The epochal span of the Catholic Church is a phenomenon of considerable significance for historians and political philosophers alike. For Machiavelli, the enigma of the Papal court’s spiritual authority prompted some scathing remarks in The Prince. 

These alone have states, and do not defend them; they have subjects, and do not govern them; and the states, though undefended, are not taken from them; the subjects, though ungoverned, do not care, and they neither think of becoming estranged from such princes nor can they. Thus, only these principalities are secure and happy. But as they subsist by superior causes, to which the human mind does not reach, I will omit speaking of them; for since they are exalted and maintained by God, it would be the office of a presumptuous and foolhardy man to discourse on them.¹

Though a tangent, the comment nicely captures something of the papacy’s singularity in a Renaissance world of centralizing kingdoms and faltering city-states. No doubt the Church has been a sui generis institution from as far back as the breakup of the Roman Empire in the West, but its current constitution emerged over the 19th century when it lost most of its former privileges and dignities and was compelled to fight for its very existence. A drawn out, contentious separation of Church and State subjected the Catholic hierarchy in many countries to a restless public opinion swayed by electoral parties and social movements. On this volatile terrain the Church stood out as a highly anomalous political form. Contemporaries struggled to categorize this Complexio Oppositorum within a schema that over centuries had dissolved Christendom into a multiplicity of enclosed sovereign communities and each of the latter into distinct public and private spheres. In the era of the railroad, parliament, and national unifications, the Roman Church took shape as a unique polity whose international and domestic status was intrinsically controversial. 

This saga of separation begins, of course, with the Protestant Reformation and the consolidation of Absolute monarchies, each proclaiming cuius regio, eius religio. Outright collapse had been averted by a militant Counter-Reformation securing the worldly power of the Church within the new half-secular Westphalian inter-state order that had emerged out of the break up of Christendom. But an even greater and more radical threat to Rome came with the revolutionary destruction of this early modern unity of throne and altar. This development triggered far-reaching doctrinal and organizational counter-offensives that bear comparison to the innovations of the Council of Trent. This was Catholicism’s second age of reaction, and it unfolded in two phases together forming a distinct historical period. The first began in mortal opposition to the French Revolution and continued in defiance of its legacy for a century and a half, while the second sought to redress the excesses of this reactionary era albeit with far less unity of purpose. A well-known watershed marks the passage from the first to second era of modern Catholic history.

The hinge point in how Catholics got from the French Revolution to the current moment is the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), one of the most important events of the twentieth century.²

Catholicism: A Global History from the French Revolution to Pope Francis is a sweeping overview of these strategic changes of course from a liberal though usually impartial point of view. In the final chapters of this saga, Professor John T. McGreevy reflects on the crises that have wracked the Church after Vatican II over the reigns of John Paul II, Benedict XVI and the current occupant of the throne of St. Peter. It concludes with a sober account of a Church in the grip of spiritual and material decline whose aspect brightens in expectation of the demographic expansion of Catholic Africa: ex Africa lux. 

What historians call the Ultramontane Revival began as a revolt against the French Revolution and then battled with the many modern ideological movements this great rebellion inspired: nationalism, liberalism, democracy, socialism and feminism. For centuries the term “ultramontane” had been a pejorative label for Catholics outside of Italy who embraced the ecclesiastical primacy of Rome, the city “beyond the mountains,” but it came to assume a specifically counter-revolutionary significance over the century and a half stretching from the turn of the nineteenth century to the midpoint of the twentieth. 

The establishment of a new revolutionary constitution subjecting the French clergy to the absolute jurisdiction of the secular state was the opening salvo of a longer war. Both bishops and humble parish priests were made to swear an oath of fidelity to the new order dividing those who did from those who refused within an escalating, eventually European-wide war of new against old regimes. In response Roman pontiffs beginning with Pius VI swept away traditions of consultation with heads of state over the election of bishops and with ecclesiastical councils over matters of dogma and church government. At the time the outcome of this incipient counteroffensive seemed far from certain. When Pius VI died in 1799 in Valence as a captive of Napoleon many thought he would be the last Pope. 

Anyone predicting the future of Catholicism in 1789 might have forecast a group of national Catholic churches, loosely linked to the papacy but fundamentally tied to local monarchs and even republican governments.

In the aftermath of the emperor’s defeat, his successor Pius VII with the aid of the newly restored Jesuit order prepared for a long war on the emerging terrain of nineteenth century industrial and parliamentary civilization. 

Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the organizational and symbolic reach of the papacy expanded. Papal bureaucrats built vigorous offices for doctrine, canon law, and missionary work, and a diplomatic corps staffed by ambassadors, or nuncios, fanned out across the globe. As recently as the eighteenth century, bishops rarely (if ever) visited Rome. Ordinary Catholics might not know the pope’s name. A pope would have never convened an ecumenical council of bishops from around the world without the approval of monarchs and nobles. And yet at the First Vatican Council in Rome in 1869, Pius IX did just that. Fifty years later a new code of canon law assigned to the pope “the most complete and supreme jurisdiction over the universal Church. 

