Search Results

Elected by the cardinals of Pius IX, Leo XIII was a conservative but with a greater knowledge of history and capable of using moderate language. The encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879) declared the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas the truest philosophy for the modern age, and Leo persisted in claims for the restoration of the Papal State. The Kulturkampf in Germany was ended by compromise on both sides. In France Leo XIII's slow acceptance of the Republic declared for the first time that Catholics could rally to a democracy, but in the short term the policy was a failure. In Italy the pope's language was more urbane than that of Pius IX, though his policy was little different. Catholics did, however, begin to take part in political life on a local level. With industrialization more Catholics were industrial workers, and Catholic trade unions and people calling themselves Christian socialists had appeared in several countries. The encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891) condemned socialism and communism, but recognized the necessity for state intervention to ensure social peace and justice and used the term ‘Christian democracy’ for the first time. It earned Leo XIII a reputation as ‘a workers’ pope’. Catholic leaders still condemned freedom of the press, but Catholic organs of opinion were needed and tended to be most influential when most extreme, most notably Louis Veuillot's Univers in France.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the dramatic changes in American Catholicism that have occurred within the past century. Topics covered include the theological tumult caused by the 1899 encyclical Testem benevolentiae (A Testament of Esteem), which Pope Leo XIII addressed to Cardinal James Gibbons; Catholicism in the 1950s, and the ideological impact of Vatican II reforms. The chapter then details the rationale and research methods used in this book.

This chapter discusses the restoration of Christian philosophy through the works of Pope Leo XIII, particularly in his encyclical letter Aeterni Patris. As Pope Leo XII understands it, Christian philosophy is philosophy guided by revelation. He believes that faith could guide reason and that this philosophy would strengthen faith. Leo XIII suggests that Christian philosophy is the best possible philosophy. He is most impressed with the thought of Thomas Aquinas that he holds that the principles established by Thomas could guide Christian philosophers. The chapter argues that it is Leo XIII who proclaimed Thomism the official philosophy of Catholic teachers. For Leo, only those who obey God and follow his commands are free men. The chapter concludes that not many philosophers have defended the dignity of the human person and the family with as much passion as Leo XIII.

This chapter addresses the theological rehabilitation of Galileo implicit in Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Providentissimus Deus; the epistemological reconviction of the culprit in Pierre Duhem's To Save the Phenomena; the collection and refinement of three centuries of anti-Galilean charges in Jesuit Adolf Müller's compendium; and a new justification of Galileo's condemnation based on Léon Garzend's account of the concept of heresy. The Duhemian interpretation of the Galileo affair has considerable originality, simplicity, and elegance. By way of general criticism, it was stated that Müller's account is too one-sidedly anti-Galilean and proclerical and too uncritical regarding the factual accuracy or legal admissibility of the special injunction. Garzend's main thesis was that there were two concepts of heresy, a theological and an inquisitorial one. Garzend made clear that the concept of heresy subsisted in a cluster of other notions such as erroneous, scandalous, temerarious, near-heretical, dangerous, formally heretical, and suspect.

The dark tone of otherworldliness in 19th-century Polish Catholic sermons was reflected in the teaching that the poor should quietly endure their lot, looking to heaven for an end to their suffering. There was little space in this worldview for talk of social reform. But this message would change with surprising rapidity, and by the mid 20th century, Polish Catholic politicians, social activists, and priests were almost unanimous in their the hostility to the socio-economic status quo. Phrases like “social injustice” and “exploitation” became commonplace in Catholic rhetoric even before WWII, eventually congealing into a comprehensive social vision that challenged both the market economies of the West and the state planning of the Soviet Union. The intellectual foundation for what is sometimes called “social Catholicism” was in fact well established in Poland very early in the 20th century, no later than elsewhere in Europe. Translating this into a meaningful social movement was another matter, though even in this regard Catholicism equipped many Poles with a vocabulary of social criticism that helped them make sense of—and propose solutions for—a wide variety of grievances and injustices.

