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Roman Catholic Conservatism in a New North Atlantic World, 1760–1829
Luca Codignola
EVENTS during the years from 1760 to 1829 significantly changed the West and the French and British North Atlantic with it. The three generations that lived through the Seven Years' War, the American War of Independence, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and the Bourbon Restoration firmly believed that they had witnessed the shattering of the familiar world that the pre- 1789 era (the Old Regime) had consigned to them. This political earthquake directly affected the Roman Catholic Church in ways that touched on its existence and role in all the countries of the North Atlantic basin. The 1760 Conquest of Canada and its subsequent cession to the British Crown in 1763 delivered a major French-speaking Catholic colony to an Englishspeaking Protestant ruler. The outcome of the American War of Independence brought religious liberty to the United States, allowing the church to abandon its semiclandestine existence and establish an official organization in 1784. Such a felicitous development was soon dwarfed by the devastating events set in motion by the French Revolution, which included the 1790 Civil Constitution of the Clergy, the Terror of 1793–94, the abolition of the Catholic cult in 1793, and the vast diaspora of political refugees. For almost two decades, from the French invasion of the Papal States in 1797 to Pope Pius VII's 1815 return to Rome, Napoleonic rule had a profound, negative effect not only on the French church but also on the Holy See's international status. After 1815 the Catholic Church experienced its greatest difficulties with two ever-present instances of internal conflict: ethnic rivalry and the so-called trustee controversy. Both represented potential challenges to its centralized organization under the cope of Rome. One wonders how three generations of Catholics in the North Atlantic world did not collapse under the weight of so many elements of internal and external crisis.1
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| Historians of the post-1760 Roman Catholic Church have shown little inclination to treat the history of the church in North America in the context of the North Atlantic world. Local developments are normally interpreted within a national or regional framework or as distant overflows from the center of the British Empire. Worship on the part of the Catholic faithful, not to mention the Catholic hierarchy in its largest sense, was still illegal there until 1829.2 American and French historians have been overwhelmed by the critical significance of the American and French revolutions. Consequently, in the United States and in France the history of the Catholic Church is linked to short- and long-term reactions to or consequences of those major events. For later years these reactions are combined with other national developments, such as the French Empire and the early Bourbon Restoration and the political democratization of and massive immigration to the United States. Quebec historians have invariably interpreted the French Revolution as a decisive factor in the early shaping of the collective psychology of French Canadians. Most also view the strengthening of the church as a fundamental factor in the survival and political emancipation of the Quebec nation within the Dominion of Canada.3 In all these instances, the role of the Holy See is interpreted within the framework of bilateral relationships between the national church and the Roman bureaucracy, and the latter is described at best as poorly informed and slow to react and at worst as willingly and stubbornly espousing reactionary policies that hampered the full blossoming of the progressive components in the national church in question. |
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