magisterial habits, will show us how John Paul II arrived at a different
diagnosis of what constitutes the crisis of our modern times.
When Leo became pope, he turned his attention immediately to the prob-
lems posed by modern states. The state-making regimes which emerged after
the Napoleonic wars—still robustly evolving in the late nineteenth century—
viewed the social institutions of the church with suspicion: sacramental
marriage, family, schools, associations, dioceses, and religious orders were
rivals to the new anthropological and political creed of‘man and citizen’
that swept from France to the rest of Europe and her former colonies in the
late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This creed of‘liberty, equality, and
fraternity’considered the human person in two ways:first, as a being of
nature, having natural liberties and rights which had been obscured or broken
by the historical social order; second, as a citizen, standing equally among
other citizens before the state. On this model, fraternity was associated pre-
eminently if not exclusively with citizenship. Other social memberships claim-
ing origins in nature, history, or divine revelation were deemed legitimate only
insofar as they were either the private choice of individuals, or insofar as they
were permitted or‘conceded’by the state.
Thus Leo set out to defend social and institutional domains not reducible to
citizenship, and to show the concord that ought to obtain among the whole
panoply of social institutions. Although he never used the term‘social doc-
trine’just as such (that was left for Pius XI), we can surmise that it would have
signified to him a doctrine about institutions: their diverse forms and modes of
authority, the so-called‘mixed things’(res mixtae) that combine a temporal
and a spiritual facet, and which therefore overlap different institutions and
authorities, and the social movements which motivate changes in institutions.
In short, in the thickness of history, Leo began the long process of sorting out
the social and political debris of the demise of Catholic political Christendom,
fashioning a coherent teaching on social institutions. The institutional situation
was truly a mess: when Leo was born, one pope had been kidnapped and soon
died in French captivity; another was held in French captivity on the day of his
birth in 1810. Moreover, the secular state made every effort to weaken the
church’s social influence. Three archbishops of Paris had been murdered
during Leo’s lifetime. A year before his death, yet another French government
shut down more than two thousand Catholic schools. In fact, the impact of the
French Revolution and its violent secularization had wreaked havoc on the
church’s institutional structure. For example, at the time of the Revolution,
there were more than 2,500 Benedictine abbeys in Europe; by the time he
became Archbishop of Perugia, only thirty remained. In 1789 there were 25,000
Dominicans; when Leo was elected pope there remained 3,300. Half of the
Prussian hierarchy languished in prisons during Bismarck’s Kulturkampf.
Leo’s frame of reference for reacting to this institutional mess was rather
traditional. There are three great institutions—which, by nature or grace—that
Christian Humanism and the Crisis of Modern Times 245