Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (157 page)

Protestant Unionists were an unstable coalition, particularly in north-eastern Ireland. Here the traditional 'Anglo-Irish' elite of the (Anglican) Church of Ireland had to make common cause with a truculently independent Ulster-Scots Presbyterianism, which shaded into a revivalism strongly linked to the fervour of the American Awakenings. Nevertheless, shared Protestant anger at British government concessions on Home Rule led significant numbers in 1914 to threaten to defend themselves by force, and when thousands of Protestant Ulstermen subsequently joined up for the British Army, their eyes were on the defence of Ulster as much as of the empire. Their slaughter in horrific numbers in the trench warfare of the Battle of the Somme in 1916, a particular holocaust of Irish regiments, only strengthened the determination of Ulster Protestants to give no ground.

As Irish nationalist support grew and shouldered aside earlier more moderate Home Rule politicians, island-wide violence mounted. Partition became inevitable, though the decision led to a further vicious civil war in the south between nationalists who accepted and those who rejected the partition deal on offer from the British government. The British Isles ceased to be a United Kingdom in 1922, although southern Ireland ungraciously accepted an increasingly threadbare figleaf of monarchical authority until 1949. Northern Ireland consolidated itself into a state where majority Protestant rule would be entrenched - not least because both Catholics and Protestants resisted the attempt of the Westminster government to create truly non-sectarian education at primary school level; thanks to the Catholic Church's firm instructions, Catholic parents overwhelmingly boycotted state secondary schools, leaving them to Protestants.
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Amid the crisis of Northern Ireland's birth in 1920-23, Presbyterian society was electrified by a series of revivals conducted by a classic representative of extrovert Ulster-American fundamentalism, William P. Nicholson: hardbitten, ebullient, contemptuous of nuance - full of Gospel fire, others might say. Nicholson is a problematic figure. He has been credited with saving Ulster from all-out war by turning 'born-again' gunmen away from violence, but equally, as with previous Ulster revivalists, he could be seen as confirming the siege mentality of working-class Ulster Protestantism. In later life, he gave his blessing to one in a new generation of populist Presbyterians who was destined to spend much of a long and politically charged ministry amid a further Ulster civil war. Ian Paisley, founder of a self-styled Free Presbyterian Church, reminisced that Nicholson prayed that Paisley might be given a tongue as sharp as a cow's in the service of the Gospel. Paisley if not God hearkened to that prayer, and despite the remarkable turnaround which crowned and then swiftly ended his political career in old age, he can shoulder much of the responsibility for the
immobilisme
of Ulster politics through three decades of violence at the end of the twentieth century.
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The virulent anti-Catholicism of interwar Northern Ireland was echoed elsewhere in the Atlantic Isles, especially in Wales and Scotland. Welsh Nonconformist Protestants were proud of their hegemony in Welsh life, but also conscious of their congregations ebbing, despite a nationwide burst of Pentecostal-related revival in 1904-5. That heightened their alarm at a growing Catholic presence in Wales, swollen by Irish and other immigrants. The Wesleyan minister Lewis Edwards in 1931 was not exceptional in his ready public affirmation, 'There is no disguising the fact that Roman Catholics are opposed to everything the Welsh people hold dear in their national life.'
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Similar circumstances led a committee of the General Assembly of the (Presbyterian) Church of Scotland in 1923 to express fears for Scottish culture under the onslaught of Irish immigrants. They stated, with an open racism coming strangely from ethnically hybrid Scotland, 'The nations that are homogeneous in Faith and ideas, that have maintained unity of race, have ever been the most prosperous, and to them the Almighty had committed the highest tasks, and has granted the largest measure of success in achieving them.' A search for solidarity against Catholicism was an important element in a successful Reunion of 1929 between the two halves of the Church of Scotland riven in the Disruption of 1843 (see p. 844), and Reunion was combined with calls to the government to legislate to reduce Scotland's Irish immigrant community. As late as 1935 there were anti-Catholic riots in Edinburgh.
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Nor was England exempt from this mood, smarting as it was from the humiliating loss of one of its subordinate partners in the Atlantic archipelago. When the Church of England's bishops tried to end Anglican contention about the liturgy between Anglo-Catholics and Evangelicals by producing a new Prayer Book, their carefully calibrated efforts twenty years in preparation were twice defeated in Parliament in 1927-8, amid much talk of popery.
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Admittedly, MPs from beyond England (and one Communist Parsee representing Battersea North) were crucial in the vote which produced this defeat on a matter which strictly speaking concerned only the English, but popular anti-Catholicism ran deep in English consciousness.
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Respectable England was 'Church', or it was 'Chapel', and both were Protestant - with the uncomfortable complication of Anglo-Catholicism, making its own way in the Church of England (see Plate 49).

