The Last Catholic Spring Withered Before the Council, and No Trace of the Next Can Be Seen. A Historical Reinterpretation

A continuation of Prof. Pertici's look at the history of the Church as we are in the midst of a severe crisis under possibly the worst Pope in history.

From Settimo Cielo

By Sandro Magister

In the previous post from Settimo Cielo, Roberto Pertici, professor of contemporary history at the University of Bergamo, retraced the last centuries of the history of the Catholic Church, from the Council of Trent to the early nineteenth century, to unearth within it the seasons of religious rebirth.

He identified and described two of them. And he outlines a third in this second and final part of his historical reinterpretation, from the mid-nineteenth century to our day.

A fourth revival was certainly among the aims of Vatican Council II. But it remained unfinished, while at the same time there advances the wave of de-Christianization, apparently inexorable.

Pertici’s essay ends without his being able to say what will happen in the near future. But neither can it be ruled out that a religious rebirth may take place again, perhaps unexpectedly and on account of impulses outside of ecclesiastical authority, as has already happened repeatedly in the past.

In a future conclave, the cardinals could be reflecting on this as well.

In the photo above, the writer Giovanni Papini (1881-1956), one of the great converts of the “Renouveau catholique” of the first half of the twentieth century.

Have a good read!

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IS A “RELIGIOUS REBIRTH” POSSIBLE?

II - From the mid-nineteenth century to today

by Roberto Pertici

4. The “religious rebirth” of the early nineteenth century gave out with the failure of the revolutions of 1848-49, which caused a historical disappointment with effects that could hardly be overestimated on the European culture of the decades to come.

The subsequent restoration, the second after that of 1814-1815, was largely supported by the Churches: in the Catholic sphere, Pius IX’s swerve to the right prompted by “fear” of the revolution and the new policy of the pontiff and of Giacomo Antonelli, his secretary of state, marked the rupture of the Catholicism-freedom pairing on which many liberal Catholics had exhausted themselves over the previous twenty years and, in Italy, of Catholicism as the civil religion of the national cause. In France, most of the Catholic world supported for all of the next decade the authoritarian pivot of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte and the second empire. Juan Donoso Cortés theorized dictatorship as a dam against the revolutionary wave. The process that would lead to the “Syllabus” of 1864 began.

This congealment, which also concerned the other Christian Churches, provoked a new wave of intellectual but also popular anticlericalism: not only in France, where it blended into the resistance against the Napoleonic coup d'état, but also in England (the origins of the secularist movement of George Holyoake) and in Germany (the great debate of the fifties on materialism, so full of political significance). From 1859 to 1863 came the publication of, in order: “On the Origin of Species” by Charles Darwin, “On Liberty” by John Stuart Mill (1859), “La Sorcière” by Jules Michelet and “Les Misérables” by Victor Hugo (1862), “Vie de Jésus” by Ernest Renan (1863). In short, European culture deserted the Catholic Church and more in general Christianity.

A similar argument can also be made with regard to Italian culture, including literary culture. Even a superficial glance shows us a series of literary circles (from the “scapigliati” to the “veristi” to the “esteti” of the early nineties) in which religious sensitivity is completely absent. The eclipse of the star of Alessandro Manzoni, evident after 1870, the weakness of his imitators (from Ruggiero Bonghi to Giacomo Zanella), the growing fortune of the entirely classical and pagan poetry of Giosuè Carducci (who in the previous decade had been the poet of Italian anticlericalism) are among the most significant indicators of the new climate. It was a whole generation that broke away from Christianity: one cannot be cultured and Christian at the same time in an age of Darwinism and secular scientism. Hence the exceptional and nonconformist character of a few conversions, such as that of Antonio Fogazzaro and, later, in eighties Rome, of Giulio Salvadori. In short, one was witnessing a new paradigm shift: the opening of the age of positivism.

