administered to them.‘The church’, in common Catholic parlance, was the
clergy, not the whole people of God. For example, when the Catholic
Church summed up its inner legal system in the Code of Canon Law in
1917, lay people hardly appeared, and if they did, it was in a passive and
peripheral manner.^3
The Catholic Church, however, did not reject the world. She did not fall into
a Manichean condemnation of material existence as evil. Her main concern
was simply concentrated on ensuring the sanctity of her priests and the
members of her religious orders, keeping them away from the temptations
and troubles of this world, which was not their business. A constructive
concept of inclusive secularity could hardly arise in such surroundings, due
to a lack of interest rather than bad will.
Anti-LiberalismTheir reaction to the crimes of the French Revolution and the persecution
of the church and of the Pope himself (Pius VI died in a French prison)
brought the popes into direct opposition to some of the main tenets of
political liberalism: democracy, popular sovereignty, religious freedom,
freedom of press and opinion, freedom of education, and so on. This
opposition peaked in the encyclicalQuanta curaof 1864 by Pius IX with
itssyllabus errorum, an appendix containing a list of quotations from
earlier papal declarations condemning errors of modernity, among them
freedom of religion and religious neutrality of the state. In such an atmos-
phere, the Catholic liberals that wanted to reconcile elements of liberalism
(such as division of power, democracy, and republicanism) with Catholic
faith had little chance of prevailing. Additionally, some of the liberals
had combined acceptable politicalarguments with arguments that were
unacceptable for the church. For example, they favoured rationalism in
philosophical reasoning, and in matters of ecclesiastic politics they sup-
ported abolishing the temporal government of the Pope in the Pontifical
States, which would have deprived him of his economic and political
independence.
The antagonists of the liberals, the Catholic traditionalists, stood a greater
chance of success. They could form an alliance with the romantic histori-
cism that wasen vogueatthetimeagainsttherationalismoftheEnlight-
enment, reviving medieval models of a state and church relationship.
They favoured an allegiance between throne and altar. In thefield of social
(^3) Cf. Can. 682f of the Codex Iuris Canonici (CIC) 1917. They stated that laypeople were not
allowed to wear clerical garb, and had the right to receive the spiritual means of salvation from
the clergy. That is all the CIC 1917 had to say on ordinary Christians.
A Catholic Concept of Christian Humanism 199