29-32

29

                                                        Catholicism and Liberalism

The restoration failed. The nineteenth century was the century of liberalism, she ideology of the bourgeois revolution. Could an understanding be reached between Catholicism and liberalism? Would it suit the Church simply to be free, without the protection of the state or recognition of the Church’s traditional privileges? Should truth and error have equal rights in public life? These and other questions were answered in different ways by Catholics in this period, which also witnessed the rise of nationalism, which directly threatened the papal states.

1. The restoration ended in failure and the nineteenth century passed into history as the century of liberalism. The revolution of 1830 put an end to the Old Regime in France; in Spain it disappeared after the death of Ferdinand VII, in the reign of Isabella II. The revolution of 1848 was an earthquake which affected most of Europe and led eventually to important social and political changes. The victory of liberalism was felt in all aspects of life. Here we will look at its effects on Christianity and the Church.

2. Liberalism had a political and an economic doctrine; but it was based on an ideology closely connected with the ‘enlightened’ thought of the eighteenth century. At the basis of this liberal theology is an anthropocentric view of the world and of existence. For liberalism, men are not only free and equal: they are autonomous, that is to say, they are bound by no law given by God: society does not recognize God’s law as the supreme norm. Freedom of conscience and of thought, of association and of the press, are people’s inalienable rights; and in reply to the traditional Christian teaching that power derives from God, for liberalism it comes from the people; the people are the only source of legitimate government. Liberal doctrine made no distinction between the true religion (Christianity) and other religions. Religion, for liberalism, is a private matter, to do with the intimacy of conscience, and the Church, separate from the state (‘a free Church in a free state’) is something on the fringe of public life and is subject to state law, as is every other association.

3. Liberal ideology certainly contained elements of genuine Christian provenance, but mixed in with others of very different origin which favored the secularization of social life, religious naturalism and, ultimately, atheism or indifference. It is easy to understand why many Christians rejected such an ideology out of hand and, having learned their lessons in their recent experience with the revolutions, were inclined to favor traditionalist positions, which called for respect for the rights of God and of the Church in the life of society. These anti-liberal Catholics were sympathetic towards the counter­revolutionary governments which still existed in Europe — governments which to some degree, at least, kept the Old Regime going and recognized the Church as having a position of privilege in society.

4. Around the year 1830 a group of liberal Catholics gathered around the L ‘Avenir, a journal edited by Félicité de Lamennais. In opposition to the traditionalist position which most Catholics held to, these favored a reconciliation, not so much theoretical as practical, of the Church with liberalism; they were convinced that liberalism was there to stay and that the Church could not fulfil its specific mission without being in harmony with it. ‘God and liberty’ was the motto of liberal Catholicism — meaning that acceptance and defense of liberty for all and in all its forms were the best credentials for ensuring that modern society would show respect for God’s authority and for the Church’s rights.

5. Initially liberal Catholics were ‘ultramontanes’, and in France rejected Gallicanism; they looked ‘beyond the mountains’, towards Rome, and showed reverence to the papacy, the cornerstone of the universal Church. But Rome’s reply did not meet with their expectations. Gregory XVI’s encyclical Mirari vos (15 August 1832) condemned a number of basic points of the program of the L ’Avenir group — equality of treatment for all beliefs which, the pope said, led to indifferentism; complete separation between Church and state; freedom of conscience; unlimited freedom of opinion and of the press. This papal rebuff was followed immediately by Lamennais’ defection; he left the priesthood and the Church. But his principal colleagues reacted otherwise: they stayed faithful to the Church; Lacordaire restored the Dominican Order in France; others, like Montalembert and Falloux, professed a less radical liberalism and campaigned in favor of freedom of education from state control.

