A Short History of Christianity / Second Edition, Revised, With Additions

by J. M. Robertson

§ 1. Catholic Christianity

All through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and till near the end of the eighteenth, the masses of Europe remained attached to their respective Churches in despite of the play of criticism among the more instructed. Whether popular religion be regarded as a matter of habit and superstition or as the expression of a higher happiness in religious rites, it has unquestionably numbered the great majority down till recent times. How the Catholic Church recovered large parts of Germany, practically all Poland and Bohemia, and for a time the complete control of France, we have seen. Within her sphere popular conduct was certainly no worse than in the age of her undivided power; and where she could number within her fold minds like Paolo Sarpi, the historian of the Council of Trent, in the sixteenth century; like Pascal and Fénelon and Bossuet in the seventeenth; and like Vico in the eighteenth, though in hardly any case are such leading spirits found to be in thorough harmony with the papal system, she could not but hold the respect of a great body even of educated people.

Her swarms of missionaries, too, seemed for a time to have begun a new era of Catholic expansion in Asia and America, finding footing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Japan, China, India, Siam, Tonkin, as well as in North and South America. Sent forth by the College of Propaganda (Congregatio de Propaganda Fide) founded in 1622, they displayed a zeal never surpassed in the Church’s history. In Japan and China, in particular, they had for a time a dazzling success, largely through the address of the Jesuits—whose policy was to win converts by identifying native rites and beliefs with Christian, never openly assailing but always seeking to assimilate them. As early as 1549, Francis Xavier had preached the faith in Japan, and at the beginning of the seventeenth century it seemed likely to become the religion of the State. But Christians undid the Christian cause. Between the various orders of Catholic missionaries there were always deadly jealousies, all the others denouncing the Jesuits, who in turn charged incompetence and malevolence on all; and the increasing arrogance of the propagandists in Japan gave colour to the hints of the Protestant traders, Dutch and English, that Catholic missions were a prelude to Catholic conquest. The Japanese emperor, accordingly, began a great persecution in 1587, and during a number of years the Christian converts were slaughtered by tens of thousands. Still the Jesuits persevered; but in the next generation persecution began afresh. At length, in 1637, by a supreme effort, the weakened Catholic flock were wholly destroyed or expelled. Once more it had been demonstrated that really determined and rigorous persecution by a majority in power can eradicate the Christian or any other religion in a given sphere.

In Siam in the next century a slight success was similarly followed by expulsion; and in China, where an outward success had been won as a sequel to the expansion in Japan, and where the Christian cause subsisted longer, despite some persecution and despite the fierce dissensions of the different orders on points both of doctrine and corporate conduct, it dwindled in the eighteenth century. The success, indeed, had been all along illusory, as the Chinese had adapted rather than adopted Christian forms, and merely carried on their usual rites under Christian auspices. When, accordingly, the rival orders at length forced on the papacy, in the teeth of the Jesuits, a decision as to whether Chinese Christians should or should not truly conform to Christian doctrine, and a decision against the Jesuits was given, the semblance of conversion melted away, and a reversion to Jesuit methods could not restore it. A similar decision made an end of a rather flourishing movement of Jesuit Brahmanism in India about the middle of the eighteenth century; and the other labours of the Catholic missionaries in India were undone by the cruelties of their own Inquisition.

Jesuitism had by this time been convicted of aiming in the old fashion at its own worldly wealth, of troubling by its political plottings the peace of every country it could enter, and of setting up its own ambitions against the papal authority. In the East it had become a great wealth-hunting corporation; in South America it was the same, contriving for some generations to govern Paraguay in particular wholly for its own enrichment; in Europe it provoked every Catholic government in turn by its audacious attempts to control them. Thus it was expelled from Portugal in 1759, from France in 1762, from Bohemia in 1766; from Spain, Genoa, and Venice in 1767; and from Naples, Malta, and Parma in 1768. At length, in 1773, the Society was suppressed by a papal bull, and though it was revived in the nineteenth century it has never since been the power it was, whether for evil or for good.

