18. The Catholic Church: Centuries of Struggle

We have a little farmhouse in northern Michigan where we go—MacBook in tow—to get away from phones, email, and the bustle of greater Grand Rapids. Located in the “town” of Isadore, we are the only residents except for Father Don, who lives across the road next to Holy Rosary Catholic Church. On the far side of the church is Holy Rosary cemetery.

Here in our town of three residents (two part-time), stands a living—and passing—memorial to the staying power of the Catholic Church worldwide. Whether the church came into being with the apostle Peter or centuries later with Pope Leo the Great, its long history of endurance and expansion is impressive—and absolutely fascinating. The Catholic Church is anything but static and steady, however. Its ups and downs, its cruelty and compassion, its profligacy and charity, offer stark contrasts.

Even the picturesque Holy Rosary Church, situated in the timeless rolling hills of Leelanau County, embodies the opposite extremes of its Mother Church. Traditions of community service and caregiving are everywhere. But hidden beneath the brick façade is a secret that lies in a nearby unmarked grave. Like many of the secrets of church history, this one is closely guarded, and even readers of the church’s hundred-year history are left in the dark.

On August 23, 1907, Sister Mary Janina, a nun serving at the Isadore parish, went missing. Newspapers later reported that she was murdered by the priest’s housekeeper, who was apparently upset by the close relationship between the nun and the priest. The housekeeper was tried and convicted in 1919, but that was not the end of the story. In the 1970s, Broadway and Hollywood presented their versions in The Runner Stumbles, and history faded into fable.

Last year author Mardi Link spent a long weekend at our little farmhouse (which doubles as Isadore Writers’ Retreat), writing perhaps the definitive story of this incident. Published in 2009 by the University of Michigan Press, Isadore’s Secret: Sin, Murder, and Confession in Northern Michigan is a well-researched and absolutely absorbing page-turner.

History fades into fable; fact becomes clouded with doubt and controversy; the inscription moldersfrom the tablet: the statue falls from the pedestal. Columns, arches, pyramids, what are they but heaps of sand; and their epitaphs, but characters written in the dust?

WASHINGTON IRVING

A ncient history marches toward the present, and columns and arches crumble into sand. We sometimes imagine that what remains are mostly museum artifacts. But the stories of the ancient church are also the stories of the eighteenth century and of the church of today. It is true that history fades into fable and great saints fall from their pedestals even as the inscriptions molder. But we recognize the voices as our own and those of our contemporaries, clouded as they are with doubt and controversy.

Church historians are sometimes tempted to emblazon the headlines with renewal, reformation, and revival. Whether inspired by monks or Puritans and Pilgrims, renewals are newsworthy. The same goes for the Reformation and later revivals, whether German Pietism or trans-Atlantic awakenings. The eccentric sectarians likewise grab headlines: from St. Francis to George Fox, their names are familiar. But alongside these movements and individuals, the established institutionalized church carries on, amid fragmentation and internal challenge, with its own colorful cast of characters, including Pope Innocent X and Olimpia, Blaise Pascal, Jeanne-Marie Guyon, Ann-Marie Javouhey, and John Henry Newman.

The Catholic Church emerged from the battering of the Protestant Reformation in some ways stronger than it was before. Overseas discoveries and colonization went hand in hand with mission outreach as religious orders expanded the church abroad. But at the same time, nationalistic impulses in Protestant and Catholic regimes ignited armed conflict, creating havoc in both countryside and city. Such rivalries were the staple of the Thirty Years War that raged in central Europe from 1618 to 1648. Simple summaries are inadequate, but the centuries-old House of Habsburgs, headed by two generations of Ferdinands, faced opposition from all sides. Maximilian I was an ally, while Frederick V rallied German troops in opposition. Calvinists, Lutherans, and Catholics were all prominent in the geographical and national upheaval that included Austria, Germany, France, Spain, Holland, Sweden, and Denmark. Borders shifted amid civil wars and feuding militias.

Throughout this period social status and mobility were swept by the winds of change. As the merchant class gained prominence, concepts of freedom and individualism came to the fore, even as aristocratic power and church tradition was challenged. New Enlightenment ideals clashed with the old institutional hierarchies that were propping up both the monarchies and the church. Beneath the aristocracy simmered the bourgeoisie and the impoverished masses.

PARADE OF HISTORY

The Catholic parade of pomp and splendor is continuous through the generations of church history. Whether in the Vatican or in local cathedrals, the processions of clerics is never-ending. But the vibrancy of the institution is another matter. In fact, the church veers seriously off course as it confronts Enlightenment thinking. The procession of philosophers from Descartes and Voltaire to Hume and Kant wreaks havoc on the supremacy of religious faith among both Protestants and Catholics. But rationalism is met by Quietism and other forms of renewal and revival. Madame Jean Guyon is one of many who journeys through the countryside and cities on evangelistic tours. She preaches in marketplaces and private homes, often with a parade of followers in her wake.

Despite the turmoil on every level of society, the Catholic Church continued to wield power as popes, cardinals, bishops, and lesser clerics came and went. The enormous wealth of the church in currency, jewels, art, and real estate combined to promote a prestige that was equaled only in its own pomp and ceremony. Notwithstanding the reform efforts of the Council of Trent, church offices were often bestowed on the basis of family or political connections. Few popes stood out as spiritual leaders or even as savvy corporate CEOs.

