Roman Catholicism and the Founding of Europe: How Catholics Shaped the European Communities

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Roman Catholicism and the Founding
of Europe: How Catholics Shaped the
European Communities
Brent F. Nelsen
James L. Guth
Furman University
Greenville, South Carolina
brent.nelsen@furman.edu
jim.guth@furman.edu
Draft 1.5
August 2003
Prepared for delivery at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science
Association, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 28-31 August 2003.
© The American Political Science Association.

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Abstract
We argue in this paper that the historical development of Catholic theology,
organizational structure, politics and community made Catholic confessional culture
particularly important to the enactment of integration proposals in the post-World War II
period. Specifically, the Catholic emphasis on the visible unity of the church, the
centralization of the church around the authority of the pope, the success of
predominantly Catholic political parties with federalist goals, and a sense of community
among prominent politicians stemming from their common Catholic cultures proved
necessary in the 1950s to moving the integration agenda forward. The weight of this
paper is on the historical development of a Catholic confessional culture supportive of
integration, with the details of the Community founding left to a future paper.

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The European Union (EU) is writing a constitution. Europe’s would-be James
Madisons have been arguing over such nuts-and-bolts questions as whether the Union
should have one or two presidents, but the real heat in the discussions has come over
what to do with God. Pope John Paul II has made it a personal—dare we say—“crusade”
to persuade Europe to acknowledge its debt to Christianity by referring in the constitution
to Europe’s Christian heritage as a source of the values that unite the continent. An early
draft of the preamble, however, mentioned the “cultural, religious and humanist
inheritance of Europe,” but identified its sources as “the civilizations of Greece and
Rome” and the “philosophical currents of the Enlightenment,” conveniently skipping
over Dante and Notre Dame. The draft outraged both Catholics and Protestants so the
drafters dropped all references to the sources of Europe’s civilization. The draft
constitution will be reexamined by an Intergovernmental Conference in the fall so the
issue may not be closed. The lesson here is that religion matters in the integration
process.
Despite decades of secularization, the EU is still divided along confessional lines.
Catholic individuals and the groups and countries they influence tend to support deeper
European political integration. Protestant individuals and the groups and countries they
influence tend to resist political integration and remain unenthusiastic even after they
reluctantly join the process. Thus, the Catholic or significantly Catholic countries of the
Continent generally encourage the development of the EU in a federal direction, while
Britain and the Scandinavian countries (including hold outs Norway and Iceland) resist
the loss of national sovereignty. The same division appears at the individual level where
Catholic citizens more strongly support integration than individuals from other
confessions, even when controlling for other factors.1 In short, a pattern exists across
levels of analysis: Catholics support integration; Protestants are more skeptical.
Why does the strengthening of the European Union divide the Continent along
confessional lines? We believe the answer lies in culture. The division between the
confessional communities in Europe reflects a conflict over the nature and purpose of
integration—a conflict rooted in the major European religious traditions. These religious
traditions form the cores of “confessional cultures” that continue to influence European
society despite the inroads of secularization. Catholics are thus influenced to support
integration by a confessional culture that places priority on visible unity. Protestants are
socialized to be more skeptical of integration by a confessional culture that values
pluralism and religious liberty. Religious devotion, of course, matters: closer connection
to a confessional culture increases the likelihood that an individual or group will follow
the general trend. But the relationship seems to matter more for Catholics than
Protestants.2 Such a result would suggest that, compared to Protestantism, European
Catholicism has a greater stake in the integration process, a tighter grip on its people, or
both. Testing such a theory would require a full comparative analysis. This paper,
however, takes a first step and examines the question from the Catholic perspective.
1 Brent. F. Nelsen, James L. Guth and Cleveland R. Fraser, “Does religion matter? Christianity and Public
Support for the European Union,” European Union Politics, 2(2)(2001), pp. 267-291; Brent F. Nelsen and
James L. Guth, “Religion and Youth Support for the European Union,” Journal of Common Market
Studies, 41(1)(March 2003), pp. 89-112.
2 Nelsen and Guth.

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We argue that the historical development of Catholic theology, organizational
structure, politics and community made Catholic confessional culture particularly
important to the enactment of integration proposals in the post-World War II period.
Specifically, the Catholic emphasis on the visible unity of the church, the centralization
of the church around the authority of the pope, the success of predominantly Catholic
political parties with federalist goals, and a sense of community among prominent
politicians stemming from their common Catholic cultures proved necessary in the 1950s
to moving the integration agenda forward. The weight of this paper is on the historical
development of a Catholic confessional culture supportive of integration, with the details
of the post-war founding left to a future paper.
Catholic Theology: Christian Universalism and Universal Empire
To be “Catholic” is to be, by definition, “universal.” Roman Catholicism shares
this universality with other Christian traditions. From the moment Jesus of Nazareth
directed his followers to “go and make disciples of all nations” (Matt. 28:19), Christianity
was a religion with global intentions. Paul the Apostle put feet to this command and took
the kingdom of God to non-Jews to whom he preached: “There is neither Jew nor Greek,
slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). Despite
historical failings, Christians have always stressed the preaching of the gospel to all
humanity and the spiritual unity of all believers who together are “one in Christ.” The
importance of this element of Christian theology cannot be overstated. Without a
universal gospel the early Christians would have remained a small Jewish sect confined
to Palestine. The universality of the gospel (coupled with local persecution) forced the
early church into all the world and forever stamped the religion with a missionary zeal.
As Christians, Roman Catholics are universalists by conviction. The Catechism
states: “Through the centuries, in so many languages, cultures, peoples, and nations, the
Church has constantly confessed this one faith, received from the one Lord, transmitted
by one Baptism, and grounded in the conviction that all people have only one God and
Father.”3 But the Catholic tradition, in contrast to most Protestant traditions, makes this
universalism visible. The church in the world is “the sacrament of salvation, the sign and
the instrument of the communion of God and men.”4 It makes visible the mysteries of
God through the administering of the sacraments; it makes visible the rule of God
through the administration of its ecclesiastical hierarchy. The visible church is the One
True Church, the presence of Christ on earth, the Mother of all believers, and the final
authority over all who call themselves Christian. In the contemporary Catholic church the
pope, as the successor of Peter, enjoys “supreme, full, immediate, and universal power in
the care of souls”5 and, thus, rules the spiritual society of believers. But the pope’s
temporal rule in Vatican City reminds twenty-first century observers that the visible
universalism of the church was once political as well as spiritual. Catholic notions of
political unity have their roots in medieval Christendom and papal claims of universal
3 Catechism of the Catholic Church (New York: Doubleday, 1994), p. 53.
4 Catechism, p. 224.
5 Catechism, p. 267.