This chapter explores the Catholic Church's antiliberal, antimodern phase from the papal point of view in contrast with today's situation in order to highlight what was accomplished at Vatican II. It considers the so-called “mind of the Church” in the late nineteenth century, following the centralizing changes in governance and authority brought about by Vatican I, along with the conservative communitarian intellectual tradition of the modern papacy as laid out by Pope Leo XIII (1878–1903) in his encyclical letters. It also analyzes Pope Leo's case against liberalism and popular sovereignty and his conviction that the crisis of ecclesiastical authority in the Catholic Church was first and foremost an intellectual crisis. Finally, it discusses Pope Leo's views about the importance of unity for the sovereign powers of the papacy.

This chapter discusses how the Thomistic philosophy survives, looking into the lives of Desiré Joseph Mercier and Jacques Maritain, and the doctrine of Pope John Paul II. As a scholar, Mercier was strongly committed to the idea that all of the sciences could work together with philosophy to form a unified, rational whole. His heroic stand against the Germans during the First World War made him an international celebrity. Leo's defense, like Mercier's, was based on natural right and justice. In 1882, Jacques Maritain was born in Paris. Maritain was perhaps one of the strongest Catholic defenders of democracy in his day. He was convinced that this form of government was best suited to protect the dignity of the human person. The strongest defender of natural law since Leo XIII was Pope John Paul II. His most comprehensive statements appeared in the 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor.

Newman was elected an honorary fellow by his old college, Trinity, and returned to Oxford again after many years. And at the beginning of December 1878, the Duke of Norfolk personally suggested to the Pope that Rome formally recognise Newman's loyalty and orthodoxy. The offer was unusual because Newman was neither a bishop nor resident in Rome. Newman was elevated to Cardinal by Pope Leo XIII. Newman's health deteriorated and he celebrated mass for the last time on Christmas Day 1889. He died of pneumonia on August 11, 1890 and was buried at Rednal in the grave of Ambrose St. John. On his memorial-tablet were inscribed the words “Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem” (Out of unreality into reality).

This chapter explores John Courtney Murray's relationship between the American experience and the legacy of Roman Catholic political thought. It first shows how Murray's Catholic, natural-law style of moral theology overlapped with the Enlightenment deism of the Founding Fathers. What Murray foregrounded through both his scholarship and his participation at the Second Vatican Council was the richness of the Anglo-American legacy of constitutionalism, a legacy seemingly unknown to the Catholic world of Latin Europe and certainly missing from Leo XIII's 1901 encyclical Graves de Communi Re on Christian democracy. The chapter argues that it is time to retrieve Murray's vision for the Catholic Church today, especially in terms of the relationship between church and state, and the distinction of the moral and legal orders that must be weighed in a pluralistic state. Murray believed that conscience should always be protected in this tension, not because freedom is its own reward, but because conscience is the point where the gospel and political life meet and interact.

This chapter examines some of the historical trends, events, individuals, and experiences that pushed Pope Leo XIII in 1891 to release Rerum Novarum, the first papal encyclical. It also summarizes the main themes of this encyclical, whose title is translated as “The Condition of Labor.” It further provides an overview of the second papal encyclical, Quadragesimo Anno (“After Forty Years,” also known as “The Reconstruction of the Social Order”), released in 1931 by Pope Pius XI. The chapter concludes with an exploration of how these teachings on labor were interpreted and put into practice by the Catholic Worker movement, led by Dorothy Day, and the United Farm Workers movement, led by César Chávez and Dolores Huerta.

The principle of subsidiarity essentially mandates that in an institution or social order, authority to implement a policy be allocated that unit or level of governance closest to the individual which is able to effectively implement the desired aim of policy. Subsidiarity assumes that all groups involved in an institution jointly and publicly accept a determinate conception of the good or a hierarchy of values, and that they jointly and publicly accept a common arbiter or a fixed process for authoritatively adjudicating disputes over the application of this aim. But pluralism denies both of these assumptions as it assumes (some) associations claim meta-jurisdictional authority. Thus subsidiarity is incompatible in principle with political pluralism. The move towards subsidiarity has resulted in a denial, in theory and practice, of deep pluralism, as illustrated by the development of the principle from Leo XIII to Pius XI, and in the European Union.

This chapter recounts the way the French government checked Pope Leo XIII’s attempts in the 1880s to establish relations with the Chinese government and how the Chinese government managed the removal of the North Church in Beijing to another site. Then in 1890, a German mission broke away from the French Religious Protectorate under a bishop of dubious character. Germany raised the ante for imperialist behavior in China by forceful seizure of a port in 1897. In 1900, the Boxer Uprising was ostensibly about hostility to things foreign and Christian communities in particular. A war between the Chinese court and the foreign powers ensued, with many casualties.

