To God be the Glory

1. Chapter 10
Karl Marlone O. Tila

2. Religion and Politics
Religion never exerted greater influence in
Europe than in the period 1500 to 1660, and
perhaps at no time in history was it so closely
bound up with politics.

3. European Countries involved in this Religion and political
revolution
Spain
England
Ireland
Netherlands
France
Poland

4. • The greatest of all religious
conflicts (1618-1648).
• Fought between Ferdinand the
elected Holy Roman Emperor
(1619-1637) against the
Protestants in Europe
Thirty Years’ War The Papacy
As temporal rulers over the Papal States,
the popes were participants in international
politics; Few showed much courage, and
most made concessions in order to retain a
precarious independence, a strategy that
emboldened secular governments to
demand still more concessions and left the
Church in an increasingly weakened state.

5. France - Before 1600, there emerged at the French
court a group dubbed the Politiques, because they
urged that the needs of “policy”—the state—take
precedence over the demands of religion, a position that
was given urgency by the assassination of Henry III and
Henry IV by Catholics.
Locke- An Englishman (d. 1704), urged freedom
of all forms of Christianity except Catholicism, he
reduced religion to a private matter, allowing people
to believe what they wished but requiring them to
accept the fact that their faith was merely one among
many.
Jews- Poland Jews are persecuted, being
accused of killing a Christian child.
Ecumenism- The unorthodox Dutch Calvinist
Hugo Grotius (d. 1645), one of the greatest political
thinkers of the age and the author of the concept of
international law, carried on friendly discussions
with Richelieu and hoped for the reunion of the
churches under the pope, although he stopped
short of actually becoming a Catholic.
Witchcraft- the mid-17th century also marked
the height of the systematic witchcraft prosecutions
that had been growing in both Protestant and Catholic
lands for almost two hundred years.
 Religious Toleration
The ideal and the practice of religious toleration
gradually grew during the seventeenth century, mainly
for political reasons.

6. The French Church
When the Council of Trent was accepted, the
spiritual forces explode suddenly in a great flowering in
which France replaced Spain and Italy as the center of
the Catholic Reformation.

7. Prominent figures in the Reformation of the French Church
▸Richelieu (d. 1629),
▸was genuinely devout, but his
support or opposition of
reforming movements was
largely dependent on how they
related to royal policy at a given
moment. He supported the
Company of the Blessed
Sacrament that has a secretive
activities, where they performed
works of charity, financed
movements, and attempted to
influence royal policy, as in
opposing the toleration of
Huguenots.
▸Francis de Sales (d. 1622)
▸His classic Introduction to the
Devout Life had a profound effect
especially on lay spirituality,
teaching that holiness need not be
dramatic but consisted in the
sanctification of daily life in all its
details, including marital love. He
espoused a kind of Christian
Humanism that encouraged a
cheerful attitude, advising that vices
be rooted out by cultivating their
corresponding virtues, including
natural virtues.
▸Vincent de Paul (d. 1660)
▸experienced a calling to
revitalize the faith in France and
serve the poor while serving
briefly as pastor of a rural parish
where the church was in ruins
and the sacraments neglected.
Vincent identified the low state
of the parish clergy as the chief
problem, and he established
minimal criteria for ordination,
along with regular exercises for
priests and seminarians that
emphasized practical pastoral
training.

8. Devotions
Private devotions multiplied: retreats for lay people; frequent Communion; exposition of the
Sacrament; and Forty Hours’ Devotion, which was originally a watch from Holy Thursday until Holy
Saturday but now held at various times of the year. The Divine Praises(“Blessed be God”) were
composed to counter the blasphemies of the growing number of skeptics.
Baroque
The Baroque style was the last great manifestation of predominantly religious art in the history of
Western civilization: its visual expressions mainly inspired by the Catholic Reformation, its music
having both Catholic and Protestant form.
Jansenism
The Flemish bishop Cornelius Jansen (d 1638), emphasized that God was remote and inscrutable.
For two centuries, Jansenism continued to be the single most influential and tenacious modern
Catholic heresy. Jansen attempted to win over Protestants by showing that authentic Catholicism
also recognized that men were incapable of keeping the Commandments; that God’s will was
absolutely sovereign; and that grace was wholly unmerited, freely given, and incapable of being
resisted. Human nature was so corrupt that it was possible to sin without willing to do so.

