Towards Spirituality: Catholicism from Napoleon to now

This ambitious book gives an account of the history of the Catholic Church from the French Revolution to the present. McGreevy argues convincingly that the French Revolution determined what the Church would be like till 1960. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy issued by the revolutionary government in 1790 required that citizens select their own bishops and priests. Monasteries were suppressed. The Mass had become illegal. Clergy and nuns had scattered.

Pope Pius VI died in Valence, a prisoner of Napoleon. Many believed that he would be the last pope. The entire Roman apparatus of curia, cardinals, nuncios, and even Swiss Guards, lay in disarray. Napoleon`s troops occupied Rome, and a republic for Rome had been foreshadowed. Forced to hold their conclave in Venice, cardinals managed to select a new pope, Cardinal Barnaba Chiaramonti, Pius VII. He signed a concordat with Napoleon in 1801 which limited the number of French clergy, affirmed the legality of the seizure of church lands, and arranged for clerical salaries to be paid by the state. The treaty guaranteed freedom of religion. Pius VII made a significant gain: he was able to replace all the bishops appointed by the revolution with his own appointees.

But his relationship with Napoleon continued to be stormy. Napoleon forced him to journey to Paris to witness his crowning as emperor in the cathedral of Notre Dame, but Pius VII excommunicated him in 1807 for annexing the Papal States into the French empire. Napoleon reciprocated by putting the Pope under house arrest in Savona, where he remained for five years. He was released in 1814, and Napoleon was finally defeated a year later.

Such was the difficult beginning of the modern Church. McGreevy calls this the Ultramontaine Church, because power in it passed over the mountains from France to Rome. It was characterised by processions, saints, miracles and novenas. One of its most potent symbols was Lourdes. It was capable of movements of mass piety, such as devotions to the Sacred Heart. Perhaps its greatest triumph came in 1917 in the first modern Code of Canon Law, the work of Eugenio Pacelli, later Pope Pius XII, which insisted that all episcopal appointments be made by the Pope, and claimed papal authority not only for “faith and morals”, but for anything “affecting the discipline and government of the Church spread throughout the World”.

McGreevy shows that women’s religious orders formed the institutional backbone of the Church in this period. For example, Catherine McAuley’s Sisters of Mercy started a landslide, founding 571 women’s congregations in the nineteenth century. A different, but politically fruitful development was a movement of intellectuals to mine Aquinas’s philosophy for ideas to use against the Church’s opponents.

As the twentieth century wore on, it became obvious that there was a dire need for social philosophy. A ruthless communist regime had become established in Russia, and the Wall Street crash and the consequent Great Depression had made the future of capitalism doubtful.

The Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain came up with a solution, “Integral Humanism”, which argued that people possess inherent dignity and that individualistic capitalism needed to recognise and support the family and institutions like trade unions. His ideas were timely. Catholicism around the world was beginning to consider entanglements with fascist governments, but he showed there was an alternative. His ideas lived on after the war as the foundation of the Christian Democratic parties, which held most of the government in Europe between 1945 and 1980, and made the later emergence of the European Union possible.

The Second Vatican Council marks the beginning of the contemporary Church. Although this was begun by Pope John XXIII, the Pope in charge of most of its work was Paul VI. Vatican II opened the Church to the world. Prior to that, it had been defensive, protecting its members from the world, the flesh and the devil. But in its document Gaudium et Spes it urged its members to immerse themselves in the world’s “joys and hopes, griefs and anxieties”.

The book contains chapters on Charisma (Pope John Paul II), the sexual abuse crisis, and the present state of the Church. Most Catholics now live in South America and Africa. There are some amazing statistics. In the central African nation of Chad, Catholics make up only 8 per cent of the population. It is one of the world’s most impoverished countries in a predominantly Muslim region, but it contains sixty-four Catholic schools, nine Catholic hospitals and 102 parishes.

In the final sentence of this fine book, McGreevy quotes Pope Francis as saying that he hopes young Catholics will be better positioned to be “citizens of our respective nations, and the entire world, builders of a new social bond”. Pope John Paul II wrote a dissertation on St John of the Cross, and Pope Francis made a study of spirituality, “long a scholarly backwater”, comments McGreevy, although he adds that it has undergone a renaissance. It may have more depth and promise than is commonly supposed. Central to spirituality is prayer, and, as Tennyson wrote, more things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of. Perhaps that is where the bond Pope Francis is hoping for will come from.

Catholicism: A Global History from the French Revolution to Pope Francis
by John T. McGreevy
W.W. Norton & Co, 2022, 513 pages, $57.95

Reg Naulty was formerly senior lecturer in philosophy and religion at Charles Sturt University, Riverina