6. Catholic Christianity and liberalism met also in another area. The explosion of nationalism, much favored by liberal policies, led to the emancipation of catholic populations which had been under the dominion of rulers of a different confession. The liberals applauded the repeated uprisings of catholic Poland against oppression by czarist Russia. The revolution of 1830 led to an alliance between Belgian Catholics and liberals, who managed to withdraw Belgium from the control of the Calvinist monarchy of Holland and gave the new kingdom a liberal constitution. Daniel O’Connell, in the name of civil and religious liberty, obtained substantial emancipation for the Irish people, and in Britain liberal reforms improved the position of Catholics by getting rid of many old laws which discriminated on grounds of religion. All these helpful results of liberal nationalist movements should not make us forget the dangers those same movements implied in one area very particularly connected with the Apostolic See — the Italian peninsula, where the Risorgimento was all the rage; the route of this movement to national unity lay through the disappearance of the papal states and the turning of papal Rome into the capital of the kingdom of Savoy.

7. This survey of the encounter between Christianity and liberalism would be incomplete if it does not refer to anti-religious intellectual attitudes at the root of attacks against the Christian view of man and the world: these attitudes developed in virulence in the nineteenth century. The positivism of Auguste Comte argued that, in the new era of human history, now that the theological and metaphysical stages had been superseded, man was interested mainly in phenomena, in the ‘how’ of things and events and not in the barren ‘whys’ of other ages. Positivism led to scientism — really religion without any supernatural dimension — which must supplant Christianity, exposing every mystery, ‘explaining’ reality and bringing happiness and unlimited progress to mankind. Positivism and the idealism of the great German philosopher Hegel were at the basis of Feuerbach’s materialism, which is very close to Marxism.

8. All these doctrines acted as a base for a generalized offensive against Christianity, in the field of science, particularly the natural sciences. But even the sacred sciences became the cockpit of this anti-Christian struggle. The critique of the historicity of sacred scripture (emptying it of supernatural content) led Strauss to deny that Christ ever existed and moved Ernest Renan (who was less daring but more subtle) to write a famous Life of Jesus, of a Jesus who is no longer God, though he is the noblest of the sons of men. It is clear that the intellectual and political climate of Pius IX’s time was fraught with threats, sometimes provoking the Church to interfere — with unhappy results — in temporal affairs. But the renewed Christian vitality which can also be noticed in this period is a good indication that all times are God’s times, in spite of men and in spite of how things look on the surface.

                                                                            30

                                                               The Era of Pius IX

The long pontificate of Pius IX covered a whole era. Pius IX was a pope much loved and respected by Catholics; even the misfortunes which befell him helped strengthen these feelings towards him. This was a period in Christian history which saw a great deal of renewal in things to do with the internal life of the Church. It also saw the holding of the first Vatican council and the loss of the papal states.

1. The pontificate of Pius IX lasted thirty-two years — from 1846 to 1878, the longest in the history of the papacy. The story is told that, during the ceremony of his coronation, when the cardinal proto deacon said the traditional words, ‘Holy Father, you will not attain the days of Peter’, Pius IX replied brightly, ‘That is not a matter of faith.’ And as it turned out Pius IX’s papacy lasted much longer than St Peter’s; so long in fact that one can speak of the era of Pius IX as a well-defined chapter in Christian history. It is a chapter which also takes in the transition from the last days of the Old Regime to the consolidation of the liberal world.

2. ‘We had foreseen everything, except a liberal pope’. This was how Prince Metternich, chancellor of the Austro-Hungarian empire and creator of the Holy Alliance, greeted the election of Pius IX. But the ‘liberalism’ of Pius IX was just one more indication of how ambiguous the word ‘liberal’ is. The new pope was indeed a liberal man — but in the sense of someone who practices the virtue of liberality, not in that he was a follower of the doctrines of liberalism. Pius IX was a cordial, generous, magnanimous person who did not hesitate to introduce a series of progressive reforms in the papal states immediately he was elected — political amnesty, improvements in public administration, and even a constitution and a government with a civil prime minister. These reforms made the pope enormously popular. He was everywhere acclaimed and the neo-Guelphs, such as Gioberti or D’Azeglio (Catholic nationalist liberals), even thought under his aegis to achieve that Italian unity sought by the Risorgimento.

