CATHOLICISM

Keith P. Luria

Catholicism's social history cannot be separated from its political or intellectual histories. But social historians have brought to the study of Catholicism questions and methodologies different from those found in older "church history." They are less concerned with the evolution of doctrine and more with the interaction between what the church taught and the way people practiced their faith. And rather than study the internal institutional development of the church, they have turned their attention to its relations with Europe's political entities.

The interest in subjecting Catholicism to social historical analysis has stemmed largely from the growing prestige of social science approaches evident throughout the historical discipline in recent decades. Historians influenced by sociology, such as Gabriel Le Bras and the school of religious sociology he founded in France, assessed people's commitment to Catholicism through quantifying their participation in ritual activities, such as Easter communion or attending mass. Others, drew their inspiration from anthropological theories, such as Émile Durkheim's idea of religion as a reflection of group's self-conception. Scholars like John Bossy and Natalie Zemon Davis have examined how religious rituals and beliefs could bind people together and could set them against those with different conceptions of religion or society.

The sociological and the anthropological do not exhaust the ways social historians study Catholicism. But they do represent two poles: the quantitative, which emphasizes the church and its varying ability to impose practices and beliefs on the faithful, and the ethnographic, which emphasizes the meanings people derive from their religion and the uses to which they put it. Keeping both of these approaches in mind, the social history of Catholicism must assess the impact the church had in shaping society, and it must also be aware of how the church was inevitably shaped by social and political concerns of the laity.

The integration of western European society and Catholicism, both as an institution and as a practiced faith was most complete in premodern Europe, apparent in the daily lives of families and individuals, the organization of groups and communities, and the functioning of states. The Protestant Reformation challenged this fusion between church and society, but, in Catholic countries, it did not disintegrate. Indeed it was strengthened. Beginning in the eighteenth century and continuing through the twentieth, the pressures of increased secularization and competing beliefs adversely affected the church's dominant role in creating national unity and communal identity. The social history of Catholicism between the early modern period and today traces this long transformation.

CATHOLICISM AND THE "SOCIAL MIRACLE"

Catholic rituals in premodern Europe had a dual purpose. Not only did they fulfill doctrinal requirements enabling the faithful to strive for salvation, they also worked what John Bossy has called the "social miracle" (Bossy, 1985, p. 57). Rituals created social bonds and harmony where rivalries and enmity could otherwise prevail. The sacrament of baptism provides an example of this dual purpose. For the church, baptism incorporated an infant into the community of Christians, washed him or her of original sin, and, through exorcism, protected him or her from diabolical influences. But for the family, baptism also incorporated the child into the earthly community of which he or she was a part. The rite also created a bond of affinity between the child's family and the godparents. Baptism thus satisfied doctrinal concerns and reinforced social bonds. Marriage did the same. The church's blessing of spouses conferred grace upon them and signaled the creation of a new Christian household. But the church also encouraged marriage's role as a means of allying families, ending feuds, and establishing peace.

Religious practices similarly established social bonds in groups such as confraternities. In small villages, confraternities could include all the adult inhabitants. In cities, they brought together members of particular neighborhoods, crafts, professions, or social classes. While most were organizations for men, some had both men and women, and others, such as Rosary confraternities in France, became primarily women's organizations. Initiation rituals, common religious observances, and periodic feasting bound the members to each other. The confraternities' rules, moreover, strove to insure brotherhood and charity among the membership. Disputes were submitted to arbitration to prevent lawsuits and ill feeling. Wealthier members helped the poorer through loans or alms. And the group aided its members even in death, arranging funerals, accompanying bodies to burial, and paying for memorial masses.

Rituals also cemented the social bonds of communities. Processions, for instance, were held on important civic and religious holidays—the festival of a city's patron saint or the feast of Corpus Christi. And they were staged at moments of crisis—during military threats or epidemics. Urban processions usually included representatives from the city's clergy, its governing body, and its various craft guilds and/or confraternities. These groups marched in a hierarchical order that reflected their status in the community. Thereby, through Catholic ritual, the social body was created and displayed in pageant form.

The most potent means of creating the "social miracle" was Catholicism's central ritual act, the Mass and its eucharistic service. The Eucharist brought about reconciliation of social conflict through its symbolism of many parts united in a never divisible unity, the body of Christ. Confession, the repenting of sins, and the making of restitution for them, including those committed against one's neighbors, was the necessary preparation for partaking of communion.

