Bible - CH 37

CHAPTER 37

 RESTORING THE FORTRESS

 Catholicism in the Age of Progress

 On the eastern edge of Paris stood an old feudal fortress, long used as a prison. Popular propaganda had made it a symbol of royal tyranny. Languishing in its dungeons were supposed to be virtuous defenders of oppressed people. Governor de Launay held the Bastille with a garrison of 110 soldiers.

 Early in the morning on July 14, 1789, a crowd began gathering in a small square before the prison’s outer gate. It grew in numbers and in excitement. People started pushing toward the great gate. Some adventurous patriots climbed up and cut the chains to the drawbridge, giving the attackers access to the outer court.

 Sensing the vicious mood of the mob, de Launay agreed to surrender the fortress on terms of a safe withdrawal for himself and his men. But as soon as the gates of the inner court were opened, the attackers swept in, seized de Launay, and murdered him.

 The dungeons yielded seven victims of tyranny — five ordinary criminals and two madmen. No learned patriots among them! The sordid facts of July 14, 1789, were speedily transformed in the telling into heroic deeds of the French Revolution.

BIRTH OF A NEW AGE

 Historians look to that fateful event as the birth of a new age: the Age of Progress (1789 – 1914). The Bastille was a symbol of the old regime: the absolute rule of monarchs and the traditional feudal society consisting of the Catholic Church, wealthy aristocrats, and powerless commoners. The tumultuous crowd was a token of the new age, the nineteenth century, and its rights of common people.

 The foundation of popular belief in the new era was the doctrine of human progress. If the riot and the bloodshed that followed the fall of the Bastille raised questions about the conditions on the road to progress, few doubted that history moved relentlessly upward. The human race was getting better and growing happier. That, at any rate, was the new creed.

 Christianity made its way through this tumultuous period but under adverse conditions. The nineteenth century was swept by currents and crosscurrents, and Christians found it hard at times to find the right way. Protestants felt the impact, but the Roman Catholic Church, because of its long association with the old order, found that many of its treasures from the past were swept violently away by the winds of modern times. 77

 The democratic gospel of the French Revolution rested on the glorification of humanity rather than God. The Church of Rome recognized this and struck back at the heresy as she had always done. She saw more clearly than did most Protestant churches that the devil, when it is to his advantage, is democratic.

 Ten thousand people telling a lie do not turn the lie into truth. That is an important lesson from the Age of Progress for Christians of every generation. The freedom to vote and a chance to learn do not guarantee the arrival of utopia. The Christian faith has always insisted that the flaw in human nature is more basic than any fault in political or social institutions.

 Alexis de Tocqueville, a visitor in the United States during the nineteenth century, issued a warning in his classic study, Democracy in America . In the United States, he said, neither aristocracy nor princely tyranny exist. Yet, asked de Tocqueville, does not this unprecedented “equality of conditions” itself pose a fateful threat: the “tyranny of the majority”? In the processes of government, de Tocqueville warned, rule of the majority can mean oppression of the minority, control by erratic public moods rather than reasoned, principled leadership.

 Unfortunately, in resisting the gospel of the common man, the Church of Rome tried to turn back the clock. She tried to erect a medieval fortress on the road to progress, and masses of secular men and women simply passed by on the other side. The question is why. Why did Catholicism look with such fear on the popular movements of the time?

 The winds of the new age were forecast in the call of the French Revolution: “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.”

 Liberty stood for individual freedoms in the political and economic arenas. The terms liberty and liberalism are used with a confusing variety. Liberty in a social sense might include Ronald Reagan and Ted Kennedy, because both men sought (and their respective parties still seek) to maximize and extend personal liberty; they differ on what liberty looks like and how to achieve it. Yet we still speak of liberty as the goal. Theologically and politically, the terms also demand careful attention.

 Liberals in early nineteenth - century politics were voices for the middle class. They wanted the right to vote and the control of representative governments. In matters of money, they wanted freedom to build factories and amass wealth without the interference of governments ( laissez faire ).

 Equality, the second term, stood for the rights of men, irrespective of their family background or financial standing. During the nineteenth century, peasants and urban workers attempted to gain political equality with the middle class, so they supported social philosophies that advanced their rights. But whereas the middle class, property owners, and business barons championed the doctrine of laissez faire , the working class demanded equality by a rival philosophy called socialism. Advantages for the workers could come either by evolution within a democratic framework or by revolution in a Marxist pattern.

