The Century of Peace
Religious Upheavals
"From a Universal Church and a Universal Empire to National Churches and National States",
Anaïs de Pònt, 1739, Tolosa (Toulouse), Occitan Autonomy, Kingdom of France --
Excerpts
There are three possible ways in which the Church can interact with the State: Independence, Supremacy and Subservience.
The Church is independent from the State when the official religion of the State is not Christianity, but rather Paganism, as it had been the case in the Roman Empire prior to A.D. 380 Salonika Edict, or Mohammedanism, as it had been the case in much of the Orient after the Mahommedan conquests and before the Christian Resurgence.
The Church may be tolerated, persecuted or even outlawed but, nevertheless, it is independent from the State which does not interfere either in its internal organization or in its doctrine.
The problem is that independence does come with a heavy cost. Without the support of the State, the Church lacks the power to curtail the spread of heretical ideas and it may thus fragment into several mutually incompatible and competing churches, much to the delight of the non-Christian authorities.
[...]
The Church has supremacy over the State when the State is weak due to feudal fragmentation or various other reasons. This had been the case in the Occident for over a millenium when the Popes in Rome ruled supreme over their half of the Christendom.
Of course that, even then, there were strong States with strong Rulers who did contest the Papal Power but the very presence of a multitude of other weak States compelled them to prefer an accomodation with the Papacy to a possible confrontation.
This situation is conductive to the preeminence of a single Church whose power trancends boundaries and acts as a unifying force in the midst of the worse possible political disunion.
Heresies are rare and successful heresies leading to the emergence of alternative Churches are even rarer. The supreme Church can easily gather the support of various States and their militaries and proceeds to either crush the rebellion completely as in the tragic case of our Cathars or at least inflict an unordinate amount of chaos and destruction upon the unfortunate people who dared to challange its rule as in the case of the Protestant Germans.
[...]
The Church is subservient to the State when there is only one State, as it had been the case during the Roman Empire, or when the Christendom is divided into a small number of large and powerful States, as it is the case in our times.
The State uses the Church for its own needs and protects it from any outside interference. This situation does, sooner or later, lead to a biunivocal relation between States and their Churches. There is always one and only one Church in each State and no Church in more than one State.
Indeed, when the Roman Empire was united, being the archetypal Universal State, there was a single Universal Church. The division of the Roman Empire into its two halves lead, centuries later, to the ineluctable division of the Universal Church into its two halves, the Catholic and the Orthodox Churches.
After the fall of the Orthodox Church under the heel of the Mahommedans, the Catholic Church took the mantle of the Universal Church. Centuries later, the role of the Popes as leaders and arbiters of the Christendom was challenged by the schism of the British Church, the Protestant Reformation and the resurgence of the Romanian Orthodox Church.
[...]
However, the singular event to which we can trace the unexpected dissolution of the Catholic Church is the raise of Nationalism with its all powerful centralized Nation States. From the moment our Continent became divided into nine Nation States adverse and wary of each other and of comparable power, the concept of an Universal Church became meaningless.
After the Unification of Italy, the last Great Power to enter their club, the days of the Catholic Church became numbered. No Great Power could be reasonably expected to tolerate a situation in which its Church, one of the most important pillars of the Nation, was controlled by another Great Power. It would have been unfathomable from a nationalistic, political and military point of view.
[...]
The present geopolitical situation with nine Great Powers, each of them Nation States possessing their own National Church is the most stable we can imagine and that is the main reason of the fall of the Catholic Church, the Christendom's last element of instability.
We can say that it is only natural the Christendom took this path in its continuous evolution because it is the path towards the most stable geopolitical system. Of course, we all know that all natural systems tend towards their most stable state and man-made systems are no exception to this rule.
Note: These are not my opinions, but those of Anaïs de Pònt, an Occitan writer from the 18th century of TTL, specialized in the History of Religion. Some or all of her assertions may be false.
Background
Despite several setbacks during the Protestant Reformation (1517-1611) and the German Unification Wars (1612-1625), the Roman Catholic Church was still the most powerful Christian Church in the whole Christendom before the Second European War (1641-1645).
At the end of the Second European War, the seeds for the downfall of the Roman Catholic Church were already planted.
1. The presence of several [1] Great Powers with a different religion (Britannia - the Church of England [2], Scandinavia - the Lutheran Church, Russia - the Russian Orthodox Church, Romania - the Romanian Orthodox Church [3], Germany - various German Protestant Churches [4])
[1] Five out of eight (Italy was not even unified much less a Great Power at that time).
[2] Renamed the British Church in 1661.
[3] Under Romanian law, all ethnic Romanians were members of the Romanian Orthodox Church. The ethnic minorities had the right to belong to any Christian Church.
[4] Merged into the United Church of Germany in 1647.
2. The outcome of the Second European War was decisively in the favour of the non-Catholic Powers.
On one hand, all the non-Catholic Powers were either victorious (Germany, Britannia, Romania and Scandinavia) or at least capable to secure a very advantageous peace (Russia).
On the other hand, all the Catholic Powers were either completely defeated (Iberia [5] and France) or, despite being on the victors' side, ended up actually losing small portions of their territory (Sarmatia).
[5] The (Castille centred) Iberian Empire actually collapsed during the Second European War, being engulfed in a civil war, and was replaced after the War with the (Portuguese centred) Spanish Empire.
3. Pope Benedict XIII incoherent actions ensured him the enmity of both sides of the conflict.
In January 1641, he opposed Italian Unification, excommunicated the revolutionaries and even ordered his small army to fight the Italian Nationalists.
A week later, after the Italian conquest of Rome, the same Pope annuled the excommunications, blessed the Italian army and militias and crowned King Alessandro with an ad-hoc Italian Crown.