Thus Catholic belief and ceremony both mirrored and created the social structure, ensuring citizens a place within a divinely ordained system, and establishing social harmony. However, we should be careful in assuming that religion's role was entirely efficacious. Religious practices could provoke disputes or provide the occasions for them. Members of social elites competed for prestige through their patronage of religious devotions or establishments. A community's poor might use the annual Carnival, the time prior to Lent when normal social rules and order were suspended or inverted, to riot and seek redress for the un-Christian inequities under which they suffered. Therefore, we must not simplify Catholicism's reinforcement of a traditional European social order; its powerful effect could work in quite the opposite direction.

Much the same is evident in Catholicism's role in states. European monarchies were sacral political systems. Catholic teaching legitimated monarchy as a divinely ordained means of maintaining social order and justice. Kings drew authority from ceremonies derived from Catholic ritual, such as the French royal coronation during which new monarchs swore to defend the true faith and took communion in both kinds, the body and the blood, a privilege usually reserved for priests. The ceremony lent rulers a semi-divine status, which was evident in the belief that they could cure scrofula by touching the afflicted.

But the political role of Catholic belief and ritual did not function perfectly. We cannot assume that subjects were convinced by the claims kings made in ceremonies and political propaganda. Certainly the sacred character of the French monarchy did not prevent revolts. In another sense also, the fit between Catholicism and royal authority was not seamless. Kings and popes frequently found themselves in conflict. Furthermore, kings could find themselves beset by quarrels within the church that weakened their power. The Jansenist controversy, for example, helped undermine the French monarchy in the decades before the Revolution (see below). Nonetheless, as long as Catholicism remained a country's largely unanimous faith, it would continue to buttress its social and political systems.

THE CATHOLIC REFORMATION

The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century challenged this unanimity. Protestant countries broke the web of connections between Catholicism, society, and the state. In Catholic societies these connections were, if anything, renewed and strengthened by the vast Catholic reform movement extending from the sixteenth century into the first half of the eighteenth. The church convened the Council of Trent between 1545 and 1563, to set an agenda for combatting the spread of Protestantism, improving the quality of its clergy, and transforming the religious and social lives of the Catholic faithful. Bishops ensured these goals by frequent episcopal visits to their dioceses' communities to investigate the ritual practices, beliefs, and moral behavior of their flocks. They targeted many customs of traditional local religion and tried to suppress those they found indecent or too independent of clerical control, such as confraternity banquets, nocturnal pilgrimages, or overly enthusiastic devotion to miracle-working relics and images. Reformers sought instead to encourage a piety based on the individual's examination of conscience, proper attention to the church's sacraments, and reverence for approved devotions. On their visits, bishops also investigated illicit sexual behavior, drunkenness, familial conflicts, and a host of other social sins.

Together governments and the church worked to create confessionalized Catholic states in which people were subjected to more political control and more religious discipline than ever before. With the political appointment of reform-minded bishops in countries like Spain and France, the Catholic Reformation advanced jointly with the extension of government control over autonomous regions and unruly subjects.

So described, the Catholic-Reformation church can easily appear as a modernizing institution in European society, one that rationalized its own internal structure, allied itself with states doing the same, imposed social discipline, and sought conformity and control. But the description exaggerates the repressive tendencies in the Tridentine program. Catholic reformers did seek to establish greater clerical control over religious practices and to focus them on the church's central doctrinal concerns, such as the Eucharist or the cult of Mary. They did insist on greater decorum in festivals, processions, pilgrimages, and confraternal celebrations. And they did want to instruct the faithful in a better understanding of church doctrine. But Catholic reformers never opposed all popular religious practices; they permitted the cult of saints and relics, confraternities, and the belief in miracles. Indeed, many of the church's efforts revitalized religion's traditional local purposes. Authorized saints may have been substituted for unauthorized ones, but the faithful could still seek miraculous intervention to help with life's problems. And even if stern bishops disapproved of what people believed, nothing prevented these people from taking what the bishops offered and adapting it to their own purposes. Hence the widespread Rosary devotion, with its individualized and meditative prayers, may have been a Catholic-Reformation style of worship, but Rosary confraternities also provided a new means to accomplish an old end by establishing bonds of affinity between their members.

The church did not seek to create a modern society based on disciplined, isolated individuals. Such an idea was entirely foreign to its social conceptions and would remain so for a long time to come. Insofar as efforts at increasing social discipline were successful, and success was partial at best, the Catholic Reformation reinforced the sense of a divinely ordained, and church-guided, society of estates or orders. In this way, the church was still congruent with the Catholic society around it. One can see this congruence at work, for example, in new religious groups established for laypeople, most notably Jesuit sodalities, which organized their members into the traditional corporate groups of European society, with separate associations for nobles, bourgeois, and artisans. But as European society changed in the early modern period, these old means of maintaining Christian charity and brotherhood would seem increasingly outmoded.