The truculent spirit of this whole enterprise of renewal under fire comes across in Joseph De Maistre’s legendary syllogism from 1819: “There can be no European religion without Christianity, there can be no Catholicism without the pope; there can be no pope without the sovereignty that belongs to him.” An echo of even more imperious claims from the thirteenth century can be heard here though that was a time when the Bishop of Rome stood incomparably higher in the temporal realm. But even in its far reduced state the new Papal absolutism would turn a once less centralized Church—enervated by a century of Enlightenment—into a pillar of what remained of the European Old Regime. As a disciplined army, the Church hoped to see off the main threats to its spiritual raison d’être as well to itsbailiwicks: the secularization of education and welfare provision, the progress of science, mass conscription and a volatile electoral politics tempting the faithful with a menu of warring ideological alternatives with middle-class anti-clericals— “freemasons” —and socialist workers standing out as the main dangers. 

Doctrinally, one Holy Father after another would rail at an insolent age in pronouncements that shocked and delighted contemporaries. 

Exercising papal authority in unprecedented ways became routine. In 1854, Pius IX declared Mary’s conception immaculate, or without sin, with minimal episcopal consultation. The idea had long been popular among ordinary Catholics and particular religious orders, such as the Franciscans. But it lacked a scriptural pedigree and widened the already yawning gap between Catholics and Protestants…In 1864, the pope issued the encyclical Quanta Cura, with its notorious appendix, The Syllabus of Errors…its final proposition famously rejected the idea that “the Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization’”

Despite the many successes of this Catholic counteroffensive, the Papal State itself would ignominiously collapse after a thousand years of existence. What Thomas Hobbes had scathingly described as “the Ghost of the deceased Romane Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof”³ now retreated into the Apostolic Palace of Vatican City from where the Vicars of Christ would hurl down the sort of thunderbolts that remained to them. In reaction to the annexation of his state into the new Kingdom of Italy, a defiant Pius IX affirmed the controversial dogma of papal infallibility and refused to recognize the new national state. The sale of the Immaculate Conception, the last vessel of the remnant papal navy, by his successor Pope Leo XIII was a poignant sign of the Holy See’s bitter, grudging adaptation to new circumstances. But neither its demise as a sovereign Italian polity nor subsequent bouts of persecution under the German Reich and the French Third Republic broke the Church’s esprit de corps and indeed such episodes galvanized it to win back a significant role for itself in the domestic politics as well as the cultural life of these Great Powers. 

Coloring the atmosphere of this century and a half, from the early Romantic era a proudly anti-modern Church would inspire a number of vogues for Catholic spirituality and hierarchy among writers and artists pained by the soullessness of the modern age. “One cannot enter a Gothic Cathedral,” Chateaubriand had sighed, “without feeling a kind of shiver of awe and a vague sentiment of the Divinity.” Thirty years later, Augustus Pugin, the most influential English architect of the nineteenth century and a Catholic convert, began designing dozens of new Gothic churches. But however welcome such inroads into the higher cultural spheres, they were of secondary significance in comparison to the immense, sustained upswing of popular Catholic religiosity, for this is what saved the Church amid all its travails. 

WHEN THE ENGLISH WRITER Frances Trollope toured Belgium in the early 1830s, she termed its people “deeply and severely Catholic.” To her amusement, she reported much talk of relics and miracles, and she included a disapproving description of churches jammed with decorations and statues of the Virgin “tricked out in tawdry finery.” What fascinated Trollope was not, as she imagined, a retrograde Catholicism yet to be liberated from the Middle Ages. The Belgium she documented was then in the throes of the ultramontane revival.

The pious fervor on display here and later at Lourdes would astonish the world. The nineteenth century is typically portrayed as a time when material, scientific and constitutional progress “drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism.” This Whiggish view implicitly accepts the Marxist tenet that the evolution of the material base will cause accompanying movements in the spiritual superstructure. While that may be so, the era would often disappoint such progressive expectations.

“We often hear it said,” the English historian Thomas Macaulay glumly observed, “that the world is becoming more and more enlightened, and that this enlightening must be favourable to Protestantism and unfavourable to Catholicism. We wish that we could think so.”

No longer as securely supported by Old Regime rulers, the Church turned to its vast legions of humble believers. The voluntary donations of the faithful amassed in Peter’s Pence made up for much of what was lost in official subsidies, though in Catholic lands the Church continued to expect generous fiscal relief and favorable terms on its debts. The social depth of Catholic popular sentiment cries out in the five million signatures written in support of the Pope just defeated in his battle with the newly established Kingdom of Italy. One priest from a tiny village in rural Ireland reported parishioners asking him, “‘How is the Holy Father? Will they banish him?’ Twelve thousand soldiers from across the Catholic world enlisted as Zouaves, or soldiers, in the papal army. An Australian bishop said of his country’s Zouaves, ‘we talk our faith: they have wrought theirs.’”  

Globally speaking, one cause of this upsurge of lay piety was the scale of nineteenth century immigration from Europe to the New World, for as Germans, Irish, Italians and Poles poured into North and South America they tended to form those rough and vibrant ethnic communities many now recall nostalgically.

SIXTY MILLION EUROPEANS left the continent over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in one of the great migrations of modern history. The Catholic portion of the migration—probably over half—was led by immigrants from Ireland and Germany in the mid-nineteenth century and from Polish-speaking Europe, Spain, and Italy after 1870. Joseph R. Biden’s great-grandfather left the west of Ireland in 1850 and arrived in the United States at the outset of the migration, and Pope Francis’s grandparents left their home near Turin in the 1920s and arrived in Argentina at its conclusion.