Because holding church office brought wealth and prestige to families, nepotism was all too common. Pope Urban VIII, who reigned for more than twenty years (1623–1644), named a brother and two nephews as cardinals and gave lesser positions to many other family members. His unrelated enemies, not surprisingly, were numerous. So fearful was he that he retained magicians to ward off evil and astrologers to read his horoscope. Such activities were not perceived as threatening to the authority of the church even when practiced by lesser clerics or lay people. But sectarian movements were another matter. Urban, like most popes and Catholic clerics, did not tolerate individuals or groups that challenged papal authority or competed with the Vatican for loyalty. In 1633 he referred his one-time friend, the ailing Galilei Galileo (1564–1642), to the Inquisition, an action that led to Galileo’s imprisonment and recantation. He also banned the writings of Cornelius Jansen (1585–1638), founder of a “Calvinistic” Catholic sectarian movement.

Urbans successor, Innocent X, shifted papal favoritism from France to Spain during his decade-long reign (1644–1655). His successor, Alexander VII (reigning for twelve years), is particularly remembered for his bitter conflicts with King Louis XIV of France. In fact, the situation became so strained that Louis marched French troops into Rome—a military venture that ended with a humiliating defeat for Pope Alexander, the terms of surrender spelled out in the Treaty of Pisa of 1664. Both, however, agreed on their condemnation of Jansenism.

A ROYAL REVOCATION THAT BACKFIRES

Since the Huguenots of France were in large part artisans, craftsmen, and professional people, they were usually well-received in the countries to which they fled for refuge when religious discrimination or overt persecution caused [hundreds of thousands] to leave France [following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV in 1685]. Most of them went initially to Germany, the Netherlands, and England, although some found their way eventually to places as remote as South Africa. Considerable numbers of Huguenots migrated to British North America, especially to the Carolinas, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York. Their character and talents in the arts, sciences, and industry were such that they are generally felt to have been a substantial loss to the French society from which they had been forced to withdraw, and a corresponding gain to the communities and nations into which they settled.

National Huguenot Society

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH ON THE DEFENSIVE

The Protestant Reformation had placed the Catholic Church on the defensive, and it would remain there until the middle of the twentieth century, fiercely combating the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, Italian nationalism, modern intellectual movements, and especially theological and biblical scholarship…. Paul V (1605–21) will always be remembered as the pope who [first] censured the astronomer Galileo—a censure removed almost four centuries later in the pontificate of John Paul II (1978–2005). Gregory XV (1621–23) decreed that papal elections should thereafter be conducted by secret ballot—a practice still in effect today. Urban VII (1623–44) consecrated the new St. Peter’s Basilica in 1626…. Alexander VII (1655–67) permitted Jesuit missionaries in China to use Chinese rites in the Mass…. Clement XI (1700–21) reversed Alexander Vll’s approval of the use of Chinese rites—a disastrous decision that completely undercut the Catholic missionary effort in China. The memory of Clement XIV (1769–74), a Franciscan, is dishonored by his suppression of the Jesuits in 1773…. Pius VI (1775–99) denounced the French Revolution and died a prisoner of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Richard McBrien, Lives of the Popes

King Louis XIV symbolizes the seventeenth-century Age of Absolutism—especially in his declaration “L’etat, C’est Moi” (I am the state). As such, he had no inclination to buckle under the authority of a mere pope. Yet he was a staunch defender of Catholicism, expressed perhaps most visibly in his revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Instituted to protect Protestants, the Edict of Nantes (1598) had allowed Huguenots (French Protestant Calvinists) to live and worship in relative peace. With the revocation, however, there is a mass exodus of Christians from his domain. The Huguenots and Jansenists were not the only sectarian movements the popes sought to suppress, however. Gallicanism, a French national movement giving the monarch priority over the pope, gained momentum with the Declaration of the Clergy of France in 1682. In the eighteenth-century spirit of nationalism, other domains followed suit, much to the chagrin of the papacy.

But these were surely not the only battles the Church of Rome was confronting. The Age of Enlightenment took a major toll on the Christian faith as the eighteenth century produced philosophers who challenged the very foundations of Christian belief. Within a matter of generations the whole of Western society was infected. In the generations following the mid-seventeenth century, the philosophical foundations of the church were severely battered.

Before this time, faith and reason were generally seen as complementary. But then came Descartes, often labeled the father of philosophy. Spinoza likewise helped initiate the seventeenth-century era of rationalism through his attack on the validity of miracles. David Hume insisted that God’s existence could not be proved by the intelligent design of the universe. Immanuel Kant viewed the existence of God as a reality only in human consciousness. And Friedrich Schleiermacher insisted that the Christian faith could not be supported by rational evidence. All of this took its toll on the underlying suppositions of natural theology expressly defined by Thomas Aquinas.

EVERYDAY LIFE

Demonic Obsession and Witchcraft

Even as science and philosophy are making their way into the modern world, superstitions of every variety abound. In the generations following the Reformation the witchcraft frenzy leads to tens of thousands of executions. Nor are Catholics alone in their accusations and torture. Protestants are equally determined to rid the land of demonic menace. Between 1500 and 1660 an estimated fifty thousand witches are executed, four out of five of them women. Germany led in executions, with France coming in second, and England far behind with some one thousand sentenced to death.

As was true in Salem, Massachusetts, spectral evidence is frequently called forth in determining guilt. The charge that an individual (typically a woman) had made a pact with the devil and signed her name to worship him is often seen in court records. Women were accused of casting “spells for getting a husband, spells for the marriage, spells before the child is born, spells before the christening.”

