The Nineteenth-Century Religious and Missionary Revivals : Liberal and Socialist Challenges

The Catholic Reveil and the Protestant Evangelical Awakening as Pacemakers

In the first half of the nineteenth century, as a reaction against the rationalistic Enlightenment, Romanticism created a favorable intellectual climate for religion in France, though most French romantic writers did not believe in the divinity of Christ. Intellectuals such as the romanticist Francois Rene Chateaubriand, the liberal-minded priest Hugo Felicite Robert La Mennais (Lamennais), and the Russian convert to Catholicism, Sophie de Swetchine,(32) had a strong spiritual impact on the French Catholic Reveil.

An immense task of instructing both children and adults awaited the artisans of religious revivals. Starting from 1816, the establishment of Sunday Schools with the initial aim of teaching reading, the introduction of the English mutual school system of Lancaster,(33) and the foundation of the educational society of the Marist Brothers, greatly facilitated the evangelization of rural areas in France. "Pious girls"(34) in those regions assumed the highly esteemed all-round service of reading and catechism classes, needlework, soup for the sick, and the upkeep of the churches. As a result, a more elaborate form of religious life developed : the congregation of secular sisters. Its omnipresence around 1860 marked a clear break with the "religious" sisters of the urban convents which had existed during the ancien regime.(35)

Many similar congregations were also founded in Belgium : the Zusters van Liefde van Maria en Jozef (1809), "Sisters of Charity of Mary and Joseph" , the Zusters van Vincentius a Paulo, "Vincent de Paul Sisters" (1818). The majority originated from the initiative of parish priests struck by the needs of the poor. They would bring some pious girls together into a community and let them start a Sunday or day school. These new congregations were often inspired by the seventeenth-century ideals of Pierre de Berulle or St. Vincent de Paul. In Holland and other Western countries many religious communities of women also followed Franciscan spirituality. The vast and rapid expansion of all these new congregations supported to a great extent the religious, educational, and charitable activities of the Church.(36)

Other agents of evangelization among Catholics were the missions to the people or "parochial missions" (volksmissies in Dutch), among Protestants the revival meetings. The "parochial missions" dated from the Counter Reformation and were revived in post-Revolutionary France in order to remedy the defects of ordinary preaching. Their spectacular character, involving the singing of hymns, processions, morning and evening sermons, setting up of huge crosses, made them very popular, but at the same time unpopular among the liberal, urban bourgeoisie. Their emotional impact often resulted in the establishment of confraternities and charitable associations. Less frequent, but more profound in its effect was the organization of closed retreats, especially among women.

The parochial missionary movement in France was halted in 1830 and resumed a few years later in a less spectacular but regular way. It reached its culminating point between 1840 and 1880. When the Belgian constitution ensured the freedom of public worship and association, the parochial missionary movement also became popular in several Belgian dioceses. In the east Flemish diocese of Ghent, the Jesuits, from 1831, and then, from 1844, the Redemptorists, had been taking care of these missions to the people. They were often based on moralizing sermons and resulted in the establishment of new or the revival of old confraternities and charitable associations. In the 1840s the movement spread to the Catholic English and German-speaking regions.(37)

During this period the monastic Orders of the Benedictines and Dominicans were revived. In 1839, Henri Dominique Lacordaire, the preacher of the Lenten sermons at Notre Dame de Paris, made a public appeal for the recognition of the right of religious to associate. Two years earlier Dom Prosper Louis Pascal Gueranger, the Abbot of Solesmes in western France, had travelled to Rome asking for the re-establishment of the Benedictine Order.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, French spontaneous and doctrinal religion were still strongly influenced by moral rigorism and the concept of a frightening God. A typical example was the parish priest of Ars-sur-Formans near Lyons, Jean-Baptiste-Marie Vianney, the "Cure of Ars", who preferred to preach about death, the existence of hell, the small number of the elect, and the Last Judgment. Basically, this was the same as seventeenth-century spirituality with its educational principle of fear and the common practice of "deferred absolution" as a means of bringing about a real conversion.

Several influences were conducive to the rediscovery of Jesus Christ and to the introduction of more attractive devotions around 1840, a trend which was manifestly stimulated by the religious congregations and the Roman ecclesiastical authorities. Popular education enabled more people to read books such as Lamennais' French translation (1824) of the "Imitation of Jesus Christ", a fifteenth-century devotional work composed in Latin, and de Liguori's "Praxis of Love towards Jesus Christ", an eighteenth-century theological work which was re-edited several times during the nineteenth century. The revival of the devotions to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and to different saints soon became a sign of the growing populist orientation of the Catholic Church against the liberal bourgeoisie's secular values. By reducing the cost of pious images, booklets, and statuettes, the Industrial Revolution allowed the rapid diffusion of these new devotions. Likewise, the development of the railway played a decisive role in the promotion of places of pilgrimage and facilitated contacts with Rome.(38)

Between 1840 and 1880, a clergy closer to the people, due to its social origin and hasty formation, guided religious sensibility by drawing more closely together what the Church prescribed and what the people actually lived. The role of exterior cults increased : public recitation of prayers like the rosary or the Angelus, benediction, processions, pilgrimages, and devotion to the saints. By giving the devotions a more collective rather than individual, a more regional than local shape, the clergy integrated them within the liturgical tradition of the Church. In France, the clergy slowly renounced, in spite of persistent resistance, its moral rigorism and abandoned the Gallican Rites under the influence of Alfonso Maria de Liguori, beatified in 1816, and Dom Gueranger.(39) In Belgium, de Liguori's doctrine was accepted between 1830 and 1840, after the Redemptorists settled in the country. Its acceptance was due especially to the support given it by the theology department of the University of Louvain.