Growing up Catholic in this country a half century ago, one was aware of how typical behavior in neighborhoods and schools conformed to familiar ethnic stereotypes. Back then the more eminent American clergy often spoke of “an Italian problem” though such problems of yesteryear can seem quaint today.   

Irish and German priests and bishops in the United States frequently described Italian Catholics as negligent because so many Italian men skipped Sunday Mass, even if they resolutely attended family baptisms or weddings. Clerical trade journals published articles on “the peculiar kind of spiritual condition” that favored street processions and festivals over the building of parochial grade schools.

This burgeoning of the flock was not limited to the heartlands of Europe and the Americas. In this era of European colonial empire building, Catholic missions, in stiff competition with the Protestants, made significant inroads into Asia and Africa compensating for setbacks closer to home and keeping alive in the hearts of the faithful a sense of militant apostolic purpose. Amid this expansion and diversification of the flock, the national makeup of the College of Cardinals began to change as this once nearly entirely Italian body slowly opened itself up to hierarchs from beyond the mountains and even from overseas.

Hostile commentators often portrayed a Catholicism still dreaming of the Middle Ages as not one but two religions: outright superstition for the humble and an entirely different, no less absurd creed of abstruse theological propositions for the learned. Despite McGreevy’s reluctance to accord too much weight to theology in the history of modern Catholicism, the Church’s promotion of neo-Thomism as its official teaching is seen as a fairly clear expression of its political outlook and predicament: bitterly opposed to the anti-clerical republicans and even more so to the socialist Left, it nonetheless regarded the moral and economic individualism of bourgeois society with suspicion. 

What was new about neo-Thomism? The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas had long been accorded prominence in Church teaching but with the encyclical Aeterni Patris (“Of the Eternal Father”) Leo XIII officially elevated it above all other texts of the tradition, with voluminous commentary informing a new Catholic discourse on contemporary social and political questions. The main ideas of the body of this work found expression in Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum (“On New Things”), the founding document of modern Catholic social thought. The attitude towards democracy is so cold that the word itself goes unmentioned though any outright condemnation was deemed imprudent given the rising stature of the American Church. But the encyclical of Leo XIII also denounced callous laissez-faire with a force that might surprise the contemporary reader. It began with an attack on the “misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class.” Of course, it denounced socialism and defended private property, but it also asserted that a “workman’s wages should be sufficient to enable him comfortably to support himself, his wife, and his children.”

Given generous institutional backing, the neo-Thomist movement soon became a world-wide philosophical enterprise. McGreevy notes that the Church’s standing in the world of modern university education nonetheless remained low with little progress made since the destruction of Catholic universities during the Napoleonic era. The exception was the United States where Catholics could partake in the general upswing of new college formation. Some of its isolation can be explained by its defensive intellectual posture. For the ultramontane Church all the false doctrines of the age had an underlying philosophical basis that it named Modernism. In the encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis (“Feeding the Lord’s Flock”) Pope Pius X defined it as agnosticism, immanentism and relativism—the “synthesis of all heresies.”⁴

While neo-Thomism would play an important role in shaping a Catholic alternative to the socialist workers movement, an ultramontane Church proved far less able to counter the challenge of modern nationalism. Despite its hostility to the revolutionary patriotism of the 19th century, Catholic hierarchy eventually came around to supporting more conservative versions of the creed whenever its interests dictated. And let us not imagine that the Holy See bowed to no secular power in these times. Despite discrimination in Imperial Germany, disestablishment as the state church by France’s Third Republic and the outrages of British colonial rule in Ireland, episcopal authorities instructed the lower clergy and laity to never be amiss in fulfilling their patriotic duty.

In a phrasing that would have seemed bizarre to ultramontane Catholics in the mid-nineteenth century, a French priest declared in 1915 that God desired ‘national homelands’ for all people and that “a soldier who dies for his country accomplishes an eminently religious act.” German bishops defined the German army’s invasion of Belgium as a “textbook example of a just war,” and in Vienna’s St. Stephen’s Cathedral, an Austrian homilist arranged to bless not only the assembled soldiers but their weapons. “There is no perfect Christian,” Belgium’s Cardinal Mercier insisted, “who is not a perfect patriot.”

In retrospect, it seems like a miracle that the Church managed to survive both this world war and the next—one that spared them from the fate of the old international workers’ movement.

With the Bolshevik seizure of power and the subsequent establishment of the Communist International, the Church braced itself for another onslaught but now in a changed historical context where new mass movements of the radical Right would be at the forefront of the fight. Even before the war, France’s rich counter-revolutionary traditions had come back to life in clashes between Socialist-supported Republican governments and a hostile Army and Church. The most stalwart champions of the latter institutions were the founders of a new outlook that anticipated fascism in the peculiar manner of its hostility to bourgeois society, so distant in spirit from the familiar animus of the socialists, masons and other outsiders.  

The most important nationalist and authoritarian voice within the Catholic milieu was France’s Charles Maurras, an unbeliever but also a royalist, an anti-Semite, and a nationalist dismayed by France’s evolution toward secular democracy. The movement Maurras founded, Action Française, began during the turmoil of the Dreyfus affair in the 1890s, but his blend of nationalism and authoritarianism gained an international audience in the 1920s.