 Fraternity, the third idea, represented a powerful sense of brotherhood unleashed in the nineteenth century. The rebels who stormed the Bastille were united by an ambition to be masters of their own territory and national destiny. They were driven by nationalism, which not only swept across nineteenth - century Europe but in the twentieth century went on to engulf Asia and Africa.

 All of these currents and more swirled about the churches in the Age of Progress, but no one predicted the devastation they would bring to the tradition - bound Church of Rome.

 On the eve of the French Revolution the Roman Catholic Church basked in the glory of the old order. For a thousand years she had sanctified the structures of feudal Europe. She gave divine blessing to the rule of kings and the marriages of nobles. Like these monarchs and aristocrats, the church gave little thought to the powerlessness of the peasants and the growing middle class. In eighteenth - century European society, noble birth and holy calling were of greater consequence than intelligence, achievement, or opportunity.

 In France’s total population of 25 million, only two hundred thousand belonged to the privileged classes — the nobility and clergy. These two groups controlled nearly half of the nation’s land and held the best positions in the government. The peasants — 80 percent of the population — staggered under intolerable burdens, including heavy taxes to church and state. The middle class had wealth without responsibility, intelligence without authority, and ability without recognition. Drastic change was simply a matter of time — less time than anyone dreamed.

REVOLUTIONARY FEVER

 The Age of Enlightenment created the ferment for change, but most of that ferment was expressed in words rather than action. Beginning in the 1760s, country after country felt the fever of political unrest. In little states like Geneva and large states like England, radical politicians challenged the established order. Everywhere their basic demands were the same: the right to participate in politics, the right to vote, the right to greater freedom of expression.

 The American Revolution in the 1770s inspired these radicals in Europe. It offered a great lesson to ponder and perhaps to imitate. To European observers, the American founding fathers were true men of the Enlightenment — rational yet passionately concerned about equality, peaceful yet ready to go to war for their freedom. By wresting independence from a formidable imperial power, they had proved that the Enlightenment ideas worked. They had been tested in the hardest laboratory of all, the laboratory to which the Enlightenment liked to submit all its ideas: experience.

 In France, the most populous country in Europe, evidence of political and economic bankruptcy mounted. The government was borrowing huge sums from European bankers and falsifying records to hide the true state of its finances. In addition, high living among church officials and a series of bad harvests in the strategic French wine industry contributed to an atmosphere of restlessness.

 King Louis XVI tried to make repairs. In 1789 he convened the Estates - General, a national assembly representing the three traditional divisions — or estates — in French society: the clergy, the nobility, and the common people.

 Controversy sprang up immediately over how the assembly should conduct its business. It had not met for 175 years, and its powers had never been clearly defined. As Peter Gay describes it, “The aristocracy and the clergy, seeking to preserve their traditional privileges, wanted each estate to vote as a unit. This would have left control of the assembly with the upper classes. The common people, comprising the third estate, wanted each representative to vote as an individual. Since their representation in the assembly had recently been enlarged to 50 percent of the total membership, and they figured on the support of liberals in the other two estates, this would have given them numerical control.

 “Popular agitation over this issue grew intense, and revolutionary sentiments spread. When the king would not honor the Third Estate’s demands, the commoners broke away from the Estates - General to form their own National Assembly.”

 On July 14, 1789, the enraged Parisian mob stormed the Bastille: the crown could no longer keep order; from then on, the French populace had to be counted as a political force. By the end of August, most of the French aristocracy’s traditional feudal privileges had been wiped out by the National Assembly, and a bold Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen had passed into law.

 The declaration codified most of the demands of the Enlightenment: it declared that the natural rights of man, “liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression,” were sacred and inalienable; it established men’s right to express their opinions freely; it prohibited arbitrary arrest and protected the rights of the accused. It also declared that France was not the private property of its monarchs but a sovereign nation owned by its people!

 In the brief ten years before the century ended, France formed a republic, executed a king, established an effective if faction - ridden revolutionary regime, and passed from that through a period of confusion that ended with a coup d’état and General Napoleon Bonaparte’s accession to power. Through it all, the French nation continually fought the rest of Europe.

