Читать книгу The World's Christians - Douglas Jacobsen - Страница 49

The last five centuries have brought both tremendous growth and frequent challenges to the Catholic Church. Even before 1500, Catholic Christianity had begun to expand beyond Europe and that expansion exploded in the sixteenth century. The Catholic monarchs of Spain and Portugal led the way with their colonization of the west coast of Africa and conquest of Latin America. New missionary orders were also created, most notably the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits), which introduced Catholicism to India and East Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But while Catholicism was expanding elsewhere, it was being challenged in Europe by the rise of the Protestant movement. Eventually about a third of the landmass of Western Europe and a sixth of its population would be won over by this new, alternative post‐Catholic Christian tradition.

The eighteenth century brought new challenges to Catholicism. The Enlightenment, the rise of modern science, and the beginnings of democratic politics began to undermine long‐held Catholic practices and beliefs. Anti‐Catholic sentiments fueled the French Revolution (1789). The Catholic Church regrouped under Pope Pius IX, who held office from 1846 to 1878, the longest papal reign in history. His famous Syllabus of Errors (1864) denounced almost everything modern about the modern world, including democracy, freedom of the press, and “secular” (non‐church‐controlled) public education. Ultimately, the public power of Catholicism declined both in Europe and elsewhere, but at the same time the power of the papacy within the Church dramatically increased. In 1800, the Pope directly appointed fewer than 5 percent of the Church’s bishops. Today, every Catholic bishop in the world is directly appointed by the Pope, and the Catholic Church is more centrally controlled than at any previous time in history.

Figure 2.5 The Gero Cross (pictured here) is the oldest known crucifix made in Western Europe north of the Alps. It is about six feet high and is displayed in the Cathedral Church of St. Peter in Cologne, Germany. DEA/N. CIRANI/Getty Images.

Figure 2.6 Timeline showing key events in Catholic history.

© John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

The authoritarian and antimodern posture that characterized the Catholic Church in the nineteenth century continued well into the twentieth century, when the new threat of atheistic Communism kept the Church on guard. Beneath the surface, however, new ideas about Catholic faith and life were being generated. Those new views were pushed to center stage in the early 1960s when Pope John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council to reassess the place of Catholicism in the modern world. He believed the Church needed an aggiornamento (a major updating and reorientation), and he asked the council to provide the blueprint. Vatican II produced sixteen documents that did precisely what the Pope asked, but since then differing interpretations of these documents have produced a growing rift between more progressive and more conservative Catholics worldwide. In recent years, the Catholic Church has also been roiled by thousands of accusations of sexual abuse by priests and by evidence of widespread efforts on the part of bishops and other Church leaders to ignore or cover up this immoral behavior. This sex abuse crisis has undermined trust in the Catholic Church around the world and has placed the future of Catholicism itself in jeopardy. (See Figure 2.6 for a timeline showing key events in Catholic history.)