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

As long as the church maintained the allegiance of rulers and their people, Catholicism would remain the essential unifying principle of social order and monarchical political systems. The first disassociation of Catholicism and society, in what had been heretofore Catholic countries, appeared in the eighteenth century as certain social groups fell away from Catholic observance. Royal governments, which had long seen the church as providing legitimacy for monarchs and stability for the social order, now looked to other ways of justifying their authority and of controlling their subjects. The impact of this development varied from country to country, and its reasons remain in some ways poorly understood. But they included disputes within the church, the impact of Enlightenment attacks on the church, and a process of dechristianization starting to take hold in certain places, notably France.

That the church's clergy had deep socioeconomic divisions was hardly a phenomenon new to the eighteenth century; however, it became at this time a source of growing conflict. In France, high-ranking aristocrats dominated the upper clergy. Parish priests, generally of middling social origins, were better trained and more conscientious in their duties than before the Tridentine reforms. They resented their inferior position in the church more than ever before, and their relations with their superiors became increasingly embittered. One result of the spread of Enlightenment rationality in France was the demand for more socially responsible and useful priests. The Enlightenment bon curé (good parish priest) who labored in his parish to provide religious, educational, and welfare services, fit this demand well; the wealthy, worldly, aristocratic upper clergy, who appeared little concerned with pastoral cares, did not. Antagonism between the lower and upper clergy resulted in their split in the 1789 Estates-General, which led to the formation of the revolutionary National Assembly. The priests had in no way sought to undermine the church's position in society, but as the Revolution progressed, their challenge to the institution's hierarchical order would have that effect.

In Spain, Italy, and elsewhere, the upper clergy was less aristocratic than that of France, but the rural clergy was also less well trained and supported. The fall in religious vocations throughout western Europe in the second half of the century left the church seriously understaffed and unable to carry out its spiritual functions in some rural areas—the Alentejo in Portugal, the Mezzogiorno in Italy. And as a large landowner in these regions, it was the target of local resentment. In certain places, such as the Mezzogiorno, the problem was somewhat offset by the missionary work of Jesuits, Redemptorists, and Lazarists. But male orders too suffered from the fall in vocations. Women's orders, especially those engaged in charitable, hospital, or educational work, survived on much better terms, but in cities more than the countryside.

During the eighteenth century, the church was also beset by doctrinal controversies that embroiled it in political conflicts and contributed further to its loss of public esteem. The most important of these disputes was over Jansenism, especially acute in France, though it had echoes elsewhere. The rigorist theology of the Jansenists found strong support among the French clergy despite its being declared heretical. Efforts to suppress the movement, such as the 1713 papal bull Unigenitus, backfired and made Jansenist priests appear the victims of papal and royal despotism. Jansenists set themselves up as opponents of heavy-handed political authority and helped turn public opinion against the royal government and the Jesuits, allies in the persecution of Jansenists. The Jesuit-Jansenist confrontation also furthered a decline in respect for the French church and led to the dissolution of the Jesuits in France in 1764. The Jesuits had problems in other countries as well. Portugal expelled the order from its possessions in 1759, and they were ejected from Spanish possessions in 1767. Finally, in 1773 under pressure from Catholic monarchs, Pope Clement XIV (reigned 1769–1774) dissolved the order.

Contemplative orders that did not seem involved in useful work were also under fire. In 1781 the Austrian Emperor Joseph II (reigned 1765–1790) closed monasteries and convents not engaged in teaching or nursing. Joseph used much of their former property to fund schools and hospitals. The reasons behind these government policies against the Jesuits or contemplative orders were different in each case, but they indicate that the monarchies of Europe were disengaging themselves from their traditional close connections to the church.

Historians of French religious life in the eighteenth century have also explored a wider disaffection with the church that they call "dechristianization." The phenomenon is not well understood and attempts to measure it have been questionable, but in France if not elsewhere it seems undeniable that at least some of the social elite were turning away from religious practices the church had tried to inculcate since the Council of Trent. The quantitative study of wills in Paris and in Provence has shown that after 1730 testators' requests for memorial masses fell dramatically. The evidence suggests that the belief in purgatory, central to the church's scheme of salvation, was exercising less and less hold over Catholic minds. Whether this development means society was becoming dechristianized, or perhaps just turning its religious concerns in other directions, has been a much harder question to answer.

Other indications suggest, however, that adherence to the church's teachings and moral strictures was falling off. One sign was the fall in vocations. Another was the decreasing share of the bookselling market that religious publications commanded. Confraternities were losing members to more secular forms of sociability: the elite to Masonic lodges and others to cafés. Demographic studies of French localities have demonstrated a marked late-eighteenth century increase in prenuptial pregnancies and illegitimate births. In general, however, birthrates fell, suggesting that people were using contraception and thus rejecting the church's rules on sexual activity.

