Revolution and Revival
The climax of state power came in the French Revolution, which seized the vast possessions of the Church, dissolved all religious orders, reordered diocesan boundaries to coincide with civil departments and turned the clergy into a semi-egalitarian bureaucracy of state employees.
This ‘Civil Constitution’ was imposed in 1790 and denounced by Rome in 1791. It caused a schism between the French ‘Constitutional Church’ recognised by the state and a ‘refractory’ Church underground or in exile. Thirty thousand priests became emigres abroad, and in 1792 the Catholic Vendee rose in rebellion against the revolutionary regime, which in 1793 declared a terror on its enemies, and tried to secularise French culture by persecuting even the Constitutional Church and by imposing patriotic Deist or atheist ritual substitutes for Christianity. Though persecution lightened after 1795, the French occupation of Rome made Pope Pius VI (1717-99) a prisoner of France. As First Consul of the Republic, Napoleon (1769-1821) restored Catholicism in 1801 by a Concordat with Pope Pius VII (1740-1823) and even compelled the pontiff to assist at his coronation as Emperor in Notre Dame in 1804; but the unprecedented if only temporary revolutionary rejection of Christianity by a European Christian nation had created both a new cultus of martyrdom and a counter-revolutionary mentality in much of French Catholicism, which explains both the strength and limitations of its nineteenth-century revival.That revival was given its pro-papal ‘neo-Ultramontane’ character by the French Revolution’s abolition of the countervailing powers to the Papacy in the Roman Catholic Church. Napoleon secularised the German ecclesiastical electorates and prince-bishoprics, the Holy Roman Emperor became Emperor of Austria, and even the humbled French Gallican Church was restored by agreement with Rome, though the Pope’s authority in France remained restricted by the Organic Articles of 1802.
But the Church’s ‘Gallican liberties’ now looked like the liberties which the State could take with her, and Gallicanism was equally attacked by the arch-conservative polemicist Count Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821), who saw in the Papacy the ultimate guarantor of social and political order, and Felicite de Lamennais (1782-1854), who wanted the Pope to give an infallible sanction to the liberties of Catholic peoples. Indeed by 1830, Catholicism had forged its still enduring links with radical nationalism, in Ireland, then governed by English heretics, and Poland, partitioned in 1772,1792 and 1795 among Austria, Russia and Prussia, and only briefly restored by Napoleon. Orthodox Greece achieved its independence from the Ottoman Empire in a religious and national rising which began in 1821, and modern Belgium owes its creation to the union of Catholics and Liberals in 1830 to overthrow the rule of Protestant Holland. There were to be similar religious contributions to the modem definition of national and regional identities from the Basque country to the Balkans, in which a number of Orthodox states arose from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, Serbia, Rumania and Bulgaria; though the Holy Alliance of Austria, Russia and Prussia formed in 1815, equally invoked the sanction of Christianity for traditional constituted authority, as did the restored Bourbon monarchies of France, Spain and Naples.In this division between peoples and princes, the Papacy backed the princes. The States of the Church were restored in 1815, but were increasingly threatened by lay secret societies of Italian revolutionary nationalists who rose in rebellion in 1831 and 1848. The Roman revolution of 1848 transformed the saintly Pius IX (1792-1878), the longest ruling Pope since Peter, from a moderate liberal into the most stubborn and intransigent opponent of the pretensions of the nineteenth-century liberal mind. The anti-clerical challenge to the authority of the Church over education and morals, and to the survival of the religious orders, in Spain and Latin America, also contributed to papal conservatism, as did the expropriation of church property by the government of Piedmont-Savoy from 1848 as it adopted the cause of Italian unity.
By 1860, most of Italy was united in a new secular nation-state, which seized its capital, Rome, from the Pope’s rule in 1870.Pius’ hostility to the liberal idea of‘a free church in a free state’ lost him the support of some of the pioneers of the Liberal Catholic revival in France like the Count Charles de Montalembert (1810-70), but it was in France especially that the Pope won a vast popular following, among the readers of the newspaper L’Univers, marshalled by its peasant- born editor, Louis Veuillot (1813-83). The rising tide of French ‘neoUltramontane’ devotion to the Pope accompanied the revival of the modem cultus of the Virgin Mary, encouraged by Pius in his definition of the doctrine of her Immaculate Conception in 1854, and by the Marian apparition to a peasant girl, Bernadette Soubirous (1844—79) at Lourdes in 1858. The French Catholic revival was sustained by an unprecedented growth in charitable and educational orders of religious women, by the sanctity of the Cure d’Ars, Jean-Baptiste Vianney (1786-1859), patron of parish priests, and the Carmelite contemplative Therese of Lisieux (1873-97), the much-loved ‘Little Flower’, and by the recovery of the French missionary spirit, which was given a new international outreach after 1850 in the creation of new Catholic churches in Asia and the Pacific, and in the French Empire in Africa.
