Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (138 page)

22

Europe Re-enchanted or Disenchanted? (1815-1914)

CATHOLICISM ASCENDANT: MARY'S TRIUMPH AND THE CHALLENGE OF LIBERALISM

The European Churches had many different responses to the traumas of the revolutionary wars and the eventual defeat of Napoleon. Up to the great convulsions after the First World War, virtually everywhere in Europe still had an established Church whose establishment owed itself to an equally long-established monarchy. As a result, anyone opposing or seeking to curb the power of such monarchies was liable to regard the Church as an enemy. Yet complications arose in countries of multiple religions, and, wherever a grouping with a common culture and language ruled by an external power adhered for the most part to one Church, that Church was likely to become the focus for nationalist self-assertion. The situation was still more complex where both sides owed allegiance to Roman Catholicism.

One underlying structural consideration was that in Western Churches, whether Catholic or Protestant, a large proportion of the clerical leadership had always been drawn from the able rather than the well born, unusually among the institutions of traditional society. Now that prince-bishops, abbacies and cathedral chapters stuffed with aristocratic dimwits had been swept away from the Catholic Church in the former Holy Roman Empire, this became even more obviously the case. In the long term, such a shift in clerical leadership, in parallel with the growing professionalization of secular government and bureaucracy in Europe, was going to produce a predisposition to liberalism in Western Christianity, but in Roman Catholicism its immediate effect was to strengthen the growing concentration of power and emotional loyalty in the papacy, as clergy turned from their traditional aristocratic leaders to the ultimate patron in Rome.

The movement embodying this mood had long borne the name of ultramontanism, deriving its image of 'looking beyond the mountains' from the perspective of people in northern Europe, caught up in papacy's great medieval conflicts with the Holy Roman Empire. 'Ultramontanes' were thus those who looked across the Alps to Italy, reverencing the pope's authority. It contrasted with those localist moods in Catholicism such as Gallicanism in France, which had not sought leadership across the Alps in Rome, and which looked first to their own resources. Ultramontanism is often seen as a conservative force in the Church, but after 1815 it represented innovation and the prospect of Church reconstruction and revival, albeit of a particular type. The papacy was now Europe's last elective monarchy. As such, the pope was a symbol of the old world, but he also embodied a form of centralizing Catholicism so old as to seem new: ultramontanism revived the ambitions of Gregory VII and Innocent III centuries before. Papal power continued to sit uneasily alongside that of Europe's royal dynasties. These monarchs sought to maintain their inherited positions with the aid of the Church. They generally negotiated concordats with Rome in the style of Napoleon, giving them many opportunities to interfere in Church affairs in their realms, including extensive powers of appointment to bishoprics - far more, indeed, for the time being than the pope himself.
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The Austrian emperor, after all the varied religious commitments of the Habsburg dynasty, still identified himself as the leader among Catholic monarchs, and as late as 1903, Francis Joseph, Emperor-King of Catholic Austria-Hungary, vetoed a likely candidate for the papacy in a papal election.
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Francis Joseph was expressing a tradition of dispersed power in the Western Church which now had much to contradict it. Ultramontanism built up its new emotional power in alliance with a startling revival in popular Catholic practice; this was heralded in the eighteenth-century popular resistance to the efforts of monarchs and revolutionaries alike to interfere in the everyday lives of Catholics. New pilgrimage cults and religious orders mushroomed to reverse earlier destruction, but just as in late-sixteenth-century Catholic Europe, this was no mere restoration of the past. Against a French Revolution which represented more than two decades of male nationalist violence, the Church found itself managing an international uprising of women - what has been termed with a pleasing overturning of modern sociological assumptions 'ultramontane feminism'.
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It followed the trend first perceptible among both Protestants and Catholics in seventeenth-century Europe (see pp. 791-4) that women were becoming more active than men in devotional practice. As far afield as Mexico, while men began to drift away from the sacramental life of the Church, lay women's associations played an ever growing part in running parish affairs.
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Everywhere, a maelstrom of nuns descended on the Church. In the land which became Belgium, for instance, the proportion of women religious to men reversed from 1780 to 1860, from 40:60 to 60:40, and at the end of this process, in a development to horrify any bishop from the Council of Trent, only 10 per cent of Belgian nuns were in contemplative orders: the vast majority were involved in teaching, health care and help for the poor.
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Even would-be female contemplatives could be distinctively active when it suited them. The world-denying and savagely self-punishing teenager Therese Martin of Lisieux in Normandy, overexcited by her pilgrimage to Rome in 1887, seized on a routine papal audience to beg no less a figure than Pope Leo XIII for permission for immediate entrance to the Carmelite Order despite her age. The hapless pontiff was understandably alarmed, particularly when she clung to his knees and had to be removed by ecclesiastical bouncers. She got her way in the end, to the point of canonization half a century after her early death from tuberculosis.
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The most assertive woman of all was the Mother of God. The nineteenth century proved one of the most prolific periods for Mary's activity in the history of the Western Church since the twelfth century. She seems to have made more appearances all over Europe and Latin America than in any century before or since: generally to women without money, education or power and in remote locations, and often in association with the political upheavals or economic crises which repeatedly hit a society in the middle of dramatic transformations.
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Our Lady conveyed a rich variety of messages and opinions. In Paris in 1830 she manifested herself three times to Catherine Laboure, a newly professed young nun. The first occasion was in July, at the height of the political upheavals which less than a fortnight later swept away the Bourbon monarchy and replaced it by the Orleanist Louis Philippe. Mary gave the nun the pattern for a medal to be struck with her image: within twelve years, a hundred million copies of the medal were providing more comfort to the faithful than a French Orleanist monarchy which many of them regarded as a distressing usurpation and compromise with the Revolution.
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When Our Lady appeared again at Marpingen in Germany to three village girls in 1876, she made a political point as she had already done frequently in France. Although she never brought the good folk of Marpingen anything like her earlier success at Lourdes (see p. 824), she strengthened the morale of ordinary German Catholics caught up in the so-called
Kulturkampf
, a fierce confrontation with the Protestant state apparatus of the new German Empire, and so she contributed to the
Kulturkampf
's failure to intimidate Catholicism in Germany. She did so without any help from the diocesan hierarchy of the Rhineland, who, if they had not been under such government pressure, would have done their best to bring her cult to a swift end.
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Mary had technology on her side: the steady speeding up of communications and the sudden availability of cheap print, two of the motors of social change generally, were of great benefit, spreading the news of her growing loquacity at an unprecedented pace. As her shrines old and new flourished, much of their prosperity was dependent on the steam train. Protestants went on trains to the seaside, Catholics to light a candle in a holy place; devout pilgrimage had never been easier or more enjoyable.