 The Church of Rome was so much a part of the old order that the revolutionaries made it a special object of their rage. In the early 1790s the revolutionary National Assembly attempted to reform the church along the lines of Enlightenment ideals. It provided a decent income for pastors and reshaped the diocesan boundaries, all for the good. But when the assembly eliminated all control by the pope in the French church and imposed a loyalty oath on church officeholders, it split the church down the middle. Two Catholic camps faced each other in almost every town and village of France: the constitutional clergy who took the oath and the nonconstitutional who refused.

 The leaders of the revolution soon drove thirty to forty thousand priests out of their native towns into exile or hiding. And that proved to be only a prelude. The revolution began to take on a religious character all its own. A new calendar removed all traces of Christianity and elevated the cult of reason. Soon parish churches were converted to temples of reason, and in the cathedral of Notre Dame, revolutionaries enthroned an actress on the high altar as the goddess of reason. This set the pattern for the provinces. Young girls decked out as Reason or Liberty or Nature led processions through towns to altars erected to the new religion of the revolution.

 By 1794 this parody of Christianity had spent its force, and a decree early the following year guaranteed the free exercise of any religion in France. All over the country Catholics returned to the altar. The Church of Rome, however, never forgot: liberty meant the worship of the goddess of reason!

 When Napoleon seized the reins of power, he had the good sense to work out an agreement with the pope — the Concordat of 1801 — that restored the Church of Rome to a special place in France. It was called “the religion of the great majority of Frenchmen,” but the church had lost forever its position of power. France and the rest of Europe could never return to a society held together by an alliance of throne and altar. And the Church of Rome never developed a taste for liberalism. The reasons are not hard to find.

PROFILES of Faith

 Yi Seung - hun (1756 – 1801), a young Korean scholar, in the winter of 1783 accompanied his father on a three - month diplomatic visit to the Chinese imperial capital. The official mission was to pay tribute to the Chinese emperor, but for Yi Seung - hun, the visit was also a long - awaited chance to learn about the Christian religion from the Catholic missionaries stationed in Beijing. After learning the catechism, Yi was baptized in China, and he returned home to lead the first independent Christian community on the Korean peninsula. The fledgling church survived more than a century of persecution that produced thousands of martyrs, including Yi Seung - hun himself. Despite this, the church grew steadily. Today, nearly a third of Koreans practice Christianity and South Korea sends out more Christian missionaries than any country other than the United States.

CATHOLICISM VERSUS LIBERALISM

 The Lord and his apostles had spent little time talking about freedom and personal independence and a man’s right to his own opinions. And through the Middle Ages and the Reformation, Augustine’s axiom that liberty comes by grace and not grace by liberty had been at the bottom of the organization and imposition of Christian belief. To be properly free, a person must be in a state of salvation, so throughout these centuries Christians had little enthusiasm for the idea of improper freedom — freedom in a political sense.

 During the nineteenth century, however, the idea that everyone ought to be as free as possible was in the air. But how far is possible?

 “The liberty of each,” wrote John Stuart Mill, “is limited by the like liberty of all.” That defined the possible. Liberty meant the right to have your own opinions, to propagate your own opinions, and to behave according to your own opinions — subject to a similar freedom for each member of the community. In practice this meant a constitutional government that guaranteed civil liberties to all, including the freedom to worship according to personal choice. The popes despised the thought.

 When Napoleon’s empire collapsed in 1815 and he was banished to a bleak island in the Atlantic, absolutist kings tried to regain their lost ground. But the return to monarchies met stiff resistance from liberals all over Europe.

 The first liberal uprisings in Spain and Italy were easily suppressed. But the liberal success in overturning the restored kings of France (1830) gave the promise of change. The important year was 1848, when liberal revolution temporarily triumphed in almost every capital in Europe.

 Through all those years the popes — Leo XII, Pius VIII, and Gregory XVI — were not bad men. They simply refused to join the nineteenth century. They continued to defend the past and lost touch with the movements of their time. None of them really understood the new world introduced by the French Revolution. They never figured out how to fight it or how to convert it.