Since the Enlightenment, the Protestants, even more than the Catholics, had been influenced by rationalism in matters of faith, ethics, and theology. In the beginning of the eighteenth century, the early German pietist movement－with August Hermann Francke at Halle and Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, founder of the Moravian brotherhood－was fundamentally opposed to rationalism. By the end of the same century, however, the attacks of Lutheran orthodoxy and rationalism had almost completely paralyzed the religious zeal and the will to mission of these pietistic circles. In Britain, the influence of German pietism and rationalism arrived on the scene more or less simultaneously. The Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (1699) and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (1701), for instance, reflected much of the "distinctly synthetic character" of British spiritual life. Thus, what the Awakenings brought and proclaimed when they burst upon the British and American scenes from the early eighteenth century onward, was not regarded as alien to and in conflict with the ideas of the Enlightenment or with those of a warm experiential faith.(40)

The Great Awakening, a series of revivals in the American colonies between 1726 and 1760, was followed by a second movement, from 1787 to 1825, which in England was called the Evangelical Revival and in the United States the Second Great Awakening. The first Awakening did not give birth directly to missionary activities, although it did lay the foundations for them. The brothers John and Charles Wesley experienced a spiritual renewal which resulted from contacts with Moravians, and, with George Whitefield, they conducted revival meetings in Britain from 1739 on. The Wesleyan revival did not distinguish between "home" and "foreign missions", but kept secular and spiritual interests separated. Starting from 1760, the influence of Romanticism was by no means new to the emotionally charged movement of Methodism. In the 1830s a new revival movement had its epicentre at Geneva, from which it strongly influenced continental Europe.

The Protestant Church authorities and academic theologians adopted, by and large, an attitude of indifference, suspicion, and sometimes censorship towards the new enthusiasm generated by the revivals. The majority of the Protestant evangelicals in the first half of the nineteenth century belonged to the less privileged class of artisans and trained industrial workers. They were moved to compassion by the plight of people exposed to the degrading conditions of the Industrial Revolution at home and colonialism abroad. In the second half of the nineteenth century the interest in missionary work shifted more and more to theological circles in the universities, as instanced by the establishment of the Universities' Mission to Central Africa at Cambridge in 1858.

In the wake of the Great Awakening, the traditional Protestant religious and missionary motif of the glory of God was wedded to other motifs, in particular that of compassion. Under the influence of the Enlightenment, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century the emphasis shifted not only from the glory of God to the love of Christ, but also from the comprehensiveness of the reign of God, which characterized the early Puritan tradition, to individual conversion ("new birth") or salvation of the soul. During the nineteenth century the motif of love manifested itself in a mixture of romantic optimism ("noble savages") and condescending pessimism ("poor savages") towards non-Westerners. (41)

Another prominent nineteenth-century Protestant missionary motif was millennialism : the biblical vision of a final golden age within history. The Napoleonic wars had already spawned extravagant apocalyptic expectations in the Protestant Anglo-Saxon world. Whereas the latent divergences between premillennialism－for instance, the Millerite movement with its emphasis on the imminence of Christ's return－and postmillennialism－the proponents of the Social Gospel stressing the kingdom of God on earth－began to surface in the United States in the 1830s, "Irvingism", a forerunner of the premillennial Pentecostal movement, became popular in Scotland and England. Later it was also influential at Geneva. Edward Irving, a Scottish Calvinist minister, regarded the reappearance of miraculous signs as evidence that the end of the world was approaching. He was deposed by his presbytery in Scotland in 1833, one year before his death.(42)

Finally, what came to be known as the "manifest destiny", the conviction "that God, in his providence, had chosen the Western nations, because of their unique qualities, to be the representatives of his cause even to the uttermost ends of the world", reached its most pronounced expression during the period 1880-1920, the "heyday of colonialism".(43) In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the notion of "manifest destiny" was barely identifiable, but it became more and more prominent with the growth of Western nationalism, imperialism, and the assumption of the superiority of Western culture.

The Elan of the Catholic and Protestant Missionary Enterprise

Romanticism, the consequent Catholic Reveil, and to a lesser extent the shock of the French Revolution, were conducive to a new enthusiastic and optimistic devotion to world mission.

The globetrotter and writer, Chateaubriand, was one of the chief animators of the Catholic Reveil and of the missionary revival. His Genie du Christianisme, ou Beautes de la religion chretienne, "Genius of Christianity, or Beauties of the Christian religion", was published shortly after his conversion in 1802. Chateaubriand, who had travelled to America, drew both on his travel experiences and the Lettres edifiantes et curieuses, "Curious and Edifying Letters", written by the eighteenth-century missionaries. The G6nie du Christianisme became a bestseller; it was reedited many times and translated into nine different European languages. It did not lead directly to the establishment of a missionary society, but was conducive to the creation of a new enthusiasm for the missions. The refractory priests who had emigrated from France after the French Revolution contributed to the propagation of Catholicism in the countries where they settled. This allowed for a rediscovery of the universal dimension of the Church.(44) From 1808 onwards, the Lettres edifiantes et curieuses were republished at Lyons and other places.