Many of Mary's appearances were surrounded by fierce controversies, as were parallel events such as twenty or so cases of the appearance of stigmata (despite the experience having been pioneered by a man, Francis of Assisi, nearly all those bearing stigmata in modern times have been women).
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Such wonders pitted Catholics against Catholics, with a regular pattern of sceptical clerical men versus heroically insistent women who went on to find clerical and lay support for their experiences. They continued into twentieth-century crises for Catholic communities across Europe. Mary's manifestations to three children in Fatima in Portugal 1917 were classics of the genre, during a world war and seven years after the overthrow of Portugal's monarchy. Similar were her appearances in the strongly Catholic Croat town of Medjugorje in 1981, as the Yugoslav Federation began to lose the political will to survive on the eve of catastrophic inter-confessional violence in the region. During the Yugoslav war that followed, Mary's Catholic partisans in Herzegovina became virulent anti-Muslim nationalists, who also bizarrely threatened to blow up the Catholic cathedral in Mostar if the bishop there did not abandon his scepticism about the heavenly visions.
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For people caught up in this exhilarating outburst of religious energy, Catholic ultramontanism represented a unifying ideology against the onslaughts of the Enlightenment, and the pope came to symbolize the sufferings and eventual triumph of the whole Church in the revolutionary era. The French arch-polemicist Joseph de Maistre was a prophet of absolute monarchy in Church and State, and a fanatical opponent of everything that the French Revolution represented: in 1819 he spelled out that 'Christianity rests wholly on the Sovereign Pontiff' and 'all sovereignty is infallible in nature'.
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The confrontational style of such ultramontane rhetoric was sharpened by the papacy's anger at the direct challenge to its temporal rule in central Italy. Nationalists and liberals sought to unite the peninsula for the first time since the disappearance of the Roman Empire. The charismatic, creative (and often naive and self-assertive) Pope Pius IX opened his pontificate in 1846 with startling measures of modernization, such as plans for a railway system in the Papal States. It was easy to see such gestures as liberalism: a possibility intoxicating in its unexpected emergence from the Vatican. It seemed as if the Pope himself might lead Rome into the leadership of a liberal reconstruction of all Europe, but the nationalist revolutions of 1848 revealed his confusion, which readily tipped into his horrified opposition to Italian unification, not least because it would involve an end to the Papal States.