Were women actually practicing witchcraft and casting spells and making pacts with devils? There is evidence women were involved in superstitious rituals, but that they made pacts with the devil and renounced their Christian faith and desecrated the Mass is doubtful. Nor did they ride through the sky at night on broomsticks or ritually sacrifice babies. There was already a long history in medieval Catholicism of women allegedly committing atrocious acts spurred on by the devil. Thomas Aquinas joined the discussion by claiming “demons reap the sperm of men and spread it among women.”

In 1484 Innocent VIII alleged that people—particularly in Germany—were making pacts with the devil, casting spells and causing stillborn babies and crop failure. He appointed two Dominican friars, Heinrich Kramer and Joseph Sprenger, to investigate and publish a full report—known as Malleus Maleficarum, “Hammer of Witches.” Among other things, the report explains “Why Superstition is chiefly found in Women … why a greater number of witches is found in the fragile feminine sex than among men.” In sum, it all started with Eve.

A Great Company of Bewitched People

Perhaps no chapter in human history is more revolting than the chapter which records the wild belief in witchcraft and the merciless punishments meted out for it in Western Europe in the century just preceding the Protestant Reformation and the succeeding century. In the second half of that century, the Church and society were thrown into a panic over witchcraft, and Christendom seemed to be suddenly infested with a great company of bewitched people, who yielded themselves to the irresistible discipline of Satan…. No Reformer uttered a word against it.

Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church

Men like the Dominican friars, however, were certainly not responsible for inventing all the unusual accusations against women. Women incriminated themselves. In 1582, at the St. Osyth witch trials in Essex, England, Ursley Kempe testified that she assigned specific tasks to her familiar spirits:

Bursting out with weeping and falling on her knees, she [Ursley] said, yes, she had the four imps her son had told of, and that two of them, Titty and Jack [a gray and a black cat] were “hees” whose office was to punish and kill unto death; and two, Tiffin [a white lamb] and Piggin [a black toad], were “shees,” who punished with lameness and bodily harm only, and destroyed goods and cattle.

To be fair, such confessions were sometimes elicited through torture or promises of release from prison. Likewise, witches were often identified through a strip search for body blemishes that were evidence of the “devil’s mark.”

Earlier, in 1571, witchcraft hysteria broke out in France after Trois-Echelles, who served in the court of King Charles IX, testified that, besides himself, there were one hundred thousand other witches roving through the countryside. Rumors spawned panic, and magistrates sometimes locked up and executed suspects without a trial. In many cases children accused their parents of heinous crimes. By the late seventeenth century, at the very time the Salem witch hysteria was breaking out, witchcraft accusations in Europe were on the wane.

As early as 1615, the Inquisition denounced Galileo (1564–1642) for his support of the Copernican theory, proving the earth is not the center of the universe—a theory “false and contrary to Scripture.” In 1632 he was found “vehemently suspect of heresy” by the Inquisition and given a life sentence of house arrest. But Galileo, the father of modern science, had begun a revolution that could not be undone by a pope or anyone else. Added to the problems caused by the new rationalism were outbreaks of witchcraft and magic that keep inquisitors busy.

The worldwide spread of the Catholic faith faces severe losses as the Chinese Rites Controversy rages among the religious orders, particularly between the more “liberal” Jesuits and the more “conservative” Dominicans. Pope Alexander VII had signed a decree favorable to the Jesuits in 1656 that permitted the widespread use of Chinese religious forms, including ancestor worship and the word Tien (heaven) for God. In the following century, however, the Jesuits are suppressed—put out of business in many regions of the world—by a papacy with French influence, and they are not reinstated until 1814. In the meantime, the French Revolution, beginning in 1789, would take a terrible toll on the already battered Catholic Church.

THEOLOGY THROUGH THE AGES

During the years 100 to 600, most theologians were bishops; from 600 to 1500 in the West, they were monks; since 1500, they have been university professors. Gregory I, who died in 604, was a bishop who had been a monk; Martin Luther, who died in 1546, was a monk who became a university professor. Each of these life styles has left its mark on the job description of the theologian, but also on the way doctrine has continued to develop back and forth between believing, teaching, and confessing.

Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition

Pope Innocent X and Olimpia: Scandal in the Vatican

With the rise of national states and the spread of absolutism, popes were easily sidelined as monarchs began to reign supreme. The prestige of the papacy had declined during the long reign of nepotism under Urban VIII. His successor, a “dark-horse” compromise candidate, was hardly the man to revitalize the office. Indeed, in many respects, Giambattista Pamfili (1574–1655), who would become Innocent X, was a non-Pope descript pope. He studied law and worked his way up the institutional ladder under three popes to the position of cardinal. In carrying out the guidelines of the Council of Trent and the Inquisition, he was faithful to a fault. As a pope, however, he was ineffective and inefficient.

Innocent X

Because he was perceived to favor France, Innocent X soon became embroiled in a widespread church dispute. French church militants were threatening to invade the Papal States. Later, when one of his bishops was murdered, the pope’s henchmen mercilessly attacked those whom he suspected were responsible and created problems that would long haunt him. During his reign the Thirty Years War was winding down and was finally ended through the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. But late that year he issued a bull nullifying much of what had been agreed upon. In his “Zelo Domus Dei,” he decreed that there would be no compromises on the part of the Roman Church.