The beginning of the nineteenth century was a period of restoration for the Catholic Church. On returning to Rome in 1814, Pope Pius VII re-established the Society of Jesus by the Bull Sollicitudo omnium Ecclesiarum and also revived the SCPF. One year later the French Bourbon monarch, Louis XVIII, followed his example by re-opening the seminaries of seventeenth-century French missionary institutions, the Missions Etrangeres de Paris, MEP, the Congregation de la Mission, CM, and the "Society of the Holy Spirit". In 1848, the latter merged with the Sacred Heart of Mary Fathers, a society founded in 1841 by Franz Maria Libermann, a Jewish convert to Catholicism from Alsace.

At the same time, several new initiatives were taken at the grassroots by simple clerics or lay persons, mostly young people. The "Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary and the Perpetual Adoration of the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar", the Picpus Fathers, was founded in 1805 by Marie-Joseph Coudrin. In 1807, a farmer's daughter and catechist from Chamblanc in eastern France, Anne-Marie Jahouvey, organized the Soeurs de St. Joseph, "St. Joseph Sisters", at Cluny. In 1816, the Society of Mary, commonly called Marist Brothers, was founded by Jean-Claude Colin at Lyons in the same year as the Oblates of Mary Immaculate by Charles-Joseph-Eugene de Mazenod in Provence. In the 1840s, all these societies, originally engaged in French missions to the people and popular education, were also active in far-away continents such as Oceania, Africa, and North America.

In 1834 and 1836, after the religious persecutions and abolition of all religious orders and associations in Spain and Portugal, Pope Gregory XVI (Bartolomeo Alberto Fra Mauro Cappellari), with the active support of the Dutch Jesuit superior general, Joannes Philippus Roothaan, recruited new missionary personnel among the members of the revived Society of Jesus. Pope Gregory XVI had been Cardinal-prefect of the SCPF.

Through the "right of entrustment" system, the ius commissionis, the Holy See delimited the mission territories and entrusted them exclusively to different religious orders and congregations, which presented their own candidates as titular bishops. The gradual establishment of this jus commissionis was the consequence both of the elan of the Catholic missionary enterprise, and of old jurisdictional conflicts in several mission fields among regular and secular clerics belonging to different national and ecclesiastical institutions. The SCPF increasingly became the central agency, directing the different vicariates apostolic, of which Pope Gregory XVI established forty-four new ones. This process was to be continued by his successors, Pius IX and Leo XIII.

The Oeuvre de la Propagation de la Foi, "Society for the Propagation of the Faith" was founded in 1822 at Lyons, in order to support the Catholic missionary enterprise. This organization, which owed its development to a young and devout lay person, Marie-Pauline Jaricot, was modelled after the Societes auxiliaires, "Auxiliary Societies", associations of prayer and good deeds for the salvation of non-Christians. In 1816, these societies were introduced into France by a French missionary, Denis Chaumont, who had returned from England. The Oeuvre de la Sainte-Enfance, "Association of the Holy Childhood", was founded in 1837 by the Bishop of Nancy, Charles-Auguste-Marie-Joseph de Forbin-Janson. It promoted exclusively the protection, the baptism－even when it was administered in articulo mortis－and the care of non-Catholic children. Both organizations published their Annales, with letters from missionaries and statistical information, collected small contributions from numerous adults and children under the slogan of an sou par semaine/mois, "a dime a week/month", respectively, and expanded to other European countries. In 1840, they were given active support in Pope Gregory XVI 's first missionary encyclical letter Probe nostis.(45)

The SCPF 's instruction Neminem profecto of 23 November 1845 could be regarded in retrospect as a decisive step towards the establishment of Catholic local churches. In fact, at the time it was only a prudent and progressive instruction, reminding Catholic missionaries of the eight principles which should guide their activities :

to divide the mission territories, to establish the hierarchy, and to appoint bishops wherever possible ;

to recruit and train a native clergy by establishing seminaries, to promote indigenous clerics to the episcopate by means of the preparatory office of vicar-general ;

not to treat the native priests as an auxiliary clergy, but to enable them to share in honours, offices, and duties, in the same way as European priests, on the basis of age and merit ;

to renounce the habit of using natives only as catechists, instead of directing all capable young men towards the priesthood ;

not to put pressure on Christian communities with an Eastern Rite to adopt the Latin Rite ;

under no circumstances to engage in politics and secular affairs ;

to devote oneself in the first place to the primary and secondary education of boys and girls, without neglecting pious and charitable associations ;

and, finally, to devote oneself to everything that enhances the integration of religion into local society, so that Christian communities may have their own means of subsistence, without having to rely on outside help, which sooner or later may be lacking.