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temporal authority. An understanding of Catholic universalism must, therefore, include
an understanding of medieval universal empire.
All the great empires of history, from Mesopotamia to pre-Columbian Mexico,
were universal empires. These empires were universal in the sense that they recognized
no other political community as their equal and claimed the right to rule the entire
inhabited world, even the cosmos. They believed that all of humanity ought, by nature, to
be subject to their imperial rule. If their rule did not extend to the limits of the known
world, they either treated the unconquered as barbarians and unworthy of attention, or
maintained elaborate ceremonial fictions to reinforce imperial ideology and disguise
reality. A universal emperor who stood above the rest of humanity as a god or God’s
representative headed all universal empires. These emperors ruled autocratically, uniting
in their persons the legislative, executive and judicial functions of the state.6
The allure of universal empire is the promise of peace. Empire unites all human
beings under one power rendering war, in theory, impossible. Empire also ends enmity
between humans and the gods by elevating the emperor to divine status and bestowing
upon him the office of Viceroy of the Gods. His rule is heaven’s rule. Thus the ancient
emperors, from Nebuchadnezzar to Octavian, after uniting their empires by force, glued
them together using a common religion centered on their deified beings. This religion
made the conquerors and the conquered equals; they were bound together as friends
sharing the same loyalty to empire and emperor. By elevating the throne to an altar,
“loyalty could become a religion.”7 Such an imperial religion could bind disparate
elements of the empire together and offer the regime popular support.
The religion of the Roman Empire followed the traditional pattern. Roman
authorities expected all peoples of the empire to participate in the imperial cult no matter
what gods they chose to worship alongside the emperor. Christian insistence on
proclaiming Jesus Christ as “Lord” stood in direct opposition to the imperial cult—the
glue of the empire—and thus constituted a political threat to the regime. Christians could
be prosecuted at any time as enemies of the state, but the most severe persecutions came
when the empire was particularly vulnerable. The Great Persecution of the early fourth
century was, in fact, a civil war against the Christian church. The Roman Tetrarchy (the
rule of four) under Diocletian’s leadership tried to save the degenerating empire by
creating an imperial monarchy and officially proclaiming the emperors the human
representations of gods. The empire could no longer tolerate a large social organization in
essential rebellion against the state so it moved to crush the church. The persecution
failed and Rome, under Constantine, capitulated to the Christians. What emerged from
the rubble of war, however, was not wholly unrecognizable to the pagan citizen of the
empire. By the mid-fourth century the church, backed by the power and financial
resources of the state, had become the new cultural adhesive holding the empire together.
Constantine did little more than baptize the Roman state. True, the emperor was no
longer a deity, but Constantine had established himself as the ruler of the church in
Christ’s stead with authority to intervene in ecclesiastical and doctrinal affairs. This
uniting of spiritual and temporal authority in the person of the emperor went
6 Martin Van Creveld, The Rise and Decline of the State (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University
Press, 1999), pp. 35-52.
7 Ernest Barker, “The Conception of Empire,” in The Legacy of Rome, ed. Cyril Bailey (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1923), pp. 48-49.

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unquestioned in the Roman Empire and continued in Byzantium until the fall of
Constantinople in the fifteenth century.
The Western Empire slowly withered away between the fifth and seventh
centuries. Gradually the Western church took the place of the Empire as the only
organized institution in the Western world. “Rome” as an ideal remained firmly
embedded in the church, which sheltered and nurtured the few educated minds left in the
West. Thus when Latin Christendom began to emerge from the chaos, led by monks,
Frankish warriors and Roman popes, notions of universal empire emerged with it. When
the time was right, the political power of the Franks and the spiritual and cultural power
of the papacy met in Rome to crown a new Roman Emperor, Charlemagne.
The imperial coronation of Charles the Great (768-814) in 800 marks the
emergence of a new Western Empire. Technically both the Byzantine Emperor and the
Holy Roman Emperor (as the Western emperor came to be known) claimed the Roman
imperial throne, but in reality the two empires became worlds unto themselves and chose
to live with the contradiction. In the East, the emperor maintained control of both church
and state according to the Constantinian tradition. The creation of the western throne,
however, had been a cooperative effort between the Roman popes and the Frankish kings.
Charlemagne earned his title on the battlefield, but it was Pope Leo III (795-816) who
placed the crown on his head. Both church and state had a claim to ultimate authority
over the united Western Empire, and both entities went about establishing their rights.
The emperors, following Charlemagne, claimed authority from heaven as Christ’s earthly
representatives to govern the empire and defend the church. The popes acknowledged the
temporal authority of emperors, but asserted their right to judge earthly powers based on
the superiority of the spiritual over the temporal. In 1302 Pope Boniface VIII (1294-
1303) issued Unum Sanctam where he declared:
both swords . . . the spiritual and the temporal, are in the power of the
Church. The former is to be used by the Church, the latter for the Church;
the one by the hand of the priest, the other by the hand of kings and
knights, but at the command and permission of the priest. Moreover, it is
necessary for one sword to be under the other, and the temporal authority
to be subjected to the spiritual. . . .We therefore declare, say, and affirm
that submission on the part of every man to the bishop of Rome is
altogether necessary for his salvation.8
Thus the ideological conflict was essentially over who ruled Christendom, pope
by virtue of his office as Peter’s successor, or emperor by virtue of his divine
appointment to protect the church. The emperors at first had the upper hand, but the
reforming popes of the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries humbled the secular
rulers and established a supranational government that extended beyond the shrunken
territory of the official Holy Roman Empire to the far reaches of Europe where the
Western church had penetrated. Popes exercised their powers through papal legates,
canon law, feudal privileges, and a centralized bureaucracy that dwarfed most national
administrations. By the early thirteenth century, the pope ruled Christendom in theory
8 “The Unam Sanctam of Pope Boniface VIII, 1302,” in The Great Documents of Western Civilization, ed.
Milton Viorst (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965), pp. 72-73.