3. But as might have been foreseen, it soon became clear that this was a mistake. Pius IX — an Italian at heart — refused to head up a national league to fight a ‘holy war’ against the Austrians who controlled the north of the peninsula. As quickly as he had acquired it, the pope lost his popularity and soon became the subject of abuse. In November 1848, Pellegrino Rossi, the prime minister of the papal states, was stabbed to death at the door of parliament by the zealots of Young Italy. In February 1849 Mazzini proclaimed the Roman republic and the pope had to flee in disguise to Gaeta, a military stronghold in the neighboring kingdom of Naples. When he returned to Rome, in April 1850, under the protection of French troops, he carried deep impressions of his bitter experiences. From then on, he saw liberalism as a movement which he had a sacred duty to oppose, because the ideal it pursued was not Christian — and because in Italy it was trying to wrest the papal states from the Holy See.

4. The defense of the temporal power of the popes lasted twenty years — from 1850 to 1870. Bit by bit pieces of the papal states fell to the Piedmontese kingdom, soon to be the kingdom of Italy. In 1870, the start of the Franco-Prussian War meant that the French garrison at Rome had to be withdrawn; the city was then taken by the soldiers of Victor Emmanuel II, who made it the capital of the new Italy. Meanwhile, the pope withdrew into the Vatican, as a voluntary prisoner, rejecting the Law of Guarantees which he was offered, and the ‘Roman question’ began, which took sixty years to solve.

5. Perhaps it is difficult for many people nowadays, in view of the present position of the pope in the world, to understand why Pius IX put so much effort into trying to hold on to his temporal power. But history does not yield up the truth unless it is seen through the eyes of the people who actually made it. Pius IX defended his rights to the very end because these rights were a precious legacy he had received from his predecessors in the papacy. And, what was more, because those states, which had existed for over one thousand years, were regarded at the time as an essential guarantee of the independence of the popes in the government of the universal Church.

6. The Church’s position on the principles of liberalism was spelt out by Pius IX in his encyclical Quanta cura (8 December 1864). This encyclical carried, as an appendix, a ‘syllabus’, a list of eighty propositions summing up ‘modern errors’, each of which was the subject of an express condemnation. The document did not contain anything substantially new, for all the errors had been condemned in earlier texts of the magisterium. What was new was the form and the uncompromising accent these propositions seemed to contain now that they were taken and put side by side, now that it was all being spelt out in one document. The ‘syllabus’ anathematized the absolute autonomy of reason, religious naturalism, indifferentism, materialism, attacks on the family, the defense of divorce, etc. The last proposition in the document, which rejected what some people claimed was the pope’s duty to come to terms with progress and ‘modern civilization’, made liberal critics really tear their garments — and went down very well with traditionalist Catholics.

7. Leaving aside the political upheavals of the time, Pius IX’s pontificate was one of great vitality in the life of the Church. The old religious orders — like the Benedictines of Dom Guéranger; the Dominicans, invigorated by Lacordaire, and the Jesuits, restored by Pius VII — grew and spread quite considerably; and new religious congregations arose, one of the more important of which was the Salesians, of Don Bosco. The clergy generally improved — more vocations and a higher level of observance (also to be seen in a return to a generalized use of ecclesiastical dress). For these secular clergy, the Cure d’Ars, St Jean Marie Vianney, was an example of heroic sanctity in the person of a humble country parish priest. The ordinary faithful, similarly, became actively involved in new apostolic and social welfare initiatives, among the most outstanding of which were the Conferences of St Vincent de Paul, created by Frederic Ozanam.