Thus the SCPF in only one passage clearly expressed its wish to promote indigenous clerics to the episcopate. The Vincentian Father Joseph Gabet, in his memorandum of 1848 entitled Etat des missions catholiques en Chine, insisted on the need to accept Chinese "at all clerical levels". But, on receiving complaints from other missionaries, the SCPF responded that it had not approved Gabet's memorandum. Eventually, it was not until after the First World War that decisive steps were taken by the SCPF and the Holy See towards the development of an indigenous hierarchy.(47)

In the second half of the nineteenth century a certain number of exclusively missionary male and female institutions were established: in Italy, the Seminary for Foreign Missions of Milan (1854) and the Combonian Fathers (1866) ; in France, the Lyons Society for African Missions (1856), the White Fathers (1868), and White Sisters (1869) ; in Belgium, the Congregation of the Immaculate Heart of Mary or Scheut Fathers (1862) and the Canonesses Missionaries of St. Augustine or De Jacht Sisters (1897) ; in England, the St Joseph's Society for Foreign Missions or Mill Hill Fathers (1869) ; in Germany, the Society of the Divine Word or Steyl Fathers (1875).

The most remarkable initiative was the founding of the Salvatorians in 1881 by a German priest, Johann Baptist Jordan. Aware of the existing gap between the Eastern and Latin Churches as well as between the clergy and the laity, both men and women, he preferred to call his new missionary institute "apostolic" rather than (Roman) "Catholic" and to distinguish three different degrees of membership : full-time clerics or lay persons, associated talented or qualified lay leaders, and sympathizers or supporters. His ideas, however, were not entirely accepted or approved by the SCPF.(48)

The Oeuvre de St-Pierre pour le Clerge indigene des Missions, "Society of St. Peter for the Indigenous Clergy of the Missions", founded in 1889 by Stephanie Bigard and her daughter Jeanne at Caen, was moved to Switzerland in 1902 because the foundresses were unable at that time to have it legalized in France.(49)

Generally speaking, the nineteenth-century Catholic missionaries were formed in a hasty, secluded, and anti-intellectual manner. The main emphasis of their formation was on the development of a morally responsible, enthusiastic, pragmatic rather than intellectual personality. The missionaries' training was geared towards a pastoral ministry characterized by devotion, charity, sacramentalism, catechesis, and apologetics. Their image was that of a heroic pioneer and paternalistic figure with a predilection for solitude, spirituality, self-sacrifice, martyrdom and a feeling of cultural superiority towards non-Westerners. Theological reflection on the Catholic missionary enterprise or "missiology" only developed at the beginning of the twentieth century in Germany with scholars like Josef Schmidlin, Robert Streit, and Johannes Dindinger.(50) Protestant missiological reflection had already been started at the end of the nineteenth century by the pietist scholar from Halle, Gustav Warneck.

The Protestants touched by the Evangelical Awakening were no longer willing to sit back and wait for the Free or Established Churches to take the initiative. Individual Protestant lay persons, frequently belonging to different Churches, banded together on a voluntary basis for the sake of world mission.(51)

In 1792, a cobbler and pastor from Northamptonshire, William Carey, published his Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to use Means for the Conversion of the Heathen. He is considered as one of the chief architects of the modern Protestant missionary enterprise. His work directly resulted in the establishment of the denominational "Particular Baptist Society for Propagating the Gospel Among the Heathen". His example was soon followed by the originally non-denominational London Missionary Society, LMS, founded in 1795. After the formation of the Church Missionary Society in 1799 by Evangelicals in the Church of England, the LMS gradually became the agent of the Congregationalists. Elsewhere, the same happened to the inter-denominational American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (1810), and the Basel Mission established in 1816 by Lutherans and Calvinists. Tensions between the latter precipitated the formation, in 1836, of an exclusively Lutheran missionary society, later known as the Leipzig Mission. The American Board became the missionary arm of Congregationalism when, after 1850, various churches began to sponsor denominational mission projects.

The new missionary societies were the result of the rekindling within Protestantism, by the end of the seventeenth century, of the individual's right to interpret Scripture and to associate in order to promote a common cause. The Enlightenment's optimistic view of humanity, and the emerging social and political egalitarianism further enhanced this trend. The societies were often organized in the manner of overseas trading companies and supported at home by a network of auxiliary societies. People of the most modest means became donors and prayer supporters of mission projects. Moreover, they were given additional backing by the many Bible Societies modelled on the inter-denominational British and Foreign Bible Society (1804), which had developed from the Religious Tract Society founded by the Free Churches.(52) Like the Bible Societies, the missionary societies, whether denominational or non-denominational, at the outset had nothing exclusivist about them. In the 1840s, however, the missionary societies became more doctrinaire and confessionalist in order to counteract the influence of rationalism and liberalism. This trend changed again by the end of the nineteenth century with the emergence of "faith missions" such as the China Inland Mission, founded in 1865 by James Hudson Taylor.(53)

Catholic Traditionalism : Ultramontanism

The French Revolution, the Italian Risorgimento, and the German Reichsdeputationshauptschluss in Regensburg (1803) had a powerful impact on the position of the Catholic Church in the political, socio-economic, and cultural spheres. Its former privileged status, especially in the fields of education and public service, was more and more contested by anticlerical and liberal-minded European nationalists. The laicization or secularization process resulted in the Church's loss of political and social influence in European society(54) and in the stripping of power from the intermediary episcopal authorities in favour of a strengthening of the papacy.

