CATHOLICISM

The Catholic Church as an institution was at the center of many of the most intense and significant political debates in the long nineteenth century. The Catholic Church was a potent political force because it frequently combined forceful leadership and a clear agenda with a membership that made Catholicism the largest single religious denomination in Europe. Although not evenly distributed throughout the Continent, Catholics were a clear majority in southern and western Europe—Spain, Portugal, Italy, Austria-Hungary, France, and Belgium (after 1830)—and constituted substantial minorities in the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Germany.

Not everyone baptized as a Catholic, of course, took their religion to mean the same thing, and levels of religious practice and commitment to the institutional church varied, sometimes sharply, on the basis of region, gender, and social class. But even lukewarm Catholics would have been familiar with the general teachings of the church about salvation and how to obtain it. And a majority of Catholics remained committed to the sacramental system that celebrated and sanctified key transitional moments in their lives. It is impossible to be certain what such participation means, but when combined with evidence of devotional vitality at shrines such as Lourdes, it appears that Catholicism continued to provide a "sacred canopy" for vast numbers of European Catholics. Catholicism functioned, therefore, not only as an institutional church, but also as a cultural system of symbols and rituals that provided a sense of meaning and order for its adherents.

the culture of catholicism

Catholicism in the nineteenth century inherited from the medieval era and from the reforms of the Council of Trent (1545–1563) a vision of a transcendent world beyond the here and now and a rich variety of rituals that allowed Catholics to communicate with that world. Heaven remained the goal for Catholics as a blissful realm where God and his saints resided for eternity. But if there was a heaven, there was also a hell, a place where those outside the church, and those within it who sinned and were not forgiven through the Catholic sacrament of penance, would suffer forever. Throughout the nineteenth century, preachers continued to resort at times to grisly descriptions of the horrific tortures awaiting the damned, as famously reported by James Joyce, whose fictional account of Father Arnall's sermon in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) mirrors many of those delivered in churches during the period. Such preaching might lead some to skepticism and fuel anticlericalism, but it could also provoke religious dread, which along with hope for salvation constituted essential elements of Catholic culture. For Catholics, as opposed to Protestants, the afterlife also included purgatory, a third place where those who deserved neither eternal reward nor punishment would suffer for a time before being welcomed into the community of saints.

Since the 1980s historians have observed how visions of the afterlife evolved over time, producing changes in the basic frameworks people used for interpreting their lives. In the nineteenth century, Catholicism, while never abandoning the threat of hellfire, tended to emphasize the possibility of redemption, at least for Catholics, and inflated the significance of purgatory. Indulgences granted by the church for prayers and devotional practices proliferated, offering believers a way to shorten not only their own time in purgatory, but also the period of suffering endured by departed loved ones. This shift can be seen as a response to complex changes, including concern about competition from secular ideologies, and enhanced attention to affective relations within families whose members could not tolerate the possibility of eternal separation. The increasing influence of the moral theology of the Italian priest Alphonsus of Liguori (1696–1787), who taught that confessors should take a paternal approach to their penitents and keep them from despair, provides another window onto a Catholic spiritual world that was softening in subtle but important ways its Tridentine patrimony.

Catholicism provided a map of the afterworld for its adherents, and through its rituals offered people a way of channeling the grace needed to gain heaven. Catholic culture was infused with a sense that Jesus and his saints, especially Mary, his mother, would respond to the prayers and supplications of believers. In particular, the sick and their families sought help and healing through the shrines that were ubiquitous in the Catholic world and through the devotions associated with them. Processions were common, especially in rural areas, to celebrate the feast day of a parish patron, to request divine help to stop a drought or an epidemic, or to seek protection from invading armies. Such practices, which had been regarded with suspicion by many clergy during the eighteenth century, were officially encouraged after the French Revolution, as the church sought to strengthen its ties with ordinary believers.