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and practice as universal emperor: he wore the imperial regalia, raised up and cast down
kings, levied taxes, made laws, and made war on foreign (i.e., Byzantine and Muslim)
powers. Catholic universalism in the Middle Ages was visible both spiritually and
temporally.
The medieval synthesis was splintered by the rise of nation states and the success
of Luther’s Reformation. France, England and Spain, even in the thirteenth century, were
beginning to create centralized states that could muster the strength to fight wars of
aggression and brush off papal displeasure. The absolute monarchies that emerged in the
seventeenth century looked and acted like mini-universal empires as divinely appointed
princes took advantage of the chaos of the Reformation to take control of their national
churches. This was especially true in Protestant areas where the churches became arms of
the state, but it also took place in Catholic countries were kings began appointing
prelates, calling councils, and deciding what papal pronouncements would be published
in the country. This close alliance between throne and altar gave legitimacy to Catholic
princes, but weakened the church as a temporal actor and—in so far as it undermined the
pope’s authority in the church—angered the papacy. The church did not give up its vision
of a single, visible community of faith, but it adjusted to reality. The pope’s temporal
power was generally confined to the Papal States; any other influence had to come
through diplomatic missions.9 The pope remained a European prince, but just one among
many. In the next section we explore the organizational role of a pope stripped of most or
all of his temporal power.
Catholic theology has consistently emphasized the idea of visible unity
throughout its long history. For Catholics the universal gospel is incarnate in the visible,
universal church; the church, as the Christian society, knows no boundaries. Political
realities do not alter this fundamental assumption. The division of Christendom
politically and religiously is the current reality, but the church is to hold out to humanity
a better way. Catholics—even modern Catholics—are committed to forging a unified
society, especially among Christian peoples. This was the theological impetus behind
Catholic support for European unity in the post-war period. European integration has
deep theological roots in Catholicism.
Catholic Organization: The Role of the Modern Papacy
Ironically the shattering of Christendom by the Reformation led to the
strengthening of the papacy within Catholicism. Events of the two centuries prior to the
Reformation had loosened the popes’ hold on the church. The removal of the papacy to
Avignon, France in 1309 brought the popes too close to the French monarchy thus
alienating the papacy from the rest of Christendom, especially Germany. The result was
the formation of an anti-papal intellectual movement aimed at establishing the supremacy
of general councils—representing the collective will of the whole people of God—over
popes. The Conciliar Movement, led by William of Ockham (1285-1347) and Marsilius
of Padua (1280-1343), produced a reaction from the Avignon popes who emphatically
asserted that popes were second only to God in authority and on par with the Virgin and
9 Robert A. Graham, Vatican Diplomacy: A Study of Church and State on the International Plane
(Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1959), pp. 157-183.

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the saints in reverence due.10 But the Papal Schism of the late fourteenth century so
weakened the position of the papacy that the College of Cardinals called a general
council to settle the dispute. The Council of Pisa (1409) failed to end the schism, but it
succeeded in changing—at least for a time—the constitution of the church by
empowering the College of Cardinals with the right to call a council.11 Six years later the
Council of Constance (called not by pope or cardinals, but by the Holy Roman Emperor)
succeeded in unifying the papacy and, in addition, extended conciliar powers. Its
authority, claimed the council, came “directly from Christ” and “everybody, of whatever
rank or dignity, including also the pope, is bound to obey this council in those things
which pertain to the faith.”12 In effect, the council had overthrown the pope as the
supreme authority in the church.
The rise of the European state also weakened the papacy. Advocates of
conciliarism had naturally favored secular powers in their disputes with the papacy;
Marsilius had argued, in fact, that the pope should be subject to the emperor.
Conciliarism thus provided a means for secular authorities to gain greater control of the
personnel and treasure of the church in their territories. The state’s new assertiveness
began in France where the clergy and King Charles VII (1422-1461) became convinced
that reform would only take place if the church was nationalized. In 1438 Charles called a
council of the French church that declared the supremacy of a council to the pope in a
document known as the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges. The Pragmatic Sanction also
asserted the right of local clergy, in consultation with the king, to elect ecclesiastical
offices and prohibited legal appeals to Rome “until every other grade of jurisdiction shall
have been exhausted.”13 In short, the council nationalized the French church and placed
the king at its head, a move legitimized by the Concordat of 1516. France’s successful
nationalization, of course, paved the way for other European princes to carve off their
own pieces of the universal church in the sixteenth century.
Thus at the time of the Reformation, the papacy was already in a weakened state.
Luther’s revolt exasperated the problem by removing a third of Western Christendom
from papal control and threatened to dissolve any remaining ties that bound Catholic
Europe together. The Roman church met the challenge of the Reformation in two
seemingly contradictory ways. First, it turned to the pope for leadership and endorsed
wholeheartedly his primacy within the church. The Council of Trent (1545-1563) ended
the threat of conciliarism by granting the pope the sole authority to call councils and
confirm their conclusions. In addition, the council granted the pope the right to shape
Catholic liturgical and devotional life by assigning him the tasks of maintaining an Index
of Forbidden Books, producing the official Latin Vulgate, and controlling the content of
the Catechism, Breviary and Missal.14 The Counter Reformation church placed greater
10 Will Durant, The Reformation: A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957), p. 8.
11 See the “Declaration of the Council of Pisa, 1409,” in The Great Documents of Western Civilization, ed.
Milton Viorst (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965), p. 74.
12 “The Council of Constance, 1415,” in The Great Documents of Western Civilization, ed. Milton Viorst
(New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965), p. 76.
13 “The Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, 1438,” in The Great Documents of Western Civilization, ed. Milton
Viorst (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965), p. 78.
14 See Robert Birely, The Refashioning of Catholicism, 1450-1700: A Reassessment of the Counter
Reformation (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1999), pp. 58-59.

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emphasis on the organizational hierarchy and the pope’s position at its pinnacle, while
new religious orders, namely the Jesuits, pledged their absolute obedience to the Roman
Pontiff. Much of this new attention on the pope as head of a visible hierarchy was a
reaction to Protestant fragmentation and insistence on the invisible nature of the church.
But much was also a recognition that the survival of Catholicism in a fragmenting Europe
depended on obedience to a single head.
Catholic Europe rallied to the spiritual leadership of the pope, but a second
strategy for surviving the Reformation pointed in the opposite direction. National
churches, aware that the pope’s political position had clearly deteriorated, instinctively
drew closer to the Catholic princes who possessed the means to protect the church from
its Protestant enemies. In exchange for security, the churches aligned themselves with the
interests of the state, wedding altar to throne. The French monarchy, for instance,
defeated Huguenot attempts to pry the country away from Catholic Europe in the
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Catholic victory, however, meant even tighter
control of the church by the French state. The church still acknowledged the unity of
Catholicism and the primacy of the pope, but in practice it pulled strongly away from
Rome. In 1682 the aristocratic clergy and the crown codified the position of the French
church vis-à-vis the papacy in the Four Gallican Articles. The Articles denied papal
dominion over temporal things, affirmed conciliarism, insisted on the inviolability of the
rights and liberties of the Gallican church, and denied the infallibility of the pope.15 Pope
Alexander VIII (1689-1691) annulled the Articles in 1690 and King Louis XIV (1643-
1715) solemnly withdrew them in 1693, but the Gallican principles lived on in the
attitudes and actions of the French church until the Council of Pistoia in 1786 again made
them official. In sum, the French church survived the religious conflicts by adopting the
interests of the French state.
A similar union of throne and altar occurred in Spain, but there the state seemed
to adopt the interests of the church. The Spanish monarchy under Philip II (1556-1598)
took as its primary purpose the defense and expansion of Catholicism. But Philip, like his
father Emperor Charles V (1519-1556), had universalistic tendencies, reinforced by
Spain’s conquest of the New World. He saw himself as “a kind of universal bishop” who
supervised the churches of the world.16 Political and religious authority united in his
person and he freely used the institutions of the church—especially the Spanish
Inquisition—to enforce uniformity throughout his empire. Philip never wavered in his
support for the papacy, but his control of the Spanish church and his willingness to
censure papal pronouncements often frustrated Rome.
The Counter Reformation church was thus characterized by two seemingly
contradictory trends, the rise of papal authority and the state takeover of national
churches. The post-Tridentine papacy was a much stronger institution than its pre-
Reformation predecessor. The pope was the unquestioned leader of Catholicism. He
defined orthodoxy, guided the worship of the church and served as a powerful symbol of
Catholic unity in the midst of religious fragmentation. He also headed a reformed and
strengthened bureaucracy that restored moral authority and administrative effectiveness
to the papacy. But the pope’s renewed spiritual authority could not completely mask the
15 Derek Holmes, The Triumph of the Holy See: A Short History of the Papacy in the Nineteenth Century
(London: Burns and Oates, 1978), p. 4.
16 Christopher Dawson, The Dividing of Christendom (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1965), p. 181.