9. Jesuit Moral Theology
The Jesuits, because of their emphasis on free will and a kind of “humanism” that saw God’s
in ordinary things, were Jansenism’s greatest antagonists. Following Ignatius, Jesuits sought to
influence every area of culture and make it Christian, while Jansenists, fearing that Christians
themselves would thereby be corrupted, advocated withdrawal from the world.
Mysticism
Most spiritual writers, on the other hand, emphasized the passivity of the mystical experience —
the individual could not seek it, and it was not granted to everyone —and it was from this sense
of passivity that the other principal heresy of the age was derived.
Skepticism
While some doubted religion, many were religious believers who used skeptical arguments
against their theological opponents in order to show the need for some kind of authority—the Bible
for Protestants, the Church for Catholics. In the seventeenth century, the claims of reason once
again came into their own, although in ways very different from the Middle Ages. The two centuries
after 1600 came to be called the Age of Reason, when reason came to deny divine revelation.

10. The Scientific Revolution
▸Rene Descartes (d. 1650)- created a
new synthesis between faith and reason
▸Francis Bacon (d. 1626)- urged that
almost all the learning of the past be
discarded and the search for truth begin
again, based on empirical investigation.
▸Isaac Newton (d. 1727)- completed the
scientific revolution by formulating a few
simply stated laws that explained the
movement of all bodies, from the planets
to the smallest grains of sand.
Scientific Progress
Almost all areas of science developed very
rapidly in the seventeenth century. Some
research practices encountered resistance from
the Church, such as the dissection of human
bodies for the study of anatomy, while some
findings prompted new and difficult questions.
Early discoveries in geology, for example, were
beginning to raise questions about the age of
the world as set forth in Genesis.
▸Nicolaus Copernicus (d. 1543)-t he sun,
not the earth, as the center of the
universe
▸Galileo Galilei (d. 1642)- presented the
Copernican hypothesis to the general
educated public.

11. The Enlightenment
▸Deism
was an abstraction in which God was
the divine engineer, architect, or clock-maker
who designed and built a complex
but then left it to move according to its own
laws. The moral law—natural law—was part
that same order and could be known entirely
through reason.
▸The Persistence of Faith
But although Deism created a gulf
between the religious culture of much of the
educated classes and the beliefs of most
other people, traditional religion remained
vital. Parish missions were still effective, and
retreat houses were established for lay
people to make the Spiritual Exercises. Many
kinds of devotion flourished, especially that of
the Sacred Heart, the newly established
stations of the cross, and Marian piety of
various kinds.
▸Intellectual Defects
The Church’s greatest failure was
intellectual. Theologically, it was a rather
barren age, and for two centuries after
Pascal, there was no major Catholic thinker,
while an indeterminate part of the educated
classes, including clergy, lost the faith or
compromised it.

12. The Enlightenment
▸ The Philosophies
The self-styled Enlightenment—so-called
because its adherents claimed to have emerged
from the darkness and superstition that had long
prevailed and for which the Church was primarily
responsible—began in France and spread from
there all over the Western world. Its apostles were
called philosophes, meaning not “philosophers” in
the formal sense but something like the modern
term “intellectuals”.
▸ Enemies of Faith
The dominant intellectual figure of the age
was François-Marie Arouet (d. 1778), a.k.a Voltaire,
he abandoned Catholicism and came to see the
Church as the chief enemy of mankind (“crush the
infamous thing”), because she exercised power
through ignorance and superstition.
▸ Secret Societies
New secret societies like the
Rosecrucians (their symbol being the “rosy
cross”) and the Illuminati (“enlightened”) falsely
claimed an ancient lineage, exalted science, and
harbored outright antagonism to Christianity.
▸ Enlightened Catholics
Whereas the philosophes were driven
by passionate conviction and an urgent sense
of mission, for a time most Catholic
intellectuals seem to have been complacent
about the threat, and many, including clergy,
were eager to prove that they too were
enlightened.