Between 1801 and 1905 the functioning of the Concordat was very shaky in France. Two currents alternated, one favorable to the Catholic Church allowing for influence on secular society ; the other very suspicious, wanting to control all the Church's enterprises outside the liturgical confines of the church building. However, both the civil and ecclesiastical authorities attached great value to the spiritual influence of French Catholicism outside France.(55) The French government consistently resisted all foreign and papal efforts in support of the growing internationalization of the missionary enterprise in China during the second half of the nineteenth century and even after the separation of Church and State in 1905. But this did not mean that French diplomats were simply at the service of the missionaries.

In Belgium, the process of secularization paradoxically increased and enhanced the Church's influence on the daily lives of the remaining Catholics.(56) In 1847, the Belgian liberals established their long term hegemony. Their policy of secularization led to a radicalization of the Catholic ultramontanist positions. The ultra-montane movement in Belgium resulted in a confirmation of the relationship between State and Church and in polarization becoming a characteristic component of the pattern of Belgian society.(57)

The Catholic Church came to rely to a great extent on traditionalism, due to its anti-liberal attitude. This explains why it was less influenced by rationalism than Protestantism, which on the whole adopted a more positive attitude towards the autonomous, egalitarian, and progressive ideas of the modern world. In the Anglo-Saxon world the separation of Church and State had already been realized after the Glorious Revolution by the Bill of Rights in 1689. Consequently, Protestantism was not directly influenced by the destructive and divisive impact of the French Revolution.

Traditionalism was a broad European movement that reacted against the basic principles of the French Revolution. Theorists such as Louis de Bonald and Joseph de Maistre turned against the Revolution's ideals of freedom and equality. They advocated cooperation between Church and State and adhered to an organic or hierarchical concept of society : viewing the individual as subordinate to the community and emphasizing the importance of the family and the role of traditional elites and estates. They took the class society of the ancien regime as their model.

Tradition, rather than reason, was held up as a guarantor of truth and knowledge. With the popular philosophical schools of ontologism in France, Italy, and Belgium－for example, the teaching of Professor Gerardus Casimir Ubaghs at the University of Louvain－individual reason was even further devalued. Ontologism had developed within the idealistic tradition of Rene Descartes and the Oratorian priest and philosopher, Nicole de Male-branche, who tried to reconcile Cartesianism with Augustinianism and thus to construct a new Christian philosophy.(58) The rise of neo-Thomism turned the tide. Catholic theologians were encouraged by Pope Leo XIII's encyclical letter Aeterni patris of 1879 to study the works of Thomas Aquinas, which advocated a synthesis between reason and faith. In 1882, the future Belgian Cardinal, Desire-Joseph Mercier, started teaching neo-Thomism at the University of Louvain. Four years later ontologism was condemned by the Holy Office.

In Belgium, traditionalism found its religious artistic expression mainly in the neo-Gothic style. The Catholic Reveil, Romanticism, and nationalism constituted a fertile soil for developing this school of art, which revived and idealized the medieval past. While in France, Germany, and Holland, neo-Gothic architects like Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, August Reichensperger, and Piet-Jos-Hubert Cuypers respectively were very influential, the ideas of the Englishman, Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, determined to a great extent the development of the neo-Gothic style among Belgian architects and artisans in the second half of the nineteenth century.(59)

Ultramontanism must be seen as a Catholic variant of anti-liberal traditionalism. It was a trend that supported the independence of the Church, its primacy in society, and continuing collaboration between Church and State. It also implied a rejection of modern intellectual freedoms. According to de Maistre, infallibility in the spiritual order and sovereignty in the temporal order were two completely similar terms: "L'infaillibiliti dans l'ordre spirituel et la souverainiti dans l'ordre temporel sont deux mots parfaitement similaires" (60)

The French ultramontanists were looking for support against the State, or against the discretionary power which the Concordat had conferred upon the bishop over his clergy. In 1826, Lamennais, denouncing the collusion between Throne and Altar, defended the infallibility of the Pope, stating that "Without the Pope there is no Church, without the Church no Christianity, without Christianity no Society".(61) After 1830, the Belgian ultramontanists accepted the liberal state structures of independent Belgium, which allowed the Church a wide freedom of movement. Later, the actions of the Protestant Belgian King Leopold I and of the Holy See reinforced the influence of the ultramontanists. This provoked a strong reaction among the liberal urban bourgeoisie and made ideological opposition a predominant issue in Belgian politics.(62) Pope Gregory XVI and Pope Pius IX increasingly aimed at the restoration of the privileged social position of the Church. The first condemnation of liberal ideas in 1832 by Pope Gregory XVI's encyclical letter Mirari vos, was followed in 1864 by Pope Pius IX's condemnation in the encyclical letter Quanta cura and the Syllabus errorum, a list of eighty unacceptable modern theses. In practice, modern liberties were rejected by promoting close cooperation between Church and State by means of nuncios and local bishops. Pope Pius IX made the ad limina visit of bishops obligatory.

