Notes from Histoire du catholicisme by Jean-Pierre Moisset (chapter 9: The shock of modernity (mid-18th century — 1870).p 394. The ritual of touching the scrofula at the end of the coronation, still practiced, is losing its credibility. Symptomatically, the formula for imposition, the formula for laying on of hands is changing. She was “the king touches you, God heals you”; it becomes “the king touches you, God heals you”. Another sign of the distancing of old certainties and the emergence of a new relationship with authority is found in the spread of contraceptive practices from the middle of the 18th century, still in France.
p 395. Admittedly, the erosion of the model is the enlightenment that dealt it a fatal blow by redefining religion as a freely consented personal belief.
p 396. Humanity is on the way to progress through the use of reason.
Locked in a strategy of opposition, the popes, and with them all the intransigent Catholics, bet on a hypothetical return to Christianity to close what appeared to them as a sinister historical parenthesis.
The most eminent representative of the writers launched into the battle of ideas against the Catholic religion is Voltaire (1964-1778). Judging Catholicism contrary to reason and nature, he wrote pamphlets, tales, treatises, which tirelessly repeated his grievances. The destroyer of "superstitions" attacks the Catholic Church in particular, but does not spare other religions.
p 397. In a general way, metaphysics displeases Voltaire, because the undemonstrable affirmations only engender in his eyes fanaticism.
This religion which he calls for is a natural religion, tolerant, in conformity with reason and excluding all revelation.
For Voltaire and most "philosophers", the religious question is a natural and tolerant, non-dogmatic religion, the founder of morality and citizenship.
Freemasonry, born in England in 1917, which also plays a big role in spreading the earthquake and religious tolerance.
At a time when the right to meet and associate was not recognized, Masonry appeared all the more like a subversive enterprise in that its members were bound to secrecy.
In France, for example, the encyclicals of 1738 and 1751 enjoining Catholics to keep away from Freemasonry were not received because of Gallicanism.
p 401. Concealed behind fate the pseudonym of Justinus Febronius, in 1763 he published his resounding De staatu Eccleia et legitima romani pontifis , in which he came out in favor of a double lowering of the power of the pope.
His success can be explained by the encounter he made with a feeling of hostility to Roman authoritarianism that was widely diffused in the German episcopate.
The papal bulls and encyclicals are subject to the placet (in Latin “it pleases”) of the state; the prerogatives of foreign superiors over Austrian convents have been reduced.
A man of his time, the emperor was hostile to contemplative orders which he deemed superfluous.
p 404. The Gallican parliamentarians and the Jansenists are his longstanding adversaries.
p 406. The Bourbon courts urged Clement XIII to abolish the Jesuits, which he refused.
p 407. The civil tolerance granted to them, reluctantly, is political and therefore precarious.
p 408. The nature of the events—unheard of—is in question; the identity of the country is just as important.
Led by a sacred king who officially bears since the 15th century the title of eldest son of the church because of the anteriority of the conversion of Clovis over that of the other "barbarian" kings, France is a symbol for the Church. Catholic.
p 409. For the subjects promoted citizens who had expressed themselves in notebooks of grievances, it is above all necessary to revise the material situation of the clerics.
“No one should be worried about their opinions, even religious ones. (Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Article 10). The situation of French Catholicism from February 1790: solemn vows are prohibited and contemplative religious orders are dissolved.
p 410. The measure, which is reminiscent of an aspect of Josephism, is not the product of an anti-Catholicism which would have gained constituents after a few months, but rather the culmination of a long hostility to a way of life deemed useless and incantatory to individual freedom. After all, Louis XV had indeed suppressed the Jesuits and had the number of convents reduced by the Commission of Regulars.
The civil constitution of the clergy on July 12, 1770 is not the fruit of a desire to persecute the Catholic Church either, but it is nevertheless at the origin of the religious fracture of France.
p 411. Obviously, a year after the start of the Revolution, most constituents are not anti-Catholic and do not seek to establish any secularism. They made Gallicanism triumph by building a national religion far removed from Rome and placed under close control of the State which also had to be provided with money during this gigantic civic ceremony which was held on July 14, 1790, three hundred priests wearing the tricolor sash are invited to take their places around the altar of the homeland and to take part in the celebration of an open-air mass. A few weeks later, the king reluctantly promulgates the civil constitution of the clergy.
p 412. He vehemently denies that Catholicism no longer has the status of dominant religion and denounces the unduly conceded “unbridled freedom”.