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church’s general loss of political power to European states. The rise of papal supremacy
was, in fact, a reaction to the loss of Catholic political unity. As Maier puts it: “The stress
on the visible signs of the church and on the primacy of the pope . . . reflected the
situation of a European Catholicism now split into isolated national churches whose sense
of unity depended on papal primacy, since it no longer could be developed in a
community of faith that transcended national borders.”17
The pope’s position in the church remained ambiguous in the eighteenth century
due in part to a complex set of cleavages that plagued the church. Tension existed
between Rome and the national churches over ultimate jurisdiction. The French bishops,
for instance, denied the jurisdiction of papal legates in France in an effort to preserve the
liberties of the Gallican church. But tensions also existed within the French church. The
high prelates were divided between those who believed in the liberty of the French
church from both Rome and Paris and those who sided with the French monarchy in its
desire to control the church for reasons of state. Tensions also grew between the
aristocratic upper clergy, who enjoyed the luxuries of a wealthy church, and the
impoverished lower clergy who resented the inequalities. In addition, the growing middle
class came to view the church as restrictive and increasingly irrelevant, prompting many
to remain in the church but not of it, or leave it altogether.18 The pattern was repeated
across much of Europe, but France became the focus of Catholic attention as revolution
broke over the continent.
The Revolution of 1789 ranks next to Constantine’s conversion and the
Reformation in its impact on the Catholic church. The French Revolution and the
subsequent changes it wrought in the nineteenth century had three major effects on the
European Catholic church. First, it overthrew the national churches. The overthrow was
violent and thorough in France. The privileges of the church, at least those associated
with feudal traditions, were swept away with the aristocracy. Church property was
nationalized. Priests were forced to take an oath of loyalty to a new church constitution.
And for the first time since Diocletian, European rulers persecuted the church as an
enemy of the state. While the violence against the church was not to be repeated across
Europe, and the church and state would find ways to accommodate one another, the tide
had turned decisively against the European Catholic church. The national churches, once
quick to align with newly powerful nation states for protection, grew rightfully distrustful
of the new liberal or nationalist (as in the case of Bismark’s Germany) states. Their only
option was to turn to Rome for support.
Second, the Revolution first threatened then eliminated the last vestiges of papal
temporal authority. Napoleon ordered the Papal States absorbed into the French Empire
in 1809, thus unifying Italy under French control. The Papal States were restored to the
pope after Napoleon’s defeat, but liberal ideas took hold in Italy and undermined the
pontiff’s legitimacy resulting in a second temporary loss of the Papal States in 1848. The
unification of Italy in 1870 finally ended the pope’s temporal reign, but his nineteenth-
century political travails, ironically, only served to raise his stature among Europe’s
Catholics. Napoleon’s unwise imprisonment of Pius VII (1800-1823) and Pius IX’s
17 Hans Maier, Revolution and Church: The Early History of Christian Democracy, 1789-1901, trans.
Emily M. Schossberger (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1965), pp. 76-77.
18 Maier, pp. 85-93.

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(1846-1878) self-imposed imprisonment in the Vatican after 1870 created among
Catholics a well-spring of sympathy for the Roman Pontiff.
Third, the Revolution created a democratic ethos antithetical to the hierarchical
culture of the church. Sovereignty now rested with citizens not monarchs; the rights of
the ruled trumped the rights of traditional rulers. The monarchical church was the cultural
antithesis of the new liberal polity and reacted with some vehemence to the changed
environment.19 Catholic intellectuals, such as Joseph de Maistre, denounced the
Revolution and the totalitarian tendencies of a secular state and called for a theocratic
order under papal authority. Pius IX, in the Papal Syllabus of Errors (1864), condemned
religious toleration, secular philosophy, the sovereignty of the people, secular public
education, separation of church and state, and divorce, refusing to “reconcile himself to,
and agree with, progress, liberalism, and civilization as lately introduced.”20 As if to
underline the church’s counter-cultural stand, the Vatican Council proclaimed in 1870
that the pope possessed “that infallibility which the divine Redeemer intended His
Church to possess when defining doctrine concerning faith and morals. . . .”21
The defeat of the national churches, the stripping of papal temporal authority, and
the rise of modernity drove the church more deeply and unreservedly into the arms of the
pope. Ultramontanism—the movement that agitated for greater papal authority in the
church—triumphed over remaining proponents of conciliarism or Erastianism
(ecclesiastical nationalism). The national churches turned to the papacy for protection
from a triumphant state. Nineteenth-century popes, who were still accorded a dignity that
surpassed their temporal authority,22 usually provided that protection through diplomatic
negotiations that produced concordats regulating church-state relations. Perhaps more
importantly, the church turned to the papacy for intellectual and spiritual guidance. The
pope became the infallible teacher who could instruct the faithful in how to think about
and act in the new world. Thus as the focus of Catholic attention, the pope (and a
powerful curia) acquired unprecedented power within the church. He had complete
control of church doctrine and exercised more and more control over teaching in Catholic
schools and universities. He appointed and deposed bishops at will and had future
bishops and leaders of the church come to Rome for their education. As Catholic revival
swept Europe in the nineteenth century, a host of ultramontane organizations sprang up.
Some were old orders, such as the restored Jesuits, but others were new religious or lay
groups conducting missionary activities or performing charitable tasks. All were
absolutely loyal to the pope.
Perhaps the high point of papal dominance of the church came in the mid-
twentieth century during the reigns of Popes Pius XI (1922-1939) and Pius XII (1939-
1958). Pius XI rejected the defensive stand the church had taken in the nineteenth century
and determined to redirect its mission toward rechristianizing modern society. By
strengthening the Vatican bureaucracy, encouraging Catholic mass movements,
exercising tight control over religious orders and social organizations, and negotiating
19 See Maier’s (pp. 127-141) important discussion of the relationship between the revolutionary state and
the church.
20 “The Papal Syllabus of Errors,” in Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, Vol. II (Grand Rapids,
Michigan: Baker Book House, 1919), p. 233.
21 Holmes, p. 158.
22 See Graham, pp. 157-187.