This chapter describes the Christian humanism of Pope John Paul II, who exemplified the two central features of Christian humanism, namely a Christological anthropology and the synthesis of faith and reason. The chapter first attempts to identify the crisis of modern times by comparing the historical and cultural contexts of popes John Paul II to Leo XIII. A second part shows how John Paul II built on the Leonine tradition but shifted the focus from institutions as arenas of human action within which modern issues are addressed to philosophical anthropology as the fundamental premise for social and cultural analysis and amelioration. The concluding section describes ‘negative anthropology’ and argues that only Christian anthropology is able to redirect the distorted humanism of modernity towards its proper Christian humanist roots.

The conclusion reassesses the early impact of Newman’s theory of development. Contrary to studies of the last several decades, Newman’s theory was not marginal to nineteenth-century Roman Catholic thought; it played a role in the Church’s attempts to come to terms with history as a field of theological inquiry. The conclusion also offers an account of doctrinal development’s subsequent fall into obscurity. As Newman’s theory reached the pinnacle of influence in the decade after his conversion, a new movement in theology, Neoscholasticism, began to expand among Roman Catholics. Neoscholasticism was, in part, a reaction to political events that punctuated the nineteenth century, and the movement was less amenable than the Roman School to the idea of development. It was in large measure the rise of this movement, and the lack of sensitivity to these events in twentieth-century scholarship, which obscured the early significance of Newman’s theory.

This chapter focuses on the Catholic Church's transition to modernity, which did not initially occur by way of theological reform. It came about through pastoral and missionary praxis as well as the rise in power of lay Christian actors: between two popes known for their intransigence, Pope Leo XIII, without compromising on any religious dogma, opened the way for the Church to engage with secular politics. Moreover, Pope Leo XIII took into account the ‘social question’, acknowledging that people were no longer living in a traditional society. The issue was no longer to bring the faithful back to church. The Church now had to reach out to secular society, which meant organizing open, socially oriented pastoral work and using secular political instruments—in other words what was to become Christian democracy—which no longer required religious observance but simple adherence to secularized Christian values. Ultimately, for global Catholicism, the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) hailed the adaptation of theology and ritual to modernism, ending a decades-long fight. Some have described it as a Protestant approach, or a Catholic version of the self-secularization of religion.

Taking the 1903 death of Pope Leo XIII as its starting point, the conclusion extends beyond the legal separation of Church and State (1905) in order to trace the ways in which the processes of transformation that were set in motion during the late nineteenth century continued well into the twentieth century. Pierre Nora’s concept of the lieu de memoire illuminates the numerous ways that the sites of Catholic and French memory that the book explores—whether as opera, popular theatre, or concert—found an extraordinary ally in the Republic as it collectively harnessed the power of memory. From its “origin” in the French medieval era, to its transformations throughout the fin-de-siècle, to the response to the devastating fire at Notre-Dame in 2019, the Catholic Church provided (and continues to provide) a new mode of expression for the French Republic. In effect, the success of the twentieth-century renouveau catholique was set in motion by its nineteenth-century forbear: the path was paved by the Republic’s musical Ralliement and the memorialization of its Catholic past as a fundamental cornerstone of its modern existence.

The conclusion touches upon the death of Pius IX and his contested legacy. It recounts several unsuccessful efforts toward the end of Döllinger’s life to bring about his reconciliation with Rome. It calls attention to the worldwide outpouring of sympathy and solidarity expressed for Döllinger at the time of his ninetieth birthday and after his death. It examines in detail the question of Döllinger and conscience, arguing that Döllinger—in acting according to his conscience—nonetheless partially vindicated the teaching on conscience in mainstream Catholic moral philosophy as voiced by Thomas Aquinas, John Henry Newman, and the Second Vatican Council. Finally, the conclusion subtly suggests that, despite his excommunicated status, Döllinger was a major harbinger of modern ecumenism, and an important, if indirect, influence on the Second Vatican Council—and therefore deserves to be better known in modern church history and modern history generally.