The outcome of the Catholic revival was the victory of a militant and monolithic Catholicism, which received its twin cap-stones in the papal condemnation of‘progress, liberalism, and modern civilization’ in the Syllabus of Errors of 1864, and in the definition, agreed by the First Vatican Council of 1869-70, of the Pope’s infallibility in faith and morals as a doctrine binding on Roman Catholics. There was opposition to defining the doctrine at the council, which was well informed of the historical objections argued by the German church historian Ignaz von Dollinger (1799-1890) and his English Liberal Catholic disciple John Acton (1834—1902). The Vatican decrees were also rejected after 1870 by small middle-class ‘Old Catholic’ churches formed in Germany and Switzerland, by the ‘Los von Rom’ movement in Austria after 1897, by the Marian ‘Mariavites’ in Poland, and in 1920 by the Czechoslovak national Church.
These movements were insignificant, however, beside the chorus of Liberal and Protestant protest, which produced the Prussian government’s anti-Catholic Kulturkampf, enshrined in the May Laws in the 1870s, and a new bout of anti-clerical persecution in France in the 1880s, culminating in 1905 in the abrogation of the Concordat under the Law of Separation. Such external pressures, however, stimulated the rise in the 1880s of a new political Catholicism, most notably the Catholic Centre Party founded by Ludwig Windthorst (1812-91) in Germany, which began to threaten the dominance of liberal elites in the new parliamentary democracies. A social Catholicism, alive to the grievances of the industrial working class, also opposed the rising power of antireligious and anti-clerical Socialism, and an anti-Socialist reforming programme received the blessing ofPope Leo XIII (1810-1903) in the Encyclical Rerum Novarum of 1891.Leo gave official patronage to a scholastic revival based on the works of Aquinas, but the attempt to defend Catholicism on a more radical intellectual basis by the French biblical critic Alfred Loisy (1857-1940), the Anglo-Irish theologian George Tyrrell (1861-1909) and the German-Scots metaphysician Friedrich von Hugel (1852-1925) was condemned as the ‘Modernist heresy’ by Pope St Pius X (1835-1914) in 1907.
The power of the Papacy was also enhanced by the rise of missionary Catholic churches, like those of England, Scotland, the United States and Australasia, largely built up by emigrants from Ireland. These churches were not subject to State interference: so that it was through the realisation of the liberal principle of‘a free Church in a free State’ that the Papacy in 1900 enjoyed a more untrammelled jurisdiction over the whole Catholic world.
Protestantism like Catholicism benefited from the conservative reaction to the French Revolution, to enjoy a massive nineteenth-century revival. In England, the former radical Unitarian S.T. Coleridge (1772-1834) defended the union of Church and State on the basis of a Neoplatonic and neo-Germanic idealist philosophy, while the Church of England Evangelicals of the ‘Clapham Sect’, under the lay leadership of William Wilberforce (1759-1833), the arch-opponent of the slave trade, offered a philanthropic if conservative alternative to violent revolution.
A similar social-reforming Evangelicalism was given practical expression in the crusades of the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury (1801-85) against the exploitation of child and female labour. The Evangelicals also produced the first great Protestant missions to the heathen overseas, while under Evangelical influence the English Nonconformist Churches grew between 1790 and 1850 to a near parity in numbers with the Church of England. The Nonconformist and radical subversion of the Anglican confessional state, aided and abetted by Irish and English Catholics, produced from 1833 a conservative High Church reaction in defence of the Church of England led by Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800-82) and John Henry Newman (1801-90), who after his submission to Rome in 1845, became one of the most original of modern Roman Catholic theologians. This ecclesiastical hostility to a more liberal reforming State also occurred in the new Calvinist secession churches of Holland, Switzerland and Scotland, where a Free Kirk, formed under the leadership of Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847) in 1843 by the disruption of the official Church of Scotland, professed to act in defence of the ‘Crown Rights of the Redeemer’ against secular tyranny. There were Evangelicals still more other-worldly: the Scots Edward Irving (1792-1834), inspirer of the Catholic Apostolic Church, and the Irish J.N. Darby (1800-82), founder of the Plymouth Brethren, denounced the existing churches as apostate, and looked for deliverance to the Second Coming to usher in the Millennium. Their literalist understanding of Scripture is the foundation of modern fundamentalism. Other churches, like the Methodists, also divided. Yet underlying the warfare of the mainstream rival denominations were shared tendencies towards the revival of higher doctrines of Church, ministry and sacrament, the formation of a more professional clergy, and the adoption of a more formal liturgy and Gothic architecture and symbolism, and even of a more distinctive clerical dress.This wholesale renewal of the institutional fabric of the Protestant Churches was, however, largely middle class in character, and repelled a large majority of the urban poor in the new industrial towns. One of the few successful proletarian Christian movements was the Salvation Army, founded by William Booth (1829-1912), with both evangelistic and philanthropic aims. The social and educational achievements of the Protestant Churches were generally impressive, if inadequate to the sheer magnitude of their task, and the Christian Socialism of well-meaning clergymen like F.D. Maurice (1805-72) was better at interesting Christians in Socialism than in converting Socialists to Christianity. The growth of the British Empire, however, enlarged the field of action of Protestant Christianity, while the advent of Protestant Prussia as the principal industrial and military power on the continent was confirmed by the proclamation of a new German Empire in 1871. The learned Protestant apologists for Prussia included the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831), who, though his system was near to pantheism, exercised an enormous influence in his defence of Christianity as the Absolute Religion, corresponding in imaginative terms to the highest scientific realisation of Absolute Idealism, as defined in his own romantic philosophy.