For all these groups, Rome was an alien world, liable to pollute the English way of life - although, curiously, even the most self-consciously Protestant army officer found no difficulty in calling army chaplains 'padre', since the British Indian Army had long used the term, following East India Company custom. Probably such Colonel Blimps did not realize that this popish usage had been borrowed from the Portuguese Catholic presence in India.
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Far more acceptable than Catholicism to many 'Low Church' Anglicans was Freemasonry: Geoffrey Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury in the late 1940s and 1950s, was an enthusiastic Mason, and fiercely protective of the organization against (generally High Church) clerical criticism.
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Until the 1960s, the tone of English public life remained a comfortably stodgy Protestant Anglicanism. Now that seems a world away.

CATHOLICS AND CHRIST THE KING: THE SECOND AGE OF CATHOLIC MISSIONS

Ireland's independence was one compensation for Catholicism's loss of its greatest political supporter in the Habsburg emperor - but the emperor had in any case always been an ambiguous asset for the pope. Until the 1960s, the Irish Republic remained a stridently confessional Catholic state (despite a sprinkling of eminent Protestants in its leadership); it represented a spectacular gain in territory which had been lost to Protestant control in the Reformation. A similar triumph for Rome after 1919 came from the foundation of an equally fervently Catholic Polish Republic, gathered afresh out of its eighteenth-century partition between the three now-vanished European empires of the Hohenzollern, the Habsburgs and the Romanovs. It is significant that when Pope Pius XI sought to rally Catholics against what he denounced as secularism or laicism in an encyclical of 1925,
Quas primas
, the brand-new feast which he introduced as a symbol for his campaign was that of Christ the King. It was then designated to be the last Sunday in October, but Paul VI moved it in 1969 to the last Sunday in the liturgical year, late November or early December. This arbitrary shift was a clue that the new festival was not the product of any long-standing popular devotion.

The Church had never stressed Christ's kingship when Europe was full of kings of this world, but now nearly all of them had gone. The papacy, betrayed by the old European powers when it lost the Papal States, necessarily took a much wider view of Catholic fortunes than simply the devastation in Europe: Christ the King, or at least his Vicar on earth, had the task and perhaps even the prospect of integrating all society under a single monarchy. An extra incentive to take this international outlook, indeed a motive far from insignificant, was finance. Pius IX had on principled grounds refused any monetary compensation for the Papal States and its tax revenues from the Italian government, and the only way of filling the gap was by soliciting financial support from devout Catholics - what had been known in medieval Europe as 'Peter's Pence'. At first the appeal for funds had been associated with the futile military effort to defend the pope's remaining territories, but this purpose became irrelevant after Italian unification in 1870. The net was cast worldwide, and the Vatican started taking a much more detailed interest in congregations far away.
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This was a shift as fraught with significance as that other great financial change in the Church's medieval past, the financing of parish priests by tithes (see p. 369).