In this sense, the break between the Church and the revolution is accidental. In a few weeks, the Legislative Assembly imposed a new oath called Freedom - Equality voted the "absolute extinction of monastic life", and condemned to exile the priests who refused the oath. A hunt for suspects led many refractory priests to Parisian prisons where about 300 of them were massacred from September 2 to 5, 1792, among at least 2,000 victims, in an outburst of violence.
p 413. The national convention which replaces the Legislative in September 1792 proclaims the Republic and condemns to death the crowned king, Louis XVI. The Vendée uprising in March 1793 brought tensions to a head.
Its retrospective starting point is the founding of the Republic the day after the abolition of royalty, on September 22, 1792.
p 414. In reality, the revolutionary calendar is a purely ideological and inconvenient creation to which the French for the most part remain impervious.
A level is crossed in this direction with revolutionary cults such as that given to the goddess Reason at Notre-Dame de Paris and in other churches transformed for the occasion into temples of reason.
A state deism then triumphs, while anti-Catholic repression reaches its apogee.
p 417. The French Revolution is definitely struggling to give birth to true religious neutrality, which the United States of America then achieved.
A provisional government proclaims the forfeiture of temporal power and the Republic.
p 418. The preamble of the text recognizes that “the Catholic, apostolic and Roman religion is the religion of the vast majority of French citizens”. This is a sociological observation: the state does not pronounce itself on the truth of Catholicism.
p 419. As for religious minorities, they also benefit from public recognition, with some attenuations concerning Judaism.
Napoleon Bonaparte allows Catholicism to regain a foothold in French society, but without legal privileges.
If Napoleon tolerated and subsidized the Daughters of Charity or the Lazarist missionaries, it was because some relieved him of social missions and others were precious auxiliaries of French influence overseas through their work of evangelization.
p 421. The formula "A free church in a free state" of the president of the Piedmontese council, the count of Cavours (1810-1861), summarizes the ambition to build a society clearly distinguishing the civil from the religious but not undermining the autonomy of the Catholic Church.
In France, article 6 of the Constitutional Charter of 1814 granted by Louis XVIII restores to Catholicism the status of “state religion”.
To the great displeasure of liberal opinion, the truth of the Church becomes the legal truth of France.
Despite this relative restraint, the regime is reviled by a section of public opinion for its clericalism. So he dragged the Church down with him when he was swept away by the revolution of 1830.
p 425. Liberalism, the main modern danger for Catholicism, is advancing inexorably.
The status of religious faith itself is devalued by Kantian philosophy.
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) came to separate two worlds: that of reparable and identifiable phenomena which is the world of science and action; that of God who remains the expression of a reason seeking to go beyond knowledge.
The conclusions of metaphysics and theology are henceforth placed outside of what must be received as truth.
p 426. The dignity of man consists for Marx in freeing oneself from exploitation by collective property, whereby religious belief must extinguish itself with the end of alienation.
p 427. In 1870, human history is very cramped in the six millennia to which the Magisterium remains faithful, that is to say the authority responsible for teaching the content of the revolution, in the occurrence the pope and the bishops. Likewise, the progress made by medicine marked the end of supernatural explanations of diseases, often presented until then as divine punishments or as the result of demonic influence.
p 428. In Germany, Canon Ignace Von Döllinger (1799-1890) is aware of Catholic intellectual backwardness and the insufficiency of authoritarian responses.
From Munich, his teaching was disseminated by publications translated into several languages, by his correspondence, by his students, making it possible to restore a little luster to a distanced Catholic science.
p 429. Zola: The Earth: What was the use of shaking and flattening oneself, buying forgiveness, since the idea of the Devil now made them laugh, and they had stopped believing in the wind, the hail, the thunder, the hands of a vengeful master?
The feminization of Catholicism at work in the Beauce did not escape Zola, a keen observer of changes in French society.
p 430. Little by little, socialist hope is gaining ground to the detriment of Christian hope. The latter lament to see thus progress what they call the (human respect) ie the fear on sarcasm, which weighs in particular on the men.
However, the practice is beginning to change direction. So to speak, it is being born. It went without saying in a world where it was everywhere an ancestral habit and a duty; over the course of the 19th century, it became a personal act that a growing part of the male population chose not to perform. The fact of mentality turns into fact of opinion, leading to the dropout of some of the baptized.
Faced with the accumulation of the challenges of the century, the Catholic Church does not remain inert. It is first carried by a cultural movement which promotes religious feeling and medieval civilization of which Catholicism was the cement: romanticism. In Germany, the romantic sensibility appeared at the very end of the 18th century in reaction to the theories conveyed by the French Revolution.
His conversion to Catholicism in 1805 is not an isolated fact in Germany, but the sign of a generational attraction for a religion which appears as a bulwark against individualism, rationalism and liberalism, political or economic.
p 432. The Gothic cathedral crowns this admirable production. Its rediscovered beauty helps to restore the honor of the Middle Ages, so despised in the 18th century.