Innocent was not a strong pope in his own right, and his eleven-year reign might have gone down in history as just one more in a gradual weakening of the papacy. In the eyes of many contemporaries he was considered weak but for one ace in the hand. He was propped up by a powerful woman behind the papal throne. Olimpia Maidalchini, his sister-in-law, possessed all the tenacity and qualifications to be a politically powerful pope herself, but for her gender. Born into a poor family, she was sent to a convent as a teenager, only to escape and marry her way into prestige. At twenty she became a rich widow, and at twenty-one she married a nobleman, age forty-nine and well connected. With her wealth and his noble blood, she relocated to Rome and was soon living in a mansion with a massive ballroom decorated by the most prestigious artists of the day.

But power, more than wealth, was her ambition. Her opportunity came when her brother-in-law was elevated to cardinal and later became Pope Innocent X. Indeed, she wielded so much control over the new pope that a cardinal commented, “We have just elected a female pope.” Banners appeared outside churches proclaiming the reign of “Pope Olimpia I.” Indeed, papal medals appeared showing Olimpia with the keys of St. Peter, crowned with the triple tiara and seated on the papal throne. The other side of the medal featured the pope spinning wool, wearing a bonnet over his curls.

She was denounced as a whore by one cardinal, and another bemoaned the “monstrous power of a woman in the Vatican.” But most cardinals and lesser clerics paid her homage, one cardinal acknowledging her authority by hanging a large portrait of her in his outer lounge. When officials had business with the pope, they sought her authorization before assuming a decision was final. Publicly, Olimpia presented herself as the papal hostess, but her oversight of daily Vatican activities included far more than serving tea and pastries. Her authority was considerable, extending to the selection of cardinals, purchasing properties, and conducting diplomacy with foreign emissaries. All the while she took generous perks for herself from the papal treasury.

Rumors that she and the aged pope were lovers flourished, but her aspirations were far beyond that of a sexual dalliance. Her lust was for power and prestige. The French ambassador reported to King Louis XIV that she was indeed a “great lady.” Even her chief nemesis conceded that she had “intellect of great worth in economic government” and a great “capacity for the highest affairs.” Yet there was widespread embarrassment that the church was being ruled by a woman. So unpopular was she that when the pope lay dying in 1655, she fled Rome, though not before filling her luggage with gold coins. At eighty-two, Innocent had long been failing. With her sudden flight, his corpse lay three days before he was reported dead.

DONNA OLIMPIA WAS POPE

There has never before been heard of nor seen that the popes allowed themselves to be so absolutely governed by a woman. There was no more talk of the pope; all the discourse was of Donna Olimpia, many taking occasion to say, That it were fit likewise to introduce the women to the administration of the Sacrament, since that Donna Olimpia was pope.

A Contemporary Chronicler

Two years before he died in 1653, Innocent had issued a bull taking aim at the Jansenists, who were located primarily in France. His predecessor, Urban VIII, had also condemned the movement, a move based largely on a book written by Bishop Cornelius Jansen (1585–1638), who had drawn heavily on the theology of Augustine. According to Jesuit heresy hunters, the book was no more than warmed-over Calvinism, though Jansen had insisted his teachings were as Catholic as was St. Augustine himself. Like Calvin (and Augustine), he affirmed God’s sovereignty and man’s inability to come to God or perform good works apart from unmerited grace—grace bestowed only on the elect. His three-volume Augustinus (published posthumously in 1640), recounted the history—and heresy—of Pelagianism as a theology of works-based righteousness that denied original sin. The book also took aim at “modern” denials of Augustine’s theology of God’s sovereign grace. It became a seventeenth-century bestseller in France and the Low Countries, and ten professors at the Sorbonne endorsed it. However, in 1641 Urban VIII added it to the Index of Prohibited Books and issued a bull against it.

Blaise Pascal: Mathematician and Philosopher

The most noted proponent of Jansenism was Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), mathematician and philosopher. The son of a scientist, Pascal was a precocious but sickly child. Introduced early to the best education of his day, he would be considered one of the most brilliant minds of his era. As young as eight he began in writing scientific papers, and in his teens he developed new concepts in geometry and invented a mathematical calculator. He later made great strides in the field of calculus and various fields of physics. But all the while he is struggling with doubt about God and his religious heritage. He lives at a time when new discoveries in astronomy point to the vastness of space. “The eternal science of these infinite spaces,” he confesses, “terrifies me.” Where is God, he wonders, in the midst of the vast universe?

Blaise Pascal

His sister is a nun, and in 1655 he converts to Jansenism through her influence. Her abbess, Jacqueline-Marie-Angelique Arnauld (1591–1661), is one of the leading supporters of Jansenism in the seventeenth century. One of twenty children, she had entered the Cistercian convent at a young age and was appointed abbess before the age of twelve. Some three decades later she is introduced to the teachings of Cornelius Jansen, and for the remainder of her life she spreads his teachings. She wields theological influence over two Port-Royal convents and is also instrumental in bringing her brother, philosopher Antoine Arnauld, into the Jansenist camp.

Pascal’s identification with the movement comes during a two-week retreat at the Port-Royal Convent, and in the following years he participates in other religious retreats there, even as he contemplates philosophical and psychological and scientific puzzles. Responding to questions in an era of increasing religious doubt, he makes his famous wager—known as Pascal’s wager: “I should be much more afraid of being mistaken and then finding out that Christianity is true than of being mistaken in believing it to be true.” Truly thoughtful people, he argues, should put their wager on the truth of Christianity. If it is false, what have they to lose? If it is true, they gain an eternal life of infinite happiness. Thus one could thoughtfully be a committed Christian in the midst of seriously questioning the very existence of God.