Historians have offered various reasons for dechristianization. One is that the rigorous demands of the Catholic-Reformation church drove people away from strict observance. Another is that politicized and irreconcilable disputes, such as that between the Jansenists and their opponents, called into question Catholic doctrine's absoluteness. Belief began to seem less a matter of truth than of opinion, and thus it could be rejected. Presumably contributing to this development were the secularizing ideas of the Enlightenment, but its role was complex. Throughout Europe, an enlightened Catholicism did not entirely reject the church but called on it to play a more useful role in society, helping to promote social welfare, education, and public morals, all part of enlightened, absolute monarchs' programs in Austria, Prussia, and Portugal, as well as in France. Finally, changing economies were leading to the migration of people from rural areas to rapidly growing cities, disrupting the parish life that the Tridentine church had seen as essential to social and religious discipline. Urbanization and increased literacy also meant the wider circulation of ideas inimical to Catholicism. Beset by internal disputes, a decline in vocations, and a poor distribution of its resources, the church was ill prepared to cope with these changes in European society. Religious conformity and the complete fit between Catholicism and society became impossible to maintain. The revolutionary upheaval of the late-eighteenth century would make this disengagement permanent.

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND NAPOLEONIC WARS

In France, criticism of the church as a wealthy and unbeneficial institution, combined with the effects of dechristianization, culminated first in the revolutionary government's takeover of the church and later in its attempt to abolish Christian worship entirely. In November 1789, the Assembly nationalized church property. In July 1790, it passed the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which made clerics into salaried civil servants and applied the Revolution's democratic ideals to the church's administration. Voters would henceforth elect their parish priests and bishops. The French Catholic church became completely dependent on the state, but Catholicism was no longer the country's single legal religion. Toleration was established and citizenship offered to Protestants and Jews. The refusal of the papacy to respond positively to these developments led to a further and even more fateful decision in November 1790, when the Assembly voted the Ecclesiastical Oath that required each member of the clergy to swear loyalty to the nation and the constitution. The oath split the French church and provoked widespread resentment and resistance. Most bishops refused it, as did about half of the lower clergy. The divisions were deep and lasted far beyond the Revolution. Those regions where oath-taking priests predominated—Paris, the southeast, and parts of the southwest—would later be known for anticlericalism and low rates of Catholic observance. Regions where priests who refused the oath were numerous—the west, the east, northeast, and the Massif Central—would remain areas of strong Catholic piety well into the twentieth century. In such areas opposition to the Revolution was bitter, leading in the Vendée and Brittany to bloody counterrevolutionary revolts.

The Civil Constitution was short-lived; the Revolution's radicalization led to a government-sponsored campaign in 1793 to 1794 in which churches were closed, vandalized, or converted into revolutionary temples. Priests were outlawed, forced into exile, arrested, and sometimes executed. Catholic worship was replaced by revolutionary festivals, such as the cult of reason. Resistance to the campaign was widespread, even in prorevolutionary areas, but open Catholic practice largely ceased until the fall of Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794) in 1794. Under the Directorial regime after 1795, Catholic worship once again became legal. But with much of the clergy dispersed and now without government financing of the church, Catholicism in France depended largely on lay initiative as townspeople or villagers undertook to lead worship themselves, reopen churches, and reestablish devotional life.

The church's position in France was not regularized until Napoleon (1769–1821) negotiated the Concordat with the papacy in 1801. Although Catholicism was recognized as the "religion of the majority of the French people," the church did not return to its prerevolutionary status as the only established faith (Desan, 1990, p. 24). All religions were legally equal. The church, moreover, was firmly under Napoleon's control. He ensured stipends for the clergy and appointed the bishops. All priests were to swear an oath of loyalty to the state, and prayers for the government were recited in all churches. Former church property would not be returned.

In no other country was the religious upheaval of the revolutionary years as traumatic as it was in France. But in every place touched by warfare, Catholic practice was disrupted and the church's relations with government and society affected. In regions where revolutionary or Napoleonic regimes were established, the church surrendered property; monasteries and convents were closed and parish priests lost positions. Confraternities, previously so important for lay-involvement in religion, declined or disappeared in much of Italy, and in Spain their role in parish life diminished. The Revolution also deeply politicized the question of religious choice. Adherence to Catholicism was no longer universal in nominally Catholic countries. Henceforth, it involved a conscious decision and that decision was not only a matter of faith it was also a statement about one's political stance and outlook on the modernization of Europe in the nineteenth century.

