Anticlericalism

views updated

ANTICLERICALISM

social resentment of the clergy
political anticlericalism
cultural anticlericalism
bibliography

The word anticlericalism can first be found in the correspondence of French officials in the 1850s, and it became an important term in the religious and political vocabulary of Europeans in the last third of the nineteenth century. But resentment of the power of the clergy can be found in the Middle Ages, and was a central element in the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment. In the nineteenth century Protestant ministers sometimes had strained relations with the laity and political establishments, but anticlericalism most often refers to antipathy directed at the Roman Catholic clergy and, to a lesser extent, the clergy of the Anglican Church in Great Britain. Anticlericalism is a complex phenomenon, which varied significantly depending on time and place. For purposes of analysis we can look at anticlericalism in its social, political, and cultural manifestations. These different strains of anticlericalism came together at certain moments to produce culture wars that defined sharply different positions and in some cases violent conflict over the role of the clergy and the church in modern Europe.

Anticlericalism was particularly potent in France during the 1790s and throughout Europe in the early 1830s. In the last third of the nineteenth century anticlericalism was an important political and cultural force that produced major legislation on church-state relations and expressed anxieties about the loyalty of citizens and the solidarity of families.

social resentment of the clergy

The Catholic clergy constituted a powerful elite in Catholic Europe as religious leaders charged with defining and defending the moral values of their communities. In carrying out this role they inter-acted with the laity in a number of ways that generated conflict and resentment. Clerical control of the sacraments was one important source of trouble, for many parishioners resented the efforts by priests to use these rituals as a way of imposing their will. French archives, for example, contain numerous complaints in which priests are accused of rejecting parental choices about godparents, of prohibiting children from receiving first communion, of deferring absolution in the confessional, and of refusing the last sacraments and religious burial to people as they faced death. Such selective prohibitions were aggravated by the fees clergy charged for the performance of their duties. Preaching directed against communal festive events was another source of tension, with dancing a particularly contentious issue. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century the clergy fought a losing battle against the growing popularity of the waltz, which they saw as a source of moral corruption for the young. Conflicts over the costs of maintaining churches, presbyteries, and cemeteries could also threaten relations between clergy and laity. Many clergy managed to get along well with the people they served, but even in the best of circumstances some tension was inevitable, and when priests took an imperious manner and played favorites communities could dissolve into hostile factions. There is no solid evidence that clerical behavior became worse in the nineteenth century and some reason to believe that priests became more accommodating to those who came to church. But the political and cultural critics whose agenda included control of and in some cases elimination of the clergy could rely on a base of social resentment based on experience and memory.

political anticlericalism

As monarchical states accumulated more and more power over their subjects in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they acted to control the wealth and influence of the clergy, who were feared as alternative sources of authority. In the late eighteenth century this policy led to a series of measures directed against the clergy, summarized as "Josephism," because they were most fully articulated by the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II (r. 1765–1790). Joseph seized the property of monastic houses and interfered with the communications between the pope and the churches in the empire. Joseph's assault on religious congregations was part of a larger pattern, exemplified most dramatically in the suppression of the Jesuits by Pope Clement XIV (r. 1769–1774) in 1773, who acted under the pressure of several Catholic monarchs. Policies targeting the clergy, especially religious congregations, were adopted in some form by almost all the European states in the course of the nineteenth century.

Political anticlericalism was a central element in the revolutionary legislation enacted by the French National Assembly in 1789, which released monks and nuns from their vows, abolished monasteries and convents, and seized church property as a way of dealing with the national debt. The refusal of about half of the clergy to swear an oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (July 1790), which called for the lay election of curés and bishops, was a major source of political conflict in France, which lasted until the Napoleonic treaty with Pope Pius VII (r. 1800–1823) was signed in 1801. The Catholic clergy were among the most visible targets of the Reign of Terror (1793–1794), when hundreds of priests were murdered as defenders of the fallen monarchy, and as proponents of superstition who kept the people in ignorance as a way of maintaining their own power.

This association of the clergy with political reaction and the pursuit of ecclesiastical power remained a central theme in European political life, with the French Revolution setting a pattern for popular violence and legislation directed against the clergy that was repeated at several times and in several places throughout the nineteenth century. In the wake of the French Revolution of 1830 mission crosses raised by preachers during the Bourbon Restoration (1814–1830) were torn down, and the palace of the archbishop of Paris was sacked in February 1831. In England the bishop of Bristol's palace was sacked in October of 1831 by a crowd angered over his opposition to the Reform Act that was intended to expand the suffrage. In Spain anticlericalism was a particularly potent force linking liberal reformers and urban workers and producing periodic outbursts of legislative repression and crowd action. About one hundred members of religious orders were killed in Madrid and Barcelona in 1834 and 1835, where they were suspected of supporting the pretender Charles against Queen Isabella in the Carlist war over the succession to the Spanish throne. A liberal government in Spain abolished monasteries and seized their property in 1837.

