| Popis: |
Ultramontanism — the belief in a stridently hierarchical Roman Catholic Church with that city’s bishop, the pope, as its infallible head — provided a renewed sense of religious purpose among Catholics at a time of immense political, ideological and structural change in Europe. Indeed, the period from roughly 1830 to 1870 — the same decades that saw a strong surge in nationalist fervour on the continent — corresponds to the time when Ultramontanism found its foothold within the Church. In these decades, an increasing number of prominent Catholic thinkers began to see the Church as a ‘healing tonic for mankind’,1 one that stood against the ‘base’ currents of nationalism. This was a vision perhaps illuminated most clearly in Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum: ‘The Church does her utmost to teach and to train men, to educate them, and, through the mediation of her bishops and clergy, diffuses her salutary teachings far and wide. She strives to influence the mind and the heart so that all may willingly yield themselves to be formed and guided by the commandments of God.’2 Such a vision was built upon a strictly ultramontane conception of the Catholic Church: a homogeneous construct that necessitated a bureaucratic and ideological structure rigid enough to withstand the disintegrating pressures of modernization — democratization, industrialization, and the threat of secularization — and especially the growing legitimacy of the nation and nation-state as a polity’s central organizing principle. |