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

After the revolutionary trauma, the church could no longer assume dominance over the spiritual lives of people in Catholic countries. Catholicism increasingly competed with other religions guaranteed toleration in liberal states. It also competed with the growth of religious indifference and with political ideologies that were suspicious of the church or rejected it altogether. The church saw itself as embattled with rapidly triumphing forces of secularization, materialism, scientific advances, liberalism, and eventually socialism. Historians too have long considered the nineteenth century a time of prevailing secularization. However, recent work in the social history of religion suggests a more complex situation.

The picture of Catholic practice in the nineteenth century presents striking geographic and class differences. Rural areas maintained high levels of compliance with Catholic observances. But in a time of rapid urbanization, fewer and fewer city inhabitants took the church's prescriptions seriously. The evidence for this conclusion comes from quantitative studies of participation in life-cycle rituals, such as baptisms, marriages, and funerals, or other Catholic obligations, such as attendance at mass and the taking of Easter communion. Available statistics show that in Paris almost 90 percent of families sought out priests to perform baptisms for their children in 1865; by 1908 the number had dropped to under 59 percent. Wealthier quarters often had much higher participation rates than working-class districts, where rates were particularly low. In Paris's working-class twentieth arrondissement between 1909 and 1914, only 6 percent of the population took Easter communion (Kselman, 1995, pp. 169–170). In the Spanish city of Logrono, over 90 percent of the inhabitants took Easter communion in 1860, but by 1890 that figure had fallen to 40 percent. Only 6 percent of the eighty thousand people in Madrid's working-class district of San Ramon took Easter communion in the 1930s and only 7 percent attended mass (Callahan, 1995, p. 51).

The numbers reflect a serious decline from the near-universal participation of the early modern period, and they suggest why ecclesiastics viewed cities as cesspools of immorality, political radicalism, and atheism. The Parisian priest François Courtade complained in 1871, that the "laboring population of Paris are without faith and without God. The notion and feeling of the divine seem to have entirely withdrawn from them" (Kselman, 1995, p. 165). Of course, he wrote this in the year of the Commune, but the sentiment was common among the Catholic clergy. In 1855, the Spanish bishop Antonio Palau wrote: "Who can doubt that people from all parts of the world, of all religions...flowtothegreat centers of manufacturing and commerce, and communicate . . . their religious indifference.... Faith has grown languid, charity has become cold [and] religious sentiment has grown weak" (Callahan, 1995, p. 43).

But we must be careful in drawing the conclusion that urbanization necessarily led to religious indifference. Research in the later decades of the twentieth century has shown that much depended on where the people flocking to urban centers came from. Cities located in regions with observant rural populations had much higher rates of participation in Catholic ceremonies than those that were not. For example, Quimper in Brittany and Metz in Lorraine—both areas of strong Catholic piety—had relatively high rates of taking Easter communion. Limoges—located in the Limousin, long known for religious indifference—had rates that were much lower.

The overall statistics on observance also hide a large gender imbalance. Women were more observant than men. The trend, already apparent in the eighteenth century, accelerated during the nineteenth and continued into the twentieth. Church attendance increasingly became a form of female sociability; men met in the café or in political groups, often those with strong anticlerical views. Some have suggested that the predominance of women in Catholic worship developed from a particularly feminized Catholic piety, of which popular shrines, such as Lourdes, associated with visions of the Virgin are one example. Such feminized piety is described as sentimental or saccharine with an emphasis on the need for quiet suffering, as found for instance in the cult of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–1897). Compared with the more austere piety of the Catholic Reformation or the eighteenth century, that of the nineteenth century, especially in its popular devotions, does seem more emotional, if not to say insipid. However, to describe such characteristics as especially feminine is to impose an already heavily gendered language on the phenomenon. Men were also involved in popular religious observances, and priests promoted and led them. It is equally possible that Catholic worship attracted women because it stressed their role, or that of saintly figures like Thérèse of Lisieux and Bernadette Soubirous (1844–1879), the Lourdes visionary, or that of a female sacred figure like Mary in the future of the church and the salvation of countries turning toward secularism. The questions that feminization of religious practice poses remain one of the most pressing areas for future research.

The overall decline in Catholic observance stemmed in part from the church's own shortcomings. The church failed to adapt its network of pastoral care to a rapidly urbanizing society. European cities grew enormously across the nineteenth century and the provision priests and parish churches did not keep pace. The ratio of priests to urban inhabitants declined steadily. In Vienna it was 1 priest to every 1,641 people in 1783, 1 to 4,290 in 1842, and 1 to 5,949 in 1910. Paris had 1 priest for every 3,056 inhabitants in 1861 and 1 for every 4,790 in 1914. Marseilles had 1 for every 2,450 in 1861 and 1 for every 4,550 in 1921. And the shortfall was particularly evident in the working-class areas into which rural immigrants flooded. In Paris in 1906, the priest-to-inhabitant ratio was 1 to 3,681 in the central, wealthy arrondissements and 1 to 5,760 in the working-class surrounding districts (McLeod, 1995, p. 16; Kselman, 1995, p. 170). Presumably some of the strong anticlericalism of urban workers derived from their sense that the clergy had deserted them.