Belief in God rises far above reason, as Pascal suggests in one of his most often-quoted aphorisms: “The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.” Just before he had gone to the Port-Royal Retreat, Pascal found this true in his own life. His discovery came through a profound mystical experience, which he recorded on paper and pinned inside his coat. It was found at the time of his death. Dated November 23, 1654, “from about half past ten in the evening until half past midnight,” it was his “nuit de feu”—his night of fire.

Fire

God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob,’ not of philosophers and scholars.

Certainty, certainty, heartfelt, joy, peace.

God of Jesus Christ….

Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy.

Sweet and total renunciation….

Total submission to Jesus Christ and my director.

Everlasting joy in return for one day’s effort on earth.

I will not forget thy word. Amen.

Although transformed by a mystical experience, he, like his contemporary René Descartes, rates rational thought as the crowning capability of humankind:

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapor, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him, the universe knows nothing of this. All our dignity then, consists in thought. By it we must elevate ourselves, and not by space and time which we cannot fill. Let us endeavor then, to think well; this is the principle of morality.

Thinking well is what Pascal is known for—despite serious health issues. Tormented by severe neurological problems most of his life, he is unfit for strenuous activities. But he excels in cognitive capabilities and not simply in complex mathematical and philosophical puzzles. His thoughts are captured by practical problems as well. For example, he engineers a plan for a mass transit system in Paris—large-capacity carriages transporting passengers on scheduled routes. At the same time, he is challenging Descartes on how we know things to be true. He insists that experiences and experiments are the starting point for the discovery of truth, not pure reason, though empiricism and reason go hand in hand for the scientist.

In some respects France of the seventeenth century was not big enough for two hardheaded, brilliant mathematician philosophers. “I cannot forgive Descartes,” Pascal laments. “In all his philosophy he did his best to dispense with God. But he could not avoid making Him set the world in motion with a flip of His thumb; after that he had no more use for God.” During Pascal’s lifetime philosophy is being turned on its head by Descartes. As Pascal recognizes, Descartes’ philosophy was more toxic to the faith than outright atheism would have been. To have a distant, mechanistic God was no better than having no God at all. God is not, Pascal insisted, “the god of philosophers.”

Descartes’ god of philosophy would reign over the Enlightenment, an era when the very truthfulness of religion was being questioned. Was there, in fact, a personal God who was concerned with human affairs, or was the biblical God more myth than reality? The Renaissance had placed an emphasis on humanity—Renaissance humanism—while leaving the biblical concept of God essentially intact. But with the dawn of the Enlightenment, the traditional concept of God is challenged.

René Descartes and Enlightenment Philosophers

Often referred to as the Father of modern philosophy, René Descartes (1596–1650) was a dutiful Catholic throughout his life. Ever conscious of the church dogma vigorously defended by the dreaded Inquisition, he nevertheless put forth a shocking proposition more radical than the ancient Greek philosophy from which he had so heavily drawn. Convinced that the rational mind was the only source of knowledge, he insisted that everything must be doubted—even one’s very existence. He is considered the first in a series of genuinely secular philosophers. Philosophy, like his specialty of mathematics, must be autonomous—not subservient to religion. Indeed, religion and philosophy must not be mixed.

Born in La Haye, France, he grew up in modest wealth and studied at a prestigious Jesuit school. He then went on to Paris where, at the behest of his father, he graduated with a law degree. But settling down in a legal profession or continuing on in graduate studies was not suited to his temperament, as he later related: “I entirely abandoned the study of letters. Resolving to seek no knowledge other than that of which could be found in myself or else in the great book of the world, I spent the rest of my youth traveling, visiting courts and armies, mixing with people of diverse temperaments and ranks.”

More than merely visiting armies, he serves as a military officer for both Dutch and German forces, though he is remembered more for his sloth than for any commanding presence. Leaving military life, he supports his traveling lifestyle with inherited money. While on his journeys he becomes captivated by mathematics and physics—particularly by questions related to gravity. In 1628 he settles in the Netherlands, where he establishes his reputation as a writer and university lecturer. A stylish dresser and life-long bachelor, he dotes over Francine, his daughter by a servant girl, and is devastated when she dies of a fever at age five.

The philosophical discovery for which he is most known comes in 1618, when he is in his early twenties serving with the Bavarian army. The scene is a cold winter day. He is contemplating epistemology—the science of knowing. How can we know anything for sure? The setting is most unusual. He is “in a stove”—perhaps a heated room or a large wood stove near which he huddles to keep warm. It is here that he suddenly recognizes the most basic foundation of knowledge: Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am). That night he has dreams that serve as a symbolic confirmation of his mystical discovery. That thinking—or doubting—would prove one’s existence would seem on the surface to have little to do with mathematics. But for Descartes the universe cannot be understood apart from the absoluteness of the hard science of mathematics. He allows no room for mere speculation and uncertainty. True knowledge requires absolute true and false answers.

Although he does not combine religion and philosophy as a single discipline as had Thomas Aquinas and others, he nevertheless takes a page from Anselm and seeks to prove God’s existence through philosophy. For Anselm, God is that which nothing greater can be conceived. For Descartes, God’s existence is proved by the same rationale that proves his own existence: I think, therefore I am. God likewise exists, he reasons, on the same foundation—essentially, I think of the idea of God, and the cause of my thinking of God proves God exists. But unlike Anselm, he is anything but a Christian apologist. In 1643 the University of Utrecht condemns his philosophy, and in 1663, more than a decade after his death, the pope includes his works in the Index of Prohibited Books.

