clergy was to be provided with proper support by the government.
Many historians maintain that the Concordat of 1801 was as important an event for the modern church as the conversion of Constantine had been for the ancient church. As Constantine had first recognized and then established Christianity in the Roman Empire, so a series of concordats and other less-formal agreements created the modus vivendi between the church and modern secular society. What this arrangement entailed for the papacy was the surrender of most of the temporal holdings of the church in Europe. The eventual outcome was the creation of Vatican City as a distinct political entity, but only after a long conflict over the States of the Church during the unification of Italy in 1869–70.
Although the Concordat of 1801 was of lasting significance, it was not the final act in the tumultuous drama involving Napoleon and the pope. Indeed, the French ruler attached a number of articles to the concordat that restricted papal jurisdiction in France, thus undermining the authority of the pope. Pius’s refusal to accept the additions to the agreement led to worsening tensions between the two leaders and to Pius’s eventual arrest and imprisonment. In January 1813, while in French custody, Pius was forced to sign a new concordat, but he repudiated the document two months later.
Pius ultimately outlasted Napoleon, who suffered his final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, after which the victorious powers attempted to restore the pre-Revolutionary order. The Congress of Vienna in 1814–15 helped to establish a basis for the church’s recovery in the 19th century by returning Rome to the pope. Pius further secured the church’s future by signing concordats with the rulers of several countries, and he recognized the newly independent states of Latin America. He also revived the Society of Jesus, condemned Freemasonry, and patronized art and education. His efforts restored the papacy to its former position of respect and reestablished the church as an important force in the affairs of Europe and America.
Pius IX
Few popes of modern times have presided over so momentous a series of decisions and actions as Pius IX (reigned 1846–78), whose early liberalism was ended by the shock of the Revolutions of 1848. During his reign the development of the modern papacy reached a climax with the triumph of ultramontanism—the viewpoint of those who favored strong papal authority and the centralization of the church—and the promulgation of the dogma of papal infallibility. It had long been taught that the church, as “the pillar and bulwark of the truth,” could not fall away from the truth of divine revelation and therefore was “indefectible” or even “infallible.” Inerrancy had likewise been claimed for the Bible by both Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians. As the visible head of the church and as the authorized custodian of the Bible, the pope had also been thought to possess a special gift of the Holy Spirit, enabling him to speak definitively on faith and morals. But this gift had not been defined in a clear way. The outward conflicts of the church with the modern world and the inner development of its theology converged in the doctrinal constitution Pastor aeternus (“Eternal Shepherd”), promulgated by the First Vatican Council (commonly called Vatican I) on July 18, 1870. It asserted that
the Roman Pontiff, when he speaks ex cathedra, that is, when in discharge of the office of pastor and teacher of all Christians, by virtue of his supreme apostolic authority he defines a doctrine regarding faith or morals to be held by the universal Church, by the divine assistance promised to him in blessed Peter, is possessed of that infallibility with which the divine Redeemer willed that his Church should be endowed.
Those who opposed the official declaration of papal infallibility argued that such a declaration would widen divisions within the church and increase animosity and misunderstanding between the church and the modern world. This opposition was, however, ineffective, and the dogma of infallibility became the public doctrine of the church. Those who continued to disagree with the dogma withdrew to form the Old Catholic Church, which was centered in the Netherlands, Germany, and Switzerland.
In September 1870, while Vatican I was in recess, Rome was occupied by forces of the Kingdom of Italy, and the council was forced to suspend its work. During the subsequent period of the “Roman Question,” which lasted until 1929, the official position of the church was that the pope was a “prisoner” in the Vatican.
Even before the promulgation of the dogma of infallibility, Pope Pius had exercised the authority that it conferred on him. In 1854 he defined as official teaching the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, “that the Most Blessed Virgin Mary, at the first instant of her conception, was preserved immaculate from all stain of original sin, by the singular grace and privilege of the Omnipotent God, in virtue of the merits of Jesus Christ.” Although the doctrine was very popular in an age of increasing Marian devotion and was supported by bishops and theologians, it was pronounced by the pope as a demonstration of papal infallibility. Ten years later Pius issued a document that was in some ways even more controversial, the Syllabus (December 8, 1864). In it he condemned various doctrines and trends characteristic of modern times, including pantheism, socialism, civil marriage, secular education, and religious indifferentism. By thus appearing to put the church on the side of reaction against liberalism, science, democracy, and tolerance, the Syllabus seemed to signal a retreat by the church from the modern world. Be that as it may, the document did clarify Roman Catholic teaching at a time when it was being threatened on all sides.
