Anti-clericalism
Anti-clericalism is opposition to religious authority, typically in social or political matters. Historically, anti-clericalism in Christian traditions has been opposed to the influence of Catholicism.
Some have opposed clergy on the basis of moral corruption, institutional issues and/or disagreements in religious interpretation, such as during the Protestant Reformation. Anti-clericalism became extremely violent during the French Revolution, because revolutionaries claimed the church played a pivotal role in the systems of oppression which led to it. Many clerics were killed, and French revolutionary governments tried to put priests under the control of the state by making them employees.
Anti-clericalism appeared in Catholic Europe throughout the 19th century, in various forms, and later in Canada, Cuba, and Latin America.
Europe
During the Protestant Reformation, anti-clericalism resulted from opposition to the political and economic privileges of the clergy.France
Revolution
The Civil Constitution of the Clergy was passed on July 12, 1790, requiring all clerics to swear allegiance to the French government and, by extension, to the increasingly anti-clerical National Constituent Assembly. All but seven of the 160 bishops refused the oath, as did about half of the parish priests. Persecution of the clergy and of the faithful was the first trigger of the rebellion; the second being conscription. Nonjuring priests were exiled or imprisoned and women on their way to Mass were beaten in the streets.The anti-clericalism during the French Revolution initially began with attacks on church corruption and the wealth of the higher clergy, an action with which even many Christians could identify, since the Catholic Church held a dominant role in pre-revolutionary France. During a two-year period known as the Reign of Terror, the episodes of anti-clericalism grew more violent than Europe would see until the rise of state atheism in communist Eastern Europe. The new revolutionary authorities suppressed the church; abolished the Catholic monarchy; nationalized church property; exiled 30,000 priests and killed hundreds more. Many churches were converted into "temples of reason", in which services were held. There has been much scholarly debate over whether the movement was popularly motivated. As part of the campaign to dechristianize France, in October 1793 the Christian calendar was replaced with one reckoning from the date of the Revolution, and Festivals of Liberty, Reason and the Supreme Being were scheduled. New forms of moral religion emerged, including the deistic Cult of the Supreme Being and France's first established state sponsored atheistic Cult of Reason, with all churches not devoted to these being closed. In April and May 1794, the government mandated the observance of a festival of the Cult of the Supreme Being. When anti-clericalism became a clear goal of French revolutionaries, counter-revolutionaries seeking to restore tradition and the Ancien Régime took up arms, particularly in the War in the Vendée. Local people often resisted dechristianization and forced members of the clergy who had resigned to conduct Mass again. Eventually, Maximilien Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety denounced the dechristianization campaign and tried to establish their own religion, without the superstitions of Catholicism.
When Pope Pius VI took sides against the revolution in the First Coalition, Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Italy. French troops imprisoned the Pope in 1797, and he died after six weeks of captivity.
After a change of heart, Napoleon then re-established the Catholic Church in France with the signing of the Concordat of 1801, and banned the Cult of the Supreme Being. Many anti-clerical policies continued. When Napoleonic armies entered a territory, monasteries were often sacked, and church property secularized.
Third Republic
A further phase of anti-clericalism occurred during the French Third Republic and its contention with the Catholic Church. After the Concordat of 1801 the Catholic Church enjoyed preferential treatment from the French state. During the 19th century, public schools employed primarily priests as teachers, and religion was taught in schools. This changed during the 1880s as several anti-clerical international gatherings took place in Paris, leading to the establishment of the Fédération nationale de la libre pensée, a strongly anti-clerical society uniting socialists, anarchists and liberals. In 1881–1882 Jules Ferry's government passed the Jules Ferry laws, establishing free education and excluding clerics and religious education from schools.In 1880 and 1882 Benedictine teaching monks were effectively exiled. This was not completed until 1901.
A law of 7 July 1904 prevented religious congregations from sponsoring and conducting schools, and the Law on the separation of the Churches and the State of 1905, were enacted under the government of Radical-Socialist Émile Combes. Alsace-Lorraine was not subject to these laws, as it was part of the German Empire.
In the Affaire des Fiches, it was discovered that the anti-clerical War Minister of the Combes government, General Louis André, was determining promotions based on the French Masonic Grand Orient's card index on public officials, detailing which were Catholic and who attended Mass, with a view to preventing the promotion of Catholics.
In the years following their relocation outside France, boarding schools of congregants were accused by some senators of trying to "recruit" French youth from abroad, supposedly placing the French Republic "in jeopardy".
