Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (139 page)

Not only Catholics subject to the British Crown benefited from the rearrangement of the modern world. In the Protestant republic which was the United States of America, Enlightenment was the benevolent force in separating Church and State, allowing the Catholic hierarchy complete institutional freedom and the chance to exercise pastoral care for a growing flood of Catholic immigrants, protected by the Constitution in the face of widespread Protestant popular hostility (which was nevertheless often paradoxically couched in the language of liberalism and resistance to Catholic priestcraft). In Lutheran northern Europe, the new constitutional arrangements for state boundaries which so favoured Protestant monarchies were mitigated by a liberal idea of
Paritat
- fair play between Catholics and Protestants - which was especially important in the former Holy Roman Empire in protecting Catholic subjects against their newly acquired Protestant princes.
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In the southern Netherlands, a revolution of unmistakably liberal character in 1830 against the lumpishly discriminatory rule of a Protestant Dutch monarchy created a new state, Belgium, whose cement across linguistic divisions between French-and Flemish-speakers was its flamboyant Catholicism. Despite having to accept a German Lutheran monarch, the Belgian Catholic Church enjoyed a freedom without parallel in any Catholic country in Europe; the closest analogy was British Quebec. This was specifically thanks to the adventurous liberalism of the new Belgian Constitution: now liberals could conveniently defend their freedoms against any royal attempts at encroachment by judicious deployment of fervent loyalty to the pope and appeals for his support.
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The Belgians were more fortunate in their access to Rome than the Catholic Poles and Lithuanians, whose repeated national risings against the Russian tsar in 1830, 1848 and 1863 met with a cold lack of support (and indeed initially even rebuke) from the Vatican, which shocked educated opinion in Europe, including French ultramontanes.
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In such varied settings, the
Syllabus
was a poisonous mistake, yet Pope Pius never admitted as much. His delighted response to the fervency of popular Catholicism, which even after his repudiation of the revolutionary fervour of 1848-9 included a rising tide of devotion to his own genial person, was to affirm more and more previously left indeterminate. In reaction to the dramatic revival of Marian cults, in 1854 he used his authority to promulgate that doctrine first formulated by English monks in the early twelfth century that Mary had been conceived without the spot of sin (see pp. 393-4). It was the final defeat of centuries of Catholic rearguard action against the notion of the Immaculate Conception, which had long been led by the Dominicans, following the opinions of their greatest theologian Thomas Aquinas. So great was the tide of opinion that even the Dominicans countenanced the foundation in 1860 of an Order of Dominican Nuns of the Immaculate Conception, in devoutly Marian Poland.

Our Lady showed her approval of the Pope's action by appearing at Lourdes in the French Pyrenees only four years after the Definition, announcing to a peasant girl, Bernadette Soubirous, with a fine disregard for logical categories, 'I am the Immaculate Conception.'
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Over the next few months she proceeded to produce alarming enthusiasm in other visionaries in Lourdes; large numbers of village women and girls had visions, saw ghostly lights and had to be restrained from throwing themselves into the river or from dizzy rocky heights. In time-honoured folkloric fashion, Our Lady was not above giving salutary frights to local sceptics - such as the state officials who unsympathetically interrogated Bernadette, and then found themselves troubled by poltergeist-like phenomena and specifically directed storms, or the drunkard who had defecated in the Grotto and was then terrified by a night of acute diarrhoea. These two aspects of the events of 1858, zestfully narrated by locals at the time, have subsequently been edited out of the shrine's official narratives; Our Lady of Lourdes has become a much better-behaved Virgin.
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Lourdes has become perhaps the most visited of all Christian shrines, Christianity's answer to Mecca (see Plate 44). It has also served as a riposte to those Catholics who had questioned the wisdom of defining the Immaculate Conception.