By 1864, after a series of humiliating losses of territory to a new Italian monarchical state based on the once devoutly papalist House of Savoy, Pius reacted in frustration by issuing an encyclical letter to which was attached a
Syllabus of Errors
, hastily gathered from a series of recent papal pronouncements. Some were uncontroversial, but they included a series of peevish statements which among other things condemned socialism and the principle that non-Catholics should be given freedom of religion in a Catholic state. They culminated in the proposition that it was wrong to believe that the Pope 'can and ought to reconcile himself with progress, liberalism and modern civilization'.
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There were many in Catholic Europe to applaud the Pope: those with memories of the atrocities inspired by that parent of liberalism and modern civilization, the French Revolution, and those still witnessing Spanish, Portuguese, Italian or Latin American anticlerical liberals - even Swiss liberals - continuing to close convents and seize schools from the Catholic Church. In Spain, between 1829 and 1834, liberals forced the King to disband that faithful guardian of Spanish Catholic identity, the Spanish Inquisition. What did that say about the Spanish patriotism of liberals?

Catholics could also readily link such destructive fruits of liberalism to that curious offspring of the Scottish Reformation, Freemasonry (see pp. 771-2). By the eighteenth century, Freemasonry had become the adopted son of the Enlightenment, just as so many eighteenth-century Protestant Scots had done more generally; long before the French Revolution, Freemasonry's leading figures came to sound more like Voltaire than John Dury or Johann Heinrich Alsted. Now especially in Catholic countries in southern Europe, Central and South America and the Caribbean, in the absence of any popular Protestant alternative to the Catholic Church, the Masonic Lodge became a rallying point for all who loathed ecclesiastical power. Here Freemasonry often did indeed become the chief force within liberal politics: a rival to that other closed male caste, the Catholic clergy, complete with Masons' own engrossing (though a good deal less public) ritual life. A remnant of this survived to our own age in that time-warped and embattled island, Fidel Castro's Cuba. A promenade around the cheerfully shabby towns and villages of Cuba at the turn of the second and third millennia would reveal an unexpected (and interestingly little-remarked) feature of this determinedly anti-Catholic state with its opportunistic version of Communism. Alongside the local Communist Party headquarters, one of the best-kept buildings on the street was the hall of the local Masonic Lodge, complete outside with its proudly displayed bust of the great nineteenth-century liberal hero and liberator Jose Marti. President Castro was as much heir to the nineteenth century's anticlerical liberalism as he was to Marx.
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Yet in 1864 'liberalism' had a different and less negative sound for Catholics elsewhere. Even in France, tormented by the rift between those venerating and those execrating the Revolution, several influential bishops were privately appalled at the
Syllabus
's potential effects. One of their number not ashamed of joining the word 'liberal' to 'Catholic', Felix Dupanloup, Bishop of Orleans, wrote a best-selling pamphlet defending the
Syllabus
by the backhanded method of explaining away its intemperate propositions.
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Likewise in the British Empire, Catholicism owed its opportunities for expansion to liberal principles. The precedent came in the historic decision of the British Crown in 1774 to secure its newly won Canadian dominions by allying with the Catholic elite of New France. This effectively prevented French Canadian Catholics from abetting France's aid to the Protestant revolutionaries of the United States. Their decision was vindicated by the anticlerical horrors perpetrated by French revolutionaries a decade later - indeed, the Catholic Church in Quebec became well aware that it enjoyed much less interference under the British than from the previous royal French government.
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Then Britain and Ireland witnessed a gradual dismantling of public disabilities for Catholics (not yet completed in the early twenty-first century, with a repeal of the legislation of 1701 forbidding Catholics to succeed to the British throne still pending). Without such new freedoms, the authorities in Rome could not have launched a comprehensive reform of the startlingly pre-Tridentine and lay-dominated Catholic Church in Ireland, to bring it into line with the well-regulated devotional revolution in the rest of Catholic Europe.
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