The Church Is in Full Crisis, but Can Rise Again Even in the Darkest Hours. The Lesson of History

A look at the history of ups and downs in the history of the Church. Remember, Christ's promise doesn't mean that the Church will always grow stronger.

From Settimo Cielo

By Sandro Magister

In reflecting on the future conclave - a growing topic of reflection among the cardinals, as Settimo Cielo is documenting - one notes an ever stronger urgency to bring back to the center the fundamental questions about God and about man, those on which the Church stands or falls, not only in order to slow the decay of the present Church, which is there for all to see, but on the contrary trusting in a rebirth of Christian vitality, even in a largely indifferent or hostile world.

At other times in the past the Church has gone through periods of decline. The current de-Christianization is one of these. But nothing says it has to be irreversible or irresistible, as none of the past declines has been.

Because in the history of the Church there have also been seasons of religious renewal. Not always promoted and led by the ecclesiastical hierarchies. Indeed, not rarely brought to life autonomously by men of culture, by Christian intellectuals capable of interpreting and inspiring even substantial mass movements.

Reviewing the alternation of these seasons is therefore more instructive than ever for those who ponder the Church today. And that is what Roberto Pertici, professor of contemporary history at the University of Bergamo, does in this essay he has written for Settimo Cielo.

There are at least three religious renewals that Pertici spots in the last half millennium. The first was encouraged by the Council of Trent but had its first roots in the Quattrocento and took shape above all in seventeenth-century France, the century of Pascal (in the portrait) and of “Port-Royal,” going on to decline with the advent of the Enlightenment.

The second blossomed after the French Revolution and Napoleon, in the climate of Romanticism and the new freedoms. It was cultural and political at the same time, ranging from Chateaubriand to Rosmini, from the “Genius of Christianity” to the “Five wounds of the holy Church.” It was extinguished with the anti-liberal congealment of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and with the affirmation of scientific positivism.

The third came between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and is referred to as the “Renouveau catholique” of the great converts, from Bernanos to Eliot, to Chesterton, to Papini with his “Story of Christ.” It gave out in the middle of the last century with the fading of the conservative paradigm already analyzed by Pertici on Settimo Cielo of August 31 2020.

And the fourth? Vatican Council II tried to make a go of it, this time through the drive of the ecclesiastical hierarchies themselves. But without succeeding, for the reasons that Pertici examined in another of his contributions to Settimo Cielo of September 14 2020.

The Church finds itself on this threshold, between an incomplete religious rebirth and the inexorable advance of de-Christianization, facing a future in which anything could happen.

Here is the first part of Pertici’s essay. The second part and the conclusion will follow in a few days.

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IS A “RELIGIOUS REBIRTH” POSSIBLE?

I - From the Council of Trent to the early nineteenth century

by Roberto Pertici

1. Among many observers of the situation the Catholic Church is going through today, whether they be believers or not, there is a widespread perception that this is a matter of an institution, I will not say in a terminal phase, but certainly in a very serious crisis: in short, that something is coming to an end, at least in the West. “Vatican, the end of a world” is the title of the latest book by the well-known French vaticanista Henri Tincq, who passed away in March of 2020, a voice critical of the ecclesial tendencies of recent decades. But that “The Church is burning” is also the view - and the title of one of his books - of such an important personality of the Catholic establishment as Andrea Riccardi.

This is a crisis of “governance” at all levels, worsened by a growing and startling wave of sexual and financial scandals; by the rapid decomposition of the figure of the presbyter, decisive in that institution; by the growing difficulty in relations with the world, for which there are no more words of persuasion and guidance, as has also been seen in the recent pandemic phase; by a lack of culture and of guidelines, which now makes it impossible to provide any answer to those who ask: “Is there such thing as a Catholic culture? And what sort of thing is it?”

This overarching crisis is accompanied by the process of secularization and de-Christianization that has overrun the Western world and has accelerated in the last century, making Catholicism negligible even in contexts in which it had always been an element of identity of decisive importance.

In the face of this situation the question spontaneously arises: is this an inexorable trend, and indeed one destined to accelerate further, or will it be possible to reverse this tendency? And how? Will we see - sooner or later - a “religious rebirth,” capable not of restoring old equilibriums (which is not even desirable) but of reopening a discussion on the “sacred” and on the ultimate ends of existence in a society made up more and more of individuals all intent - it has been written - on living a finitude without suffering, that is, aimless and without past or future? And will the Catholic Church be able to have a role in this rebirth or, rather, will it be willing to play one?

The Catholic friends to whom I pose these questions usually answer me with wishes or statements of principle: a generation of saints is needed… holy priests must arise, disciplined and cultured, as Charles Borromeo wanted them… we have promises (“non praevalebunt!”) that require that we have trust… etc.

