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The election of Giuseppe Sarto, archbishop of Venice, as Pius X in 1903 was a surprise in that he had little political or diplomatic experience and knew nothing of the workings of the Curia. He did not understand modern thought in science and religious scholarship, and his papacy was marked by a conservatism condemning the modern world and appealing to a loyalty involving the practice of the whole faith of the traditional Church. Pius X's papacy saw the codification of canon law and encouragement of frequent communion, but his reforms of the Curia did not go very far. In France the Dreyfus case and the separation of Church and State caused vehement, sometimes violent, conflict between Catholics and anti‐clericals. The division, which would take years to overcome, was caused by the papacy's earlier condemnation of democracy and socialism, the belief of the French Right that Catholicism was its political strength, the prejudices of some left‐wing politicians, and the centralization of authority which made it impossible for French bishops to ignore the pope's decisions. In Italy the old fight between the pope and the Italian government was now obsolete. It continued on the level of words, but by 1913 Catholics were participating wholeheartedly in Italian politics.

Theologically, tradition may embrace in Christianity both the practice of the faith as well as the faith itself, including scripture; or, more narrowly, ‘tradition may be distinguished from scripture, and taken to mean the teaching and practice of the Church, not explicitly recorded in the words of the Bible, but handed down from the beginning within the Christian community’. Tradition may embrace a sense of age-old ‘orthodoxy’ versus state autocracy. It may also be associated with fundamentalism. This chapter first looks at various definitions and distinctions of tradition in Islam and Christianity before proceeding with a discussion of the Second Vatican Council, Pope Pius X's Encyclical Pascendi Gregis and Pope Pius XII's Divino Afflante Spiritu, John XXIII and Dei Verbum, the spirit and practice of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, definitions and distinctions of sunna, neo-ijtihād and a return to the salaf, tradition and purification, and kénōsis.

This chapter begins with a summary of the aims and objectives of the volume and a historiographical review of the existing literature. It then examines the features, positive and negative, of the legacy of the pontificate of Pius X (1903–14). In particular, it focuses on the longer-term effects of Pius X’s innovations in the liturgical field, his inauguration of the process of codifying Canon Law and his reform of the Roman curia, and his attempts to improve training for the priesthood. It also analyses the longer-term effects of the ‘modernist’ crisis that dominated his reign and the consequences for the papacy during the July crisis of 1914 of Pius X’s and Cardinal Merry Del Val’s mishandling of the Vatican’s diplomatic relations with states.

Ideas of spirit did not enjoy a renaissance only thanks to neurology and psychology; they also took shape in the cultural circumstances of the modernist upheaval in Roman Catholicism during the early twentieth century. Catholic modernism was a multinational movement, which erupted among theologians who sought to reconcile reason and religion. What followed was the official separation of church and state in France in 1905 and the official ban on modernist books in 1907 by Pope Pius X. The chapter focuses on Maurice Blondel and Édouard Le Roy, thinkers who negotiated the Catholic commitments of spiritualist thought. These thinkers did not see eye-to-eye. Le Roy embraced Catholic modernism; Blondel did not. But their ongoing dialogue during the period illuminates how ideas of spirit came to matter afresh for religion.

This chapter demonstrates how a few Catholic seminary professors in the first two decades of the twentieth century began to reconsider and critique the nineteenth-century Catholic understanding of the history of confession in light of Henry Charles Lea’s history of auricular confession and John Henry Newman’s theory of the development of doctrine. That re-examination of the early church’s history of penance met strong resistance from Pope Pius X’s anti-modernist campaign because the new approach clashed with Trent’s understanding of the divine origin of the early church’s practice of auricular confession. The pope, however, also promoted a liturgical revival in the Church that focused on active participation in the Eucharist that had consequences for American Catholic emphases on frequent confession for children as well as adults in preparation for communion. By 1920 that Pian revival in the United States reinforced the nineteenth-century promotion of frequent and devotional confessions.

This chapter discusses the mission of the laity, people belonging to a religious order who are not in the clergy. In some past centuries it might almost have seemed that the laity had no mission. Sensing the advent of a new situation, the popes at the beginning of the twentieth century began to involve the laity in the ministry of the Church. Pius X established Catholic Action, and Pius XI assiduously fostered its growth. As a general description of what the lay faithful are to do, the Vatican II council selected the term “apostolate”. The council defined the apostolate as the sum total of the activity whereby the Mystical Body spreads the kingdom of Christ and thereby brings the world to share in Christ's saving redemption. The discussion suggests that lay ministries in the Church, properly conducted, can greatly help to offset the forces of secularism.

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.