If Descartes paved the way for the Enlightenment, Francois-Marie Voltaire (1694–1778) would stand as its most controversial representative. Like his predecessor, he acquired his razor-sharp thinking skills by way of a Jesuit education, but unlike Descartes he turned against his church heritage. His religious contempt wounded the church more severely than the guns of a mighty army could have. Yet for all the unbelief that flowed from his acerbic pen, he was no atheist. He was a deist. “I shall always be convinced,” he wrote, “that a watch proves a watch-maker, and that a universe proves a God.” But his God was not the personal God of the Bible, as he explained in his Philosophical Dictionary: “The Theist is firmly persuaded of the existence of a supreme Being as good as He is powerful…. The Theist does not know how God punishes, or how He favours and pardons, and is not rash enough to flatter himself that he knows how God acts, but that God acts and that He is just, this he knows.”

Even more than Descartes or Voltaire, the brilliant Scottish thinker David Hume (1711–1776) stands out as a philosopher of skepticism. He maintained that no credible scholar could any longer honestly believe in the Bible. He challenged the cosmological argument for God, insisting that it is impossible for a cause (God) to be known only by its effect (the existence of the universe). He likewise argued that it is false to assume that the cause has any other qualities than those related to causing the effect. Thus, one cannot identify the first cause as the Christian God or give this cause intelligence or moral attributes.

In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to another.

Voltaire

“A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature,” he argued, “and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined.” In fact, all religions, he pointed out, depend upon miracles—and how, he demanded, can all religions be right? Yet he sometimes doubted his own methods so much that he experienced “melancholy and delirium,” cured only by activities: “I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when, after three or four hours’ amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any further.”

Like his predecessors, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was unable to entirely rid himself of God. He was born into a poor Prussian family. His mother was a devout Christian whose faith had been profoundly influenced by the heritage of Jakob Spener, Auguste Hermann Francke, and other German Pietists. Through her influence he was immersed in evangelical religious values. But as he developed his speculative philosophy, he argued that no generation should be bound by the religious beliefs of earlier generations. He rejected biblical claims and attempts to prove the existence of God. But while he had no patience with the concept of a personal God who answers prayer and offers guidance, he nevertheless acknowledged that the universal human understanding of moral codes pointed to God. Jesus, for him, was a model worthy of recognition. He was convinced that because God is beyond our human comprehension, there is no value in attempting to prove his existence. But one might seek to know God not by looking for a deity but by starting with man and his quest for moral values.

These philosophers and many others had a profound effect on Christianity. Unlike the previous renewals and reformations and revivals that challenged the church to mend its ways, this movement aimed its arrows straight at God. The damage had only begun. Friedrich Nietzsche and others would carry on the fight.

Madame Jeanne-Marie Guyon: Catholic Evangelist

Flourishing alongside philosophical speculation in every age are charismatic and mystical beliefs. On the opposite end of the spectrum from Descartes and his colleagues was Madame Guyon (1648–1717). Born into a wealthy family, she was a sickly child who spent her early life in a convent. Her desire was to become a nun, but her parents instead arranged a marriage when she was sixteen to a wealthy forty-year-old aristocrat whose mother treated her cruelly. The loss of her parents, a sister, and a son and daughter added to the anguish of her twelve-year marriage. Widowhood at the age of twenty-eight comes as a relief.

Jeanne-Marie Guyon

All the while, however, she is finding solace in God through mystical experiences, convinced that suffering is drawing her closer to God. Influenced by a French Barnabite monk, Père Lacombe, she adopts a passive spirituality, one that opens the consciousness to deep meditation and comprehension of God. So consumed is she with spiritual discoveries that she leaves her two young children behind and begins an evangelistic tour. Her confessor, she insists, gives not only his blessing but also the command of the Lord: “My Father, I am a widow, who has little children four and six years of age. What else could God require of me but to rear them?” He responds: “I know nothing of it. You know whether God had made you recognize that he wished something of you. If it is so, there is nothing which should hinder you from doing his will. One must leave one’s children to do it.”

She journeys to Geneva where Father Lacombe has settled. But the local bishop orders them out of town. She later returns to France, where she publishes her mystical insights and is once again forced into exile by a local bishop. Her flight from persecution becomes an opportunity to evangelize. She preaches in marketplaces and private homes and is amazed at the spiritual hunger she finds. On entering the town of Thonon, she writes: “I have never in my life had so much consolation as in seeing in that little town so many good souls who vied with each other in giving themselves to God with their whole heart. There were young girls of twelve and thirteen years of age, who worked all day in silence in order to converse with God.”

ELIZABETH ANN BAYLEY SETON

When Elizabeth Seton (1774–1821) converted to Catholicism in 1805, there was an uproar in her family. The daughter of a noted professor of anatomy and granddaughter of an Episcopal priest, she was devoted to her faith from childhood. Indeed, a battle began, with bishops on both sides fighting for her religious devotion. But on Ash Wednesday of 1805, she made her commitment official and never looked back. Despite a series of ministry failures, she attracted other women who joined with her in an informal religious community. In 1809 she took vows to enter a religious vocation. Property for a charitable complex in Maryland came through a donation as did other necessities. Eight women committed themselves to work with her, including her three daughters and a sister-in-law. Soon they had established an infirmary, a school, a chapel, and later an orphanage. Their own impoverished lifestyle—including a leaky roof and an infestation of fleas—replicated that of those who came for aid. In 1811, her ministry was recognized by the Vatican as an American order of the Sisters of Charity. By the time of her death in 1821, the order had expanded to a total of twenty communities. In 1975, she was canonized by Pope Paul VI.