Although Maurras made no secret of his well-nigh Nietzschean disgust with the small-town Jews of the Gospels, Pius X and not a few Cardinals felt his heart was in the right place and discreetly encouraged the movement as a weapon to beat back the internal threat of a quasi-democratic Catholic Modernism. In 1926 at a moment when the European scene seemed to have stabilized, his successor Pius XI officially repudiated Action Française, failing to see any advantage in continuing to indulge this admittedly talented atheist and his ardent coterie. (This decision was reversed in 1939 by the newly elected Pius XII, just as Maurras was being inducted into the Académie Française.) But there would be no departure from the overall strategic line of the Church for the upheavals of war and revolution seemed only to have vindicated its rejection of the modern age at least in the eyes of its own militants and supporters. In facing the great red dragon, the battle-hardened gaze of the Pope and his Cardinals now sparkled with the fiery visions of the new militant Right.  

In 1919, two future popes, Eugenio Pacelli (Pius XII) as a nuncio in Munich and Achille Ratti (Pius XI) as a nuncio in Warsaw, witnessed struggles with local communists firsthand. Pacelli stayed in Munich in 1919 during the city’s short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic, and by his own possibly self-aggrandizing account, revolutionaries with guns drawn threatened to shoot him on the steps of the nuncio’s residence. During the anxious days of Warsaw’s siege during the Soviet-Polish War, Ratti also remained in the city. Neither man distinguished revolution from communism or from the Jewish people. Pacelli feared a “grim Russian-Jewish-Revolutionary tyranny.” Ratti described Bolshevism as “essentially Jewish, anti-Catholic and anti-religious.”

It was Ratti, later his Holiness Pius XI, who would secure the controversial Vatican diplomatic settlements of church-state relations—the 1929 Lateran Accords with Mussolini and the 1933 Reichskonkordat with Hitler—expressing a measure of sympathy for their new regimes though tempered by a healthy fear of the latter.

Hitler’s electoral victory in 1933 presented new threats but also an opportunity. Always wary, Pius XI nonetheless credited Hitler in these early days with being “the first and only man of state who speaks against the bolshevists. Until now, it has only been the Pope.” In Cardinal Pacelli’s phrasing, by negotiating a diplomatic accord with the National Socialists, Catholics dodged a Kulturkampf much worse than in Bismarck’s times. A pleased Hitler told an aide that no one would have thought “that the Church would be ready to commit the bishops to this state.”

Vatican relations with the new rulers in Rome and Berlin belong to a wider policy of alignment to inter-war regimes of the authoritarian Right. If Fascism and National Socialism occasionally rankled the Church, relations with Europe’s less flamboyant new dictatorships were very warm.    

In Portugal, Antonio Salazar, a onetime Catholic youth leader and seminarian, became the country’s dictator in 1932. As a young man, Salazar had endorsed Rerum Novarum and the idea of a more ordered economy. A stint in parliament, with its unstable coalitions, dismayed him. As he explained, “We are drawing near to the moment in political and social evolution in which a political party based on the individual, the citizen or the elector will no longer have sufficient reason for existence.”

The spokesmen of the Estado Novo claimed that it expressed a national-spiritual renaissance, wisely adapting proud tradition to burning desires for a new order. For Pius XI, Salazar was the head of a nearly ideal body politic and the period witnessed the rise of not a few others of its ilk, most notably the regencies of Franco and Horthy. In Austria, a right-wing Catholic government of a similar stamp came to power in a coup in 1932 that then unsuccessfully competed with the rising National Socialist movement before being gobbled up in the Anschluss. Engelbert Dollfuss, the first chancellor of this ill-fated Austro-fascist experiment, promised in 1933 to build a “Catholic German state” that would offer a healthy alternative to the decadent constitutions of “the era of liberal and capitalistic systems.” 

The ideas of Rerum Novarum that shaped Catholic social welfare policy were not just influential on states and movements of the authoritarian Right but also on the predecessors of Christian-Democracy. McGreevy sadly notes that the Holy See long regarded such clerically unsupervised democratic parties with great suspicion. This was a serious mistake as their existence testified to the vitality and, in contrast to the outlook of the higher clergy, the political wisdom of popular Catholicism. The release of Pius XI’s encyclical Quadragesimo Anno (“In the Fortieth Year”) in May 1931 inspired not only the corporatist ideologues of the newly minted dictatorships but also a small but growing Catholic Left longing to bring a social justice message to workers bearing the brunt of a global depression.⁵

Published at the height of a global depression, Quadragesimo Anno was more radical than Rerum Novarum. Where Rerum Novarum stressed the rights of property owners, Quadragesimo Anno emphasized the “social character of ownership,” and some neo-Thomists went further and dismissed conventional defenses of private property as “bourgeois.” Where Leo XIII recommended workers’ associations, Pius XI insisted that workers and employers jointly direct particular industries. The fact that the publication of Quadragesimo Anno coincided with the collapse of the Credit-Anstalt bank in Vienna and a subsequent run on banks across central Europe gave its recommendations even more punch.