Of her extensions beyond Europe there thus remained substantially to the Church of Rome at the end of the eighteenth century only the Catholic populations of Central and South America and Canada; and at the outbreak of the French Revolution, marked as it was by the wholesale abjurations of Catholic priests and populace, it might have seemed as if the reign of Rome in Europe were coming to an end. The political movement, however, had outrun the educational; and as we have seen, there was even a literary reaction at the Restoration. In Italy, where the revolutionary movement had been hostile to the Church, the reaction after 1815 was very marked. All criticism of Catholicism was made a penal offence, and in the Kingdom of Naples alone, in 1825, there were twenty-seven thousand priests, eight thousand nuns, as many monks, twenty archbishops, and seventy-three bishops. In Spain and France, too, the clergy worked hard to recover authority over the people; and in Catholic Ireland they had never lost it, despite all the efforts of Protestantism.

Everywhere, however, save in America, the struggle for existence has gone against Catholicism in the nineteenth century. Catholic Ireland has been in large measure depopulated through the failure of Protestant England to solve its economic problems; and though this means a gain to Romanism in the United States, there is no great likelihood that that is permanent, or that Catholicism there will ever be very docile to the papacy. France has become gradually more rationalistic, so much so that the municipal government of Paris is usually in the hands of freethinkers; and the recent expulsion of the recalcitrant religious orders has proved the determination of the republican majority to put down clerical influence. The movement of anti-theological Positivism, founded by the teaching of Auguste Comte (d. 1857) on bases laid by Saint-Simon, has never been numerically strong, but has affected all French thought; and to-day there is scarcely one eminent French writer who professes religious opinions. Even in Spain, so long the stronghold of the faith, and still more generally in Italy, educated men are as a rule either indifferent or hostile to the Church; and the common people, especially the Socialists in the towns, have gone the same way. Both in Spain and Portugal there are journals zealously devoted to a propaganda of freethought; and the judicial murder of Ferrer has but intensified hostility to the Church. National union in Italy, accomplished in the middle of the century, has been fatal to ecclesiastical supremacy. The papacy is unable to recover its temporal power at Rome. In Catholic Belgium, the action of the clergy is constantly fought by a ubiquitous freethought propaganda; and Dutch Catholicism does not gain ground.

Some appearance of Catholic revival occurred in England in the second and third generations of the nineteenth century, the “Oxford movement” preparing the ground; but though John Henry Newman was followed into the Catholic Church by a number of clergymen and rich laymen, the movement soon ceased to be intellectually important, and the popular success seems to have reached its limits. Though there is much leaning to Rome in the High Church section of the heterogeneous Anglican body, it is certain that while the economic basis remains Protestant there will be no great secession. Economic considerations, again, have latterly set up even in Catholic Austria—which with Southern Germany is perhaps the most believing section of the Catholic world—a movement with the watchword “Loose from Rome.” In Brazil, again, there has been a quite extraordinary development of Positivism among the educated class; and the revolution which peacefully expelled the last emperor—himself personally estimable, and not an orthodox Catholic—was ostensibly wrought by the Positivist party. Portugal, finally, has taken the same path.

Thus the age which saw the promulgation of the formal decree of Papal Infallibility (1870) has seen the most vital decline that has ever taken place in the total life and power of the Church of Rome. It preserves its full hold to-day only on (1) the most ignorant or most rural sections of the population of Catholic countries, (2) the unintellectual sections of their middle and upper classes, and (3) the emotionally religious or pietistic types, who are still, by reason of the total circumstances, more numerous among women than among men. Hence in the Catholic countries, female education being there specially backward, the Church depends relatively even more on women than do the churches of the Protestant world. But among women in the Catholic countries also there goes on a process of rationalization, Socialism doing some of the work of education where the other machinery is inadequate.