The most radical of Pius's achievements was to go where the Council of Trent had feared to proceed and produce a new definition of papal authority. The setting for this was a further council of the Church, in which seven hundred bishops from all over the world, including more than a hundred from across the Atlantic, arrived at the Vatican in December 1869, and occupied themselves in discussion for the next ten months. The council was paradoxical in its chief work, which was a thoroughgoing denial of the principles of conciliarism. Pope Pius was once more influenced by the political events around him: the Italian army was surrounding his last territory, the city of Rome. When external political crises resulted in the hasty withdrawal of French protective troops, it poured through the city defences, halting only at the locked gates of the Vatican. Soon afterwards, the bishops of the Vatican Council dispersed after a hasty adjournment. Some had gone already, before the moment in July 1870 when the vast majority, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, backed a decree,
Pastor aeternus
('The Eternal Shepherd'). This decisively exalted papal power at their expense, just at the moment when the pope's temporal power was about to disappear for ever. Only two bishops voted against the decree, though fifty-seven (including nearly all the bishops from 'Uniate' or Greek Catholic Churches) left to avoid the pain of voting against a frail and personally highly popular and respected old man in his hour of misfortune.

Now, with careful limitations, agreed after much charged episcopal debate in bad Latin in the echoing acoustic of St Peter's Basilica, the pope had been declared 'possessed of that infallibility with which the divine Redeemer willed that his Church should be endowed for defining doctrine regarding faith and morals'.
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Only on one subsequent occasion, once more a Marian declaration in 1950, on the subject of Mary's bodily assumption into Heaven, has the pope used this infallible authority. Yet even to recognize it was a triumph for ultramontanism. When Joseph de Maistre had proclaimed the infallible sovereignty of the papacy in 1819, the Vatican had been nervous, and liberal Catholics had been furious. Now such statements were guiding principles for the Roman Church. It is extraordinary that the conciliarist tradition, which flourished in the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Western Church and which still had weighty advocates in the eighteenth century, should crash in ruin at the time when Europe's temporal powers were all yielding to the logic of constitutionalism. That was a mark of how much the ultramontanes decided that the principles of liberalism were potentially subversive of their whole project.
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At least in its rhetoric, then, the late-nineteenth-century Catholic hierarchy set itself up against liberalism, whatever local accommodations it might make to circumstance. Perhaps that was inevitable when liberalism and nationalism humiliated the pope in his own city. Anticlericals in the new Italian regime sponsored the erection of a statue of the sixteenth-century free-thinking Dominican maverick Giordano Bruno, placed in the Roman square where the Church had burned him alive - Pope Leo XIII was so upset that he threatened to leave Rome for good (see Plate 45). They also built a massive and leeringly visible monument to Vittorio Emanuele II, first king of Italy, and with exquisite wit adorned the King's tomb in the Pantheon with bronze ornaments cast from cannon which had formerly defended the pope's Castel Sant'Angelo. Meanwhile, year on year, the steam trains to the Eternal City carried crowds of devout Catholics like the young Therese of Lisieux. They savoured the sufferings of early Christians in ill-ventilated visits to the newly exposed catacombs, and they returned from these archaeological outings to show their vocal support for the suffering papal 'Peter in Chains', often provoking riots with angry Italian nationalists which anticipated the aftermath of international football matches in more recent decades.
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Such confrontations were a stark symbol of a new battle for popular allegiance throughout Catholic Europe. In this, Catholicism might outflank liberalism by proclaiming its commitment to social reform, just as increasing numbers of ordinary Europeans were looking beyond liberalism to socialism, voting for socialist parties in European parliaments. In England, the ultramontane Cardinal-Archbishop of Westminster, Henry Manning, was a key mediator in ending a bitter industrial dispute in London Docks in 1889, a turning point in the recognition of the rights of trade unions in Britain. It was the first occasion on which a Catholic priest had been able to play such a role in the society of Protestant Britain since the Reformation, and it was more than most Anglican bishops seemed able to do at the time.
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Manning's achievement was important in the background to the encyclical of 1891,
Rerum novarum
, in which Pope Leo XIII restated the Catholic Church's commitment to social justice for the poor, even to the extent that it would promote trade unions with a Catholic base. Its tone was passionate and direct, with a passion whose direction was very different from that of Pius IX's
Syllabus of Errors
:

some opportune remedy must be found quickly for the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class: for the ancient working-men's guilds were abolished in the last century, and no other protective organization took their place. Public institutions and the laws set aside the ancient religion. Hence, by degrees it has come to pass that working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition.