For the clergy and many of the laity, however, the Mass was at the center of Catholicism, and at the center of the Mass was the moment of consecration, when the officiating priest pronounced the Latin phrases "Hoc est enim corpus meum" (For this is my body) and "Hic est enim calix sanguinis mei" (For this is the cup of my blood), thus transforming the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. Catholics were obligated to attend mass each Sunday, and to confess their sins and receive Communion during the Easter season. These two practices have been used by sociologically minded historians, inspired by the work of Gabriel Le Bras in France, to measure levels of Catholic commitment. The French case has been the most thoroughly studied, but the reports of clergy from throughout Europe allow us to form a general picture of Catholic observance, which varied widely according to a number of factors.

Throughout Europe some regions were renowned for their devout populations. Brittany in western France maintained high levels of religious practice among both men and women throughout the century, while the clergy in Limousin, southwest of Paris, despaired over the low

levels of practice among their flock. Father Ramo'n Sarabia, who preached throughout Spain in the early twentieth century, was pleased with the piety he found in the north, in Castile, Aragon, and the Basque country, but was shocked by what he found in the southern provinces of Andalusia and Extremadura. In the city of Azuaga in 1913, for example, only ten men and two hundred women, out of a population of eighteen thousand, attended mass regularly. Ireland and the Polish-speaking territories were also sites of high levels of Catholic practice, which may even have increased in the course of the nineteenth century. In the Irish case, greater mass attendance in the wake of the potato famine of 1846 resulted in part from the organizational work of Paul Cullen, who was named archbishop of Armagh in 1850 and of Dublin in 1852. But in Ireland and Poland, Catholic practice was also an important means of expressing cultural opposition and political dissent directed at foreign rulers.

Gender as well as region emerges as a crucial factor in studies of religious practice. Women tended to be more devout than men, a pattern that became stronger in the course of the century, to judge by the French case. In the middle years of the century, when slightly more than half of the French population received Easter communion, two women practiced for every man. When the percentage of Easter communicants dropped to around 25 percent in the early twentieth century, the ratio of females to males approached five to one. Finally, social class and urbanization were important factors in determining religious practice, with Catholic preachers throughout the century bewailing the alienation from the church of workers, who were being led astray by the seductive appeal of cities and the corrosive ideology of socialism.

There is a good deal of evidence to suggest that clerical laments about the problems posed to Catholicism in a modern age marked by materialism and unbelief were more than just groundless complaints. The positions of clerical hand-wringers and sociologically minded historians have converged to produce an argument that sees religion in general, and Catholicism in particular, as out of step with the modern world. According to this view, the secularization of Europe is an inevitable process that accompanies the rise of science and the progress of reason, the growth of the state as a provider of basic services, an urbanized society with a large working class, and ideologies that provide alternatives to traditional religion as the basis for moral codes and a sense of meaning. All of these developments had a negative impact on Catholicism, and declining levels of practice do suggest an attenuated attachment to the institutional church. However, historians have become increasingly attentive to the numerous exceptions that qualify a vision of Catholicism in decline. The high levels of orthodox practice in Poland and Ireland have already been noted as important indications that Catholicism could flourish when associated with national political movements. Similarly, the sustained loyalty of women works against models of decline that give privileged status to the behavior of men. The minority status of Catholicism in the newly unified Germany also led to higher levels of attachment to the church. Among the urban working class in Germany, Catholics were much more likely to practice their religion than were Protestants. Polish Catholic miners in Prussian-ruled Silesia went to Mass on Sunday and prayed to Saint Barbara as they descended into the coal pits.