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dozens of concordats, Pius XI demonstrated his desire not merely to exercise moral
authority over the spiritual life of the church, but to be its ruler.23 He failed to
rechristianize Europe, but he did succeed in regaining authority over a small piece of
Rome (Vatican City) and thereby recapturing the dignity of a temporal prince. Pius XII
continued the policy of his predecessor. Trained as a papal diplomat and involved in
many of the negotiations conducted under Pius XI, he preferred quiet diplomacy to public
condemnations of totalitarian fascism. For all its moral ambiguity, the strategy of non-
confrontation allowed the church to operate virtually intact throughout Europe during
World War II. It remained, however, a tightly controlled church as the pope continued the
process of spiritual and administrative centralization.
The papacy emerged from the war years remarkably undamaged and confident.
Pius XII, despite criticism, expressed no remorse for his unwillingness to condemn
fascism or Nazi treatment of Jews during the war.24 He continued to exercise the full
powers of his office in a self-assured manner: in 1949 he excommunicated all
communists and in 1950 he invoked papal infallibility when declaring the Assumption of
the Virgin Mary.25 These were not acts of political or spiritual timidity.
At mid-century, then, the papacy dominated a church that was increasingly
“centralized, autocratic, and rigid.”26 Pius XII strove mightily to unite Catholics in a
single spiritual, social and political bloc capable of rebuilding a war-torn world, defeating
communism, and reversing modernism. Against long odds, he was remarkably
successful.
Catholic Politics: The Rise of Christian Democracy
As we saw in the previous section, the French Revolution accelerated the
Tridentine trend of giving more spiritual and ecclesiastical authority to the pope as his
temporal power waned. But the centralization of the Catholic church in the hands of the
pope did not mean Catholics became politically homogeneous. The Revolution created a
new political world of mobilized masses and separated states and churches that caught
the Roman church off balance. For a century it floundered around for a viable political
strategy, often at odds with itself.
The church hierarchy, as we saw above, rejected the liberal state and developing
democracy, but this official position masks deeper complexities. A revolutionary alliance
of middle-class Catholics and lower clergy in France, for instance, proved essential to the
success of the revolt. Surprisingly, one third of the French clergy swore allegiance to the
Civil Constitution before the liberal state turned totalitarian and ended the union of
revolution and religion.27 Liberal Catholics were again to make common cause with
23 Martin Conway, Catholic Politics in Europe, 1918-1945 (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 40.
24 István Deák, “The Pope, the Nazis and the Jews,” The New York Review, March 23, 2000, p. 44.
25 Martin Conway, “The Age of Christian Democracy: The Frontiers of Success and Failure,” in European
Christian Democracy: Historical Legacies and Comparative Perspectives, ed. Thomas Kselman and
Joseph A. Buttigieg (Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame Press, 2003), p. 47.
26 Deák, p. 46.
27 Maier, pp. 97-141.

12
revolutionary movements in France in 1830 and 1848 but without great success.28 Liberal
attacks on the church in the last half of the nineteenth century, most notably in Germany
during Bismarck’s kulturkampf, heightened the need for an effective strategy. The
hierarchy discouraged or prohibited Catholic participation in democratic politics,
preferring instead to lobby governments directly. The age of mass politics, however, had
arrived and Catholics were busy creating organizations of workers, farmers, former
soldiers, women, youths and others. Many of the organizations were encouraged or led by
clergy and almost all were aggressively anti-liberal and anti-democratic. The goal was to
create a Catholic movement so large, monolithic and comprehensive that it would, as
Kalyvas puts it, “swallow the Liberal state and reestablish the church in its former
glory.”29
While the church did not condone electoral politics, the bishops decided to align
these mass movements with Conservative parties pledged to defend the interests of the
church. The alliances proved successful and Catholics, many of whom now began to
accept parliamentary democracy, tasted political power. The alliances with
Conservatives, however, proved uncomfortable for Catholics, especially those in the
working class. This prompted some Catholic politicians to found independent parties
against the wishes of church leaders, first in Germany (1871), then Belgium (1884), the
Netherlands (1888), and Austria (1890). Soon these parties were adopting political
programs that went beyond the defense of the church to address broader social and
political problems. Catholic party leadership remained deferential to the church
hierarchy, but did not always take orders. When in 1887 the pope and bishops negotiated
an agreement with Bismarck that required the Catholic Center party’s vote in favor of the
Chancellor’s military budget, the party refused, signaling just the kind of political
independence Rome feared.30
The Catholic parties survived World War I and entered the interwar years with
some reason for optimism. Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903) in his 1891 encyclical Rerum
Novarum had given Catholics a radical political and social program that promised an
alternative to secular ideologies. The pope had rejected the radical individualism of
liberalism and the tyranny of socialism and had outlined a program of support for worker
benefits, private property, family, and class unity.31 The Catholic parties of the interwar
period took up this social program and coupled it with a commitment to democratic
institutions that buried any remaining pre-war nostalgia for the ancien régime.32 In
addition, a religious revival swept Catholic Europe, bringing pious and stridently counter-
cultural young people into the church. Furthermore, a vibrant Catholic intelligentsia,
centered in the Catholic universities, began publishing a wide array of newspapers and
journals that further promoted discussions of democracy and human liberties. These
factors contributed to the strength of Catholic parties, which were now regularly
28 René Rémond, “The Case of France,” in Concilium, The Church and Christian Democracy, ed. Gregory
Baum and John Coleman (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1987), pp. 73-74.
29 Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Rise of Christian Democracy in Europe (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University
Press, 1996), p. 23.
30 Michael P. Fogarty, Christian Democracy in Western Europe, 1820-1953 (Notre Dame, Indiana:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1957), pp. 312-313.
31 Pope Leo XIII, “Rerum Novarum.”
32 Conway, Catholic Politics, p. 39.