The revolutions of 1848 had exiled Pope Pius IX from Rome. Due to French and Austrian intervention, he was able to return. Since then the Roman question has been dividing the Catholic world: whether temporal power is necessary or not in order to guarantee the spiritual independence of the Holy See. Louis Veuillot, the French editor of the newspaper L'Univers and "lay Pope of the Gauls", became one of the leading spokesmen of the French ultramontane and authoritarian imperialist party.(63)

Ultramontanism was further enhanced by active Roman support for less rigoristic and more touching forms of piety, and for the unification of the liturgy. The Marian and Sacred Heart devotions were stimulated by the definition of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception in 1854 and the beatification of Margaret Mary Alacoque in 1864. Ultramontane piety was further strengthened by regional and national pilgrimages. In the 1870s, tens of thousands of pilgrims would yearly congregate at places such as Paray-le-Monial and Lourdes. Dom Gueranger had always struggled for the unification of the liturgy according to the Roman Rite and a return to the authentic Gregorian chant. In 1850, the Roman Rite was universally adopted and, in 1869, the editor Pustet at Regensburg was commissioned by the Roman Congregation of Rites to publish officially the Gregorian chants.

Ultramontanism reached its apex during the first Vatican Council (1869-1870) with the hotly debated proclamation of papal primacy and infallibility. This was the first time that vicars apostolic were invited to attend a Church Council. Apart from some schema and postulates, the theme of "mission" did not appear on the Council's agenda. However, ultramontanism became an essential dimension of the overseas Catholic missionary enterprise. It was not until the end of the nineteenth century that the limitations of this ultramontane strategy became apparent.(64)

The Social Question : Catholic and Protestant Responses

In the wake of the Industrial Revolution, with the consequent migration of the rural population and the industrial proletarization of the factory workers in England and later in continental Europe, the "social question" was first raised among the Protestant and Catholic laity.

In France, Charles de Coux and especially Alban de Ville-neuve-Bargemont in his work Traite d 'Economic politique chretienne, "Treatise on a Christian political Economy", (1834) denounced liberalism and the industrialist's sole concern about production and gain. In May 1833 in Paris, Frederic Ozanam, a lawyer from Lyons, together with his friends, started the St. Vincent de Paul Society. Ozanam was an eager student of the social sciences of Count Claude Henri de Saint-Simon and of Charles de Coux. By the 1840s, when the Society of St. Francis Xavier was founded in Paris for the Christianization of the working class, the Vincentian movement reached Belgium. The initiative was taken by lay persons from the aristocracy and especially from the bourgeoisie rather than by clerics. The members of the St. Vincent de Paul Society adhered to a frugal and devotional life-style, attended the weekly conferences, and personally visited poor families. The St. Vincent de Paul Society stimulated and financially supported popular education, the establishment of free libraries, the diffusion of edifying literature and folk almanacs, and the functioning of parochial groups of Catholic youth, apprentices, workers, and soldiers.(65)

In Germany, Johann Josef Gorres and other Catholic intellectuals were particularly influential in the rise of the Christian social movements, while Adam H. Muller and Franz von Baader were among the first Catholic social theorists. Like their French colleagues, they supported the right of the proletariat to relief in their life, but believed that this could only be achieved in an organic or corporative order of society. The demands made by Muller and von Baader for the reorganization of State and industry, which was to be along the lines of a modified model of the medieval classes and guilds, continued to influence Christian social movements and Catholic social philosophy down to the end of the nineteenth century. In 1846, Adolf Kolping, a former shoemaker's apprentice who became a priest, founded the first group of the Gesellenvereine, "Journeymen Associations". After 1848, he developed them into a network for young craftsmen, covering all of Germany and Switzerland. Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler, a pastor of the Westphalian community in Hopsten and a Catholic delegate to the Frankfurt parliament, saw the solution to the social question primarily in the establishment of charitable associations.(66)

The revolutions of 1848, particularly the June rising of the Paris proletariat－when for the first time the threat of socialism became apparent to the establishment－were followed by a politically conservative reaction all over Europe. In 1851, the initially liberal-minded Spaniard Juan Donoso Cortes published his work Ensayo sobre el catolicismo, el liberalismo y el socialismo, which advocated ultramontane and antisocialist ideas. His work was rapidly translated into French and German. More democratic-minded French social theorists, such as Ferdinand Ozanam, with his call to pass to the side of the "barbarians", i.e. the proletariat, were rejected by the majority of French Catholics. The connection between anti-liberalism and the social efforts of the Church was shown early in Civiltd Cattolica－a journal founded in 1849 by the Jesuits in Rome－in which, for example, the Jesuit Father Luigi Taparelli d'Azeglio in 1852 held the view that the corporations, or guilds and trade associations, which had been dissolved during the French Revolution by the Le Chapelier law of 1791, were rooted in natural law.