 Liberalism proposed to overthrow the evils that afflict humanity, and in this battle it not only refused the assistance of the Roman Catholic Church, it insisted that the church had no right to express its views on the morality of public life. For politics was independent of Christian ethics. Roman Catholics are private citizens with all the rights of private citizens, but nothing more.

 The most obvious symbol of the papal ties to the past were the Papal States in Italy, for in these the pope was not only a spiritual leader but an earthly sovereign. For centuries Italy had been nothing more than a geographical expression. It embraced seven Italian states in addition to the papal territories running northeast from Rome across the peninsula.

 In the middle of the nineteenth century, however, a movement for Italian unity arose in Sardinia. It was called risorgimento — “rebirth.” It aimed at the overthrow of all alien powers in Italy and the unity of the whole peninsula in a modern Italian nation. This revolutionary spirit could not tolerate the continuation of the Papal States, a medieval state in the heart of Italy governed by strict absolutist principles. After 1849 the Papal States were so hated they could be defended only by French bayonets.

 Liberals initially welcomed Pope Pius IX (1846 – 78). He was a warm, kindly, well - meaning man, and the liberals took him for a true reformer when, on March 14, 1848, he gave the Papal States a constitution that permitted the people a moderate degree of participation in their government. Some dreamed of an Italian federation under the pope. But Pius suddenly changed his mind about the Papal States when revolutionaries assassinated the first papal prime minister, Count Pellegrino Rossi. Revolution broke out in Rome, and Pius was forced to flee. With French military help, he regained Rome and the Papal States, but this time Pius insisted on a return to the old absolutist rule.

 The irritation of his opponents mounted, and the national unity movement, headed by King Victor Emmanuel II of Sardinia (1849 – 78), grew into an avalanche that could not be diverted. In 1859 – 60 large portions of the Papal States fell to the nationalists. In Florence in March 1861 Victor Emmanuel was proclaimed king of Italy.

 Rome itself was still protected by a French garrison, but when the Franco - Prussian War forced the withdrawal of the French troops to their homeland, Italian nationalists immediately invaded Rome. After a short bombardment on September 20, 1870, the city surrendered. After more than a thousand years, the Papal States came to an end. 78

 Pius IX withdrew into the Vatican. In June 1871 Victor Emmanuel transferred his residence to Rome, ignoring all protests and excommunications of the pope. The new government offered the pope an annual subsidy together with the free and unhindered exercise of all his spiritual functions. But Pius angrily rejected the offer and continued his protests as the “prisoner of the Vatican.” He forbade Italy’s Catholics to participate in political elections. But this only left a free field to the radicals. The result was an increasingly anticlerical course in the Italian government. This unpleasant condition, the Roman Question, reached no solution until Benito Mussolini concluded the Lateran Treaty in February 1929. In the treaty, the pope renounced all claims to the former Papal States and received full sovereignty in the small Vatican State.

IMMACULATE CONCEPTION; INFALLIBLE POPE

 The year 1870, however, not only marks the end of the earthly rule of the pope but also signifies the declaration of the supreme authority of the bishop of Rome and the doctrine of papal infallibility. That is more than symbolic. The First Vatican Council represented the culmination of a movement called ultramontanism. It means “across the mountains” — the Alps — and stands for devotion to Rome.

 After the French Revolution, a peculiar loyalty to the papacy had developed in that troubled country. After the turmoil of the revolutionary and Napoleonic years, some Catholics extolled the papacy as the only source of civil order and public morality. They claimed that only the popes were capable of restoring the disordered human society, and only a clergy independent from the state and firmly led by an infallible pope, the uncontested master of the church, had the required prestige and strength to protect spiritual freedom from the tyranny of political power.

 Infallibility, therefore, had appeared as the unavoidable, necessary, and obvious prerequisite of an effective papacy. The church must be a monarchy according to the will of God. What sovereignty was to secular kings, infallibility was to the popes; infallibility was nothing more than sovereignty in the realm of the spirit and the church. In this way convinced monarchists could transfer their concepts of political authority to the church and the papacy.

 By midcentury this line of thinking attracted a sizable Catholic following. The pope encouraged it in every way possible. A Jesuit publication explained that when the pope meditated, God was thinking in him. Hymns appeared addressed not to God but to Pius IX, and some dared to speak of the Holy Father as “the vice - God of humanity.”