The papacy was looking to every last Catholic man, woman and child for help in carrying out its task, and in return it delved much deeper into the everyday lives of the faithful. One liturgical change engineered by Pope Pius X had a huge effect on Catholics and their experience of the Church. Over the centuries there had been a seesaw of arguments as to how frequently or infrequently the laity should receive the eucharistic elements at Mass. Pius X had no doubts that the more frequent reception, the better, and issued a barrage of instructions to that end. One of these had a powerful effect: in 1907 the Pope decreed that the minimum age for first communion should be lowered from twelve or fourteen to seven. Around that 'first communion' there rapidly grew a new Catholic folk culture, a public celebration of family life in the parish church, centred on an array of proud infants dressed in innocent splendour. One might say that the modern vision of Catholic family bliss which the Church still so assiduously promotes dates from that order of 1907.
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The fact that financial appeals across the oceans succeeded in keeping the papacy afloat after its nineteenth-century losses of territorial revenue was an indication of the Church's overall optimism and growth. For the Catholic Church was now undergoing one of the greatest expansions in its history, especially in Africa. Whereas the nineteenth century had been the great age of Protestant mission, Catholic missions were now outstripping at least European-run Protestant initiatives. In 1910 there were more or less equal numbers of European or American Catholics and Protestants in African missions, but recruitment of Protestant missionaries from Britain was beginning to fall away - just at the time that the Irish Catholic Church, previously remarkably inward-looking, was beginning to produce great numbers of clergy and nuns prepared for mission abroad, to add to a growing stream of Catholics from mainland Europe.
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Benedict XV (Pope 1914-22) and his successor, Pius XI (Pope 1922-39), were both keenly interested in world mission. Benedict, conscious of the political impotence revealed in his peace initiatives during the war, was further galvanized by reports from China by a Belgian Lazarist Father, Vincent Lebbe, who was deeply critical of the French government's continuing use of its historic powers over Chinese Catholic missions to interfere with what the Church was trying to achieve.

Benedict's resulting apostolic letter of 1919,
Maximum illud
, addressed a much wider missionary canvas than simply China's. It echoed Henry Venn's 'three-self' principle, but went much further, doing a considerable amount to banish the ethos in Rome which had condemned 'Chinese Rites' long before (see p. 707). As well as looking forward to a wholly native leadership in all regions of the Church, the letter pointed out how damaging the reproduction of European nationalisms had been for work in other continents, and it urged respect for other cultures. It has been styled a 'Magna Carta' for modern missions, and it was quickly followed by moves to appoint indigenous bishops in China and Japan.
Maximum illud
heralded an age in which the Roman Catholic Church has become the largest single component in the Christian world family of Churches.
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Across the Atlantic, the papacy viewed contrasting situations. In North America, with its history of dominant Protestant Churches evolving away from establishment towards pluralism, the Catholic Church was a flourishing part of a denominational spectrum. In South and Central America it was still largely unchallenged by Protestantism, which remained confined to niches of immigrant communities such as the Welsh miners of Argentinian Patagonia. The successor regimes of the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies inherited the intimate relationship between Church and secular government conceded by Renaissance popes, and throughout the nineteenth century this brought confrontation with liberal regimes inclined to see the power of churchmen as a threat to progress. Colombia, for instance, had been the first independent republic recognized by the Vatican after the defeat of Spain's South American armies, in 1835, but in 1853 it had also been the first to separate Church and State, as a consequence of which, in a further insult to the Church, it had made civil marriage compulsory. The pattern had been repeated throughout Latin America.
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It was not invariable: in late-nineteenth-century Mexico, an energetic Archbishop of Oaxaca, Eulogio Gillow, combined modernizing ideas in social and ecclesiastical matters with first-hand knowledge of what the Curia in Rome meant by modernization. He established excellent relations with Mexico's long-term dictator Porfirio Diaz (whose power base coincided with Gillow's archdiocese) and did much to overcome previous conflicts.
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Nevertheless the official Church in Latin America habitually competed with liberal politicians for the allegiance of the population. Each had handicaps. Leading actors in both power structures were largely drawn from an elite of Creoles who claimed pure Spanish blood. Creoles might be regarded as indifferent to the concerns of ordinary people, and they had certainly long treated native peoples as second-class citizens, rather as they themselves had once been treated by home-born Spaniards.
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Now
mestizos
(half-bloods) and full-blooded natives were voters as well as parishioners, and they began to seek to exercise their power in church as much as in the ballot box. In 1903 Pope Pius X far away in Rome sought to impose good taste on liturgical church music, emphasizing that pipe organs honoured God in worship, while popular instruments did not. Faced with a ban on brass bands, some Mexican parishes menacingly gave their parish priests an ultimatum: no bands, no services. One Mexican priest wearily summed up the situation in 1908 when filling in a diocesan questionnaire: in reply to, 'Do all the parishioners profess the Catholic religion?' he put down, 'The Catholic religion, in a manner of their own.'
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This might seem a symptom of Catholic weakness, but it proved an unexpected asset when matters again turned sour between Church and State in Mexico, provoking the most serious trial of strength faced by the Catholic Church worldwide in the 1920s, equalled only by the tribulations of Greek Catholics in post-1917 Soviet Ukraine.