Notes from History of Catholicism by Jean-Pierre Moisset (chapter 9: The shock of modernity (mid-18th century — 1870).p. 394. The ritual of touching for scrofula after the coronation, still practiced, is losing its prestige. Symptomatically, the formula for the laying on of hands is changing. It used to be "the king touches you, God heals you"; it becomes "the king touches you, may God heal you." Another sign of the distancing from old certainties and the emergence of a new relationship to authority is found in the spread of contraceptive practices from the mid-18th century onward, again in France.
p 395. Certainly, the erosion of the model is dealt a fatal blow by the Enlightenment, which redefines religion as a freely given personal belief.
p 396. Humanity is on the path to progress thanks to the use of reason.
Locked into a strategy of opposition, the popes, and with them all intransigent Catholics, have banked on a hypothetical return to Christendom to close what appeared to them as a sinister historical parenthesis.
The most prominent representative of writers engaged in the battle of ideas against the Catholic religion is Voltaire (1764-1778). Judging Catholicism contrary to reason and nature, he wrote pamphlets, tales, and treatises that tirelessly reiterated his grievances. This crusader against "superstitions" attacked the Catholic Church in particular, but did not spare other religions.
p 397. In general, metaphysics displeases Voltaire, because in his eyes unprovable assertions only engender fanaticism.
This religion that he calls for is a natural, tolerant religion, in accordance with reason and excluding all revelation.
For Voltaire and most of the "philosophers", the religious question is a natural and tolerant religion, non-dogmatic, foundational to morality and citizenship.
Freemasonry, which originated in England in 1917, also plays a major role in spreading seism and religious tolerance.
At a time when the right to assemble and associate is not recognized, Freemasonry appears all the more as a subversive enterprise because its members are bound to secrecy.
In France, for example, the encyclicals of 1738 and 1751 urging Catholics to keep away from Freemasonry were not received because of Gallicanism.
p 401. Concealed behind the destiny of the pseudonym Justinus Febronius, he published in 1763 his resounding De staatu Eccleia et legitima romani pontifis , in which he argued 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 towards Roman authoritarianism widely disseminated in the German episcopate.
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 decreased.
A man of his time, the emperor was hostile to contemplative orders, which he considered superfluous.
p 404. Gallican parliamentarians and Jansenists are his long-standing adversaries.
p 406. The Bourbon courts urged Clement XIII to suppress the Jesuits, which he refused.
p 407. The civil tolerance granted to them, albeit reluctantly, is political and therefore precarious.
p 408. The nature of the events — unprecedented — is at issue; the identity of the country is equally at issue.
Ruled by a sacred king who has officially held the title of eldest son of the church since the 15th century due to the earlier conversion of Clovis than that of other "barbarian" kings, France is a symbol for the Catholic Church.
p 409. For the subjects promoted to citizens who had expressed themselves in grievance notebooks, it is especially necessary to review the material situation of the clerics.
"No one shall be disquieted on account of his opinions, even religious ones." (Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, Article 10). The situation of French Catholicism from February 1790 onwards: solemn vows were forbidden and contemplative religious orders were dissolved.
p. 410. The measure, which is reminiscent of an aspect of Josephism, is not the product of an anti-Catholicism that gained traction among the constituent assembly after a few months, but rather the culmination of a long-standing hostility to a way of life deemed useless and an incantation against individual liberty. After all, Louis XV had indeed suppressed the Jesuits and reduced the number of convents through the Commission of Regulars.
The Civil Constitution of the Clergy on July 12, 1770, was not the result of a desire to persecute the Catholic Church, but it was nevertheless at the origin of the religious fracture in France.
p. 411. Clearly, a year after the start of the Revolution, most of the members of the Constituent Assembly were not anti-Catholic and did not seek to establish any form of secularism. They promoted Gallicanism by building a national religion far removed from Rome and placed under the close control of the State, which also sought to secure funding for it during the gigantic civic ceremony held on July 14, 1790. Three hundred priests wearing the tricolor sashes were invited to take their places around the altar of the fatherland and participate in the celebration of an open-air Mass. A few weeks later, the king reluctantly promulgated the Civil Constitution of the Clergy.
p 412. He vehemently refuses to accept that Catholicism no longer has the status of dominant religion and denounces the unduly granted "unbridled freedom".