8. At the very same time as the waves of anti-religion were lashing the Church, a powerful spiritual impulse was animating nineteenth-century Christianity. In the heart of Anglicanism it produced the Oxford movement, which led the finest spirits, eagerly searching for Christian authenticity, to their genuine roots, that is, to the gates of the Church. Some went no further; but others took the decisive step and crossed the threshold of the Church: John Henry Newman was received into the Church (1845), and both he and his fellow Anglican Manning — later on in their lives — were made cardinals. Two other factors which point up the deep religious dimension of Pius IX’s pontificate are the definition of the dogma of the immaculate conception (8 December 1854), followed four years later by appearances of the Blessed Virgin at Lourdes, and the holding of the first Vatican council (1869-70). This council, despite its short life (due to political events), approved two very important resolutions: the dogma of papal infallibility, and the constitution Dei Filius, which formulated the teaching of the Church on the central religious question of the nineteenth century —the problem of the relationship between faith and reason.

9. When it comes to assessing the era of Pius IX, an observer who focuses only on temporal aspects and on political events must surely decide that the Church came out losing: the pope lost the papal states, the catholic cantons of Switzerland lost out to the Protestants in the Sonderbund war (1847) and the last years of Pius IX were overshadowed by anti-clerical violence and the attacks of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf against the German Catholics. Yet, if one looks at it with supernatural outlook, Pius IX’s reign was a very positive one for Christianity and the Church, and it opened the way to the modern papacy. A very important development was the entirely new phenomenon of pope and people of God coming together — something made possible by the development of communications (railways, steamships) which made it much easier for Catholics to make the journey to Rome. Thanks to this and to the speed of communication by telegraph, the pope ceased to be someone remote and distant: he became accessible, and even his misfortunes endeared him to the faithful. It has been said, with good reason, that Pius IX was the first ‘loved’ pope in modern history. For the first time Catholics looked to and loved the pope as a father, and his lithograph presided, like a family portrait, over catholic homes around the world.

                                                                            31

                                                Christianity in a New Kind of Society

The nineteenth century also witnessed big changes in society. The rise of capitalism, the industrial revolution and the creation of the urban proletariat created a ‘social problem’, which had never before existed. Anti-Christian ideologies, like Marxism and anarchism, proposed new models for society and exercised a strong influence on workers’ movements. Pope Leo XIII proposed a Christian program for the new world of work.

1. Nineteenth-century liberalism had a political ideology and an economic doctrine. But it had no social conscience, no sense of social responsibility: yet the ‘social question’ was an obvious fact and one of the new phenomena of the period. The industrial revolution had led to the creation of a new working class — a proletariat — concentrated in industrial areas of large cities. In the heyday of capitalism the conditions of the working class were deplorable: long working hours, low wages, child labor, bad living conditions were some of the many injustices which workers suffered.

2. Naturally, various different attempts were made to deal with the injustices of the social question. Anarchism, one of whose main authors was the Russian Mikhail Bakunin, proposed it be solved by violence — putting an end to the state and unjust social structures. Various socialist systems, thought up by Saint-Simon, Fourier, Proudhon and others, were soon eclipsed by the ‘scientific’ socialism of Karl Marx — Marxism —, whose ideological content we cannot discuss here. From the Christian point of view (which is what concerns us), we must remember that Marxism, based on historical materialism and the dialectic of the class struggle, showed itself to be opposed to all religions which it considered to be a cause of alienation (‘the opium of the people’), and Marxism was particularly hostile towards the catholic religion. Atheism or, rather, Marxist anti-theism has done much to de-Christianize the working classes — and even society as a whole — in many countries of the world.

3. The proletariat, living on the outskirts of the larger cities, often included a high proportion of immigrants from rural areas, who had drifted from the farms to work in the new industries. This meant that they left the towns and villages where their roots were and became part of the depersonalized mass of the new working class. This often had negative effects from the religious point of view. For centuries the rural population and the artisans in the cities had been part of the Church’s pastoral structures and the traditions of Christian society had imbued their lives. But in the industrial suburbs where the new proletariat was crowded on top of itself, things were quite different. The industrial workers felt the impact of Marxist and anarchist doctrines which used them as the vanguard of the revolutionary struggle and in some countries filled them with hostility towards the Church and Christianity.

