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"As for the reverence due to monarchy, Who does not know that kings and rulers are sprung from men who were ignorant of God, who by pride, robbery, perfidy, murders, in a word, by almost every crime at the prompting of the devil, who is the prince of this world, have striven with blind cupidity and intolerable presumption, to dominate over their equals, that is, over mankind?"
-Pope Gregory VII
King Theoderic was an Arian, but he was also a wise and indulgent ruler to his Catholic subjects, and he cultivated good relations with successive popes. These overtures got a mixed reception in Rome, where the Senate and the wealthy Roman families longed for reconciliation with Byzantium and the restoration of the empire in Italy.
From 1931 the new Republican regime in Spain was increasingly hostile to the Church. With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 hostility turned to active persecution, and refugees flooded into Rome with accounts of Communist atrocities. The Nationalist opposition, by contrast, though also guilty of atrocity, and not originally noted for their piety, increasingly saw the Church as integral to their vision of Spain. They received the endorsement of all but one of the Spanish bishops in a joint pastoral in 1937, and despite General Franco’s murderous acts of repression, the papacy backed him.
Fatima is a Portuguese shrine where the Virgin was believed to have appeared in 1917. The apparitions and the Fatima cult rapidly became drawn into the apocalyptic hopes and fears aroused by the Bolshevik Revolution and the Communist attack on Christianity. During the Cold War years Fatima become a devotional focus for anti-Communist feeling, and the aging Pius XII was rumoured to have received visions of the Virgin of Fatima.
John Paul was convinced that the shot with which Mehmet Ali Agca almost killed him in St Peter’s Square in 1981 was miraculously deflected by Our Lady of Fatima. Agca’s bullet was later presented to the shrine at Fatima, where it was set in the Virgin’s jewelled crown.
With the Concordat safely achieved, Hitler discarded the mask of cordiality towards the Church, and the Nazi press began a smear campaign. The Archbishop of Baden, it was claimed, had a Jewish mistress, the Vatican was financed by Jews, the Catholic Church was profiteering on inflation. Press attacks gave way to physical intimidation. By 1936 the Vatican had accumulated a vast dossier of Nazi attacks on the Church’s freedom in Germany, which, it was rumoured, it intended to publish. Cardinal Pacelli, on a visit to America, declared that ‘everything is lost’ in Germany.
Executed by the Romans as a pretender to the throne of Israel, Jesus' death and resurrection were interpreted by reference to the stories and prophecies of the Jewish scriptures, and much of the language in which it was proclaimed derived from and spoke to Jewish hopes and longings.
As the empire shrank under the Muslim advance, theologians and preachers began to wonder aloud whether God was angry with his people, whether at the heart of the empire there lay some great sin, for which all were being punished. In 726 this speculation was given symbolic focus by a terrifying volcanic eruption: black ash settled like an omen all over the Aegean, and the Emperor acted. God was angry, he declared, because of the sin of idolatry. The Old Testament forbade the worship of images, yet the churches were full of them. He commanded the destruction of all images of Christ and his mother, and their replacement by the unadorned symbol of the cross, the sign in which Constantine, the founder of the Christian empire, had conquered.
The emergence of Prussia as the dominant European power after 1870 transformed the position of Catholicism in Europe, as the dominance of Catholic Austria was replaced by that of a strongly Protestant Prussia.
The Chancellor of Prussia, Bismarck, detested and feared the Church as a potentially treasonous fifth column. Catholics in general wanted a larger pan-German state which would be less Protestant, and allied themselves with Liberal political critics of Bismarck’s regime.
By the summer of 1831 much of central Italy was in revolt, seeking the ejection of foreign powers and the creation of a unified Italian state. Out of these ferments, Giuseppe Mazzini’s ‘Young Italy’ movement, and the national independence movement known as the Risorgimento, would emerge. More immediately, and within three weeks of Gregory’s election, many of the cities of the Papal States had been occupied by rebel forces.
Gregory called for the help of Austrian troops to suppress the revolts. The aftermath in the Papal States was disastrous. The papal prisons filled up, and liberal exiles schooled Europe in anti-papalism. The Secretary of State, Cardinal Benetti, raised a volunteer police force, in effect arming one element of the population against another, and the papal revenues were devoured by the machinery of repression. Gregory XVI was forced to negotiate a loan from the Rothschilds .
The saintly Dominican Benedict XIII (1724–30) had resigned a dukedom to become a friar. He was unworldly, and he did try to be neutral. But he also refused to behave like a pope, instead behaving like a simple parish priest, living in a whitewashed room, visiting hospitals, hearing confessions and teaching children their catechism. Meanwhile, he put all the affairs of the papacy into the hands of his secretary, Niccolo Coscia. Coscia was totally corrupt, and surrounded himself with a disreputable parcel of cronies and profiteers.