In this sense, the break between the Church and the revolution was accidental. Within a few weeks, the Legislative Assembly imposed a new oath, known as the Oath of Liberty and Equality, voted for the "absolute extinction of monastic life," and condemned to exile those priests who refused the oath. A hunt for suspects led many refractory priests to Parisian prisons, where approximately 300 of them were massacred between September 2nd and 5th, 1792, among at least 2,000 victims, in an outburst of violence.
p 413. The National Convention, which replaced the Legislative Assembly in September 1792, proclaimed the Republic and condemned the crowned king, Louis XVI, to death. The uprising in the Vendée in March 1793 brought tensions to a head.
Its retrospective starting point is the founding of the Republic in the aftermath of the abolition of the monarchy, namely September 22, 1792.
p 414. In reality, the revolutionary calendar is a purely ideological and inconvenient creation to which the French remain, for the most part, impervious.
A step forward was taken 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.
State deism then triumphed, while anti-Catholic repression reached its peak.
p 417. The French Revolution is clearly struggling to give birth to a true religious neutrality, something that the United States of America then achieved.
A provisional government proclaims the fall of temporal power and the Republic.
p. 418. The preamble to the text acknowledges 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 on the truth of Catholicism.
p 419. As for religious minorities, they too benefit from public recognition, with some mitigations concerning Judaism.
Napoleon Bonaparte allowed Catholicism to regain a foothold in French society, but without legal privileges.
If Napoleon tolerates and subsidizes the Daughters of Charity or the Lazarist missionaries, it is because the former relieve him of social missions and the latter are valuable auxiliaries of French influence overseas through their evangelizing work.
p 421. The formula "A free church in a free state" of the president of the Piedmontese council, Count Cavours (1810-1861), sums up 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 restored Catholicism to the status of "state religion".
Much to the dismay of liberal opinion, the Church's truth becomes the legal truth of France.
Despite this relative restraint, the regime was reviled by a segment of public opinion for its clericalism. Consequently, it dragged the Church down with it when it was swept away by the 1830 revolution.
p 425. Liberalism, the main modern peril for Catholicism, is advancing inexorably.
The status of religious faith itself is devalued by Kantian philosophy.
Emmanuel Kant (1724-1804) had come to separate two worlds: that of repairable and identifiable phenomena, which is the world of science and action; that of God, which remains the expression of a reason seeking to go beyond knowledge.
The conclusions of metaphysics and theology are now placed outside of what must be accepted as truth.
p 426. For Marx, the dignity of man consists in freeing himself from exploitation through collective ownership, whereby religious belief must die out of itself with the end of alienation.
p. 427. In 1870, human history was confined to the six millennia to which the Magisterium remained faithful—that is, the authority charged with teaching the content of the revolution, in this case the Pope and the bishops. Similarly, the progress made in medicine signaled the end of supernatural explanations for illnesses, often presented until then as divine punishments or the result of demonic influence.
p 428. In Germany, Canon Ignace Von Döllinger (1799-1890) was aware of the Catholic intellectual backwardness and the inadequacy of authoritarian responses.
From Munich, his teaching spread through publications translated into several languages, through his correspondence, through his students, helping to restore some luster to a distant Catholic science.
p 429. Zola: The Earth: What good was it to tremble and grovel, to buy forgiveness, since the idea of the Devil now made them laugh, and they had ceased to believe that the wind, the hail, the thunder, were in the hands of a vengeful master?
The feminization of Catholicism at work in the Beauce region did not escape Zola, a keen observer of the changes in French society.
p. 430. Little by little, socialist hope is gaining ground at the expense of Christian hope. The latter lament seeing this progress of what they call "human respect," that is to say, fear of sarcasm, which weighs particularly heavily on men.
The practice, however, is beginning to change in meaning. It is, so to speak, being born. It was taken for granted in a world where it was everywhere an age-old custom and a duty; over the course of the 19th century, it becomes a personal act that a growing portion of the male population chooses to no longer perform. A matter of mentality transforms into a matter of opinion, leading to the disengagement of some of those baptized.
Faced with the mounting challenges of the century, the Catholic Church did not remain inactive. It was first and foremost driven by a cultural movement that valued religious sentiment and medieval civilization, of which Catholicism was the cornerstone: Romanticism. In Germany, Romantic sensibility emerged at the very end of the 18th century as a reaction to the theories propagated by the French Revolution.
His conversion to Catholicism in 1805 was not an isolated event in Germany, but a sign of a generational attraction to a religion that appeared as a bulwark against individualism, rationalism and political or economic liberalism.
p 432. The Gothic cathedral crowns this admirable production. Its rediscovered beauty helps to restore the Middle Ages to honor, so despised in the 18th century.