The growth of belief systems hostile to Catholicism also contributed to the decline in religious practice. Middle-class liberals and working-class socialists often saw the church as an enemy. Liberals could, at times, reach accommodations with the church, as did Spanish Moderates in negotiating a concordat with Rome in 1851. And after the upheaval of the 1848 Revolution, bourgeois Frenchmen found a new appreciation of the church as an instrument of social control. But as heirs to eighteenth-century rationalism, many liberals found themselves at odds with Catholicism. The church opposed certain basic liberal beliefs, for example, religious toleration. Liberals deplored the church's ownership of large amounts of property, its influence within educational systems, and its alliance with right-wing politics. Liberal governments moved to curtail the church's role and power in society. In 1836, the Spanish government suppressed male religious orders, and over the next twenty-five years liberal regimes sold much ecclesiastical property. In Prussia, Otto von Bismarck's Kulturkampf, the decade-long campaign against the church in the 1870s, included expulsion of the Jesuits, prohibition of using pulpits for political uses, state approval of clerical appointments, and establishment of state control over religious schools and instructors. Education was also a source of conflict in France, where, in the 1880s, the Third Republic laicized the school system.

The antipathy between the church and political radicals was even stronger. The church saw socialism as godless. Workers were suspicious of the church's alliance with social elites, employers, and political conservatism. Although the church was not an inveterate defender of capitalism—unconstrained economic development seemed egotistical, and unrestrained competition for wealth seemed sinful—its view of society was steeped in an idealized understanding of the past in which rich and poor were tied together by the bonds of Christian charity. Political radicals saw conflict between classes as inevitable, and workers had no use for clerics who preached resignation rather than political action. Mutual hostility erupted in serious outbreaks of violence, most notably during the Paris Commune of 1871, when priests held hostage were killed.

The social and political conflicts in which Catholicism was engaged in the nineteenth century can easily make it appear that the church was in constant retreat before the onslaught of the modern world. And the complaints of clerics, especially Pope Pius IX (reigned 1846–1878), who issued the Syllabus of Errors in 1864 to combat modernity, can give the same impression. However, the church could also make use of what modern life offered. Cities, so often derided as spiritual wastelands, were also places where new Catholic groups could organize. Catholic leaders established schools, youth groups, women's clubs, sports associations, credit unions, cooperatives, and unions in their effort to reclaim the religious loyalty of urban populations. The success of these efforts was limited, particularly when workers were targeted. In the aftermath of the Commune, the French aristocrat Albert de Mun founded Catholic workers' discussion circles and recreational societies. In Spain, church leaders sponsored associations of workers and employers. Workers were suspicious of such organizations, which were more concerned with regaining them for the faith and fighting socialism than with improving their economic situation. In the spirit of Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum novarum (1891), some of the clergy sought to open the church to science, political democracy, and worker's rights. Leo (reigned 1878–1903) had insisted on including in the document the statement that workers had a right to organize independent unions. But the church could not shed its paternalism, and when such ideas were put into practice they still involved clerics leading laypeople whom they expected to be obedient.

The church had more success when it could combine opportunities available in modern society with its more traditional undertakings. The most spectacular development in nineteenth-century Catholic piety were the apparitions of the Virgin Mary that led to the development of popular pilgrimage shrines. The church preached the imminent arrival of a Marian age that would precede the Second Coming, and the message found a receptive audience among a laity with an already fervent popular devotion to the Virgin. Although not all the apparitions and pilgrimages gained ecclesiastical approval, the church promoted those that did energetically, and it used the means the modern world provided to do so.

The most successful of the nineteenth-century shrines was that of Lourdes in the French Pyrénées, where the Virgin appeared to Bernadette Soubirous in 1858. Lourdes quickly became a magnet for pilgrims from all over Europe, who came to the sacred grotto seeking miraculous cures. The church's promotion of such a miracle shrine might seem a retreat from the modern world into the popular religion that the Catholic-Reformation church had tried to discourage. Indeed, the church hierarchy, faced with a European culture it no longer dominated, now found strength in the deep well of popular devotion and practices, which rallied the faithful to an embattled religion.