In 1932 presidential candidate Franklin Roosevelt enthused American Catholics by quoting the new encyclical on the campaign trail, declaring that it was “just as radical as I am” and “one of the greatest documents of modern times.” After the repeal of Prohibition, Catholicism in America was on the upswing as cheap booze and counsel from still respected spiritual supervisors eased the pain of humiliating poverty and unemployment. A priest from Dearborn Michigan, Father Coughlin, had a weekly radio program that reached an audience in the tens of millions. An early champion of the New Deal—“Christ’s New Deal”— in the mid-1930s Coughlin began to denounce the Roosevelt administration as too beholden to banking interests. A militant anticommunist, the good father was America’s leading advocate of the Franco cause, applauded the Krystallnacht, and inspired boycotts of Jewish shops in the US. American bishops were embarrassed by him, but the vast majority of pious Catholics were more sympathetic. 

The Church’s record in this age of dictators would later be denounced sometimes reasonably, but the author reminds us that its stance was neither wholly unprovoked nor lacking in principle.   

This antidemocratic sensibility stemmed in part from the tendency of democratic governments to abolish or harass Catholic schools or expropriate Catholic property.

And let us not forget that Catholics, with the official backing of the Church, stood alone at the time in their opposition to those seeking to sterilize the “unfit” in the name of science. Indignation on the matter occasionally found eloquent expression. An archbishop of New Orleans is quoted scorning the notion of a “millennium of supermen and superwomen as perfect specimens of the human animal, bred and reared according to the latest eugenic rules.” 

As democracies crumbled across Europe and Latin America, the hero of McGreevy’s story steps forth: neo-Thomist French philosopher, Jacques Maritain. Appealing to the large numbers of the faithful dismayed by the official stances of the Church, Maritain’s anti-fascist polemics would make him the world’s most influential Catholic intellectual. McGreevey claims that after the Nazis came to power in Germany and a right-wing demonstration in Paris ended with fifteen dead, he drafted the manifesto for a work entitled “For the Common Good,” but I’m not sure such a work exists (perhaps he meant La personne et le bien commun, published in 1947).  In any event, at the outset of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, he published Integral Humanism,“a text that became one of the key documents of twentieth-century political thought.” In 1941 he defended moderate democracy as best fulfilling the Thomist ideal of good government. His dissent from the then prevailing cultural anti-Americanism of the Catholic intellectual scene presaged the latter’s subsequent submission to the new Atlantis. 

JACQUES MARITAIN’S IDEAS underwrote one of the key achievements of twentieth-century political history: Christian Democratic parties. After almost a century of doubting the efficacy of democracy, at least in much of Europe and Latin America, Catholics became its guarantors. For all or part of the period between 1945 and 1980, Christian Democratic parties held power in Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, Brazil, Chile, Venezuela, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Costa Rica.

During the Cold War Pius XII and his closest aides were seen as so sympathetic to the new American rulers of the West that some Italian observers dubbed tiny Vatican City, Il Pentagone. Understandably, then, the changes that would soon come from the top caught the world and indeed the Catholic world by surprise.

To predict in 1958 that Catholics would witness more changes in their church in the next fifteen years than at any time since the French Revolution would have seemed preposterous. Only the election of a new pope that year, Venetian cardinal Angelo Roncalli, or John XXIII, altered horizons. 

Who was this new prince? A few delightful anecdotes convey the impression of a man of humble peasant origins—McGreevey does not mention that he traced his origins to a secondary and impoverished branch of an aristocratic family—ready to break with tradition. After his election, he apparently strolled over to the Holy Office, opened the dusty file on himself, and found a notation, “suspected of Modernism.” If one recalls the anti-Bolshevik crusader politics of the previous two Pontiffs, the new pope’s effort to cast the Church as a peacemaker truly seemed to signal the advent of a new era.

 
Two years into his papacy, in a gesture that would have seemed impossible in the era of Pius XII (or Joseph Stalin), John XXIII appealed to both countries to “face squarely the tremendous responsibilities they bear before the tribunal of history.” Another peasant son, Soviet president Nikita Khrushchev, welcomed the “common sense” of John XXIII. Khrushchev then asked, maliciously, whether John Kennedy and Konrad Adenauer would lessen Cold War tensions and obey “the Pope of Rome?”

As America stepped up its involvement in Vietnam, his successor, Paul VI, pronounced with conviction: “Jamais plus la guerre! Jamais plus la guerre!” making headlines across the world. Though McGreevy discusses neo-Thomism as an official Church teaching on the social question he is curiously silent on the other, equally well-known branch of this tradition—the just war doctrine—and what became of it. One suspects that the author perhaps finds himself no longer as opposed to America’s wars as he may once have been and so avoids the whole topic of war and peace. In fact, he only mentions the Church’s teaching on the subject once in a passing reference to the geo-political environment of a half century ago, leaving the reader wondering what in the world, or in the Church, has changed since then such that the issue now no longer warrants further discussion.   

Paul VI’s plea for an end to war highlighted another topic in Gaudium et Spes, whether the council would endorse the just war tradition or take a more pacifist stance. American and British bishops urged the council to recognize the possibility of a just war, even one conducted with nuclear weapons. Gaudium et Spes eventually straddled the line between pacifism and the just war tradition.

The American imposed post-war settlement had sealed the fate of what remained of the continent’s old regimes, unleashing the culturally permissive dynamics with which the Catholic world would thereafter have to contend. It is often said that the West’s quasi-official sponsorship of the avant-garde was a challenge to—in one of those ironies of history—the stodgy, bourgeois aesthetics of the Communist bloc. In this new ideological context, the Church sensed it could no longer maintain its previously uncomprehending and, for the educated Catholic, now embarrassing hostility to modernism in the arts.