Science has indeed become the new cultural glue, replacing religion. The clergy are ill-equipped to counter it.
p. 434. In the social sphere, the Catholic Church is more enterprising than in the field of research. In this era of great discretion on the part of the State towards the poor, the concrete work carried out by a multitude of congregations and charitable organizations brings relief to those in need.
p. 435. In the near-social wasteland of the time, the actions of these social Catholics, combined with those of Protestants, such as the French law of 1841 limiting child labor in factories, made progress. However, their efforts stemmed from a traditionalist and hierarchical inspiration that could not appeal to workers as much as the promises of socialism.
The Bishop of Mainz proposes a more comprehensive approach that addresses the root causes of poverty. Rejecting both liberalism and socialism, he advocates worker self-organization through consumer and production associations or cooperatives, as well as state intervention through labor legislation.
p 436. However, the essential point is the prevalence of a hierarchical way of thinking that justifies the inequalities of a social order "willed by God".
Another burden lies in the priority given to the fight against the expressions of modernity out of attachment to an old order where the church had a dominant social influence.
As the beginnings of industrialization and rapid urbanization transformed European societies, the clergy remained trapped in an outdated, overly self-assured worldview that prevented it from providing modern solutions to contemporary problems. Ultimately, the extensive network of Catholic congregations, charitable works, and associations devotedly alleviated the suffering of the poorest, but the institution failed to produce a discourse capable of rallying the working classes who yearned for social change.
For those who do not wish for revolution, but simply a progressive emancipation of individuals, the clergy appears to be an obstacle.
p 437. Abbé Félicité de Lammenais (1782-1854) provided liberal Catholicism with a program, with the newspaper L'Avenir: freedom of conscience; freedom of education; freedom of the press; freedom of association; extension of the principle of election; decentralization.
p 438. Faced with this accumulation of threats, Pius IX responded in 1864 with the encyclical Quanta cura, which was accompanied by the Syllabus as an appendix.
p. 439. On a global scale, Catholicism was once again flourishing after a series of obstacles in the second half of the 18th century and up until 1815: colonial difficulties faced by Catholic powers in relation to England and the Netherlands; the dissolution of the Society of Jesus; and the trials of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era. Around 1820, the priests under the jurisdiction of the Roman Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (Propagation Fide) numbered only slightly more than five hundred, but the missionary revival was beginning.
p. 440. The effective support provided by Gregory XVI during his pontificate (1831-1846) was also instrumental in the missionary renewal of the period. The Pope fought against Portuguese patronage in India and took two innovative initiatives that contrasted with his attachment to the legacy of the past in Europe. The first was the condemnation of the slave trade and the principle of racial inequality (but not of slavery itself). The second was the call to hand over the reins to an indigenous clergy, not confining them to subordinate tasks, but rather preparing them for the episcopate.
p. 441. For example, the teaching congregation founded in 1816 by Father Colin under the name of the Society of Mary was directed by Gregory XVI in 1836 towards mission work in the western Pacific. Marists thus moved away from their original area of operation to bring the Gospel to an Oceanic region that had not received it before the beginning of the 19th century, further expanding the Catholic sphere of influence.
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, starting in 1814.
p 442. This renewal is not without difficulty, as the heirs of the Enlightenment are wary of "the monastic order";
p. 445. The penitent of a clergyman who is a devotee of the liquor merchant no longer has to divulge his intimate secrets and appear a second time, or even several times, to finally receive the absolution delayed until then in order to lead him to a genuine conversation. It is better to facilitate his participation in the sacraments, which are not a reward, rather than to terrorize him.
p 446. By proclaiming the dogma of the Immaculate Conception in 1854, the Pope gave a new dimension to the age-old conviction that the mother of Jesus was conceived without sin.
p 448. The Vatican crowns this ecclesiological evolution known as ultramontanism.
The dogma of infallibility stems from the conviction that, in certain circumstances, the Church cannot err when seeking to clarify its faith. While its principle is commonly accepted by Christians, its scope is viewed very differently. In the definition of the Council Fathers of 1870, it is restricted to theological questions addressed by the Pope ex cathedra, from the highest office, that is, according to a solemn procedure. Fundamentally, political and social stances cannot be taken as the basis for this new dogma, and the vast majority of papal pronouncements cannot be considered beyond error.
p. 449. Trapped in a strategy of opposition, the popes, and with them all intransigent Catholics, have placed a sinister historical parenthesis on any hypothetical return to Christendom. This flight backward has disconnected Catholicism from the emancipatory forces of the century.
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Notes from History of Catholicism by Jean-Pierre Moisset (chapter 9: The shock of modernity (mid-18th century — 1870).
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