Her ministry reaches every social class and vocation, from an impoverished “laundress” to a prominent physician: “I entered into conversation with him on the subject of religion,” she writes. “He acknowledged that he had known something of the power of religion, but that the religious life had been stifled by the multitude of his occupations…. The conversation was greatly blessed to him. And he became afterwards a decided Christian.” Later on he “had occasion to bring to me some of his companions, and God took them all for himself.” She preaches to those she encounters along the way and also seeks the rich and famous. In Paris she forms a group of “ladies of rank,” including a countess and two duchesses. Nor does she assume clerics are off limits. Convents and monasteries become regular stops on her journeys. In fact, she is permitted to present her message at the monastery of the Grande Chartreuse, where no woman has before entered.

When she encounters a suicidal nun, she writes, “I endeavored to explain to her she must no longer rely upon observances, or trust to personal merits, but must trust in Christ and resign herself to Him alone.” With further counsel, “she was so much changed that she became the admiration of the Religious community.” Even if her words were true to the dogma reaffirmed by the Council of Trent, a female itinerant evangelist is not acceptable to the church hierarchy—particularly one considered mentally unstable. Indeed, she is regularly given to bizarre behavior. In an effort to gain holiness and comprehend the suffering of Christ, for example, she sucks bitter herbs, rolls in stinging nettles, puts stones in her shoes, and pulls out healthy teeth. She is convinced that in identifying with Christ she has actually ceased to exist and has become one with God.

Church authorities seek to silence her, but she is a Quietist who will not be quieted. Both she and Lacombe are imprisoned on orders of Louis XIV. Following her release, she is examined by theologians and signs a recantation. But she continues on with her ministry and is again imprisoned, this time in the Bastille. In 1703, after seven years of suffering, the last two years in solitary confinement, she is released. She lives the rest of her life with her son, writing poetry and following the injunction not to preach. “I found myself in happiness equal to that of the Blessed,” she said of her suffering. “Nothing here below affected me; and neither at present do I see anything in heaven or in earth which can trouble me as regards myself.”

Anne-Marie Javouhey: Missionary to Africa and the World

Since medieval times large numbers of women have served alongside men in the Catholic Church, particularly in humanitarian ministries. Barred from the priesthood and the church hierarchy, they volunteered in droves to serve among those on the margins of society. Although many girls were sent to the convent by their parents, others felt called by God when they were very young. Anne-Marie Javouhey (1779–1851), the fifth often children born in the French countryside to prosperous pious farmers, grew up in an era of ferment which would erupt violently as the French Revolution, an uprising against both the state and the church.

Ten-year-old Anne Marie, like her family, was loyal to the church. As the Revolution ignited she feared that the church—her very Mother—might be destroyed by the waves of violence. Nuns and priests were persecuted. What could a child do? She found her niche in keeping watch as priests surreptitiously perform the Mass.

Anne-Marie Javouhey

At nineteen she takes vows to become a nun, hoping to help undo some of the ravages of the Revolution. But she is restless until a vision awakens her one night. Before her is a nun with children from around the world pressing in from all sides. The nun calls to her: “These are the children God has given you. He wishes you to form a new congregation to take care of them. I am Teresa [of Avila]. I will be your protectress.”

In the following years, she founds the Congregation of St. Joseph. Then in the 1820s, learning of an epidemic in Gambia, she journeys there with several nuns to serve the sick and dying. She establishes hospitals, schools, and agricultural colonies; within a few decades her blue-robed sisters are spread out over the world. She supervises the work and is referred to by a sea captain as “my most seasoned sailor.” Her mission outreach corresponds to the beginnings of the nineteenth-century Protestant modern missionary movement, predating the Women’s Missionary Movement that began in the 1860s.

Like many of her male counterparts, she is an authoritarian leader who does not tolerate dissent. Her decisions are final: “God has made known to me what he wants me to do.” Her superior, Bishop d’Hericourt, is not convinced, however. Her motherhouse is in his diocese, making him in his own mind the superior general. Before becoming a cleric, he had been in the military, and he is not about to be bested by a woman. For nearly two decades a fierce tug-of-war would consume precious ministry time on both sides. Accused of demanding obedience from her nuns while disregarding obedience to him, she insists that the bishop is her superior only in personal matters—that he is not the superior over her religious order.

Despite her remarkable success—or because of it—the bishop’s stance hardens as the years pass to the point of his excommunicating her, and she observes her nuns taking communion while she is forbidden to participate. Her aim, he charges, is to “extricate herself from Episcopal authority.” Among her violations: she is appointing nuns without approval, and her business affairs are in “total disorder.” She is carrying on like a bishop and a doctor of the church. He appeals to the archbishop, but she fights back: “I am not only the Superior General of the Congregation of St. Joseph of Cluny; I did not merely cooperate in the foundation of that Order; I am its sole and solitary foundress. I am its Mother General as God is its Father, since it is I who created and have developed it.”

Cardinal Newman

In the end, the archbishop comes down on her side. But it is a Pyrrhic victory. She is worn out by the long ordeal. Indeed, within a year both she and the bishop are dead, he before her. When she learns of his death, she writes to one of her nuns: “We almost met, he and I, on that very day, before the judgment seat of God. So he’s gone in ahead of me, that good Bishop. Well, that is correct; that is how it ought to be.”

John Henry Newman: Catholic Convert and Apologist

As the Catholic Church marched into the modern era, controversy increased. Not only was it fighting philosophy and science and sectarian movements from within, but it was also clashing with Protestants in a battle for souls worldwide. By the mid-nineteenth century, the Protestant missionary movement was expanding, and Catholics, whose worldwide mission ventures were already centuries old, were not amused. Whether in Africa or Asia or the Pacific Islands, territorial battles raged. Catholics’ eagerness to baptize infants and terminally ill individuals of all ages often led to horror stories that little ones (and others) were being poisoned, and Protestants did nothing to quell the rumors.