Science is indeed the new cultural cement, instead of religion. To counter it, the ecclesiastics are ill-equipped.
p 434. On the social ground, the Catholic Church is more enterprising than on that of research. In this time of very great discretion of the State towards the miserable, the concrete work carried out by a multitude of congregations and charitable works brings relief to the needy.
p 435. In the quasi-social desert of the time, the action of these social Catholics, combined with that of Protestants such as the French law of 1841 limiting child labor in factories. However, their efforts stem from a traditionalist and hierarchical inspiration which cannot seduce the workers as much as the promises of socialism.
The Bishop of Mainz offers a more global treatment attacking the causes of poverty. Challenging both liberalism and socialism, he advocated worker self-organization in consumer and production associations or cooperatives, as well as state intervention through labor legislation.
p 436. However, what is essential is the significance of a hierarchical thought justifying the inequalities of a social order “willed by God”.
Another weight lies in the priority given to the fight against the expressions of the priority given to the fight against the expressions of modernity by attachment to an ancient order where the church had a dominant social influence.
While the beginnings of industrialization and accelerated urbanization transformed European societies, the clergy remained prisoner of a vision of the backward world, excessively sure of itself, which prevented it from giving a modern answer to the problems of time. In the end, the rich network of congregations, works and Catholic associations devotedly alleviates the misery of the poorest, but the institution does not produce a discourse capable of rallying the working populations who aspire to social change.
To minds who do not wish for a revolution, but simply for a progressive emancipation of individuals, the clergy seems an obstacle.
p 437. Father Félicité de Lammenais (1782-1854) provided liberal Catholicism with a program, with the newspaper L'Avenir: freedom of conscience; academic freedom; freedom of the press ; freedom of association; extension of the principle of election; decentralization.
p 438. Faced with this accumulation of threats, Pius IX responds in 1864 with the encyclical Quanta cura which accompanies the Syllabus as an appendix.
p 439. On a global scale, Catholicism is once again booming after an accumulation of obstacles in the second 18th century and until 1815: colonial difficulties of the Catholic powers in the face of England and the Netherlands; dissolution of the Society of Jesus; revolutionary and imperial trials. Around 1820, the priests belonging to the Roman congregation for the Propagation of the (propagation fide) are only a little more than five hundred, but the missionary revival begins.
p 440. The effective support provided by Gregory XVI during his pontificate (1831-1846) is also not unrelated to the missionary renewal of the period. The pope fights against the Portuguese employers in India and takes two innovative initiatives which contrast with his attachment to the heritage of the past in Europe. The first is the condemnation of the slave trade and of the principle of racial inequality (but not of slavery). The second is the invitation to pass the baton to a native clergy without confining them to subordinate tasks, but on the contrary by preparing them for the exercise of the episcopate.
p 441. For example, the teaching congregation founded in 1816 by Father Colin under the name of the Society of Mary was oriented by Gregory XVI in 1836 towards the mission in the Western Pacific. Marists thus move away from their original territory of action to bring the Gospel to an Oceanian space which had not received it before the beginning of the 19th century, extending the Catholic area a little further.
Several of them, like the theologian John Henry Newman (1801-1890), returned to the Roman fold.
Reconstitution of the Society of Jesus, by Pius VII, from 1814.
p 442. This revival is not without difficulty, as the heirs of the Enlightenment are wary of the “monastic order”;
p 445. The penitent of an ecclesiastic follower of the liquorist no longer has to reveal his intimate secrets and present himself a second time, or even several times, to finally receive the absolution deferred until then in order to bring him to a real conversation. It is advisable to facilitate his frequentation of the sacraments, which are not a reward, rather than to terrorize him.
p 446. By the proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception in 1854, the Pope gives a new dimension to the millennial conviction according to which the mother of Jesus was conceived without sin.
p 448. Vatican crowns this ecclesiological evolution designated under the name of ultramontanism.
The dogma of infallibility stems from the belief that in certain circumstances the Church cannot err when seeking to clarify its faith. If its principle is commonly accepted by Christians, its field of application is very diversely appreciated. In the definition of the council fathers of 1870, it is restricted to theological questions dealt with by the pope ex cathedra, from the top of the clear, ie according to a solemn procedure and. In substance, therefore, political and social positions cannot be taken from the new dogma, the vast majority of the various papal declarations cannot be considered as not subject to error.
p 449. Locked in a strategy of opposition, the popes, and with them all the intransigent Catholics, have put on a hypothetical return to Christianity a sinister historical parenthesis. This backward flight disconnected Catholicism from the forces of emancipation of the century.
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Notes from Histoire du catholicisme by Jean-Pierre Moisset (chapter 9: The shock of modernity (mid-18th century — 1870).