5. Something new began to change toward the end of the eighties: starting from France. Here too we can indicate a symbolic date: the publication in Paris in 1886 of “Le roman russe” by Melchior de Vogüé. While France had been seething for decades with a realist literature based on the most oppressive form of materialism and determinism, in Russia - this was more or less the proclamation of that brilliant diplomat - there developed instead a literary culture that dealt with the great metaphysical, spiritual, and religious problems of contemporary man.

In the following years Ferdinand Brunetière, director of the “Revue des deux mondes” since 1893, proclaimed the “bankruptcy of science.” The era of the “Grands Convertis” began: Paul Bourget, J.-K. Huysmans, Brunetière himself, Francis Jammes, Charles Péguy, Jacques Maritain and his wife Raïssa, Paul Claudel. In Europe there was a general return to Catholicism, or at least to religious discussion, by a series of great intellectuals, especially writers: in France Georges Bernanos, Julien Green, François Mauriac, Ernest Psichari; in Great Britain T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, Robert Hugh Benson, Evelyn Waugh, Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton; in Norway Sigrid Undset; in Austria Franz Werfel; in Poland Henryk Sienkiewicz; in Russia Nikolai Berdjaev; in Germany Carl Schmitt, Romano Guardini.

It is the composite movement that has been called the “Renouveau catholique.” While the Church, with the anti-modernist persecution, reduced to silence and obedience the culturally most dynamic parts of the clergy, it paradoxically left more room for this intellectual laity, judging it less dangerous on the doctrinal level: indeed capable of conveying its religious message more broadly in a society in which the traditional Catholic presence had been shrinking more and more, to the point of becoming a minority. The position of most of these intellectuals was critical of “modernity,” its materialism, the decline of traditional moral values, the emergence of mass uniformity: these gave warning of a need for a “return to order” and to “tradition,” typical of a conservative paradigm.

In Italian historical and literary culture the “Renouveau catholique” has been given little consideration, yet this phenomenon also presented itself in Italy: Agostino Gemelli, the founder of the Catholic University, had been a socialist and positivist and had studied medicine in Paris and psychology in Germany: but he had converted to Catholicism and had entered the Franciscan order. His was the first of a series of conversions of men of culture and of “intellectuals,” which also took place in Italy in the years of the lead-up to the war, then of the war and the post-war period. The new “converts” belonged to the world of magazines, publishing houses, newspapers of opinion, in short to militant literature; that is, they moved in environments in which there had been almost complete irreligiosity during the previous decades, and they seemed like the symptom of a reversal of tendency. Giosuè Borsi, Domenico Giuliotti, Federigo Tozzi, Giuseppe Fanciulli, Ferdinando Paolieri, Guido Battelli, later Clemente Rebora and even former followers of the neo-idealist philosopher Giovanni Gentile such as Mario Casotti and Armando Carlini again proposed, in sometimes resentful and aggressive ways, the problem of a Catholic culture.

But it was the conversion of Giovanni Papini, with his “Story of Christ” that appeared in April of 1921, that immediately constituted one of the post-war literary causes célèbres, marking the “emergence from the catacombs” of a new culture that was organized during the following years without waiting (as is sometimes wearily repeated) for the new concordatory climate between state and Church. That same period saw the birth of the Catholic University of Milan, the most significant institution born from the Italian “Renouveau catholique.” It was a cultural movement quite variegated and differentiated within itself, which - in not a few of its representatives - could see in the Fascism of the twenties an enemy of many of its enemies and some realization of a few of its expectations, but without ever identifying completely with it, always remaining something else, in both its cultural presuppositions and its spiritual horizons. The same can be repeated for many representatives of the European “Renouveau catholique.”

For many decades it was these authors, not the theologians, who conveyed Catholic culture, not only in vast sectors of the Catholic laity, but also among the educated public. To give an example: the French writer Joseph Malègue, so dear to the current pontiff, was entirely within this world.