The Catholic art produced during the ultramontane revival—mass-produced statuary from the workshops on the streets of the Saint-Sulpice neighborhood in Paris, stained glass from Germany, paintings copied from Italian originals—had no place in the burgeoning world of galleries, journals, and museums. Antoni Gaudí, in Barcelona, might design an eccentric masterpiece such as the Basilica de La Sagrada Familia. But a fraught relationship existed between Catholicism and a modernism understood as the most innovative feature of the early-twentieth-century arts. T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound expressed interest in Dante and Catholic imagery, but more artists disdained what they understood as an oppressive institution. The hectoring Jesuit in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man reflected this view. “Hating the Church fervently,” Joyce privately vowed to “open war on it by what I write, and say and do.”

The Church’s firm hand had not just come down on writers bearing childhood grudges like Mr. Joyce but even on renowned intellectual sympathizers. Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory about an alcoholic priest persecuted by state officials in Mexico apparently came close to being placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (“List of Forbidden Books”) in the waning years of that redoubtable institution. 

THE 1960S MARKED the moment when Christian churches…ceded much of the formal and informal control they had long exercised over culture. As late as 1952, students and faculty members at universities such as Notre Dame had to request permission to read texts by authors on the Index of Forbidden Books, including philosophers such as John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. (The books were kept in a locked cage in the basement of the library.)

A less openly hostile attitude to cultural modernism would take shape over the 1940s and 1950s as a made-over Church was compelled once again to sway to the music of time. In these years, the spirit of a wider cultural-generational revolution began talking back to preceptors in institutions of Catholic learning from elementary school on up. This is when the lid came off in Catholic higher education, at least in this part of the country. One incident the author mentions entered the annals of Catholic school legend.

Some undergraduates at Jesuit-run Boston College ritually tossed their textbooks into a bonfire and a nearby reservoir to register discontent with the eight required courses in neo-Thomist philosophy.

Whereas Catholic intellectuals might have once been able to persuade themselves that modern ideas had met their match in neo-Thomism, they were now bored and disgusted with scholasticism. McGreevy evinces little interest in the contemporary Catholic intellectual scene, and one fears it may be because there’s so little to speak of now. The one exception to his general downplaying of the role of ideas in his history is the more careful consideration he gives to the intellectual biography of the Bavarian, Joseph Alosius Ratzinger, later Cardinal and finally His Eminence Benedict XVI. 

Conscripted into the German anti-aircraft corps as a teenager in 1943, Ratzinger escaped and walked back to his village during the final weeks of hostilities. Witnessing the destruction of the Third Reich was a spiritually turbulent experience that made it possible for this learned Dominican to hear the call for epoch-making change.

To Ratzinger, Europe’s plunge into the abyss of two world wars had discredited any notion of Western superiority. Catholics must “recognize the relativity of all human cultural forms” and cultivate “a modesty which sets no human and historical heritage as absolute.” Local liturgical practices should be encouraged and local episcopal authority strengthened. Archaic practices such as the Index of Forbidden Books should be jettisoned precisely because they mimicked “totalitarian” restrictions on the quest for truth.”

The drama of the Second Vatican Council is nicely staged. On the one hand, a business convention where unkempt bishops from less endowed and newly decolonized nations encamped in Rome’s cheaper hotels mingle with their luxuriously accommodated and chauffeured European counterparts, it was at the same time a spiritual event of palpably momentous significance. Ratzinger, then a young man, called the final conciliar documents a “counter-syllabus” signaling a sharp departure from the outlook of the 1864 Syllabus of Errors and subsequent encyclicals which had expressed, as he put it, “the one-sidedness of the position adopted under Pius IX and Pius X in response to the situation created by the new phase of history inaugurated by the French revolution.” 

But if all that had been decided upon at these palatial hustings were finer points of doctrine, most of the TV-viewing laity would have soon forgotten about it, being now ever more inclined to disregard church counsel in matters of politics and personal morality. We will never know what would have happened over the coming decades had the Church at Vatican II boldly updated its earlier influential pronouncements on the social question. In any event, what struck the flock with immediate impact the world over was a liturgical revolution imposed from above.

The bishops had agreed that on the first Sunday of Advent, November 29, 1964, Catholics around the world would begin to implement the sacred constitution on the liturgy. The comprehensiveness of the changes—and their abruptness—was remarkable. Ornate altars were removed from the back wall of thousands of churches and simple altars installed closer to the congregation. Communion rails separating the priest from the congregation were dismantled. Statues of saints thought to clutter the altar disappeared. The priest faced the congregation instead of standing with his back to them. The prayers he uttered in Japanese, Portuguese, and Swahili now required the congregation to respond, and the congregation was encouraged, haltingly, to sing hymns instead of listening to a choir or organist. In time, communicants would receive the eucharistic host in the hand instead of on the tongue and while standing instead of kneeling.

The most symbolically significant of these iconoclastic measures was the abolition of the Latin Mass, whose restoration thereafter became le cause célèbre of a disgruntled conservative Catholic subculture. 

One bishop, France’s Marcel Lefebvre, a founder of the conservative Coetus Internationalis Patrum group at the council, rejected the Vatican II documents on the liturgy, religious liberty, and relationships with non-Christians. In a telling comparison, he termed the council a “French Revolution.” He formed a breakaway church in 1975 and named it after the anti-modernist pope, Pius X. Lefebvre would eventually be excommunicated for ordaining his own bishops along with dozens of priests.

