The Church and the Modern World

From the eighteenth century, the Church faced an adversary of a new kind. It was no longer a heresy within nor an empire without, but a whole civilization turning away from her: the modern world, born of the Enlightenment, which made man and reason the measure of all things and pushed the faith to the margins. Two centuries of trials and renewal followed, down to the Second Vatican Council.

The Enlightenment and the Revolution

The philosophy of the Enlightenment, in the eighteenth century, exalted reason against revealed faith and contested the authority of the Church. In 1789, the French Revolution, at first reforming, turned against her: it seized her goods, sought to make priests servants of the State, and in its harshest phase persecuted the faith, sending to death or exile thousands of priests, religious and faithful who refused to betray. It was a new age of martyrs. Napoleon later restored to the Church a measure of peace, but the old alliance of throne and altar, born in the time of Constantine, was broken forever.

What was demanded of them was the oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, voted in 1790: the priests who refused it, called refractory, were hunted and outlawed, while the juring priests submitted to it.

The Church and the Modern World

Throughout the nineteenth century, the Church stood against the errors of the age: rationalism, which admitted only reason and denied faith; liberalism, which cut society off from God; the reduction of religion to a private opinion. Often on the defensive, she condemned these currents, pope Pius IX in the Syllabus of 1864, then Pius X against modernism at the beginning of the twentieth century, without always managing to reach the world she was warning. At the same time, Italian unity took from the pope the Papal States, the territory he had governed for a thousand years; by 1870, he had lost all temporal power.

Vatican I and the Authority of the Pope

It was at the very moment his earthly kingdom collapsed that his spiritual authority was affirmed. The First Vatican Council, gathered by pope Pius IX in 1870, defined papal infallibility: when the pope solemnly proclaims, for the whole Church, a truth of faith or morals, he is preserved from error by the assistance of the Holy Spirit. Stripped of his lands, the pope then appeared more clearly for what he is: not a prince among princes, but the pastor of the universal Church. The Roman question thus opened was settled in 1929, under pope Pius XI, by the Lateran accords, which recognised the pope full sovereignty over the small State of Vatican City, securing his independence without giving him back an earthly kingdom.

The same council also answered rationalism: in the constitution Dei Filius, it affirmed that God can be known with certainty by the light of reason alone, and that faith and reason, coming from the same God, cannot contradict each other.

The Social Question

The industrial age cast workers into misery and made socialism rise. The Church answered it with a social teaching. In 1891, pope Leo XIII defended the dignity and the rights of workers, the just wage, the value of work and of property, but also the duties of the rich, against unbridled capitalism as against socialist revolution. So began the social doctrine of the Church, which has never since ceased to shed light on the life of societies by the light of the Gospel.

He set out this teaching in the encyclical Rerum Novarum, “Of New Things”, the first of the great social encyclicals.

The Martyrs of the Twentieth Century

The twentieth century, with its total wars and its atheist tyrannies, made more martyrs than any other before it. Communism and Nazism persecuted the Church across Europe, and countless Christians died for their faith. Among them, Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish priest, took at Auschwitz the place of a father of a family condemned to die; Edith Stein, a Jewish convert become a Carmelite, was gassed there. The blood of the martyrs flowed again, at the very heart of the century that believed itself free of God.

Vatican II and the Church of Today

To go out to meet the modern world, the Church gathered, at the call of pope John XXIII and under the guidance of his successor Paul VI, the Second Vatican Council, from 1962 to 1965, the largest in her history. It did not wish to change the faith, but to present it anew: to renew the liturgy, to open a dialogue with the world, to call all the baptized to holiness. Meanwhile, the center of gravity of Christianity shifted from Europe toward Africa, Asia and Latin America, where the Gospel was still spreading. Having lost her Christendom and her earthly power, the Church found herself again as she had been at the beginning: a spiritual and missionary body, living in the world without belonging to it, bearing the same Gospel to a new age.

It also recognized religious liberty, the right of every man to be kept free from coercion in matters of faith, distinguishing this just principle from the religious indifference the Syllabus had condemned; and it committed the Church to the search for unity with separated Christians. After a century on the defensive, the Church spoke to the world again without yielding anything of the faith.