13
participating in coalition governments, in Austria, Belgium, Italy, Germany and the
Netherlands.
Not all aspects of the Catholic resurgence of the 1920s, however, benefited the
Catholic parties. For instance, despite the obvious electoral advantages of multi-class
parties, divisions between working- and middle-class Catholics eventually disrupted the
religious parties. Class conflict contributed to the electoral decline of Catholic parties in
the late 1920s and contributed to the collapse of the Italian People’s Party in 1924.33
Likewise, the religious revival energized Catholics to work toward the “Christian
society,” but the intense personal nature of the new religiosity led young people away
from political parties toward overtly religious activities. Finally, the hierarchy itself
undermined the Catholic parties by preferring a strategy of direct diplomacy over
electoral participation and creating Catholic Action movements across Europe to compete
directly with socialist organizations. These lay movements, controlled by the clergy,
aimed to re-christianize Europe by raising awareness of Catholic teaching and conducting
campaigns—through demonstrations, parades and rallies—in favor of Catholic virtues
and against Catholic vices. Catholic Action was the hierarchy’s favored means of
transforming Europe, not parties in parliament.
The Catholic electoral slump continued in the 1930s. Economic depression and
political instability discredited Catholic parties in government. Meanwhile, the
radicalization of the Catholic laity in the 1920s and the natural authoritarianism of the
church hierarchy made authoritarian means to Catholic social and political ends
attractive. As a result, fascism drew Catholics to its ranks in large numbers in the 1920s,
particularly in Spain and Mussolini’s Italy. This was less true in Germany where Nazi
paganism repulsed many Christians, but even there substantial numbers of Catholics
supported right-wing movements. Pius XI eventually condemned anti-clerical fascism in
1931, but Catholics were quick to back Catholic forms of authoritarianism in, for
instance, Austria and Slovakia. By the end of the 1930s, however, the choices were stark
for Catholics: either support fascism or liberal democracy. Catholics continued to insist
on a third way, but their pleas were swallowed up in war.
World War II divided Catholics across Europe. A minority whole-heartedly
backed the Nazis and their puppet regimes in Vichy France, Croatia and elsewhere; a
second minority actively resisted Nazism; and the majority did neither. The war and the
experience of resistance, however, had a profound effect on Catholics in France, Italy and
the Benelux countries that fundamentally changed their collective mind. According to
Conway,
the war served as a period of internal liberation for many Catholics. The
direct experience of German oppression and of the crude authoritarianism
of satellite regimes such as Vichy France created a revivified belief in the
values of free expression, of participatory politics and of individual rights.
Both in resistance as well as in many more mundane areas of daily life, the
war eroded the barriers between Catholics and their fellow citizens,
encouraging new forms of debate and mutual discovery. The consequence
was a new mood of openness and, especially among Catholic intellectuals,
an interest in the possibility of political initiatives that transcended the
33 Conway, Catholic Politics, p. 31.

14
Catholic-secular divide. . . . Catholic movements and parties shared the
general aspiration to build the modern, democratic and egalitarian society
that, it was hoped, would emerge from the sufferings of the war.34
Thus the experience of war and resistance transformed Catholics and with them
their political parties. First, most of the new confessional parties were just that, new. The
German Center party reconstituted after the war, but soon sunk into political
insignificance. In other Catholic countries the old confessional parties disappeared and
new Christian Democratic parties emerged. Second, most of the new parties claimed to
be merely “Christian”—as opposed to “Catholic”—and open to other confessions. Only
the German Christian Democratic Union (CDU), however, could claim significant
numbers of Protestants in its ranks. Third, the new parties also tended to drift to the right
of their pre-war predecessors. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century confessional
parties stood between the right-wing liberals and conservatives and the left-wing
socialists and communists, but their defense of worker interests and calls for
interventionist social policies drove them left of center. Post-war Christian Democratic
parties remained committed to Catholic social policies and the social market (read
“managed”) economy, but the continued drift of workers to the socialist parties, the
increased support from the more liberal middle class and conservative rural electorates,
the virtual disappearance of strong right-wing parties in most countries, and the
dominance of a virulent, Cold War anticommunism pushed them to the right.35 Finally,
and most importantly, these parties broke from their pre-war predecessors by adopting
human liberty as a fundamental value to be protected. Christian Democrats had come to
terms with the Revolution. They did not abandon their aim of establishing a Christian
society, but they did abandon authoritarianism as the means to that end.
The war played a decisive role in refashioning political Catholicism, but the
discontinuity can be overstated. The parties were still products of the European Catholic
culture of most of their leaders and the vast majority of their voters, despite their
proclaimed openness to other confessions. Post-war Catholicism was, as we saw above,
very much like pre-war Catholicism: Catholic social organizations still waved banners in
parades and Catholic propaganda still proclaimed the church as the sole fortress of truth
in a decadent culture.36 Reflecting this religious culture, Christian Democracy initially
took a militant attitude toward politics. Elections were portrayed as struggles over
ultimate values; legislative issues were cast as decisions to accept or reject divine
mandates.37 Furthermore, Christian Democrats saw it as their duty to forge a united
Catholic front, represented by a single Christian party. Christian Democratic parties,
assisted by the church hierarchy, moved against competing Catholic parties, as they did
against the Center party in Germany.38 Even in Italy Catholics eventually rallied behind a
34 Conway, Catholic Politics, p. 89.
35 Conway, “Age of Christian Democracy,” pp. 53-59.
36 Conway, “Age of Christian Democracy,” p. 47.
37 Frederic Spotts, The Churches and Politics in Germany (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University
Press, 1973), p. 163; for a description of the apocalyptic view towards communism in Italy taken by the
church in the late 1940s, see Carolyn M. Warner, Confessions of an Interest Group: The Catholic Church
and Political Parties in Europe (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 84-85.
38 Spotts, pp. 152-157; Carolyn M. Warner, “Strategies of an Interest Group: The Catholic Church and
Christian Democracy in Postwar Europe, 1944-1958,” in European Christian Democracy: Historical

15
single party, despite the machinations of the Holy Office and members of the Roman
establishment to counter the leftist leanings of the Christian Democratic party with a
Catholic right-wing party.39 The exception to this trend was France where the fragmented
Catholic vote never united behind the MRP, although no competing Catholic parties
emerged.
Behind the reinvigorated post-war Catholic front stood the church hierarchy.
Church officials, especially in Germany, Italy, France and Austria, had learned how
dangerous it was for bishops and clergy to draw too close to secular regimes and resolved
to stay out of active politics. In practice this meant prohibiting clergy from holding party
positions and government offices; but it did not mean withholding political direction from
Catholic parties and politicians. Church officials were determined to forge a monolithic
Catholic bloc under the direction of the church. Delivering the Catholic vote to a single
Catholic party was an important element of their strategy. Subtle but strong messages
were sent to the Catholic electorate to vote en bloc. And sometimes the messages were
not so subtle as when a German priest stated in 1949: “If Christ were alive today, he
would certainly be in the CDU.”40 A second element of their strategy was to direct the
program of the party and influence its leaders when in government. This took different
forms in different countries. At one extreme, the French hierarchy, mainly out of
deference to the anticlerical nature of post-war French politics, played almost no role in
the MRP, relying instead on the religious devotion of party officials and government
ministers to pursue church-friendly policies.41 At the other extreme was the German
hierarchy which exercised enormous influence in the party during the 1950s through
private representations to CDU politicians and the creation of an extensive interlocking
network of CDU politicians, leaders in the lay movements, and clergy.42 Church
influence, however, did have its limits in Germany. The pious Konrad Adenauer had little
trouble deciding against the church when his political interests so dictated.43
Catholic political strategies worked remarkably well in the twenty years following
the war. Christian Democratic parties dominated the politics of the original six countries
of the European Community. Even the relatively small MRP in France became essential
to the shaky governments of the Fourth Republic and thus held an inordinate number of
important cabinet portfolios. Christian Democracy became less overtly Catholic in the
1960s as religion lost its hold on large portions of the European electorate. Secularization
and the need to attract broad electoral support to stay in power forced the parties to
distance themselves from the church hierarchy and employ less religious rhetoric. The
Christian Democratic parties of the immediate post-war period, however, were still
parties of militant, hierarchical, universal Catholicism.
Legacies and Comparative Perspectives, ed. Thomas Kselman and Joseph A. Buttigieg (Notre Dame,
Indiana: Notre Dame Press, 2003), pp. 149-155.
39 Andrea Riccardi, “The Vatican of Pius XII and the Catholic Party,” in Concilium, The Church and
Christian Democracy, ed. Gregory Baum and John Coleman (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1987), p. 41.
40 Quoted in Spotts, p. 154.
41 R. E. M. Irving, Christian Democracy in France (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1973), p. 82.
42 Spotts, pp. 167-168.
43 Spotts, p. 173.