The abrupt imposition of these changes soon set loose a broader unease as much of the laity had been sentimentally attached to the old liturgy and sweeping it away without consultation likely did contribute to the loosening of the bonds people once felt for their Church. 

An even more politically consequential challenge had been brewing for several decades.

Frank discussion of birth control troubled Roman theologians…The first shift occurred among Anglicans, whose bishops in 1930 voted to permit married couples to use contraceptives for “a morally sound reason.” In response, two Jesuits based in Rome—one Belgian and one German—drafted the first formal papal statement on contraception, the encyclical Casti Connubii (“Of Chaste Wedlock”) which consolidated Catholic teaching in the strongest terms.

As the cultural atmosphere got warmer many previously solid institutions and mentalities began to melt, unleashing a widening entropy that many would experience as a liberation. The sexual revolution that would so adversely affect the fortunes of the Church was made possible—or rather, made permanent—with the arrival of the pill. One could say that having wrested the reproductive process from behind the veil of nature, modern society ended up exposing itself to a moral transvaluation of breathtaking scope, provoking decades of periodic, frightened backlashes. In this age of Aquarius, the outlook for the Church has come to look dire.

After having assumed that the world spirit would be heading left, the Church would soon be swept up by a powerful conservative counter-current emanating from Reagan’s America. Under the new Polish Pope John Paul II, the Vatican took a leading role in the West’s final crusade against Communism, ensuring that the Roman Catholic Church would play a world historical role in toppling its old revolutionary nemesis. Tacking to the Right, the charismatic Pontiff downplayed social justice on his spectacular world tours. “His first visit to Brazil in 1980 included a four-hour lecture to a mute assembly of Brazil’s bishops, often lauded for their focus on social justice.” But one of their successors he appointed in 1985 would shutter their vaunted Justice and Peace Commission. “Upon the site a developer erected a shopping mall.” At the time, El Salvador’s bloody civil war was exposing the local Church to cross-fire between government-backed death squads and guerillas. The hard men of the Latin American Right were not above killing priests and nuns suspected of abetting their enemies and felt no need to make an exception for outside agitators. Unlike in the Spanish Civil War, there would be clergy on both sides of Latin America’s civil wars of the 1970s and 1980s.

United States Ambassador Robert White, also a Catholic, had dined with the four American churchwomen on the night before their deaths. He supervised the exhumation of their bodies and became a thorn in the side of the new Reagan administration by emphasizing the need to apprehend the murderers.

Archbishop Romero would be gunned down by a death squad while celebrating mass. His Holiness John Paul II mourned the deaths of Romero and the American churchwomen. “But if in Poland John Paul II encouraged defiance of a dictatorial government, in Central America he worried about a destabilizing radicalism.” 

The 1970s saw the global return of economic crisis on a scale that recalled the 1930s. But while across the political spectrum the governments of that era had responded to the collapse of laissez-faire with Keynesianism and other statist measures, forty years later their successors would respond to the world-wide crisis of their now more regulated economies with tireless efforts to liberate market forces.

At the same time, the stagflation (high unemployment and high inflation) tormenting the developed world in the 1970s, and the even more devastating economic crisis sweeping through the communist bloc, prompted new questions. Catholics more enamored of free markets than the authors of papal encyclicals seized the opportunity to reassert the importance of economic growth and entrepreneurship.

Catholic business leaders and modernizing functionaries of the Franco regime were at the forefront of a campaign touting the spiritual discipline of the market. John Paul II’s Polish brand of anticommunism led him to embrace Opus Dei’s combination of traditional piety and free-enterprise. The Holy Father transformed this lay institution into personal prelature reporting directly to the Vatican (a special relationship recently discontinued by Pope Francis) and expedited the canonization of the movement’s founder, Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer y Albás. 

Neither the leftward tack of Vatican II nor the attempted reverse course under John Paul II managed to put a stop to ominous trends. In what had been its historic European and American bastions, Church attendance was declining alarmingly.

France, the country where the ultramontane revival had such a profound impact in the wake of the revolution, and which sent more missionaries around the world than any other place, is now a missionary destination. Fewer than 10 percent of French Catholics attend Mass weekly, and hundreds of churches are falling into disrepair. The number of Catholic weddings is down 60 percent in twenty-five years. The sexual abuse crisis followed a now familiar pattern, with a 2021 report finding that over four thousand clergy or other Catholic personnel had committed acts of abuse over seven decades.

A once feared and respected institution, the Church’s opposition to progressive social engineering earned it the open hatred of America’s liberal establishment—its media in particular—which has come to the conclusion that it must either subdue or break it up. But whereas older bouts of repression from those claiming to represent progress once spurred determined opposition, Catholics now have reason to fear that their Church no longer has the will even to defend itself. What has happened? Many Catholic leaders who had supported the changes effected by Vatican II now suspected that the Church had been weakened by “an endeavor that wants to dissolve the Church into the world.” As bishop, Cardinal, and finally Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger channeled their concerns and became their leader. 