However, the church's investment in popular shrines did not represent a turning away from the modern world. It was precisely the cultural, technical, and commercial developments of the nineteenth century that made the shrines' success possible. Increased literacy provided a large audience for the reports of miracles published in widely-read Catholic periodicals. La Croix, produced by the Assumptionist order in the 1880s and 1890s, was one of France's most popular newspapers. New national railroad networks made it feasible for large numbers of pilgrims to travel to remote locations like Lourdes. The newly developing travel industry saw to the housing and feeding of the pilgrims. These miracle-working shrines were very much a part of the modern world.

The shrines also became embroiled in the modern world's political conflicts. Lourdes served the cause of the Bourbon legitimists against the Second Empire and later against the Third Republic. But eventually it also became identified with French nationalism; French Catholics took pride in Mary's appearance in their country. And after the defeat by Prussia and the crisis of the Commune, the shrine was declared a symbol of national regeneration. Lourdes's success sparked imitations. At Marpingen in the German Saarland in 1876, village girls had visions of the Virgin near a spring. A pilgrimage quickly developed that boosted German Catholic morale in the struggle against Bismarck's Kulturkampf. The Marpingen apparitions also raised the possibility that Germany would now have a shrine to rival the French Lourdes.

Thus the church at the end of the nineteenth century was not in complete retreat from the modern world but was painfully coming to grips with it. Catholicism's sources of strength lay no longer in the universality of Catholic practice, but in sometimes spectacular manifestations of popular devotion. Rather than being a primary determinant of European society and culture, the church was and would continue to be subject to problems that divisions in society provoked.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

The church's problematic reconciliation with the modern world continued through the first half of the twentieth century. In multiconfessional societies, and in those with growing religious indifference, the church remained on the defensive. In liberal democracies, even in those with nominally Catholic majorities, the church increasingly operated in a self-contained sphere with its own associations, school systems, welfare institutions, and political parties. In Spain and Portugal, the church was closely allied with fascist regimes, which enforced the conservative morality Catholicism condoned. The church's relations with Italian Fascism and Nazism were much more problematic. And under post–World War II communist regimes, the church provided a rallying point for political resistance and was an important component of national identity against Soviet domination. Thus for much of the century, the church's relation to society depended largely on the political system of individual countries. At the end of the twentieth century, however, the trend toward political liberalism and democracy seemed to be leading to the compartmentalization of Catholicism throughout all of Europe.

In France the separation of state and society from the church proceeded the farthest. In the first decade of the century, the anticlerical Third Republic applied harsh laws against Catholic religious orders, and in 1905 it enacted a complete separation of state and church. Relations between the two remained embittered. In 1925, an assembly of French cardinals and archbishops issued a declaration condemning laicity and urging the faithful to disobey the law. This resistance seemed precisely the sort of disloyalty that secularists feared from ultramontane Catholics. The French clergy, as was the case with the church as a whole, was intransigent in the belief that no well-ordered society could exist unless its laws conformed to Catholic teachings. The church's relations with the Vichy government, which enforced a conservative moral regime, were much better. But under the postwar republics the church once again had to contend with governments that disassociated themselves from religious institutions and with a population that was increasingly nonobservant.

In Spain the conflict between the church and liberal governments as well as that between the clergy and left-wing workers provoked great conflict, culminating in the Civil War of 1936–1939, during which seven thousand members of the clergy were executed, churches were sacked, and the bodies of clerics were exhumed from their graves. The Civil War's violence convinced many that it was necessary to organize society around the church's moral, social, and political teachings. Francisco Franco's regime overturned the liberalizing policies of the republican government. It repealed the divorce law and made religious marriages compulsory for all. It also decreed Catholic religious teaching mandatory in schools, and gave ecclesiastical authorities oversight of educational curricula. Hence, the segregation of Catholicism and society was, in principle, reversed; Catholic observance became a sign of social respectability and political orthodoxy. But the church-state alliance also worked to limit Catholicism's impact. Regions and social groups resistant to the regime were also strongly anticlerical.

In Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, the situations were different. As was the case in Spain and Portugal, a church that had long opposed liberal ideas had no problem at first in seeing authoritarian regimes suppress them. However, in neither country would the church-state alliance endure. The nationalization of the Papal States at the time of Italian unification had set off a long church-state conflict that Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) and Pope Pius XI (reigned 1922–1939) brought to an end with the signing of the Lateran Treaty of 1929. However, conflict arose over church autonomy and fascist ideology. The papal encyclical Non abbiamo bisogno ("We have no need") of 1931 denounced the pagan worship of the fascist state and declared its conception of society to be incompatible with Catholic doctrine. In Germany, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (the future Pope Pius XII, 1939–1958) signed a concordat with Hitler in 1933. Disputes between the state and the Vatican quickly resumed. In 1937, when the Vatican issued the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge ("With burning anguish") condemning racism (though without specifically mentioning Nazism), the regime reacted with a fierce antichurch campaign that sent many priests to concentration camps. Thus although the church and these totalitarian regimes shared common enemies in democratic liberalism and socialism, they were not capable of, nor even inclined to, re-create the integration of Catholicism and European society that had long since disappeared. Nonetheless, the willingness of the church to come to agreements with these regimes disillusioned many, and the disillusionment was accentuated by the sorry and controversial record of Pius XII's refusal to speak out against the Holocaust. The church's encounter with conservative, totalitarian regimes would finally bring about its long overdue reconciliation with liberal democracy and eventually with religious toleration. But this would occur in a post-World War II Europe in which the church as an institution was increasingly isolated from much of society, and its teachings increasingly out of step with social mores.

Ironically, only where the church was persecuted, as in Poland, would its integration with society remain strong. The Polish church provided political leadership as well as a rallying point during the centuries-long struggle for national unity and independence. Catholic symbols, such as the shrine of the Black Madonna at Czestochowa, were also national symbols. In the twentieth century, the great variety of Catholic educational, cultural, welfare, and labor organizations constituted much of Polish civil society. However, before the war Poland was an ethnically and religiously diverse country; Catholics accounted for 65 percent of the population. It was only after the war, especially with the extermination of the Jewish community, that the church could claim the religious allegiance of 95 percent of Poles. The church's hostility to communism made it the center—and its primate, Cardinal Stefan Wyszy?ski (1901–1981) the leader—of resistance to the postwar regime. And the church's alliance with Solidarity helped bring about the downfall of that regime. However, since the establishment of the post-communist government, splits between church and society have appeared. Catholic leaders see their faith as central to Polish identity and seek to have the church exercise a tight control over society. The primate Cardinal Józef Glemp encouraged Catholic political candidates to run against those of other religious, specifically Jewish, backgrounds. The church has opposed the liberalization of divorce and abortion laws. The disputes these policies have provoked, even in strongly Catholic Poland, are replaying the sorts of church-society conflicts found throughout Europe as modernization increasingly has marginalized the church's role in European society.

The church has had two very different responses to the problem modernization poses. One has been to continue to draw strength from some of its most ancient practices, for example, miracle-working shrines. Miracles at Fatima in Portugal, which started in 1917, have continued to this day, and Pope John Paul II has expressed his personal attachment to the devotion. Pilgrims also flock to Medjugorje in Croatia where apparitions of the Virgin started in 1981.

The church's major institutional response was the Second Vatican Council, which Pope John XXIII (reigned 1958–1963) convened between 1962 and 1965. The impact of the Council's work on liberalizing Catholic doctrine, ritual practice, and openness to the world, especially the non-European world, has been profound. The Council greatly reduced the church's traditional hostility toward modern society. Henceforth, an ecumenical institution would respect other Christian faiths and promote religious freedom and tolerance. It would devote new energy to improving the earthly lot of the poor as well as their salvation. The laity would gain a greater role in worship, a democratization of traditional clerical-directed devotional life. The Council thus reformed many of the policies that had guided the church since the sixteenth-century Council of Trent.

But manifestations of popular piety and the liberalization begun at Vatican II have not reversed the separation of the church and European society nor the decreasing importance of Catholicism as a source of individual identity. Regular church attendance has continued to fall, especially among the young. According to a survey done in France in the early 1990s, only 12 percent of those who consider themselves Catholic attend mass regularly (down from 20 percent in the mid-1980s). And only 2.5 percent of those under twenty-five attend (Hervieu-Léger, 1995, p. 155). The church has lost battles over divorce, homosexual rights, and abortion as European electorates have ratified liberal laws on all these issues in most European countries. A more conservative papacy under John Paul II exacerbated some tensions during the 1990s, though the pope roused great popular enthusiasm during his frequent travels, particularly in eastern Europe.

Although Catholicism no longer holds the place it once did in organizing social life and determining social attitudes, it has by no means disappeared from public life in Europe. Fierce political conflicts over such issues as abortion demonstrate the church's continuing ability to interject itself into debates on social morality. And even in France with its long history of secularized public education, attempts by the government to alter the funding of religious schools led to huge protest demonstrations in the 1980s and 1990s. Clearly, even though Catholicism is no longer a dominant element in European society, its impact is still considerable, and social historians will continue to assess its impact.

See alsoSecularization (volume 2);Charity and Poor Relief: The Early Modern Period; Charity and Poor Relief: The Modern Period (volume 3);Schools and Schooling (in this volume); and other articles in this section.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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