After the events of 1848, the Catholic European elite continued to promote a rather hierarchical and corporative community model of social reconciliation and charity, with its emphasis on the role of the natural communities. Among others, the French mining engineer and Catholic social theorist, Frederic Le Play, in his work L' organisation du travail, "The organization of labour" (1845), stressed the family as the pivot of the community and the model for a stable community structure. In Belgium, the ultramontane leader and professor at the University of Louvain, Charles Perin, with his work De la richesse dans les societes chretiennes, "On the Wealth in Christian Societies", (1861), advocated corporalive ideals. The Belgian arch-confraternity of St. Francis Xavier, founded in 1853 by the Jesuit Father Louis Van Caloen, expanded. It aimed at the moral uplift of workers and the provision of suitable recreation, mainly on Sundays. In the Flemish diocese of Ghent, the Xaverian movement, in comparison with the Vincentian movement, was more active in the rural than the urban areas and almost exclusively geared towards the pastoral and devotional needs of the workers. The political and social emancipation of the workers was rather discouraged by the local bishop. By the 1860s, next to the edification of the workers, attention focused more and more on their material needs and emancipation. Soon Xaverians and Vincentians established mutual aid societies.(67)

In Germany, Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler, who had become bishop of Mainz in 1850, in his influential work Die Arbeiterfrage und das Christentum, "The Labour question and Christendom" (1864), stressed the need for a systematic social policy and social reform. By the end of 1865, at the latest, he had come to realize that the social question could not be resolved by charitable measures alone, and from then on argued more clearly for the collaboration of the State and "self-help" from the workers. Between 1865 and 1870 the first "Christian-social associations" spread especially along the lower Rhine, in the Ruhr and other adjacent regions. They involved themselves in organizing strikes and attempts to organize the workers' interests in a way which transcended confessions and was independent of Church supervision.(68) As early as the middle of the 1870, however, charitable associations became the model in the Catholic sphere.

In the wake of the French defeat by Prussia at Sedan in 1870 and the repression of the Commune of Paris in 1871, Count Albert de Mun, together with his friend Marquis Rene de la Tour du Pin, discovered German social Catholicism and developed the Oeuvre des Cercles catholiques d'ouvriers, "Society of Catholic Workers Circles". This corporative organization endeavored to enhance the concern of the ruling class for the working class, thereby respecting the natural ranks or hierarchies. It was founded and directed by lay persons and left the French clergy indifferentor hostile. Leon Harmel's factory corporations, associated with confraternities at Val des Bois near Rheims, and Joris Helleputte's "Guild of Crafts and Trades" at Louvain, belonged to the same corporative tradition.

The Catholic social movements, together with the more academic discussions－the Geneva Association, the Conseil des etudes de l'Oeuvre des Cercles catholiques d'ouvriers, the Circolo dei studi sociali ed economichi, the Free Association of Catholic Social Politicians, the Fribourg Union, the conservative School of Angers, and the Social Congresses of Liege－resulted in Pope Leo XIII 's social encyclical letter Rerun novarum of 15 May 1891. Its recognition of the workers' right of association gave a new impetus to the democratic forces within Catholic social movements and offered a new alternative community model, namely a "society of the middle" with the motto "Religion, Family, Property". Next to the Catholic confraternities, charitable and popular associations, class-related social works were set up, in which the clergy often assumed the role of social workers.(69)

The Catholic and Protestant missionary enterprise was no exception to this paternalistic and rather conservative social attitude. In the beginning of the nineteenth century the Evangelical Awakening was characterized by its antislavery agitation. William Wilberforce, a member of the Clapham Sect and of the British Parliament, launched a frontal attack on the practice of slavery in the British Empire. At home the members of the Clapham group advocated prison reform and state interference in order to improve factory conditions. Their lifestyle and paternalistic social concern were very similar to that of the members of the continental St. Vincent de Paul Society. The British businessman Granville Sharp established, within the context of the Church Missionary Society, the first mission station for freed slaves in Sierra Leone.

The Catholic Reveil was not unmoved by the slave trade. Anne-Marie Jahouvey, foundress of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Cluny, established a new mission for freed slaves in French Guiana and, in 1828, dreamt of creating a new reduction at Mana. By 1877, the French Cardinal Charles-Martial-Allemand Lavigerie, founder of the White Fathers and Archbishop of Algiers, promoted the Catholic Oeuvre anti-esclavagiste, "Antislavery Society". In November 1889, largely as a result of the agitation carried on by Lavigerie, the Brussels Conference for the Abolition of the Slave Trade assembled and, in July 1890, signed the first international agreement for the abolition of the slave trade. However, Catholic missionary work in the second half of the nineteenth century remained very paternalistic in its development of African and Chinese Christian enclaves, the chr6tient6s or ferme-chapelles. The CICM historian, Jozef Van Hecken, who has described the missionary enterprise of the Scheut Fathers in the Ordos Region, chose for this work the significant French title: Les reductions catholiques du pays des Ordos. Une methode d 'apostolat des missionnaires de Scheut.(70) The eighteenth-century reductions in Paraguay offered a memorable precedent. (71)

32.CHOLVY, Gerard, op. cit., 23-26, 143.　

In 1815, Sophie de Swetchine (1782-1857) was converted to Catholicism. Two years later, she opened a saloon in Paris and was the "spiritual director" of Montalembert, Dom Gueranger and Lacordaire.

33.Ibid., 23 ; 70.　

The mutual or monitorial system of Lancaster in contrast to the commonly used simultaneous system had the advantage of being less expensive : one teacher, assisted by student-monitors, could teach in a vast area.

34.The pious girl was also called "sister" or "blessed one", la beate. She stayed with her family but wore a cross. See CHOLVY, Gerard, op. cit., 23-24,141-142.