Sunday Mass attendance and Easter communion are not the only ways to measure the attachment to Catholicism. Throughout Catholic Europe those who did not go to Mass on a regular basis still generally insisted on participating in the sacramental system, which established a series of rites of passage that marked their path through life and death. In Paris during the 1860s, only 14 percent of the population made their Easter duty, but over 90 percent of the children continued to be baptized. Anticlerical societies made an effort to promote civil alternatives to religious services in the last third of the century, but despite their efforts the vast majority continued to insist on Catholic baptism, first communion, and rituals for marriage and death. It would be excessive to conclude that all those who participated in these rites of passage were thoroughly familiar with and committed to the doctrines and beliefs that the church understood as the underlying principles. But the vast majority of Catholics would have heard either through an occasional sermon or a catechism class required for first communion, that baptism took away original sin and thus made eternal salvation possible. And when the clergy attempted to limit access to the sacraments, especially extreme unction, administered to the dying, or to deny the dead a Catholic burial, they faced angry congregations, a fact that made priests increasingly hesitant to adopt too rigorous a standard for admission to the sacraments. Count Cavour (Camillo Benso) and King Victor Emmanuel, under whose leadership Italy was united at the expense of the pope and his papal territories, and who were officially excommunicated by Pius IX (r. 1846–1878), asked for the sacrament of the dying, extreme unction, and were able to find accommodating clergy to minister to them on their death beds. The Catholic sacraments drew popular support because they provided individuals and communities traditionally sanctioned rituals appropriate to celebrate the most important moments as people moved through life. This need was channeled through rituals that also opened up the promise of salvation. Catholic culture in the nineteenth century thus operated on both a horizontal plane, where it sanctified birth, marriage, and death, and a vertical one, where it provided access to grace and salvation.

ultramontane catholicism: governance and ideology

Catholicism was a cultural system constituted by beliefs and rituals, but these were maintained by a hierarchical church with an institutional and political agenda that was complex, contested both internally and externally, and in constant evolution. From the perspective of the institutional church, the most noteworthy change in the nineteenth century was the increasingly centralized and authoritarian governance by officials at Rome and particularly the pope. Papal authority grew

relative to national churches, a point evident in the series of concordats that Rome negotiated with state governments, starting with the treaty between Pius VII (r. 1800–1823) and Napoleon I in 1801 that resolved the decade-long battle between the revolutionary republic and the church in France. Throughout the rest of the century concordats were established with most of the states in Europe, including Protestant Prussia, that specified the rights of Catholics to practice their religion freely, to train their clergy, and to educate their young, frequently in state-funded institutions.

The centralization of church governance, or ultramontanism, was defended in theoretical terms by writers such as Joseph-Marie de Maistre (1753–1821) and the vicomte Louis-Gabriel de Bonald (1754–1840), who saw Roman authority as the only alternative to the disorder of the revolutionary era. Devout Catholics in the nineteenth century never forgot the attacks on churches and the clergy that accompanied the radical phase of the Revolution between 1792 and 1794. The revolutionaries' association of Catholicism with fanaticism and counter-revolution was matched by the conviction among most French Catholics that republican institutions posed a mortal threat to their religion. The sacking of the episcopal palace in Paris in the wake of the French revolution of 1830 and the violent deaths of two archbishops in Paris during the June days of 1848 and the uprising of the Paris Commune in 1871 served as powerful reminders of the continuing threat revolution posed to the church. The memory and continuing fear of revolution, and the consequent desire for order, provided a powerful impetus for popes to form alliances with established governments, even those of non-Catholics. Thus, Pope Gregory XVI (r. 1831–1846) condemned the Polish insurrection of 1830–1831 and called on Polish Catholics to remain loyal to the Russian tsar, despite government policies that favored the Orthodox Church and discriminated against Catholics.

Revolutionary impulses were linked to liberalism, which was condemned in a series of papal pronouncements that fulminated against claims for the rights of individual conscience, freedom of the press, and the separation of church and state. Pope Gregory XVI set the tone for such statements in Mirari Vos of 1832, directed against the French priest Félicité de Lammenais, whose newspaper L'avenir (1830–1831) envisioned a liberal Catholicism allied to democracy and independent from state entanglement. Pope Pius IX's famous "Syllabus of Errors," which accompanied the encyclical Quanta Cura (1864), included the following among the propositions it condemned:

15. Every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true.

77. In the present day it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the State, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship.