 On December 8, 1854, Pius IX declared as dogma the traditional belief that Mary had been conceived without original sin: “It is a divinely revealed truth of faith that Mary in the first moment of her conception was freed by special grace from the stain of original sin in view of the merits of Christ.” The subject of the decision was not new. It was the way it was proclaimed. This was not a decision by a council but an ex cathedra definition by the pope. The expression means “from the chair,” the official teaching role within the church.

 Questions arose from all sides. Can the pope alone, without council, decide and proclaim dogma? The one great topic of the First Vatican Council was before the church. The solemn proclamation of Mary’s immaculate conception was attended by fifty - four cardinals and 140 bishops, but the decision was made by the pope alone.

 Ten years later, December 1864, as the Italian nationalists tightened their noose around the neck of the Papal States, Pope Pius IX sent an encyclical, or papal letter, to all bishops of the church.

 In it he enclosed a Syllabus of Errors , a compilation of eighty evils in modern society. In no uncertain terms, he declared war on socialism, rationalism, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, public schools, Bible societies, separation of church and state, and a host of other demons in the Age of Progress. He concluded by denying that “the Roman pontiff can and ought to reconcile himself and reach agreement with progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.”

 Pius IX wanted no peace talks with the modern world. The church had to close its ranks around its infallible leader and brace itself for a long struggle.

 To strengthen the hands of the Vicar of Christ, Pius laid plans for a general council of the church. He appointed a preparatory congregation of cardinals (March 9, 1865), took additional bishops into his confidence, and, on the occasion of the eighteen hundredth anniversary of the martyrdom of Peter and Paul (1867), announced to more than five hundred bishops his plan to convoke a council. The council opened in Rome on December 8, 1869.

 The question of the definition of papal infallibility was in the air. The concept as such posed no great difficulties; Catholics had little doubt that the pope, as successor of Peter, possessed special teaching authority. The only question was how far this authority extended, whether it could be exercised independently from councils and the College of Bishops, and what special conditions would have to be met.

 In the council, Bishop Hefele of Rottenburg, the learned author of the famous History of the Councils , and Bishop Strossmayer of Djakovar in Bosnia led the opposition against a definition; they were supported by numerous other cardinals and bishops, among them the majority of the Germans.

 At the first balloting on July 13, 1870, 451 council fathers voted in favor of the definition of infallibility, eighty - eight opposed it, and sixty - two accepted it with reservations. Many who opposed simply thought that the time was not right.

 After further discussion a number were still uncertain, but rather than create a scandal, fifty - five bishops, with the consent of the pope, left Rome before the final vote. The vote for the record, on July 18, was 533 for the doctrine of infallibility. Only two against.

 Thus the council asserted two fundamental truths: the primacy of the pope and the infallibility of the pope.

 First, as the successor of Peter, Vicar of Christ, and supreme head of the church, the pope exercises full and direct authority over the whole church and over the individual bishops. This authority extends to matters of faith and morals as well as to discipline and church administration. Therefore, the individual bishop owes the pope obedience “not only in matters concerning faith and morals, but also in those of habits and administration of the church.”

 Second, when the pope in his official capacity ( ex cathedra ) makes a final decision concerning the entire church in a matter of faith and morals, this decision in itself is infallible and immutable and does not require the prior consent of the church.

 Immediately after the vote on infallibility, the council had to discontinue its work. The outbreak of the Franco - Prussian War (July 19, 1870) forced many council fathers to return home. And later the occupation of Rome by the Italian nationalists on December 20, 1870, destroyed any hope of continuing. No matter, the really vital work had been done. The council succeeded in restoring, so to speak, the Bastille.

 The whole strategy of the ultramontanists, led by Pius IX, shaped the lives of Roman Catholics for generations to come. Surrounded by the hostile forces of liberalism, socialism, and nationalism, Rome chose to withdraw for safety behind the walls of an exalted and infallible papacy.

 Unfortunately, fortresses have a decided disadvantage. They grow stuffy. They allow no enlargement of thinking, and after a time you begin to imagine that the only world of any importance lies within the walls.

Chapter 37: Restoring the Fortress - Catholicism in the Age of Progress

The Fall of the Bastille

• Location: Eastern edge of Paris, an old feudal fortress used as a prison (the Bastille).

