In Citizens, Simon Schama’s narration of the French Revolution, he describes the revolutionary government’s suppression of the popular rebellion in the Vendée. Far more than a military maneuver, he recounts, the operation sought “the wholesale destruction of an entire region of France.” In a “sinister anticipation of the technological killings of the twentieth century,” the revolution’s armies exterminated women, children, entire villages, and ultimately some one third of the inhabitants of the region. Among the massacres’ chief targets was the Catholic Church, which the revolution sought wholly to destroy and to replace with its own parallel hierarchy, priesthood, rituals, and theology: the Cult of Reason and the Cult of the Supreme Being. Throughout the nineteenth century, even while advancing the rights of man— free assembly, free speech, a free press, the franchise—liberal republicans and allies like Germany’s Bismarck sought to carry on the revolution’s ideals, closing Catholic schools, shutting down monasteries, and seeking to dissever the Church’s bishops from the authority of the pope, all with the hope and expectation of hastening the Church’s inevitable exit from history.
This slice of history might seem to complicate judgments about the “brave opposition of secular modernity to Catholicism” or about the “deep hostility of the church for the modern world and [this hostility’s] dreadful consequences.” But these are precisely the summary judgments that historian Robert Orsi delivers on the Church in his recent blog post on The Immanent Frame in a forum on the launch of Contending Modernities. He attacks directly the very premise of the project: that Catholics, Muslims and secular people can engage in an ongoing scholarly conversation about modernity that would increase the sphere of justice and mutual understanding. The problem, he explains, is that one party to the conversation, the Catholic Church, is implacably opposed to modernity’s achievements.
Read Full Article »