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New Perspectives on Twentieth-Century Catholicism

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JamesChappel, Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 352 pp. (hb), $35.00, ISBN: 9780674972100.
Piotr H.Kosicki, Catholics on the Barricades: Poland, France, and “Revolution,” 1891–1956 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018), $40.00, xxviii + 391 pp. (hb), 13 b/w illus., ISBN: 9780300225518.
SamuelMoyn, Christian Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), $24.95, 264 pp. (hb), ISBN: 9780812248180.

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Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 October 2019

Rosario Forlenza
Rosario Forlenza*
Affiliation:
Remarque Insitute, New York University, 60 Fifth Avenue, 8th Floor, New York City, NY 10011
*
rf1231@nyu.edu; ros.forlenza@gmail.com
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Extract

Until the 1980s the history of the Roman Catholic Church and Catholicism in modern Europe was mostly the preserve of the theologically and confessionally defined field of ‘church history’ or ‘ecclesiastic history’. Catholic historiography was sealed off from mainstream (North American and British) historiography, with nineteenth- and twentieth-century Catholicism seemingly little more than a backward-looking footnote in the dominant narrative of secular modernity and progress. In a 1991 review article David Blackbourn pointed out that ‘historians in the mainstream have commonly considered Catholicism, if they considered it at all, as a hopelessly obscurantist force at odds with the more serious isms that have shaped the modern age’. Within the same review, however, Blackbourn signaled the emergence of timid but nevertheless clear ‘signs of a change’ in the historiographical direction and a new interest in Catholic history.

Type
Review Article
Information
Contemporary European History , Volume 28 , Issue 4 , November 2019 , pp. 581 - 595
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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References

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6 José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Rodney Stark, ‘Secularization R.I.P’, Sociology of Religion, 60 (1999), 249–73; Peter Berger, The Desecularizaton of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999).

7 As noted by Thomas Albert Howard, ‘Commentary – A “Religious Turn” in Modern European Historiography’, Church History, 75 (2006): 157–63, here 157.

8 John Rawls Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 143–9.

9 Jürgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger, The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005),

10 Vali Nasr, ‘The Rise of Muslim Democracy’, The Journal of Democracy, 16 (2005), 13–27; Jan-Werner Müller, ‘Making Muslim Democracy: How Religious Ideas Enter Politics’, Boston Review, 35, 6 (2010), 36–42.

11 Charles Maier, ‘Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era’, The American Historical Review, 105 (2000), 807–31, 826.

12 On ‘transformative experiences’ see Harald Wydra, Communism and the Emergence of Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 6, 31–57; Rosario Forlenza, On the Edge of Democracy: Italy, 1943–1948 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 15–6.

13 James Chappel, Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitatianism and the Remaking of the Church (Cambridg, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2018), 13.

14 Ibid., 14

15 Ibid., 187.

16 Pietro Scoppola, Crisi modernista e rinnovamento cattolico in Italia (Bologna, 1969); Francesco Traniello, Religione cattolica e stato nazionale. Dal Risorgimento al secondo dopoguerra (Bologna: il Mulino, 2007); Guido Formigoni, Alla prova della democrazia: Chiesa, cattolici, e modernità nell'Italia del ’900 (Trento: Il Margine, 2008); Jorge Dagnino, Faith and Fascism: Catholic Intellectuals in Italy, 1925–1943 (London: Routledge, 2017); Rosario Forlenza and Bjørn Thomassen, Italian Modernities: Competing Narratives of Nationhood (New York: Palgarve, 2016), 57–90; Bjørn Thomassen and Rosario Forlenza, ‘Catholic Modernity and the Italian Constitution’, History Workshop Journal, 81 (2016), 251–71.

17 E. Fuat Keyman, ‘Modernity, Secularism and Islam: The Case of Turkey’, Theory, Culture & Society, 24 (2007), 215–34.

18 Chappel, Catholic Modern, 2, 64, 112, 146.

19 Thomassen and Forlenza, ‘Catholic Modernity’.

20 On this see also Rosario Forlenza, ‘The Politics of the Abendland: Christian Democracy and the Idea of Europe after the Second World War’, Contemporary European History, 26 (2017), 261–86.

21 Forlenza and Thomassen, Italian Modernities, 57–90; Forlenza and Thomassen, ‘Rethinking Christian Democracy: Transcendence as Transformation, 1930–1950’, paper presented at the American Historical Association annual meeting, Washington DC, 2018; Thomassen and Forlenza, ‘Christianity and Political Thought: Augusto Del Noce and the Ideology of Christian Democracy in Post-War Italy’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 21 (2016), 181–99.

22 On the differentiation of pathways to modernity see Bjørn Thomassen, ‘Anthropology, Multiple Modernities and the Axial Age Debate’, Anthropological Theory, 10 (2010), 321–42; Peter Wagner, Modernity: Understanding the Present, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012); Timothy Mitchell, ed., Questions of Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

23 Piotr H. Kosicki, Catholics on the Barricades: Poland, France, and “Revolution”, 1891–1956 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018), 138.

24 Porter-Szūcs, Faith and Fatherland, 328–59.

25 In the specific context of Poland, Kosicki argues, anti-Germanism ‘assumed the place that anti-Semitism had occupied before World War’; Kosicki, Catholics on the Barricades, 160.