The undersigned does not have a philosophy of history, much less a theology of history: he believes in the absolute freedom of the course of history (“History is a great improviser,” the Count of Cavour used to say) and at the same time in the possibility of identifying in what has happened and is happening a logic, which however does not lead to a predisposition toward “necessary” outcomes. He is therefore convinced that the de-Christianization process is not the fruit of some conspiracy, but has deep roots in the culture and history of the last centuries; nevertheless, he hesitates to proclaim that it cannot be reversed, or at least, in some way, resisted.

But the historian cannot make prophecies, and if he does so he is only expressing “wishful thinking,” which ultimately is hardly useful. To try to answer the questions just asked, however, there is one thing he can do: he can climb “centuries on the mountain” and look down on the history of the last half millennium, since the development and deployment of what is called “modernity.” Have there been - within this history - moments of “religious rebirth,” and with what characteristics and outcomes? And what role has the “official” Church played in them?

2. Of course there have been, as we will see right away. There have been phases (which I define precisely as “religious rebirths”) in which important sectors of European culture have returned to discuss religion and reflect on religious problems; in fact, they have had no hesitation in defending the reasons for “orthodoxy” and in admitting and even extolling the function of the Church-institution. In all these rebirths, as we will also see, the main role has been played more by laity than by ecclesiastics.

It will be said: this is still a matter of goings-on pertaining to the world of culture and intellectuals, without a true relationship with the religious life of the “masses.” True, but the cultural sphere is a kind of “self-awareness of society,” and therefore a hegemonic role is played within it, sooner or later, by religious repercussions as well as by the much vaster political and social: the Counter-Reformation came even to the small towns that are reflected in Lake Como, if it is true that in “The Betrothed” Renzo Tramaglino and Lucia Mondella interact with a curate trained in the new seminaries provided for by the Council of Trent, with a friar belonging to one of the orders (the Capuchins) held dear by the Catholic Reform, and even with a cardinal who is laboriously carrying out his pastoral visit, also according to the dictates of the prior council.

The Catholic Reform: this is the first movement of “religious rebirth” that took place in the Catholic sphere after the storm of the Protestant Reformation. The notion was popularized by Hubert Jedin in the brief 1946 book “Full as an egg,” according to Delio Cantimori. The German historian made a conceptual distinction with respect to the political and religious Counter-Reformation initiated by the Council of Trent. The Catholic Reform was not intended to be - like the Counter-Reformation - a repressive and disciplinary movement (aspects on which there has however been a great deal of insistence in the last decades), but was a somewhat spontaneous tendency already present in personalities and circles operating in the second half of the Quattrocento, which then flourished and was encouraged as a response to the Reformation on its own turf, one might say. This was supported by the Council of Trent: the fight against the abuses of the hierarchy and its often scandalous conduct, a widespread need for morality and spirituality, seminary and clerical training reform, new religious orders that operate in the different environments of society, renewed forms of piety and popular devotion, etc.

The Catholic Reform was therefore a “religious rebirth” in which the action of the Church-institution was still playing a decisive role. Yet if we want to see the culturally more mature and lasting fruits, we must move to mid-seventeenth-century France, in that reaction to the spread of “libertinage” and of the new natural philosophy which goes from Pascal to Bossuet to Malebranche: in that incomparable season described by Sainte-Beuve in his “Port-Royal.” A movement that the Church-institution sometimes looked at with great concern and even hostility both on the doctrinal (Jansenism) and political (Gallicanism) level, but that for over a century and a half remained an inevitable point of reference for a Catholic who wanted to give a cultural basis to his faith, outside the culture of the seminaries: it is no coincidence that after 1810 a writer and philosopher like Alessandro Manzoni, in an effort to think in a Catholic way, at first had to hark back to these sources.

When does this first “rebirth” give out? We can venture a date, following the hypothesis of another great book of the twentieth century, “The crisis of the European conscience” by Paul Hazard: the date is 1685, when with the Edict of Fontainebleau Louis XIV abolished for eminently political reasons the religious tolerance in the land of France sanctioned in 1598 with the Edict of Nantes of Henry IV. The consequent emigration, especially to Holland, of the leading Huguenot intellectuals, and here the development of a series of anti-Catholic and even anti-religious polemics, was the symptom of a paradigm shift that was to lead to deism, to natural religion, to the first biblical criticism, to the questioning of miracles: all phenomena that were then to develop impetuously in the Enlightenment, more or less radical, of the eighteenth century.