35.During the Middle Ages the religious Orders incorporated the laity through the Third Orders. The Society of St. Ursula founded by Angela Merici (1474-1540) at the end of the fifteenth century differed from the religious Orders in the sense that it originally consisted of a group of unmarried young women, who devoted themselves to the care of the poor and the education of girls, without leaving their family or environment. See DE FIORES ET TULLO, Stefano, Dictionnaire de la vie spirituelle (Paris : Cerf 1983) 537, 1167.

36.BOUDENS, Robrecht, "De diocesane clems en de religieuzen", in : CLOET, Michel, (ed.), Het bisdom Gent (1559-1991). Vier eeawen geschiedenis. (Gent : L. Van Melle 1991) 404.

37.Ibid.

38.CHOLVY, Gerard, op. cit., 54.

39.Ibid., 53-56.

40.BOSCH, David J., op. cit., 276-277.

41.Ibid., 284-291.

42.VIDLER, Alee R., The Church in an Age of Revolution : 1789 to the present day. The Pelican History of the Church, vol. 5, (London : Penguin Books 1974) 65-67.

43.BOSCH, David J., op. cit., 298-302.

44.CHOLVY, Gerard, op. cit. ,23-26.

45.BOUDENS, Robrecht, "De negentiende-eeuwse missionaire beweging", in : BOUDENS, R., (ed.), Rond Damiaan. (Kadoc-Studies 7), (Leuven : Universitaire Pers 1989) 17-39 ; DIJARDIN, Carine, "Van pionier tot dienaar. Profiel van de Belgische missionaris in historisch perspectief (1800-1989)", ibid. 115-186 ; CAMPS A., "De katholieke missionaire beweging van 1789 tot 1964", in : VERSTRAELEN, F.J. et al. (eds.), op. cit. 236-242.

46.Collectanea S.C. de Propaganda Fide, Vol. I (Rome : 1907) 541-545.

47.SOETENS, Claude, art. cit., 143-167.

48.See VAN MEIJL, Peter, P. Antonio di Gesu Intreccialagli OCD als apostolischer Visitator der Salvatorianer und Salvatorianerinnen (1894-1913), Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. (Leuven : KUL 1990) Buch 1A. 179.

49.RETIF, A., "La grande expansion des missions", in : DELACROIX, S., ed., op. cit. 110-111

50.BOUDENS, Robrecht, "De negentiende-eeuwse ...", 17-39 ; DUJARDIN, Carine, art. cit., 115-186.

51.BOSCH, David J., op. dr., 280.

52.VIDLER, Alee R., op. cit., 38.

53.BOSCH, David J., op. cit., 327-334.

54.LAMBERTS, E., De Kruistocht tegen het Liberalisme. Facetten van het ultramontanisme in Belgie in de 19e eeuw. (Leuven : Universitaire Pers, Kadoc 1983) 38-63.

55.CHOLVY, Gerard, op. cit., 15-16.

56.DE MAEYER, J., and HELLEMANS, S., "Katholiek reveil, katholieke verzuiling en dagelijks leven", in : BILLIET, J., Tussen bescherming en verovering. Sociologen en hislorici over zuilvorming. (Kadoc-Studies 6), (Leuven : Universitaire Pers 1988) 171-200.

57.LAMBERTS, E., op. cit., 62-63.

58.DE JONG, Kardinaal, Handboek der Kerkgeschiedenis, vol. 4 (Nijmegen-Leuven : NV Standaard / Dekker 1949) 145-146.

59.See DE MAEYER, J., De Sint-Lucasscholen en de Neogotiek, 1862-1914. (Kadoc-Studies 5), (Leuven : Universitaire Pers 1988)

60.Quoted in HAMON, Leo, (ed.), Du Jansenisme a la laicite. Le jansenisme et les origens de la dechristianisation. Le entretiens d'Auxerre. (Paris: Ed. de la maison des science de l'homme 1983 / 87) 188.

61.Quoted in CHOLVY, Gerard, op. cit., 53.

62.LAMBERTS, E., op. cit., 62-63.

63.CHOLVY, Gerard, op. cit., 56.

64.See PRUD'HOMME Claude, Strategic missionnaire du Saint-Siege sous le pontifical de Lean XIII. Centralisation Romaine et defis culturels. Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation. (Universite Jean-Moulin Lyon III 1989).

65.ART, Jan, "De gelovigen en het parochiale leven", in : CLOET, Michel, (ed.), op. cit. 413-435.

66.SCHAFERS, Michael, "Rerum Novarum－The Result of Christian Social Movements 'From Below'", Concilium 1991 / 5, 3-17.

67.ART, Jan, "art. cit. ", 413-435.

68.SCHAFERS, Michael, "art. cit."

69.CHOLVY, Gerard, op. cit., 37-52; DE MAEYER, J., and HELLEMANS, S., art. cit..

70.See VAN HECKEN, J., Les reductions catholiques du pays des Ordos. Une methode d 'apostolat des missionnaires de Scheut. (Schriften reihe der Neuen Zeitschrift fur Missionswissenschaft, no. 15) (Schoneck / Beckenried 1957).

71.NEILL, Stephen, A History of Christian Missions, The Pelican History of the Church, vol. 6, Revised Edition (London : Penguin Books 1987) 358-362