Republicans' anti-clericalism softened after the First World War as the Catholic right-wing began to accept the Republic and secularism as allies against socialism. In the present day, the issue of subsidized private schools, which are overwhelmingly Catholic but whose teachers draw pay from the state, remains a sensitive issue in French politics, and the Fédération Nationale de la Libre-Pensée, now commonly associated with the anti-clerical far-left, maintains its strongly anti-clerical stance.
Austria (Holy Roman Empire)
Emperor Joseph II opposed what he called "contemplative" religious institutions – reclusive Catholic institutions that he perceived as doing nothing positive for the community. His policy towards them is included in what is called Josephinism.Joseph decreed that Austrian bishops could not communicate directly with the Curia. More than 500 of 1,188 monasteries in Austro-Slav lands were dissolved, and 60 million florins taken by the state. This wealth was used to create 1,700 new parishes and welfare institutions.
The education of priests was taken from the Church as well. Joseph established six state-run "General Seminaries". In 1783, a Marriage Patent treated marriage as a civil contract rather than a religious institution.
Catholic historians have claimed that there was an alliance between Joseph and anti-clerical Freemasons.
Germany
The Kulturkampf refers to German policies in reducing the role and power of the Catholic Church in Prussia, enacted from 1871 to 1878 by the Prime Minister of Prussia, Otto von Bismarck.Bismarck accelerated the Kulturkampf, which did not extend to the other German states such as Bavaria. As one scholar put it, "the attack on the church included a series of Prussian, discriminatory laws that made Catholics feel understandably persecuted within a predominantly Protestant nation." Jesuits, Franciscans, Dominicans and other orders were expelled in the culmination of twenty years of anti-Jesuit and antimonastic hysteria.
In 1871, the Catholic Church comprised 36.5% of the population of the German Empire, including millions of Germans in the west and South, as well as the vast majority of Poles. In this newly founded Empire, Bismarck sought to appeal to liberals and Protestants by reducing the political and social influence of the Catholic Church.
Priests and bishops who resisted the Kulturkampf were arrested or removed from their positions. By the height of anti-Catholic measures, half of the Prussian bishops were in prison or in exile, a quarter of the parishes had no priest, half the monks and nuns had left Prussia, a third of the monasteries and convents were closed, 1800 parish priests were imprisoned or exiled, and thousands of laypeople were imprisoned for helping the priests.
The Kulturkampf backfired, as it energized the Catholics to become a political force in the Centre party and revitalized Polish resistance. The Kulturkampf ended about 1880 with a new pope Leo XIII willing to negotiate with Bismarck. Bismarck broke with the Liberals over religion and over their opposition to tariffs; He won Centre party support on most of his conservative policy positions, especially his attacks against socialism.
Italy
Anti-clericalism in Italy is connected with reaction against the absolutism of the Papal States, overthrown in 1870. For a long time, the pope required Catholics not to participate in the public life of the Kingdom of Italy that had invaded the Papal States to complete the unification of Italy, prompting the pope to declare himself a "prisoner" in the Vatican. Some politicians that had played important roles in this process, such as Giuseppe Garibaldi and Camillo Benso, conte di Cavour, were known to be hostile to the temporal and political power of the Church. Throughout the history of Liberal Italy, relations between the Italian government and the Church remained acrimonious, and anti-clericals maintained a prominent position in the ideological and political debates of the era. Tensions eased between church and state in the 1890s and early 1900s as a result of both sides' mutual hostility toward the burgeoning Socialist movement. Initially also anticlerical, fascist Benito Mussolini tempered such rhetoric to win support from Catholics and later as dictator, official hostility between the Holy See and the Italian state was finally settled by Pope Pius XI and him: the Lateran Accords were finalised in 1929.After World War II, anti-clericalism was embodied by the Italian Communist and Italian Socialist parties, in opposition to the Vatican-backed party Christian Democracy. Since the PSI joined DC-led coalition governments, the DC under Aldo Moro turned centre-left. In 1978, with support of the PSI, the DC-led coalition government legalized abortion despite strong opposition from the Catholic Church and DC conservative factions.
The revision of the Lateran treaties during the 1980s by the PSI Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, removed the status of "official religion" of the Catholic Church, but still granted a series of provisions in favour of the Church, such as the eight per thousand law, the teaching of religion in schools, and other privileges.
In recent years, the Italian society has got increasingly secularized and many contest the intervention of the Catholic Church in Italian politics, usually through voting instructions to the faithful and to Catholic parliamentarians on the legislative and regulatory action of the State. For example, the positions of Cardinal Camillo Ruini in the 2005 Italian fertility laws referendum attracted criticism, and so did his opposition to a 2007 bill that would have provided recognition of same-sex unions in Italy. From the side of the Church, a right to express its opinions and a moral duty in guiding Christians on ethical questions is claimed.