3. It was the traumas of the French Revolution and the revolutionary wars that constituted the premise of a new “religious rebirth.” Here too we can indicate a somewhat symbolic date: the publication on April 14 1802, in the Napoleonic France that had stipulated a concordat with the Holy See the previous July, of the “Genius of Christianity” by François-Auguste de Chateaubriand. The author, who was 34 years old at the time, was the typical representative of a nobility worn out by revolutionary events: after losing relatives and friends on the guillotine and wandering around the world, he had overcome the libertine agnosticism typical of the Enlightenment, returning to the religion of his fathers. A widespread phenomenon in the European aristocracy of the following decades: one could think of the Cavour family, dedicated to the domestic devotion of St. Francis de Sales after decades of religious indifference.

The abandonment of eighteenth-century sensualism, the reborn sense of traditions and their value, suspicion toward a reason that had proudly claimed it would remake the world according to its own designs, the re-evaluation of common sense, meaning of what - it was said - men had always thought and felt, appreciation for sentiment and imagination, in short, that new cultural paradigm which we can define in a broad sense as “Romantic,” induced a new wave of religiosity and also a return of a substantial part of European culture to religious faith. Among the intellectuals, that is, among those most characterized in the second half of the eighteenth century by complete religious indifference, if not by virulent attacks against religion, there was a series of sensational conversions: in Italy the most famous remains, in fact, that of Manzoni.

After 1815, an eagerness for restoration was widespread in European society: the Church came forward as the interpreter of this and promoted it in an ambiguous relationship with political power. Ambiguous because no sovereign was truly open to a full restoration of the “societas christiana,” so much so that soon a series of Catholic thinkers who had dreamed of it began to say: if this is the way things are, then instead of compromising itself with these states the Church should set sail and start thinking about its freedom. But introducing the theme of the Church’s freedom implied, more or less explicitly, more or less instrumentally, the broader one of “modern” freedoms. Then, after the Parisian revolution of July 1830, the great season of liberal Catholicism began.

It is not rash to say that between 1830 and 1848 Catholic culture (also of the Catholic laity) tried perhaps for the last time to play a hegemonic role in Western Europe. After 1830 the religious and Catholic element was the mainstay of great national revolutions (Belgian, Polish, Irish) that inflamed European public opinion and in which the word “freedom” resounds widely: galvanizing the new Catholics and creating embarrassment for the Holy See, which instead insisted on the theme of the political loyalty of its subjects. The only victorious revolution for the moment, the Belgian one, led to a constitutional monarchy that for the first time incorporated a Catholic party, which would make a fundamental contribution to the elaboration of the new constitution (which in fact affirms the separation of state and Church, meaning the Church’s liberation from all the controls and conditioning of the old jurisdictionalism): this made concrete the possibility of coexistence between the Catholic world and constitutional regimes.

In spite of the pontifical condemnation of the encyclical “Mirari vos” (August 15 1832) and the rupture with the Church of the “apostate” Lamennais, the great season of liberal Catholicism in France opened, which with Charles de Montalembert challenged the liberal world on a few issues such as freedom of instruction. In Spain, Juan Donoso Cortés lived his liberal youth as an anti-Carlist. The emancipation of 1829 brought English Catholics out of the catacombs and Catholicism was at the center of the religious discussion of the 1940s, with the development of the Oxford movement. In the very complicated religious situation in Germany, the circle that gathered in Munich around Johann Joseph von Görres found important expression in the defense of ecclesiastical prerogatives from state power (“Athanasius,” 1838). This explains why in the face of the revolutions of 1848, at least initially, the Church was not seen as an integral part of the counter-revolutionary front: not even in France, as shown by the death on the barricades on June 27 1848 of Paris archbishop Denis-Auguste Affre during an attempt to make peace between the insurgent workers and the troops of Cavaignac.

The awakening of religious culture (and the need for religious reform) of those years was prodigious, even in Italy: from November 11 1830 to July 19 1834 Raffaello Lambruschini wrote the first six “Thoughts of a solitary”; between 1832 and 1833 Antonio Rosmini composed “Of the five wounds of the holy Church,” later published in 1848; in 1834 Silvio Pellico published the “Duties of men,” and Gino Capponi began to write the “Civil history of the Church.” In 1835 Niccolò Tommaseo, an exile in France, published “Of Italy” in Paris, which is like a great Lamennaisian manifesto. Priests, historians, men of letters, revolutionaries as they may have been, all of these were convinced that the future Italian rebirth must be intimately religious: only Pellico maintained that Catholicism as it was (or almost) could be its soul; the others thought of a religion restored in all its purity, thus relieved of its secular privileges (Rosmini) and also of the Papal States (Tommaseo), sometimes bordering on heterodoxy (Lambruschini).

4. This “religious rebirth” ends with the failure of the revolutions of 1848-49...