While Catholics faced competition from Protestants in world mission, they also competed for celebrity conversions from Protestantism to Catholicism. The much-publicized conversion story of Mother Seton was only equaled by the triumph of John Henry Newman (1801–1890), who departed the Church of England to become a Catholic. An Anglican priest and tutor at Oxford University, he was the founder of the Oxford movement that sought to stem the tide of low church liturgy and more closely conform to Catholic liturgy and beliefs, including apostolic succession. In addition to sermons and books, he began writing “Tracts for the Times,” defending high-church “ancient” liturgy.

A HYMN FOR THE AGES

Lead, Kindly Light, amidst th’ encircling gloom

Lead Thou me on!

The night is dark, and I am far from home—

Lead Thou me on!

Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see

The distant scene—one step enough for me.

John Henry Newman

Accused of being too cozy with the Catholics, he insists that he is not. “If there ever was a system which required reformation, it is that of Rome at this day,” he argued, referring to the Catholic system as “Romanism or Popery.” But as the years pass, he comes more in line with Rome than with the Church of England. In 1841 he publishes Tract Ninety, making the case that the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles are compatible with Catholic doctrine. The tract creates an explosion among Anglicans, and he soon finds himself a cleric without a church.

He remains in limbo for a time even as the Oxford movement disintegrates. Then, in 1845, to the chagrin of his Anglican friends and colleagues, he formally joins the Catholic Church. The following year he is ordained a Catholic priest, helping to establish Catholic schools, publishing treatises, and serving in other clerical roles. In 1879 he is named a cardinal. His intent is not necessarily to pull others away from the Church of England into Catholicism. “You must be patient, you must wait for the eye of the soul to be formed in you,” he writes to an inquiring friend. “Religious truth is reached, not by reasoning, but by an inward perception.”

In both Catholic and Protestant circles Newman is today remembered as a deeply thoughtful writer in the field of spiritual formation, especially that which intersects with the rationalism and romanticism of his age. In The Grammar of Assent (1870), he makes a case for faith in the face of rational religion. Religious faith, he argues, is a legitimate outcome of cognitive activity. His chief opponents are British empiricists David Hume, John Locke, and John Stuart Mill. His Apologia challenging that philosophy also prefigures C. S. Lewis:

I understood … that the exterior world, physical and historical, was but the manifestation to our senses of realities greater than itself. Nature was a parable, Scripture was an allegory; pagan literature, philosophy, and mythology, properly understood, were but a preparation for the Gospel. The Greek poets and sages were in a sense prophets.

HAWAII SAINT

HONOLULU—The Congregation of the Causes of Saints at the Vatican has voted to canonize Father Damien of Molokai to sainthood…. Supporters of the sainthood effort are overjoyed that now the world will know what Hawaii has known for 100 years—that Father Damien of Molokai is a saint. He was born Joseph De Veuster in Tremeloo, Belgium, in 1840. De Veuster’s older brother, Pamphile, was set to travel to the “Sandwich Islands,” but was too sick to go. Instead, De Veuster traveled to Hawaii in his brother’s place. The Roman Catholic priest arrived in Hawaii in 1864 and took the name Damien. He served the leprosy patients at the Molokai colony at Kalaupapa for 12 years before he succumbed to Hansen’s disease at age 49.

Honolulu News, July 1, 2008

Newman’s writings have had a long shelf life. Thoughtful Christians in the generations since have looked to him for spiritual direction when facing intellectual struggles and doubt.

What if …

What if there had been a series of strong popes to confront kings like Louis XIV? What if the Catholic Church had held to an egalitarian position that would have allowed Olimpia, with her diplomatic and financial skills, to actually serve as pope? Like many strong papal predecessors, she had no inclination toward spiritual development, but she might have successfully protected the Vatican’s interests against the power of seventeenth-century monarchs.

What if Pascal’s “Christian” philosophy and science had prevailed in the Age of Rationalism and following? What if Descartes and other of the leading philosophers had followed his line of thinking?

What if Ann-Marie Javouhey had been allowed to expand her mission outreach with encouragement and support like that enjoyed by the Jesuits two centuries earlier? Would her band of missionaries have become a nineteenth-century Society of Jesus?

What if John Henry Newman had not converted to Catholicism? Might he have become a key ecumenical leader, bringing the Church of England and the Church of Rome closer together?

18. The Catholic Church: Centuries of Struggle

18. The Catholic Church: Centuries of Struggle

CHAPTER 18

The Catholic Church

Centuries of Struggle

PARADE OF HISTORY

A ROYAL REVOCATION THAT BACKFIRES

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH ON THE DEFENSIVE

EVERYDAY LIFE

A Great Company of Bewitched People

THEOLOGY THROUGH THE AGES

Pope Innocent X and Olimpia: Scandal in the Vatican

DONNA OLIMPIA WAS POPE

Blaise Pascal: Mathematician and Philosopher

René Descartes and Enlightenment Philosophers

Madame Jeanne-Marie Guyon: Catholic Evangelist

ELIZABETH ANN BAYLEY SETON

Anne-Marie Javouhey: Missionary to Africa and the World

John Henry Newman: Catholic Convert and Apologist

A HYMN FOR THE AGES

HAWAII SAINT

What if …

Further Reading