The church’s hostility toward modern thought and society led to a serious confrontation with the Prussian government in the Kulturkampf of the 1870s and ’80s. Because he was a Prussian and a Protestant, Prime Minister Otto von Bismarck resisted the basic trend of the developments just traced. In his view, the Roman Catholic parties in the German states were an obstacle to the political union to which he was dedicated—i.e., a predominantly Protestant Germany without Roman Catholic Austria. Moreover, he believed that both the Syllabus of Errors and the dogma of infallibility were expressions of the church’s opposition to the very sort of state he was trying to establish. Much of the theological opposition to papal infallibility came from German thinkers, notably Ignaz von Döllinger, to whose defense Bismarck sprang.
The Kulturkampf began with the elimination of the Roman Catholic bureau from the ministry of education and ecclesiastical affairs in the Prussian state. Bismarck asserted the state’s authority over all education in Prussia and expelled the Society of Jesus. Then, in direct defiance of the Syllabus of Errors, he made civil marriage obligatory, regardless whether the couple had exchanged vows before a cleric. Laws were passed to compel candidates for the Roman Catholic priesthood to attend a German university for at least three years. Bismarck summarized his defiance of the church in an allusion to the conflict between Pope Gregory VII and Emperor Henry IV in the 11th century: “We are not going to Canossa!” When Pius IX died in 1878, the conflict was still unresolved.
Leo XIII
Leo XIII (reigned 1878–1903) was no less conservative in his ultramontanism and his theological inclinations than his predecessor, and on issues of church doctrine and discipline his administration was a strict one. It was during his reign that the movement known as Modernism, which advocated freedom of thought and the use of biblical and historical criticism, arose within Roman Catholicism. Although the formal condemnation of its tendencies did not come until 1907, four years after his death, Leo made his opposition to this trend clear by the establishment of the Pontifical Biblical Commission as a monitor over the work of scriptural scholars. His conservative and centralizing tendencies also were reflected in his relations with other churches. Although he voiced a more open attitude toward the Eastern churches, he sought their return to obedience to Rome. In 1895 Leo appointed a commission to decide the long-mooted question of whether, despite the separation from Rome in the 16th century, the priestly ordination of the Anglican Communion was valid, as was that of the separated Eastern churches; in 1896 he issued Apostolicae curae (“Apostolic Concerns”), which denied the validity of Anglican orders and was a setback for ecumenical hopes on both sides.
The pope’s conservative nature was demonstrated most dramatically in his condemnation of Americanism. He had difficulty comprehending the burgeoning republic of the United States, American pluralism, and American Catholic praise for religious liberty. The controversy over Americanism arose from a French translation of a biography of Isaac Thomas Hecker, founder of the American congregation of priests, the Paulists. Hecker had sought to reach out to Protestant Americans by stressing certain points of Catholic teaching, but Leo understood this effort as a watering down of Catholic doctrine. Hecker also had used terms such as “natural virtue,” which to the pope suggested the Pelagian heresy. Because members of the Paulists took promises but not the vows of religious orders, many concluded that Hecker denied the need for external authority. Progressive Catholics in America advocated greater Catholic involvement in American culture, which some understood to mean that Roman Catholics should adapt its teachings to modern civilization. In Longinqua oceani (1895; “Wide Expanse of the Ocean”), Leo warned American church leaders—such as the only cardinal in the American church, James Gibbons, archbishop of Baltimore—not to export their unique system of separation of church and state, and in his pastoral letter Testem benevolentiae (1899; “Witness to Our Benevolence”) he condemned other forms of Americanism. Gibbons denied that American Catholics held any of the condemned views, and Leo’s pronouncement ended the Americanist movement and curtailed the activities of American progressive Catholics.