The victories of the Church from Reagan to Biden, from John Paul II to Francis I have been few but nonetheless of considerable significance. In this new Gilded Era in the West, the Church is being essentially abandoned by its flock, but it retains some powerful friends among wealthy and powerful conservatives who have leaned against the prevailing cultural winds, in America by getting sympathetic jurists placed on the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary more generally.

Although Catholics numbered only 20 percent of the population, they now constituted a majority on the US Supreme Court. Five Catholics were appointed to the court by Republican presidents—Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—and a sixth justice appointed by a Republican president, Neil Gorsuch, was raised as a Catholic and studied with the prominent Catholic legal scholar, John Finnis.

What have been the priorities of these nominally Catholic justices?

Their jurisprudence stressed the autonomy of religious institutions in an increasingly secular milieu…By 2020, they spoke and wrote less about the morality of contraception or gay marriage—lost causes in terms of public opinion—than did their predecessors. But they did emphasize free markets and free speech. These libertarian impulses would have surprised their nineteenth-century ultramontane ancestors, who thought such ideas rested on a misguided individualism.

Of course, our supreme justices, like their counterparts in the other branches of government, are unanimous in their regard for the monied interest and rule accordingly. As everyone knows, where they divide is on the issues that dominate the culture war era, although these disagreements are usually couched in a language more legalistic than principled. When this book came out, the Supreme Court was poised to overturn Roe v. Wade. Now the front line of the epic battle of progressive vs. reactionary has moved on. Individuals and now whole nations are being asked to swear allegiance to the values of the American awakening under the great, fluttering banners LGBTQ and BIPOC. Those who choose not to swear are being made to feel the heat. The leading role the Church played in the decades-long campaign to overturn Roe v. Wade has boosted morale for the time being but will no doubt be followed up by yet another intimidation campaign to get a reluctant Vatican to board the train of progress—destination unknown. Many forces are now eyeing the coming vacancy of the seat of St. Peter and hope to see the Fisherman’s Ring placed on the finger of an ideological ally.  

McGreevy expresses no opinion on abortion nor on the controversies surrounding “transgender-ism.” A historian may not be entitled to foreground his values, and such restraint lends his perspective credibility but also makes it difficult for him to address the moral-spiritual climate of the times. But if we don’t know whether we live in a society whose emancipation is currently being held back by the forces of reaction or—looking at it from the other end—in some spiritual wasteland of progressive social engineering, then we really can’t say much about the alternative Catholicism offers, or how it’s doing and what it should do. 

For all the talk of this being a post-secular age, the Church for now seems fated to decline in the West in the resigned view of this author. Nonetheless, McGreevy’s story unsurprisingly concludes on a hopeful note as he looks to the sheer demographic expansion of Africa as the beginning of a new era in Catholic history.

Neither decline nor migration should overshadow a more important shift: the center of gravity within the Catholic world has moved south. In 1900, over two-thirds of the world’s Catholics lived in Europe. Now less than one-third do…High birth rates and high rates of adult conversion mean that African influence within the global church will continue to grow. Already, the roughly 230 million African Catholics represent one-sixth of all Catholics worldwide. Soon, the ten countries with the largest Catholic populations will include not only Brazil, Mexico, and the Philippines but also Nigeria. More Catholics will live in the Democratic Republic of the Congo than in Spain.

We catch a glimpse of this future world of a Christian, Catholic Africa that has so eagerly embraced American visions of the Holy Ghost. 

Never more than a small presence in North America and Western Europe, Catholic Pentecostalism became influential in Africa, Brazil, and India. Merging the healing practices and devotions of nineteenth-century ultramontanism and twentieth-century Pentecostalism proved surprisingly easy: both traditions saw the world as locked in a struggle between God and Satan.

As large-scale African immigration reshapes the world over the rest of the twenty-first century, the jaded, aging societies of the West may be re-evangelized amid events reminiscent of the great days of Lourdes. There is also the prospect that the current and coming wars of the Great Powers will have catastrophic nuclear culminations. One does not see the Church stepping forward as a peacemaker though that is arguably the kind of role that it can still play, and must, if it wants to have a future. If it cannot rise to the occasion now, perhaps once again it will end up playing a useful role in the rebuilding of civilization, for out of the ruins may come some new cities of God. 

1. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, 2nd ed., trans. Harvey C. Mansfield (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1998), 45. ↩︎
2. John T. McGreevy, Catholicism: A Global History from the French Revolution to Pope Francis (New York: National Geographic Books, 2022). ↩︎
3. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), 480. ↩︎
4. Why did the Church not do better? It would be hard to maintain that the ideological climate of the era somehow precluded the emergence of Catholic ideas of a higher rank. After all, God had a brief though remarkable intellectual comeback outside of the Catholic sphere, if in often unrecognizably modernist forms. In the Germany of the Weimar years, a quasi-messianic political theology emerged at the highest level of Protestant and Jewish intellectual life and at both ends of the political spectrum, an important episode of modern intellectual history. Nothing comparable ever happened with us, though, to be fair; the Jewish and Protestant intellectuals of that time never had to address the political problem that the strategic mission of the Church raises for the true Catholic theologian—what the Marxists call “hegemony.” ↩︎
5. The American Catholic Worker movement whose newspaper was edited by the fiery Dorothy Day is only mentioned once in passing—an omission I found puzzling as the author does not seem to share the political point of view of family members and teachers of bygone days who would refer to her not by name but as “that communist slut.” ↩︎