A second major wave of anticlerical political activity occurred in the last third of the nineteenth century. The clergy were targeted by a number of radical leaders of the Paris Commune of 1871, such as Raoul Rigault, a disciple of the socialist and militant atheist Louis-Auguste Blanqui. Inspired by Blanquist ideals the police of the Commune took a number of clerical hostages, including the Archbishop Darboy, who was among the dozen or so priests executed in the chaotic last days of the Commune in May 1871. A more moderate version of anticlericalism was a basic element in the establishment

and development of the French Third Republic. In the 1880s the state began enforcing restrictions on religious congregations, and forced priests, brothers, and nuns out of the public school system. As a result of the Dreyfus affair, when the Assumptionist fathers took a leading role in attacking Captain Alfred Dreyfus (1859–1935), the government passed a Law of Associations (1901) that prohibited religious congregations and led to the exile of thirty thousand clergy. The separation of church and state, enacted in 1905, abolished the Concordat of 1801, and thereby eliminated the state salaries that had supported the clergy throughout the century. The program of laïcité defended by the Fifth Republic, which seeks to exclude religious expression from the public sphere, is a direct descendent of the policies put in place by the anti-clericals of the Third French Republic.

Political anticlericalism was a potent force throughout Europe in the last years of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. A wave of anticlerical legislation followed the Spanish revolution of 1868, and in 1909 workers in Barcelona destroyed forty convents and twelve parochial churches in a series of riots known as "the tragic week." As a result of the repression that followed, including the execution of the anticlerical Francisco Ferrer, workers in Barcelona and elsewhere in Spain were even more convinced that social and political progress depended on eliminating the power of the clergy. The animosity of Spanish anticlericals and supporters of the clergy that developed in the nineteenth century set the stage for much of the violence that occurred during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939).

In Italy and Germany political anticlericalism was a prominent force insofar as many politicians suspected the clergy of being more loyal to the church than to the nation. During the German Kulturkampf (culture war) in the 1870s Chancellor Otto von Bismarck (r. 1871–1890) won approval for laws that established Prussian state control over clerical education (1873) and abolished religious orders and congregations (1875). Opposition resulted in at least some time in jail for five of the twelve German bishops and hundreds of prosecutions directed at the lower clergy. The Kulturkampf ended in 1887, in part because Bismarck sought Catholic support in his attack on the socialists, but the Protestant League formed that year became a powerful mass organization that saw Catholics, and particularly their clergy, as disloyal to the nation.

cultural anticlericalism

Anticlericalism as a political force has sometimes been viewed as a maneuver by liberal politicians to draw in a working-class constituency without having to offer any fundamental social reforms. Anticlericalism did provide an agenda for cross-class alliances, an obvious benefit that was apparent to liberal politicians. In addition to such political motives anticlericalism became increasingly fueled by an intense hatred of the clergy, who were seen as destroying the emotional lives of families and ruthlessly seeking to defraud them in order to accumulate wealth. These attitudes were conveyed in a growing literature that included pamphlets and press reports highlighting clerical scandals, as well as novels by some of the leading literary figures of the late nineteenth century. Masonic lodges and societies of freethinkers were also conduits for attacks on the clergy, and were particularly important in France and Belgium in the last third of the century.

The French historian Jules Michelet gave powerful expression to some of the most important cultural complaints of anticlericals in Le prêtre, la femme, et la famille (1845; The priest, the woman, and the family), where he attacked priests for using the darkness and isolation of the confessional to form an intimate bond with wives and daughters of French families, alienating them from their husbands and fathers. For many anticlerical writers this intimacy led easily into the seduction of young women, a central element in the plots of Émile Zola's La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret (1875; The Sin of Father Mouret) and José Maria Eça de Queriós's O crime do Padre Amaro (1880; The Crime of Father Amaro). Stories of such sexual misconduct were common in newspapers as well as in novels in the last third of the century, with nuns as well as priests being accused of immorality. The heavily sexualized content of much of the anticlerical writing suggests that the clergy were in part a useful screen on which people projected anxieties about the separate spheres that determined the lives of middle-class men and women, a social pattern that coexisted uneasily with a desire for domestic intimacy.

The Jesuits were the most widely loathed religious congregation among anticlericals, and the target of some of the most lurid literature. Eugène Sue's Le Juif errant (The Wandering Jew), which first appeared as a popular serial in the French newspaper Le Constitutionnel (1845), revolves around a Jesuit plot to seize the inheritance of the Rennepont family, part of their larger conspiracy to dominate the world through wealth and intrigue. This "Jesuit myth" resembles much of the anti-Semitic literature of the period, for both drew on simplistic and titillating scenarios that described villainous enemies conspiring to destroy the social order. In its moderate form anticlericalism pushed European states toward policies directed against religious congregations, clerical influence on education, and the exclusion of Catholicism from the public sphere. In its more radical form anticlericalism is part of a larger history of the demonization of political and cultural enemies, of the use of distorted and invented images that carry a religious charge, and which propose a Manichean view of history as the battle of good against evil.

bibliography

Primary Sources

De Queirós, Eça. The Crime of Father Amaro: Scenes from the Religious Life. 1880. Translated from the Portugese and with an introduction by Margaret Jull Costa. New York, 2003.

Zola, Émile. The Sin of Father Mouret. 1875. Translated by Sandy Petrey. Lincoln, Nebr., 1983.