Despite his theological and ecclesiological conservatism, Leo’s attitude toward the modern world was more accommodating than that of his predecessor. More diplomatic and flexible than Pius, Leo also initiated contacts with contemporary scholarship. He encouraged historical studies and opened the Vatican archives to researchers, including Protestant historians. He also promoted education and the study of astronomy and science. The positive aspects of his theology appeared in the encyclical Aeterni Patris (“Eternal Father”) of August 4, 1879, which, more than any other single document, provided a charter for the revival of Thomism—the medieval theological system based on the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas—as the official philosophical and theological system of the Roman Catholic Church. It was to be normative not only in the training of priests at church seminaries, but also in the education of the laity at universities. To that end Leo also sponsored the start of a definitive critical edition of the works of Aquinas. Although he was a staunch Thomist, Leo named John Henry Newman (1801–90), the English scholar whose theology was more Augustinian than Thomistic, a cardinal.
In 1931, on the 40th anniversary of Pope Leo XIII’s landmark encyclical Rerum novarum, Pius XI promulgated Quadragesimo anno (“In the 40th Year”), which confirmed the church’s position on social justice issues. Pius’s encyclical was the first of several papal documents issued by successive popes to commemorate Rerum novarum.
Leo XIII is best remembered for his social and political thought, which earned him the sobriquet the “pope of peace.” Uncompromising in his attitude toward Italy and papal independence, Leo strove to improve relations with France and encouraged French Catholics to participate in their democracy. He also managed to mollify the church’s position toward the policies of Bismarck, and the chancellor in turn moved toward a compromise. Diplomatic relations between Germany and the Vatican were restored in 1882, and gradually the restrictive laws of the Kulturkampf were lifted. But Leo’s greatest achievements in relations between the church and the modern world were his social and political encyclicals. Without repudiating the theological presuppositions of Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors, these documents articulated a positive social philosophy, not merely a defensive one. In Libertas (“Liberty”), issued on June 20, 1888, he sought to affirm what was good about political liberalism, democracy, and freedom of conscience. Above all, the encyclical Rerum novarum (“Of New Things”) of May 15, 1891, allied the church with the modern struggle for social justice and laid the foundation for 20th-century Catholic social teaching. Although rejecting the program of 19th-century socialism, Leo also severely condemned exploitative laissez-faire capitalism and insisted upon the duty of the state to strive for the welfare of all its citizens. The social thought of Leo XIII helped to stimulate concrete social action among Roman Catholics in various lands, as in the Christian social movement.
By the time of his death, soon after the close of the 19th century, Leo had restored the prestige of the papacy, and the church seemed in many ways to be entering a new era of respect and influence. Two historical forces, however, came to dominate the development of Roman Catholicism during the 20th century: World Wars I and II, with the accompanying upheavals of politics, economics, and society; and the Second Vatican Council, with upheavals no less momentous in the life and teaching of the church.
The period of the World Wars
Pope Pius X (reigned 1903–14) symbolized the church’s transition from the 19th century to the 20th. In his encyclical Pascendi Dominici gregis (“Feeding the Lord’s Flock”) of September 8, 1907, he formally condemned Modernism as “the résumé of all the heresies,” and in 1910 he prescribed that clergy and seminary professors take an oath abjuring Modernism and affirming the correctness of the church’s teachings about revelation, authority, and faith. He sponsored the revision and clarification of the Code of Canon Law, which was completed during the reign of his successor and which replaced the code that had been in effect since the Middle Ages. More perhaps than any of his immediate predecessors or successors, Pius X attended to the reform of the liturgy, especially the Gregorian chant, and advocated early and frequent reception of Holy Communion. Yet hanging like a cloud over his pontificate was the growing threat of world war, which neither diplomacy nor piety was able to forestall. The last major document issued by Pius X was a lament over the outbreak of war, dated August 2, 1914; less than three weeks later he was dead.
Benedict XV (reigned 1914–22) began his pontificate by issuing an encyclical, Ad beatissimi (“To the Most Blessed”; November 1, 1914), in which he condemned the extremes of the anti-Modernist crusade, but his efforts in this area were overshadowed by World War I (1914–18). Although he vigorously denounced the atrocities committed by both sides in the conflict, his diplomatic policy of strict neutrality left him with few friends among the combatants. His peace initiatives were further thwarted by the Italian government, which succeeded in placing a clause in the Allies’ secret Treaty of London (1915) that prohibited papal participation in any peace talks. Although excluded from the peace conference at Versailles, whose decisions he denounced, Benedict played an important role in the years after the war through his financial support of refugees and the wounded. He also improved relations with Italy, laying the groundwork for a final settlement in 1929. In 1920, as part of his program to reconcile Rome and France, he canonized Joan of Arc, the 15th-century French heroine who had led the French army in a momentous victory at Orléans that repulsed an English attempt to conquer France during the Hundred Years’ War.