80. The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.

By bluntly opposing freedom of religious choice and the separation of church and state, and insisting on the incompatibility of Catholicism with "modern civilization," Pius IX identified the church with a reactionary posture, a connection that has since shaped the attitudes of many Europeans, both Catholics and non-Catholics.

Socialism, like liberalism, was defined by the Catholic Church as a modern ideology that needed to be contested and defeated under the leadership of the pope. Associated with a materialist philosophy and an assault on the family, property, and established religions, socialism was forcefully condemned in papal pronouncements in the second half of the nineteenth century. Rerum Novarum (1891), the important encyclical of Pope Leo XIII (r. 1878–1903) on the condition of the working class, vigorously defended private property, and asserted that "the main tenet of Socialism, community of goods, must be utterly rejected, since it only injures those whom it would seek to benefit, is directly contrary to the natural rights of mankind, and would introduce confusion and disorder into the commonweal." But Rerum Novarum included as well a critique of uncontrolled capitalism and its consequences for the working class, whose rights to organize and strike were defended. By the end of the century, Catholic leaders realized that jeremiads condemning the modern world were an insufficient response to the new social conditions. In practice as well as theory, Catholicism showed itself adaptable to modern conditions in ways that belie some of the more extreme rhetoric of Gregory XVI and Pius IX.

Nationalism was in some instances another powerful ideological enemy of ultramontane Catholicism. The unification of Italy under the leadership of the Piedmontese monarchy crushed the hopes expressed by writers such as Father Vincenzo Gioberti in the 1840s that the pope might assume the leadership of a federal Italian state. Instead, the popes consistently condemned the new state, and insisted that the papal territories be restored, a claim that was not settled until the Lateran Treaty with Mussolini in 1929. In Germany the unified nation-state that emerged after 1870 engaged in a decade-long Kulturkampf, a culture war fought by the chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, and his government against a church whose members were thought to owe their primary loyalty to the pope rather than to the German emperor. In a sense, the drive for creating a unitary nation-state in Europe parallels the impulse toward papal infallibility, as both nationalism and ultra-montanism sought to clarify lines of authority, and to strengthen central authority at the expense of the provinces.

Ultramontanism was a defensive ideology directed against newly emerging competitors, but it was also a positive statement affirming the truths of Catholic doctrine and the power of the pope to define and defend them. Ultramontanism achieved its most dramatic victory with the declaration of papal infallibility at the Vatican Council that met in Rome in 1870. Although this decree was opposed by a minority of bishops, including the archbishops from Vienna and Paris, most of the dissidents eventually accepted the doctrine, which claimed that the pope could not err when he taught Christians on matters of faith and morals, and also called on all Christians to submit to Rome on questions of discipline and governance. This affirmation of papal authority was accompanied by an enhanced symbolic status for the person of the pope, who became an object of popular veneration, a representative figure for a Catholic identity that transcended national boundaries. Images of Pius IX, for example, were widely distributed among Catholic populations, providing Catholics with a symbol of unchanging truth, doctrinal certainty, and the defense of their communities from the threats posed by increasing state authority and rapid social change.

ultramontane catholicism: politics and society

Ultramontane Catholicism embraced papal authority and rejected modern ideologies it saw as immoral and destructive. It is easy to understand why so many liberals, nationalists, and socialists saw Catholicism as a reactionary force, a defender of authority and hierarchy that needed to be opposed and defeated for the sake of human dignity, freedom, and progress. Some historians have suggested, however, a more complicated version of Catholicism as it affected political and social development in the nineteenth century. The church rejected the right of individuals to make personal judgments about religion, but it also opposed the claims of the nation-state when it infringed on the freedom of Catholics to practice their religion, and educate their children. Catholics in Belgium formed an alliance with liberals that produced a constitution in 1830 that affirmed the principle of popular sovereignty and granted religious toleration. Margaret Anderson has argued that the Catholic Center Party in Germany, which represented a third of the electorate in the last third of the century, was an important instrument for training German Catholics about the democratic process. In Poland and Ireland, Catholicism ended up in an alliance with ethnic groups whose aspirations to throw off the tutelage of foreign rulers were combined with a powerful Catholic identity. In all of these instances, Catholicism can be seen as fueling movements in favor of liberty and democracy, thus challenging any easy generalization based only on papal encyclicals. But it is important to note as well that the successful efforts of Catholics to mobilize a mass constituency could be based at times on targeting religious enemies, roles played by Protestants, Freemasons, and Jews. The French newspaper La croix, published by the Assumptionists starting in the 1880s, was particularly effective in using anti-Semitic language and images to reach a mass audience and played an important role in provoking the controversy surrounding Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus's conviction of treason in 1894.

