Catholics and politics in Europe at the end of the th century

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Catholicism played an obvious role in all counterrevolutionary movements whether legitimist Carlism in Spain for example or very conservative in the revolutionary era. Its great formulation would be ultramontanism with a strong fundamentalist character compared to modern States. Rome did not accept the new political situation generated by the triumph of liberalism the advance of secularism nor by the growing secularization of society nor of course by an increasingly widespread anticlericalism. Ultramontanism was promoted by Pope Pius IX. With this idea the Vatican sought to free the Papacy from dependence on civil powers and give more freedom of action to the Church especially when it was considered a prisoner in Rome since the newly created Italy had stripped it of the Papal States.

But when Leo XIII was elected pope important changes were introduced in the way in which Catholics had to approach political life overcoming at least the belligerent hostility of the past. In Germany the Kulturkampf conflict occurred causing a phenomenon UAE Phone Number that would have strong influences in the rest of Europe the creation of a specifically confessional political party the Catholic Zentrum and which had enormous weight as a political opposition in Germany after the decade of the seventies until the end of the Weimar Republic. The Zentrum defended Catholicism Catholics and German states with a strong presence of this confession such as Bavaria or certain areas of the Rhine. He united this defense along with religious freedom with an evident social concern against the Prussian power the backbone of the new Reich.



Although on the other hand it would be a party governed by the Catholic aristocracy and upper bourgeoisie. In France the intense secularization policy that began in the s coinciding with the definitive stabilization of a Republic the Third born with very little republican vigor from the ashes of Sedan and the Commune caused an evident confrontation with the Church. Catholic. But Pope Leo XIII opted for a conciliatory policy at the beginning of the following decade. In the encyclical Au milier des sollicitudes was published   which established that the Church was not linked to any form of government and that therefore accepting the Republic did not imply accepting its secularizing legislation.