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 Felicite 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, Civilta cattolica in Rome and La Verite 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). A fatal mistake in the Vatican's approach, which ran through all these edicts and condemnations, was the church's characterisation of its critics as a conspiratorial group, intent on undermining the hierarchy while pretending to be its friend.60 This underestimated and at the same time patronised the opposition. The real enemy of the Vatican was the very nature of authority in the new intellectual climate. The papacy insisted throughout on its traditional authority, its historical, apostolic succession.61 These ideas were carried to their extreme in the doctrine of papal infallibility, which was declared for the first time by the First Vatican Council in 1870. Nineteenth-century Catholicism was similar in many ways to twelfth-century Catholicism, not least in the fact that it was dominated by two long pontificates, those of Pius IX (1846- 1878) and his successor, Leo XIII (1878-1903). Amazingly, at a time when democracies and republics were being formed on all sides across the world, these two popes sought to resurrect monarchical theories of governance, both within and outside the church. In his encyclical Quanto conficiamur , Pius IX looked back as far as Unam sanctam , the papal bull issued by Boniface VIII in 1302 (see above, Chapter 16). In other words, he was seeking to resurrect the medieval notion of absolute papal supremacy. In Testem benevolentiae , his attack on Americanism, Leo XIII ruled out any hope of democracy for the church, arguing that only absolute authority could safeguard against heresy.62 In these circumstances, and with the papal states compromised by the Italian desire for independence and unification, anticlericalism deepened in Italy. This was one of the important background factors to Pope Pius IX's apostolic letter which called for the First General Council of the Vatican.63 Political turmoil meant that the council very nearly didn't get off the ground. When it did, it faced the problem of reestablishing the hierarchy of the church and in attempting to do this it produced two famous statements. The first was this: 'The Church of Christ is not a community of equals in which all the faithful have the same rights.' Instead, some are given 'the power from God...to sanctify, teach and govern'. And second, the most famous statement of alclass="underline" 'We teach and define that it is a dogma divinely revealed: that the Roman Pontiff, when he speaks ex cathedra , that is, when in discharge of the office of Pastor and Doctor of all Christians, by virtue of his supreme apostolic authority he defines a doctrine regarding faith or morals to be held by the Universal Church, by the divine assistance promised him in Blessed Peter, is possessed of that infallibility with which the divine redeemer willed that his Church should be endowed for defining doctrine regarding faith or morals.'64 And so the doctrine of papal infallibility became an article of faith for Catholics for the first time.65 This was highly risky and had been resisted since at least the fourteenth century. The Vatican may have felt that, with the great travel and communications revolutions of the nineteenth century, it would be able to exert its authority more effectively than in the Middle Ages and this may explain why, in addition to papal infallibility, Leo XIII issued Aeterni Patris in 1879 in which he singled out St Thomas Aquinas to be the dominant guide in modern Catholic thought. This, like Pius' edict Quanto conficiamur , involveda return to pre-Enlightenment, pre-Reformation, pre-Renaissance thinking of the Middle Ages. Scholastic theology was notable for being pre-scientific, for being a speculative exercise, inside people's heads, an attempt to marry Christianity and other forms of thought, and noted for its cleverness rather than a truthfulness that could be widely agreed upon.66 In effect, Catholic thought was again becoming a closed and self-referential circular system, mainly in the hands of Jesuit theologians. The most influential of these were grouped around Civilta cattolica , a journal created in 1849 at the behest of the pope, as a response to the events of 1848.67 These Thomists (of whom Gioachino Pecci, bishop of Perugia, later Leo XIII, was a leading figure) were implacably opposed to developments in modern thought. Modern ideas should be rejected, they insisted, 'without exception'. The main feature of this neo-Thomist thought was that it rejected any idea of evolution, of change. It looked back, beyond the twelfth century, to Aristotle, to the idea of timeless truth as affirmed by scholastic thought. After Aeterni Patris bishops were ordered to appoint as teachers and priests only men who had been instructed in 'the wisdom of St Thomas'.68 At every turn, their aim was to show that the