World War I, which is often called the real end of the 19th century, was also a major turning point in the history of modern Roman Catholicism. Since ancient times the church had been accustomed to ordering its relations with secular society through negotiations with kings and emperors, who would preferably be members of its own fellowship. The war and the revolutions attending it brought about the end of the ruling dynasties of Germany (Hohenzollern), Austria-Hungary (Habsburg), and Russia (Romanov) and thus forced the church to come to terms with new democratic, communist, and fascist regimes. Of special significance was a series of pacts with the Fascist Italy of Benito Mussolini. In 1929 the church and the Italian government signed the Lateran Treaty, which regularized relations between them and recognized an independent Vatican City under papal authority, thus finally settling the “Roman Question.” In 1933 the church concluded a concordat with Nazi Germany, hoping to protect its own interests and those of German Catholics; this hope proved ill-founded, and the church’s relations with Adolf Hitler and his regime deteriorated.
In the years leading up to World War II (1939–45), the church’s relations with Italy and Germany were shaped not only by the desire to protect Catholic interests in those countries but also by a hostility toward communism, which was shared by both popes of this period, Pius XI (reigned 1922–39) and Pius XII (reigned 1939–58). Although the papacy often spoke out against communism during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), it was silent on the subject during World War II, when Pius XII adopted Benedict XV’s policy of strict neutrality. Although criticized during and after the war for its position, the papacy had enunciated its opposition to the secularist and racist programs of the totalitarian regimes, most notably in Pius XI’s encyclical Mit brennender Sorge (“With Deep Anxiety”), which was read from Catholic pulpits in Germany on Palm Sunday (March 14) in 1937. Pius planned other pronouncements condemning Nazism but died before he could deliver them.
St. Maximilian Kolbe (also called St. Maksymilian Maria Kolbe) was a Franciscan priest who was martyred by the Nazis for aiding Jewish refugees during World War II. He was arrested in February 1941 for sheltering refugees, and he died at Auschwitz six months later after volunteering his life in place of another prisoner.
His successor, Pius XII, who played a much more controversial role during the war, has been criticized for failing to speak out more forcefully against the genocidal policies of the Nazis, which targeted Jews, homosexuals, Roma, and other groups of people who fell outside Hitler’s views of Aryan supremacy. His strongest statement against genocide was regarded as inadequate by the Allies, though in Germany he was regarded as an Allied sympathizer who had violated his own policy of neutrality. Pius also approved efforts to help Jewish people and ordered that the Jews of Rome be given refuge in the city’s religious houses. After the war, the Vatican was involved in extensive humanitarian efforts. Pius, however, was criticized for not having done more. A cautious and experienced diplomat who feared that bold actions would cause more harm than good, he was not a prophet at a time when the world may have needed one.
As a diplomat and former papal secretary of state, Pius was obliged, under the pressures of World War II, to clarify and refine the church’s teachings on war and peace as well as to work out a strategy of survival. In the encyclical Mystici corporis Christi (June 29, 1943; “Mystical Body of Christ”) he sought to explain the nature of the church and its relationship to nonbelievers. In Divino afflante Spiritu (September 30, 1943; “Inspired by the Divine Spirit”) he reinvigorated Catholic scholarship by approving the limited use of modern methods of historical criticism in biblical studies.
Pius also approved liturgical reform, inviting greater participation of laypeople in religious services in Mediator Dei (November 20, 1947; “Mediator of God”). After the war he continued to oppose communism, becoming increasingly strident and threatening communists with excommunication. In the last years of his papacy he also moved away from his more liberal encyclicals and showed his more conservative nature. In 1950 he became the first pope since Vatican I to exercise the right of defining doctrine, proclaiming the bodily assumption of the Virgin Mary to be a dogma binding on all members of the church. Earlier the same year, in the encyclical Humani generis (August 12, 1950; “Of the Human Race”), he had given a reproof to various theological trends that appeared to be reviving the ideas and methods of Modernism.
