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rfmcdonaldOver at his main blog, Pearsall Helms "Religious Practice and Change in 19th Century Catholic Europe". An excerpt:
Pearsall goes on to examine at length the situations in Bavaria, urban Spain in the nineteenth century, Rhineland-Westphalia, and northern France, where traditionally Catholic cultures were destabilized by the growth of urban-industrial capitalist societies. In Rhineland-Westphalia, and to an extent in northern France, the Church was flexible enough to respond to popular concerns and to avoid alienating potential communicants by ill-judged political interventions. Not so elsewhere, and never with complete success.
The nineteenth century changed this. The rise of industrialization and its crusading ideology, liberal capitalism, completely upset the balance of power in European society. Needless to say, this was a change that had a serious impact on the Catholic Church as well. It created a new social class of industrial tycoons whose power was based on wealth, not on their inherited status. Improvements in transport and communications technology drew together European societies in an entirely new way, creating the phenomenon of nationalism, a new way for people to connect their communities into a larger cultural whole. Industrialization drew people by the millions from the old way of life in the countryside to the booming cities. The negative side effects of industrialization, the poverty, the disease, the squalid housing, created socialism and the workers' movements, which were implicitly against the Establishment in all of its forms. The Church was, of course, an integral part of what they were fighting against. Essentially, these enormous changes created new communities of interests that were in many respects diametrically opposed to the old order dominated by the clergy and the aristocracy.
Pearsall goes on to examine at length the situations in Bavaria, urban Spain in the nineteenth century, Rhineland-Westphalia, and northern France, where traditionally Catholic cultures were destabilized by the growth of urban-industrial capitalist societies. In Rhineland-Westphalia, and to an extent in northern France, the Church was flexible enough to respond to popular concerns and to avoid alienating potential communicants by ill-judged political interventions. Not so elsewhere, and never with complete success.