16
Catholic Community: Confessional Identity and European Integration
Latin Christendom was never so much a political union as a cultural expression.
Christendom extended far beyond the borders of the Holy Roman Empire and while in
theory the pope had temporal authority wherever the Roman church was present, in
practice his power was unevenly distributed, even in the High Middle Ages. Culture, in
fact, defined Christendom. As Europe emerged from the chaos of the barbarian invasions
Frankish warriors, Roman popes and Celtic monks forged a new civilization tied together
by a liturgy that ordered the whole of life, a language shared by a cosmopolitan monastic
elite, a law governing most public and private activities of clergy and laity, a common art,
music and architecture, and a supranational identity as a Latin Christian.44 Latin culture
did not eliminate local distinctives, but employed them to serve the purposes of the
sacred community that stretched from Portugal to Poland, Sicily to Sweden, and even to
the Latin outposts of the Middle East.
The Reformation divided Latin Europe into two cultural communities. Catholic
Europe remained culturally unified around Tridentine orthodoxy and papal authority. The
Society of Jesus and a host of new orders, through education, charity and new forms of
personal spirituality, aggressively defended Catholic belief and practice internally, then
helped Catholic princes claw back much of the Catholic territory originally lost to the
Protestants in France, Germany and Eastern Europe. With a Baroque flourish, Catholic
culture maintained its hold on most of Europe.45
Catholic community, of course, took another blow from the French Revolution.
The upheaval produced two cultural results. First, it eliminated any notion that European
Christian culture could be fundamentally changed overnight. French experiments with
new cults, despite the fact that they employed crass imitations of Catholic rituals, were
utter failures. Even non-believers recognized that the rhythms of secular life—from
weekly work schedules to holiday traditions—would continue to follow Christian
patterns. Kings could be overthrown in a day, but culture possessed an inertia that could
not be reversed by political will. In short, secularizing Catholic countries would remain
Catholic in culture.
The second effect of the Revolution was to cause antirevolutionary Catholics to
withdraw into a self-contained world behind ideological and institutional walls.
Nineteenth-century Catholics were increasingly conscious of having made a choice to
join a distinct social group that transcended ethnic, class, and national divisions. The
Revolution thus birthed “closed Catholicism”—with its unique beliefs, behaviors and
institutions—as a distinct culture within a broader European civilization. Papal efforts,
religious revival, lay activism, and participation in electoral politics in the 1920s and
1930s heightened the sense of “shared purpose and common identity” not just within
nation states, but across Europe. National boundaries remained important within
Catholicism, as World War II demonstrated. But “Catholic horizons had broadened and
with this change came a sense of membership of a spiritual community that transcended
secular boundaries.”46
44 See Dawson, The Dividing of Christendom.
45 Dawson, The Dividing of Christendom.
46 Conway, Catholic Politics, pp. 3-4.

17
The growing recognition of a common closed Catholicism that extended across
borders took on a political dimension as early as the 1920s. The interwar confessional
parties, led by the Italian People’s Party and inspired in part by the writings of Pope
Benedict XV (1914-1922), began incorporating into their programs a commitment to
“Christian universalism,” which referred vaguely to a desire to see the international
system disarmed and governed by law and common institutions.47 Catholic parties began
contacts in the early 1920s and established a loose international organization in 1925.48
The regular meetings of Catholic politicians never achieved coordinated policy, but they
forged important bonds between future European leaders who shared a common Catholic
culture. They also provided a forum to discuss policy. As early as 1932 these meetings
were producing resolutions calling for a “European union” and a “common market.”49
Ideas of European integration were floating among Catholic politicians who at the time
were in no position to act on them. But three leaders who would one day be in a position
to act decisively did attend those meetings: Alcide De Gasperi, Robert Schuman, and
Konrad Adenauer.50
Catholicism and Integration
Europe took its first important steps toward unity in the late 1940s and 1950s
beginning with the Hague Conference in 1948 and continuing with the establishment of
the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (1947), the Council of Europe
(1949), the European Coal and Steel Community (1952), the European Economic
Community (1958), and Euratom (1958). There were major failures too; the European
Defense Community and the European Political Community were defeated in 1954.
Catholics and their Christian Democratic parties, as a solid bloc, were the major political
force behind these efforts. The demands of the international economy, commercial
interests and the politics of the Cold War pushed Europe toward some type of economic
and political cooperation,51 but it was primarily Catholics who gave integration its
particular supranational flavor and the political support it needed to overcome
particularist opposition.
Catholic theology, organization, politics and sense of community guaranteed that
Catholics would collectively support the idea of European unity. Catholic universalism,
which had once provided ideological support for a world-wide papal monarchy, now
provided the theological underpinning for a new vision of a united humanity free from
the violent divisions of nationalism (which Catholics had always seen as a Protestant
47 Roberto Papini, The Christian Democrat International, trans. Robert Royal (Lanham, Maryland:
Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), p. 20-21.
48 Michael Gehler and Wolfram Kaiser, “Toward a ‘Core Europe’ in a Christian Western Bloc:
Transnational Cooperation in European Christian Democracy, 1925-1965,” in European Christian
Democracy: Historical Legacies and Comparative Perspectives, ed. Thomas Kselman and Joseph A.
Buttigieg (Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame Press, 2003), p. 241.
49 Papini, pp. 43-44n63.
50 Papini, pp. 22, 27.
51 Many scholars reject the view that ideology had any important impact on the integration process. See
Andrew Moravcsik, The Choice for Europe: Social Purpose and State Power from Messina to Maastricht
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).

