One other new element which made the secularisation debate in the nineteenth century different from that of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries involved the revised notion of ‘dogma’. Originally, dogma meant an affirmation of beliefs, or doctrines – in other words, it had a positive flavour. But that gradually changed so that, by the age of the Enlightenment, to be dogmatic was to be ‘unenlightened and closed to alternative interpretations of the truth’.47 This was an important transformation because although the Catholic hierarchy was by no means inexperienced at combating heretical dogmas, the very notion of dogma was itself now under attack. The successful methods of the positive sciences offered an alternative and were increasingly used as tools for attacking the church. One organisation that sounds fanciful now but which was typical of the time was the Society for Mutual Autopsy. This was a group (of anthropologists mainly) who were so concerned to prove that there was no soul that they all bequeathed their bodies to the society, so that they could be dissected and examined, to kill off ideas of where the soul might be located. They held dinners where the food was served on prehistoric pottery or in the cavities of human and, in one case, giraffe skulls, to emphasise that there was nothing special about human remains, that they were no different from animal remains. As Jennifer Michael Hecht points out, in her book on the end of the soul, one anthropologist wrote ‘We have attested many systems in order to maintain morality and the fundamentals of law. To tell the truth, these attempts were nothing but illusions . . . The conscience is nothing but a particular aspect of instinct, and instinct is nothing but an hereditary habit . . . Without the existence of a distinct soul, without immortality, and without the threat of an afterlife, there are no longer any sanctions.’48
In these circumstances, the reactions of the Catholic establishment were, more often than not, grudging. This, in itself, became an issue, a factor in the growth of anticlericalism, which was another aspect of secularisation, at least for a vociferous minority. In Britain, says Chadwick, it surfaced for the first time in a Saturday Review leader in May 1864, criticising the wilful inability of the Curia in Rome to concede the advances of modern science, in particular Galileo’s discoveries and insights, by then hundreds of years old. In this way, clericalism came to be synonymous with obscurantism and administrative stonewalling and was broadened beyond the Roman Catholic Church to all churches and their opposition to modern thinking, including political thinking.49 Among educated Catholics everywhere there was some regret at the Vatican’s anti-modern stance but in Italy there was an additional problem.
In 1848, the year of revolution across Europe, the Italians mounted their war of liberation against Austria. This put Pope Pius IX in an unwinnable position. With whom would the Vatican side? Both Italy and Austria were sons of the church. At the end of April that year Pius announced that ‘as supreme pastor’ he could not declare war on any fellow Catholics. For many Italian nationalists this was too much and they turned against the Vatican. It was the first time anticlericalism had appeared in Italy.
In France anticlericalism played havoc with the established church. Over and above the attacks on church authority – Strauss, Darwin, Renan, Haeckel – in France, Catholic clericals were systematically expelled from institutes of higher education, meaning that as time passed the church had a weaker and weaker grip on the minds of the young.50 The French Church was paying the price for the fact that, in the eighteenth century, the country’s bishops had been drawn overwhelmingly from the aristocracy. Decimated by the Revolution, the French church changed its complexion so much that the pope was forced to anathematise the entire Gallican hierarchy, refusing to consecrate any new bishops. The French church was thus cut off from Rome for a time though this did little to reduce anticlerical feeling, since for many ordinary people Rome was now even further away than ever.51
A further complicating twist was the attempts in France to reconcile the church with the aims of the Revolution. These were led by Félicité de Lamennais, a priest but a man with a strong commitment to secular educational institutions. He founded a daily periodical, L’Avenir, which advocated religious liberty, educational liberty, liberty of the press, liberty of association, universal suffrage, and decentralisation. This was very modern, too modern. L’Avenir’s policies proved so controversial that, after several times when publication was suspended, the pope went so far as to issue an encyclical, Mirari vos, condemning this particular periodical.52 Lamennais responded two years later by releasing Paroles d’un croyant (Words of a Believer) in which he denounced capitalism on religious grounds and called for the working classes to rise up and demand ‘their God-given rights’. This provoked another encyclical, Singulari nos, which criticised Paroles d’un croyant as ‘small in size but immense in perversity’, and said it was spreading false ideas that were ‘inducing to anarchy [and] contrary to the Word of God’. Gregory ended by demanding that Catholics everywhere submit to ‘due authority’. But this too backfired, in a sense, because it appeared not long before the revolution of 1848, which revived republicanism among French Catholics, and for the first time significant numbers of the Church hierarchy appeared to be sympathetic to revolution.53
Pius was originally a liberal (he was elected at fifty-five, a comparatively young age for a pope). But he was as changed by the events of 1848 as the rest of his fellow Italians. ‘Now cured of all liberalism’, Pius gave a triumvirate of cardinals a free hand to restore absolute government in Rome.54 However, since this attempt was accompanied by a general loss of traditional authority across the broader political landscape (e.g., Italy’s war of independence against Austria, the unification of Germany) this only provoked new waves of anticlericalism. In 1857, in Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert portrayed a people who were anticlerical most of the time, even though their children were baptised and they continued to receive the last rites from a priest.55 In France, indifference to religion was growing among ordinary people, just as Engels had noted a decade earlier in England.
Anticlericalism in France came to a head in the last decades of the century over the secularisation of the schools. For the Vatican, to lose the schools meant the final blow to its influence.56 This is why a number of Catholic universities were established across Europe in the mid-1870s – it was an attempt by the church to recover some of its losses. But this only created a new battleground: priests and schoolteachers were now pitched against one another.
The teachers won. They were led by the Third Republic’s new minister of education, Jules Ferry. Ferry was convinced, as Auguste Comte was convinced before him, that the theological and metaphysical eras were a thing of the past and that the positive sciences would be the basis of the new order. ‘My goal’, Ferry declared, ‘is to organise society without God and without a king,’ and to this end he expelled more than 100,000 religious teachers from their posts.57
The Vatican responded to this latest move by setting up Catholic Institutes in Paris, Lyons, Lille, Angers and Toulouse. Each boasted a theological faculty independent of state universities, whose task was to develop their own scholarship to combat what was happening in science and biblical historiography. Lester Kurtz sets out the Vatican thinking.58 ‘First, it defined Catholic orthodoxy within the bounds of scholastic theology, thereby providing a systematic, logical response to the probing questions of modern scholarship. Second, it elaborated the doctrines of papal authority and of the magisterium (the teaching authority of the Church), claiming that the Church and its leadership alone had inherited authority in religious matters from the apostles of Jesus. Finally, it defined Catholic orthodoxy in terms of what it was not, by constructing an image of an heretical conspiracy among deviant insiders.’59 The Church now gradually identified a new era of ‘heresy’, set out mainly in the conservative Catholic press (in particular the Jesuit publications, Civiltà cattolica in Rome and La Vérité in Paris). There was also a series of papal edicts (Syllabus of Erros, 1864; Aeterni Patris, 1879; Providentissimus Deus, 1893), followed by the condemnation of Americanism, Testem benevolentiae (1899), and, finally, a full-bloodied assault on modernism, Lamentabili (1907).