26 Ibid., 12–3.

27 Ibid., 308.

28 Forlenza, On the Edge, 202–3; Forlenza and Thomassen, ‘Rethinking Christian Democracy’.

29 Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Mazower, ‘The Strange Triumph of Human Rights, 1933–1950’, Historical Journal, 47 (2004), 379–98; Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2007); Jay Winter and Antoine Prost, René Cassin and Human Rights: From the Great War to the Universal Declaration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013).

30 Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA, 2012).

31 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007); Hans Joas, The Sacredness of the Person: A New Geneaology of Human Rights (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013); Josè Casanova, ‘Cosmopolitanism, the Clash of Civilizations and Multiple Modernities’, Current Sociology, 59 (2011), 252–67.

32 On this see Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2002); John S. Nurser, For All People and All Nations: The Economical Church and Human Rights (Washington, DC: Georgetwon University Press, 2005).

33 Forlenza, ‘The Politics of the Abendland’; Forlenza, ‘A Party for Mezzogiorno: The Christian Democratic Party, Agrarian Reform and the Government of Italy’, Contemporary European History, 19 (2010), 331–49; Maria Mitchell, The Origins of Christian Democracy: The Politics and Confession in Modern Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012); Wolfram Kaiser and Martin Gehler, eds, Christian Democracy in Europe since 1945 (London, 2004); Martin Conway, ‘The Age of Christian Democracy: The Frontiers of Success and Failure’, in Thomas Kselman and Joseph A. Buttigieg, eds., European Christian Democracy: Historical Legacies and Comparative Perspectives (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 43–67.

34 On this see also Rosario Forlenza and Bryan S. Turner, ‘Das Abendland: The Politics of Europe's Religious Border’, Critical Research on Religion, 7 (2019), 6–23.

35 Samuel Moyn, Christian Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 167.

36 Karl D. Bracher, The Age of Ideologies: A History of Political Thought in the Twentieth Century, tr. E. Osers (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1984); Eric J. Hobsbawn, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (New York: Penguin, 1994); Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999); Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005). There is instead ample space dedicated to Catholic ideas in Jan-Werner. Müller, Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century Europe (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011) and in John Connelly, From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Thinking on the Jews, 1933–1965 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012).

37 Martin Conway, ‘Christian Democracy: One Word or Two’, Historia y Religión (2012), available at http://historiayreligion.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Christian-Democracy-MConway.pdf (last accessed 4 Mar. 2019); Thomassen and Forlenza, ‘Christianity and Political Thought’.

38 Jan Eckel, ‘Under a Magnyfying Glass: The International Human Rights Campaign against Chile in the Seventies’, in Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, ed., Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 321–42; Eckel, ‘The Rebirth of Politics from the Spirit of Morality: Explaining the Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s’, in Jan Eckel and Samuel Moyn, eds., The Breakthrough: Human Rights in the 1970s (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 226–60.

39 Moyn, Christian Human Rights, 167.

40 Ibid., 61.

41 Talal Asad, Formation of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Standford University Press, 2003), 1–2.

42 Gerd-Rainer Horn, The Spirit of Vatican II: Western European Progressive Catholicism in the Long Sixties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 259–60.

43 Hugh McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 187.

44 See on this Alana Harris, ed., The Schism of ’68: Catholicism, Contraception, and ‘Humanae Vitae’ (London: Palgrave, 2018).

45 Rosario Forlenza and Bryan S. Turner, ‘The Last Frontier: The Struggle over Sex and Marriage under Pope Francis, Rassegna Italiana di Sociologia, 57 (2016), 689–710.

46 Piotr H. Kosicki, ‘Introduction’, in Piotr H. Kosicki, ed., Vatican II Behind the Iron Curtain (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2016), 1–26, here 7.

47 John Pollard, ‘Pius XI's Promotion of the Italian Model of Catholic Action in the World-Wide Church’, Journal of Ecclesiastic History, 63 (2013), 758–84.

48 Stephen J. C. Andes, The Vatican and Catholic Activism in Mexico and Chile: The Politics of Transnational Catholicism, 1920– 1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 4.

49 Ibid., 3.

50 Darcie Fontaine, Decolonizing Christianity: Religion and the End of Empire in France and Algeria (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 11–5.

51 Ibid., 8.

52 Jeffrey Kames, Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization and Third World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Jennifer Johnson, The Battle for Algeria: Sovereignty, Health Care, and Humanitarianism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

53 Fontaine, Decolonizing Christianity, 211.

54 For the notion of ‘markers of certainty’ see Claude Lefort, ‘The Question of Democracy’, in Democracy and Political Theory, trans. D. Macey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 9–20, here 19.

55 E. Voegelin, ‘Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History’ (1970), in E. Sandoz, ed., The Collected Works, vol. 12, Published Essays, 1966–1985 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 115–33.

56 Weber, M., ‘The Social Psychology of the World Religions’ (1922–1923), in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. Gerth, H. H. and Mills, C. W. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 267–301Google Scholar, here 270.

57 Ibid.

58 Ibid.; see also, on Weberian concept of ‘stamping’, Forlenza and Thomassen, Italian Modernites, 84–5; Szakolczai, A., Max Weber and Michel Foucault: Parallel Life-Works (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 23–5Google Scholar.