On social questions Catholics inspired by the traditional obligation to help the poor played an important role in providing relief in a period when state welfare systems were either nonexistent or in their infancy. Frédéric Ozanam's Society of St. Vincent de Paul, established in Paris in 1833, brought together middle- and upper-class Catholics who involved themselves directly with the needy. Ozanam's goals for both the givers and receivers of charity were spiritual as much as social, and the Society did not embrace a program of social reform, but by the middle of the century chapters had spread throughout Catholic Europe, and were offering help to thousands of the poor, answering their basic needs. In the Prussian Rhineland, Father Adolph Kolping (1813–1865) founded an association that provided cheap housing and educational opportunities for young unmarried workers, an initiative comparable to the work of Father Don Bosco, who founded a religious congregation in Turin to work with the growing youth population in Italian cities. Toward the end of the century, in the wake of Rerum Novarum, Catholic labor unions were organized, providing support for workers ranging from miners in the Ruhr Valley to agricultural laborers in Sicily.

Catholic women practiced their religion more regularly than men, but the role of women in Catholicism was not limited to passive participation in rituals celebrated by a male clergy. Organizations provided an important outlet for female sociability, creating networks in which women assumed leadership roles, organizing charitable work and managing pilgrimages for the sick to Lourdes, for example. Female religious congregations were particularly important, growing throughout the century, from 11,000 to 40,000 in Spain between 1797 and 1904, from 12,000 to 135,000 in France from 1808 to 1878, and from 7,794 to almost 50,000 in Germany between 1866 and 1908. The schools and hospitals run by sisters provided crucial services, but they also gave women opportunities for leadership and power unavailable elsewhere in European society.

Catholic labor unions and religious congregations were part of an organizational network that expanded rapidly in the late nineteenth century, creating in many areas a subculture that encompassed schools, churches, a specialized press including daily newspapers and periodicals, and leisure activities. The People's Association for Catholic Germany (Volksverein) was a model of Catholic organizational success, enlisting over eight hundred thousand members by 1914, establishing itself as one of the largest voluntary associations in imperial Germany. Historians of the Netherlands, where Catholic schools and organizations were especially important, have used the concept of pillarization, to describe a process whereby Catholicism formed, alongside Protestantism and socialism, a comprehensive framework for the lives of its members. German Catholicism could be described in similar terms, providing its members with schools, churches, youth clubs, reading rooms,

and adult education programs—a whole range of institutions that generated a sense of identity and empowerment, but that also marked Catholics as separate and insular.

Some of the most popular Catholic organizations had as their main goal the support of missionary activity, which experienced a major renewal in the nineteenth century. The Society for the Propagation of the Faith, founded in Lyon in 1822, published a magazine full of stories about heroic preachers spreading the gospel throughout the world; by 1860 there were over two hundred thousand subscribers for a journal that was translated into over ten languages. New congregations of priests and nuns, such as the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, and Sisters of Saint Joseph de Cluny, along with older ones such as the Jesuits (reestablished in 1814) provided European clergy for the missions, who staffed schools and hospitals as part of their conversion efforts. Catholic missions contributed to the sense of religious revival that was common in the nineteenth century, and along with Protestant efforts helped define the "civilizing mission" that European states used to legitimize their expansion into the world.