13. The French Revolution
▸ The Attack on the Church
 Seizure of the wealth of the Church. Abolition of the support for the clergy. Thus, making the
employees of the state. Abolition of all papal taxes in France.
 The Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which Louis XVI reluctantly signed but which Pius VI eventually
condemned, required all priests to take an oath of loyalty to the government and to swear that
no had no higher loyalty, a provision specifically aimed at papal authority.
 Bishops and priests were to be elected by laymen, including non-Catholics, and were subject to
governmental supervision, while parish and diocesan maps were redrawn and a large number of
dioceses suppressed.
 There was a concerted attack on clerical celibacy, partly on the grounds that priests had an
obligation to produce children for France, partly because celibacy was recognized as a major
of the priestly charism. Many clergy soon married.
 The government also extended religious toleration, making non-Catholics fully equal to Catholics.
Marriage was defined as a civil contract regulated by the government, and divorce was allowed for
the first time.

14. ▸Vendée
Massive armed rebellion against the new revolutionary government
broke out, plunging the area into a decade of civil war and terrorism in
which 250,000 people perished. Although at first the clergy did not
the rebellion, they were soon among its leaders, as the rebellious armies
marched into battle under banners of the Sacred Heart, singing hymns,
sometimes with chaplains carrying the Blessed Sacrament.

15. ▸ Attack on the Monarchy
The attack on the monarchy and the attack on the Church were intimately linked, since the
king’s authority was said to be divinely conferred. In 1792, fearing that a conforming priest would not
respect the seal of the confessional, the king demanded to go to confession to a priest who had not
taken the oath. When this was refused, he and the royal family attempted to flee the kingdom, only
be caught, brought back to Paris, and imprisoned.

16. ▸The Terror
In the Reign of Terror, innumerable suspicious persons, including
any priest who had not taken the oath, were systematically rounded
some immediately killed by mobs, others subjected to speedy trials at
the hands of revolutionary tribunals and carted off to the guillotine,
which was the new, “efficient” instrument of mass execution. Loyal
Catholics were accused merely of the crime of “fanaticism”.
Approximately five thousand priests were imprisoned at one time or
another, many of whom never emerged alive.

17. ▸“Dechristianization”
Even clergy who had taken the oath were now forbidden to exercise their
ministries, and all churches were closed or converted to secular uses like
stables. Most had their images defaced, and a few were razed completely.
▸“Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”
Where the Gospel was not rejected altogether, it was said to teach the social equality
of all men, something the Revolution was at last achieving. The revolutionary slogan
“Liberty Equality, Fraternity” set in motion a fanatical drive to destroy all social ranks
and was itself a major cause of the suppression of liberty.
▸ The Directory
The Terror then subsided under a new government called the Directory. At first, limited
religious toleration was restored, including the right to conduct schools, and the constitutional
church, which satisfied few people, was left to fend for itself, without official status. But after a few
years there was renewed repression, and when a French general was killed in Rome by a papal
soldier, the French army took Pius VI prisoner and brought him to France, where he soon died.

18. THE AGE OF NAPOLEON
▸An Uneasy Truce
In 1801, the master papal diplomat Cardinal Ercole Consalvi (d. 1824) negotiated a
concordat (“agreement”) with Napoleon, a pragmatic settlement that sought to protect the
interests of the Church as far as possible, without necessarily conceding legitimacy to the
regime.
The Pope and the First Counsel each saw advantages—for Napoleon, the end of
religious strife in France and papal recognition of his legitimacy; for Pius, limited toleration for
the Church and the defeat of both Gallicanism and the powerful prince-bishops of Germany,
since by the terms of the Concordat the papacy alone represented the Church.
The Directory was weak, and a successful military commander, Napoleon Bonaparte (d.
1821), organized yet another government—the Consulate—which he dominated. was essentially a
Deist and an enthusiastic supporter of the Revolution, but he was also a realist who sought power
above all and who tried to avoid the mistakes of the Directory, including its unpopular repression of
religion.

19. ▸Renewed Persecution
Papal diplomacy failed to save the Church from a determined secular
In 1804, Napoleon proclaimed himself Emperor of the French (1804-1815).
redrew the entire map of Europe and placed his relatives or close associates in
and imposed the principles of the Revolution, including restrictions on the Church
and the seizure of her lands. He abolished the Holy Roman Empire, which became
merely “Austria.
▸The Fall of Napoleon
When Napoleon was defeated by the combined European powers in 1814,
the Pope was able to return to Rome, only to be seized again when Napoleon
regained his throne the following year. The aged Pope was released for the last
time after Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo in 1815. But, alone among the
European heads of state, Pius was willing to receive Napoleon’s mother and other
relatives as refugees, and he interceded to try to make the conditions of
Napoleon’s exile less severe.

20. Thank
You

21. To God Be the
Glory