True to the scholastic Thomism which was now the approved theological style of the Church, there was a pervasive medievalism in Leo's encyclical. It urged the forming of corporations like the gilds of the Middle Ages, which would repudiate class conflict and ground society in organic cooperation between interest groups. Despite its fairly shallow social analysis and inbuilt political caution, the document provided a convenient shield against the hostility of later popes for Catholics who wished to take part in the enterprise of social reform with liberal groups, or even to find common ground with socialism.

Pope Leo's realism also led him to seek an understanding with French Republican leaders, when it became apparent in the 1880s that any form of monarchy in France, Bourbon, Orleanist or Bonapartist, was unlikely to overturn the Third Republic. His successors proved less capable of maintaining good relations. Many Republican politicians were still mentally fighting the battles of the 1790s against the Catholic Church. It was easy to see why they should, when from the mid-1890s so many in the Church irrationally supported the harsh imprisonment of a Jewish army officer, Alfred Dreyfus, long after it was clear that he was innocent of the betrayal of military secrets of which he was accused. The sheer nastiness of the 'Anti-Dreyfusards' did not present French Catholicism in a good light, particularly their hatred of 'deicidal' Jews, whom they saw as staging a conspiracy along with the Freemasons against Christian society. Their paranoia was matched by anticlerical fears that the Catholic Church was sponsoring conspiracy against the Republic, led by Jesuits and the anti-Dreyfusard promoters of the Lourdes shrine, the Assumptionist Order of Augustinians.
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After tense confrontations, Napoleon's Concordat was abrogated in 1906. For a hundred years from the mid-nineteenth century, every village in France was liable to become a battleground between church and school, pitting the power of the
cure
against the state-paid schoolmaster to win the minds of the next generation. The fault line in French politics between Church and Revolution persisted into the 1960s, anachronistically shaping the structure of political parties, and absorbing political energies which could have been spent on more pressing social and political problems.
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PROTESTANTISM: BIBLES AND 'FIRST-WAVE' FEMINISM

Protestantism benefited as much as Catholicism from all the new resources of transport and communication at the disposal of organized religion, and showed a similar institutional and devotional vigour. Cheap print was naturally of huge importance to a Bible-based religion. The sheer numbers of Bibles produced was staggering: between 1808 and 1901 one Protestant anglophone agency alone, the British and Foreign Bible Society, produced more than 46 million complete Bibles and nearly three times as many New Testaments and sections of the Bible. Moreover, the advance of printing technology tempted Protestants away from their long-standing suspicion of the sacred visual image. Bibles became prodigal with illustrations, particularly scenes set in the newly accessible Holy Land, and the 'Family Bible' (naturally, the 'King James' version for English-speakers) became a symbol of domestic success. It was hawked by salesmen from door to door in the way that encyclopedias would be in the twentieth century, boasting an impressively decorated pseudo-leather cover, opened ceremoniously for children with clean fingers carefully to leaf through its pictures of an idealized ancient Middle East, and linger over its proud entries of family births, marriages and deaths on a handsomely illuminated template page. Certain other pictures gained a special resonance for Protestant Christians. One of the greatest successes was achieved by William Holman Hunt, an English 'Pre-Raphaelite' artist and a strenuously if unconventionally devout Anglican, who in 1853 created an endearingly intimate image of the Saviour bearing a lighted lamp, bringing warmth and light to a neglected and melancholy doorway: 'the Light of the World'. The critics sneered at it, but its triumphant tour of the British Empire on exhibition in 1905 confirmed it as a global rival to any of the classic icons of Orthodox or Latin Christianity.
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