18
heresy anyway). The Holy See, which had backed the failed League of Nations, came out
strongly in favor of a federated international system. Before the war ended Pius XII
called for the “formation of an organ for the maintenance of peace, of an organ invested
by common consent with supreme power, to whose office it would also pertain to
smother in its germinal state any threat of isolated or collective aggression.”52 But while
the pope’s call for international cooperation was genuine, his special concern was for the
unity of Europe. Pius XII was, in his own words, “instinctively drawn” to the “practical
realization of European unity”53 and repeatedly backed the idea of European unity and
the political efforts to achieve it. He first called for a “European Union” on 2 June 1948
in the afterglow of the Hague Conference, which was attended by a papal representative.
On Armistice Day of the same year the Pontiff stressed the urgency of the situation:
That the establishment of a European union presents serious difficulties no
one will gainsay. . . . Yet there is no time to lose. If it is intended that this
union shall really achieve its purpose, if it is desired to make it serve to
advantage the cause of European liberty and concord, the cause of
economic and political peace between the continents, it is high time it
were established.54
The pope was reticent to comment on specific proposals, although his addresses
frequently seemed timed to benefit particular efforts. His interventions were primarily
aimed at reminding Europe of its debt to Christianity as the source of its ideals and values
and to encourage it to recreate a united Europe with the church at its center. In an
amazing speech to a group from the College of Europe in 1953, the pope expressed
clearly his wish:
Beyond its economic and political goals, a united Europe must make it its
mission to affirm and defend the spiritual values which formerly
constituted the foundation and support of its existence, values it once had
a vocation to transmit to other peoples in other parts of the world, values it
must seek out again today in a painful effort to save itself. We speak of the
true Christian Faith, the basis of the civilization and culture which is
Europe’s own and also that of all others. We state this very clearly because
We fear that without it Europe does not have the inner strength to preserve
either the integrity of its ideals or its territorial and material independence
in the face of more powerful adversaries.55
52 Pius XII, “Christmas Allocution of 1944,” quoted in Edward J. Berbusse, “The Church and International
Society,” America, vol. 75 (1 June 1946), p. 173; see also, Christopher Dawson, “Foundations of European
Order,” The Catholic Mind, Vol. 42 (May 1944), pp. 313-316.
53 Pius XII, “European Union: An Address of Pope Pius XII to the ‘Congress of Europe, June 14, 1957’”
The Pope Speaks, Vol. 4 (Summer 1957), p. 201.
54 Pius XII, “Address to the European Union of Federalists,” quoted in Edward A. Conway, “Catholics and
World Federation,” America, Vol. 80 (4 December 1948), p. 233.
55 Pius XII, “European Unity: An Address by His Holiness at an Audience Granted to a Group of
Professors and Students from the College of Europe, Bruges, Belgium, March 15, 1953,” The Catholic
Mind, Vol. 51 (September 1953), p. 560.

19
In 1957 he told the Congress of Europe to construct for Europe “an earthly home which
bears some resemblance to the Kingdom of God. . . .”56 He also made it absolutely clear
to the Catholics of Europe that their mission was to support in every way possible the
integration of Europe. In his June 1948 address calling for European union, he said:
“Neither have we any doubt that Our faithful children will realize that their position is
always at the side of those generous souls who are preparing the way for mutual
understanding and for the re-establishment of a sincere spirit of peace among nations.”57
To Pius XII, Catholic universalism and European unity were of the same cloth and he
was more than willing to put the considerable power of the papacy, and thus the Catholic
church, behind the cause.
Catholicism, in addition to its commitment to universalism and its centralized
structure, provided the common culture necessary to integrating groups of nations.
Christian Democracy supplied the political program and strategy. The elite supporters of
European integration in the post-war period were not all Catholics, but most were. The
left was deeply divided over the issue and the Protestants of Britain and the Nordic region
were not interested in the supranational character of Continental proposals. Catholics, and
the Christian Democratic parties they supported, on the other hand, were massed as one
behind the project. Christian Democratic parties, backed by nearly unified Catholic
voting blocs in Catholic or substantially Catholic countries, quickly rose to power in
Germany, France, Italy and the Benelux countries. Adenauer of Germany, De Gaspari of
Italy and Schuman of France, pious men who had been educated in Catholic universities
and members of the interwar network of Catholic politicians, came to office in this period
and set to work shaping an integrated Europe (along with Jean Monnet, a nominal French
Catholic whose sister was a prominent lay leader). Christian Democracy became the
vehicle for politicians who shared the same culture to work out the specific plans for
deeper cooperation. Adenauer said at the time:
The Christian Democratic parties have a special vocation to do this work
[bridge differences among European countries], since the traditions of
Western Europe are Christian, and since the parties which hold those
traditions in high esteem and which strive to make them again fruitful for
the requirements of our time hold the assurance of an interior renaissance
of Western Europe from its finest elements. They are therefore . . .
destined to create the condition for an understanding and for co-operation
in such countries of Western Europe as have a different Weltanschauung
but which nevertheless seek to bring about the unification of Europe.58
Catholicism provided the sense of community—the “we feeling”—that according
to Karl Deutsch was necessary to successful integration.59 This sense of community
56 Pius XII, “European Union: An Address of Pope Pius XII to the ‘Congress of Europe, June 14, 1957’”
The Pope Speaks, Vol. 4 (Summer 1957), p. 204.
57 Pius XII, “Address to the European Union of Federalists,” quoted in Edward A. Conway, “Catholics and
World Federation,” America, Vol. 80 (4 December 1948), p. 234.
58 “The Future of Christian Democracy: An Interview with Dr. Konrad Adenauer,” Tablet, Vol. 198
(September 22, 1951), p. 185.
59 Karl W. Deutsch, et al. Political Community and the North Atlantic Area: International Organization in
the Light of Historical Experience (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1957).

20
visibly influenced elites. For example, Robert Schuman, as foreign minister of France,
was driven to place integration high on his post-war agenda by his often-expressed desire
to see Germany and France, as Christian nations, forgive and reconcile. The presence of
so many powerful Catholic politicians advocating a European federation backed by the
pope, however, smacked of a Vatican plot to many non-Catholics.60 In truth, there was no
plot, just a shared world-view that naturally brought Catholics to a common position.
Catholic theology, organization, politics, and community put Catholic
confessional culture in position to shape and promote European integration. Protestant
confessional culture lacked a universal theology that stressed visible unity, a centralized
organizational structure that could manage a mass movement, an international political
movement capable of mobilizing confessional supporters, and a common international
culture that shaped elite and mass opinion. As a consequence, Protestant politicians and
countries were, for the most part, absent at the creation of the new Europe. Catholics
from Catholic countries founded the European Community and proved its strongest
backers. Catholics remain Europe’s most ideologically committed supporters because,
despite rapid secularization in Europe and the weakening of confessional ties, Catholic
culture remains an important shaper of attitudes toward integration.
60 “Does the Pope Run Europe?,” America, Vol. 88 (November 8, 1952), p. 146; “European Unity at Paris,”
America, Vol. 92 (October 30, 1954), p. 118.