devotional and theological developments

Ultramontane Catholicism, understood as an ideology, took a defensive and intransigent posture toward the modern world, as being assaulted by revolutions, new ideologies, and aggressive nation-states, forces opposed by a heroic and infallible leader. But the ultramontane program included as well a devotional and theological component that, while linked to the political and social agenda of the church, established new modes of thinking and feeling about God and the saints. Early in the nineteenth century the writings of Catholic Romantics such as Friedrich Schlegel, Joseph Görres, and François-René du Chateaubriand challenged the rationalist critique of religion represented most prominently by Voltaire (1694–1778). They argued instead that religion needed to be valued as an emotional and aesthetic experience, and they looked to the spiritual writings and religious architecture of the Middle Ages for inspiration. Catholicism, however, produced few intellectuals of great significance for most of the rest of the nineteenth century. Ignaz von Döllinger revived historical studies of the church from his position in Munich, but was marginalized as a result of his opposition to infallibility. John Henry Newman, whose conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism drew attention throughout the Catholic world in 1845, argued for a developmental and historical approach to theological doctrine, but he was more an influence on the twentieth than the nineteenth century. Early in the twentieth century Pius X (r. 1903–1914) stifled Catholic intellectual life through his assault on "modernism," an attempt by scholars such as Alfred Loisy to interpret the Bible using the tools of modern historical criticism.

An intensified emotionalism characterized Catholic popular devotions, exemplified in the cults of the Sacred Heart and of Mary, which exploded in the nineteenth century, fueled by millions of rosary beads, holy cards, novenas, and confraternities. In 1858 Pius IX provided doctrinal support for Marian devotionalism when he defined the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which asserted that Mary, alone among humans, had been born free of original sin. The Immaculate Conception had been a subject of theological debate since the Middle Ages, and Pius IX's decree resolved the debate in a manner that elevated Mary, already the most important of Catholic saints, to an even more exalted position. Christological devotions remained important as well, however, as Thomas a' Kempis's fourteenth-century spiritual classic, The Imitation of Christ remained immensely popular among Catholic readers. The devotion to Christ took more somber forms as well. The Stations of the Cross, based on contemplating the suffering of Jesus during his passion and death, continued to spread from its base in Italy, and a number of women became famous throughout the Catholic world for sharing the wounds of Christ and thus his redemptive work. Anna Katharina Emmerich (1774–1824), a West-phalian mystic who dictated widely read and detailed accounts of the life of Christ based on her visions, experienced the stigmata, as did Gemma Galgani (1878–1903), a young Italian woman from Lucca who became the first person who lived into the twentieth century to be canonized as a saint. In France, Thérèse Martin (1873–1897), who entered a Carmelite convent when only fifteen years old, authored a spiritual autobiography that became enormously popular among Catholic readers after its publication in 1898. Sister Thérèse (who became known as the "Little Flower") advocated a life of constant self-sacrifice, but rejected the spiritual tendency that emphasized pain and blood. Both of these models had broad appeal, especially among women, and along with the high levels of female religious practice and the prominence of female religious congregations suggest a "feminization" of Catholicism in the nineteenth century. This development needs to be understood, however, within the context of a church that still concentrated most of the power in the male clergy, and substantially increased the authority of the pope. Few generalizations bearing on the complex institutional and cultural system that made up Catholicism can be maintained without the need for such qualification. Catholicism in the long nineteenth century faced enormous political and social challenges, and even a sympathetic historian would acknowledge that it struggled at times in adapting to them. Even historians critical of Catholicism would acknowledge that in 1914 it had reinvented itself as a potent political, social, and cultural force, figuring centrally in the personal and collective lives of millions of Europeans.

See alsoAnticlericalism; Catholicism, Political; Center Party; Concordat of 1801; Leo XIII; Manning, Henry; Newman, John Henry; Papacy; Pilgrimages; Pius IX; Separation of Church and State (France, 1905).

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Thomas Kselman