4. Even from early on in the nineteenth century, some Catholics, concerned about the social question, made various efforts to assuage its effects through charitable and welfare activities. But, in general, Christians were slow to take the problem to heart. It was in some non-Latin countries, less affected by anti-clericalism, that we find the Church getting actively involved in the world of work. Thus, in the United States and in Britain, where there were large numbers of Catholics in the working-class population, the roots of trade unionism were not Marxist but Christian, if anything. It is significant, for example, that Cardinal Manning helped resolve the London dock strike of 1889. In 1864, Von Ketteler, the bishop of Mainz, was already pressing the urgent need ‘to solve the great problem of our time, the social question.’

5. A large amount of documentation on the social question was assembled by the first Vatican council but the abrupt end of the council prevented it from dealing with this matter. Some years later Pope Leo XIII did tackle it, in his encyclical Rerum novarum. The pope was well aware of the gravity of the problem and of the need for effective action by Christians. Trade unions were the best way of going about the protection of workers’ rights. In 1889, Leo had written to Cardinal Manning: ‘Oppose socialist associations with popular Christian ones. . . Leave the sacristies, go out to the people’. Two years later (15 May 1891) he published his famous encyclical, which rejected on principle the dialectic of class struggle and asked owners and workers to work together in harmony to develop a new society. The pope proclaimed the social responsibility attaching to property, and the just wage, and appealed to the state to stop being a mere spectator (that was the state’s role, as preached by liberalism) and to take control of economic relationships, without going as far as the socialist planned economy. Rerum novarum concluded by calling for the creation of Christian-inspired trade unions. Leo XIII’s pontificate marks the beginning of social Catholicism, within which it would soon be possible to identify a corporativist tendency and a (more politicized) progressive democratic tendency.

6. Leo XIII held to Pius IX’s non expedit policy which forbade Italian Catholics to have any involvement in political life. But in other countries the pope tried to shed out, defensive positions and pursue an intelligent diplomatic policy — which increased the Holy See’s prestige and meant that many old casus belli became forgotten. Thus in Germany, for example, the empire called off its Kulturkampf and even submitted to the Holy See’s arbitration in its dispute with Spain over the Caroline and Marshall Islands. But it was in French papal relations that Leo’s directive led to important changes in policy.

7. After the fall of the second empire, an attempt to restore the Bourbons failed; gradually, the Third Republic stabilized, under the control of a republican party which dominated political life from 1877 onwards. French republicanism was deeply hostile to the Church: ‘Clericalism, that is the enemy was Gambetta’s war-cry. French republicans, very influenced by the ideology of the Education League, had as prime objectives the fight against religious congregations and the establishment of the ‘lay’ schools (which came in 1882) by Jules Ferry, minister for public education, who on some occasion called his ministry ‘the ministry of souls’. The French Catholics were almost all of them monarchists, and this republican sectarianism only served to increase their opposition to a regime which they regarded as an enemy of the Church. Leo XIII stepped in to try to solve this problem threatening religious life in France.

8. Leo first encouraged Catholics to take part in public life. In his encyclical Immortale Dei (1 November 1885) he had shown the Church’s readiness to be on good terms with any system of government, including republican democratic government. Applying these directives, Leo invited French Catholics to cooperate with the Republic: this was the policy of ralliement, announced in a famous toast given by Cardinal Lavigerie in Algeria in 1890. In Spain, also, the integration of Pidal’s Catholic Union into the political system there was at one with what Leo XIII was saying about Catholics taking part in political life.

9. The beginning of the twentieth century coincided with the end of Leo XIII’s pontificate, which had lasted so long that it too could be considered as another whole chapter in church history. The elderly pope had gained the respect of the whole world, even though in some quarters, such as France, his efforts at conciliation obtained little response. His encyclicals constituted an important body of church teaching; and his solemn restoration of Thomistic philosophy had a particularly valuable effect of the renewal of Christian thought. But the presence of Catholics in politico-social life also had its risks; and inside the Church itself a new doctrinal crisis was incubating.