• Symbolism: The Bastille represented royal tyranny according to popular propaganda, and was believed to contain defenders of the oppressed.

• Governance: The fortress was commanded by Governor de Launay with 110 soldiers in garrison.

• Event Date: July 14, 1789. A crowd gathered outside the Bastille, growing in excitement as they pushed towards the gates.

• Assault: Some climbers cut the chains of the drawbridge, allowing access.

• Surrender: De Launay agreed to surrender if he and his men could withdraw safely; however, upon opening the gates, he was captured and killed by the mob.

• Outcome: Only seven prisoners were freed: five common criminals and two mentally ill individuals; the narrative turned these events into heroic deeds of the French Revolution.

Birth of a New Age - The Age of Progress (1789 – 1914)

• Significance: Historians mark this event as the start of the Age of Progress, representing a break from absolute monarchy and feudal society.

• Elements of the Old Regime: Traditional authority existed through the Catholic Church, the aristocracy, and powerless commoners.

• Doctrine of Progress: People believed in the relentless upward move of human history towards improvement and happiness.

• Christianity’s Challenges: The Catholic Church struggled to adapt, facing societal shifts that threatened its traditional values. Protestants felt the impact but the Catholic Church faced a direct assault due to its ties to the old order.

• Democratic Gospel: The ideals of the revolution emphasized humanity over God, causing the Church to recognize and resist this heresy.

• Warning: Alexis de Tocqueville warned of the potential oppression of the minority by the majority in a democracy.

Reactions of the Catholic Church

• Resisting Change: The Catholic Church attempted to resist the popular movements of the time, striving to preserve past traditions in a modernizing world.

• French Revolution Motto: "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity" introduced new social dynamics:

  • Liberty: Focused on freedoms in political and economic realms, seen differently by various political figures.

  • Equality: Advocated for equal rights across all social standings, with tensions fueled by class struggles between peasants, workers, and the middle class.

  • Fraternity: A sense of national unity emerged, driven by the desire for self-determination.

Political Climate

• Enlightenment Influence: Ideas of liberty and equality gained traction, inspired by the American Revolution.

• French Political Crisis: King Louis XVI's efforts to repair the government's financial crisis led to the convening of the Estates-General, where conflict arose between the estates over voting procedures.

• Formation of the National Assembly: When the king failed to meet demands, the commoners broke away to create their own assembly.

• Storming of the Bastille: This event marked the beginning of the people’s political power and led to the National Assembly repealing feudal privileges and declaring rights.

Church Versus State During the Revolution

• Hostility towards the Church: The revolutionaries saw the Church as part of the old regime, leading to a push for reform along Enlightenment lines.

• Constitutional Clergy: Clergy who took loyalty oaths to the revolution split the Church in France, leading to widespread persecution of those who refused.

• Cult of Reason: Revolutionaries created a new calendar and elevated reason above Christianity, leading to acts such as enthroning a goddess in Notre Dame.

Restoration under Napoleon

• Concordat of 1801: Napoleon established a working relationship with the Church, restoring its role in France but decreasing its power significantly.

Profiles of Faith

• Yi Seung-hun (1756 – 1801): A Korean scholar who learned about Christianity in China and founded the first independent Christian community in Korea, showing resilience through persecution and martyrdom.

Catholicism versus Liberalism

• Historical Context: The church historically emphasized grace over liberty, but the 19th century saw a shift towards personal freedoms.

• Public vs. Private Freedoms: John Stuart Mill's definition of liberty became significant, advocating for individual freedoms balanced by a communal responsibility.

• Popes’ Resistance: Popes resisted liberal ideas and the notion of personal liberties, preferring to adhere to traditional rule.

Papal Authority and Italian Unification

• Papal States: The pope's temporal power clashed with rising nationalist movements in Italy, notably during the resurgence and political turmoil.

• Pope Pius IX's Shift: Initially welcomed by liberals, Pius IX withdrew to absolute governance amid revolutionary pressures, leading to the loss of the Papal States.

Immaculate Conception and Infallibility

• 1870 - A Year of Change: The First Vatican Council addressed papal authority, culminating in the declaration of papal infallibility and solidifying the pope's supremacy over the Church.