6. If this was the way things were, then one understands when this “religious rebirth” gave out: with the sunset of the “conservative paradigm,” about which I wrote previously on Settimo Cielo of August 31 2020. “After 1945,” I wrote, “the conservative paradigm seemed overwhelmed by the violent end of the radical right-wing regimes (Fascism, National Socialism). The relationship between conservatism and these regimes is historically controversial. There are not a few scholars (including the undersigned) who also emphasize, alongside the undeniable compromises, the perhaps even greater divisions and conflicts. But in the post-war period the prevailing thesis was that right-wing totalitarianism had essentially been the development and the complete unfolding of conservative culture, which therefore deserved to disappear along with the others.”

This change was not immediate: throughout the fifties the catalogs of Catholic publishing houses continued to bring forward the authors of the “Renouveau catholique”; until in the early sixties (for the Church, the years of the Council), with the attenuation of the Cold War and the fading of the pre-war generation, that cultural constellation was definitively submerged. Who re-reads Mauriac or Bernanos or Claudel anymore today? What high-level Catholic literature or culture has taken their place and offers itself to a Catholic catechist or teacher?

We can identify in Vatican II the biggest attempt at Catholic reform made by the Church in recent centuries. Again in Settimo Cielo of September 14 2020 I tried to explain the reasons why, contrary to the hopes and efforts of many churchmen and also of the intellectual laity, this council has not so far produced the “religious rebirth” that was certainly among its aims; indeed it has contributed - contrary to its expectations - to a process of “Christian de-Christianization,” as Michel Onfray effectively defined it, which endures to this day.

Many observers thought, hoped, or feared that the decomposition of Marxism and the end of Communism in Europe (the historical enemies of the Churches and religious culture of the twentieth century) could bring about a new “religious rebirth.” The great personality of John Paul II, his extraordinary media impact and his cultural stature seemed to be the emblem of this, the ecclesial movements (to which that pontiff was giving ample space) its possible vehicles: but the gigantic funeral of Karol Wojtyla was to a certain extent also the funeral of that dream. Benedict XVI’s plan to relaunch a Catholic culture that would respond critically to the challenges of modernity was defeated by “friendly fire,” as well as by the reaction of rejection on the part of the moguls of the Italian and international media world: it was perceived as a “restoration” rather than as an attempt at “rebirth.” As for the current pontificate, it is still too early to make an assessment of it, but one gets the impression that it does not even set for itself the aim of a “religious rebirth” in the sense that I have tried to illustrate here: if anything, of a “political” rebirth, in part because this is the only language that the dominant media system is able to understand.

7. In conclusion: the “religious rebirths” that have taken place in European culture in recent centuries did not develop under a direct impulse from the Church-institution and the hierarchy, except for the first, that of the sixteenth century, which nevertheless produced its culturally more mature fruits in the age of seventeenth-century French classicism, with results that the Church partially condemned and even fought against. The one promoted and hoped for by the Church of Vatican II has so far not brought the desired results.

The other rebirths occurred after great epochal events that relaunched the image of the Church as an institution capable of defying the storms of history, in the age of Romanticism, or profound cultural breaks, like the crisis of positivism and the rebirth of religious sentiment. between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One wonders whether in both cases the Church that Joseph de Maistre or Bernanos or Eliot had in mind was not an “imagined community” rather than a real historical entity. In all these cases, however, these rebirths were accompanied by attitudes critical toward the inexorable march of “modernity,” sometimes opposing it, in other cases trying to graft the Christian spirit (liberal Catholicism) into it, but without ever accepting it completely: maintaining a deep-seated refusal in the face of it.

The Church has variously sought to manage, temper, institutionalize, sometimes even repress these movements, which developed outside of its impulse and ultimately also of its control.

Will “religious rebirths” still be attempted? Will it still be up to the laity, to single individuals or groups and movements, given the spiritual atrophy of the institutional Church, to try to promote them? And with what contents? Or this time will it be the Church that will try to reopen a religious discourse? And with what attitude toward the hypermodernity that surrounds us?

For the historian, these inevitably remain questions without an answer.