32

St Pius X and the Modernist Crisis

Arising by a whole series of factors — including irreligious philosophies, nineteenth-century scientism and liberal Protestantism — Modernism began to take shape in the Church. Some people expected Modernism to reconcile Catholicism and the modern mind and to bridge the so-called gap between faith and science; but in practice Modernism emptied the catholic faith of its supernatural content. Pius X decisively closed the door on modernism. He was a courageous pope who concerned himself above all with ‘the interests of God’ and energetically fostered Christian piety.

1. The first years of the twentieth century, up to the start of the first world war, will always be remembered as a brilliant and happy period in European history, which was brought to an end by the most useless and absurd of wars. But from the Christian point of view it was not at all without its problems — some due to the hostility of enemies outside; others originating within the Church itself, a Church ruled by the last pope to merit canonization, St Pius X (1903-14).

2. During those years, anti-clericalism was really making itself felt, especially in the Latin countries of Europe — all of which had Catholic majority populations. Portugal, after its proclamation of a republic (1910), expelled religious from the country, separated the Church from the state and confiscated the Church’s property. But France was the scene of the most violent attack on the Church.

3. Radical French governments flaunted their laicism, causing a confrontation with Pius X (aided by his faithful secretary of state Merry del Val). France broke off relations with the Holy See and abrogated its concordat (1905); religious lost the right to teach and many were expelled from the country. Church property was also confiscated which meant that the French church, for the second time in a century, was despoiled of its patrimony and deprived of the state help it had been receiving, since Napoleon’s time, in compensation for the previous confiscation. From now on priests and churches were dependent on contribution from church members and the Church’s title to ownership of church buildings was no stronger than the fact it occupied them.

4. But difficulties of this kind, which the Church and Catholics encountered in a number of European countries in the early years of the twentieth century were nothing in comparison with the doctrinal problems which arose inside the Church itself. Already, at the end of the nineteenth century, Leo XIII had denounced ‘Americanism’, which proposed that, in the light of Catholicism’s experience in the United States, the Church in Europe, to be more effective, should adapt itself to the new times and give greater importance to the natural virtues and the active life. But the great doctrinal crisis which hit the Church — it was probably the event of the Pius X period — was the modernist crisis.

5. Modernism in its origins may have stemmed from the desire of some Catholics to prevent what they saw as the Church’s backwardness in the area of historical studies, philosophy and biblical exegesis. Modernism, which was much influenced by liberal Protestantism, tried to rationalize the Christian faith, in order to make it acceptable to the modern mind, freeing it of its deadweight of dogma and even of all supernatural content. The modernists did not try to leave the Church; they wanted to reform it from within, and the positions they took up contained a deliberate ambiguity — in keeping with Tyrrell’s saying that Christ had not left men a doctrine but a spirit. Modernism’s philosophy was immanentism, which erected ‘religious consciousness’ as the supreme norm of Christian life. The modernists even designed their own model of a saint, which Fogazzaro used as the hero of his novel The Saint.

6. Biblical exegesis, the favorite ground of the modernists, was cultivated by Alfred Loisy, the most outstanding figure in the movement. As if he were dealing with mere historical texts, Loisy applied to the sacred books the rules of rationalist criticism, not taking account of their being inspired books and not listening to the Church’s standing on interpretation of the Bible, repeated by Leo XIII in his encyclical Providentissimus Deus. Among the conclusions Loisy arrived at was that the kingdom which is constantly referred to in the gospel was in Christ’s mind a purely eschatological one and that the Church was an unforeseen consequence of the fact that the end of the times, which Jesus mistakenly thought imminent, failed to materialize, Therefore, Jesus Christ was not God nor was his resurrection an historical fact: it was the product of the enthusiasm of the first Christian community.