When the Iberians expelled the Italian Nationalist troops from Rome in May 1641, the Pope welcomed back his previous masters. However, the Iberians could not trust him anymore and moved him to Seville. Pope Benedict XIII spent the rest of the war in Iberia, a prisoner in all but name.
4. When the Romanian Army led by Empress Iulia liberated Rome in November 1643, the Pope was in Iberian captivity.
The Italian revolutionaries pressured the Cardinals to depose Pope Benedict XIII. After tense negotiations, a compromise was reached. Pope Benedict XIII was declared unable to exercise his functions and a council of three Italian Cardinals was established to act in his name until the end of the war.
This state of affairs, although temporary, further delegitimized the Papacy.
5. After the war, Nationalist pressure in Italy, Spain and France, coupled with increased German meddling into the internal affaires of the Vatican, made a return to the earlier state all but impossible.
The dissolution of the Roman Catholic Church
In November 1644, at the end the Iberian Civil War, Pope Benedict XIII was freed by the Portuguese revolutionaries. In February 1645 he returned to Rome in the midst of the Italians who despised him.
The Peace Settlement assigned newly unified Italy in the German sphere of influence. From the very beginning, Spain and France alleged that the Papacy was under undue German influence as well.
Between 1644 and 1648, Germany was ruled by the Radical Nationalists who unleashed unprecedented terror and widespread abuse.
One of the measures of the iron-fisted Nationalist Government was the 1647 merger of all the Churches in Germany under the
United German Church. Thus, eight million German Catholics (one third of the German population) lost their ancient connection with Rome and were compelled to become Protestants.
The resistance of the German Catholics was met with extreme measures: between 22,000 and 100,000 Catholics were killed and up to one million were deported to the Protestant States of the Empire.
But the real coup de grâce to German Catholicism was dealt by the same infamous Pope Benedict XIII. When asked to intervene in favour of the German Catholics, the Pope was cowed by the German
Lord Protector of Italy and bluntly stated that each State has the sovereign right to settle its internal religious issues without any outside interference.
In 1648, it was perfectly clear to everyone that the Church was powerless in front of the State and the Pope was at best a figurehead and at worse a puppet of Protestant Germany!
In March 1649, Pope Benedict XIII died, possibly poisoned.
The Papal Conclave convened in May and, for 17 months, attempted in vain to elect a new Pope. Slowly, it became painfully clear that not the Cardinals but the Catholic Powers were the real Papal Electors.
The deadlock had multiple causes:
- Italy and Sarmatia, being under German influence, would not accept a Spanish or French Pope;
- Spain and France would not accept an Italian or Sarmatian Pope due to feared German influence;
- Neither Spain, nor France would trust a Pope from the other country.
In August 1650, the French Cardinals quitted the Papal Conclave and returned to France.
In Avignon, they elected Cardinal Maurice and installed him as Pope of France. The French Catholics were no longer part of the Roman Church!
Without the French Cardinals, the rump Conclave quickly elected an Italian Cardinal, Antonio, as Pope. Outvoted, the Spanish Cardinals conferred with the Spanish Ambassador and decided to leave Rome as well. They elected Cardinal Domenico and installed him as the Spanish Pope in Seville. The Spanish Catholics were no longer part of the Roman Church!
In 1651, the Catholic World was split in three parts: The French Catholic Church (the only legal Church in France), the Spanish Catholic Church (the only legal Church in Spain) and the Roman Catholic Church (in Italy, Sarmatia and Romania [6]).
[6] Only for the ethnic minorities of Romania: the Croats, the Hungarians (partial), the Slovaks (partial), the Poles, the Germans (partial).
After the 1659 death of the Roman Pope, the three Catholic Churches recognized each other's autocephaly and their mutual communion on the model of the Orthodox Churches.
In 1664, Sarmatia decided to split from the Roman Church as well and thus the Sarmatian Catholic Church entered the Catholic Club as its fourth member.
The Catholic minorities from Britannia, Germany and Romania found themselves without any external support. Today, with the exception of Romania, all of them are extinct.
Note: Massive religious shifts occured in the Orient in the same time period, but these will be discussed in the relevant chapter.
Religious Make-up of Europe in the 18th Century
From the second half of the 17th Century, all nine European Great Powers had their own
Independent National Church.
1. Spain
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Spanish Catholic Church (in communion with the other Catholic Churches) -- official, 100%.
2. France
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French Catholic Church (in communion with the other Catholic Churches) -- official, 96%;
- French Huguenots (Protestants) -- outlawed, 4%.
3. Britannia
-
British Church (Protestant) -- official, 88%;
- Irish Catholics -- outlawed, 12%.
4. Germany
-
United Church of Germany (Protestant) -- official, 73%;
- German Catholics -- outlawed, 16%;
- Other Protestants (Lutherans, Calvinists, Anabaptists, etc) -- outlawed, 11%.
5. Sarmatia
-
Sarmatian Catholic Church (in communion with the other Catholic Churches) -- official, 69%;
- Ruthenian United (Catholic) -- legal, 20%;
- Russian Orthodoxes -- unknown, 5%;
- Protestants -- unknown, 2%;
- Muslims -- unknown, 4%.
6. Romania & the Orient (see the chapter about Romania)
7. Scandinavia
-
Lutheran Church (Protestant) -- official, 97%;
- Scandinavian Catholics -- legal, 1%;
- Russian Orthodoxes -- legal, 1%;
- Pagans -- outlawed, 1%.
8. Russia
-
Russian Orthodox Church -- official, 84%;
- Muslims -- legal, 10%;
- Pagans -- unknown, 5%;
- Jews -- legal, 1%.
9. Italy
-
Roman Catholic Church -- official, 99%;
- Protestants -- legal, 1%.
